“We like what China is doing in terms of growth … we just don’t like censorship,” Schmidt said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We hope that will change and we can apply some pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.”

What would it take for Google to stay, a woman from China asked: “We would very much like to stay in China. We would very much like the censorship we oppose to improve in China.”

So far nothing has seemed to change from when Google drew a line in the sand on Jan. 12. Google is still in China, and hasn’t said when or to what extent it would stop censoring content on Google.cn. China and the United States are in a mild war or words, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chastising “countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks” and China firing back to mind your own business, not make this into a big deal and accusing the United States of hypocrisy and initiating cyberwarfare against Iran.

Illustration: Felipe Siem

Source: John C Abell

The specs on the iPad page mention the lack of FCC approval in tiny print that is easy to miss. And nobody seriously expects the iPad won’t be approved — Apple’s been through this before, with the launch of the first iPhone announced six months before it was available. And the “why?” is almost certainly to have kept as few people in the loop, and only those you could in some way control.

But in an e-mail sent to customers, Apple made the situation a bit more clear. “Some features and applications are not available in all areas,” reads the note. “Application availability and pricing are subject to change. This device has not yet been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.”

Apple has good reason to keep a government agency out of the advance loop, since somehow anything juicy is likely to see the light of day. Still, the FCC likes Apple right now, recently commending the company for reversing its policy against VOIP calling over AT&T’s 3G network, which allows the iPhone and iPad to be used as web phones.

However, the new reference in Apple’s e-mail about certain features and applications not being available or being priced differently depending on a customer’s location raises unanswered questions. It could refer to content-oriented applications (movies, books, magazines, etc.), which in their physical forms, vary in price based on location — we already know that this is true of books. But all we really know about that at this point is that the iPads sold in one area will differ in features and app prices from iPads sold in another area.

The FCC’s approval process is standard for electronic devices. The agency ensures that they don’t interfere with other wireless equipment, operate in an area of the spectrum that’s allocated for something else, or emit too much radiation into the people using them.

The agency approved the iPhone about a month after Apple announced it. Unless there’s an unexpected hiccup, it will most likely do the same for the iPad. A conspiracy theorist might say that Apple secretly hopes the FCC will step in and “force” it to sell the iPad to all of its potential customers, regardless of which wireless carrier or plan they want to use, but that seems like wishful thinking.

See Also:

• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• Bob Lefsetz Isn’t Sold on the iPad
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle’s Space, And Other First Impressions
• No Verizon on the iPad. Is There a Map For That?
• Why You Can’t Use Your Phone’s SIM in the iPad

Source: Eliot Van Buskirk

The specs on the iPad page mentioned the lack of FCC approval in tiny print that is easy to miss. And nobody seriously expects the iPad won’t be approved — Apple’s been through this before, with the launch of the first iPhone announced six months before it was available. And the “why?” is almost certainly to have kept as few people in the loop, and only those you could in some way control.

But in an e-mail sent to customers Apple made the situation a bit more clear. “Some features and applications are not available in all areas,” reads the note. “Application availability and pricing are subject to change. This device has not yet been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.”

Apple has good reason to keep a government agency out of the advance loop since somehow anything juicy is likely to see the light of day. Still, the FCC likes Apple right now, recently commending the company for reversing its policy against VoIP calling over AT&T’s 3G network, which allows the iPhone and iPad to be used as web phones.

However, the new reference in Apple’s e-mail about certain features and applications not being available or being priced differently depending on a customer’s location raises unanswered questions. It could refer to content-oriented applications (movies, books, magazines, etc.), which in their physical forms, vary in price based on location — we already know that this is true of books. But all we really know about that at this point is that the iPads sold in one area will differ in features and app prices from iPads sold in another area.

The FCC’s approval process is standard for electronic devices, to ensure that they don’t interfere with other wireless equipment, operate in an area of the spectrum that’s allocated for something else, or emit too much radiation into the people using them.

