Google's two new announcements: integrating a Twitter-like service into Gmail and a goal of a real-time speech translation service shows what direction they're taking the company: Into the space between you and every other human being on the planet.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

The web is becoming more dynamic, context-aware and personalized by the day, and the amount of information consumed by each person is increasing exponentially. But while hardware performance is improving, except when it comes to the simplest of parallel programming tasks, software infrastructure is not keeping pace. We need to develop new data processing architectures ones that go beyond technologies like memcached, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc.

Think of this as a search problem. Traditionally, there was an index of every document in which every word occurred. When a query was received the search engine could just look up the precomputed answer to which documents had which word. For a personalized search, an exponentially larger index is needed that includes not only factual data (words in a document, brand of cameras, etc.) but also taste and preference data (people who like this camera tend to live in cities, be under 40, love Napoleon Dynamite, etc.).

Unfortunately, personalizing along 100 taste dimensions leads to nearly as many permutations of recommendation rankings as there are atoms in the universe! Obviously there isn't enough space to precompute what recommendations to show every possible type of person that queries a site. Additionally, precomputing the answer to queries is too slow. People expect real-time results, not hours- or days-old precomputed answers. If I tell Amazon I don't like a book, I want to immediately see that reflected in my recommendations.

We're at a turning point in how we need to build web sites to handle these sorts of personalization problems. While first-generation distributed systems split the application into three tiers web servers, application servers and databases second-generation systems build large non-real-time back-end clusters to analyze huge amounts of sales data, index billions of web documents etc.

A third generation of systems is now emerging, with the computation shifting from those back-end clusters into front-end real-time clusters. After all, you just can't build a back end that precomputes personalized results for millions of Internet users. You have to compute it in real time.

Adding complexity, many personalization problems are more difficult to parallelize than a lot of traditional back-end applications. Indexing the words in web pages is actually a lot easier to parallelize than are the long sequence of matrix calculations required to optimize a user's recommendations.

Matrix calculations tend to involve complicated data access patterns that mean it's hard to partition calculations and their data across a cluster of computers. Instead there tends to be a lot of sharing among many different computers, each of which holds a piece of the problem and updates the others as data changes. This back-and-forth data sharing is both incredibly hard to keep track of for the programmer, and can significantly degrade application performance.

The systems we've built at Hunch to solve this started off using distributed caching with memcached but very quickly veered into something more akin to distributed shared memory (DSM) systems, complete with multiple levels of caching, coherency protocols with application-specific consistency guarantees and data replication for performance. With an abundance of processing cores at our disposal, the real challenges tended to revolve around getting the right data to the right core.

I think that in a few years we'll look back at this time as an era in which a slew of new large-scale programming challenges and their solutions were born. Hopefully we'll also see more open-source solutions along the lines of memcached and Hadoop, so that building personalized and real-time web applications is easy for everyone.

Tom Pinckney is the co-founder & VP of engineering of Hunch.com.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

• What's Next for the Cloud? Distributed Architectures
• Infrastructure Winners and Losers of 2009

The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn't have to spell the end of the company itself.

Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:

1. Facilitate Closure - When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don't rush to find a fall guy. Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.

2. Set a Vision - According to intentional change theory, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members' dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.

3. Find an Enemy - The easiest way to solidify an us is to identify a them. As Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.

4. Tend the Garden - In our recently published book, The Art of Scalability, we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren't working out, they need to be weeded out.

The time period between Microsoft's release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company's history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview to telling Bill Gates at one point that It's not going to work, describing the development as crashing to the ground due to haphazard methods of feature integration.

To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.

There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.

I purposely waited a few days before writing my iPad article just to be sure that the initial excitement and hype is washed out of my system. I wanted to make sure that I'm writing as objectively as I can and not just let my emotions get the better of me. That being said, here are my thoughts on Apple's iPad.

iPad - image courtesy of Apple Inc.

