Google appears to be getting a tad paranoid about its own privacy policies on the heels of the whole Google Buzz debacle. The company apparently sent out an e-mail to some Latitude users this morning, warning them that the service might be giving away their location – which is kind of the whole point of the app – and asking them to check their settings. Update: commenters tell us Google started sending out said e-mails a while ago, not today. As a reminder, Google Latitude is a location-aware application that was specifically designed to let mobile phone users broadcast their location to certain people. This is the e-mail, forwarded to us by Andrés Catalán: ———- Forwarded message ———- From: Date: Feb 18, 2010 3:22 AM Subject: You are using Google Latitude and reporting your location To: Hi, To protect your privacy we would like you to know that Google Latitude is running on your Android-powered device and reporting your location. If you didn’t enable this or want to stop reporting your location please open the Maps app on your device. Go to ‘Menu’ > ‘Latitude’ > ‘Privacy’ and change your privacy settings. Thanks, Google Latitude Team (c) 2009 Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. Terms of Service | Privacy Policy CrunchBase InformationGoogle LatitudeInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week. What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends. To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) : Distribution of shared items Facebook: 44% Twitter: 29% Yahoo:18% MySpace:9% It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins. Here are the stats: Share of Authentication By Platform: News sites: Facebook: 31% Google: 30% Yahoo: 25% Twitter: 11% AOL: 3% Entertainment sites: Facebook: 52% Google: 17% Yahoo: 12% Twitter: 11% MySpace: 7% AOL: 1% Facebook Chat is also a strong option, making up more than half of all live event chats measured by Gigya. Live Event Chat: Facebook: 56% Twitter: 28% Yahoo: 9% MySpace: 7% Update: A broader view of sharing on the Web comes from Gigya competitor AddThis, which has its sharing buttons on more than 600,000 Websites. (Gigya tends to be on larger content sites). AddThis also shows Facebook on top when it comes to sharing on the Web, but with a smaller 33 percent share. Twitter is at 9 percent, but it gets beat by email and printing out content as options provided by AddThis. Even with these broader numbers, more than 40 percent of sharing is through Facebook and Twitter. Top 10 Services, Overall Facebook: 33% Email: 13% Print:9% Twitter: 9% Favorites: 8% Google: 6% MySpace: 6% Digg: 3% Live: 3% Delicious: 3% CrunchBase InformationFacebookTwitterGigyaInformation provided by CrunchBase

The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear. One issue raised earlier today is that the people you follow and who follow you are made public by default on your profile page, but are based on people who you email the most in private. You can make these lists invisible, but it remains an opt-out process instead of an opt-in one. It turns out there is another privacy flaw in Google Buzz that can expose private email addresses to everyone who follows you. Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address. But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email. For example, I wanted to direct a comment at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, so I typed in “@mg” and up came three of his different emails. I picked his TechCrunch email, not realizing that his public profile is linked to a different Gmail account. What this means is that the 231 people following me on Buzz can all see MG’s private email address in my comment even if they had no direct connection to him before.  They can now send him unsolicited emails and spam galore.  Now multiply that type of potential exposure by the millions of people already using Buzz, and you can see why it is a hole that should be patched up quickly. I asked Google to explain how all of this works, and here is their response: Generally typing someone’s email address autocompletes with that person’s name and therefore their address is not visible to anyone. Only in cases when you don’t have access to a person’s name and there is no name to connect to that email address, the system will show that person’s address instead of their name. This is very rare, and only happens when:

the person who’s address you’re typing doesn’t have a public profile OR they are not Following you and you are not connected via Chat.