The agency approved the iPhone about a month after Apple announced it. Unless there’s an unexpected hiccup, it will most likely do the same for the iPad. A conspiracy theorist might say that Apple secretly hopes the FCC will step in and “force” it to sell the iPad to all of its potential customers, regardless of which wireless carrier or plan they want to use, but that seems like wishful thinking.

See Also:

• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• Bob Lefsetz Isn’t Sold on the iPad
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle’s Space, And Other First …
• No Verizon on the iPad. Is There a Map For That?
• Why You Can’t Use Your Phone’s SIM in the iPad

Source: Eliot Van Buskirk

The price of music has everything to do with supply — in that the major labels and music stores set the price of music — and little to do with how much the consumer is willing to pay — in that they either buy at those set prices, get their music for free, or throw up their hands and buy an iPhone app or Blu-Ray disc instead.

During the dawn of digital music distribution, some experts thought that free alternatives, fierce competition for entertainment dollars, and the declining cost of distribution would drive music prices down, but online stores like iTunes have never offered much of a discount compared to the CD, which must be manufactured and delivered in trucks rather than zinged (nearly) weightlessly around the internet.

The optimal price for a song download if record labels want to maximize their profits, found Wharton business school marketing professor Raghuram Iyengar, is between 60 and 70 cents per song — significantly lower than the 69 cents to $1.29 that iTunes and the rest currently charge, with strong emphasis on the high end of that range. (Unfortunately, book publishers are taking the wrong lessons from the digital migration of music and continue to charge more than the costs of e-book production justify.)

If music pricing were driven by both supply and demand, the professor found, record labels would collect 30 to 40 cents from each 60- to 70-cent song sale.

Professor Iyengar, a specialist in pricing and consumer behavior, surveyed only 600 digital music consumers as part of the study, and no study can reveal precisely what would happen if the price of music were reduced by 50 percent or more.

But it stands to reason that the price of music should be lower, considering the factors mentioned above: increased competition, free alternatives, and declining distribution costs.

In addition to finding that music is priced too high, Iyengar’s study indicates that people prefer to pay higher prices per song for single-song downloads to having access to cheaper music through a monthly subscription.

“Iyengar was surprised to learn that not only was the pay-per-song model more popular with the digital consumers,” reads Wharton’s article, “but that their music purchases would increase sharply at a lower price — so much so that the record labels would actually raise their overall profits by dropping the cost per song.”

Unfortunately, the recorded music industry continues to labor under the assumption that people associate higher prices with increased value, rather than embracing the supply and demand theory so familiar to the college freshmen their music targets.

See Also:

• Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive
  
• Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
• Sony’s RED Agrees to Price Music Reasonably: 15 Cents and Up
  
• Why the Price of Music Is Heading Towards Zero
• Interview: Lala Co-Founder on 10-Cent Songs, iPhone Apps and Cable Partnerships
  
• LaLa: How Does 10 Cents a Song Strike You?

Image courtesy of FinancialSense

Source: Eliot Van Buskirk

Although Apple's official iPad photos don't show it, the iPad has a removable micro SIM card tray, similar to the SIM card one in the iPhone, which slides out from the top of the device (paperclip required).

Steve Jobs’ bid to create a new product category with the iPad includes a new approach to connectivity: Wi-Fi with 3G as an (expensive) option. And the fact that iPad users will be able to buy data plans on a month-to-month basis, without contracts, is a welcome development.

But in other ways, Apple has squandered a delicious opportunity to add its weight to the open-carrier movement.

Not only has Apple extended its widely reviled partnership with AT&T, but it has pointedly made it difficult to bring your own broadband to the ostensibly unlocked device by swapping in the SIM card of your choice.

Instead of using the standard SIM card found in GSM phones around the world (including the iPhone), Apple went with the 50-percent smaller micro SIM format, found in only one other device in the United States: a children’s GPS watch.

