It’s about bringing content into the environment you’re already in, not creating an environment conducive to your content.

Introducing the iPad

The iPad has been highly successful since its recent introduction, selling 2 million units within 60 days. The iPad benefits from a growing base of Apple customers, software developers, partners and media relations, and builds on the functionality of Apple’s previous mobile devices, leading to their adage, “You already know how to use it.” It looks and feels like the iPhone with a larger screen. Apple has leveraged our familiarity with their existing products and added some innovative new steps. With a stunning design and an advanced multi-touch user interface, this larger-screen mobile device is hard to resist.

Balancing The Mobile Experience

The reach of mobile computing continues to expand as sleeker, more feature-rich devices enter the market. At the very least, these wireless smart devices serve as glorified PDAs that enable users to carry around their most important information wherever they go. At their best, they enhance and enrich the user’s lifestyle through a careful balance of convenience, transparency, relevance, connectivity, and flexibility.

Convenience

As mobile devices merged into smarter and more powerful devices they also got thinner, smaller and lighter and Apple is truly innovative in this area. But let’s face it, with the requisite learning curve, a new device can be anything but convenient. It has to be connected, configured, customized and protected. Data has to be transferred from the previous device and there’s usually some troubleshooting required, even for Apple’s easy-to-use products. And there’s the initial cost, too. But once those hurdles are cleared, we have a convenient device that simplifies and consolidates our personal effects.

Ease of use is also a must, because consumers will not use a product that’s difficult, unstable or uncomfortable to use, no matter how attractive it is. The device shouldn’t require the user to change their behavior in order to use it; it should adapt and complement the user’s existing lifestyle. It’s about bringing content into the environment you’re already in, not creating an environment conducive to your content.

Transparency

Of course, by transparent we’re not referring to a device that is actually invisible (or perhaps missing because it was left unattended a bit too long in a California pub), but transparent in that a user ‘forgets’ the device for the content it holds. Apple’s iPad and iPhone stay out of the way of the on-screen content. In fact, they are mostly screen—apart from a highly designed bezel and a few understated controls. The 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen dedicates much of the visible area to content, giving users a large frame for exploring and sharing their digital lives on the go.

Relevance

With the hardware and underlying software working in the background, content is the primary focus. What makes the iPad so desirable, like its iPhone and iPod Touch cousins, is the level of personal relevance for the user. There’s prestige in carrying a beautifully designed, cutting edge device, but even after the love affair over having the latest, greatest product fades by a few newer versions, it’s the ability to customize and fill the device with personalized content (photos, videos, music, contacts, files, apps, etc.) that makes it relevant, even essential, to our daily lives.

Connectivity

When you hold the iPad in your hands you’re actually holding the entire dynamic content of the Internet (minus the Flash bits, of course) and the bright, large display creates a rich, immersive experience. It gives users who spend time on social media sites the ability to update their status accordingly. Expect to see “Running on my treadmill with my iPad,” or “Laying on the beach with my iPad,” much like “Sent from my iPhone” email signoffs.

Flexibility

Software-based controls keep the device flexible and simplify the ability to adapt the controls for multilingual use. It allows Apple to dramatically improve the user experience through software-driven OS updates and has the ability to drive additional revenue-generation for content and software developers. As our world changes, the iPad will change and adapt to remain viable longer, making it a great investment.

It Just Fits

The iPad was released in January 2010 to mixed reactions. The biggest question revolved around whether there was a market for a touch-screen device that bridged the gap between Apple’s iPhone and laptops. The iPad’s early sales success can be attributed to the simplicity of use of other Apple products, or it could be that it’s a new kind of user experience that just fits.

In future articles we’ll look at some of the reasons that the iPad is destined to stand out and excel in an industry flooded with smart mobile devices.

What’s a picture worth?

Inline Email Insertion

External attachments are great but when you don’t have time to type a thousand words, only an inline picture will do. Until now, Gmail didn’t offer that functionality.

Google just announced the ability to insert images anywhere in the body text of an email by simply enabling the feature in your Gmail Settings under Labs. It will add this icon to your email toolbar; just click on it to insert an image:

Check out The Official Gmail Blog for more information about this and other new features.

image: adria.richards

Unlike traditional marketing,
conversation implies that you know
your audience.

Social Cultures

Envision social domains as environments—geographical destinations with varying demographics, practical uses, and cultural inclinations. Hi5, CyWorld, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xiaonei, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, and to a lesser extent Ning sites and IM aggregators, are macro-cultures with diverse market proclivities and subcultures.

