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My $0.02 (first edition)

The perfect device for baby boomers and pensioneers

As i already twittered : It looks like the perfect device for my mother (just turned 80).I always did not set-up a computer for her (although i’m storing a couple of my old ones at her home). It would just have been too complicated for her. Still she is very interested to learn about that internet thing. And as her eyes got worse she is not able to easily read the newspaper or regular size books.

Others agree:

• A colleague walked into the office yesterday morning, saying: “Now we know what to buy for our parents.”
• More on this for example on jageree.com and Ultimi Barbarorum

A future version will probably add a camera (jointly with a camera for the iTouch) and grandma’s are able to have iChats with their siblings and friends.

A home and an away version

I’m happy to see  a  WiFi only version of the iPad as well as a full mobile version. i already have an iPod Touch and an iPhone and have complementary uses for them at home and away.

I’m not too happy to have no GPS in the WiFi device because with offloaded Maps i would love to use it also in the car or on holiday etc (Romaing charges are just ridiculous high in europe, so i typically offload maps of the region before going on holiday)

A lost opportunity

A lot of people are complaing about missing features. I typically don’t because i firmly believe in simplicity. There are exceptions (see e.g. above).

But right now i think Apple lost an opportunity to not add a MiniDisplay Port and or micro USB port as video and serial connector. May be even add  a third  proprietary connector if neede.

Placed them side by side and  they would not need more  room on the device than the 30-pin connector.   You  could even build an  dongle to convert the threesome to a 30-pin connector in order to  be able to  the existing iPod accessories.

I know it would potentially cannibalize the existing iPod  3rd Party ecosystem (you wouldn’t if you build / sold the above dongle.

But having separat small standard ports would:

• make the connector cables much more elegant (no bulky dongles)
• beam the  port capabilities into the current time
• especially would enable digital video out. I suspect that the A4 SoC is perfectly able to do digital video, but  having only analog video out has mainly to do with the aging 30-port connector. It may also have to do with making content providers happy)

Open Questions

These have mostly to do  with my professional view on the iPad (as the head of the R & D lab of one of the worlds largest newsagencies currently looking very hard at ereading:

• When will iBooks be available outside the USA?
• Will it offer subscription based pricing models that magazines and newspapers can use (although the app is called iBooks? But we also got used to buy videos etc. in an app called iTunes :-)
• Will the SDK contain classes for rendering ePubs or will tht be private to iBooks?
• Will ePubs automatically opened with iBooks?
• …

Misc

iBooks looks an awful lot like Delicious Library (as others have olso noted). Could swear that Mike Matas (the original designer of Delicious Library that joined Apple in 2005) had a hand on it. But then learned that Matas left Apple  in July 2009.

Now Micheal Arrington’s business partner speaks up. The price rises up to $499 and will be available for preorder from Friday with 8 – 10 weeks shipment time. We’ll see if that beats the Apple Tablet to the market

The Crunchpad is dead, but the JooJoo is alive.Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan, founder and CEO of Fusion Garage, unveiled today the hardware that was to be the CrunchPad.It is now named the JooJoo, an African word for magic.It will be available for preorder this Friday at TheJooJoo.com.

via Business Insider.

More at: liliputing,  eee-pc.de (german)

Danny Sullivan put up a great (and very long) post comparing ACAP and Robots.txt in the Context of the current discussion around paid content and the Hamburg declaration. I urge you to read it in full if you want to know more about the current situation, and why ACAP will not help the publishers to pursue their hamburg declaration goals.

Disclosure: After some critical posts regarding ACAP and due to the fact that i’m working at a news agency i was invited to join the ACAP technical working group. I attended one face-to-face meeting and a couple of phone conferences, mainly there was interest to integrate news agency use cases into ACAP.  I stopped active work in the TWG basically a year ago, mainly due to the following reasons:

• dpa has no B2C business and FTP / satellite not HTTP are still the major news delivery mode :-(
• The general situation regarding ACAP is as Danny describes it
• Hence there are more efficient uses of my precious time than the ACAP TWG

To give you an idea what Danny is talking about i’ll include a quote fromhis post showing that even the protagonists are not really using ACAP :

Sounds easy enough to use ACAP, right? Well, no. ACAP, in its quest to provide as much granularity to publishers as possible, offers what I found to be a dizzying array of choices. REP explains its parts on two pages. ACAP’s implementation guide alone (I’ll get to links on this later on) is 37 pages long.

But all that granularity is what publishers need to reassert control, right? Time for that reality check. Remember those 1,250 publishers? Google News has something like over 20,000 news publishers that it lists, so relatively few are using ACAP. ACAP also positions itself as (I’ve bolded some key parts):

an open industry standard to enable the providers of all types of content (including, but not limited to, publishers) to communicate permissions information (relating to access to and use of that content) in a form that can be readily recognized and interpreted by a search engine (or any other intermediary or aggregation service), so that the operator of the service is enabled systematically to comply with the individual publisher’s policies.

Well, anyone with a web site is a publisher, and there are millions of web sites out there. Hundreds of millions, probably. Virtually no publishers use ACAP.

Even ACAP Backers Don’t Use ACAP Options

Of course, there’s no incentive to use ACAP. After all, none of the major search engines support it, so why would most of these people do so. OK, then let’s look at some people with a real incentive to show the control that ACAP offers. Even if they don’t yet have that control, they can still use ACAP now to outline what they want to do.

Let’s start with the ACAP file for the Irish Independent. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it, just skim, and I’ll explain:

##ACAP version=1.0

# Allow all

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search/

Disallow: /*.ece$

Disallow: /*startindex=

Disallow: /*from=*

Disallow: /*service=Print

Disallow: /*action=Email

Disallow: /*comment_form

Disallow: /*r=RSS

Sitemap: http://www.independent.ie/sitemap.xml.gz

# Changes in Trunk

ACAP-crawler: *

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /search/

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*.ece$

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*startindex=

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*from=*

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*service=Print

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*action=Email

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*comment_form

ACAP-disallow-crawl: /*r=RSS

OK, see that top part? Those are actually commands using the robots.txt syntax. They exist because if a search engine doesn’t understand ACAP, the robots.txt commands serve as backup. Basically those lines tell all search engines not to index various things on the site, such as print-only pages.

Now the second part? This is where ACAP gets to shine. It’s where the Irish Independent — which is part of the media group run by ACAP president Gavin O’Reilly — gets to express what they wish search engines would do, if they’d only recognize all the new powers that ACAP provides. And what do they do? EXACTLY the same blocking that they do using robots.txt.

So much for demonstrating the potential power of ACAP.

I was watching the Crunchpad for quite some time (see e.g. here). It was the device that came closest to my dream surfing/ereading device (besides an Apple Tablet with a PixelQi screen). Now Michael Arrington announces it’s end, due to “interesting circumstances” to say the least. Given the nature of TechCrunch i’l take his version with big grains of salt but at least it is an entertaining read. Also of interest: the raise of the estimated preice from $200 to $300. But read for yourself

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”

But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”

And with that, the entire project self destructed.

via The End Of The CrunchPad.