I’ve held off writing this post because the subject has been covered (beaten to death?) so well elsewhere. So in homage to those voices (and laziness), I’ve copy and pasted the key points into some sort of a cohesive logical position. If even the cliff notes version is too much to read, I’ll summarize it further with this:

The iPad is a new type of device, that belongs in an entirely new market of simple, casual, lifestyle computing. The benefits of this new technology are profound, and the market for them will be large, but its not a short term proposition. The technology will have to mature, it will take time to educate the market, and most importantly, the price will need to drop. But at the end of the day its a category of computer that needs to exist, one that everyone will eventually buy into, and the likelihood is Apple will own the segment.

• It’s a new type of computer, a lifestyle computer, one you throw on the couch, casually pick up off the coffee table, grab when you’re in bed.
  From Business Insider: In three years, when the low-end WiFi-powered iPad costs $199, many households will buy 3 or 4 of them and just leave them lying around the house. These iPads won’t be “owned” by any one member of the household, the way PCs and cell phones are. They won’t live on desks, the way desktops do, and they won’t be carried everywhere, the way mobile phones are. They’ll just be there, around the house, on tables and counters, the way today’s books, magazines, games, and newspapers are, booted up, ready to use. Eventually, every household will have them.
   
• The iPad Will Take Off When It Breaks the $299 Price Level
  From Walt Mossberg (WSJ): But I will remind you that the iPhone came out at $599 and they dropped it to $399 within 60 days, not because it wasnt selling at all, but because it wasnt selling as fast as they hoped, and then it began to take off, and of course it took off much much more when it went to $199…
   
• You’re going to see them everywhere, and you’re going to want one.
  From David Carr (NY Times): Imagine youre on an airplane, or on a train, or in a car or with somebody, and they seem to have a whole the whole web in their hands, a whole movie in their hands, its not like the iphone where they are constantly trying to make you look at it, its going to be sitting next to you and you’re going to be going “Wow! Thats an amazing looking thing.”
   
• The experience of using some software and web services will be better on the iPad than anywhere else.
  From Joe Hewitt (Facebook.com): My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! …Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small… The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors.
   
• The iPad is the future of computing, because it simple, fast and just works.
  From TechCrunch: The iPad is a computer for people … who don’t like the idea of upgrading their 3D drivers, or adjusting their screen resolution, or installing new memory. Who don’t understand why their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it. My mom… It does exactly what she needs. It will let her watch movies and listen to music and read books on long flights. It will make using a computer fun instead of an annoying chore. But it also won’t allow her to install umpteen news and weather gadgets that start up on boot and slow her computer to a crawl. It won’t suddenly forget how to talk to a network, or get so confused by all of the software installs and uninstalls that you finally have to break down and reinstall the system from scratch.
   
• Its a new market, which means it will take much longer to reach main stream adoption
  From Steve Blank (summarized/amended): A new market is one in which you need to create the market to sell your product. If you have to spend 20 minutes describing the market, you’re in a new market! A startup in a New Market (enabling customers to do something they never could before,) might be unprofitable for 5 or more years, (hopefully with the traditional hockey stick revenue curve,) while one in an Existing Market might be generating cash in 12-18 months.
   

Hank Williams brought up an interesting issue on his blog today:

The problem is that we are in this awful in-between phase of our planets productivity curve. Technology has vastly reduced the number of workers and resources that are required to make what the planet needs. This means that a small number of people, the people in control of the creation of goods, get the benefit of the increased productivity. When we get to the end of this curve and everyone can, in essence, be their own manufacturer, things will be good again. But until we can ride this curve to its natural stopping point, there will be much suffering, as the jobs that technology kills are not replaced.

This is a subject I’ve written about before. From a purely economic perspective, as technology and innovation increase, economically we ALL should be richer. The same technology and innovation that makes some jobs unnecessary, enables everyone to buy / get more with less input. Whats interesting, as Hank points out, though, is that it appears that this hasn’t been the case for the vast majority of people in the last decade (or at least the gains haven’t been distributed very evenly).

The truth is, that we have all been getting richer (particularly in terms of the technology, food, clothes, etc… we can all buy for less money). However, much of the increase in our purchasing power has been eroded by manipulation of the money supply. So if in theory we should have seen on average a 30% (just using this as an example) deflationary change over the last 10 years (i.e. each of us can buy 30% more stuff with our existing salaries) instead we’ve seen a 30% inflationary change (we each can buy 30% less). That 60% net change then gets transferred from the everyday money holding american public to large banks and debt issuers that have first access to borrow money from the government at a subsidized rate.

What this means is that the problem isn’t that we’re in the “in-between” phase, its that the the “in-between” phase only has a certain capacity to overcome harmful external forces. At some point Hank is absolutely right, technology based deflation will push the cost of all production to $0 (think Star Trek replicators) and currency will likely be irrelevant. We’re obviously some time off from this though, and until that happens it would be nice if everyone shared fully in the gains that technology and innovation bring to the world.