The world has waited quite awhile for Apple to finally release its tablet. The world wanted it so much that in a way it worked against Apple. People built up their expectations of the iPad so high that it was going to be tough for Apple to surpass it. Did they? The simple answer is no. The iPad falls short of the world's lofty expectations. Is it Apple's fault? Not totally.

The world wanted Apple to produce a breakthrough device so much that when Jason Calcanis, founder of Engadget fired of tweets saying that he had been a beta tester for Apple and started to rattle off specs that were too good to be true, people believed him (this writer included). Why not? He's been writing about the tech industry and is one of the more recognizable names in the blogosphere that it seemed plausible. I hindsight, the solar panels should have been a dead giveaway.

On to the iPad. At first glance it does indeed just look like a big iPod Touch. Is it revolutionary and magically as Apple said it is? It should be had the world not been exposed to the iPhone and iPod Touch prior to it. On its on it is still revolutionary. Here's why.

1. The size is a big factor Sure it may look like a big iPod Touch but the bigger form factor just opens up a lot more possibilities. I've been a long time user of the iPod Touch and iPhone. I have both the first generation of iPod Touch and iPhone and thus have a little bit of experience with the devices. They both are great mobile devices. For checking important emails, looking up stock and weather quotes, reading a short article on the internet that really can't wait both these devices are top notch. But for reading books, watching movies, etc. It's just ok. After awhile your head starts to spin because of the eye strain and makes you want to put it down. The iPhone and iPod Touch are great mobile devices that can be used for short periods.

On the areas that the iPod Touch and iPhone are lacking, I think this is where the iPad starts to shine. Its size makes for an excellent device to watch videos on. The screen is large enough for personal viewing that it doesn't become such a chore. Reading books should be easier too although I shall reserve judgment on that until I actually get to try it.

2. Keeping it Simple - I've heard about a lot of people saying that the iPad lacks multi-tasking, etc. but I believe that Apple's attitude of keeping the iPad simple is actually is a strength. We've been surrounded by a culture of multitasking that it's gotten to a point that it's become a hindrance rather than helpful. When we work on our computers, we often find ourselves doing email, chatting, reading web pages all at the same time. It's becoming confusing and our concentration is suffering. I'm not saying this is always bad but in some cases keeping focus on things is good.

I also believe that the target users for the iPad are really people who aren't that techie. Let me qualify this. I'm not saying these people don't like technology or are adverse to it. I'm saying these people are the ones that like technology that just works. That's why a lot of people play games on consoles. Sure they can play games on the PC but it takes so much work to do so. Consoles are simple. You place the game, you play. Simple. The iPad is pretty much simple as well. It won't take rocket science to figure it out.

3. Touch me - The touch interface feels natural. It's been around for awhile but Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch interface that has been adapted for the iPad is the most natural touch interface I've seen. It's not a PC interface that has been adapted for touch. It's actually designed with the touch interface in mind. Therefore it just feels natural. People who aren't tech oriented really don't have a hard time figuring it out. Case in point, my tech challenged mother didn't have a hard time learning her iPhone.

4. It's what inside that counts In this case, one of the biggest things about the iPad announcement is actually the processor. Apple now has it's own processor inside one of its devices. It actually looks pretty good. If the impressions of people that have had a chance to play with the iPad. This thing screams and isn't power hungry. If this chip finds it way to the iPhone, we'll have quite the smart phone on our hands.

The iPad was designed to fill a gap between the netbook and a smar tphone. Will it do that? I think to a certain extent it will. I envision people buying this to have them in their homes and have easy access to email, photos, videos. Sometimes you just want to share photos with a friend and not necessarily project it on the TV. The iPad is a good alternative.

I also see it as a good addition to people who have desktops but want something portable to bring around the house to check emails, watch videos from anywhere and yes that includes the bathroom. I don't think it will get hot enough to burn your crotch as a MacBook/MacBook Pro does.

Will it revolutionize the way the iPod has? It has the potential to do so but only time will tell. For a 1.0 product it's good. I'm sure as with the iPod and iPhone the succeeding versions will only be better.

