January 30th, 2010
What does the ‘i’ in iPad stand for?
I know. It’s late.
I know. It’s all been said already.
I know these things and yet still I must chime in.
I will not be wowed by the chip processor (thanks tech crunch). Nor the development platform. Thanks Joe Hewitt. But, what I will be wowed by is – This is it. This is, for those of you who have slaved in the interactive TV world, Jennifer Aniston’s sweater. (For those of you that managed to stay out of that sticky wicket, the Holy Grail was that you would be watching ‘Friends’ and you could, with a click buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater.)
Now forget for a moment that for the moment the iPad is not Cable or Broadcast TV so the TV example is only half appropriate, but think about what it means that instead of pointing and clicking, a mode of interaction that recently celebrated it’s 40th anniversary since being developed in the early 70’s at XEROX Parc, you now have a whole new way of interacting. Instead of scrolling, pointing, clicking, waiting for something to open. You can touch. Zoom. Re-arrange.
Yes, it is the vision we all saw with Tom Cruise manipulating files in ‘Minority Report’ but now, instead of that being a kludge or a gimmick, it is real. All of the ideas that Interactive TV developers have been working on for the last 25 years will begin to bear fruit as ‘touch’ computing goes mainstream.
So the i which once upon a time stood for the Internet in relation to the iMac and has now become simply a prefix. Well the i is now truly for interactive and this is a keeper peoples. This is it.
This will transform advertising.
This will transform purchasing.
And, if we’re lucky, it will begin to transform entertainment itself.
iPad is the new Avatar.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.