Editor’s note: Guest author Ohad Samet is an expert in managing fraud and other risks in payments systems. He is a cofounder of Signifyd, and years ago was a senior manager at PayPal and blogs at As Risky As It Gets and Tweets at @ohadsamet.
2011 is going to be a big year for payments, with more startups and mature companies getting funded in the space than almost ever before. It’s important to make the distinction between the headline chasers, the slow moving giants struggling for a piece of the pie and the companies that have a chance at real disruption. For my money Facebook and Square are both very interesting companies to follow in this space.
In my last post on TechCrunch I discussed Google and Apple and their efforts around payments, and explained why I don’t yet think they are serious players for the whole payments pie. The post ended with some ideas around what serious contenders could look like, and who are other potential large companies that could step into user-to-user payments. I’d like to expand on that, looking at how the companies above might take advantage of chinks in Paypal’s armor (disclosure: my consulting company, Analyzd, has done a project with Square in the past).
Paypal’s Weaknesses
Paypal (eBay’s growth engine) is demonstrating strong growth and evidently still enjoys network effects—in many territories its service sells itself to small and medium merchants. Moreover, much like with banks and other financial services companies, people like to complain (about fees, user experience and customer service) but will not easily migrate to another company just by virtue of marginal improvements. But Paypal is far from untouchable; it has a few flaws that make room for some fierce competition. What are they?
First and foremost, Paypal’s service has matured over the last ten years. Product and policy decisions that made a lot of sense in the era of “The Paypal Wars” became structural issues, accompanied by limitations gathered in an attempt to improve profitability and revenue. Concepts such as a full redirection to Paypal’s website to make a payment which is still widely required in its most popular small merchant products and the limitations it places on businesses it deems risky (such as rolling reserves, 10-20% of your volume being held for up to 120 days) create whole segments that are underserved and can be tempted by a new service.
Second, the company is heavily reliant on the existing card association and banking infrastructure. Despite having acquired Bill Me Later (offering credit on the spot to approved buyers), its payment volume is still noticeably a mix of card and direct bank payments (here’s an old yet still relevant explanation). This creates a boundary both on the level of fraud and credit losses it can sustain and (more importantly) on its pricing. Paypal is left struggling with getting more people to pay with a bank account (and, given Bill Me Later, more and more using credit products) or it’s forced to skim a few basis points on top of card fees. This is one main reason why small merchants start with Paypal, but then graduate out of the system and move to a full merchant account where they can work directly with card products and other, lower fee payment options.
Third, Paypal is very much U.S.-centered in both infrastructure and process. It has definitely gone global, with good presence in Europe and Asia, but its hold of the market is much less obvious in these territories. Other countries have significantly different regulatory challenges and sometimes completely different payment processes and preferences (Germany is a good example); a few ongoing issues (most recently in India) have demonstrated that being based in the U.S. is not always an advantage. Becoming a truly international organization, with a distributed work force adapting or (in some cases) rebuilding the product creatively to match the local market is a daunting challenge for many companies.
Finally, with size comes the innovator’s dilemma which hinders Paypal’s ability to bet on small and evolving markets, resulting in the company being late to the game. We need to take this one with a grain of salt, though—Paypal is investing in user experience and technology, and through sheer size can reclaim market share even when it is a late entry. However, a wide consumer base is not as large an advantage as it once was when new consumer (web or mobile) products gain immense amounts of traction within weeks and months and other innovative consumer companies with a shorter history are eyeing the space.
And so, competition for Paypal’s lead position can come from two types of players: the first and obvious one is a consumer brand that has a trusted relationship with a massive user base; the second is a company rooted in an underserved segment of the market, preferably out of the U.S., and does not build on the usual card-and-bank infrastructure (or worse, on carrier billing or some other secondary derivative).
Facebook’s Social Advantage
Facebook is a good example of the first type of player. Why them and not Google or Apple, which I’ve discussed in my previous post? All three have a wide user base, have experience with some sort of payments, and are faced by the same challenges. Why is Facebook different? First, Facebook signaled it wants to play, at least to some extent, with its new Facebook payments subsidiary.
Second, of all the large companies it not only has the largest, most diverse and global user base, it also has a rather clear identity strategy that extends beyond their website and is based on real information. This is a critical element in payments today. The ability to control identity isn’t the be-all and end-all of payments (spam, abuse and fake accounts on Facebook prove that) but if enforced properly it will provide a good enough basis for seller and consumer risk management.
