On its face, matching iPad textbooks with college students seems almost perfect. But Apple’s plans for its new iBookstore, from the way it’s structured book purchases to its development strategy for multimedia e-books, doesn’t seem like it’s well suited for the college textbook market at all ? if it even has that target in mind.
The turning of the clock to 2012 means a new beginning for many. I am happy with simply tweaking what has been working by making things simpler and thus better. So as I look ahead, I hope that over the next few months, some of the technology products that I use the most will make incremental changes that could make life better for the people who use their products.
Here is my wish list, not in any specific order:
1). Twitter Sync.
Twitter is trying its very best to make its service more accessible to what some call “normals.” It is a good aspiration to have. In the interim, what Twitter needs is the ability to “sync” across multiple devices and platforms.
How many times do I need to read the same “direct message” or “@ replies?” The fact of the matter is that syncing across platforms is table stakes in today’s modern & highly mobile web. And if they have trouble developing this, maybe Amazon can license it to them.
2). Amazon Match
This holiday season, I signed up for iTunes Match and now I have nearly all of my music in the iCloud. Now Amazon needs to build something similar — for lack of a better word, let’s call it Amazon Match. I have bought hundreds of books from the Seattle-based online retailing giant. What I want them to do is make all of them (or at least the ones that are available online as e-books) sync to my Kindle account.
If they want to charge me an annual fee, I am perfectly fine with that. It is one way of keeping me loyal to the Kindle platform and keeping me using it more often. Kindle as a front end for my cloud-based book library isn’t far fetched: they are making videos & music one acquires through Amazon available on Amazon Prime, so why not books?
3). Instagram-to-Blog
Instagram just might be the most used social app on my iPhone (after Twitter.) I love using it because it allows me to cross-post photos to various platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. However, there is nothing I want more than for Instagram to build support for WordPress (& other blogging platforms such as Squarespace) so I can post my photos directly to my personal blog at the same time as I do on other services. It allows me to share my experiences with others who are not on Instagram and allows me to keep a permanent record of those experiences.
4). Connect the Apps
In December 2011, Path relaunched and with it created a unified social and mobile experience. It combined photo sharing with location, video sharing and a whole lot of other little incremental changes that basically helped the Dave Morin project recover from its early blunders.
However, the biggest take away from Path is that we need ways for mobile apps to connect with each other better and create enhanced experiences across platforms. Right now, mobile users need to enter data (photos, locations etc) into different applications multiple times. The ability to mix and match the data from other apps is going to help us realize that “data is the new plastic.”
5). Un-Swiped
My iPad has become my preferred way of consuming information — video, text and photos — and has started to suck time away from my Macbook Air. This move to iPad has created many new reading experiences and some of them like the Flipboard and Zite are quite spectacular. And then there are the OnSwipe-enabled WordPress.com blogs, which are a lot less so. It is the one iPad-centric view that needs to be retired — or at the very least it shouldn’t be the default setting for those blogs.
What is on your wishlist? Share with us.
Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
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While 2011 was a big year for political unrest, another uprising was afoot in the world of content creators and artists. Everywhere you look, artists are taking more control over their own economic well being, in large part because the Internet has enabled them to do so. You see it in all forms of content, from books, to video to music.
A few examples from this year:
e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing. From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing.
Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for a pop.
Radio/Music: All sorts of independent entrepreneurs are putting audio entertainment online, from the rise of podcast kings like Leo Laporte to a huge number of independents like Adam Carolla and Marc Maron. Music artists are being given freedom too, through new platforms to create and share their music like Soundcloud.
So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012? Here are a few underlying trends:
The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals
The middleman is under attack on all fronts, whether its in video, music/audio and e-books. As 
devices like TVs become connected, as books become e-readers and tablets, and music is now digital, the storefront is fast-becoming the entire distribution chain. With e-books it’s Amazon or Apple, with radio it’s iTunes, with video it’s Google/YouTube, Netflix and other upstarts who are investing in original content, or simply direct-to-consumer efforts using web-payment platforms like Paypal.
