Kerfuffle

Amazon's Silk, their new Kindle web browser, may just be a game changer

Yesterday, my friend and former colleague Harvey Briggs included a post on My View From the Shore that asserts Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet will "torch everyone but Apple" in the tablet game. 

This is a classic disruption strategy. While everyone else is battling for the same customers at the top end of the category, Amazon found a way to open the market to a huge swath of people for whom a $500 tablet just doesn't make sense.

Very few people who "need" an iPad will trade down to get one of these. But those tablets stuck in the middle will see their volumes fall to a product that's just good enough but a whole lot cheaper. The fact that Amazon is being launched with an integrated multimedia ecosystem guarantees it.

I totally agree with Harvey.  Essentially there are those people who will always want the high-end Apple product, and for them cost is not considered a barrier.  Others want something that costs a lot less and offers the key functions of content delivery, web access and email.

Both Apple and Amazon understand and offer something besides price that is key to category success in tablets: content.  Both have vast collections of content that they continue to grow by the minute.  All of the other tablet manufacturers and marketers out there simply don't have that.  They rely, essentially, on others (notably Amazon and Apple's iTunes) for content.  They're not even re-sellers, just also-ran conduits that make no money on the real product (aforementioned content).  How key is content compared to hardware? BusinessInsider.com opined yesterday, we may see Kindle devices actually be free some day soon... since it is simply the last link of Amazon's content delivery chain.

From my survey of two (my partner, a Kindle-user and me, an iPad user), content access and its portability are the primary if not only reasons we use those particular devices.  We both have laptops for all our computing needs, and smartphones for all our mobile needs.  The Kindle and iPad fill this in-between need that is, for us, totally about content.

But that's not the only reason Amazon is will rock the tablet market in a huge way.  They are going to do what others -- except, some might say, for Apple -- have not been able to really do:  use cloud computing to do the heavy lifting of browser functions, making browsing fast, easy, and (most importantly) invisible.  The best thing for complicated technology is for it to work really well without you knowing it.  I hope I am correct in thinking Amazon's Silk browser will deliver on this in such a huge way as to dramatically change the way web surfing technology works.

Here's a group of Amazon geeks to explain it, and they explain it quite well...

I love my iPad.  But something tells me that we'll be getting one of these in the house this Christmas.  If I order it early enough.

[cross-posted on my course blog, J646 Overtime]

My dad made it into a cartoon!

Was PC's likability the fatal error that crashed the I'm a Mac campaign? It's possible given the character is more lovable than the operating system it represents.

The marketing folks at Apple finally said it publicly:  The "I'm a Mac" ad campaign is dead.  So dead that Apple has removed the ads from their website and replaced them with product-specific promotional ads.

The campaign became iconic rather quickly.  Mac (actor Justin Long) and PC (humorist John Hodgman) became larger than life, developing a following beyond their own day jobs that was driven by the campaign.  Of course, not everyone loved it.  Shortly after its debut, one of its many detractors called the campaign mean-spirited. Slate's Seth Stevenson gave the campaign a C+, panning it for pitting cool kid against nerd.  He criticized Apple for an "off-putting brand strategy."  I wonder if he still feels that way, given where Apple is today.

One look at Apple's brand architecture, along with it's high level of management and execution, suggests that it's a good thing Apple ignored Stevenson (as they seem to do with all critics) since their brand appears to be stronger than ever some four years after the campaign began.  As for Microsoft's brand, well, they're no BP on the loathe-o-meter right now, but they are hardly what one would call beloved either.  To be fair, a lot of Apple's popularity and success right now is driven by its trio of mobile devices, the iPad, iPhone and iPod.  But all of those share the same DNA from the Apple master brand.

Marc Perton, writing for The Consumerist, offers what I'd say is a leading reason for the death of the I'm a Mac campaign...

Apple has finally caught on to something many of us have known for years: John Hodgman's befuddled "PC" is far more appealing than Justin Long's smug "Mac," so the "I'm a Mac" ads aren't really very effective at converting PC-users to Mac fans.

I have to agree that Hodgman's PC was the star of the ads.  Long's Mac was simply the straight man.  Hodgman actually made me dislike Microsoft less than it made me like Apple more.  (Admittedly, it would be hard for me to like Apple much more, as a brand, than I already do.  I'd be hard pressed to give up my MacBook and iPhone.)

