With all the fury surrounding Apple’s latest announcements, we thought it would be fitting to recap the highlights and debate some of the opinions spewing out so far.

iTunes 10 & Ping: A social network for music

Some will call this a MySpace killer (available for upload now) but in this current configuration, I don’t think that is the case. After playing with the product and reading comments online, I think Apple’s insistence on a simple user experience in comparison to MySpace’s cluster of over personalization, went a little too far and features that should have been left in were left out. For example, there’s currently no easy way to follow people I actually know.

Apple claims on their site that there is a Facebook Connect feature allowing you to search for your Facebook friends easily. Well, this turns out not to be the case as Apple did not follow processes necessary to turn this feature on with Facebook. Namely, because Ping “pings” the Facebook API to such a significant degree, the social network requires Apple to pay for the service, something which was not negotiated ahead of time but I’m sure is in development now. Until this is resolved, I can only find my friends by entering in their email address one by one until I find someone. Yesterday, my friend from Berlin tracked me down so I officially have one real Ping friend. Read More »

The iPad has struck a nerve, stirring up a ton of controversy… Is it the next great device or an overhyped Apple toy? Check in with the Lab to see our first installment of our new series: “Point/CounterPoint: Whose Side Are You On?” Featuring Lab Director, Lori Schwartz and Lab CTO, Scott Susskind.

There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not the iPad is a game changer. After all, isn’t changing the game what Apple does best? The iPod changed the media consumption game. iTunes changed the media purchase game. The iPhone changed the mobile game. Macs are an ongoing effort to change the PC game. Apple invades thriving markets and smoothes out the edges, giving consumers a simplified way of approaching familiar problems.

What game is the iPad playing? It’s a tablet PC in form factor alone. Is it an e-reader? Is it a web browsing tool? Is it a laptop replacement? Is it a desktop supplement? Is it for productivity? Entertainment? Is it for Millenials? Boomers? Toddlers? Is it for everybody? Is it supposed to do everything? What makes the iPad a truly unique Apple product may be the fact that it subverts Apple’s successful change-the-game model – this time, Apple might actually be inventing games as opposed to changing them.

Rather than asking if the iPad changes the game, maybe we should ask why the iPad exists. Is it possible that Apple might have developed a product without knowing exactly what problem they were solving? Read More »

Ok, I admit it. I love new technology. I love getting new devices, figuring out how they work, learning what they can do for me. But increasingly, I find integrating new technology into my life harder and harder.

I need a new PC for my home office, but I keep putting it off because it will be such a pain to reinstall software, update drivers, connect to my network. I want to switch to a new carrier for my portable phone, but the idea of actually going to the carrier store to switch service irritates me. And my multi that drives my home theater recently died – the thought of buying and reprogramming a new one seems ridiculously complicated, even though I have done it before.

In short, the lure of new technology and the realities of life integration seem increasingly more difficult the older I get. And it seems I am not alone. Read More »

Last week Tracy Swedlow’s  annual “TV of Tomorrow” Conference was held in San Francisco where the “who’s who” of Interactive television gathered to discuss the future of television from broadcast to broadband including tru2way and TV Anywhere.

In past years’ conferences, you would have found the the few, the proud, the clinically-depressed-die-hards of advanced television platforms, geekgirls like myself , who have been trying for years to advance the cause of TV with social features, commerce solutions and true targeting capabilities.  And in the past, the legacy systems of the US cable infrastructure, the limitations of satellite’s two-way capabilities and the lack of scale in broadband hindered advancement in the space.  But this year, the conference came into its own as the industry showed market growth in a number of ongoing initiatives.   There is movement happening, money being spent and real players involved in the marketplace.

To set the stage for what’s happening in the interactive video space, here are some relevant statistics:

57% of Americans use their TV and PC simultaneously at least 1x a month (Nielsen)
20% of all tv viewers are simultaneously on their pc or mobile device (MRG)
78% of Teens and Tweens are online while watching tv and 66% are sending text messages while watching tv (ypulse/Pangea)

Of all the solutions bubbling up, here are a few that marketers can immediately take advantage of to leverage the power of video to accomplish a number of marketing goals:  Read More »

Humanity has come to an intriguing crossroads. Our technology is evolving faster than ever, and yet the human experience hasn’t changed much since the golden age of Rome. We stand on the verge of a collision between these two worlds as our technology becomes increasingly integrated with the innate methods humans use to interact with the world. It’s a trend of “engaging the primal.”

