This is the best coverage with loads of images:
Live Apple “Come see our latest creation” / tablet event coverage
The teaser for Apple’s press event, “Come see our latest creation,” has a double meaning. Content creators, not gadget freaks, will be the biggest target of Apple’s Wednesday press conference.
Although most of the speculation has centered on a tablet device that will likely be announced at the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs probably has bigger plans in mind. (Click for live coverage of the Apple event, which starts 10 a.m. Pacific time on Jan. 27.)
Apple’s goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content — in addition to offering a new avenue for content producers to make money. That platform will likely be far broader than just a tablet device, and will extend to every device or computer that iTunes touches.
HTML5 and iTunes will form the centerpieces of Apple’s new content strategy. The new iTunes content will not be packaged as apps sold through the App Store, though Apple will likely provide a tablet app for displaying new content created with this new platform, and developers will still be free to create apps. Instead, HTML content will be presented similar to the way iTunes currently presents enhanced music and video content.
“The focus is going to be on content creation and participation,” a technologist with close ties to Apple told Wired.com. “If the tablet is going to be an answer to things like the Kindle, which are purely about consumption, what you’re going to see is Apple is going to be full-blown about creation.”
Our source said he inferred the arrival of an HTML5-and-iTunes book platform based on a combination of knowledge from Apple and his own analysis of news reports.
By creating a business platform for content producers, Apple would be recycling a winning strategy for its iPhone’s App Store: the genius of crowdsourcing. Apple opened up a software development kit to third-party developers to code for the iPhone and sell their apps through the iTunes App Store. The result? 100,000 apps and counting, a lucrative industry worth over $1 billion, and a 30 percent cut for Apple with each sale.
Apple has sold more than 6 billion songs through iTunes, and the software comes bundled with all new Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard computers. That means publishers who sell through iTunes have access to an enormous potential market.
Already, iTunes LP utilizes HTML5 and JavaScript code to present richer album experiences that can include cover art, liner notes, lyrics and more, in addition to music. ITunes Extras works in a similar way with movies. Both take advantage of a browser built in to the iTunes application to present multimedia content.
An iTunes book involving HTML5 would be a logical extension of the platform to create similar rich-media wrappers for e-books and e-magazines. But why stop at the covers?
Content creators could use HTML5 and JavaScript to create well-designed, interactive content. That could be as simple as an illustrated and code-enhanced story or as complex as a fancy digital magazine packed with video and audio.
It could also change classroom learning. Textbook material could incorporate multimedia and social networking elements as easily as any web page currently can.
(Fans of Adobe and its Flash platform are likely to be disappointed, since Apple’s support for Flash has been anemic at best, and is nonexistent in iTunes LP and iTunes Extras.)
Then, instead of deploying that content on a website and asking for donations or trying to sell ads, creators could deploy their web pages-cum-e-books to the iTunes store, where a built-in retail apparatus takes care of collecting payments as small as $1 while Apple holds on to what looks like a reasonably small 30-percent cut.
A recent Wall Street Journal story suggests that Apple is in last-minute negotiations with book publishers, urging them to adopt a model where most books are priced at $13 or $15, instead of the $10 that prevails on Amazon’s Kindle e-book store.
By distributing through iTunes, creators would have access to users on any of Apple’s platforms, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, MacBooks, desktop PCs, or possibly even the Apple TV. Even more significantly, iTunes users on Windows PCs would also be part of the available market.
And sure, that content will no doubt look good on a tablet, too. Our guess is the tablet will have exclusive functions for displaying iTunes book content in a special way, which will be one of the gadget’s main selling points (among other new, yet-to-be-known features, of course).
In one fell swoop, a move like this would give content creators easy-to-use and powerful tools for creating interactive content, and give them a way of making a living from it, too.
That’s the kind of thing — not some shiny gadget — that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would say “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
FROM:Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets | Epicenter | Wired.com
SIMYO and Ahead of Time presents the future of mobile media and communication.
This is a great film presenting a summary of key result of the open think tank MOCOM…
Enjoy:
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
Apple Inc. on Monday morning announced an invitation-only special event in San Francisco Jan. 27 at which it is widely expected the company will unveil its much-anticipated tablet device.
The New York Times hasn’t spilled the beans over the Apple tablet again, but rumors are linking the two companies once more. Reports of an upcoming paid model to be adopted by the New York Times are correlated with the mythical Apple tablet, as both are said to go public in the coming weeks.
The Times is expected to announce in the next few weeks details on how the paper plans to charge for its online content, unnamed sources told the New York Magazine. The Times didn’t confirm or deny the report, saying it will announce the decision when possible. Its answer, though, has raised several question marks in the blogosphere, especially as the paper’s announcement is supposed to come smack bang around the same time as the Apple tablet, at the January 27 event.
