Apple announced the new iPad yesterday, essentially a large format iPhone. Some are disappointed that it is not more revolutionary with respect to the iPhone. I think the device is exactly what it needed to be.

Many of my friends and colleagues who own iPhones have noted that they already use their home computer much less, instead simply using their iPhone. The iPhone is already a decent replacement for a home computer if you are just surfing the web, playing games, reading email and looking at photos.

What it needed to be is bigger. So they made it bigger.

I think Steve Jobs did not position the device entirely honestly in the release announcement. He positioned it as sitting between the PC and the smart phone, implying that it was a device that consumers needed in addition to these products. I believe he did this because he knows the early market already owns the other two devices. If you want the Apple faithful to buy the product then you have to convince them they need an additional device.

I wrote in July 2007 about the iPhone’s potential to herald in a new age of consumer computing and my views about operating systems for consumers. The real impact of the iPad won’t be felt for some time. The iPad has the potential to replace the personal computer for the casual user who is not a knowledge worker. If your mom needs a replacement for her aging computer, the iPad would be a great recommendation. If she occasionally likes to type long emails, get her the optional keyboard. Even for knowledge workers, the iPad will work just fine when they are doing things other than work.

I don’t believe the iPad will help the newspaper or magazine industry much. The iPad is an information appliance and the forces that are eroding newspapers and magazines will continue unabated. In books, its nice to have another player selling the media.

I agree with Jeff Bezos that avid readers may still buy a purpose built device for quite some time. And I agree with Jobs that most people will buy a more general purpose device that can read books. Long term trends favor the iPad; the greater user base will pay for more advanced development and we will see the same cannibilization from the low end that we see in photography and GPS devices.

As for what percent of books will be able command charging anything or whether the basic format of a book will survive is a larger open question.

A couple of months back, Facebook changed their default settings so that wall posts (those status messages everyone creates) would be open to the public. Then facebook took everybody through a wizard asking that they take on the new defaults.

Recently, in an interview with Michael Arrington, Mark Zuckerberg started explaining why he made the changes. He says that the world is becoming more open and young people are more comfortable sharing more of their life online. If he had to start facebook again, he would default all wall posts to open.

The utility of facebook, as it was worked previously, was that it helped you remain connected to the people who were important to you. In a sea of information, facebook enabled you to maintain private relationships with your true circle of friends.

In Zuckerberg’s new world, there is little difference between whether your are friend with a person are not. Either way, they can read your daily thoughts. He devalues the importance of relationships to individuals and it shows a lack of respect for the individual.

Having a set of close private relationships permits people to hide the complexity of their lives from the rest of the world. We keep some people closer than others so that we stay competitive with our fellow human beings, so that we can present an abstracted version of ourself that lacks all the nitty gritty detail that would be overwhelming.

For many of the same reasons that facebook, as a company, does not divulge every thought, every half-baked plan, and the notes taken at internal meetings, human beings have a legitimate interest in privacy.

Zuckerberg claims that encouraging everyone to share more and more widely will make the world a more empathetic place. I don’t see there being any strong barriers today to people sharing their every thought if they so desire. Further, I can use information on a person’s inner state of mind for good or evil. The information does not care. Hence, empathy may not result. Maybe marketers want to pray on a person when they are down and offer them products that play on their insecurities. Does that make the world a better place? Does it make the world a better place that a potential employer can find out details of your family and relationship situation before hiring you, basing their hiring decisions on their value judgments about your private life?

Friends in their 40s come to me and ask whether they should try facebook. They express concerns over privacy. I used to tell them facebook was a very private place, a place where you information was locked down by default unless you chose to share it. But now, I have to warn them they they need to read the fine print because facebook wants the world to be more empathetic.

The question is, does Zuckerberg really believe the stuff he is currently saying or are there other pressures? Is he concerned that he can’t expose the facebook data to search, google style? Is he trying to stay ahead of twitter, which defaults information to public and does not require reciprocal relationships? Or is he just collapsing under the enormous weight of his personal success and the success of facebook? It can’t be easy to run a company where 300MM people have an opinion.

For some good background reading on the topic, read
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ReadWriteWeb piece where he argues that rather then reflecting reality and trends, Zuckerberg is trying to influence those trends. Kirkpatrick also wrote a follow-on piece arguing that Zuckerberg is fundamentally wrong about the need for consumer privacy.