Interface technology is an interesting field right now. It takes a long time to move forward, but when it does, the world moves along with it. For a time, we interacted with technology and computers through punch cards that indicated what we wanted done. Eventually, we re-purposed the legacy interface of a typewriter to arrive at the keyboard, expanding the accessibility of computers to most households. Then in 1963, the mouse was invented and with it computers eventually became centered around graphical interactions, no longer requiring arcane command line input.  Today the hot new interface technology revolves around kinetics. Multi-touch screens, image and gesture recognition, internal gyroscopes — as these technologies advance, devices like the Wii and the iPhone are quickly moving from outliers to standards.
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The IPG Media Lab team weighs in on Apple’s release of the much anticipated iPad device.

Is the iPad a game changer?

Scott Susskind, IPG Lab CTO: I don’t know if I would consider it a “game changer.”  However, I do think it raises the bar.  We saw several tablet devices this year at CES that leveraged the Google Android platform that have some similarities to the iPad.  However, the iPad will quickly leapfrog the competition due to the maturity of the iPhone OS and breadth of the existing application ecosystem. The heavy lifting was already done. It allowed Apple to focus their efforts on smoothing out the user experience for this form-factor as well as developing special ports of business apps that make it an attractive device for the workplace.

That said, I think it will be a short-lived lead.  As the Android App ecosystem matures, the marketplace will swell with a variety of Android-based devices Devices that will either compete directly with the iPad, or fill smaller, niche markets that would be too costly for Apple to support through multiple hardware versions.  And since the content (and app) distribution model will likely be based on an open ecosystem, I would wager that the lion’s share of the market will be non-Apple inside of a few years. Read More »

Being a veteran attendee of CES, it is inevitable that each year someone asks me what I thought was the most amazing thing I saw at the show. And each year, I can usually point out one interesting piece of tech that fits into that category. Year after year there are invariably a few items that cause we merry geeks to circle around them ooh-ing and ahh-ing with avarice in our eyes.

This year, however was different. What struck me most this year was not to be found in a piece of super-slick technology (though there were a few), but rather something surprising. The industry as a whole seems to have undergone some radical rethink and rallied itself around a few core technologies and concepts. Rather than the chaotic grab-bag of offerings that we are usually presented with, something has galvanized the industry to get their products into some sort of alignment.

Could it be the sudden revelation that what really matters is the content? Read More »

With all the hype about 3D television, bendable OLED was not on the list of top CES breakthroughs from most reporters. In fact, the display wasn’t even in the main hall; instead it was tucked away, in just a corner of the Asus booth. “Waveface” is a few years off from hitting the consumer market, but the implications have the retailer in me excited, my eyes filled with the potential communications applications.

What are OLED screens? Micro thin, seamless, smooth, high definition video screens capable of bending around objects. To me it’s the coolest display at CES this year. Imagine a wrist watch where the band, the display, the case – everything – was a seamless video bracelet that wraps around your wrist. Sports scores, weather information, photos of your kids, all moving across the band in one continuous circle of light. Oh and probably the time as well. Read More »

Late last week Gizmodo revealed details about a secret Microsoft tablet codenamed “Courier.” The mockup video and photos show a dual-screen, book-shaped device about the size of a small business planner. Though historically tablet computing has not been a particularly hot topic, this sleek device has a number of features that could potentially be a game-changer for the software giant.

Based on the video expose and leaked images, the device sports a slick multi-touch interface. Tasks and apps can be manipulated via fingertip or stylus and flicked between screens a la-iPhone. The Courier supposedly supports WiFi & 3G as well as fully functional browser. The tablet also is expected to sport a camera and an inductive charger that would allow you to simply drop it onto a charging pad rather than tether it up to an AC power supply or cradle. Read More »