Louis CK, who created his own site, paid for bandwidth, and used Paypal for payment, captured how many artists are beginning to think when he said in an interview with Bill Simmons that he “didn’t want to cut out the middleman, I just didn’t need one. There wasn’t any reason to have someone there. I just thought make this thing and put it up.”
Content production, distribution and monetization tools are becoming democratized through the web
In e-books, distribution and storefronts have already collapsed into one, but managing distribution across multiple channels is difficult since storefronts are still siloed (Amazon is separate from Apple iBooks, which is walled off from Barnes&Noble, etc). However, companies like Smashwords enable 
creation and distribution across multiple storefronts, while Vook, post-pivot, is working on SaaS tools to create e-books and manage their distribution, complete with reporting and management dashboards.
In music, artists are starting to embrace sites like Soundcloud to create music and share it, while others direct-to-fan sites like Topspin Media are enabling artists to create commerce sites to sell music in turnkey fashion. And it’s not just music sales, but actual concert tickets. The Pixies used Topspin to sell tickets for a recent concert, utilizing email campaigns and to notify fans and processed the tickets using an iOS app at the door.
With video, big middlemen still dominate, but that is changing as video creation and distribution costs come down in a world of connected devices. As Ryan Lawler wrote in a piece for GigaOM Pro:
“independent content creators stand to gain the most through massive reductions in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, as well as the greater availability of streaming video service on connected devices. They gain new distribution opportunities for their content and greater possibility for monetization. Consider any of the top YouTube video channels, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive in the pay-TV universe but have created thriving businesses due to the cost structure online.”
Generational shifts towards technology savvy-artists
As Matt Mullenweg put in in his New Year’s resolution on GigaOM:
“For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.”
Matt is right, in that scripting is the new literacy, and a growing form of artistic expression. Tech-savvy artists are creating apps and developing sites to put their art into the world. Whether its Matt Inmann creating his work and coding his site at The Oatmeal or young app developers like Robert Nay, artists are becoming coders and vice versa, since, as Mullenweg states, scripting is “new literacy”.
No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.
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Computing is taken for granted in our post-PC world, in which we are increasingly surrounded by a multitude of smart devices. But did you know that computing and our quest to build intelligent machines is essentially a human narrative and a stunningly engaging one at that?
That’s the premise of a new Kickstarter project from Grady Booch, IBM’s chief scientist, co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language and a rock star in the programming world. Booch is looking for ,000 to help launch Computing: The Human Experience. The project is aimed at shining a light on computing much the way that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series elevated the universe 25 years ago, generating excitement over the exploration and understanding of the heavens.
But to call Computing a documentary really just scratches the surface of what Booch is proposing. He’s envisioning a “trans-media” assault, complete with a series of broadcasts on the web and on TV as well as apps and interactive e-books, a social network and a website. Booch and his wife Jan along with screenwriter Seth Friedman will start by creating a series of recorded lectures that will lead to a book and online videos, culminating in a seven-minute trailer that can ultimately entice bigger funders. All in all, Booch imagines Computing to be a -million project.
So is there enough drama and excitement in all of this previously geeky territory? Absolutely, Booch says, because the project will not only focus on the science of computing but will challenge people to think about our relationship to computers and whether we are controlling or being controlled by our creations:
We need to show them all – in a way they totally understand – that Computing is distinctly not a boring technical video of talking heads, but that it is really the unbelievable, exciting, provocative story of humanity’s ongoing fight between extending and not surrendering ourselves to our digital doppelgangers. In other words, what we are doing here is creating the initial material that proves just how fascinating, jaw-dropping, and cool Computing really is. Very. Wickedly. Cool.
Booch is offering backers increasing levels of access to himself depending on the donations, ranging from a hand-written note for a donation to a phone call or face-to-face meeting for 0. At the high end, ,000 donors will get their name hidden in the book, a copy of the app, a credit in the teaser video and a Booch bobble head figure.
This definitely plays to the computer scientists in the crowd. But it’s cool to see Booch take on this subject and try to frame it for a mainstream audience. Booch apparently got some of the idea for the project after hearing from his goddaughter that all she needed to know about computing was surfing the web.