The moment you post, it will be very obvious that the email address is publicly visible, and you can always edit and/ or delete that post. Except that it is not rare.  Many of my contacts, including the ones using Buzz, have multiple email addresses.  When I type their name in Buzz to reply to them, the autosuggest box shows me all the different email addresses I have for them in Gmail, and doesn’t specify which of those are public or private.   When I typed in MG’s name, for instance, I chose the TechCrunch email because that is the one I use the most.  I had no idea that his Gmail address is the one linked to his public profile, and thus the one I should have used to protect his privacy. In my eyes that is a design flaw.  Google actually expects us to pick up on these things and protect each other’s privacy, rather than the other way around.  What happens when you inadvertently type in someone’s email address?  According to Google: In this case, a person attempts to type an @reply using a contact’s email address, types out the email address, and then after posting sees the email address plainly displayed in the post. It is expected that after this, most people would understand that the email address will be visible to the viewers of the post. The user can edit or delete the post. Sorry, but that is expecting too much from the average user, who probably wouldn’t even notice such a tiny detail.  It’s really up to Google to warn users or to make sure that only public names come up in the autocomplete.  How hard can that be? Instead, Google is telling us that it is our problem and we should be more vigilant using their product. In the overall scheme of things, this is a small and fixable flaw for a feature that 80 percent of people may never even use.  But it is an example of what can go wrong when you inject private contacts into a public stream.  Google needs to be extra careful with details like this one. CrunchBase InformationGoogle BuzzInformation provided by CrunchBase

Google’s Street View has gone to many strange places, even off-road. But in preparation for the Winter Olympics it equipped a snowmobile with 360-degree cameras and took it to the top of Whistler, the Canadian ski resort where the Games will take place. There are also views from chair lifts, the village, and other places around the mountain. The slope-side views can be seen in the map on Google’s new Winter Olympics information page. Google should do this for all major ski mountains. It’s a great way to see if you really want to go up to the top of that double black diamond chair lift.
Here is a video showing how they got the images:

As predicted, Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it’s famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love. We’ve embedded the ad below. Yesterday, John Battelle correctly predicted that the ad would be running during the Super Bowl.
Amid dozens of ads focused on cars, beer, and busty women, the Google spot definitely took a different approach: it tells a love story through a series of search queries. The tale begins with a query for “study abroad paris france”, moves on to “impress a french girl” and eventually makes it all the way to “how to assemble a crib”, showcasing Google’s technology in a way that pretty much everyone can relate to.

While Google is a company built on advertising, for the most part it has stayed out of advertising itself on the dominant medium: television. Yes, there have been those short ads for Chrome and a few for Android that it has been involved with. And Google is even said to have considered an ad during the Olympics, but that was killed at the last second, apparently. But now, it looks like Google may be ready to advertise itself on the biggest stage possible: the Super Bowl. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just posted this very intriguing tweet: Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”) It’s hard to know exactly what he’s saying there, but it would seem to suggest that Google will have an ad that will run during the third quarter of tomorrow’s game. If that is indeed the case, who knows what product it will be for — but the “hell has frozen over” comment is interesting. Could Google be running an ad to promote Google.com itself to counter Microsoft’s Bing ads? We’ll all be watching. Below watch one of Google’s Chrome television ads.

Update: After some internal discussion, we think it could be a Nexus One ad (which Google said during its launch event that it wasn’t likely to do outside of the web). Some commenters seem to be agreeing as well. Update 2: John Battelle believes the ad will be about Google “search stories” and singles out this “Parisian Love” ad below.

CrunchBase Information

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

Following its unveiling last week, everyone continues to debate Apple’s iPad. Some are certain that it’s doomed to fail, while others are sure it’s the future of computing. The truth is that, like the iPhone, it’s hard to make any kind of accurate judgement about it until you’ve actually used it. Unfortunately, that’s not yet possible since the earliest models are still about 60 days away from shipping. But until then, developer Frasier Speirs can give you the next best thing. Speirs has made a Flickr set in which he dissects screenshots of the iPad from the promotional shots and videos Apple has released. On each photo he adds his own notes of things to take notice of. But rather than go for most of the obvious elements, Speirs focuses on a lot of UI elements that the majority of people will overlook while watching the videos. This is important because as any good fanboy will tell you, it’s often the subtle things Apple does in its UI work that make its devices stand apart. And with the iPad, Apple has a number of new UI ideas it’s putting out there. As Steve Jobs made clear during his keynote, the iPad was built to be equally as good in either portrait or landscape mode. This is already different from the iPhone which, while full of plenty of nice landscape UI elements, is still going to be used in portrait mode most of the time. But on the iPad, there are elements such as a left hand pane that is visibile in the Mail app only when the device is horizontal. Turn it vertical, and it only shows the message area, and there are new overlays that you activate to navigate in this view. And that’s probably the most obvious example of elements Speirs points out. If you’re really chomping at the bit to get your hands on an iPad, Speirs’ 53 photos should be right up your alley.

