Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!
After years of waiting, rumours and nonsense, the Apple iPad is finally upon us. Am I impressed? Am I blown away? Kinda.
Clearly it makes sense to move media from the somewhat clunky interface of keyboard and screen to a touchpad, and Apple is the company to move the computer industry kicking and screaming into a new paradigm. And what the iPad does, it does very, very well, from we surfing to reading books and newspapers. And yet….there’s something missing. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no camera, no multi-tasking and the fact that the iPad seems geared more to content consumption than content creation.
As someone who creates content for a living, that leaves me high and dry. I can’t use the iPad for quick and dirty vlogging or podcasting and I definitely won’t be editing video on it anytime soon. I have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone, and between the two of them I get everything I need without a third device.
But on the other hand it’s a new platform, so as a content creator that makes me happy. In theory, the iPad form factor makes it an ideal platform for video and for print, both fields I happen to work in. It even opens up the possibility of new forms of magazine, hybrids of video, audio, game content and print articles, distributable by small publishers consisting of a writer, developer and designer. In a way it could be the rebirth of the zine.
In fact, the potential of the iPad is almost limitless. But right now, that’s just what it is…potential. And that’s why i won’t be getting one just yet.
TEDMED is the newest offshoot of TED, the conference/video channel that brings big ideas to the Internet in digestible videos. Biotech and medicine have reached the point where an entirely new site dedicated to just medicine is now viable. The site is pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be well populated with great videos inside of a month. Also, the opening graphics for the videos, which consist of CG flybys through the nervous system, are pretty damned cool.
Here’s an interesting video about growing regenerated organs:
I could do without all the ads, but the rest of it looks mighty neat. Plus if ads move to an AR format, you just turn ’em off until you need access, rendering the real world blissfully ad-free.
For the second time, the NYT is thinking about instituting a paywall. My personal feeling is that it’ll be slow suicide, but maybe the brain trust at the Gray Lady knows something I don’t. Apple’s new tablet might be a revolutionary product that heralds a new media delivery system, and in the process makes the NYT “app” worth both paying for and subscribing to. And if I had to pick a paper I’d pay to read, the Times would definitely be the top contender. But….it all smacks of desperation and futility. Matthew Ingram, who recently left the Globe and Mail to become a senior writer at GigaOm (itself formed by former BusinessWeek reporter Om Malik) has written an interesting post about the NYT paywall. Check it out.
Well, no surprise there. But many a year has been pegged as “the year we (fill in the blank)” in the sci-fi realm, and as we reach those years we’re filled with a crashing sense of disappointment. Here’s some of the best sci-fi years and how they actually panned out.
They don’t make local news openers like this anymore, and I’m torn as to whether that’s a good or bad thing.
In addition to coddling a dead language and being pretty damned bitter about their lost colonial empire and handy defeat at the hands of the Nazis, France can now add “hatred of the future” to their long list of missteps. French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tax Google and other new media giants in order to help struggling print and other media companies. Well, pleut moi un rivoire, Nicolai, if those businesses are failing there’s likely a very good reason for their downward spiral, such as lack of a 21st century business model.
The Irish government recently enacted a new law which makes statements of what it deems blasphemy punishable by a fine of up to 25,000 pounds (about $50,000). Atheist Ireland isn’t about to take this nonsense lying down, and have published 25 blasphemous statements on their website. They’ve also stated that “medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas.” I couldn’t agree more.
Way back in 1984, William Gibson took the then new phenomenon of the Japanese capsule hotel, a place for salarymen to rest their head when they’d missed the last train home, and turned it on its ear as a last chance saloon for his criminal protagonist. While the capsule hotel hasn’t yet become a den of villainy, it is a new alternative for the many otherwise homeless Japanese desperately looking for work. While the Japanese economy continues to tank, many are turning to the tiny self-contained bunks as their last resort before hitting the streets.
I’ve never been to a capsule hotel, but I have been to Tokyo several times, most recently this October, and the homeless problem is definitely getting worse. What was at first an anomaly is now if not common place than certainly more noticeable. With an aging population and a seemingly intractable economic mess, it’s hard to see how this problem will get solved anytime soon.