Post from: EveryJoe

Apple iPad: Breakthrough or Breakdown?

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

Eugene Shimalsky in his short piece "One Small iPad for Man, One Giant Leap for Apple" declares that the iPad is interesting primarily because it isn't a computer. As he puts it:

Yesterday, Apple got all of the geeks glued to their screens waiting for the "Jesus Tablet," iPad. An hour later, they were twittering that it did not come. Or maybe it just wasn't their Jesus?

It turns out it was his Mom's.

It's been a long time since most of us have used our computers to do anything approaching "computing," but the iPad explicitly leaves the baggage behind, leaps the conceptual gulf, and becomes something else entirely. Something consumery, media'ish, and not in the least bit intimidating.

The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that's how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don't even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills.

So, in some ways this evolution of the computer to the iPrius seems completely natural. I don't care all that much if the iPad is hermetically sealed, but I wonder uncomfortably if in a few years the MacBook and the PC will be too. Or, more likely, we'll just wake up one day to a world without MacBooks or PC's. As we continue our shift en mass to the mobile device ecosystem and the laptop as we know it goes the way of the desktop, banished to special purpose niches.

In mobile land, closed carrier heritage combined with Apple's product vectors may leave us with only closed options. A confluence of interests - commercial (get your pure non-pirated content only from me!), governmental (cyber defense!), and user (I want to be safe!) - will find that outcome attractive. Our generative and hacker-friendly world will be replaced by a sterile world of sealed aluminum.

No doubt the iPad will be hacked by someone to prove it is still possible. They'll run linux on it within a week of launch, but that's not where they will have learned those skills. They learned them on the highly generative PC they probably bought for something else. Slight differences in approachability and "ease of mastery" (as Zittrain puts it) make a big difference. The curves are steep. And tomorrow the people that buy iPad's descendants will be less likely to develop those skills. Who's going to buy a developer's license just to screw around?

For your phone Apple could make a strong argument that this kind of control was necessary. They needed to make sure it was a reliable first and foremost as a phone (rather than reliable as a snooping device or wouldn't just crash every time you really needed to make a call). The argument is being extended to the iPad more because of Apple's culture than real need, and if I was Steve Jobs looking at iTunes receipts I would do the same thing. But... directionally this is a vector toward compuserve, not away from it. The iPad is Steve's Minitel terminal.

Just for the heck of it, imagine for a minute that the MacBookPro was locked up like the iPad. The apps that run on the iPhone have been mostly trivial. One person for a few weeks is probably the average effort. Eugene Lin may be willing to build apps on spec and hope for the best after they are submitted, but will Adobe? Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week.

The real question about Apple's new multitouch pseudo-computer, dubbed the iPad, is not whether it sucks or rocks. What all of us really want to know is whether it will change the future. The answer? Yes, but badly.

The iPad And The World Of Tomorrow

For those who spent yesterday glued to the State of the Union address instead of tech news feeds, Gizmodo has a terrific summary of Apple's new device. To break it down: The iPad looks basically like an iPhone, but with a 9.7 inch screen. It runs the same software as the iPhone, can connect to the internet, and seems to work nicely for reading books, newspapers and magazines, watching video, checking Google maps, reading your email, surfing the web, and casual gaming. Like the iPhone, it has no keyboard - you can touch-type on the screen. (It also has a keyboard attachment that you can buy separately.)

Why is this outsize version of the iPhone so important that the internet basically exploded over it yesterday? Mostly because Apple's last two new mobile devices - the iPod and the iPhone - changed the way people think about computers. They really did change the future, by making it glaringly obvious that computing devices are not all desktop PCs - they can be specialized music players, or telephone/internet toys that put the web in your pocket. They are the beautiful, cool poster gadgets for the mobile computer generation; they are what we imagine when we think of tomorrow's machines.

