"The Lenovo iPad" LePad

An iPad look-a-like?  Lenovo launches its colorful LePad Series!

( Las Vegas) CEA expected 80 Tablets, but they said there might be over 100 at CES, Leading PC Manufacturer Lenono Releases its iPad look-a-like LePad. If you like the way iPad looks and feels, well you have a new option in with this colorful and a sexy new Android Tablet launched today at the unveiling session at CES.

What makes this product more unique is that it normally runs on Android 2.2, but they claim that as soon as you plug-in the keyboard you can switch to Windows 7.   It was designed for the mobile lifestyle.  It can be purchased separately, and even though the target for the product is China, they claim it will be available in the US with Android 3.0.

The product houses a 10.1 inch touch screen (same as the iPad), 3G as well as a front facing camera to enable video calls.

As Lenovo has build a very strong business model through Enterprise sales, will this device become a standard around the office?  More coverage on this device as we cover the event over the next couple of days..

The estimated pricepoint is $520 for the tablet alone.  This is a bit higher then the average prices presented at the CEA press conference between $300~400, but is looks like the right prices for this product that I may just want to buy.  In addition, I have always loved the Thinkpad red nipple

I learned about Delta’s decision to add WiFi now to its regional Jet Service. It appears the Virgin domino strategy has worked!  This is big news for all of us that like to work when we are flying.  I do not know what they will do about Skype or video calls over Wifi, but being connected during those several hours when flying is exactly the service I like as a business traveler.

This will bring a new breath of fresh air to iPad, smartphone Apps as now we will start to see the in-flight entertainment services moving to those opportunities as well.  Just think of the future shopping potential? Duty Free when you fly with one-click of the button….

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I was touched by the crisp and thoughtful strategy presented by Jeff Bezos recently on Charlie Rose ( also covered by Techcrunch) .

Why?…… well the questions that Charlie Rose asked recently on this interview, have been no different from what any New York Times, Techcrunch or other Media have asked recently;  ” How are they going to compete against the tablet hype of the today, i.e. iPad”.  I felt that that really missed the point entirely.  Jeff Bezos did explain this quite well on what is needed for optimized book reading and a device that is focused clearly on that experience.  What he missed in my mind is drilling down into the real genius behind what Amazon has been doing with access, conversion and fufilling a business model for the old media world in a new media era .   Many ask and  compare the product and the category to the iPad, when it is categorically totally different.   It is like comparing a bicycle to a bullet train as if they were competing products?  Well you can bring your bicycle onto a bullet train, like you can get book titles onto an iPad or iPhone, I guess, but the key is in the usage and the experiences are totally different. eBooks are carving a way to bring centuries of literature into readable 21st century form.  Reading hours on end is clearly an area in user experience that must be optimized.   There are those that gravitate to something new ( such as in new media), and those that cherish and gravitate toward something in the past ( centuries of long-form media for reading).   As Jeff Bezos put it,  - You want the hardware to disappear and for the user to experience the book.

Collecting and consuming media on devices is like an antique collector vs. a Ferrari collector, I guess.   In this case, the News Media has been digging at the core of what is special about the creation of  ”New Media” and business models, when we have something incredible powerful going on here.   The eBook trend is now at the tips of our  fingertips to give us  the ability to get  access to all of the past readable media more readily…. like having those wonderful antiques to experience  right by your side.  As Amazon is now 600K titles strong, how long will it take to get to the 10′s of millions.

According to Wikianswers “How many books exist in the World”,  the answer  comes out to be 3.5Billion.  Most of these books are part of the “old media” and they are not “new media”.  Bringing them to live on an electronic device suited for reading can be a very powerful thing. When we think of “New Media” we might compare that to 700Million Websites ( A statistic I recently learned from a colleague at Google). The books of yesterday may have charts, pictures and have color, but fundamentally they are content in long-form  for researching and for sizable reading periods.  During the 1900′s with the growth of other media such as Radio and Television, the old media of books was paralleled by 20th century new media, but the amount of recorded songs or TV programs does not even come close to the number of 3.5Billion books.   For instance, the library of congress has over 18M books, alone.  So bringing this legacy of information, knowledge is like bringing the worlds libraries to not only access immediately, but to consume in the way we have done for centuries….simple book reading.