It’s bad enough that mobile internet data plans are not interchangeable. You can’t tether your portable computer to your iPhone to use its 3G connection, even though that is a trivial technical matter (and AT&T has been promising to support this feature for months). Tethering your iPad to your iPhone? Don’t hold your breath for that one, either.

And while you can buy a family plan to share minutes and unlimited texts for your two or more iPhones, each still pays a separate, mandatory data fee which is about as expensive as a single home broadband connection.

And now, iPhone owners will have to pay for a second data plan just to use their 3G iPads, which, to add insult to injury, resemble nothing so much as large iPhones.

Your small iPhone has a large SIM card. The large iPad has a small SIM card. Why, for the love of Steve?

In fact, there are two incompatibilities that will keep your iPad stuck on AT&T. The SIM card size is one, and 3G frequencies another.

First, the card: Nearly every phone available in North America that runs on a GSM network, including the iPhone, uses a larger, second-generation SIM card. It’s about twice as big as the micro SIM card (also known as a 3FF SIM) in the Apple iPad’s slot.

Any carrier, including T-Mobile, can make a micro SIM card using the same manufacturer that Apple used for the iPad.

Norbert Haas is the COO of Lok8u, the first company to ship a micro-SIM product in the U.S. — a watch that relays the location of children from their wrists to their parents’ cellphones. According to Haas, a company called Gemalto manufactures the micro SIM card for Apple’s iPad.

Gemalto vice president Jean-Louis Carrara told PC Magazine that “Gemalto makes it possible for all carriers worldwide to punch out a 3FF [miro] SIM… [ Jobs] mentioned publicly that the [iPad] will be available in 60 days. A lot can happen in 60 days.”

So, is T-Mobile going to start busting out pre-paid micro SIM data cards, giving iPad owners an internet-on-demand option?

Not so fast, because of the frequency problem: Because the iPad’s 3G frequencies are different than those used on T-Mobile’s network, anyone using a T-Mobile SIM would be limited to the carrier’s slower 2G network. That would make your shiny, new iPad about as fast as a first-generation iPhone.

Still, a few people might take T-Mobile up on that possible offer, if only to poke AT&T in the eye. (T-Mobile did not give us an official response in time for this story.)

“The iPad, from what we know, operates in frequencies where T-Mobile does not have a 3G play, and therefore, if you had a micro SIM card [from T-Mobile], you would have to accept the fact that it would run at a somewhat less than optimal speed [than] for which it was designed,” said CTIA vice president of public affairs John Walls.

The largest rectangle represents a credit card; the smallest represents a micro SIM card (image courtesy of Professor Andreas Steffen of the Institute for Internet Technologies and Applications).

In order for the iPad to connect to T-Mobile’s faster 3G network — or, for that matter, Verizon’s CDMA-based 3G network — Apple would have to sell a variety of iPads for connecting to the various networks, each with its own type of 3G transmitter. Part of the problem here is that there are so many competing wireless standards in the United States, which isn’t Apple’s fault.

There is one option hackers are sure to try: slicing the standard AT&T SIM card (15mm by 25 mm) down to the size of a micro SIM card  (12mm by 15 mm) and slapping it into the iPad. They’ll have to save the larger plastic outline to use as an adapter to make the cards work with their iPhones again, but that won’t stop people from trying.

“The connectors are the same… and it has the same thing inside… it’s just that the plastic is much smaller,” said Lok8u’s Haas, adding that SIM card manufacturers slice the same cards down to one size or the other depending on which one its client requests.

That iPad owners will likely consider taking a razor to the plastic SIM cards inside their iPhones, just so they can use the same portable data plan they’re already paying for, should tell you everything you need to know about the wireless data industry.