I love Instapaper. It was one of the first apps I downloaded when I got the iPhone 3G last year, and I’ve used it as much or more than any other app since. Hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of articles have passed through there, including every edition of BusinessWeek and the Economist.

I’m a power user, and being that as it is, I’d be more than willing to upgrade to pro, or at least look at some advertising, if it meant that the product would continue to improve. And there was a very simple way to get me and others like me to do that: stop developing the free version, and add awesome features to the pro version. Eventually, that would be too enticing to pass up.

But instead, Instapaper chose a really strange path, releasing an update to the free version that is a downgrade in a number of ways: only your last ten articles are visible, it doesn’t save your place when you leave an article, and it’s now ad-supported (I don’t really have a problem with this, but taken with the former two, it’s a little ridiculous). There are some added features, including background updating, but not nearly enough to make it a net positive.

The idea, of course, is to make Instapaper Free just objectionable enough to encourage people to upgrade. But now I just feel annoyed, and upgrading almost feels like rewarding bad behavior. As I said before, the right approach would have been to stop developing for the free version, and make the pro features so great that the free version would just feel stale.

As it stands, I’ll probably try out a couple of other tools, including ReadItLater. Honestly, I really want to upgrade to Instapaper Pro, but I’m still put off by that “upgrade,” and the last thing I want is to encourage other companies to do the same later.

How valuable is google docs? Valuable enough apparently for Twitter to trust it (and their biggest competitor) with a copy of their confidential notes, financials, and plans. In all the hooplah last week about Twitter getting hacked, I was surprised no one seemed to notice this.

In fact, some of the compromised notes directly commented on the status of negotiations with (and potential threat from) Google itself:

In a May 7 management meeting… the attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”

But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense - with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great - better than the landing pages on Google.”

While it’s unlikely Google management would sanction eavesdropping policies against competitors, it’s not hard to believe that a lone employee might occasionally do a key word search and stumble upon proprietary and potentially useful information.

I’m a big tech geek. I have enormous amounts of trust in both technology and many tech companies to do the right thing. Still, even I hesitate to put strategy docs on google, when a project may be competitive or otherwise relevant to google’s business. Whether or not Twitter management themselves trust gmail / google docs with this proprietary info, it’s certainly worth noting that it’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to prevent ALL employees from storing or transmitting info via Google.

It’s an issue that more and more companies (particularly web companies) are going to have to consider, and it’s something that Google would be wise to address (hello - encryption!) at some point (especially for companies that don’t trust ANYONE with their data).

Nonetheless, this says a lot about not only the utility of google docs, but also the inherent trust our generation of web startups has in each other to do the right thing. Trust is the future, “Do No Evil” is a requisite.

It’s official - the most libertarian, freedom promoting, anti-authoritarian society in history is now reorganizing itself around strong central government. And if my intuition is correct, that says something interesting about the future of real world societies as well.

From its design as a tool to help communication survive nuclear attacks, to its evolution as an distributed web of information, the internet is all about decentralization. And that decentralized nature  has unleashed an explosion of creativity and innovation across the world.

But something is changing, and it’s happening very quickly: we are starting to empower specific organizations and companies with central control.

We used to all host our own web servers. Now it’s generally far more efficient to let Amazon do it for us. Five years ago we used to communicate through our own email servers. Today an increasing chunk of that communication is now happening on managed communities like Facebook and Twitter (and soon Google Wave). These communities have very specific and pronounced structures (laws) that govern everything from how the system acts, to who can participate in it.

And to a large extent these laws are widely beneficial. Unlike email, users on Facebook have a (somewhat) validated identity. There is also a centralization of spam-prevention, abuse procedures, content formatting, and even structure to profiles that maximizes the efficiency of finding and retrieving information.

And it’s not just Facebook, the same thing is happening with Twitter, which is using centralized management and control to improve the experience of un-managed platforms like blogging and SMS. In fact, the biggest critism of Twitter today is that its not exerting enough control.

And while my libertarian blood cells coagulate at the thought of centralization and its inevitable abuse and inefficiency, that doesn’t seem to be happening online. What does seem to be happening, unlike with real world governments, is that these strong central players are organically rising and falling (ahem, MySpace) based on the effectiveness and responsiveness to the people they are governing.

I’m far from a political scientist, but it’s a common belief that as societies advance they form governments to maximize the quality of life for their citizens. The same seems to be true for the online world. The question is what happens as the two worlds increasingly become one.

Every month i see a new headline from the Firefox team about a new feature, tool, or platform they’re building. Some of them even look cool. The problem is I dont care. And honestly most other people don’t either.

The world is becoming 100% internet based. Apps, info, data, communication, its all online. What this means is that everything else is just foundation. Apple gets it. Google gets it. Firefox doesn’t.

