iPad, wallet photos, day planners, media revenues, and copyright

All of those nouns go together.

Today Apple released the "God" tablet, I mean iPad, and it is indeed good. After all the hype there will surely be quick and harsh critics. AT&T and it's 'generous deal' (or whatever Jobs said) of wifi will probably be seen as apology for lousy 3G service and overburdened networks. There's no camera for web conferencing (relax, it's probably saved for next year's model and there'll be peripherals).

But for all that, let's acknowledge what this does-- it fits not just web but multimedia into our lives. Already the iPhone serves as my wallet photos. I have a "family wallets album" set to be created by a combination of dates and faces. I curate the set, but when a colleague/friend/distant family asks me, "Got any new photos" while we chat, out comes the iPhone. Not actual wallet photos or a photo sleeve page in a day planner. Plus the thing does a credible job with games, movies, music, books-- I think we can agree Apple's got the media presentation thing down.

A quick history of multimedia: We used to have to get Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM and install it. Then the web came and killed that program, but we all still had to be at a desk. Then Palm and then Windows CE and then Blackberry came and mobilized it, with harsh aberrations like Verizon VCast along the way. The iPhone perfected its portability. But all of that was varying parts clunky, inconvenient, or just too damn small to enjoy. Trust me, I regularly ride NJ Transit with myself and many others in the new "Thinker" crouch, staring at video content on a mobile. It's embarrassing, bad for the eyes and back, and the audio is the only reliably immersive part.

Now the iPad- sure, it's a lousy name- comes along and offers a journal-sized experience. It can show video at a decent size, though it may prove too big for action games, we'll see. The painting app looks great, I fully expect creative renderings of "fingertip art". I can imagine music mixing apps too (here's a free idea: two turntables, maybe a tapescrubber onscreen, and you can take any three iTunes songs and mash them).

The point is, its big enough to be enjoyable, small enough to be portable, and will most likely do media "right". This is a long, much welcomed step past the Encarta CD-ROM.

So now we are entering the age of Personal Multimedia Everywhere. Will people even notice the HD screens over the 34th St. subway entrances anymore? Or will they be walking with their head into their iPads (or other e-reader, Google "CES 2010 tablet")? Reading over shoulders on the subway will become much better.

But look at the form factor again. Was it Laporte who noted, "it's not quite the size of a letter sheet"? Apple has actually given it an anachronistic name, "iPad" as in "Internet pad of paper". This is the most common journal size. I prefer half-sheet size (8.5x5.5"), but check the stores, the catalogs, and the meetings-- customers seems to prefer letter sheet pads or about.

Take that and throw in what during the keynote seemed underwhelming: Email, calendars, address books. Throw in another successful class of iPhone apps: productivity (OmniFocus is $19.99). The iPad is a natural business tool.

Add in the Internet access and you get something I salivate over: A page-size rendering of Analytics, a Google Analytics feed (basically needed to overcome the Flash limitation, but anyway...). In five months I expect that to be pitching to senior management and I will show the analytics numbers via an iPad, or financials.

Now we can see the suprise focus on iWork. Make the iPad cheap enough, make iWork cheap enough, and these things get on traction. I recall that Gates' big inspiration was "a computer on every desk"? Well how about "an iPad in every meeting"?

And it seems, every meeting. It was touted as able to attach to a projector. But it scales-- it can be used in 2-person meetings too. So from auditorium to 1:1-- that's reach for a presentation device!

But there is a dark side. We've covered the first three nouns: iPad, wallet photos, and day planner. But there's also media revenues and copyright.

Here, I get less optimistic. Revenue is what's left after scarcity's friction shaves off the premium yielded from demand. But multimedia is well-known for being crazily plentiful, at least in terms of access-- the first copy is expensive, the rest are nearly free. In the history of multimedia that which has made multimedia, "content", scarce has been the player technology. CD-ROMs were clunky. Desktops are constraining. Mobiles are hard to enjoy.

But give us a device that is proficient, affordable and connected and scarcity disappears. I buy an iPad and a visually robust, technically dependable multimedia faucet is in my lap. And again, that content is sooo easily copied!

First, the consumer view: It could be a flowering. I could be watching 5x the movies! Reading more newspapers and comics! Writing more position papers, business plans, financial and analytics reports!

But then the publisher's view: They're getting all this content! Where's the receipts! What? They're going to uncredentialed sources? They're siphoning from aggregators? They're generally avoiding ads? (Especially those Flash ads we overpaid for?)

Both are reasonable arguments. Humans want to be creative and part of that is connecting with others' creativity. But that connecting takes work, and man editors and authors need to eat too...

This is what bothered me about the keynote: The focus on iTunes. Sure, go Apple it's your store and I love capitalism too. But really, is that the only way to get content on there?

What about my PDFs from O'Reilly's Safari Books Online? What about my content? Can I get my DropBox on there? My friends' drop.io?

How about this: I own the DVD of "Batman: Dark Knight". Great film, really. But I am rarely home and with the leisure time to watch it via DVD player. I work long hours and I'm happily married with 2 kids. Most of my TV time comes on a bus midway between Wayne, NJ and Fort Lee. I can't take Dark Knight there without hacking.

See, there's the last noun: Copyright. I'm a fan of it. I have books, nothing you've read according to my royalties, but I benefit from it. But still, as a consumer, the digital world is horrible. I don't own anything, I license it. There's these fabulously rich, effectively immortal (compared to my puny lifespan) companies that have worked to establish a legal regime I can barely understand. They keep single mothers from sharing Britney Spears with friends. They keep me from watching Dark Knight without nurturing my children.

And the iPad was pitched as for them. I recall the big slide with publishers' names: Simon and Schuster, Hachette... What about me? What about my PDF? My video queue?

In the end, I love the iPad, but only if Handbrake is an app for that.