Even more, the Times presumably confirmed the existence of an Apple tablet in October last year, in a private speech. The relation between Apple and The Times is said to be a special one. Firstly, as noted by 9to5 Mac, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often uses the Times’ website when demonstrating the iPhone’s web browsing capabilities. Also, Apple has reportedly been in talks with publishers, including The Times, in order to prepare content for its impending slate computer.
But could really the two rumors be linked? Previous reports and speculation conveniently point in this direction, but the correlations are pretty vague at the moment. The Times announcement could be just a simple metered model, similar to the one used by the Financial Times, paidContent speculates. This would allow registered users to read certain stories free, while full access would be available only to subscribers.
Then again, maybe the Times won’t repeat its mistake with a paywall, as with TimesSelect, which operated from 2005 to 2007. The system charged $50 per year or $8 per month for access to certain areas of the site, but failed miserably and it was taken down. To make up for that, The Times opened its archives from 1987 to the present without charge.
One of my new prefered subject or topic these days is Augmented Reality.
CNBC ran an hour-long special on Google. The show dropped some exclusive news that eWeek picked up on – Google is in the process of developing an augmented reality system called Visual Search for Android phones.
The CNBC special, which had exclusive access to the Visual Search team, showed that the technology was not quite ready for prime time – at least back in August when footage was filmed. In his report eWeek’s Clint Boulton notes that Neven has a patent for mobile advertising around augmented reality.
“Imagine you’re a tourist and you arrive at this place and you want to know more about it,” said Neven on a visit to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles the show off the technology. “All you will have to do is take a picture of the sign. We send the information up to the server and we recognize this as the Santa Monica pier. The idea is you see something that interests you, you whip out your camera phone, take a picture of the object of interest, and this will trigger a Google search.”
The rumors published last week may be true after all.
Google is testing a new search interface on random people, as these screenshots confirm:
Like the Google Wave-inspired interface for Gmail, the new user interface is cleaner and bolder than the current version, offering more options to the user. It may still be far from deployment, however, but it’s good to see some changes after so many years of same all same all.
Hype around augmented reality, a technology that can superimpose graphics or information over the real world in your phone’s viewfinder, is at a fever pitch. But can it deliver the revenues?
I believe so.
Around two dozen applications like Layar, Junaio and Wikitude have burst onto iPhone and Android devices as smartphones with GPS, a compass and Internet access have finally made it possible for the technology to go mainstream. (If you’re curious about how augmented reality looks and feels, see the videos I’ve embedded at the bottom. It’s kind of like looking at the world through Terminator vision.)
Now Juniper Research is saying the market could grow to $732 million in five years, from just under $2 million next year. ABI Research has a more modest estimate: $350 million in annual revenues by 2014. That’s on the back of three primary revenue models: upfront payments to buy an app, subscription fees or paid premium versions and advertising.
The first two are self-explanatory, and might work well with augmented reality games. Advertising could take several forms. You might see augmented reality coupons or sponsored information tags as location-based services become more adept at serving ads based on your historical search needs and where you are. A couple augmented reality browsers like acrossair’s Nearest Tube or Layar could incorporate sponsored layers. For example, Starbucks could pay to add a special augmented reality layer to an existing browser showing nearby coffee spots. Or they could buy access to the technology to build their own app.
But there are reasons to remain skeptical. Venture capital firms have been relatively reluctant to back these young companies — Amsterdam-based Layar is the only company in the last three months to announce a round of venture funding. The larger and older businesses, Metaio and Total Immersion, are launching mobile products on the back of the businesses they’ve already built through augmented reality marketing and factory layout projects from the past.
There are still also a number of design issues to overcome. The use case is physically uncomfortable. It can be easier to look something up in a conventional map application than to constantly hold your phone at eye-level to see augmented reality tags.
The second issue is that augmented reality is still a bit of a novelty or a gimmick (see Metaio’s app to the left where you can insert 3D objects into your camera viewfinder).
And then of course there’s the business hurdle of reaching critical mass so that an advertising model can sustain the company. That said, Layar is boasting some promising statistics. The company said it has close to half a million downloads and the app is sticky with users logging in about 6.7 times a week on average.
So if their adoption (and those of their competitors) continues accelerating upward, stay tuned.
Since I live right above the tunnel, in Crozet – France, when I am running outside during the week I often think about what is going on, 100m under my feet.
The world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is in full operation after a year of repairs.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, said in a statement on Friday that particle beams are once again circulating in the LHC, and that a clockwise circulating beam was established at 10 p.m. in Geneva.
According to the CERN Twitter feed, an anticlockwise beam was also successfully injected, and both beams have completed many thousands of turns of the LHC.
Let’s hope CERN can take a step further the experiments that took place a year ago now.
Google demonstrated Google Chrome OS for the first time on Thursday in Mountain View:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
Read the full post at Google’s blog. You can also download Chrome OS in VMWare, VirtualBox or USB-installable at gdgt.