The Mythical Convergence Device

The iPad promises to be just as revolutionary as its predecessors, for one reason. It embodies, as much as possible, the mythical convergence device that technophiles have been craving for almost two decades. The convergence device, which people began to discuss seriously in the 1990s, would be a unified gadget where you could consume many kinds of media, especially TV and the web, with the same gadget.

This is exactly what the iPad does, helped along by the fact that so much television is available online already. And you can add books to this convergence, too (possibly even with a Kindle app). The iPad is also the perfect shape for a convergence box. Its screen is about the size of a quality paperback or small television set. There's none of that scrunching your forehead as you peer into the teeny screen of the iPhone to read a book or watch YouTube.

What I'm saying is that the iPad appeals to a very deep and longlived fantasy in the consumer electronics world: A device that does it all. At least, if all you want to do is consume media.

And there's the problem.

Reinventing The Television

Apple is marketing the iPad as a computer, when really it's nothing more than a media-consumption device - a convergence television, if you will. Think of it this way: One of the fundamental attributes of computers is that they are interactive and reconfigurable. You can change the way a computer behaves at a very deep level. Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you're using. Hardly more interactive than changing channels on a TV. Sure, you can compose a short email or text message; you can use the Brushes app to draw a sketch. But those activities are not the same thing as programming the device to do something new. Unlike a computer, the iPad is simply not reconfigurable.

The iPad emulates television in another way, too: You can channel surf through the Apps Store, but you can't change what's playing. Every single app that's available for the iPad has to be approved by Apple first, just like apps for iPhones. That means censorship of "offensive" apps, no apps that compete with Apple (i.e., no Google Voice), and no random app somebody wrote to do whatever obscure shit you want to do. So you've got thousands of channels and nothing on. You can only keep flipping through the channels, hoping in vain to see something other than reruns of Cheaters and Alf.

If you want something new, there are very limited ways of getting it. You can write an app, and it might be accepted to the Apps Store. Or you can write your own (unacceptable) app and hand it out to a few friends, if you and they are technically savvy enough. But most users won't be in that position.

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple's big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that's borderline acceptable, but it's not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

Back To The Shopping Mall

So if it's not a computer, what exactly is the iPad? It could be just a really tarted-up ebook reader, which would make sense if you consider that the iPad is competing with Amazon's Kindle. So it's a reinvention of the book, a fairly old technology, but in a gleaming new package. Except that package isn't even very new, as futurist and science fiction author Karl Schroeder pointed out. He told io9 that the iPad isn't about brilliant hardware innovation, and that in fact the device doesn't even use state-of-the-art ebook tech like e-ink.

Speaking to us via email, Schroeder said:

What Apple has done (again) is seize the moment with a combination of a device and a business model . . . even if e-ink provides a better reading experience for books (reading on an iPad will continue to literally mean staring into a lamp, just like reading on a computer screen), it doesn't matter because it's the total package of iTunes, iBookstore, 3G, games, apps etc. that will pull ebook readers along with it. Consider that the iPad is a closed platform that doesn't even multitask; if the technology mattered, those would be major considerations for the buyer. But they won't be, because when you buy an iPad, you buy access to the whole Apple business ecology.

Looked at from this angle, the iPad isn't so much new technology as it is a shiny, pretty doorway to a mall where you can buy everything from books to movies.

The iPad hasn't brought us forward into the future. It's taken us backward to a world of strip malls and televisions.

Another Vision Of The Future

So the iPad takes us back to the 1980s, or maybe even the 1950s. It's likely to be a device that changes our future, but what that means is we're facing a tomorrow where true innovation is sidelined by a device that represents a convergence of old media and shopping.

