tablets

Last week, research came out from ABI saying that 1 billion cameras had been shipped in tablets and smartphones in 2012.   On the back of this, I wanted to find out the size of the smartphone camera market relative to the digital camera market.

The tablet revolution, by making it possible to place advertisements within digital e-books, is about to change the publishing world forever. Imagine commuting to work while reading The Great Gatsby on your Kindle for free, thanks to the generous sponsorship of a financial services company like Chase. Or, imagine being curled up in your pajamas reading Doctor Zhivago at night, while tiny contextual ads for 1-800-Flowers pop up on your Kindle anytime there's a romantic scene between Yuri and Lara. 

The other week someone asked me what an agency such as Rabbit (where I work) should be focusing on going forward.

My reply, was previously organisations have been talking about a digital first approach.   In other words, concentrate on online channels and content 1st, which then filters into the offline world.   However now the priority has to be mobile first,  you cater in the 1st instance for people who may be consuming your content via their smartphones.

Sounds obvious enough, but some recent stats demonstrate the need to move from theory to practice:

I am a great fan of Jakob Nielsen. He always talks a great deal of sense about usability and has been around long enough to witness all of the cycles of fashion in design in user interfaces. He very kindly is making available, for zilch, a really detailed report about iPad usability.

Or rather (sadly), perhaps I do.

So The Daily is finally with us. My disclosure right up front is that (since it is not available in the UK) I haven't actually seen it. I applaud bold experimentation of this kind but the written and video reviews of it have left me somewhat underwhelmed. It's a shame. The concept of consuming news and feature driven content via a tablet interface is genuinely exciting.

The argument for or against e-books always seems to boil down to one central issue: e-books can not be touched, bookmarked and lovingly annotated in the same way that real books can (sorry, Kindle). The early adopters will always embrace digital content, on whatever device is offered to them. It's the middle- to late-adopters who need an additional emotional connection to that digital content before they will embrace tablets and e-books. The current approach to "flipping pages" on a tablet is a cute start, of course, but there's more that can be done to create emotional attachments to digital objects.

During the peak of the social media revolution, "lean forward" was one of the buzzwords that was bandied about quite often to explain the changing habits of media consumption. The term “lean forward” implied a deeper engagement with the content, rather than just passive consumption - the type of content that you'd share with your friends on Facebook, tweet about on Twitter and interact with in real-time.

John W. Moravec (1), has recently posted his Five Predictions For 2011 That Will Rock The Education World to his Education Futures blog (find also my prior post iPad & Serious Games To Revolutionize The Way Students Access Core Curriculum).

This awesome infographic (below), created by the team at Focus, predicts that Tablets (iPad et al.) will be the future of computing. According to the data, 14% of online shoppers intent to purchase an iPad in the next five months. This equates to 28 Million people planning to buy the iPad in the next 5 months. Even though people don’t often do what they say, if we even consider 10% of buyers following through, that is still a lot of iPads.