Third, while Google and Apple have built their ecosystems and added payments to them to facilitate the type of commerce they required, nothing is a more natural extension of social interaction than adding payments to the mix. Payments and commerce are by their very nature social transactions. From the user perspective, Facebook moving into payments is an easy to comprehend progression, and the social graph can easily add relevant reputation to boost the feeling of trust.
Where is Facebook aiming to be and where can it fit? While currently it is clear that the company is aiming at social games—a high margin industry it understands and could use as a classroom to learn about payments—it can go way beyond that. As I noted above, Paypal has a merchant graduation issue that is clear from its fee structure; when you grow beyond a certain point, a merchant account is better than a Paypal account if only for the costs, even given the need to manage risk management yourself.
While Facebook may not be able to solve the cost problem that’s limiting Paypal, it can provide large merchants with a different incentive—a huge, diverse, captured audience—which translates into conversion heaven. With its growing experience in ad targeting and more users moving to Facebook messages, Facebook can create unique marketing opportunities for merchants that integrate Connect. Payments are the next logical step—all through one simple integration. Getting those merchants on board and using Facebook Credits as a universal form of payment will drive enough users to attach cards and bank accounts to their Facebook account. That could pose a huge threat to Paypal, and strongly limit its opportunity.
Square: Going For The Mobile Wallet
Square comes to mind as a good example of the second type of player, however its case requires some explaining. Square seems to be a consumer-mobile-focused payment system for offline payments using cards, kind of a well-designed poor man’s POS (point of sale system). But look deeper: what I find super interesting is not the payments small sellers and retailers are receiving through credit cards. This is a necessary evil. What’s interesting to me is what these users then do with this money they have in Square’s system—currently deposited to their bank accounts, but which can potentially stay with Square and be used as a low cost funding source.
It’s a little farfetched, but Square may be onto a very creative way to tap into payrolls—effectively becoming the one real mobile wallet—by meeting the money spent by consumers at the point of sale and providing better ways to spend it directly from your Square account. The result will be an ecosystem which you enter with a credit card payment, but then never use that card again.
If everyone has a mobile phone with a Square app, wide payment acceptance is just one tap (or bump) away, and with fees more befitting cash than cards. This direction can also explain why removing the fixed portion from their card fees makes sense—a loss leader used to pump huge amounts of cash from small retailers into their Square balances. This is the power of going after payroll. From the financial perspective, if Square keeps its current fee structure, it remains competitive with merchant accounts for anything under $15-20 (see Feefighters’ handy calculator here) and with Paypal on even larger average transaction sizes (anything under $35, even for Paypal’s most competitive fees).
While Square needs to drive down costs further to become more interesting for the larger retailers, it’s definitely compelling for exactly the population that might then spend money directly from its Square balance and build its wide user base, namely the small retailers and occasional sellers. To those people, Square is also offering a quick way to accept credit payments that may not have been paid otherwise and a superior user experience, both strong drivers for adoption that can be more important than fees in the short term.
Photo credit: Flickr/Aaron Nace
Website: paypal.com Location: San Jose, California, United States Founded: December 1, 1998 Acquired: July 8, 2002 by eBay for $1.5B in Stock PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and… Learn More
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $2.34B Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by… Learn More
Website: squareup.com Location: San Francisco , California, United States Founded: February, 2009 Funding: $37.5M Square is a revolutionary service that enables anyone to accept credit cards anywhere. Square offers an easy to use, free credit card reader that plugs into a phone or iPad. It’s simple to sign up. There is no extra equipment, complicated contracts,… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Paypal Is About To Get A Bruising From Facebook And Square
Google Said To Have High Level Mole At Twitter, Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees
Google may have paid as much as $150 million in stock grants to retain key product employees Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan, say multiple sources. Both were offered the chief product role at Twitter earlier this year (cofounder Jack Dorsey eventually filled the position), but Google offered Pichai $50 million and Mohan $100 million, respectively, to stay, say multiple sources. In what could be called an IQ test, both accepted Google’s offer.
The stock grants are significantly higher than what we’ve unearthed previously, but the model is the same. Google grants restricted stock to the employee that vests over time (two years in the case of Sundar and 3 or 4 years with Neal, says one source). An engineer last year was offered $3.5 million in stock to stay. At the time it seemed outrageous.
There’s lots to say about the statement Google is making with these counteroffers. “Don’t mess with us,” comes to mind. As well as “If you’re a Google employee and you aren’t out interviewing at Facebook, Twitter or Zynga you are a moron.” Regardless, the fact that large fortunes are being handed out to mid level technical managers is somewhat of a red flag in general. That kind of money is usually reserved for founders of companies that make it to IPO. Actually, most IPO founders make substantially less than that.
