iPad for Business

Apple has published some profiles of companies incorporating the iPad into their business practices. One of them is a dentist using the iPad to collect patient information using the Adobe Ideas app (photo below), which is interesting to me because I thought this app was just for making drawings — my kids love playing with it. Once the form is filled out they email it directly from the app into the practice’s database.

They also use the iPad to review X-rays with patients. This is a great example of implementing mobility onto a formerly stationary business process. Little service improvements like this can be huge differentiators for a small business.

iPads are changing the PC industry

This morning Silicon Alley Insider published an article titled Now Apple’s iPads Are Cannibalizing The Whole PC Industry (Sorry, Microsoft), which looks at the iPad’s effect initially on netbook sales, and on the PC industry generally.

Sales of traditional notebooks appear to be feeling pressure from the iPad, causing a scramble by vendors to launch iPad-like tablets… We believe that a majority of this impact is occurring on the lower end of PC sales as the iPad is priced close enough to this range that it becomes attractive to consumers looking to make purchases within this segment. We are not sold that the iPad is purely cannibalizing PC sales, as the functionality of the iPad can not yet fully match the functionality of notebook PC’s. However, consumers who purchase iPads may be more willing to delay purchases and upgrades of existing PC’s.

I recently worked with the CEO at a company here in the Houston area to get him set up on the iPad. He wanted something to replace his laptop for short business trips, mostly for email and calendar but also casual web browsing. His Windows laptop is slow to start up, and the two things he immediately noticed and liked about the iPad are (1) the instant-on status, and (2) long battery life. You push the home button and the machine is ready—there is no boot-up, no waiting.

Netbook sales since the iPad’s introduction

Vimeo’s new iframe embed code

As a follow-up to a previous post about embedding Vimeo videos and having them work on Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), Vimeo just announced their Universal Player which will deliver the appropriate video format for the device being used. Vimeo’s FAQ page has more info on it, but the new method uses an <iframe> HTML tag to frame in the content, and the player will detect the device to serve the right video file. YouTube has recently rolled out something similar. Vimeo’s code looks like this (line breaks were added):

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/12345678?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;
portrait=0&amp;color=CC6600" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I did some quick testing and it worked fine. Both the iPad and iPhone were delivered h.264 versions, while Mac and PC still get the standard Flash player. I would like to see Vimeo offer some embed options to include serving straight HTML5/h.264 to the desktop as well and avoid Flash altogether.

WordPress doesn’t like the <iframe> tag, so if you’re using WP you will need to install the Embed Iframe plugin. In my testing this plugin has supported the new Vimeo method within a WP post. I have a test page here where I embed two videos, the first one using the new iframe code and the second one with the earlier javascript workaround.

Vimeo Tests

Test using Vimeo embed code for iPhone and iPad.

580×326

Using new Vimeo embed iframe code:

Using Javascript workaround code:

RIM to release the Blackpad

According to this Bloomberg article, Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry smartphones, plans to release a competitor to the iPad this November: the Blackpad.

Pricing for the device will be in line with the iPad, which starts at $499, the person said. RIM is focused on reaping additional profits from the tablet effort, rather than competing on price to sell a large number of devices, the person said.

In the tablet market, RIM will have to demonstrate how its device can stand out against products including the iPad, which has attracted buyers because of its integration with Apple’s iTunes service and many software applications, or apps. More than 225,000 apps are available for Apple devices, the company said in June. RIM said in April it had more than 6,000 apps.

So they’re going to launch a new device with far fewer native apps, to compete against the iPad which has a mature app store containing tens of thousands of titles and huge brand awareness right now, and they’re going to demand the same price as the iPad? Good luck with that strategy. I have a few questions:

• Where’s the mobile OS to compete with Apple’s iOS4? RIM still hasn’t delivered anything close to the touch capabilities found on the iPad/iPhone today. This is not a trivial point and I don’t know that RIM has the engineering chops to do it.
• What’s RIM’s answer to the App Store/iTunes ecosystem? Easy integration is critical to the adoption of a new device like this.
• What’s the retail strategy — is there a store people can walk in to and get their hands on the Blackpad when it’s released? This has been huge for Apple, and RIM needs a response here.
• What’s the differentiator? Is there anything about the Blackpad that says better than iPad?

I can see RIM getting some limited traction in the enterprise just due to brand recognition, but I don’t know if that’s enough to take the Blackpad very far considering they’re already late to a game they probably don’t even want to be in. And Blackpad is an awful name.

Hewlett-Packard Co., which bought smartphone maker Palm Inc. this month, said it plans to produce a tablet device that runs on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

HP bought a company with a strong mobile operating system (Palm’s webOS) and tons of valuable patents, and they’re going to put Windows on their tablet instead?

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said yesterday the software company plans to increase its focus on tablets.

Translation: The software company plans to increase its focus on what the innovative companies are doing and attempt to duplicate that somehow.

What I think is likely to happen with these companies scurrying to jump into the ‘tablet’ space is something akin to the commodity PC market: A race to the bottom.

