Tag Archives: iPad

Ten years before the iPad

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Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. Does the following excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon (punished in 1999) sound familiar?

“Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”

What’s in your bag?

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This Q&A with James Altucher might be the best thing I’ve come across about “minimalism” although he quickly disavows that label. I couldn’t live as he does but he’s not suggesting I should. A few snippets:

I have one bag of clothes, one backpack with a computer, iPad, and phone. I have zero other possessions.

For me, having little means I don’t have to think about things that I own.

I have 238,795 unread emails in my inbox. Emails are a suggestion but not an obligation.

I understand real books are beautiful. So I go to bookstores for hours and read them. But I won’t own them because they won’t fit in my one bag.

I never read random articles on the Internet unless they are by people I know.

I like this guy’s style. No idea what others should do… just some thoughts on what he should do. Today. Tomorrow? Who knows?

Steve Jobs Schools

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“Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad. There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.”

More at Spiegel Online

Flying by iPad

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Barb had a meeting in Kansas City today and the client sent the company plane to fetch her (and save a few billable hours, I assume). She snapped this photo of the pilot’s iPad. I shared this on Google+ where Bisbo (a pilot for Southwest) posted the following comment:

“The major airlines are starting to go to this, and slowly moving away from paper charts.  With it tied into GPS, you can see your position along the route, and you can also overlay weather radar information from the NWS.  In fact, I often get much better weather information form my First Officer’s iPhone than I do from dispatch.”

How Apple accidentally revolutionized health care

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“A study by Manhattan Research in 2011 found that 75% of physicians owned at least one Apple product. Vitera Healthcare’s 2012 survey of health-care professionals backed up this high number. The company’s study found that 60% of respondents used an iPhone and 45% owned an iPad.”

“Yale University’s School of Medicine even did away with paper materials for training upcoming physicians. The school provided iPads and wireless keyboards to all of its medical students. Other schools followed suit.”

“By April 2012, the (Apple) App Store included more than 13,600 health-related applications.“

Motley Fool

Your Next Doctor Might Be Your Car

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“Since 2010, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and BMW have been working on Nigel, a Mini Cooper outfitted with 230 sensors that creates a log of everything that happens in the vehicle, letting users see it all via an iPhone and iPad app. Now USC’s Center for Body Computing is getting in on the Nigel project, looking at how the car could be used to monitor driver health as well as vehicle health.”

“One day, she imagines, a car’s pollution sensors, heart-rate sensors (maybe integrated into the steering wheel), GPS, and oxygen content sensors could all work together to tell drivers if, say, a certain polluted area of the highway affects their health–or if their heart rate goes up every time they arrive home or at the office.”

What does mobile explosion mean for news?

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Some nuggets from new Pew Research Center report based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012 (including 4,638 mobile device owners)

  • Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet
  • Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier
  • 64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly
  • As many as 43% say the news they get on their tablets is adding to their overall news consumption. And almost a third, 31%, said they get news from new sources on their tablet
  • Fully 60% of tablet news users mainly use the browser to get news on their tablet, just 23% get news mostly through apps and 16% use both equally

“Consumers don’t want tablets, they want iPads”

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“Fifty percent of respondents preferred Apple over all other brands. There is a remarkable degree of unanimity in consumer’s preferences for the iPad over competing products. … In the US, we find that Apple has more than double the brand appeal of BlackBerry, HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung combined. These manufacturers have a very high level of brand equity and visibility in adjacent categories. It is striking that they hold so little appeal for consumers in tablets.”

WSJ’s All Things Digital

My favorite line from this post: “Apple is succeeding in the category because it reinvented it.”

iMovie on the iPad

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I’ve had the iPad2 for a while but hadn’t gotten around to doing any video, so I sat down with Jeff Moore, one the sellers for our company. He’d just returned the World Pork Expo so I asked him a few questions about the event.

I thought audio and video quality on the iPad was pretty good (I typically do a shitty job with lighting). And iMovie has some very nice features. I was a little disappointed with the title options but that might be just my lack of familiarity with the app.
Here’s a pretty good demo of the features