Can you ditch your laptop for an iPad?

On Monday of this week we received our first iPad at LiveIntent. I had a two-day business trip starting later that day, so I decided to take it out on the road to answer the question: could I replace my laptop with a 3G iPad for short trips and the daily commute?

You’ll still have to run it through security like a big boy laptop

The answer is….that depends. First, a little about the device and my initial observations.

The iPad is solid. This thing is almost heavy. Like late model Macbooks, it’s made of aluminum and is very sturdy. If you take this with you, you’ll notice it.

The iPad is gorgeous. If there has ever been a ‘shiny object’ this is it. It makes your other gadgets jealous.

The iPad is closed. Unless you have MobileMe, there is no way you are getting your content on here without a fight. There is no USB port, only the apple connector that you use for iPhones and iPods to sync.

Luckily (?) for me i have MobileMe and use the iDisk feature to mirror all my files. That’s where we start this journey.

The iPad comes with the apps and layout you would expect if you already have an iPhone. So the first thing you are doing is adding apps to do ‘business stuff, and because there is no disk drive, you’re doing this via the AppStore. Oh, and one more thing – there’s no Microsoft Office, so if you’re going to need to do more than email and calendar (which means Mail and iCal) your going to have to go the iLife route. Luckily, that will work with all of your .xls, .doc and .ppt files, but to do that you’re out $27.99 – and $50 if you don’t already have MobileMe.

So now you’ve got the tent, sleeping bag, Coleman stove…what else do you need?

Your one and only place for getting apps onto the iPad

If you really plan on going it alone and roughing it without your laptop you’ll need a charger (the ipad battery is prodigious but 2 days max for business use) and if you plan to present to an audience, there’s another cable (iPad to VGA) that you’ll have to get. You can get any apps that you want for ‘productivity’ right from the app store (like WordPress for iPad which I *mostly* wrote this with).

Here’s what’s tough about traveling with the iPad. First, it’s not a real multitasking device, so if you are afflicted with ADD there is much to love with this platform, but you need to save your work. Second, it’s a closed device, so unless someone emails you a file or sends it via MobileMe you can’t share documents as easily as you might like.  I’m sure there’s an easy way buried somewhere in the heart of this proprietary box, but I haven’t found it yet.

Ergonomically, it’s slightly awkward. Because the keyboard and screen are one and the same, it can be difficult to type for long periods.  And when you have typed on it, you cover the screen with fingerprints.  Lots of them.  Carry some glasses cleaner with you and something non-abrasive to wipe.

On my trip, I had both my laptop and the iPad. I found myself using the iPad for simpler, more immediate tasks (email, specifically) and reverting to the laptop for spreadsheets and presentations. The iPad is somewhat handicapped when it comes to content *creation* but it’s great for presentation -mostly because there is no built in mouse. There are no scroll bars either.  That’s a little bit odd to get used to.

Battery life is inspiring, especially if you’ve been living with an iPhone 3GS. I would be comfortable going on the road with an iPad for a day without a charger, not so for the iPhone.

There is no camera, front or back.  You know that’s on its way.  Add a camera plus phone capabilities and this is a real dick tracy/flash gordon future machine.

Just add a camera and phone and you have something envisioned in 1935. Revolutionary!

As you already know, the ipad is wireless dependent, and requires either wifi or 3G to bring it to life. AT&T’s 3G, while convenient mostly available everywhere, is just not that fast. You can’t, for example, download a movie from iTunes in the 10 minutes before your plane leaves, whether you use wifi or 3G. Wifi, if it’s an ‘n’ connection, is pretty fast. 3G is just adequate most of the time, but it consistently available and at $29 a month it’s cheaper than hotel wifi over the long run.

Summary:  If you don’t need to work on complex spreadsheets, don’t want to use Skype, spend most of your time on email and the web, and don’t have to type very long documents or compile code/video or perform any disk or processor-intensive tasks (this means most everybody), AND you can learn how to type on a flat surface, than the iPad is a great laptop replacement for trips of a day or two.  I know it worked pretty well for me.

If you can’t wait for the Apple store to get you a new 3G model, you can get one here:

Get an iPad that you can travel with here

I’ve moved my blogging for now over to www.liveintent.com

Hey Folks

It’s been awhile since I’ve been here.  I’ll be back sometime soon, but until then all of my attention has been directed at making http://www.liveintent.com a resounding success.

