iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators

Loose notes from SXSW 2010 panel session iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators

75 million + iPhone OS units and growing

Is there a room for a third category of device in the middle? Yes, but… What set of problems is the iPad solving that has not been addressed in other product markets?

Pre-launch demand is actually higher for iPad than it was pre-iPhone.. Market is primed by iPhone/iPod Touch. 51,000 units pre-ordered in two hours, 90,000 in six hours. But that doesn’t cover people who ordered in stores.

Bill Jensen, director New Media at Village Voice. 14 million pageviews per week across 14 newspaper sites. Print is hurting. But some orgs making the transition to digital better than others. We have shown monetary digital growth of 70% for past 3 years. 90% of business is local.

Mobile: Periodicals are there, but iPad is a different beast. What people want on moile is very geo basied – restaurants, events, concerts. Last night reviews and slideshows.

Landscape for periodicals: People have a choice of 10 papers on the street. Bookstore: 100,000 books. But now you have 109 million web sites. 25.x billion pages indexed on the web. How weill we set ourselves apart?

The iPad will deliver a focus on design and reading that you don’t get with iPhone. Every journalist sees this. The challenge: How ot incporporate our daily web content and our print equity into one plaform? Free drings for the person who can solve this dilemma.

You all bring your iPhone into the bathroom. I know you all do.

A lot of people pick up periodicals for the ads. This doesn’t translate well online, but it will translate on the iPad.

Shervin Pishevar:

The projected iPhone market: 76% games = $ 30 billion. Estimate 20 million iPads on the street by 2013. Pishevar thinks it’s going to be many more.

Pishevar got to try iPad in advance. In 10 minutes training he was able to go fro 60 wpm to 85 wpm. “My laptop is history.”

Speed of the chip is unbelievably fast – makes everything else look like DOS. Blows iPhone out of the water. On an iPhone your fingers are in the way. The problem goes away. Big impact on gaming.

All of this enables new usage occasions, pushes the creative frontier, boosting engagement.

Jason Grigsby @grigs – new web opportunities.

Same old browser in iPad? What’s the big deal? BUT we have a a standard size browser – we don’t have that on the web (known design dimensions). Great javascript engine. Device characteristics less important on iPad than on iPhone. No camera, You won’t be carring it around on the street as much as you do with a phone.

Not JUST consuming media (iWork). Dashboards and intranet sites (touch data) = big opps. Books will differ with the well-defined form. Design for reading, as opposed to ebook readers of the past, which were formless. Does vertical scrolling make sense here? Paging replaces.

No Flash, get over it. Device detection more importan than ever. 3G means performance still matters. HTML5 – especially forms.

Katherine Tasheff – Hyperion Books. Books havent’ changed since 1450. The business model has worked really well. Suddenly it isn’t. Kindle changed the game even though it isn’t perfect. $1 billion in ebook revenue in the coming year. Mimics the experience of reading a book like nothing else. Book sales in general have declined 5% in the past year.

eBooks in app store already outnumber games, but not in sales dollars of course.

ePub format still really needs to be hashed out. Penguin is only going after apps on the iPad.

This is a peek into the future – we’re going to become a more paperless society.

Prediction: The new computing paradigm – tablet computing rather than desktop computing – will take 5 years, not 20.

But you can’t really have an iPad without also having a desktop computer – to sync, back up to, etc. that will hamper adoption of it as a replacemnt paradigm. But give it time.

People are adopting smart phones now at a rate of adoption faster than internet uptake was in the 90s.

Hyperion on DRM: There are many red-line contracts floating around our office right now. We are divided on many issues. This is a huge area that needs to be figured out.

You’re going to need a good designer on staff to make this work – design is going to rule the landscape.

Lots of potential for board games that simply coldn’t work on the iPhone. Imagine online multi-player Monopoly on iPads. Or the Ouija board!

Imagine real-time collaboration on the same device – we just can’t do this with web 2.0 apps. Everyone hands-on!

Devs converting iPhone apps to iPad apps are going to make a common mistake – simply scaling up their old apps. You need to rethink layout and design, stretch your creative selves and push the boundaries. Scaling up isn’t nearly enough.

Village Voice: Right now it takes 1 hour to prep our print content for web. But we think we’ll have to add a midnight shift to be able to handle multimedia prep work for iPad edition.

The user account thing will be a problem for shared devices in families – right now it’s single user. Will you want to store your email in it and hand the device to your kids to play games?

“I always feel sorry for people on the plane watching movies on the iPhone. It’s kind of cute, but mostly pathetic. You’re going to see a lot of people watching movies on IPads on the plane.”