[via Finer Things In Mac]

  CrunchBase Information

iPad

Information provided by CrunchBase

“One defends when his strength is inadequate, he attacks when it is abundant.”—Sun Tzu, The Art of War The Apple iPad isn’t even available yet, but already it is forcing Amazon to respond in a variety of ways to protect its competing Kindle eBook business. Amazon just snapped up a touchscreen technology startup, presumably to update the already ancient-looking Kindle. Emboldened book publishers are pushing back on Amazon’s $9.99 pricing now that they can sell the same eBooks on the iPad for $14.99, and Amazon is capitulating. And the Kindle team at Amazon, which once had an arrogant approach towards publishers when it was the only game in town, is now bending over backwards to solicit their loyalty, says one editor at a publishing company who has noticed the change in tone. The coming battle between Apple and Amazon will occur on many fronts, but place where Apple can really hurt Amazon is on pricing. Just as Apple initially did with 99-cent songs on iTunes, Amazon imposed a uniform $9.99 price on bestsellers in the Kindle Store.  A single price helps to establish markets for new product categories, especially when that price is at a discount to the physical alternative.  While the 99-cent strategy worked well for Apple in digital music, in books Apple doing a jujitsu move on Amazon by allowing publishers to have more control over the pricing. Now Macmillan is demanding that Amazon sell its eBooks for $14.99, and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is making similar grumblings about  HarperCollins. Even before the Macmillan dustup, on the day of the iPad launch Steve Jobs predicted (in this video with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg that Kindle and iPad “prices will be the same. . . . The publishers are actually withholding books from Amazon because they are not happy with it.”  And voilà!  All of Macmillan’s books disappeared from Amazon, to the great joy of Barnes & Noble. The books will be back soon at the higher price, but the pressure from other publishers to follow suit is already growing. Simply by allowing a $14.99 price on the iPad, Steve Jobs destroyed Amazon’s $9.99 price advantage.  At first glance, it might seem that Amazon will actually come out the winner here, since it was losing money on each $9.99 bestseller and now will be making money on those.  For instance, it currently pays publishers 50 percent of the list price for bestsellers, which is typically $28.  Thus it loses about $4 on each Kindle bestseller. Under the new agreement with Macmillan, it will pay 70 percent of the new list price of $13 to $15 and pocket about $4 on each sale. Forced to make a trade-off, book publishers prefer to make less on each digital book under the new iTunes economics and keep the list price higher in order to protect sales of physical books. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Amazon is actually not the winner because it just lost pricing power to the book publishers. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney explained why in a note earlier this week: This one is counter-intuitive. Typically, people think of pricing power as the ability to raise prices. With AMZN, it’s the ability to lower prices and to compete on Price, Selection & Convenience. If Amazon is forced to do away with $9.99 pricing on all best-sellers (which typically account for 5% of book retailers’ sales), it will be less able to compete effectively with other eBook retailers. The economics of eBooks for Amazon just changed.  It was willing to take the loss on that 5 percent of sales to win customer loyalty, bring them into the Kindle Store, and buy other titles at a profit.  It was a loss leader.  Just like Amazon loses money on free shipping or Amazon Prime, it chose to lose money on bestsellers to gains loyalty and market share. Mahaney estimates that Amazon will sell 3.5 million Kindles this year and 100 million eBooks.  He estimates total Kindle hardware and eBook sales (assuming the $9,99 price) to come to $1.9 billion, or 5 percent of Amazon’s estimated total revenue for 2010.  If Amazon can’t hold the line on the $9.99 price, it will be harder to sell 100 million eBooks and there might also be less demand for Kindles. (The ability to buy new books at a steep discount is one of the Kindle’s main appeals). Every million Kindles Amazon doesn’t sell will result in a 1 percent reduction in Amazon’s total estimated revenue for 2010.  (Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth estimates only 3 million Kindle sales this year). Will the iPad dampen sales of the Kindle and its eBooks, and by how much? Amazon cannot afford to lose this war.  Not so much because of the potential revenue impact this year, but because as digital books become more popular they will become a bigger part of Amazon’s business than of Apple’s.  What we are seeing is a fight over who, if anyone, will get to be the iTunes of eBooks. Amazon holds that position today, but book publishers saw how iTunes emasculated the music industry and don’t want to repeat that experience.  Perhaps nobody understands that better than Steve Jobs, which is why he is now playing a different game.