But as John Connor would say, we can change the future. That might be as simple as pushing Apple to change its App Store policies to make iPads less like TVs and more like computers. As Lifehacker's Adam Pash put it, "The App Store isn't exactly the problem-it's the way Apple runs and limits the App Store." He suggests that Apple could create a special "Restricted section" for its App Store. He continues:

Rather than reject applications that it feels may confuse the user (like they claimed Google Voice or Google Latitude might), or applications that allow users to access naughty pictures, or even applications that it hasn't had time to vet for the App Store proper, [Apple] put those applications in the Restricted section. Before a user is able to install applications from the Restricted section, that user has to agree that the application may confuse their feeble minds, offend their delicate sensibilities, or even slow down their device. Is this such a problem? . . . Even better, [the iPad] could work like the package manager it actually is and allow users to add their own trusted repositories as sources for other applications . . . The point is, users should at least be allowed to flip some switch, somewhere on the machine, that says, "Hey computer, I'm an adult, and I take responsibility over how I use this machine."

A convergence device that can also be reprogrammed the way computers can? Now we're in the twenty-first century.

Another possibility would be for developers and investors to focus on hardware that truly is innovative and futuristic. Schroeder says:

There's really nothing in the iPad that's new; if you want truly new, disruptive tech that would be at a similar price point if commercialized, look at Pranav Mistry's SixthSense and related projects.

SixthSense is a gesture-controlled mobile device with a projector - you can see its telephone app at work above. You project the phone onto your hand and press the buttons. You can also use gestures to take pictures. This is truly the next step in mobile computing, and will likely revolutionize computer networks in ways we can't yet imagine.

What Is To Be Done?

I know a lot of otherwise-savvy consumers and hackers who are already drooling over the iPad and putting in their orders. They hate the idea of a restricted device, but they love the shiny-shiny. I'm not saying that they should deprive themselves of this pretty new toy. What I am saying is that this toy represents a crappy, pathetic future. It is no more revolutionary than those expensive, hot boots I bought at Fluevog, and only slightly more useful.

The only way iPads can truly become futuristic devices is if we hack them so that we can pour whatever operating system we want inside. We need to jailbreak these media boxes so we can install the apps we want, not the ones provided by the Apple shopping mall.

Do not be content with a television when you can have a computer.

Do not be content with yesterday's machines, because the future is before you. Ready to be hacked.

Editor's note: This a guest post written by Joff Redfern. Redfern is the co-founder of FlattenMe.com, a site for creating personalized storybooks. He was formerly a vice president of product at Yahoo, where he managed Yahoo Buzz and Toolbar.

Amazon Kindle: The Road Ahead

I'm a recent Kindle fan boy. I like the instant access to earth-friendly books, the paper-like display and the way it fits in my hand like a paperback. I've also deeply admired the crispness of the Kindle visionany book, any language, in minutes. But with Apple's iPad announcement the playing field on which the Kindle competes shifts and the disruptive technology itself gets disrupted.

If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry? Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.

As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravelwhich path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader . . .

For the same price, more is better

Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. I look to the evolution of my own personal technology habits for the answer.

When I wanted to manage my contacts I started with a paper-based Address Book, upgraded to a Digital Rolodex, upgraded to a Palm V, upgraded to a Blackberry, then upgraded to an iPhone. Fundamentally I was trying to solve how I manage and communicate with my contacts. With each upgrade I got more functionality yet the price point for each device was not radically different.

If consumers can eventually get an entertainment tablet that also has the core features of a great reader (screen, content catalog, ease of purchasing) at under $200 they'll want more.

Prices drop. Over time, price won't be a factor in the purchase decision.

Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489. That is pretty close already. What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?

Moore's Law and business model innovation will drive the iPad-like devices to sub-$200 pricing. Unrealistic? The retail price of the iPhone 8GB dropped ~83% in 3 years from $599 to $99.

Also keep in mind that entertainment tablets are using different math from the Kindle. The device pricing will be subsidized by multiple revenue streamsdownloads of books, music, movies, games, apps, advertising, and more. Today I can get a cell phone device for free, will my iPad be free some day?

Competitors are playing a platform war. Is Kindle?

Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world.

This Apple sizzle has drawn 100,000+ developers and publishers to its iPhone (and now iPad) ecosystem. These apps are already available to entertain us in all sorts of ways on the iPad beyond what Apple exec Scott Forstall showed today.

Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?

What would you do if you ran the Kindle?