Vimeo HTML5 Embed Workaround

Many people are using Vimeo.com for their video hosting rather than YouTube. I’ve been using it for nearly a year. Personally, I like it better than YouTube because you’re not limited to 10-minute segments per video. I like the features they provide with a Vimeo Plus membership, and the user community that’s grown there. Also, the content on Vimeo seems to have more of an artistic focus, with some very talented folks posting quality work.

One of the limitations with Vimeo right now, however, is the lack of HTML5 embedding and the impact this has on iPhones and iPads. You can view videos on the Vimeo.com mobile site (www.vimeo.com/m) with your iPhone and iPad (neither of which will display Adobe Flash content), but if you want to embed your videos on another site, Vimeo doesn’t yet have a player implemented to handle embedding for those devices.

YouTube has a solution in place, and there’s been some push from Vimeo members in recent months to get this done there as well. Recently the Vimeo staff responded that they’re working on it, and I expect they will deliver something good. We don’t know how long it will be until it’s ready, so in the meantime I thought I would post a temporary solution to get embedded Vimeo videos working on the iPhone and iPad. This is not my original idea. I found it in this YouTube video describing the process, and decided to document it a little further and put it here. Thanks to YouTube user “optikalefxx” for posting his solution for everyone.

(It’s nothing more than a javascript browser-sniffing workaround/hack, but it works well enough and might be a good way to bridge the gap and get your videos to these popular iDevices until Vimeo delivers a proper API for it.)

Here’s a link to the code in a PDF you can download, including some notes, caveats and assumptions about using it. (If you have trouble with formatting when copying the code from the PDF, try this Google doc where I have included a complete HTML page that you can work from.) I assume you’ll know what to do with this, how to modify it for your particular video ID, dimensions, controls color, etc. As always, make a backup copy of any files before you modify, and test it across your platforms and devices before publishing. This method is intended to be temporary, and it may break in the near future as Vimeo implements their HTML5 embed solution, so don’t put this out there expecting it to be a long-term fix. Caveat developer.

Take your files mobile with Dropbox

Here’s the idea: you’re away from your computer—Mac or PC—and you want to use your mobile device to access folders and files that are saved on your computer. A cloud sync service like Dropbox can fill that gap and provide quick and easy access to your files. I’ve been testing this for a while and it works great.

The way it works:

• You have a Dropbox account (free 2 GB account, or pay for more space).
• The Dropbox application is installed on your computer, which creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ and syncs this folder (and every folder inside it) to your online account.
• Any folders and files that you would like to be able to access on your mobile device, just move those into the Dropbox folder structure.
• Install the free Dropbox app on your mobile device, enter your login information, and have access to your online account and all of the folders and files you have synced up on your computer.

It’s important to point out that this is not some ‘virtual’ folder—the Dropbox folder and its subfolders actually exist on your computer, so it’s no different than your current folder hierarchy: your data is still stored on your hard drive. The only difference is that once a file is saved locally, a copy automagically gets pushed to the cloud. This serves several purposes:

1. A remote backup of your files. In case your computer were stolen or damaged such that you couldn’t get to your data, you could recover your files from Dropbox. This is reason enough to do it.
2. Remote access for viewing up-to-date copies of all your files when you’re away from your computer.
3. The ability to share a file with someone else, either by using the Public folder or by emailing a link to the file directly from the Dropbox mobile app.

As of this writing Dropbox mobile apps are available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and iPod Touch—according to the Dropbox Anywhere page, Blackberry support is coming as well.

I’ve found the Dropbox service and the mobile applications to be very stable and reliable so far as I have used them on iPhone and iPad. I experimented for a while with a free 2 GB account, but recently upgrade to the 100 GB service for $20 a month.

I’ve mentioned Dropbox in several blog posts—I’m not involved with the company in any way, just a satisfied customer. They’re doing a really good job.

PDFs on your mobile bookshelf

The new iPhone operating system, iOS4, has a smart feature that lets you store PDFs on your ‘bookshelf’ in the iBooks app. There are two sections in the bookshelf — one for books and one for PDFs — tap the button at the top of the screen to navigate between the two.

To get your PDFs onto the iPhone, in iTunes go to File > Add to Library… and import them. iTunes will put them in the right place when you sync up.

I like this because I have product manuals and user guides and all kinds of things in PDF form; this is a good way to have them somewhat organized and available wherever you are. You can selectively choose which books and PDFs you want to sync over, so you don’t have to carry them all. If you have a lot of PDFs, it’s nice to have a ‘library’ to organize them in.

Here’s what it looks like when you open a PDF on the web — you get an ‘Open in iBooks’ button at the top. Pressing this button will take you to the iBooks app, put the current PDF on your bookshelf, and open it up:

Here’s the two bookshelves in the iBooks app:

BOOKS

PDFs

3 Million iPads Sold in 80 days

Apple issued a press release today stating that they have sold their 3 millionth iPad just 80 days after its US introduction. iPad will be sold in nine more countries beginning in July.

How many of these things will they sell by the end of 2010? My prediction: 9 million.

Opt Out of Apple iAds

Once you’ve upgraded your iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch device to iOS 4 (it’s out today), you can go to http://oo.apple.com and opt out of iAds. It only works if you go to this link with a device running iOS 4.