Investors took a look at the Apple iPad yesterday and decided they didn’t really know what to think. Not a terrible conclusion: We won’t really know what this thing can do until we see the software Apple’s partners deliver.
Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason: The magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet. Tease that out a bit and you can tell the story of most media companies. They’re excited to start taking advantage of the tablet–as soon as they find out what it is, exactly.
Here’s yet another content creator that’s convinced Apple has a tablet device in the works: Condé Nast says it will have a digital version of Wired magazine ready for the purported gadget by the middle of next year and will eventually create similar versions for all of its 18 titles.
But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device–or even acknowledge that it has plans.
When Apple added a video camera to the iPhone last summer, the digerati declared that Flip, Cisco’s cheap digital video camera line, was dead. When Apple added a video camera to its cheap and tiny Nano iPod last week, the digerati heaped dirt on the camcorder’s grave.
You know what? I think the conventional wisdom is right on this one. Take a look at this clever side-by-side test.
The announcement from RealNetworks that Apple had approved its iPhone app–all you can eat music, to go, for $15 a month–gave the company’s stock a brief jolt yesterday. That’s over now: Wall Street seems to have thought about it and concluded that people won’t pay a monthly fee for music, even on an iPhone.
The last time Amazon held a press conference in New York City was in February, when it introduced the Kindle 2.0. Now the company has scheduled another one for Wednesday morning at Pace University in lower Manhattan. Expect a new large-format device that’s optimized for reading newspapers and magazines.
Google is letting advertisers who buy AdWords–its main revenue engine–automatically buy mobile advertising, too. The company says AdWords buyers can choose to have their AdWords automatically show up on phones that support “real” Internet browsers like T-Mobile’s G1 phone and Apple’s iPhone. That’s a relatively small market, but one that’s growing fast, and Google’s first real opportunity to show that it can make money on mobile.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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