Today Apple announced a new initiative for textbooks on the iPad. If successful, this could transform the textbook publishing industry and radically improve the way classroom materials are developed, published and used in schools around the world—a classic example of disruptive technology. They are proposing that high school textbooks be sold through the App Store for $15 or less.
Apple also introduced a new free application—iBooks Author—for creating this content and publishing it to the iBooks Store for distribution, so the tools are there to start making this happen now. You can download it from the Mac App Store here.
There’s a 7-minute overview of the whole thing here, and the longer keynote presentation video can be seen here.
He’s talking about mobile virtualization—accessing a PC remotely from another device, like a tablet or smartphone, for those situations that require a full Windows machine. This is impacting PC sales as many users are finding they can do a lot of what they want on the other devices with less reliance on the PC.
Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.
PC sales are down, while tablets and smartphones are gaining traction with both businesses and consumers. And smartphone sales have already surpassed PC sales.
In 2006 Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil passed the Clean City Law which banned “every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo.”
Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were illegal. “A billboard is media on the road,” she told the FT. “In rational purchases it means less effectiveness… as people are involved in so many things that it makes it difficult to execute the call to action.”
It’s like everyone is competing to see who can scream the loudest, or find the most clever way to say Click Here. I went to a business meeting a few years ago in Aspen and, in addition to the natural beauty of the place, one of the first things I noticed: no billboards, and very little outdoor advertising at all.
Estimates say some Americans now look at upwards of 4,000 ads per day. When is enough enough?
This is the main reason we don’t watch much TV at our house, and when we do everyone in the house knows to hit the mute button when a commercial comes on because most of it is vacuous or obnoxious. I don’t know how anyone tolerates it.
I wonder if any major US cities might ever try Mayor Kassab’s model. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the visual pollution just disappeared one day.
Sometimes we do a web search because we want a bunch of results to look through, and this usually works pretty well. But sometimes we just want the answer to a question: we know there is exactly one correct answer to the question, and we just want that—not a bunch of useless “hits” and ads (aka sponsored links) cluttering up the page.
When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the Siri intelligent assistant software on the new iPhone. He made a really interesting comment about the current state of web search: he said that what we often need is not search technology but answer technology.
Rick Webb posted a typical example of search results for “gold price” on Google and also on Wolfram|Alpha (WA). The Google results are familiar—and not entirely useless—but the WA result is an answer (assuming that the search term means ‘what is the price of gold?’). The technology at the heart of Siri uses the WA services, among others, to find and deliver very specific responses to user input. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty amazing considering how relatively immature the field is right now. This is clearly the future of web search, especially on mobile devices.
Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that can provide an amazing breadth of data, sometimes cross-referencing several databases and calculating complex results on the fly. If you haven’t yet checked it out, start with the tour and see for yourself what this technology can do. Also, see the examples page to get an idea of the range of subjects where you can put WA to work for you. It’s free.
Many online publications do this really annoying thing with their articles. Rather than putting the entire article on one web page, they break it out into several pages, forcing you to click ‘Next’ over and over to get through it. They do this, of course, so they can show you more ads every time a new page loads.
Apple’s Safari web browser (in OS X Lion and Windows) has a great feature called Reader—clicking on the Reader icon in Safari’s address bar does two useful things:
formats the article into a single page
removes the ads
Other images that are part of the article will still display, but the ads get filtered out. This is brilliant and makes reading on the web better.
Reader presents the article in a subtle pop-up screen and darkens the surrounding page, drawing your attention to thing you want to read. If you hover your mouse towards the bottom of the page you will see icons that let you decrease or increase the font size, email the article, print it, or close out Reader and return to the normal web page. You can also click the Reader icon in the address bar to close it out.
make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products: the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively.
• [ with obj. ] introduce (something new, esp. a product): innovating new products, developing existing ones.
Large organizations often look for big, enterprise-wide solutions to their problems. In some cases this is the right approach (ERP, CRM), but sometimes larger problems can be solved by tackling smaller, localized challenges first.