Ad campaigns each have a life span.  Some are mercifully short; others have staying power that can work over decades.  It probably is the right time to say goodbye to this one.  But not without one last look, courtesy of the team over at OneMoreThing...

Why don't we just accept this is the way it is and implant smartphones in kid's forearms?

When I was a kid, and we only had four or five television channels to choose from, my mom was always telling me to turn off the TV and go out and play.  She was concerned that as a ten year old, watching more than two or three hours of TV would turn me into a crazy person.  (She was close; it turned me into an advertising executive.) 

My media excesses were nothing compared to the media habits of young people today.  A majority of kids on America today have their own cache of smartphones, iPods, netbooks, laptops, and video game/TV/entertainment racks.

And they are using them... a lot.

From Tamar Lewin of the New York Times...

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

Eleven hours of media... a day.  Eleven f***ing hours... a day! 

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Dr. Rich is probably correct.  It is what it is, and there's no going back.  Especially since this is probably an average kid's experience...

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

The article goes on to say that young Francisco wakes up to his Sidekick LX's ringtone as his alarm clock, and falls asleep to it playing YouTube videos.  While the smartphone was purchased as an additional way to access the Internet for school, Francisco's mom says it's about a 2% homework to 98% "other stuff" ratio in terms of time spent.  She goes on to say that she has yanked service for a week or two when things are getting out of hand.  (I wonder what "out of hand" is.)  And what to do is service is frozen?  Read a book?  Oh, the humanity!

Entire NYT article here.

Ford's Sync technology adds automobiles into the digital convergence mix at a whole 'nother level. Very cool. Perhaps controversial.

I'm old enough to remember that when a person who wanted a kick-ass stereo in a new car, they bypassed the dealer for some place called Crazy Eddie's or Monster Sound.  Those after-market places lived in old converted service stations and strip malls, and you picked from brands associated with high-end home stereo systems.  (The guys in marketing had yet to invent the "entertainment system" term.)

How times have changed.  I was driving with my 83-year-old father last week, and he was marveling at the factory-installed electronics in my 2006 (!) Ford Escape Hybrid.  I tried to explain to him that our 2008 Honda has an even better system, but he was still simply amazed the car would tell me to turn left in 500 yards.  He's still impressed with four-year-old technology while I complain that it doesn't have Bluetooth technology or an auxiliary jack for my iPod.

Dad probably won't even begin to understand what Alan Mulally, CEO of the Ford Motor Company, was talking about this past week at the Consumer Electronics Show.  Ford's Sync technology is about to take us into a completely new level of entertainment and productivity in our cars.  Craig Daitch muses about Sync on AdAge.com...

The 2010 edition of Sync comes with a number of useful extensions, including the ability to keep up with Twitter, stream internet radio and download turn-by-turn web maps at no cost. It takes a page from companies such as Facebook and Apple by supporting third-party applications. That means you could soon be controlling many of the handy applications you use on your iPhone via the voice recognition on your car's console.

Daitch points out that this is not only a powerful selling point for Ford automobiles, but it is also a potentially huge revenue stream in terms of marketing and media opportunities...

And why shouldn't they be? We spend an inordinate amount of time in our vehicles. By today's standards, some experts believe that number exceeds three hours per day. So as provoking as a thought this may be, is it difficult to imagine a time when the auto manufacturers subsidize in-vehicle technology through advertising? What brand wouldn't want to be pervasively integrated into a vehicle's GPS unit?

Even today, is it really not feasible to think that GM's OnStar service couldn't provide pay-per-click (or even pay-per-visit) smart results based on customer inquiries? Think about the following scenario:

Driver: Hi, I'm looking for the closest gas station.

OnStar: You are 0.5 miles away from a Shell but 0.6 miles from a BP, where you can use a discount code to save 15%.

As marketers look for more ways to reach people as so-called traditional media seem less targeted, less relevant, and less accountable, it won't take long before other automakers follow suit.

Of course, this isn't all good.  As it is now, safety experts, legislators, insurance companies and law enforcement experts all worry that with so much productivity and entertainment stuff at our disposal behind the wheel, we seem to be spreading our attention around, at the expense of safe and defensive driving.

An unattributed writer from marketing blog AsGoodAndBetter expresses concern in a comment below Daitch's post that this may not be such a good idea in terms of road safety, then links to a recent post...