CrunchBase Information

Amazon Kindle 2

iPad

Information provided by CrunchBase

Evernote, the popular site, iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them, is gaining serious traction on the web. In December, Evernote just reached 2 million unique users, only 7 months after reaching its first million. Of course, it makes sense that users would want to use Evernote to record social interactions. Today, Cliqset, a FriendFeed-like realtime online identity platform that lets users merge and share a vast variety of social information, is integrating with Evernote to allows users to archive social content. With this integration, users of both Cliqset and Evernote can store photos, status updates, reviews, blog posts, videos, music, documents and anything they want to remember or save, to their Evernote account. Cliqset, which offers both a web-based and desktop app, aims to be a one-stop-shop for social communications, pulling in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Users can also update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Once you activate the Evernote integration and account information, you can share any content on Cliqset via the click of the Evernote icon on the app. You can create folders for Evernote content, and then search for the content within Evernote. The integration has been synced across web-based app, Cliqset’s desktop app, Firefox extension and bookmarklet. While the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others offering compelling platforms, Cliqset is continuing to innovate its platform to allow for ultimate syndication. Of course, Seesmic is entering the fray with the acquisition of Ping.fm. Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, has told us that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren’t as technologically savvy. Cliqset will be launching an iPhone app in the near future and is currently developing a browser extension for Chrome.

Cliqset + Evernote from cliqset on Vimeo.

File sharing and syncing service Dropbox is close to expanding its line of mobile products, which includes a mobile phone friendly website and an iPhone app, with custom apps for Android and Blackberry devices. In an e-mail update sent out to its user base – over four million strong these days – the startup reminds people about the existence of its mobile website but ends the message with a couple of sentences that leave little to one’s imagination: “Do you own a Blackberry or Android phone? Don’t worry! We’ve got plenty more mobile magic coming soon!” Furthermore, in the latest post published on Dropbox’ company blog, engineer Will Stockwell notes his resolution for 2010 is “to release some crazy new features for the iPhone app” and to begin poking his head around “some other undisclosed projects.. coughANDROIDAPPcough”. The company seems pretty serious about its plans for servicing Google’s open mobile OS platform, as it’s also looking for an extra Android Developer according to its jobs page. In case you’re not familiar with the service – unlikely given the fact that the startup has won a Crunchie for Best Internet Application at the most recent awards ceremony – Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free (twice the storage Google offers), with add-on plans offering more storage and functionality for a fee. Dropbox was founded by CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator soon after. The company went on to raise $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Amidzad Partners. (Thanks to Erin Blaskie for the tip and the TwitPic image)

CrunchBase Information

Dropbox

Android

Research In Motion

Information provided by CrunchBase

When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku. That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet: Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more Really, what more needs to be said? Schwartz had been serving as Sun’s CEO since 2006; prior to that he was the company’s COO. It has been known that he would resign for several days now following Sun’s sale to Oracle, which the EU just approved. Schwartz has always enjoyed this type of public discourse, as he continued to blog in a time when very few CEOs would dare do such a thing. His latest post was on January 27, describing what he’d be doing next. As for where life takes me next, you should follow me via Twitter at openjonathan to find out. I’ll also be rehosting this blog (and again, stay tuned to Twitter by following me here). I expect to do my part to keep things interesting. Indeed. Tonight he started that off with a bang (and we love the two self-promotion links).