“That was frightening and it gave us even further impetus for the project,” Grady told eWeek. “We want to make sure people get an opportunity to know what’s behind their Facebook page.”
The project is not being pursued by IBM so Booch can’t count on big funding from his employer. But he’s found a good partner in The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which has offered to host Booch’s first lecture talks. Booch has raised about ,000 so far and has until Jan. 3 to reach his ,000 goal.
I think this is a timely project, especially as computers become so personal and indispensable to people. I think it would be a shame to see so many people grow up surrounded by computers without having a deeper understanding about what’s happening. And for the sake of the U.S. tech sector, we need to do a better job of telling the story of our successes in technology, to help influence a generation of students who can help keep the Silicon Valley story alive.
We’re falling behind in the number of computer engineers we produce and already there’s a talent crunch in most big tech centers. We need to connect these cool mobile apps and online sites like Facebook to career choices for students. We need to demystify the computing story and make it less of something only geeks pursue. The big opportunity is in recruiting all kinds of people, non-technical and techie alike, to jobs in computing. I’m not sure one project can turn the tide but it’s time we had more ambitious efforts aimed in this direction.
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Voting Booth
Another presidential election year is a month away, and just as with every election cycle, technology will play a critical role in determining who the next President of the United States will be.
Have your doubts? Just look at the last two elections.
In 2004, the rise of blogs opened the door to an influential new source of political commentary outside the traditional press,while in 2008, we witnessed the rapid rise of social media (and the Obama campaign’s early embrace of it), which played a big role in dissemination of messaging as well as fundraising.
In both elections, the growth of online video proved important; 2004 saw mainly short-form political entertainment/commentary from the likes of JibJab, but by 2008 both parties saw online video as a real competitive weapon, and YouTube became the testing ground in efforts to find a “Daisy”-like message to sway voters.
Just how will technology be part of the story in the 2012 election? Here are four possible ways:
Since money is, for better and for worse, the lifeblood of American election politics, it seems there are always new ways to utilize technology to raise money. Just a few years ago, it was novel to have a website as a central way to raise money for an election on the Internet, and more recently, social media has become an important part of fundraising for any campaign.
So what technology could play an important role in fundraising in 2012? The simple answer is the mobile phone. We’ve already seen Square being used at political fundraisers and multipurpose mobile apps like Mobilecause for fundraising and communication, and as I’ve written previously, there’s no reason in-app payments couldn’t be extended to apps such as enhanced e-books. Expect all the major candidates to make mobile a big part of their fundraising and messaging efforts throughout the year.
If 2008 was the year Facebook wagged the dog in terms of social media’s impact on politics, 2012 might be the year in which Twitter could prove decisive. Over the past few years, Twitter has become the new real-time newswire for influencers and the media, and it has emerged as a way for candidates to connect directly to constituents without the filter of campaign managers and media experts.
However, Twitter has also shown why a filter is sometimes necessary. The unfortunately (and appropriately) named Congressman Anthony Weiner got his own “gate” as a result of accidentally tweeting lewd photos of himself, and other politicians in the States and elsewhere have shown it’s all too easy to hit that tweet button.
With more politicians tweeting and at greater frequency, there’s no doubt Twitter could play a big role in 2012, and in possibly unforeseen and unwanted ways.
While Facebook proved significant in 2008 as a way to build a following for a candidate, it was early days for social media and big data analytics in general. Four years later, it is likely savvy use of analytics by a candidate to sift through the mountains of data made available through social, mobile and other types of profiling and behavioral data could give them a significant advantage over their opponent. Political campaigns have already proven themselves to be fairly advanced users of polling analytics and there is no doubt that campaigns will only double down this election cycle on data scientists to possibly squeeze more advantages out of the huge cache of new data available from a variety of new sources.
In 2010 and 2011, one of the biggest political stories of all had nothing to do with traditional political establishments, but instead was about the rise of a new form of political activism on the Internet. Wikileaks showed how by releasing huge caches of documents about political actors online could destabilize traditional political establishments, while new groups such as Anonymous showed that the Internet is the new frontier for civil disobedience.