So the Kindle as the showcase product of the category “eBooks”  is bringing that “old media” into a more efficient way to consume and access.  This was very close to the original vision of Google ( Access to the worlds information)  that has seemed to morph quite significantly with their obsession for “new media and advertising as well”.   As we now see Google chasing the iPhone and iPad with their Android strategy in many ways they have become ” me too” in their strategy of new products evolution in a category that has been called the  ”Multimedia Computer”.  Maybe we will see simplified Google Android devices that will go head-to-head with the Kindle for purposes of reading as the main design priority.  This will be a very interesting addition to Google Books and Google Print, but it has not yet happened.

As Amazon grows with the Kindle, so will the tendency to migrate the mass numbers of literary form into simple eBooks.  It is clearly a unique additional convergence device worth having to take reading to the next level.

( See Next post on the categories of Personal Screen Media)

It is amazing that couple of years ago, Google was a search engine company with a great business model around advertising.  As they grew, so did their products and services.   From the vision of ” organizing all of the worlds information to make it readily available” to now a Media company with their fingers on everything as they transformed into to a major media company with several hundreds of products all free powered by advertising.   In a funny video released recently by  Time.com’s Odd Todd , you can get a good laugh over all of the value of these products, that are free, but in Beta.  Google has been a key player in the foundation of the web as we know it.

Chris Anderson talks about the Free-Conomy in this session at the Commonwealth Club about how to leverage free to build and grow a business in the digital economy. Google clearly had the vision and prowess to leverage this philosophy and become the giant we all know and love.

….But now, Google is getting into the hardware business.  We all thought that they would enter the mobile space with Android only based the software model of opensource and free, but somewhere along the line their complete strategy and vision seemed to change dramatically with the launch of Nexus One.

Moving from free open source API’s and software to the pains of managing inventory ( PCB’s. LCD’s, Batteries, etc)  and building products is quite a different animal and business.   I originally thought that the purpose of Google’s journey surrounding the Nexus One was one of creating a reference platform for them to build and develop what they believed was the ultimate mobile device in order to better serve their efforts around the building the best Android platform possible, but now the gPad?

We all wonder that when something goes up, it must come down… and this Nexus One to the gPad example reminded  me of the old Jewish folktale from the Wise Men of Chelm called “Ruined by a pair of shoelaces”. Is entering the hardware business and chasing after Apple, Nokia and Rim the first step to getting to over abundant and completely getting out of control? It at least made me think about it, and even though there is a long way to go in the evolution of media, why now to become a hardware player?

About a year ago, I was a strong believer in the fact that native applications would only be a passing trend and the web page for mobile would start to overtake them in usage volume due to the transition to the full HTML browser in Smart Phones, the  larger volume of web sites and the ease of access via search and social media links.  According to Wolfram ( and a variety of other sources), I was able to find out that  on the web there is over 150M websites globally, there are over 8Billion page-views a day from the major Search Engine leads and over 8Billion page-views a day from clicks on links from Social Media.  Even though there are still only hundreds of thousands of Apps, this is a tiny number compared to the relative business of  the web and that over time the app would become part of the web experience with all content tied to links for ease of discovery.   In the case of a Native application that has been developed for a device like the iPod, iPhone or iPad is a self-contained black box and the content seems to only be accessable via installing the app and going to the home screen of the App.  Deep content in the App may be difficult to tag today for SEO    ( Search Engine Optimization) and this will leave many of the publishers of Apps only in a position to drive a user to the App and possibly not all the content contained in the app.  The fluidity of what we have know as Search Engine Marketing or Social Media Marketing that is the art of driving people to your site or landing page of content does not seem to have the same foundation around Apps in the internet that we have know to love with a one-click to get to the rich deep content.