Twitter is locking many users out of the system this morning, and sending them notices that they need to change their passwords in order to regain access to the service, due to concerns over a possible phishing attack. While some people are worried that the e-mails might have actually been a phishing attack, there’s a flood of tweets from users having received the same message after effectively getting denied access to their accounts, so this seems 100% legit. The message, copied here by a blogger, reads: Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser: [PASSWORD RESET LINK]. The message adds: As a reminder, you should be extraordinarily suspicious of any third party that offers to artificially inflate your follower count. We do not endorse any of these sites. We’ve contacted Twitter for more information, but for now it may be wise to change your password regardless of whether you’ve received this e-mail or not. Just yesterday, Sophos published a report that showed social networking services like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being targeted in cybercrime attacks. (Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra)

Last week, the world saw Apple’s long anticipated tablet device, the iPad, for the first time. In the aftermath since that announcement, a few things have become clear: it will be great for some people, but its apparent lack of flexibility (at least in its first iteration) may leave something to be desired. It’s increasingly looking like the best alternative will be Google’s Chrome OS, which is clearly on a collision course with the iPad. And tonight, we’ve come across some very impressive mockups of what Chrome OS may look like on a tablet form factor. The photos have been posted to the official Chromium site (Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS). And while Chromium is not actually part of Google, it appears that these mockups were put together by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer. In other words, there’s a good chance that the final version of Chrome OS will resemble this. Update: Be sure to watch this video to see a mockup of the tablet in action. It’s worth pointing out that there almost certainly will be multiple “Google Tablets”, given that Chrome OS won’t be tied to a single device. That said, Google is working with select hardware partners to ensure that it runs on devices that are up to its specifications, and there may be one tablet device that is designated as the “Google Tablet”, much like the Nexus One is the “Google Phone”. Via TheChromeSource.

In the movie Contact, when revealing to main character Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) that there is actually a second space travel machine that was being built at the same time as the first one, but in secret, S.R. Hadden (John Hurt) says, “why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” Apple, it seems, may have the same line of thinking. By now, we’ve all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? Now, before I say anything else, take this information with a grain of salt. While it originated from a good source, it was a second-hand source. Meanwhile, I’ve corroborated some the main details with another source, but not some of the smaller ones. That said, from what I’m hearing, Apple is pretty far along on work on second tablet device. A bigger one. And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone. Before the iPad was revealed last week, rumors circulated for a long time that Apple might be working on two different sizes for the screen of the device. Some had the device as small as 7″, others were saying it would go up to 10.6″. (The actual size of the iPad is 9.7″.) But the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs. If there is any truth to that, we could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year, which will likely take place in June (just as it does every year). Apple typically uses the event to show off its new iPhone hardware, but it is first and foremost an event for Mac platform developers, and the past two years have seen OS X as a major component. This included two years ago when Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) made a surprise appearance and developers got a very early peek. There is already talk that WWDC 2010 could bring a similar peek at OS X 10.7. If there are some significant multi-touch components to OS X 10.7, you can expect the rumors to start flying about this new device that I’m talking about (or possibly touchscreen iMacs). As usual, you should also note that Apple likely has a ton of projects in various stages that never see the light of day. It seems certain that at points they were playing with different sized screens for what became the iPad. But one of our sources here puts this new tablet as being released within the next year. While everyone is still debating the uses of the iPad, a larger tablet would probably have a completely different set of uses. For example, it would likely be meant to be more of a straightforward laptop (or desktop) replacement. As such, it would almost undoubtedly come with some sort of external keyboard/stand just as the iPad offers as an accessory, but it would probably be a more integral part of using the device. When undocked, maybe you could use the thing just as you would an iPad (which is to say, holding it or placing it in your lap and using your fingers to manipulate its screen). And maybe while docked, you would even use a bluetooth mouse or touchpad device attached to the keyboard to interact with it.