The next version of OSX Snow Leopard has a few new features, but that’s not what it’s really about. Snow Leopard is all about being faster, smaller, and more stable. Apple literally is rewriting large chunks of the code just to radically increase speed.

Google is so preoccupied with performance they went out and built Chrome. And wow, is it fast. Google understands that in a world of always on information, winning is all about helping people get that information faster.

And yet Firefox, the scrappy open-source David that took on and beat Goliath (well former Golliath, sorry Microsoft) based on speed and performance, is now increasingly looking like the one that’s out of touch.

In the last month Firefox has crashed on me at least once a day. No doubt there may be a specific issue with Firefox and Mac (Im using the latest Macbook pro), but it seems to be much more wide spread than that. More importantly, compared to Chrome or even Safari, the browser is slow. Yes i know Firefox has made improvements, and will make more with FF 3.5. But the fact of the matter is Safari and Chrome are almost completely focussed on speed and stability - and that focus is starting to pay serious dividends.

For now I’ve literally had no choice but to switch to Safari (which btw is actually really nice - their developer tools are even surprisingly comparable to Firebug!). I hold out hope that Firefox will one day return to greatness. Right now though the third browser war is on, and so far Firefox’s cannons are pointed in the wrong direction.

Google Wave is the talk of the town today, and for good reason. It’s a radically smarter way of structuring personal information management and collaboration. But the most interesting part of the product might be that only Google could have built it. And I say this from first hand experience — because I tried.

Six years ago, I came up with an interesting idea: those threads in email should be shareable containers. They shouldn’t just group emails, they should group docs, live chats, photos, calendar items, etc, and each should be collaboratively shareable and editable in real time by everyone involved in the conversation. All stored, accessed, and edited in the web browser. Sound familiar?

I actually built an interactive flash prototype (slide show of it embedded below) and I spent a few months showing it around feeling out interest from investors. Unanimously, everyone thought it was a great idea and said they’d love to use the product.

But there was a problem. Actually several:

1. It’s a huge project: 2003 was pre-google docs, pre-gmail, pre-most web apps. Even today though, the size and scale of building ALL of these apps and integrating them in a web based system necessitated 100s of developers and likely $10s of millions of development dollars. Especially in 2003.
2. Chicken and the egg: What I designed was actually backwards compatible with normal email protocols and file system management. Still, to really use the value-added functionality everyone needed to be using the system. And given the huge infrastructure and raw numbers of different technologies that it would be replacing, the cost and scale of convincing millions to be the first jumpers was an enormous barrier.
3. Browser / technology limitations: In 2003 Ajax was barely possible in most browsers. Fast forward to 2009 and there are still major limitations in browsers that obstruct some key functionality needed for this type of application.
4. People don’t pay for email: Well businesses do, but the real point is that large Internet companies (Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft) give away web based email and collaboration products for free to most consumers. For companies with other substantive income streams that’s fine. But for a start-up, that’s a major barrier to large scale paid adoption, which would have been key for a project of this scale.

If you see where I’m going with this, each of the challenges above represented potentially game-stopping obstructions to building and successfully running a start-up business built around this product. But the beauty of Google circa 2009 is that they literally have built in solutions for each problem.

Google not only has the financial resources and might to build something on this scale, and give it away for free, but it also has the entire Google Apps code base to build it on. Of equal importance, Google has the clout and control over browser development to actually change the standards (which they intend to do with HTML5 to support the technologies needed to build this product).

Perhaps most important of all though, Google has the attention (and an existing user-base) of billions of people - enough that they might actually be able to pull off the greatest chicken-and-egg product problem that has ever existed.

One way or another though, I applaud them for taking this enormous and needed step towards a much smarter information management design. Despite the value of the product, and the resources behind them, the road ahead will not be easy. But if anyone can drive it, it’s them.

Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times that when we go online, “each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.” This, apparently, is a bad thing, as it insulates us in our own “hermetically sealed political chambers.”

Brian Lowry of Variety got in the act two days later. Mr. Lowry also seems terrified that the news experience is becoming more personalized, and that people might actually get to choose what they want to read. He specifically called our site, Veritocracy, a “worrisome tool” that “limits online exposure,” creating “hermetically sealed thought-bubbles.” (Is it possible that “hermetically sealed” was the term of the week at big media’s weekend getaway?)

To be honest, I’m not sure either has actually used social media. Mr. Lowry, in particular, says that users of sites like Veri “never need see an article or link that challenges their existing opinions.” This is one criticism I never expected, given that we built Veritocracy to make it easier to find multiple perspectives on the topics you want to read about (from blogs, mainstream media, readers, etc). This is possible today only because there are so many unique and diverse perspectives in the blogosphere and social media.