What’s more fascinating is this. In at least one of the cases Google is said to have made a counteroffer before the employee even told Google they were considering an offer from Twitter.
We previously reported that Google had set up a special group to respond to these situations quickly, sometimes overnight. But we’ve never heard of Google making counter offers prior to the actual offer from Facebook or Twitter being made.
Multiple sources close to Twitter have said that someone with access to Twitter’s most confidential information, such as who they are interviewing for key executive spots, may be leaking that information directly to Google. In this case, Google may have acted on that information too quickly. And people at Twitter, say these sources, are steaming mad.
I spoke to Twitter PR earlier today about this story and they declined to comment. I’ve been unable to reach Google for comment.
Website: twitter.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: March 21, 2006 Funding: $360M Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging… Learn More
Website: google.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Founded: September 7, 1998 IPO: August 19, 2004 Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including:… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
The New Information Age - Via TechCrunch
LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman said, recently, “that if Web 1.0 involved go search, get data and some limited interactivity, and if Web 2.0 involves real identities and real relationships, then Web 3.0 will be real identities generating massive amounts of data.”
Reid is a visionary and certainly had this right. But the information that Reid described is just the tip of the iceberg. We are already gathering a thousand times more data than that. The growth is exponential, and the innovation opportunities are even bigger than Silicon Valley can imagine they are.
I’m going to explain why I believe this. But let me start with a short history lesson.
Over the centuries, we gathered a lot of data on things such as climate, demographics, and business and government transactions. Our farmers kept track of the weather so that they would know when to grow their crops; we had land records so that we could own property; and we developed phone books so that we could find people. Web 1.0 made it possible to make this information globally available and searchable.
This rapidly evolved into Web 2.0. Now data were being captured on what news we read, where we shopped, what sites we surfed, what music we listened to, what movies we watched, and where we travelled. And “the powers that be” started gathering information about our age, health, education, and socioeconomic status.
With the advent of LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and the many other social-media tools, the Web became “social” and “the powers that be” began to learn all about our work history, social and business contacts, and what we like—our food, entertainment, sexual preferences, etc. This is what Reid Hoffman calls Web 3.0.
But there is much, much more happening in the Web 3.0 world. It’s not just “social”.
In 2009, President Obama launched an ambitious program to modernize our healthcare system by making all health records standardized and electronic. The goal is to have all paper medical records—for the entire U.S. population—digitized and available online. This way, an emergency room will have immediate access to a patient’s medical history, the effectiveness of medicines can be researched over large populations, and general practitioners and specialists can coordinate their treatments.
The government is also opening up its massive datasets of information with the Data.gov initiative. Four hundred thousand datasets are already available, and more are being added every week. They include regional data on the efficiency of government services, on poverty and wealth, education, on federal government spending, on transportation, etc. We can, for example, build applications that challenge schools or health-care providers to perform better by comparing various localities’ performance. And we can hold the government more accountable by analyzing its spending and wastage.
There are more than 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and far more video is being collected world wide through the surveillance cameras that you see everywhere. Whether we realize it or not, our mobile phones are able to keep track of our every movement—everywhere we go; how fast we move; what time we wake. Various mobile applications are beginning to record these data.
And then there is the human genome. We only learned how to sequence this a decade ago at a cost of billions of dollars. The price of sequencing an individual’s genome is dropping at a double exponential rate, from millions to about $10,000 per sequence in 2011. More than one million individuals are projected to be sequenced in 2013. It won’t be long before genome sequencing costs $100—or is free—with services that you purchase (as with cell phones).
Now imagine the possibilities that could derive from access to an integration of these data collections: being able to match your DNA to another’s and to learn what diseases the other person has had and how effective different medications were in curing them; learning the other person’s abilities, allergies, likes, and dislikes; who knows, maybe being able to find a DNA soul mate.
We are entering an era of crowd-sourced, data-driven, participatory, genomic-based medicine. (If you’re interested, Dr. Daniel Kraft, a physician–scientist who chairs the Medicine track for Singularity University, is hosting a program called FutureMed, next month, which brings together clinicians, AI experts, bioinformaticists, medical-device and pharma executives, entrepreneurs, and investors to discuss these technologies.)