Based on various patent filing and the general trend of multi-touch enabled devices (Magic Mouse, MacBook trackpads, etc) that Apple has been releasing, it seems that Apple is definitely trending in the direction of touch computing as the future of computing. A larger tablet device could serve as a nice transition device between the traditional laptop and this new type of computing. And just as the iPhone has prepared many of us to naturally use the iPad, the iPad may do the same for this new tablet. And while a larger screen tablet would undoubtedly cost more than the iPad, Apple would have a lot of room to price it if it really was meant to be a laptop-replacement. If that’s the case, anything north of $1,000 wouldn’t seem unreasonable, unlike it would have for the iPad. That said, for that type of price, people are going to expect a machine that is as powerful as a laptop. We’re also hearing that Apple would likely use an Intel chip (just as it uses in traditional Macs) in such a device rather than its new custom-made A4 chip. The problem with that would be power consumption. A larger screen plus a power-hungry chip would likely lead to a battery life well below the stated 10-hour limit for the iPad. Still, if they could bring something like that in with around around 5+ hours of battery, plenty of people would be happy. And Apple has made a lot of advancements in the past couple of years with getting battery life on its laptops well above industry averages. In terms of weight, the iPad is 1.5 pounds, while the MacBook Air is 3 pounds (with a 13.3″ screen). If Apple could remove all the unnecessary parts of the MacBook Air (like the keyboard and trackpad), it could probably keep a device pretty close to the 2-3 pound weight even with a larger screen. But given such a large screen, it would almost undoubtedly have to come with some kind of case to put it in so as not to damage the screen when in transit. In terms of what OS X applications could or would support multi-touch integration, that’s hard to say. Safari is an easy and obvious one, but others would have to be completely reworked for this. But as we saw during the iPad keynote, Apple didn’t need too long to do that with its iWork suite of apps. Third-party developers would likely get a good set of tools from Apple to update their apps as well. Again, take this all with a grain of sale, but look for clues in OS X 10.7. [image: Steve Burg]

CrunchBase Information

iPad

Apple

Information provided by CrunchBase

Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations. This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail. The first iteration of the labs feature added a ‘Web Search’ box next to the main column (left side on the screenshot) that provides much of the same functionality, only you needed to remember to go to the side column to run a search. Now, enabling the feature also adds an icon to the top toolbar in the ‘Compose Mail’ window, where you can also customize colors and fonts for your message, add links and emoticons and more. It’s unclear when the icon was added, but we can’t retrieve any mention about this on the Gmail blog and today marks the first time we’ve seen it. The icon opens up a search box at the bottom of your screen and lets you run a search like you would using the regular Google search interface. A small arrow opens up a limited menu where you can paste results, paste URL and send by e-mail (which is kind of redundant in this case, since you’re already in a new e-mail). If you have a chat conversation open in Gmail, you’ll also get an extra option to send search results to your contact. Obviously, this isn’t a ground-breaking feature, but if you’re a Gmail user you might want to (re-)enable the Labs feature in Settings. Guaranteed to save you quite some time.

Editor’s note: Ever since yesterday’s debut of Apple’s iPad, the debate has been raging about what it means for Amazon’s Kindle. Will it kill it? Will it not? Is comparing the two like comparing a computer to a typewriter? To add fuel to the fire and, well, because we love top 10 lists, we present this guest post from Ben Elowitz, who comes down very firmly on the Kindle-is-kaput side of the debate. Ben is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a media company with an audience of 10 million monthly unique users; and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, he co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of fine jewelry. 1) The multi-functional capability. Buy a Kindle and you get… a reader. Another dedicated device to carry. Buy an iPad, and you get a whole new companion that can do pretty much anything. Games, movies, browsing, documents, and more—all in one. And zillions of iPhone apps. It’s sooooo much more than a reader, it’s a whole-life device. 2) The screen. Full color, multi-touch screen, gestures, and more. It’s a pleasure to look at it – and we all can rely on Steve Jobs’ aesthetics to know that it’s a pleasure to hold as well. 3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub out of the box, overcoming publishers’ resistance to having to support a proprietary format such as Kindle’s; and creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. (Something tells me Amazon will be making an announcement about ePub support real soon…)