To some extent, this feels like old media looking for a boogeyman, and not taking the time to learn about why these new technologies are so popular. The idea that mainstream media provides a noble, unbiased, universal truth, is simply wrong. If anything, sites like Veritocracy are making better information more accessible, and eliminating the inevitable biases that come from having a limited amount of human editors deciding what people should read.

This isn’t to bash mainstream media — it still has a tremendous amount of value, and I personally read the NY Times, WSJ, BusinessWeek, and, yes, Variety (among others). But it’s now just one form of consumption among many, and I think that scares people who a) work in that space, and b) don’t understand the other side.

Mr. Lowry never talked to me directly about what Veri does or how it works. Instead, he seems to have cherry-picked bits of information from an email that a friend of ours sent out to his own list the day we launched. That’s unfortunate, because as I’ve said, Veri’s goal is simply to help people get better information about the topics they care about. That, to me, is something we all should be rooting for.

More Perspectives: Is Social Media Trustworthy?

Mark Cuban thinks cable will continue to be the dominant platform for TV. He makes some compelling arguments, but he’s wrong on one account: Personalization. Cable’s one-to-many distribution technology makes it a very efficient way to distribute video, but it fails on personalization, and that is the Internet’s killer app for both consumers AND advertisers.

In a world where all the world’s video content is available on embeddable Hulu-like sites, really creative people and companies will create technologies that give us the convenience of TV with the personalization of the Internet. You might watch Joe’s Channel one night, Jane’s Channel the next, and CNBC’s during the day. More powerful systems will give you Pandora like stations. Choose a genre (comedy or sci-fi or action) and get a personalized stream of tv episodes and movies chosen specifically for you. The point is technology moves towards convenience, and Internet TV has the ability to give it to us in personalized ways.

One of the big reasons newspapers are dieing is not because every one of their old subscribers decided to follow them online; it’s because many of those subscribers DIDN’T. The NY Times used to be able to depend on the fact that if you want 10% of their articles, you would be willing to consume all 100% of their paper. Now you find those 10% through links from thebusinessinsider.com, Twitter, or maybe Veritocracy, and the other 90% comes from other papers and blogs. It’s personalization from increased choice (even to make less of them sometimes!) that is the killer app of the Internet, and the reason old distributions platforms will fade away.

The beauty of this transition is that personalization also enhances the experience for advertisers. Combine all of the information about you on Facebook, with the complete history of EVERY tv show and movie you have ever watched, maybe even what you’ve purchased before, and what web sites you visit, and all of a sudden that 15 second ads becomes exponentially more effective. In fact in a world where ads are so much better targeted, you can show less of them, which means people are more likely to actually pay attention.

None of this is easy, but there is nothing technologically that cable will be able to do, that the Internet eventually won’t. The same is not true in reverse. And while Mark does make a good point that standards for video monetization have not progressed quickly, there is enormous economic incentive to do so. Anyone (include some big companies like Facebook and Google) can work on this right now - and many probably are. It’s a big technical challenge, but if i had to bet on either a few cable companies, or millions of entrepreneurs getting there first, my money’s on the latter.

We’re still at least a couple years away before we start really seeing this happen first hand. And I dont fault cable companies and content providers for maximizing large, exisiting revenue sources. BUT and this is the big but, the trend is there, and it will only continue to gain steam. The decision content owners (and cable operators) have to make, is whether they want to stay ahead of that trend and try to exploit it, or fall behind and watch others do it instead.

More Perspectives: Will TV Over the Internet Challenge Cable?

Its official… Veritocracy has officially opened up to the public. Check it out.

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We started Veritocracy based on a simple idea: to create a personalized news site that really worked. There were and are a lot of social content sites and news aggregators, but we believed it was possible to build a site that wasn’t just finding popular stuff — it was finding the highest quality and most relevant content, specifically for you.

It took a lot of testing, tweaking, designing, and building, and quite honestly it proved a lot more complex than we originally expected. But today, we’re really thrilled to allow everyone in to see what we’ve been working on.

Simply put, Veri gives you a personalized view of the topics and news stories that interest you. The system brings together articles from the blogosphere, mainstream media, and readers, and then helps group them into specific and narrow topics (like a news story, a stock or a movie). As a reader, you simply vote up on the articles you like and down on the ones you don’t, and Veritocracy automatically learns to feed you the best articles on the topics that interest you most.

Instead of searching for information and hoping that what you read is credible and complete, Veritocracy creates a rich and full picture of each story you read about. And of course, since Veritocracy is a social content site, if you have a better perspective on any topic, you can always submit your own. In fact, for bloggers and publishers, Veritocracy automatically helps build organic traffic by connecting you with other publishers and readers interested in the topics you’re writing about.

At the end of the day, we believe that if you create a site that can deliver the best information on a personalized basis, you create a true meritocracy of content distribution as well.

We have a lot more in store in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned and definitely let us know what you think.