I returned from vacation to find out that the 3 year old Western Digital boot drive on my Mac Pro failed and the machine would not boot. That gave me pause for reflection on what I really needed to recover to get up and running. Here is my list:

1. Need to install OS X on a new drive. ($99 from Best Buy).
2. Need to install Apple Aperture to do initial culling of photos and videos that I take before uploading to Phanfare. I also do minor editing in Aperture. (some day Phanfare will solve this problem)
3. Need to install MS office because I still have some legacy files on NAS in my house.
4. Need to install VMWare because I still use Outlook for email. My Windows image was stored on a SW raid in the same machine so that is intact.
5. Need to install iLife so that I can test iPhoto with Phanfare. I don’t use much of iLife very often.
6. Need to install Firefox and Chrome. I still can’t decide what browser I want to use. Firefox has become a memory hog. Chrome lacks Java support on the Mac.
7. Need to Install dropbox. I am trying it out as a substitute for the NAS in my basement.
8. Need to install Skype. I use it mostly for text chat.

That’s it. My music was on the RAID partition so I did not lose that. Music seems to be the last remaining data challenge to get running off the cloud. Apple probably has some ideas there with the acquisition of Lala. I wrote a post on how I would like to see the music service work at Apple.

We all hear that Garmin is going to be disrupted by cell phones and be left with no business. Maybe that is true, but that day has not yet arrived for geocaching, a hobby of mine.

I went out geocaching today with my son. Geocaching is awesome. It combines three different activities that I love: hiking, treasure hunts and GPS electronics.

I have the Groundspeak geocaching app for the iPhone. It’s a pretty neat piece of work, leveraging the built in GPS to provide lists of caches nearby with full descriptions, maps and log entries. The app provides all the collateral info that I need to decide which cache to pursue, alleviating the need to do legwork on the computer before going out to geocache.

But when it comes to actually finding a cache under heavy tree cover, the app is no subsititute for a dedicated GPS unit. Today was typical. The app got us within 100 feet of the cache, or so the phone seemed to indicate, but the location kept jumping around. Lacking confidence that we were in the right vicinity, I entered the coordinates into my Garmin GPS 60csx, a three year old unit. The Garmin pointed me about 100 yards away. When I got to the location the Garmin centered on, the cache was about 20 yards away and easily visible.

Purpose-built devices will nearly always outperform general purpose devices. The only caveat to that is when the market for the general purpose device is so much larger that there are inadequate R&D dollars to fund a better purpose-built device.

Purpose-built devices are typically more expensive, especially considering that they do only one thing well, but if you need performance, you will buy a purpose-built device.

Photography and GPS are both under seige from the low end from smart phones. But in both, if performance is your primary criteria, then you will likely buy a purpose-built device. However, there are attributes of the general purpose device, in particular the network connectivity and UI that smart phones provide, which are becoming essential features of GPS devices and cameras. So if the manufacturers want to attract the performance-driven consumer, they will need to add those.

Case in point: my 7-yr old son was calibrating the compass on the 60CSx and tried to active the ’start’ button by touching the screen. Of course, there is no touch screen on the 60CSx, but he is so used to user interfaces being touch and intuitive that he would never think to hit a dedicated button. In his world, you point at what you want on the screen.

My son looking to touch the screen, only reiterates that the purpose-built devices better have the other basic features like networking and user interface worked out to be competitive.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that Garmin is not going to be hurt by smart phones. They will be hurt, but I suspect that they can continue to exist for quite some time at the high end of the market if they make the right investments. I would buy a dedicated Garmin GPS unit, based on Android, that was very accurate and could also provide me the information that the Geocaching app provides on the iPhone. How they will manage to get wireless data on there is another matter.

Also, I just want to make clear that this post is an update to my earlier post when the Geocaching app first shipped. Back then, I though I might be able to leave my Garmin at home for geocaching. True some of the time, but not for the harder caches.

Of course, the general purpose devices are not standing still. If the GPS performance gets much better, then Garmin will be squeezed even further into the high end.

While the addition of HD video is the big news in the latest release, there were lots of other goodies tucked in as well.