4) The iBooks store. Apple has captured the magic of shopping. Once again, whereas Amazon does great with the functional needs of buying a book, Apple goes beyond to create an experience. 5) The experience. The Kindle provides a good functional experience for readers—in a very Bezosian way, it meets all our needs. But Apple’s creation goes beyond, to make the experience fun and cool.  You can swipe through pages on an iPad.  On the Kindle, you have to dutifully click a button. 6) The economics. Publishers have been deeply concerned about price erosion with Amazon’s $9.99 pricing—and have been up in arms over Amazon’s 70% revenue share take. Though Amazon has reversed the revenue share (to match Apple’s reported offer at 30%), it would require publishers to cut prices and offer deep discounts. Considering the threat the publishing industry is under, the last thing that publishers want in a time of transition is to have their revenues crammed down further by Jeff Bezos. 7) The apps. In a digital age, a book is (finally!) becoming more than just words on a page. But the Kindle has been slow to recognize this. With the iPad, out of the gate publishers can create whole experiences. Want to create something unique in the market to draw consumers? Publishers can go beyond e-books, and create an app using one of the world’s most popular SDK platforms. 8) The marketplace. Apple’s iBook and App Store marketplaces will instantly be a must-attend venue for publishers. The anticipated sales of the iPad will mean exposure to so many more consumers than Kindle; and Apple already has 125 million consumer store accounts with 12 billion products already downloaded. Amazon won’t even release the number of Kindles sold, because the number of consumers buying its device pales next to Apple’s reach. 9) The price. For $10 more than a Kindle DX, consumers get an incredible ebook reader, and so much more: a device that they can use for, well, pretty much anything. The options, consumer experience, and flexibility for that $10 are a no-brainer. 10) The Apple factor (a.k.a. “sexy”). Let’s face it, Apple is a brand people want to be affiliated with. It has a cool factor. Even those of us who are smart enough to know better still fall in love with Apple products, and carry them with pride. Amazon just doesn’t have that. As Jason Kottke says, “the iPad makes the Kindle look like it’s from the 1980’s”. Apple has upped the game for Amazon.  Jeff Bezos and his team better start a clean sheet of design if they want Kindle to catch up again and play as a leader with consumers. It’s clear that Amazon is already scared: witness their recent moves in the last few days running up to Apple’s announcement. Just this month, they’ve announced an app framework and a new royalty structure to be more attractive to publishers – and both moves are clearly defensive catch-up plays to respond to the threat of the iPad. Amazon is even trying to win love by giving away free Kindles to their best customers. But the best plan for Amazon isn’t to try to buy customers or try to match Apple’s approach. Rather, they’ll need to re-think their consumer experience from  start to finish. They’ve done a great job so far of digitizing books, but now if they want to compete with Steve Jobs’ inventiveness, they’ll have to step up to be a must-have device in consumers’ digital lives.  Of course, they can also just surrender and continue to sell books through their existing iPhone app, which should be compatible with the iPad like all the other apps in the App Store.