How will the use of Internet political activism take shape in 2012? It’s impossible to predict at this point, other than to say there’s a high likelihood that new and existing groups will likely try to make their voices heard in new and unforeseen ways, making this new frontier of Internet activism perhaps the biggest x-factor of all in next year’s Presidential election.
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In today’s crowded media marketplace, presidential candidates (and their media consultants) have an almost mind-boggling number of mediums in which to get a message across. From TV to talk radio to the printed word and all the permutations in between, there’s no doubt that a mastery of the message means, in large part, mastering the channels in which they are communicated across.
And while some channels of communication — such as cable TV, print news and talk radio — are fairly mature, history tells us early mastery of any new medium can give a candidate a discernible advantage in a given election cycle.
For example, it’s commonly accepted that Kennedy’s performance in his televised debate with Nixon helped him win in the 1960 presidential election, while Obama’s more evolved social media strategy gave the Democrat a competitive advantage that, in the end, helped deliver him the presidency.
But what about the book? Judging by Obama’s success with The Audacity of Hope in 2008 and the rush by the current crop of 2012 candidates to push tomes out this primary election season, the book, while perhaps the oldest of all the mediums outside of speaking in the public square, is still one of the most effective ways for candidates to inject their messages into the stream of conversation.
As publisher Peter Cosnos puts it in this NPR piece, “If you can get somebody to buy it, a book has a great virtue. It’s just you and the reader. There is no interviewer; there is nobody to get in the way.”
However, while books can certainly be effective, the paper book is the product of an inarguably antiquated distribution model. To push a book out through traditional publishing means putting your message on the slow train to the voter; a book usually gets to the reader months after the final draft was written.
But just as the Internet (and in particular YouTube) has reshaped the way campaigns use video to get messages quickly out to the voter, is it possible e-books could create a similar disruption in how candidates reach voters through the written — and electronic — word?
If early e-book pioneers who were able to bypass the byzantine and slow-moving world of traditional book publishing are any indication, than yes. John Locke, Bob Mayer and other authors have been able to go direct to consumer — with the help of Amazon — and reach a much wider audience. So why couldn’t presidential candidates, or politicians in general, do the same?
In order to do so, candidates would need to change the way they think about the book today. Instead of viewing a book as a brute-force, one-size-fits-all message delivery vehicle it drops in one big package every election cycle, candidates need to instead think about how they could instead deliver a stream of targeted messaging throughout the long election cycle with electronic publishing.
Imagine for a moment if Obama or the prospective GOP candidate were able to publish e-books in advance of major debates, or to convey certain messages to address voter concerns. One month a candidate could focus on national security, the next he or she could convey his or her personal story through a media-rich e-book with photos and video interviews.
Or, looking back, ponder how things might have been different last election cycle if, for example, McCain released an e-book with his plan for economic stability in the face of the financial crisis that assuaged concerns of those who thought he may not have had a plan, while also giving the faithful talking points to distribute by word of mouth.
Candidates also need to maximize what’s possible in this new medium. By releasing enhanced e-books, they can create highly personalized messages rich with video and audio; they can become more humanized to the voter.
Lastly, with the traditional book model, candidates are often their own biggest enemy as they seek high book advances and try to climb the bestseller lists to put more money into their pockets. This traditional approach to the traditional model only serves to create expensive books the vast majority of voters never buy.
But what if a candidate looked at the e-book as an interactive application complete with fundraising capabilities built in? Would they possibly consider distributing all their e-books for free if they could, somehow, garner campaign contributions through an in-book (or in-app) payment model? E-books and enhanced e-book apps could become the main way in which candidates could come into many voters homes and, in a sense, fill their campaign coffers.
Book and e-book purists may be moaning at the thought of a flood of campaign e-books filled with talking points and calls for contributions. But that is, for better or for worse, what campaigns are about, and if these same messages are flooding every other medium during campaign seasons, it was only inevitable that the campaign would eventually come to the e-book.
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