Many SEO’s have struggled with the use of Flash in a site from the standpoint of this discovery and it has been a pain point in marketing for the greater search or social media marketing community.  New methods of tagging or marketing the Flash content and the use of other meta data/ keywords on a site have been used to refer to content , but it has not been optimal.

As Apps become more and more relevant and devices centralized around this experience has made it so that today we are looking at an entirely new Internet in my mind.   An Internet that has been structured by massively indexing webpages of content and the discussion and road map of the future of the Semantic Web.  Everything has been tied to links and now the rise of the meta-tags that can make discovery and access that much easier.  All of the things from the deep content we can search and discover to the apps and content that once was discoverable from a webpage.  Now with the growing trend of user experience and content consumption that are really self-contained packages derived from App stores the type of search needs to be treated differently.  This could be a new revolution for the advent of a new search engine to take on the Google, Yahoo, Bing of today that could essentially even be more social-media friendly as a search architecture.  Lately, I have found Google to be a mess in search relevancy, and I have been using Twitter as an alternative search engine for news and discussions more then 50% of my time.  It is also interesting to hear that   if Apple were to launch a new kind of search engine for applications it would clearly make sense given the course of this new Internet.

However, my gut still tells me it is going to be very difficult for one company like Apple to take on the world and create the next generation of Global Search Engine.  Rather a Search Engine for its own world and hopefully we will see some of the cool social elements associated with it.  What I believe could be the case from this strong spike in user adaption and the massive effect of apps on all of us is rather a new debate that stems back to the HTML5 vs. Flash discussion.  As Apple has been a strong advocate of the usage of HTML5 and has left Flash as the proprietary rich media standard out of its devices, there is room for the new innovation of leveraging now HTML5 as the new Application platform of choice for many media companies and developers and to breed an entirely new industry of Search Engine Optimization around HTML5 as it becomes the next foundation of the webpage and the run-time widget architecture of the Web.

Of course we will probably continue to see this self-contained in the closed ecosystem of Apple, and even through they are working with these open standards of HTML5 and others, there is this new paradigm shift toward Apps that will exist across all platforms that makes this discussion quite interesting.   Last week, at CTIA, I was discussing this with several different App developers from the Blackberry camp and found that they have started to do unique tagging of content even in the alert and push architecture of content from Apps.  This could be another hook into strong opportunities for searchable methods to all of this content that is formed from push experiences.  Apps have now been definitely know to be able to give us better experiences then typical web pages, but  the opportunities surrounding them from the standpoint of market discoverability of the deep content is still very open.  Will Blackberry at some point come up with there own search engine as well?  Will we see multiple search engines for different forms of App content that will then lead to the subject of an open API for the massive crawlers of the world to link each one in a greater search interface to find across multiple different channels?   Will this phenomena of the app keep evolving and create the opportunities for a new internet of channels and deep search accross those channels with dedicated tagging platforms within the apps of a each of the different platforms?

As the iPad’s application ecosystem evolves and so does the application ecosystems of  Blackberry, Nokia, Android, Palm, Windows, we will need to have a new kind of search and discovery mechanism that will lead us to a new form of Internet?  Look at all the Apps that live across Facebook and other social media and the opportunity for discovery requires one to be living in that portal. A simple Google or Bing search may take you to the App, but not the content within.

I would have never expected to see Apps over take Web pages, but this phenomena is getting so strong that it has and will create a New Internet  or Branch of the Internet that will keep evolving with the phenomena of  mobile usage case.  As we saw a strong growth in the area of SEO, SEM of the last 10 years, will we see a new form of SEO called SEOA ( Search Engine Optimization for Apps)?

Regardless of where this all goes, there is clearly new business opportunities for the SEO’s to start to design services and products for Application Publishers and Developers in designing their marketing and discovery platforms in a new way that is related to this phenomena of the mobile usage case.