A couple of actual cases from my work with a big organization:
Scenario One — DIY
A few years ago our business unit needed a way to capture and report on employee training hours. The company had minimum requirements for training so we needed to know who had been to training, which classes they took, the number of approved hours for each class, how many cumulative hours they had for the year, subtotals for each office around the country, and we needed the instructor of each class to verify attendance.
Our CIO had talked a little about creating an application for this and other pedestrian business processes, but there were so many other priorities competing for limited resources that I knew this would not get done soon, if ever. So we hired a small development shop to work on it and we built it ourselves for less than $10,000. What used to take a training coordinator four days to do every quarter with multiple Excel spreadsheets now took a few minutes with our new web app.
But the really interesting thing was that shortly after we implemented it we started getting calls from other business units in the company. They had heard about our training management app and they wanted it too. Why? Because most every part of the company had the same training requirements and they were all experiencing the same challenges we were in tracking and reporting. So we shared what we had created, others got the same benefits, and the company was just a little better because of it.
Scenario Two — Reverse Engineering
Our business unit needed a way to look up a few data points about affiliate companies we worked with. All of the data existed in several company databases, but none of those databases contained everything we wanted, so the current process required our users to query multiple sources just to get a small dataset. We wrote up some specs for an app that would take a nightly export from the various data sources, parse out the subset we wanted, load it into a single SQL database, and then lay a simple web interface on top of it for our users to get everything they need in one place. Our internal dev team estimated it to be a $40,000 project.
We took our plan and the cost estimate to company leadership and asked for funding to build it. Our conservative ROI calculation came to $140,000 in productivity savings the first year, so it seemed like a slam dunk business case.
Funding was denied. There were other priorities, we were told, and besides this same functionality will be delivered in another system by year end, except that it wasn’t.
Well, necessity being the mother of invention and all, we retreated to the local burger joint to talked about how we could get this app done. I was lucky enough to have a first-rate Project Manager/Business Analyst/Programmer on my team—he brought up an earlier integration project we had done and thought maybe we could reverse engineer some of the work we had done there. As we talked about it and walked through how it might work the light started to come on for both of us: this is doable. It will take some time to do it without a dedicated development team, but we don’t need corporate funding so who’s going to stop us? (By the way, that’s a useful question to ask yourself when you see an opportunity. Don’t ask: can I do this?—instead, ask: who’s going to stop me?)
I told him to get started on it and let me know when he had a working prototype. About two weeks later we sat down to look at the first iteration and the framework of it all was there (and it was built using free open source tools). A few weeks later, after much testing, tweaking and documentation, we delivered the app to 100+ business users—they are still using it today and others in the company regularly ask for access to the application. Total hard dollar cost to the company: $0.
A couple of important things came out of these exercises in innovation:
Tangible benefits—increased efficiency and productivity, cost reduction, improved reporting and customer service—were now being realized in the company. Immediate impact.
An innovative mindset was being fostered: the idea that we can sometimes solve problems from the bottom up, without waiting for the big enterprise solution that may never materialize.
I understand that these scenarios may not translate directly into other organizations, but the point is that sometimes we just need to get creative within our own teams and look for ways to bring about the change we want. We don’t always have to take no for an answer, and sometimes the smallest innovations can scale up to make a real difference.
Physorg.com published an article today about Apple’s design work on solar technology for laptops, smartphones and tablets.
One such patent involves using sunlight to light up a laptop’s screen. The patent application explains the idea as an “apparatus and methods for harnessing external light to illuminate a display screen of an electronic device.”
AeroFS is a file syncing application, similar to Dropbox, but instead of syncing your files with their servers it runs within your own network and syncs data among your devices internally. It’s a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) filesystem that doesn’t require a ‘middleman’ server. They offer an optional encrypted sync to their servers (cloud) if you want offsite backup as well. See their Features page for more info.
The idea is a really good one: if you already have file storage capacity in your home or business you can use it to set up automatic syncing and sharing of directories and files without going through a third party service. Many companies have security policies that don’t allow file sharing through services like Dropbox, so something like AeroFS could meet that need really well.
As of this writing they are in beta so you can sign up for an invitation and be notified when it’s ready.
When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the 
Wolfram|Alpha