You may think that the U.S. leads in information collection. But the most ambitious project in the world is happening in India. Its government is gathering demographic data, fingerprints, and iris scans from of all its 1.2 billion residents. This will lead to the creation of the largest, most complex identity database in the world. I’ll cover this subject in a future piece.
It’s not all wine and roses. There are major privacy and security implications such as those I discussed in this piece. Forget about the “powers that be”: merely the information that Google is gathering today would make Big Brother envious. After all, Google is able to read our e-mails even before we do; it knows who our friends are and what they tell us in confidence; it maintains our diaries and our calendars; it can even guess what we are thinking by watching our surfing habits. Imagine what happens once Google has access to our DNA information.
Regardless of the risks and security implications, the technology will advance, however.
This period of history has been called the Information Age because it makes available instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. I would argue that we are way beyond this; we’re at the beginning of a new era: the New Information Age.
In previous technology revolutions, companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Facebook were born. Such giants get mired in the technologies that they helped create; they stagnate because they are making too much money and are afraid to obsolete themselves. It is ambitious startups that come along to change the world. I have little doubt that the next Facebook and Google are already being hatched in a garage somewhere.
I discussed all this and much more in a keynote I gave at the recent midVentures Data 2.0 conference. This video is below, and you can find many other discussions on the conference website.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.
Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.- Via TechCrunch
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.
And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right.
So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Not surprisingly, another Internet bubble seemed the farthest thing from his mind. But, he argued, America is under the spell of a bubble of a very different kind. Is it an emerging markets bubble? You could argue that, Thiel says, but he also notes that with half of the world’s population surging to modernity, it’s hard to argue the emerging world is overvalued.
Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.
Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.
Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.
Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. Bush decree that student loan debt is the one thing you can’t wriggle away from by declaring personal bankruptcy, says Thiel. “It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage,” he says. “You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.”
But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”
And that ripples down to other private colleges and universities. At an event two weeks ago, I met Geoffrey Canada, one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” He talked about a college he advises that argued they couldn’t possible cut their fees for the simple reason that people would deem them to be less-prestigious.
Thiel is the first to admit some of this promised security is true. He himself grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class household and went to Stanford and Stanford Law School. He certainly reaped advantages, like friendships with frequent collaborators and co-investors Keith Rabois and Reid Hoffman. Today he ranks on Forbes billionaire list and has a huge house in San Francisco with a butler. How much of that was him and how much of that was Stanford? He doesn’t know. No one does.
But, he argues, that doesn’t mean it’s not an uncomfortable elitist dynamic that we should try to change. He compares it to a world in which everyone was buying guns to stay safe. Maybe they do need them. But maybe they should also examine some of the reasons life is so dangerous and try to solve those too.
Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.
Two weeks ago, Thiel quietly invited 45 finalists to San Francisco for interviews. Everyone who was invited attended– no hysterical parents in sight. Thiel and crew have started to winnow the finalists down to the final 20. They’ll be announced in the next few weeks.
While a controversial program for many in the press, plenty of students, their parents and people in tech have been wildly supportive. Thiel received more than 400 applications and most were from very high-end schools, including about seventeen applicants from Stanford. And more than 100 people in his network have signed up to be mentors to them.
Thiel thinks there’s been a sea-change in the last three years, as debt has mounted and the economy has faltered. “This wouldn’t have been feasible in 2007,” he says. “Parents see kids moving back home after college and they’re thinking, ‘Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.’ We got surprisingly little pushback from parents.” Thiel notes a handful of students told him that whether they were selected or not, they were leaving school to start a company. Many more built tight relationships with competing applicants during the brief Silicon Valley retreat– a sort of support group of like-minded restless students.
Of course, if the problem Thiel sees with the higher education bubble is elitism, why were so many of the invitees Ivy League kids? Where were the smart inner-city kids let down by economic blight and a failing education system of a city like Detroit; the kids who need to be lifted up the most? Thiel notes it wasn’t all elites. Many of the applicants came from other countries, some from remote villages in emerging markets.
But the program has a clear bias towards talent, and like it or not, talent tends to be found in private universities. Besides, he’s not advocating that stopping out of school is for everyone any more than he’s arguing everyone should be an entrepreneur. But to start a new aspirational example– an alternative path– it makes sense to start with the people who have all the options. “Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else,” Thiel says. “We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top.”
That hints at another interesting distinction between the housing bubble and the education bubble: Class. The housing bubble was mostly a middle-class phenomenon. Even as much of the nation was wrapped up in it, there was a counter narrative on programs like CNBC and in papers like the Wall Street Journal pooh-poohing the dumb people buying all those condos in Florida. But with education, there’s barely any counter-narrative at all, because it is rooted in the most elite echelons of the upper class.