See Also:

• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle’s Space, And Other First Impressions
• No Verizon on the iPad. Is There a Map For That?
• Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets
• This Tablet Pessimist Has Just Switched Sides

(Image via Fonearena)

Source: Eliot Van Buskirk

Image courtesy of Lefsetz.com

(This article appears here with the permission of Bob Lefsetz, an opinionated music industry insider who’s newsletter, The Lefsetz Letter, has been published in various forms for over 25 years.)

I’m not convinced I need one!

I remember vividly the moment I knew I needed an iPod. I was on the back side of Mammoth Mountain, waiting to get on Chair 14, and the guy in front of me had white wires dangling from his ears. It wasn’t even 2002. The device had only been introduced only two months before. Been trounced by commentators as overpriced and unnecessary. But if you owned a Rio, as I did, and you contemplated FireWire transfer and a thousand-song capacity… you wanted one. But that day at Mammoth was when I realized I needed one. With that desire that makes you run to the store, lay down your hard-earned cash and emerge with a smile on your face.

Steve Jobs gets the question. Of need. He lays it right out. At the advent of the presentation. Even revisits the question again at the end. But he just didn’t close me.

Oh, he had me at the beginning. As he did those in attendance. Who gave him the anticipatory ovation a rock star gets before he even said a word. He wore none of GaGa’s outfits, in fact he wore running shoes and a mock turtleneck, but you knew he had something to say. Like our old rockers, first and foremost, we wanted to hear the music.

But what Steve kept saying was “It works!”

Okay, you’re Apple, I expect it to work.

I can see the engineering triumph, all the touch points, the design, even your own proprietary chip. But why do I need one?

Not to surf the Web. This isn’t 1995, when most people didn’t have computers and ordered up a PC just to be able to play. Everybody’s got Web access. And so many have smart phones. And since the iPad makes no calls, luddites are going to buy iPhones/Blackberrys/Androids first. Sure, the fanatics will have to have iPads the same way they needed Apple TVs. But Apple TV never really took off. Will the iPad?

It’s about having a killer app.

Photos?

Actually, an iPhone/iPod Touch is good enough for this, you get the idea, especially at the resolution the iPhone takes pics.

Apps?

Well, there is a mobile gaming industry, Apple is positioned as a player, will the iPad emerge as the dominant portable gaming platform? Doubtful, it’s just too big. But it’s possible. As for information apps, they work just fine on the iPhone, and don’t you want to use them on the run anyway? Hell, whipping out your iPad on a Paris street corner seems like an SNL routine.

Productivity apps? Like iWork and Keynote? Love the price, $9.99, but how often do I want to generate a presentation on the fly? As for superseding the laptop… Well, did you see Steve hunt and peck on the virtual keyboard? Maybe he doesn’t know how to touch-type. Still, this is a stopgap device, that does nothing better than a laptop at first glance. Do I need to surf the Web in my hand? My laptop is good enough for that.

How about movies?

Yup, you can take the iPad on an overseas flight and watch a movie and not run out of juice. So maybe the portable DVD player market will be affected, but I don’t watch flicks on flights anyway, and if I get the urge, what they’re purveying is good enough, long flights tend to have more choice. However I do appreciate the cover that turns into a stand.

It all comes down to books.

Now the iPad makes the Kindle look like a toy. It’s got a better interface, and color. But naysayers will state that it’s uncomfortable to read for long periods of time on a computer screen. The Kindle’s E-Ink technology is supposed to solve this problem, and it does. But the Kindle is not backlit. And oftentimes, the best technology does not win. People love MP3s, usability is better than CDs, never mind vinyl.

So now it becomes a battle of price with Amazon. Expect Kindle cost to decline, dramatically, very soon. But Amazon has one great advantage, the $9.99 price point for books. Apple is endorsing higher prices.

And speaking of prices, buying TV shows and movies never really took off at the iTunes Store, do you really think this device is going to make a difference?

Where was the Netflix plan? Where was the innovative pricing?

As for saving the media industry…whew, there was no word of that, probably because all the content providers are afraid of playing ball, fearful that Apple will start out as a friend but end up as an enemy, dictating prices, their entire business model.

