Category — Marketing

Screen shot from iTunes taken at 2:23 pm today; three of the books my colleagues Michael E. Cohen and Dennis Cohen wrote are in the iBooks Top Computers and Internet Paid Books.

Thanks people who bought our books; thanks Peachpit for being a great publisher. I’ll be sending out review copies this week; thanks to Peachpit for those, too.

See that blue book cover over in the right column? Yeah, look over there →

That book is now available for purchase. Go ahead, click that cover: we dare you!

]

This was a pleasant sight when I logged into the iBooks bookstore tonight.

A writer with the interesting alphanumeric name of Jennifer 8. Lee writes in the New York Times about the most painful dilemma faced by men today: “With its rigid tablet shape, Apple’s iPad has raised an awkward consideration for many men: how to carry it in a manner that is practical and yet, well, masculine.”

Apparently, no red-blooded American male in New York has ever carried an attaché case or folio case.

When I was in college, I sent a short story I had written to The Atlantic, which, according to my dog-eared copy of The Writer’s Market, seemed like the kind of place that would publish stories like the one I had written.

Of course I was wrong: they actually published good fiction, which my story was not, written by competent writers, which I wasn’t at the time. The Atlantic provided me with my very first rejection slip.

Now, almost four decades later, I, along with my co-authors, grace the digital pages of The Atlantic. One of the simpler set-up projects from our book provides the body of Nicholas Jackson’s October 26, 2010 post in his iPad Week series: Setting Up Calendars.

Gee, getting accepted by The Atlantic didn’t take me long at all!

Coming soon in iOS 4.2 is AirPlay, Apple’s re-branded and re-engineered version of AirTunes. AirTunes, in case you didn’t know, could stream music from iTunes on your computer to AirPort Express base stations connected to speakers or audio equipment. The re-engineering has added lots of capability:

• Information about the music is also streamed—such as time elapsed, artist, song title, album artwork—and can be displayed on any AirPlay-enabled audio device.
• Video can now be streamed to the new low-cost Apple TV.

It’s this second item that is the most intriguing, as far as the iPad is concerned, because an iPad with iOS 4.2 will be an AirPlay source, able to stream video to the Apple TV.

When Apple announced iOS 4.2 on September 1, AirPlay was just one bullet point among the many announcements Apple made, and it had to vie for pundits’ attention with a bunch of new iPods, a new version of iTunes, the Ping social music network Apple had created, a new version of iOS for the iPhone, and the new Apple TV. Most of the pundits just mentioned AirPlay in relation to the new TV device and made little of it, focusing, instead, on the features lost (e.g., the internal hard drive) and on Apple’s struggle to convince TV networks to provide low-cost rentals for the device.

However, AirPlay really is a big deal, because it makes any iPhone 4 and any iPad capable of being a video source for the Apple TV. With it, suddenly, video becomes social in a way that it has never been before. Just as teens used to carry their LPs or cassettes or CDs (pick your generation) to friends’ homes to share favorite music, they now can load up their favorite videos on their iPads and play them on any Apple TV-equipped TV. Or consider their parents, who can load their iPad or iPhone with business or home videos and easily play those videos in work meetings or social gatherings. Given that an Apple TV can fit into any briefcase or purse, the equipment necessary to share videos anytime and anywhere has become much more affordable and, more importantly, much easier to set up.

Yesterday, I saw a commercial touting a new HTC smartphone that could hook up to a TV’s HDMI cable: in the commercial, a dancing hipster plugged his phone into a TV and rocked out to his tethered player—as best he could, as he was forced to stand only a couple feet away from the screen because of the short cable length.

With the iPad/iPhone and an AppleTV, the cable has been cut, and that dancing hipster suddenly looks very unhip.

With iPad’s and iPhone 4′s enormous sales, and with Apple TV’s very low price, it seems quite likely that Apple may finally have turned Apple TV into a winner.

This Bloomberg article describes how the iPad has become very popular among senior citizens in Japan.

I’m actually not surprised at this (though I am a little surprised at the Japan part). My silver-haired mother, who is on the far side of 80, just got an iPad and shows surprising strength and ninja fighting skills if you try to wrest it away from her. What I do find surprising is how few of the tech pundits saw how iPads could appeal to an otherwise under-served market segment when the device was first announced.

I will say that, in my limited experience, senior citizens really don’t care that the iPad lacks a camera and a standard USB port and expandable memory. But they do like the bright, easy-to-use touch screen. And I’m convinced they don’t mind not having a complicated file system where stuff can get lost far too easily.

The New York Times has an unsigned op-ed piece today in which they say

Antitrust regulators are right to look into whether [Apple] is leveraging [its] clout to stymie the development of applications for its rivals, closing the door on competition.

One supporting reason? This:

[E]xperts estimate that Apple accounted for virtually all the roughly 2.5 billion app downloads last year.

Given that Android, Apple’s leading competitor in the app market, only started selling apps last year, this is disingenuous support for the op-ed’s argument at best. Even more so given the enormous inroads Android devices have made in the market this year.

And what the op-ed doesn’t mention is that the Times has a vested interest in having the Feds disallow Apple’s development standards: that way, the Times can use a set of cross-platform development tools to build their online apps for Apple, Android, and others, instead of devoting resources to building first class apps tailored for each platform.

I call shenanigans!