Maybe it’s time to calm the hell down with the tech integration before we all kill each other, hm? We know Americans can’t go two goddam seconds without engaging with an electronic device, but if we’re going to muster up an attention span for one activity, shouldn’t that activity be driving a car?

The folks at Ford are obviously tracking this, because it didn't take long for Scott Monty, presumably a PR person from Ford's "Global Digital Communications" group, to pony up a comment complete with a handy video link...

@asgoodandbetter: Our first priority is safety. What we've done is to simplify the driver interface and keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suggest you take a look at this video for a fuller understanding: http://twit.tv/ces3

This raises a lot of interesting points.  First, this shit is pretty fucking cool.  (I chose those words because that's exactly what went through my mind as I read about Sync, knowing in the next few years i will replace my current Ford hybrid with another Ford.  I'm kind of a Ford guy, going all the way back to the 1973 Mustang in the garage.  But I digress.) 

Beyond coolness, and productivity, there are legitimate safety issues.  No matter how integrated this may be, these new and promised features still draw attention away from driving in ways a simple radio never did.  As much as it's wrong, and as much as it's dangerous, I use my iPhone for various tasks while driving.  In addition to calls, I may tag a song on Shazam, may check my calendar and, yes, stupidly text now and then.  I know, I know:  Wrong, wrong, wrong.)  I'm probably representative of most people driving today, including those who won't admit it.

As another commenter points out below Daitch's post, the big automakers seem to have enough problems without becoming media sales and content organizations as well.  I'm not so sure this is a huge problem, in as much as there are all kinds of ways to approach this that hopefully can co-exist with the automakers' core business of designing and marketing vehicles.  they seem to know this, as Daitch points out...

...GM has hired former Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell and was rumored to be speaking with Apple's Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook for the CEO position. Cars aren't cars anymore, they're productivity hubs with entertainment extensions on four wheels.

Lots of things to think about; lots of things to debate.  Meanwhile, though, as said above, this shit is fucking cool.  Take a look.

Here's a glimpse at a totally different kind of change you can believe in: Did you know 4.0?

I've spent the better part of the afternoon and evening slogging through reading and accompanying exercises for my grad school statistics class.  You'd think the last thing I'd want to look at, much less post about, would be more statistics.  And you'd be correct... unless those stats were about new media and technology, and were presented in a really cool video like this one:

I only wish I could go to the third annual Media Convergence Forum in New York next month... the event the video is promoting.  Sounds really cool... in the technogeek kind of way... which is even cooler.

Yet another cool thing about the new iPhone, and it's not even from the App Store: Crime-fighting tool

There's a great story on Mashable today from Jennifer Van Grove that details the role an iPhone played in sending some backwater larcenists to the slammer.

A teenager, Dustin Simantob, returned with his dad to their car after a canoe trip.  There they discovered the car and others in the same spot had been broken into.  Among the items stolen was young Dustin's iPhone.  Upon his return home, he remembered that he had set up the "Find my iPhone" feature.  Through MobileMe, find it he did, and he turned over the exact location to the local police.  Officers promptly visited the home of a family they suspected of similar crimes but never before had proof.  They did this time.

Van Grove learned of the story when the teen sent Mashable an email.  She verified the story with the Mesa County (Colorado) Sheriff's Department, and published the email in it's entirety.  With full credit to Van Grove and Mashable, here's the unedited email:

“so, my dad and I went on a 3 day father and son river trip and parked the car where we get out of the river to leave, so we get up to the cars and all 4 cars had one window broken and all the valuables taken from the car, so we ended up submitting our case to the near by cop and started on our 5 hour journey home, when we got back i remembered that i had set up the “track my iphone” on the mobileme site and immediately got on and tracked it.

it ended up being at a house near by where it was stolen, so i called up the cop that had taken our case and told him where it was located. as soon as i told him the address, he started to laugh, apparently the family had done a few things like this before and the local police had been trying to catch and arrest them but could never get proof that they had been the culprits.

now they had proof. so 4 police showed up at the door of this house and ended up getting mine and my dads iphones back along with my wallet and the Garmen GPS, they also were able to recover the two phones and wallet that was taken from the other car that was broken into. so thanks to obileme we will all be getting our belongings back and a family of criminals will be put in jail.”