Here is a digest of some of the latest posts over there, please visit!

You are your followers! Why it’s important to create follow/follower relationships based on context and content and not just on reciprocity

@Anywhere launches – LiveIntent’s reaction – our brief take on the impact of Twitter’s @anywhere

The Digiday conference – My latest speaking engagement as of March 2010

What’s the difference between and iPad and a Stone Tool?

Hope you enjoy…

How much is a follower worth? Will #freenexusone really work?

The release of the new Nexus phone by Google has clearly excited net denizens.  For some of them it’s provided an interesting promotional opportunity.

This lucky phone will end up with one of Jason's new friends

Jason Calacanis, aka @jason, has raised the promotional ante by creating a twitter-based lottery for a free Nexus phone.  Earlier today, Jason, who had tens of thousands of followers already, tweeted that he would give away a 10 phones to tweeple that followed him.  He was getting several thousand an hour last time I checked.

This is a great gimmick.  @jason has encouraged people to retweet him to get more distribution.  He estimates that he’ll be over 100k followers by the end of the day.  That’s an impressive number.  Or is it?

Jason already has a loyal following for his newsletter.  As a member of his list, I enjoy reading his missives and often respond.  Jason has always been great about responding back when I’ve replied with something interesting.  That sort of engagement has made me continue to read and has given me the feeling that we have a relationship.  Now, we do have some sort of real world relationship, but it is very acquaintance level.  We met about a business deal when he was running Silicon Alley Reporter, back in the day, and since then I’ve bumped into him at conferences.  I follow him on Twitter, but I don’t think he follows me.

So, I am fairly engaged with him and his message.

Now that he has 20,000 new friends today on twitter, how do I feel?  Am I equal to those friends?  After all, they are only interested in him for his free phone, whereas I am more interested in his opinions about tech and the web, etc.

After he runs out of phones where will his followers go?

Anil Dash might have some ideas about this.  In his excellent post last week ‘Life on the List‘, Anil recounted his life since he became a member of Twitter’s suggested user list.  Since his inclusion, his twitter follower numbers have skyrocketed.

This is as sustainable as the housing bubble

Anil has gathered hundreds of thousands of new followers.  But his engagement patterns haven’t changed.  Not one iota.  Anil observed that:

Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don’t form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like “normal” followers do. If I’d have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I’d have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I’d have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn’t changed at all.

That makes total sense to me.  After all, these folks didn’t follow Anil because he was engaging with them on issues of importance to them.  Only because they were pre-checked on the entry to using Twitter.  Anil goes on further on the concept of recommended users:

People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they’ve barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.

Recommended users are not the problem, however, rather random followers and following is the issue.  In Anil’s case, the problem is that folks are just following a guided path and trying to get their footing.  After all, you need to follow others in order to get the full value of Twitter.  In Jason’s case, the followers he is getting are already in Twitter and they already follow people who are retweeting @jason’s message, or they have searched for #Freenexusone.

Ultimately the link between the folks following on the basis of winning a Nexus phone and following @jason are tenuous.  Jason’s usual content is not ‘Free Phones’, but rather tech, web, startups, cars, Mahalo, TC50, his dogs, etc.  Those are cool topics and his real followers are interested in engaged with him because of that.  They signed up with him to hear about that.

My prediction is that @jason’s new friends will stick around for a few weeks and then as he does not repeat his trick and up his ante, they will slowly unfollow.  In the meantime he’s generated tons of new followers.

@jason, how will you monetize them?  Can you monetize followers that are not interested in your core message and product?  I don’t think so.  Do they leave you for the next shiny object (like and Apple Tablet)?

• dh

It pays to pay attention

It’s not a revelation to point out that there are increasing numbers of ways to get distracted today, like writing your blog and spending time on Twitter.  And despite the dangers of taking your eye off the ball, we continue to do so, most often in the middle of something that can really affect us, like the street.

Look up! Manhole ahead!

Not paying attention also is rampant under seemingly less critical situations, like meetings.  I started noticing people paying less attention in meetings when wireless access became more common.  As soon as you could surf or check email – whatever, as long as it wasn’t paying attention – wherever you wanted, it started to affect the quality of meetings.  I once presented to a group at a large software company where the main decision maker barely, if ever, looked up from his screen as we demonstrated our solution.  Under these types of circumstances you wonder why you even bother.  We ended up losing, but I didn’t feel as bad knowing that the decision maker had no idea what we had presented, so he hadn’t voted against us.

