Mitch Wagner's Blog

Apple iPad: Good news or bad news for Amazon.com?

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

Apple's upcoming iPad includes the iBooks app, which combines e-book reader software with an iTunes-like service for selling books. I was somewhat surprised by iBooks. I had just assumed that Apple was going to let existing e-book distributors like Amazon.com and FictionWise install apps on the iPad and sell books that way. But I should not have been surprised. Why wouldn't Apple want to have its own e-book store?

The iPad is likely to suck the oxygen from e-book hardware sales. Given a choice between an e-book reader and a device that does e-books and dozens of other things, consumers will likely choose the more useful device.

Novelist Charles Stross thinks the Kindle is in trouble.

And this thing is going to slaughter the Kindle and most of the other ebook readers on the market, even without Apple coming up with a better business model for the publishers. With Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins on board, they've just about aced the main US trade publishers — remains to be seen how smaller outfits plug into the platform, but at this point Amazon have a struggle on their hands. As iBook reads ePub format files it may be possible to add free content to it. Maybe.

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Apple iPad: Will it run Second Life?

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

As a Second Life enthusiast, I really want the iPad to run Second Life. There's no reason why it shouldn't. As my friend Wagner James Au points out on the blog New World Notes, the iPhone already has a couple of rich, text-only Second Life clients, and the iPad now has the horsepower and screen size to support Second Life graphics.

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Apple iPad: What people are saying about it

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

The iPad looks like a winner. It's an e-book reader, video player, game console, and netbook, all in one sexy package. I want it. I'll buy it the day it comes out. Millions of other people will buy one too. Apple will make billions of dollars off this thing, and revolutionize an industry or two in the process. But that's just my opinion. Here's what some other people are saying:

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Apple iPad: Questions about the keyboard and missing mouse

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

Is the on-screen keyboard on the iPad going to be practical? It's a full-size keyboard that you type on like a regular keyboard, but with no tactile feedback, and it's also part of the display. It looks awkward. It looks especially awkward for touch-typists who are used to typing without looking at their hands. Somewhere, Mrs. Cunningham, my 10th Grade touch-typing teacher, is sobbing gently to herself.

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Apple iPad: Will it save publishing?

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

The problem with publishing isn't technological, it's the business model. For a couple of centuries, we've had nice business models for publishing, but the models are broken now and nothing new has emerged to take their place. The iPad is not going to be a savior of publishing, much as I love the iPad for other reasons and am eager to buy one.

The old business models for publishing evolved over centuries, and they worked well for a long time. Books are straight purchase transactions, people pay for what they buy. That isn't true for magazines and newspapers; single-copy purchases and subscriptions at best break even. Magazines and newspapers are funded by advertising.

Now, those business models are broken. Consumers have a great many other forms of media competing for their time, many of them free and brought to you by the Internet. Internet advertising has proven to be more efficient than print ads, and more efficient advertising is less expensive for the buyer, which means less money coming in to the sellers. That's why the sellers, the newspaper and magazine publishers, are hurting.

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Apple iPad: Twitter brings the funny

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

As you might expect, Twitter was buzzing yesterday with talk about the Apple Tablet. There were some surprisingly insightful tweets. People have learned to stuff a lot of information and knowledge into 140 characters. But these are not the insightful ones. These are just a few tweets that I thought were funny.

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Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie

My latest on Tor.com:

There’s a scene at the end of the movie—and I don’t think this is a spoiler, the movie has been building to this point the whole time—where Kirk has the bad guy on the main bridge viewscreen. The bad guy is defeated, his ship crippled, and Kirk offers amnesty. The bad guy proudly refuses, and instead dies with his ship.

Spock approaches Kirk afterward and asks if Kirk was really going to help the bad guy out. And Kirk smirks and says, no, of course not. Spock is happy about that.

It seems to me that one scene spits in the face of one of the greatest things about the original Trek. The show was primarily an action-adventure program, with plenty of fistfights and stirring ship-to-ship battle. But in the end, Gene Roddenberry and the rest of the people who created Trek were espousing a philosophy of peace and forgiveness.

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Hands-on with the new Google Voice mobile app

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

Google Voice is a service that simplifies connecting with multiple phones. It gives you a single phone number that rings your home phone, cell phone, office phone -- however many phones you have. It's also a simple tool for managing voice messages. Now, Google Voice has a Web app that simplifies accessing the service on an iPhone or Palm WebOS device. The new app works very well.

To run the app, just go to m.google.com/voice in your mobile Web browser. Nothing to download and install. You need to be a user of Google Voice to run it, of course.

I tried it on my iPhone 3G. When I visited the Google Voice mobile page, the software automatically recognized that I was already logged in to Google, and asked me which phone I was using.

I tapped the selection for my iPhone, and the browser showed me a fully functional phone dialpad.

You can tap numbers to dial, or spell out the name of a contact. Alternately, you can access your Google Voice address book by tapping the appropriate icon at the top of the screen.

One particularly impressive feature is that the tool generates its own list of your favorite numbers, which it calls "Top."

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Next on Copper Robot: The Apple iPad

Next on Copper Robot, we're talking about the Apple iPad with the two of the best minds and Apple observers in Second Life: Joe Miller, a/k/a Joe Linden, VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab; and Second Life entrepreneur and blogger ArminasX Saiman.

WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 31, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time

WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast later on this Web site.

Joe (left) and Armi

The iPad is Apple's answer to low-priced PC netbooks. It's a tablet computer with a 10" display and a multitouch screen like the iPhone. It runs a Web browser, plays videos and music, displays e-books, and functions as a gaming console. It also includes an office suite, and runs all the applications in the App Store, with its own software development kit to allow developers to write more. You'll be able to buy it, priced starting at $499, in two months.

Apple supporters say it will reinvent computing the way the iPhone reinvented cell phones. Apple detractors shrug and say the device isn't much, it's just a big iPod touch. Join us Sunday when we'll decide what's really going on.

About our guests: As VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab, Joe oversees the technology strategy for Linden Lab. Previously, he oversaw all of engineering, including operations and viewer development, which included the viewer used by tens of thousands of Second Life Mac users (including yours truly). He headed up deployment of SL Voice (without which the Copper Robot would not be possible -- well, I suppose we could do it in mime). Joe's a Mac user himself, and follows Apple quite closely. He's been a registered Apple developer since 1983, before the first Mac. He's even met Steve Jobs.

Armi is author of the popular Second Effects blog, and proprietor of the particle effects store Electric Pixels. Armi keeps his first life and Second Life separate, as so many of us do, so I don't know a lot about him, and I can tell you even less. But I do know this: He knows a great deal about Apple products and business technology. He was one of our guests when we had a roundtable discussion about Apple's spring announcements last year.

Hope to see you Sunday. Bring your questions and opinions, this will be more of an open discussion than our usual interview format.

My favorite Internet and Web applications

My latest on the Computerworld Tool Talk blog:

I'm still old-fashioned in that I still use desktop apps for most of my work, but I've come to rely on a toolkit full if Internet and Web applications for communications and scheduling. Here are some of my favorites.

MobileMe. Apple's much-maligned services for synching e-mail, calendars, and contact lists between multiple Macs and iPhones, as well as sharing documents and photos. The service had growing pains which give it a lingering bad reputation, but I've found it quite reliable for the past couple of years. Many people prefer DropBox for simple document sharing and synchronization between multiple computers running different operating systems.

I also use BackBlaze for online backup. Apple really needs to step up and make MobileMe cross-platform, offer a free introductory package, and offer unlimited online backup to make MobileMe more competitive with BackBlaze and DropBox.

I keep blogs on Typepad and Wordpress, and I like them both.

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