This strikes me in several ways.  As FAILs go, it's hilarious.  It also points up a unto fore considered (by me, anyway) benefit of the new iPhone 3.0 software.  I can assure you that had I not already set up the "find" feature for my iPhone, I would be doing it immediately after reading this story.

It's worth noting, as Van Grove did in her post, that this can and should become a key selling feature for iPhones.

If you were pretty sure your phone was stolen, instead of the typical "if you find my iPhone message like the one above, it might be fun to post something like:  "Have you ever been served with a search warrant at 3 AM?  You may want to put some pants on."

For a brief time last night, I thought perhaps Illinois was launching an air attack on Wisconsin. Twitter let me know I didn't need to duck and cover.

I was up late last night, trying (and succeeding) in completely reloading my iPhone.  (Kudos to Apple for a solid back-up system that  works right down to the smallest detail.)

Around 1 AM the overnight quiet was shattered by the unmistakable sound of fighter jets.  LOUD fighter jets.  Outside of the occasional air show, the last time I heard that sound was when F-16s were in the skies over Chicago on September 11, 2001.

WTF?  Is Illinois coming for us?  But the Twitterati knew better, as the Chicago Now's "Breaking Tweets" page notes...

Around 1 a.m. last night, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) successfully carried out a military exercise over the Chicago area involving F-16 fighter jets. The training involved at least one plane headed toward downtown from the north and another going west, according to witnesses.

The exercised is based on new restrictions placed on Chicago airspace and is a direct response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the NORAD Web site.

Some Chicago Twitterers were still awake at the time and noted the event.

The post goes on to show some lifted Tweets...

1. 
   ChicagoLatina80 Wait, I hear something, sounds like it's getting closer. It sounds like thunder from far away. It comes and goes. It's gotta be the planes 21 Jul 2009 from web
2. 
   4danlopez I just heard the Norad planes go by, they are louder than a regular plane. 21 Jul 2009 from TwitterFon
3. 
   ChicagoLatina80 @4danlopez Yes, they are loud. It's cool. 21 Jul 2009 from web in reply to 4danlopez
4. 
   ChicagoLatina80 Listening to the F-16s fly by, I feel so patriotic. I know I'm a weirdo. 21 Jul 2009 from web
5. 
   bcurc15 @jdmel heard a loud sustained roar and saw two sets of rapidly flashing lights, guessing 2 f16's in formation 21 Jul

Just another way the Twitter, the thing I loved to make fun of when it first made the scene, is actually pretty cool when it comes to disseminating news as it happens.  I'm up here in Wisconsin, which in terms of F-16s, is in Chicago's neighborhood.  Within minutes of hearing those things roar over our house, I was able to read that it was a NORAD test.

Our cheese curds are safe from the FIBS.  For now.

Orwell's ghost has to be laughing at the irony of Amazon's remote deletions of his books on customers' Kindles

Those books you "buy" from Amazon to be downloaded to your Kindle device apparently aren't quite so much yours as the hard copies they also sell. Kindle users found this out when the nice folks at Amazon used the direct connectivity of the devices to delete certain titles that were the subject of a copyright claim.

What makes this remote removal of the books most ironic is that one of the titles was George Orwell's tale of a world totally controlled by "Big Brother," 1984.

As Wall Street Journal writer Geoffrey A. Fowler notes on his blog, this does beg the question:  Am I buying the book or just buying the right to read it? 

Whether it occurs again or note, the incident raises a question: can a company legally take back such a purchase? “In essence, Kindle is licensing you access to the book,” said Peter Brantley, director of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. “It is a purchase, but you are actually not owning the book in the same way that you go to the book store and own it.”

Books in the real world are covered by a notion of copyright called the “first sale” doctrine, which allows a purchaser to do pretty much whatever he or she wants with the book–including reselling it or lending it to a friend.

But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules. “We have not matured our understanding of copyright to work in a digital environment in way that provides a set of protections and meets people’s expectations for how we use digital content,” said Brantley.

Even though Amazon credited customers for the price paid, not everyone was happy with the way the situation was handled.  And competitor Sony was quick to point out that they have never reclaimed or removed purchased material from customers. Easy for them to say, since they don't have the direct connectivity, as Fowler notes...

Competitor Sony did not miss a chance to point out that sales are “final” on its Reader. “Sony has never remotely deleted a downloaded title,” a representative for the company said. (Of course, since the Sony Reader device doesn’t have wireless access, it would have to be plugged into a computer in order for the company to gain access.)