You can guess my surprise and delight when I checked my email this morning while my kids were eating their breakfast.  Brad Feld, who’s Feld Thoughts blog is among my favorite reads, posted about the importance of paying attention and being prepared.  The post, Board Meeting Lessons From the Supreme Court, is a loveletter on the virtues of preparing for important meetings (like court hearings and board meetings) and secondarily (but as important) paying attention during those meetings.

The point is, there are many shiny objects that can distract you, and if you are on your own time that’s just fine.  But if you are in the presence of others who have prepared something for you, and who are looking for your input and analysis, you are cheating yourself and your associates by not giving it the attention it deserves.  Turn off the iPhone and the Blackberry and shut the lid on the laptop.

Two things Today

Rupert shutting down access to NewsCorp sites to Google indexing

Google Buying AdMob for $750 million.

What will make more of a difference to your life?  Google in the news today in a big way.

Here’s what Mark Cuban thinks:  Rupert is smart.

Catch the Google Wave? If only they would throw us an invite!

Since I don’t have an invite – who does – to Google Wave, I’ve had to rely on other people to tell me what it is.  To date, I’ve heard that it’s an update to the email paradigm – a sort of real-time, AJAX-y take on communication that melds collaboration with communication.

Well, some guys at some call Epipheo Studios have come up with a nice, cartoony explanation of what they consider ’3.5%’ of Google Wave.

If I understand it correctly, this has some really cool applications beyond the interoffice environment.   With moderation features, you could see viral commerce uses for this that would be very interesting.  It might also make chain mail jokes easier to read.  Now that would be an innovation worth paying attention to….

If you want an invite to Google Wave, here’s the link:  https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

reBlog from avc.com: A VC

I found this fascinating quote today:

But many marketers don’t realize there are similar tools for getting customers and potential customers to see their email messages. As Matt Blumberg, CEO of our portfolio company Return Path, points out in this post, there are very similar tools available in the email world.avc.com, A VC, Sep 2009

You should read the whole article.

Artisanal News coming sooner than you think

Yesterday afternoon (star date August 31, 2009), The Nieman Journalism Lab reported the latest stunning figures put out by the Newspaper Association of America:  Q2 2009 newspaper revenues were down year over year by a nearly incomprehensible 30.15%.

This can’t be a surprise.  Another thing that won’t be a surprise?  Newspapers are going to start loking for ways to 1) cut costs and 2) grow revenues like they have never done before.  One action that we can count on will be a reduction in newsroom staff.  The next thing that will happen will be the further reliance on syndicated content for all but the most healthy papers.  The net result of this will be a reduction in local reporting, as it is replaced by bloggers – where it is replaced at all.

As the amount of original content produced by newsroom staff inexorably shrinks, attempts to ‘own’ and monetize this content will accelerate, and as access to this content is steadily reduced to only paying subscribers of the paper, distribution will plummet, reducing page views for the few(er) online ads the papers have sold.  Online ad performance will then tank, and advertisers will start paying less for these ads, hastening the crash.

So what’s left for the newspapers to do?  The Nieman Lab has the answer:  Embrace the Digital Future!

I think that the age of the hyperlocal blogger and syndicated, artisanal columnist supported by her own subscriber base is rapidly upon us.

Mark Cuban comes out in favor of pay walls for Murdoch

As times are getting tougher for media companies, all options for generating content revenue are on the table.

In the last several weeks, the AP has announced plans to charge, as have FT.com and others.  There are two camps forming and it seems like they are lining up in basically this fashion:  Content Producers and Content Aggregators.

Mark Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com, owner of the Dallas Basketball Mavericks and co-founder of HD.net, wrote a piece on his blog that supported Rupert Murdoch’s call last week to strengthen pay walls.

It’s a serious piece, that takes part of the Freemium model, but monetizes it more dramatically.  For companies like NewsCorp, with multiple properties, Cuban makes the argument that once you are in the park (i.e. a subscriber to one of the properties) you should be able to get to ride all the attractions.

He also rails against news aggregation sites, and quantifies his argument with some calculations that lead him to believe and state that the traffic from aggregators doesn’t amount to much, and that content sites are keeping aggregators alive.

Again, see the article here on Blogmaverick.