The iPad is almost like a computer without software. Why do I need one again? There’s no MacPaint, like on the original Macintosh. There’s nothing revolutionary. I give Apple credit for building it, but I’ve got to give them credit for building the Cube too.

Even the presentation dragged. It was almost like hearing the follow-up to a classic album. You want the new one to be great, but the more you listen, you come to realize that the first one was unique. The iPhone was a breakthrough, the iPad? The presentation almost devolved into parody, when everybody kept saying how great the product was. Products truly this great sell themselves.

Maybe if I get my hands on one I’ll change my mind.

But for now, I’m gonna pass.

The Lefsetz Letter | Lefsetz on Twitter | Apple’s iPad announcement

See Also:

• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle’s Space, And Other First …
• No Verizon on the iPad. Is There a Map For That?
• Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets …
• How Will the Apple Tablet iPad Change Our Kids’ Lives?
• Live Coverage: Apple’s Special Tablet Event
• Analysis: Apple Bunts on iPad Gaming
• Would You Buy an iPad? Wired Readers Weigh In

Source: Epicenter Staff

More From Reuters:

• Nokia drops music package from flagship X6 model
• Tablet launch, earnings mean big week for Apple
• Buzz builds for Apple’s tablet launch
• FCC seeks info on early mobile termination fees
• Nokia hopes local services, phones pay for satnav

Source: Reuters

One of the most interesting things that didn’t happen when Apple announced its iPad on Wednesday is that AT&T didn’t get the boot. It was widely believed that Apple was going to drop the carrier because of its poor service and go with Verizon instead. Instead, Apple reaffirmed its relationship with AT&T, and there was no Verizon announcement at all. I don’t know the first thing about Apple’s negotiations, and Apple may indeed announce some kind of deal with Verizon soon. But in retrospect, keeping AT&T makes perfect sense.

Why?

1) It remains unclear whether AT&T’s sin was incompetence. They are a big, bad phone company, so it’s easy to just assume the worst. But the iPhone has generated more traffic on AT&T’s network than anyone, even Apple, expected; and AT&T, in addition to taking the blame publicly, has been laying out billions to fix the problem.

2) Verizon’s network runs on CDMA technology, not GSM. That means it only works in the US. To sell the iPad in the US on Verizon’s network and globally, Apple would have needed to equip US and international devices with different radios — or cram in two radios.

3) There is nothing like doing business with a partner that is back on its heels. Given how much bad press AT&T has gotten for its network failures, it’s likely that it was prepared to do almost anything to keep from losing Apple. Thus, if you want an iPad that has 3G service — and you can buy them without — it’s cheap ( $15 for 250 MB of data a month $30 for unlimited);  you can buy them unlocked so they work on any GSM network carrier; you don’t have to sign a contract with AT&T; and you can activate the device at home instead of a store.

Apple seems to have remembered one of the first rules of business: Don’t get mad; get even.

Related Stories

• In Escalating War Against Verizon, AT&T Is Getting Tone Deaf — and Outflanked
• Cap My Phone? Try This Instead, AT&T
• Analysis: Apple Bunts on iPad Gaming
• Apple’s Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev’s Creation
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
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• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle’s Space, And Other First Impressions
• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?

Source: Fred Vogelstein

In Gruber’s view, all the pieces are in place, or close enough, to start building services that understand spoken requests; filter them according to context; scour the net for relevant data; and cull, organize, and present the results in a meaningful way. Cloud computing power is growing. Mobile bandwidth is exploding. Smart phones are on the way to ubiquity. And public databases are proliferating, enhanced by programming interfaces that let third-party developers slice, dice, and mash. “Talk to your phone,” he said. “It’s the new way to get things done.”