Thiel assumes this is why his relatively modest plan to get 20 kids to stop out of school for a few years is so threatening to a lot of the people who have the biggest megaphones to scream about it. “The people who are the most critical of this program are the ones who are most complacent with where the country is right now,” he says.
Companies: The Founders Fund, Geni, Buddy Media, Powerset, OpTrip, Clarium Capital, Facebook, Bildaburg, Palantir Technologies, Asana, Confinity, YouAre.TV, Rypple, Halcyon Molecular, CapLinked, and more Peter is Clarium Capital’s President and the Chairman of the firm’s investment committee, which oversees the firm’s research, investment, and trading strategies. He is… Learn More
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10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do On Your iPad: Apple News, Tips and Reviews «
What is usually the first thing everyone that gets a new iPad wants to know? Which apps to get. But there are still some cool things that you can do with your iPad, even without buying a single app. I’m not talking about well-known features like Multitasking, Folders, Airplay, Airprint, or even the new HD Mirroring capability of the iPad 2. Instead, here are ten, hidden in plain sight, secret features of the iPad 2. You maybe aware of one or two, but let’s see if you knew about all ten.
Access Your iTunes Library Remotely
There are several ways you can access your media collection from your iPad. The first and easiest is to sync your library from iTunes. However, if you have enabled Home Sharing in iTunes on your Mac, you can also access your entire iTunes Library on your Mac while connected to the same Wi-Fi network. To access your Home Sharing library from the iPad you need to click on the Library tab in the iPod app. From here you select the iTunes Library you want to access (make sure you have Home Sharing turned on in iTunes on the computers you want to share from). Unfortunately it is an either/or situation. You cannot browse both your locally synced library as well as your remotely accessed library.
Capture Your Screen to Your Photo Library
This can come in handy if you want to send someone a screen shot of your latest high score, weather forecast, map directions, or preserve a crazy moment from a FaceTime chat. To take a screen shot, simply hold down both the Home and Sleep button at the same time. The screen should flash white and a shutter sound should be audible. An image of your screen will be saved to your Photo Library on the iPad. Use the Photos app on the iPad to review the screen shot you have taken.
Scroll to the Top of a Web Page
You will often find yourself reading through an article on a particular web site, and once complete, you want to get back to the top of the web page. Simply tap once on the top of the screen near the status bar and the page will automatically scroll back to the top. This works in many apps, too, like when you want to get to the top of your Twitter stream, for instance.
Find Text Anywhere On Web Page
When typing in a search term in Safari, notice the section titled “On This Page” towards the bottom of the search suggestions. Clicking on terms in this section will search only within the page. There is even a count of how many matches there are on the web page for that particular search term. By clicking on the search term in this section, a search bar will appear at the bottom of the screen with a “Next” and “Done” button. Unfortunately there is no previous button, but the search will cycle back to the first result after you click through the last available instance.
Join Wi-Fi Networks Without Asking
When roaming around town, I do not like it when my iPad asks me if I want to join some rogue network that happens to be nearby. Instead, I want my iPad to to remember and automatically join only the networks that I have specifically logged on to in the past. To accomplish this , simply switch off the “Ask to Join Networks” feature in the Wi-Fi section in the Settings App. The iPad will still automatically join any network you have joined previously, and you will still be able to manually add any new network configuration you may need moving forward.
Secret Keyboard Keys
With a virtual keyboard, each key may be more than it first appears. Simply press and hold certain keys on each keyboard and additional keys will appear. For instance, when entering a URL or email address, press and hold the .com key and you will be presented with .net, .org, .us and .edu optional keys (and other options depending on your country of residence). Press and hold any letter of the alphabet to reveal other languages variations of the same letter. This works with alternate punctuation as well. Press and hold the dash key to reveal the bullet and long dash keys. And if you are looking to enable the Emoji keyboard on the iPhone or iPad, check out the free Emoji app in the App Store.
Play Podcasts at Double Speed
As much as I like listening to Leo Laporte on TwiT, there are certainly times when I need to get through his shows a little faster as I am convinced that Leo has found some way to record more than twenty-four hours of audio in a given day. To that end, when listening to audio podcasts, you can click on the 1x and 2x buttons to speed up the audio playback to twice the speed, or slow it back down the normal speed. This only works in the iPod app, not when playing Podcasts directly from within iTunes, and not when playing podcasts from within the Remote app.
