B minor

I was quoted in a New York Times article about giving up cable TV this morning:

Bradley Lautenbach, 28, who recently moved to Los Angeles to work at Disney, found enough alternatives to allow him to turn back the technological clock on his TV.

“I’ve always had cable. It’s the thing you do when you move to a new place: call the company and set it up,” he said. Not this time. Instead, he got an antenna and now watches over-the-air news and sports, complemented by episodes of shows like “Entourage” that he buys from iTunes. “I don’t miss cable at all,” he said.

- Rabbit Ears Perk Up for Free HDTV [NY Times]

It’s been fun getting emails from friends all day. One of these days I will write a full post about my decision to quit cable and how I consume media now.

Everybody’s talking about the plan by a church in Florida to burn the Quran this weekend (Google News). It’s been on the radio during my commute all week. I’ve been thinking about it.

I’ll state my opinion upfront, and then move onto what I’m left pondering.

I think the plan to burn the Quran is a bad idea. I don’t think there should be laws against it and I don’t think the government should intervene to stop it.

But I think it’s a bad idea:

Not because it is incredibly disrespectful. (It is.)
Not because it puts coalition forces in greater danger abroad. (It does.)

But because IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE.

It’s the cheap and easy way to get attention for one’s own feelings. How about, instead of protesting by burning another religion’s sacred text, you protest by over-emphasizing the positive aspects of your own? Instead of protesting at all, why not engage the people you seem to dislike so much in an actual conversation? That would be challenging, rewarding, and productive. Burning books is not.

Next, I turn to the media. It is the first amendment of the US Constitution that extends to this Pastor the right to say whatever he wants in whatever form he wants. The same first amendment establishes his right to practice the religion of his choosing. That same amendment enables the press to operate freely in this country.

The media paying all the attention to this Pastor and his protest is a bad idea:

Not because it is giving too big a voice to someone who doesn’t deserve it. (It is.)
Not because it puts coalition forces in greater danger abroad. (It does.)

But because IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE. Don’t we have more important issues on which to expend our national collective breath? The economy? Education?

Doesn’t the attention this man is getting just make him more likely to carry out this protest? And to carry on being noisy afterwards?

What is he protesting anyway? I’ve read a dozen articles and can’t figure it out. Do the journalists covering it even know?

If a religious text caught fire in a forest, would anyone notice?

I’ve now spent 24 hours with the iPad. Everyone keeps asking what I think of it, so I’m formalizing my thoughts and posting them here:

The device:

It’s pretty. This is no shock, coming from Apple, though I do find myself impressed with the quality of the display every time I fire it up.

The battery is good. Pogue said 12 hours of straight video play. Haven’t tried that myself but at the rate things are going, I’d believe it.

Downside: it does not charge when plugged into my mac (older machine) and the cord isn’t really long enough to plug into wall and continue playing with it, so you do have to take a break when you want to charge it. Fortunately the battery seems good enough that that shouldn’t be a problem.

The thing is heavier than a kindle and holding it for a while, while not painful, can get awkward. I got a case. I’d recommend it.

The content:

The Apple apps (mail, calendar, etc) are top notch. They feel like they are the full incarnation of what the iPhone version wanted to be. Disappointingly, Apple does not provide a native chat application (still) which feels like a missed opportunity for the device – perhaps that will come in the next OS.

The third party apps I’ve tried so far are also quite impressive. There does seem to be a thinness around the offerings at the moment though, particularly among the free ones. Also, there is no Facebook app, which seems weird to me. I’ve been much less active on Facebook because of that.

File handling is an annoyance. I can’t download a PDF from the web to view later (I can bookmark it and view it in safari – but there is no way to get the file in an offline state – and no way to mark up the PDF unless it’s imported into Pages – which I can only do if I email myself). Access to Mobile Me iDisk (available on the iPhone) is also noticeably absent.

One would presume the apps will catch up as they begin approving in the iTunes Store again this week.

The experience:

The thing moves fast. I imagine that the next iPhone will also process this quickly and finally we will have a powerful smartphone instead of just a smartphone. The apps all load quickly, video runs beautifully, the speaker is good enough quality to watch tv shows with.

Most importantly though, is the lack of multitasking. This will upset power users, but I found myself consistently more relaxed as I was doing only one thing at a time instead of the usual 4 or 5. I wonder if this will help combat ADD overall – I doubt it.

(I should also add, that while typing is obviously not as good as with a keyboard, it is lightyears better than with the iPhone. I can type at near keyboard pace on the iPad screen.)

So what?

Ya, I agree with the sentiment that this device is more about consuming than creating. But I’m okay with that. It’s been a pleasure to consume with it so far and I do now understand the middle zone between the phone and the laptop that this device will serve – I was skeptical about it before.

The verdict: if you like toys and consume a lot of media, it’s worth the add. But yes, there will likely be a slightly cheaper, better one in 12 months. (That said, this does not seem to suffer from the bugginess or rough first outing effects that iPhone 1 did – so don’t make that the excuse.) I like mine, and it’s been an excellent couch companion for the past day.

This post was written from the iPad.

Feel free to ask specific questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

In corporate strategy, theorists like to talk about the “wedge,” or the gap between cost of goods and a customer’s willingness to pay. This means that the company with the most sustainable strategy has the lowest cost of goods and the customers with the highest willingness to pay. (That’s a simplification, but bear with me).

The same could be said of content, if it weren’t for a complicating factor called quality. Whereas other industries have found ways to reduce the cost of goods without reducing the quality, content quality is still tied very closely to cost. (If you give a film student a prosumer camera and a modest budget, the discerning audience will still be able to target the work as sub-par when screened alongside a professionally produced film involving 35mm film cameras, etc.)

Recently, though, things have started to change. Technological advances have enabled the creation of high-quality content that rivals that of Hollywood. The question then remains, how long before a new system, a new content producing apparatus, springs forward to break the old-standing business model?

You can see some of this type of work happening around the web already. My friend Nathan Heleine of Crush + Lovely has been involved with this project called Fifty People, One Question. The videos are pretty astounding both from an editorial perspective and from a physical quality perspective. The photography is done by Benjamin Reece of The Deltree and it is just astounding (more of his stuff on his site). Worth checking out any of the links if you have time.

Projects like this are the future of moving image content.

This article on Bloomberg this week caught my attention for its claim: “Morgan Stanley Intern Says Teens Don’t Twitter, Prefer Events”

For those that might not know, large financial institutions publish large amounts of research as part of their product offerings (they both sell this research and use it internally to inform invesment decisions). This report, published on a topic I care about, purports (according to the article):

Teenagers spend money on game consoles, movies and music concerts while ignoring newspapers, a Morgan Stanley report said, citing Matthew Robson. Robson should know: He is a 15-year-old intern at the securities firm.

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

“Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it,” Morgan Stanley analysts Edward Hill-Wood, Patrick Wellington and Julien Rossi said in a note, citing Robson.

Call me crazy, but I had two reactions to this:

1. duh. (on the last part. not sure I buy that “teens don’t twitter”)
2. are banks in the habit of publishing research that is anecdotally single sourced?