CrunchBase Information

iPad

Amazon Kindle 2

Information provided by CrunchBase

When Apple was demoing its new iBooks application for the iPad today during their keynote address, I just kept thinking to myself: this simply must have been designed by Delicious Monster, the shop behind the brilliant Mac app Delicious Library. I’m not the only one who thought that either. Delicious Monster founder Wil Shipley thought the same thing. The only problem? His shop didn’t make it. In fact, Shipley was quite vocal on Twitter during the keynote today about the situation. “No, Apple didn’t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,” he wrote. Later, he added, “I guess it’s not enough Apple has hired every employee who worked on Delicious Library, they also had to copy my product’s look. Flattery?” While Shipley tries to play it off as not that big of a deal, clearly he’s pretty upset about it. And he should be. I mean, the bookshelf view in iBooks is nearly identical to the main bookshelf view used in Delicious Library. Not only that, but it’s not like this is a little-known app that Apple may have missed: it has won the Apple Design Award twice, and been a runner-up one other time. Apple gives out those awards. Still, as Shipley notes, iBooks is only for eBooks while Delicious Monster is for all types of media, and has much more functionality. But if Apple really did hire much of Shipley’s team then just re-create the look, that’s a little shady. We’ve reached out to Shipley to confirm those hires and will update if we hear back. Back in July, you may recall that Shipley had to kill the Delicious Library iPhone app because of a change to Amazon’s APIs for pulling product data. You may wonder why Apple didn’t just hire Shipley if they poached his whole team? “They couldn’t afford to hire me,” he writes. Update: Shipley has responded with some lengthy comments. Notably, he says, “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.” “But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing,” he went on to say. “Although Delicious Library was the first to do it, we didn’t try to copyright the idea of wooden shelves, or of showing books photo-realistically. ‘Look and feel’ is kind of an outmoded concept, I think.” “Now, of course Apple couldn’t contact me ahead of time and say, ‘Hey, we’re taking your idea, thanks.’ Their lawyers would worry they’d open themselves to a huge lawsuit, for one, and they’d also be leaking a secret. Nor could they write me a check. Even a token one would be an admission (in their lawyers’ eyes) that they were copying something. They are a public company — they can’t write someone a check unless they got some value in return. And if they got value, the lawyers would ask, how much was it? How was it determined?,” he continues “So their official policy has to be, ‘No, of course it’s a crazy coincidence that these shelves look almost entirely like Delicious Library’s shelves.‘,” he concludes But this goes even deeper for Shipley: “As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.” “But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’”

CrunchBase Information

iPad

Information provided by CrunchBase

By now you’ve probably seen the videos on Apple’s site showing the iPad. But those aren’t always indicative of the way it actually works in real life. Luckily, Apple had plenty of iPads in a demo pit area after the event today and we captured some footage of a few applications actually being used. In the video below see Apple’s new Keynote app (built specifically for the iPad), as well as the new iBooks app, in action. As you can see, the device is very fast. Also note the Apple employee talking about using the iPad to make calls.

The suspense is over! Today, Apple unveiled its new tablet computer, aptly called the iPad, here in San Francisco. Steve Jobs positions the tablet as a third computing device between a laptop and a smartphone geared towards the “key tasks” of Web browsing, email, sharing photos, watching videos, playing games, and reading digital books. All current iPhone apps will run on the device, as well as new games and digital books designed specifically for it. Here’s a list of all our recent coverage from before, during and after the event.

Video: The iPad In Action (link) The iPad: our take (link) Apple has a solution for the iPad’s missing SD card slot and USB port: adapters(link) Investors Didn’t Like The iPad Until They Heard Its $499 Price (link) Apple Teams With AT&T For The iPad’s 3G Connection. Ugh. (link) The iPad Comes With iBooks And Will Cost $500 To $830 (link) New iPhone SDK with iPad support coming today, 100% compatibility with iPhone apps (link) Looks Like The Apple iPad Doesn’t Have Flash, After All (link) Apple unveils the iPad – at last – and it’s $499 (link) Our Live Notes Of The Event (link) The Tablet Could Spur A Media Revolution, But It Will Be Out Of Apple’s Hands (link) Who Gets The First Hands On With The Apple Tablet? Maybe Jack Bauer. (link) McGraw-Hill CEO Confirms Apple Tablet Is Coming Tomorrow (link) The First Apple Tablet Commercial? No Way (link) Apple Execs Downright Giddy About The Tablet (For Them Anyway) (link) The Apple Tablet May Come With A Barnes & Noble Bookstore (link) Breaking: Flurry Notices Cupertino-based Users Testing Apps on Apple Tablet (link) Overheard: Steve Jobs Says Apple Tablet “Will Be The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done.” (link)

CrunchBase Information

iPad

Information provided by CrunchBase

Don't you worry about the iPad lacking an SD card slot and USB port. Apple has you covered with adapters! How nice of Lord Jobs. Instead of building in two industry standards, users are forced to buy extra items with their new iPad. It's not like the these standards are large and would take away from the oh-so-important design.

But it really is ridiculous that the iPad doesn't have an SD card slot built-in. USB port, fine. Apple is sticking with its massive dock connector, but an SD card slot -- or microSD card slot -- would actually open the iPad to some niche markets.