View PDFs Out Of The Box
Looking for a good app for reading PDFs on the iPad? Look no further than Apple’s own iBooks. To add PDFs to your iPad, simply connect the iPad to iTunes on your Mac and drag and drop PDFs directly from the Finder Application in OS X onto the connected iPad in iTunes on OS X. This is probably the quickest and easiest way that I have seen to get PDFs onto the iPad without having to sync or access the cloud through third party apps like iDisk, Dropbox or GoodReader. Alternatively, if you have PDF files as attachments in your e-mail, you can click and hold on the PDF which will allow you to open the PDF in iBooks. You can even use collections to manage your iBooks PDF library on the iPad.
Watch Feature Length Movies From SD Card
This feature requires the use of the iPad Camera Connection Kit and an SD Card. While you cannot play the movie files directly off of the SD card, you can import the movie files from the SD card onto the iPad and watch them in the Photos application. Make sure that you have two nested folders on the SD card labeled /DCIM/100VIDEO. Place all of your video files in this folder. Make sure that the movie format is compatible with the iPad. You may need to delete movies you have already watched, and you will not be able to see the name of the file itself in the Photos app. This is just one of seven additional features you get with iPad’s Camera Connection kit.
Enable Multitasking Gestures
When Apple released Xcode 4 to the Mac App Store, it also exposed the ability for anyone to enable the multitasking gestures on the iPad. Once enabled, you can use five fingers to swipe up and down to reveal the multitask bar, left and right to navigate through open Apps on the multitasking bar. You can also perform a five finger pinch to close the App you are in and return to the home screen. To enable multitasking gestures, you must first purchase Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store ($4.99) or simply download it from the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) if you are already a member. Then launch Xcode 4 and select the Organizer tool from the Window menu (or click Shift+Command+2). Attach the iPad to your Mac and click on the enable development button. Log on the the ADC and click through the error messages if they are presented. Finally, on the iPad go to the General setting in the Settings App and you will notice a new setting near the bottom labels “Multitasking Gestures”.
So there you have it. Ten features of the iPad that you may not have known you had before. Just because you want to do something you feel is unique on the iPad, your first recourse might not be the App Store. You may already be able to do exactly what you want with what you already have.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Awesome advice from Gigaom.com.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
The iPad Has Broken My Brain; OS X Lion Will Help Fix It
This past weekend, I went on a trip and did the unthinkable — I didn’t turn on my computer. Not even once. Okay, that’s sort of misleading. While I didn’t turn on my computer, I did use my iPad. Extensively. But I still fully expected to get the urge to turn on my computer as well. And I never did.
That itself isn’t that remarkable; I’m sure a lot of iPad users have experienced the same thing by now. What is a little remarkable it is that I’m a heavy, heavy computer user. As in pretty much every hour I’m awake. And I used to think the iPad could never fully break me of that. Future generations? Sure. But not me. Now I’m starting to sway the other way.
On a deeper level, I’m realizing something else: the iPad (and iPhone) is changing the fundamentals of computing for me.
Since I’ve been back from my trip, I’ve started using my traditional computers extensively again because I have to for work. (There’s still no denying that a laptop or desktop are far better for typing than an iPad.) But I’m finding myself continually confused when I go to use the trackpad. I swipe my fingers up expecting a page to scroll down and yet it doesn’t.
I’m trying to interact with a Mac as if it’s an iPad.
It’s actually pretty frustrating. I keep doing it. It’s like my brain is locked in. I’m someone who has had an iPad for a year, but I’ve never used it for days in a row without touching a computer like I just did this weekend. And it seems to have re-wired my brain.
The good news is that help is on the way. OS X Lion, the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system launching this summer, actually reverses the scrolling mechanism. This means that when you swipe two fingers up on a long web page, it goes down, and vice versa. Again, it’s like the iPad/iPhone, not the way it has been on the Mac.
Among developers who are testing OS X Lion right now, this switch is driving some of them absolutely nuts (though it apparently is changeable in the settings). That’s understandable, it’s changing something we’ve all gotten used to over the years. It’s also may seem a bit odd because you’re not directly manipulating a screen as you are on the iPad/iPhone.
I’m in the opposite camp. I think Apple is genius for making this switch. Why? Because eventually most people that use Macs will have come to the systems by way of iOS devices. And they’ll be going through exactly what I’m going through now — only it will be much worse.
