Making Things Happen

It’s been a while since my last post, what a perfect occasion to break my silence is the launch of the new Apple iPad!

After months (years?) of anticipation and rumors finally Apple made his move, entering the ebook readers and tablet pc arena. It’s a difficult market, currently targeting mostly early adopters and geeks but which is indeed going to grow in the coming years.

The proposition is solid. It’s a great device, offered with the same iPod Touch/iPhone diversity (wi-fi only and 3G), targeting different audiences and needs. I really loved the concept of using the iPad to move around the house and office, it’s a great entertainment and productivity tool.

It could also be used as the centre of a home media center, controlling my whole music and video library, routing audio and video through different sources (TV, Hi-Fi, etc.) simply by sliding fingers on its beautiful interface. It’s already a great experience with the iPhone, the iPad find a way to augment it.

Also the office could be a perfect environment, walking around from meeting to meeting with this lightweight and responsive gadget, keeping in touch with emails, calendar and iWork.

There are indeed blurred boundaries between the iPad and the iPhone/MacBook Air, I guess that it just addresses slightly different needs, which could be tricky. I was a little disappointed to see that it mounts iPhone OS, I thought for a moment that it could run the very same Mac OS X that runs on Macs, but it does make sense if we think about the multitouch interface and its purpose.

It’s still very early to forecast how it will perform, my take is that we’ll need at least one or two upgrades to really see the iPad take off and reach mass adoption. It’s a completely new device, which needs new behaviors to arise. To this degree I liked very much the setting created during the presentation: Steve sitting on the sofa almost “teaching” how to use it, as if we need to be educated on how to interact with the iPad during our daily life.

I’m sure there’s much more to come, and developers will play a key role in finding endless ways to leverage iPad’s key features.

After London, it’s now news that also Nokia’s New York and Chicago flagship stores are being shut down, tossing out millions of investments aimed to showcase the latest gadget from the Finnish manufacturer.

I have to say that this news came with no surprise for me, as I still remember this bare shop in the middle of Regent Street where Nokia gadgets were exposed in a pretty cold design environment.

Nokia is loosing ground in the cutting edge of mobile technology, where Apple and HTC are leading, while it’s still very strong on the cheap mobile phone market which, perhaps, it’s not the ideal market for stylish flagship stores.

It’s a pity however, Nokia has to regain its place in the high end mobile market. The Booklet 3G is indeed an important leap forward, but more has to be done (starting from ditching Symbian OS).

At LeWeb ‘09 FON founder Martin Varsavsky announced Peek, a GPRS email gadget that, like Amazon’s Kindle, comes with (almost) free data connection all over Europe through the new MVNO Spotnik.

The price point is set at 99€, then for around 13€ per month you’ll get unlimited data to send and receive your emails.

This could be a serious threat to BlackBerry prosumer users, which have bought their BlackBerries just for the email functionality and now have a real alternative, less expensive and available everywhere around Europe without lengthy binding contracts.

At the same time, offering data roaming connection for a bunch of euros per month disrupts the current roaming market, nowadays hardly accessible to consumers and small businesses that can easily spend hundreds of euros over a weekend abroad.

I can’t wait to learn more about this!

The latest Ikea online campaign on Facebook is creating a huge buzz, as they managed to ignite a viral reaction to a pretty inexpensive and simple campaign.

To promote a new store they registered the store manager on Facebook and added a bunch of catalog pictures to his profile. They then invited people to tag themselves in the picture, to win Ikea products. In a few weeks this was a huge success, with people asking for more pictures, sharing Ikea marketing material on their profiles.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE2LSp-hjbQ

The idea is indeed brilliant and being a first mover has been a key advantage for Ikea, however I don’t really like this approach. Tagging is used to alert your friends of pictures you’re in, for them to see and have fun. Honestly if I receive a status update from a friend tagged in a photo and eventually land on a Ikea furnished room, I won’t be very pleased, both with Ikea and my friend.

But, clearly, that’s probably just me as the campaign was a huge hit!

Back in the “old days” when I was a happy iPhone user, I remember how hard it was to type long messages on that tiny touchscreen keyboard, especially as I was coming from a BlackBerry Curve 8300.

Swype is a new technology that promise to bring ease back to touchscreen writing, by understanding what are you going to write as you swipe your fingers across the screen.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTooBnKAdSw

The idea is very interesting and the execution shown in the video looks pretty impressive, I should try it to say my final word, but at least it looks like something it’s going on in touchscreen input methods!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmEBFWXMImM

I’m loving this concept of creating this huge cloud over the skies of London! The idea is both to create a huge display where to show information and shows, and also to perform particular activities inside the bubbles themselves, for people to experience London from above.

Another interesting idea is to microfund the whole process, so that the final actual scale of the building will be determined by the amount of money collected. I don’t know if this will be really possible, but it sounds sexy!

Goes without saying that the whole building is completely energy self sufficient.

You can read a full detailed report on this project here.