Rather, it will be if Gruber’s latest company, Siri, can deliver the goods. Siri is a free service that aims to transform your cellphone into “your personal assistant.” Ask it to find, say, a nearby theater showing Avatar on an iMax screen within a few blocks of a romantic Italian restaurant that has a table open at 7pm, and it will help you buy tickets and book a reservation. The service interprets your language and then draws on commercial taxonomies, databases of film schedules and restaurant listings, mapping services, and so on to assemble a dynamic mashup that responds to your query. Tell it, “I’m drunk, take me home,” Gruber said, and Siri will call a cab. And it’s designed to learn about your world, so when you say, “find a bar near the office,” it knows to search near your workplace.

Siri isn’t the only location-sensitive mobile search service, and that class of business isn’t the only one implementing semantic features. Gruber points to a gaggle of kindred enterprises, including Yelp, Shazam, and Wolfram Alpha, and of course search behemoths Google and Bing. (He’s especially enamored of Google Goggles, which matches photos with images in the cloud as a way of recognizing and gathering information about the subject.)

No doubt, the new Rosie is in her infancy. For one thing, natural-language processing is a work in progress; Gruber was amused
when Siri once rendered “Tell my wife I’ll be late” as “Tell my wife ovulate.” But the trends are clear in mobile communications and open databases, and information businesses are reluctantly setting their data free and pinning hopes for revenue on their role in a larger value chain. Services that can actually forge that chain have an opportunity to pull the web into a new era that might actually earn the designation 3.0.

Ted Greenwald is tweeting from Web 3.0 using #web3

See Also:

• Web 3.0, Semantic Web, Potayto, Potahto
• EarthWeb Founder Nova Spivack’s Startup Finds $13M
• Semantic Search Engine Hakia Adds Social Feature
• Powerset’s 2008 Promise: A Wikipedia Seach Engine
• Stephen Wolfram Reveals Radical New Formula for Web Search
  
• Wolfram|Alpha Fails the Cool Test
• [Microsoft's Bing + x(Wolfram|Alpha)] > Google?
• Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs
• Stephen Wolfram on the Meaning of the Meaning Life

Source: John C Abell

So, let’s cut through the hype about the iPad.

1) Would I buy one? Yes.

Why? Because it’s better than Amazon’s Kindle, costs about the same and does so much more – games, photos, videos, e-mail. I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too. I played with one this morning for about 10 minutes. Not only is the book reading experience better because the screen is in color, the iPad solves the Kindle’s biggest problem: layout and graphics. Reading a newspaper or a magazine on a Kindle is disappointing. On the iPad, you get the publication virtually as it was designed to be read in print, with extras like video and photo slide shows that you don’t get in print.

Save for the New York Times, there were no announcements early Wednesday of newspaper or magazine reader apps for the iPad. But they’re out there . It is well known that all of the big media companies are building them (Condé Nast is among those magazine publishers poised to be on the platform on day one). If they make it easy enough to impulse buy, I’d ditch all my paper subs and buy everything on the iPad. Lots of people won’t, I’m sure, opting instead to just keep getting their information free from the web. But I think lots of people will as well.

2) Would I write a magazine story on it?

Not with the on screen keyboard; but if bluetooth keyboards work as advertised — sure.

3) Will others buy it?

You bet. How do I know? Well, I’ve seen estimates that said Amazon sold 3 million Kindles last year. Unless for some insane reason book publishers decide not to make their books available on the iPad — and five big ones already have — if you’d buy a Kindle, you’d definitely buy an iPad.

Then there are the gamers. I’ve seen estimates that conclude that Apple has sold 30 million iPod Touches. Why? Not because it’s a great music player, but because many think it’s better than a Nintendo DS. You can’t stick the iPad in your pocket, but the gaming experience is so much better because the screen is so much bigger that I predict many will happily trade.

So Apple already has a built in market that approaches 35 million users. That’s before you count anyone who buys an iPad just because it’s cool.

• Apple Tablet: Full Coverage

Source: Fred Vogelstein