We’ve just finished a interesting assignment covering Orange Business Services’ annual customer event Orange Business Live! as part of a team of internal and external bloggers from France, UK and Belgium. The idea of the coverage was to show that interesting things happen at shows like this by publicising it to the outside world in real time. Stories,photos and videos were published to the Orange Business Live! blog and to the Orange Business posterous page. I wrote a round up of some of the stories that the bloggers wrote in this post and the social media presence was so successful that the new Orange Business Services CEO Vivek Badrinath came and checked us out himself.

This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines

I’ve been having a ponder over the Good Enough culture. It was sparked yesterday by a flittering debate on Twitter – obviously not the best tool for discussing such an ephmeral idea – about the closure of the Guardian’s technology supplement. The tech editor asked, rather tongue in cheek, would we be prepared to translate our collective grief about its demise, into cold hard cash – would we pay for the supplement on an iphone app or on Scribd. My reply: too few people want to pay for quality content anymore, what’s happening with media is the same as what is happening to technology. Excellence is no longer required, we want “good enough” culture.

I’m not sure it there’s any research on this – but it seems to me to be a confluence of Flat Earth News (the expose of just how low British journalism has fallen) and an article on Good Enough technology from Wired magazine back in August.

We consume online because it’s free, it’s quick and its convenient. Buying a newspaper is no longer as quick and convenient. Advertising pays because we are not prepared to, which means we are prepared to accept “good enough” content.  (The same is happening with the London free papers, which have admittedly struggled of late. They are proof that you do not need to invest heavily in content: you recycle, tap news feeds, and churn out celebrity pap. Investigative reporting is expensive – even writing off-diary pieces is an exception these days).

That’s not to say not to say that the Guardian, or any other successful media site, is destined to collapse (though on the wane it maybe). We’ve been through the debate about news aggregators, and the complete disintermediation of the news creators already, and to an extent this has come to pass. Some people do consume their daily news from Google Alerts, Google News, news feeds into Yahoo and MSN and so on. With aggregation, you can be the  editor, creating your own  news agenda. But most people will not be quite so dynamic, hence the online success of news from the BBC, the Guardian, New York Times etc.

So what’s the idea of Good Enough?

Well, simply put, there is not enough advertising spend to fill all of the competing media, whether that be mainstream news, tech publications or golfing mags. This is excerbated in the downturn when advertising contracts. The FT’s IT technology supplement has shrunk because there are no ads to sit next to the features; the Guardian’s tech supplement suffered a similar fate (and undoubtedly, surveys of why readers where buying the printed newspaper showed that the tech supplement was not a significant reason anymore).

And yes we are happy to consume “good enough” content – which you might otherwise call churnalism.

I’m in the content business – I’ve been writing since the early nineties and seen the rapid decline in the status of the journalist. We work with many very skilled, knowledgeble journalists who know how to research, how to form an opinion, how to translate complex messages.

But these skills are not so sought after anymore, or at least not by traditional media. Not when you can procure articles at $1 for a 100 words from sites like Elance. Copy factories in Asia, stay at home moms in the Midwest and so on are benefiting from disintermediation of the media (which in itself is not a bad thing). They can create copy for a client which will be syndicated on web sites searching for SEO; it can be syndicated over multiple news sites; it can be used to drive traffic to sites that are porn or drug outlets. And there is the blogosphere, where publishing has become democratized – inevitably some opinions are worth hearing, others little more than pub chatter.

So how do you seperate the wheat from the chaff? Have you collected favourite sources of info, or go to sites where you know content has been investigated and researched? Maybe you have, but are you paying for these sites or contributing to their upkeep? Unlikely.

Rupert Murdoch may seem an unlikely champion of of quality content, but he is fighting a losing battle.  We skim, we flip between sites, we have very short attention spans. Futurity manages some very successful blogs with thousands of readers. We believe we are writing some genuinely interesting and useful articles but dig down to into the web site stats, and you would probably be surprised how little time is spent reading a post. It’s fleeting (so you probably haven’t read this far). Our content is not at fault, I hope. It’s that readers have found what they want in the first few paras and moved on. Content is just “good enough”.

We are all suffering this – the creators, the content owners and the concent consumers. I wonder where it will all lead?

#stewartbaines

After what seems like an awful long time in planning, we have launched our new web site. We will be updating the site regularly with advice articles on technology and marketing, blog entries on topics that interest us, and also bring together material that we have published elsewhere. We already include three advice notes to kick you off – on Twitter, SEO and Google. In addition we’ve been doing more audio and video work and will publish some examples of our interviews on a range of topics including vehicle telematics, application acceleration and service management. Please feel free to contact us on any topic at anthonyplewes@futuritymedia.com and stewartbaines@futuritymedia.com.