As Mashable reports, an Amazon spokesman insists they won't sneak into your Kindle and remove content if this situation arises again.

These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books…When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers….We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

Somewhere, George Orwell is laughing.

Everyone's tweeting but no one listens to terrestrial radio anymore. That's how it goes with the all or nothing media measurement scale

A couple of different media posts reminded me today that like lot of things, audience measurement can really be overly generalized.  Maybe it's an extension of the "glass half-full/empty" thing.  It's all about the spin. 

This morning I was reading a column by Chicago Tribune media writer Phil Rosenthal.  I found my way to the column via a link Rosenthal included on his Twitter feed.  Seems that WXRT-FM morning radio personality Lin Brehmer posted a rebuttal of sorts on his Facebook page about a mass email that went out to 100,000 radio station listeners under his name, asking his audience to lobby their Congressmen about a pending bill that (my interpretation) charges stations royalties for the music they play.  CBS Radio, XRT's owner, opposes the "radio tax" bill as they characterize it, but Brehemer claims to support the artists and took exception to how the station supposedly used his name without permission for their own political purposes.  Rosenthal's column had a long list of reader comments, and not all supported Brehmer.

So here we have a whole lot of discussion about radio stations, but it was all taking place in the digital ether.  That's because, of course, everyone is on the Internet and everyone Twitters, right?  But, as some posts in the comments section suggested, no one listens to radio anymore.

How many people listen to terrestrial radio anymore?
::

People still listen to the radio ? I hear mine for the less than five seconds per day that it takes for me to turn off the alarm clock. Radios will follow the same route as printed media. This is the 21st Century. The magic of radio is long gone. It was lost long ago. . The only listeners that they might have left are the unemployed people lounging around hoping to be the 100th caller to win free tickets to some concert or event. [emphasis mine]

Kind of reminds when of the time back in 1983 when Cubs manager Lee Elia used very colorful language when telling reporters that the only people who showed up for Cubs games were unemployed losers. (That was before they lit Wrigley Field and weekday attendance sucked.)

Fortunately, and rightly so, many more people pushed back to criticize the people who claimed no one listened to radio... and chided them for being "stupid enough to pay for it."

In contrast, now on to the other thing:  the mad rush to Twitter.  Everyone's jumping on board, don't you know?  Just last week here in Madison a brand communications firm hosted a conference where social networks and stuff like Twitter were a major topic of discussion.   It's so hot that, why, even Newt Gingrich is on Twitter!  And, goodness knows, Newt is the Jesus of Cool when it comes to being on the cutting edge.

But what's this?  Over half the people who are on Twitter have never tweeted?  And they have no followers?  And they follow no one else?  Ruh roh...

A new report about how the majority of the population uses Twitter reveals that most people, well... don't really use it. The microblogging service has grown exponentially over the last year, but a little more than half of its users have never sent a single tweet, according to the latest report from HubSpot (PDF). The report reminds us that, like many Web services, much of the content is produced by a small number of users while everyone else likes to look in and watch.

According to HubSpot's analysis of Twitter's 4.5 million accounts, 54.9 percent of users have never tweeted and 52.7 have no followers whatsoever. This doesn't actually surprise most of us who do use Twitter—a number of our friends and colleagues have joined the service but don't actively participate in it, therefore netting them a big fat goose-egg in terms of followers (why would anyone follow you if you don't tweet?).

What's more perplexing, however, is that 55.5 percent of Twitter users don't follow anyone else. This finding sums up the quintessential "Internet User Who Joins Service And Then Quits Immediately" stereotype, though the ones who don't follow anyone aren't necessarily the ones that aren't tweeting. HubSpot said that only 9.06 of all Twitter users are categorized as "inactive" (those with fewer than 10 followers, fewer than 10 people they're following, and fewer than 10 updates). This makes the usage statistics slightly less puzzling, though Managing Editor Eric Bangeman's account is basically inactive, yet he doesn't satisfy any of those requirements with his 140 followers. Needless to say, there are a lot of users who aren't making very frequent use of Twitter.

 What's all this mean?  Hell if I know.  But just like there are still a shitload of radio listeners out there tuning into local stations with actual radios, not everyone is lining up to anxiously await what Newt or other tweetmeisters had to chirp about today.  It's not an all-or-nothing game, no matter what anyone tells you... even me.  Jeez, especially me.