Social Tools

The way we conduct ourselves within those subcultures is akin to a dialect or preference. The tools we use are the words and media we employ.

The tools we select reveal us as finish carpenters (Laugh aloud) or rough framers (lol). Grammar, the words we use, the language we speak; our topics (or lack of same); the videos, pictures and links we post; to whom we speak and who responds all combine to classify and define us within a given subculture.

Social Sharing

If businesses and marketers fail to invest the time to understand the accepted tools and nuances of the specific culture they hope to reach, they won’t be welcome on the ‘job site.’

As with traditional marketing, “Know thy audience.” But, unlike traditional marketing, conversation implies that you know your audience; that you live and work among them in a culturally appropriate manner, using culturally accepted tools.

That knowledge and those tools will certainly vary, domain to domain, culture to culture.

This article began as a comment on Beth Harte’s post, Social Media, It’s About the Tools Right? on The Search Engine Guide.

Image: tashland

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed
only to those who own one.”

—A.J. Liebling (MagCloud)

A Press for Democracy

So you want to be a print publisher. Luckily, you’re living at the right time in history. Freedom of expression has never been more celebrated and available. From personal broadcasts of text, voice and video messages to social networks, blogs, micro-blogs and podcasts, media options and outlets abound.

A Democratic Appeal

Although digital media is easily distributed, it’s imprisoned by electronic devices and an endless sea of competition for readership. And, often it’s merely scanned, not truly read.

By contrast, published works derive value from their singular appeals: a tactile form, a willing and welcomed commitment of one’s time, a personal gift.

Until now, print-publishing was expensive, with customized items made affordable only via mass production and distribution methods.

Democratic Demand

Traditional publishing and digital print technologies have now merged, offering a vast array of online, on-demand, turnkey publishing and distribution platforms like these, ready to meet your needs:

Lightning Source
Lightning Source, a sister company to U.S. book wholesaler Ingram Book Group, is an online print-on-demand (POD) service provider to publishers. They offer online publishing, production and distribution solutions that can reduce on-hand inventories and warehousing costs by satisfying niche book demands and calls for backlist and out-of-print books.

CreateSpace and BookSurge
Amazon’s answer to on-demand publishing brings their third party connections and distribution acumen to help you develop and distribute manuscripts and other types of media.

Blurb
Affiliated with Flickr’s popular photography management and sharing site, Blurb offers prepackaged, user-friendly templates for a more consumer-oriented solution to book publishing.

Shutterfly
Shutterfly enters the on-demand book and publishing market from its core focus, online photo sharing and management. The seamless port of existing albums into books, calendars and other product templates positions Shutterfly as a solid consumer choice.

BookPrep
HP brings its leadership in on-demand printing to BookPrep. BookPrep allows you to digitize any existing book into a virtual asset that can be ported via the web and printed on-demand as-is, or customized by the consumer.

MagCloud
For those wanting to produce the next New Yorker, Fast Company or Sports Illustrated, MagCloud offers an affordable solution for would-be magazine publishers. MagCloud not only handles printing, but mailing and subscription management as well.

Lulu.com
Lulu provides a matrix of vertically and horizontally marketed offerings, from consumer-oriented photo calendars to hardbound business books and digital media. In an obvious response to Amazon, it also offers the means to buy and sell works.

A Freeing Democracy

Whether you want to target a single customer with an extended one-to one message or hope to take your ideas to market in multiples, on-demand printing solutions offer both prototype and production solutions in a single model.

From individuals to tier one corporations, online on-demand publishing provides another instrument to add to your integrated brand marketing mix, and a chance at real freedom of the press.

[image: tonystl]

Because we believe we can add value
for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

-Google on their new browser, Chrome

Open Source

Google launches Chrome, its open source web browser, today. News of the release, initially leaked in comic book form then later confirmed on The Official Google Blog, has the Internet abuzz with talk about the demise of Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Chrome is a natural addition—an integrated mechanism to deliver the search giant’s extensive suite of free, albeit ad-driven tools and services.

Open Season

Chrome bolsters Google’s efforts to prevent Microsoft from leveraging Internet Explorer to wrest Google’s position in the search market space.

But whether users adopt Google’s latest development en masse, or not, marketers in every sector will benefit from a viable communication partner offering an integrated delivery vehicle.

[image: ndanger]