• Play It Again Sam – Or Not. Add multiple songs to the same slideshow, including the option of having different playlists for each album section. You can choose from our stock music or upload your own music.
• Look Sharp. Phanfare now sharpens photos by default for web presentation. You can control the degree of sharpening applied. We use the unsharp mask algorithm. Sharpening occurs on resize only, so to see the effect on older images, rotate the image and then revert within Phanfare.
• Orwellian Reporting. Improved analytics information on who clicked through your Phanfare invitations and when. You can now adjudicate disputes around who opens your email first, your Mom or your Dad.
• A Codec a Day Keeps the Tech Support Away. Phanfare now supports AVCHD videos directly. You probably know if your camera is producing this troublesome format. The extension on the files is MTS.
• Look Mom, No Wires. Phanfare now supports wireless video transfers from Eye-Fi wireless SD memory cards. These cards make great gifts, especially for the parents, as they solve the ancient question of “how do I get these photos and videos off my camera?”
• Dating Yourself. You can now buy gorgeous 12 month wall calendars customized with your own photos and custom personal dates.
• Who Moved My Cheese? Navigate web albums without your mouse, using only the arrow keys.

All of these features were top requests by our customers. Be sure to let us know how you like them.

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of HD video support for Pro customers. You can now watch your videos in full-screen, HD glory.

We are busy reconverting all the videos for web presentation, but if you are eager to see what it looks like, here are some soccer videos and some photos too, taken with the Canon 5D Mark II. This is not professional quality video, but it gets the point across (and probably looks a bit more like what you are going to create at home versus what Hollywood produces).

Most computers can’t even show HD video without stuttering unless the hardware presentation is accelerated by special-purpose hardware built into most graphics cards. To get the benefits of HW acceleration, click the full screen button. Our full screen player uses the hardware acceleration that is likely built into your computer.

Our HD video is at 720p and runs at 3 megabits/second. Most viewers won’t be able to stream that without some significant buffering but when it does start to play, it is gorgeous.

Although HD video is reserved for Pro customers, everyone enjoys a significant improvement to the video experience in this release.

• A new video player that looks good and hides its controls.
• New controls to switch between video quality and a larger sized player at all quality levels.
• A new embedded player for blogging of video. Caveat: you will need to put out new links to get the new player but old links continue to work.
• A better experience for videos transferred to facebook.
• AVCHD files are supported.
• Eye-Fi Video transfer are supported, including HD video if your camera shoots it.
• full screen video with hardware acceleration.

We are busy converting our entire library of videos for Pro customers from the archival versions that we keep. We keep those versions for Premium customers too, so if you upgrade to Pro, your video experience will improve as well. We estimate that it will take the better part of two weeks to convert all our videos to HD for current Pro customers. But any video you upload should get converted with higher priority.

We hope you enjoy these improvements to the video experience. Let us know in the comments how it is working for you.

There is a new version of Phanfare Photon for the iPhone available in the app store. This version fixes the nasty bug where you get knocked offline because you created an album when your default music pref was null.

However, this version also removes our super cool image import flow and replaces it with the default image import picker. That picker forces you to import one image at a time and is much slower. You also can’t choose what album the image goes into.

We removed our custom import flow and associated user interface screen at Apple’s request. Apparently, their developer agreement changed and they no longer permit modifying that flow or allowing us to access the camera roll except through their interfaces.

While we understand the need to enforce standards and keep the platform stable, there is no doubt that Apple has failed to provide alternative methods that work as well as the ones developed by third parties, like ourselves.

It is our hope that Apple will eventually modify the rules to allow extension and customization such as we provided, or improve the native interfaces to provide the same interface. Until such time, any third party camera application for the iPhone can’t provide an experience that matches what Apple provides in their built in app.

Phanfare Photon synchronizes your media wirelessly to your iPhone and provides a full set of management and editing tools. Hence, it provides features and functionality unmatched by Apple’s built in app or their MobileMe service. But prohibiting us from modifying the camera to take photos as quickly as the built in camera app or allow fast import from the camera roll means that Phanfare Photon’s utility for capturing photos from the iPhone is somewhat limited.

This turns out not to be a huge deal for Phanfare customers, most of whom own digital SLRs and find that the iPhone is much more interesting as a multimedia display and management device than as a capture device.

We can’t possibly divine Apple’s motives for creating the set of rules that they did. The iPhone ecosystem is enormous and successful. There are over 100,000 apps. They could be trying to impede competitors to the built in iPhone experience, or they could be trying to keep the platform stable and not care what the impact is on camera apps. Unlike many out there, I think it is their right to do whatever they want with their platform.