OS X Lion represents a transition. We’re moving from the “point & click” to the “flick & swipe”, as I’ve previously written about. But I’m not sure I realized just how big of a change some of these interactions would be at the time. They’re big and important because computing as we know it is changing.
And this matters not only to the next generations of computer users, but also to current computers users. There will be backlash to some of these changes — hell, there already has been. As much as people love the idea of future technology, they hate change. And that’s especially true if something is so ingrained that it requires a re-wiring of your brain.
But if my experience is any proof, that re-wiring is a lot simpler than it would seem to be. It’s not just the trackpad issue, I also find myself constantly trying to touch my MacBook screen after using the iPad for an extended period of time. These are more natural methods of computing. It’s the way it should be. It’s the way it should have always been. The technology just wasn’t there yet.
Now it is.
[photo: flickr/open exhibits]
Website: apple.com Location: Cupertino, California, United States Founded: April 1, 1976 IPO: 1980 Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple… Learn More
Company: Apple Website: apple.com/ipad The iPad 2 which will launch in March 2011. It is one third thinner than the original ipad, has a front and rear camera and is 2 x faster than the original. Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
This is the real beginning of the revolution for desktop computing....
Make mine a 007...Recipes
Most of us can’t live the 007 lifestyle, due to factors like jealous spouses, too many doughnuts, and a very real lack of casino chips. But don’t despair...we’ve all got a licence to swill. Get a taste of the good life with these authentic drink recipes. Cheers!
| Drinks from the Novels | Drinks from the Films | Heroes and Villains |
| Bond-inspired Drinks | 007’s Hangover Cure | A Shot of Humor |Authentic 007 Drinks from the Novels:
The Vesper
(from Casino Royale)
- Three measures of Gordon’s gin
- One measure of vodka (preferably a Russian grain vodka)
- Half a measure of Lillet Blanc
Shake very well until ice-cold. Pour in a deep champagne goblet, and add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.
Americano
(from Casino Royale and “From a View to a Kill”; Bond’s first-ever drink)
- 1 oz. Campari
- 1 oz. Cinzano Rosso
- Perrier (because expensive soda water is the cheapest way to improve a poor drink)
Put ice in an old-fashioned glass. Add the Campari and Cinzano, then pour in a splash of soda water. Add a large slice of lemon-peel.
Old Fashioned
(from Live and Let Die)
- 2 oz. bourbon
- 1 tsp sugar, or 1 sugar cube
- splash of water
- two dashes Angostura® bitters
- orange slice
- maraschino cherry
Muddle the sugar, water, and bitters in the bottom of an old-fashioned glass. Add the orange and cherry. Fill the glass with ice, add the bourbon and stir.
Black Velvet
(from Diamonds Are Forever)
- 1 part Guinness Stout
- 1 part chilled champagne (preferably Taittinger)
Add the Guinness to a pint glass, and pour the champagne on top.
Stinger
(from Diamonds Are Forever; the signature drink of Ian Fleming’s buddy Evelyn Waugh)
- 1½ oz. Brandy
- ½ oz. White Crème de Menthe
Shake ingredients with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.
Negroni
(from “Risico”)
- 1 oz. gin (Bond asked for Gordon’s)
- 1 oz. sweet vermouth
- 1 oz. Campari
- orange slice
Shake ingredients with ice, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add the orange slice.
Pink Gin
(from The Man with the Golden Gun; favorite of Ian Fleming)
- 2 oz. gin
- two to four dashes of Angostura® bitters
Shake ingredients with ice, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Can also be served on the rocks.
Authentic 007 Drinks from the Films:
Medium-Dry Vodka Martini
(from Dr. No)
- 2 oz. vodka
- ½ oz. measure dry vermouth
Shake well with ice and pour into a martini glass. Add a thin slice of lemon peel.
Mint Julep
(from Goldfinger)
- 2½ oz. bourbon
- 4–6 sprigs fresh mint
- 1 tsp powdered sugar
- 2 tsp water
In a julep cup, muddle the mint leaves, sugar and water. Fill the glass with crushed ice and add bourbon. Top with more ice and a mint sprig.
Rum Collins
(from Thunderball)
- 2 oz. light rum
- juice of 1 lime
- 1 tsp powdered sugar
- club soda
- orange slice
Shake rum, lime juice and sugar with ice. Strain into a collins glass, over ice cubes. Fill with club soda and stir. Add the slice of orange.