If you don’t like what they are doing, let them know, because we have little say here. We try to follow the rules, support the platform and Apple ultimately decides what gets accepted into the app store.

It’s kind of funny, because the iPhone was a huge step forward for developers in opening up a mobile handset to third party development. Compare how open the platform is to what it was like under the old regime convincing Verizon that you wanted to go ‘on deck’ in their terrible ‘get it now’ experience. Walt Mossberg used to refer to Verizon and the other service providers as “the Soviet Ministries.”

And yet, as much as Apple broke new ground in opening up a mobile platform to developers, there is much left to be desired. For that, we may need to look to Android. Android is not competitive with the iPhone today, in my opinion, but for an app developer the platform is more open and updates can go out with no review. That’s a double edged sword. It means that developers can respond more quickly but it also means that consumers need to be more wary about destabilizing their phone by downloading an app.

We will see how it all plays out. Right now, it seems that Android is providing the open, cross hardware platform that will take longer to mature but may in fact be much larger than the more controlled Apple experience. Apple is very good at providing a strong paternal hand in crafting experiences that are seamless from end to end. The iPod and iTunes is a great example. But control by its very nature stifles innovation and drives up costs. There is a good chance that it will be Android that powers the majority of the smart phones in 5 years. If so, it will be another example where Apple led and then left open the door for someone else to be the market share leader with a lower cost solution that is more open, has a bigger ecosystem and more rough edges.

I have been a subscriber to Zagat.com for about 10 years. It costs $24.95/year. They provide online access to the information that is in the books. As New Yorkers know, where the guide got its start, The Zagat survey was for a long time the goto book for figuring out where to eat in NYC.

They put the ratings together through an annual survey that diners completed.

They charged for the book and when they went online, they charged for online access to the same data. Why? Because they did not want to cannibalize the sales of the book.

Well, they don’t need to worry about that anymore because I am sure book sales are close to zero. And as for online, Yelp does a better job with their free ad-supported review site.

Online reviews is a natural online business. There are huge network effects. You want to review a restaurant where people are reading and you want to read reviews where there are lots of reviewers and reviews.

Yelp also has lower costs than Zagats. They don’t run a customer service team to take calls from people cancelling and they dont need to run the annual survey. The survey is ongoing and automated.

Yelp has more data too.

In just about every way, Yelp is better than Zagats now. And its free to use. So even though Zagat.com is cheap, even one penny is too much because the free product is actually better.

How did this happen to them? They were clearly the leader in 1998 when they started moving online. But their fatal mistake was an unwillingness to cannabalize the books sales when they went online. And by doing so, they left an opportunity for someone to do it to them.

I think a lot about not being Yelped. Phanfare has few network effects. It’s really high quality web hosting for your photos and videos. We are archival, holding the original bits, something I know is outside the cost model of facebook. And we are just about the photos and videos. Hence, I think a high end to our market will continue to exist: people willing to pay for a better product with better ingredients that is purpose built for the problem.

But at the same time, the mass market will go to the free ad-supported solution. For us, that is not a problem. But for Zagat it really is, because in restaurant reviews, its winner take all.

Only last year, all the H1B visa slots available to hire foreigners to work in the US were snapped up in a single day. We hired someone through the program a few years back when tech hiring was tight. It seemed ridiculous that more slots were not made available. The fear in Washington is that tech companies like us were hiring foreigners over US citizens. This could not be further from the truth.

We went looking for someone abroad because we could not find someone qualified here. We prefer to hire US citizens. There are no language or cultural barriers to overcome and it does not require an immigration lawyer.

Fast forward to today and we find out that the H1B program is now undersubscribed, according to the WSJ. Interesting, now that unemployment in the US is above 9% and there are good engineers looking for jobs, companies are once again hiring US citizens and passing over the non US citizens.

To me, this is just more evidence that there should be no limit on the number of H1B visas we allow. The cost to hire an H1B is lots of paperwork and at least $5000 in legal bills. That tax alone guarantees preference for US workers. Beyond that, limits only make US tech companies less competitive in boom times.

Truth be told, I am pretty pro free market. I think the market allocates resources somewhat efficiently and when we tinker, we always create some secondary effect that may or may not be desirable. Rather than prop up dying industries with stimulus money or try to pick winners in new industries, I would have sent the millions of unemployed workers back to school to retrain them in industries that are expanding. Ultimately, our prosperity will be related to our individual productivity multiplied by the number of people working.

Disclaimer: this is my blog and these are my opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the views of every Phanfare employee. I have been scolded by readers for talking politics on this blog before, but I have a right to my opinion just like everyone else. That is what makes this America.

Photography enthusiasts of a certain age remember that it was not long ago that the SLR camera was declared all but dead, a niche product for die hard tinkerers. The date was 1995. Film was the name of the game. Point and shoot cameras (P&S) were getting better and better. Enthusiasts were buying Yashica T4 cameras and leaving their heavy iron at home. I remember a series of articles by Philip Greenspun, founder of photo.net, talking about point and shoot cameras being more than adequate for most purposes (some of those pages have been updated).

The thinking went something like this: Most people buy P&S cameras and hence there are more R&D dollars to develop them. P&S cameras were improving at a faster rate than SLR cameras and you could see the day when the quality of the images and auto-focus systems would mostly equal that of the expensive cameras. Back in film days there was no difference between the light sensitivity of P&S cameras and SLR cameras since they both used the same film.

Cannibalization from the low-end is a common phenomenon in technology. As technology improves and prices come down, the low end, mass market product eventually satisfies the performance needs of most applications, marginalizing the high end product. I saw this painful effect first hand when I worked for Silicon Graphics. Every year the PC graphics boards satisfied the needs of more and more people and the market for graphics workstations shrunk.

Digital Photography reset the camera market. Camera prices more than doubled overnight. In 1999, entry level P&S cameras were $700. Digital SLRs that could rival film were $10,000. For all the enthusiasts moving over from digital, there were some painful choices to make. Digital had clear advantages in immediacy and the incremental cost of shooting, but most enthusiasts were priced out of the cameras that could deliver image quality equal to their $700 Canon A2E film camera.

As prices dropped and technology improved, Digital SLRs became the tool of choice for the enthusiast. Starting with the Canon D30 in May of 2000, which was priced at $2400, enthusiasts gradually started buying digital SLR cameras.

Digital SLR cameras came down in price over the years. Now once again, digital SLRs cost approximately what prosumer film SLRs cost in the 90s ($700-$900). In the last few years DSLRs were one of the fastest growing segments of the digital camera market. Only a digital SLR could offer the shot-to-shot time, auto-focus speed, and low light performance that enthusiasts demanded.

But there is no fundamental technological advantage to the SLR format where you look through the lens through a pentaprism equipped with a mirror. In fact, the whole concept of having a mechanical mirror that pops up to expose the sensor is a complicated mechanical contraption that seems almost odd in a modern digital camera. Furthermore, the SLR format has some disadvantages, including size, weight and frame rate (you have to move that mirror out of the way).

Why can’t point and shoot cameras produce images that are as good as an SLR in a smaller form factor? Well the answer is that they can. Panasonic and Olympus have led here with the introduction of the micro 4/3rd format, which is really nothing more than a line of point and shoot cameras with interchangeable lenses and big image sensors.

The Panasonic GF-1, which I own, is the first camera that makes me want to leave my 4.5 lb Canon 5D Mark II with 24-70 f/2.8L at home in some situations. Not all situations mind you. But some. the GF-1 is 1lb with its 20mm f/1.7 lens. It can take a photo in low light. It autofocuses well. Challenges remain. Auto-focus speed is not equivalent to what a DSLR can deliver. Low light performance is not equivalent to a Canon 5D Mark II. But you can see where this is going.

DSLRs are not getting better at any significant rate. They are already amazing. The gap between P&S camera performance and DSLR performance is closing. When P&S cameras deliver anything close to the performance (image quality, low light performance, auto-focus speed) of SLR cameras, the market will once again shift back to point and shoot cameras.

Why? Because consumers mostly don’t care about tinkering with settings (aperture, shutter speed). They care about image quality, auto-focus speed, and low light performance. Once point and shoot cameras close the gap, the market will shift away from the heavy, clumsy digital SLR cameras.

I believe that when we look back, Panasonic’s GF-1 will be seen in the industry as heralding the second rise of the point and shoot camera. In five years, I predict the DSLR market will actually have shrunk relative to the market for compact, 1 lb point and shoot cameras with digital viewfinders and amazing performance. These cameras will be under $400.

And after that? well, technology is merciless. Don’t count the smart phones out. It will just take a long time before they satisfy the performance needs of the mainstream.