Sazerac
(from Live and Let Die)
- 1 tsp sugar or simple syrup
- 2 oz. rye whiskey
- 1 dash of Herbsaint or Pernod
- 2 dashes Peychaud bitters
- 1 twist lemon peel
Coat the inside of a chilled old-fashioned glass with Herbsaint, and then pour out most of the liqueur. In a mixing glass, blend the sugar or simple syrup with the bitters. Add the rye and the sugar mixture to the old-fashioned glass. Rub the lemon twist on the rim of the glass and serve.
Mojito
(from Die Another Day)
- 2 oz. light rum
- 1 oz. lime juice
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- fresh mint
- soda water
- lime slice
In a tall glass, muddle the mint leaves, sugar and lime juice. Fill the glass with ice, add rum and stir. Top with soda water, and garnish with lime slice and a mint sprig.
Felix Leiter’s Martini
(A definite gin man, he drinks them in Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and Thunderball)
- 2 oz. gin
- ½ oz. dry vermouth
Shake with ice and pour into a martini glass. Add a twist of lemon peel.
Brandy Alexander
(Used by Kristatos as a recognition signal in “Risico”)
- 1½ oz. brandy
- 1 oz. Dark Creme de Cacao
- 1 oz. cream or half-and-half
- grated nutmeg
Shake ingredients with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a sprinkle of nutmeg. The drink can also be made with White Creme de Cacao.
Bullshot
(Milton Krest has three of these in “The Hildebrand Rarity”)
- 1oz. vodka
- 4 oz. beef bouillon
- 2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
- dash of lemon juice
- Tabasco® sauce
- celery salt
- pepper
Shake vodka, bouillon, Worcestershire and lemon juice with ice. Pour into a glass, and add celery salt, pepper and Tabasco to taste.
Crème de Menthe Frappé
(The favorite drink of Emilio Largo in Thunderball; for this alone, he deserved to die)
- Crème de Menthe
- shaved ice
- maraschino cherry
Fill a cocktail or wine glass to the top with shaved ice. Add the Crème de Menthe, and put the cherry on top. Serve with a straw.
The 007 Cocktail
(Created as a promotional tie-in by Martini & Rossi during the Dalton era)
- 3 parts Martini & Rossi Extra Dry Vermouth
- 2 parts orange juice
- splash of grenadine
Serve shaken or stirred.
The 007 Classic Martini
(Created by Smirnoff as a promotional tie-in with Tomorrow Never Dies)
- 2 oz. Smirnoff vodka
- splash of Cinzano dry vermouth
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with two olives.
The Wai Lin Martini
(Created by Smirnoff as a promotional tie-in with Tomorrow Never Dies)
- 2 oz. Smirnoff vodka
- ¼ oz. cranberry juice
- ¼ oz. melon liqueur
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with lemon or lime twist.
The Moneypenny Martini
(Created by Smirnoff as a promotional tie-in with Tomorrow Never Dies)
- 1¼ oz. Smirnoff vodka
- ½ oz. raspberry liqueur
- ¼ oz. cranberry juice
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.
The Q Martini
(Created by Smirnoff as a promotional tie-in with Tomorrow Never Dies)
- 2 oz. Smirnoff vodka
- splash of blue curacao
- ¼ oz. lime juice
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.
The James Bond Perfect Martini
(Created by Finlandia as a promotional tie-in with Die Another Day)
- 2 parts Finlandia vodka
- a whisper of vermouth
Shaken, not stirred, until cold. Serve in frosted martini glass.
The GoldenEye Martini
(Version 1)
- 1 oz. Smirnoff vodka
- ½ oz. cognac
- ½ oz. amaretto
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange twist.
The GoldenEye Martini
(Version 2)
- 2½ oz. tequila
- ½ oz. Grand Marnier
- splash of Cointreau
- ½ oz. of Orange Juice
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange slice.
The Walther PPK
- 2½ oz. gin
- ½ oz. dry sherry
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an olive.
The ESB (or Ernst Stavro Blofeld)
(from Cypher’s Bar, Osaka, Japan)
- 2 oz. Polish vodka (preferably potato-based, like Chopin)
- 1 oz. sake
- 2 dashes of bitters
- 1 anchovy (or an anchovy-stuffed olive)
Shake the vodka, sake and bitters with ice. Pour in a martini glass, and garnish with the anchovy (or you can feed it to your pet cat).
The Goldfinger
(version 1, from San Antonio’s Swig, one of the world’s great martini bars)
- Gordon’s gin
- Noilly Prat vermouth
Shake with ice, and serve in a martini glass. Garnish with bocconcini marinated olives (stuffed with mozarella cheese).
The Goldfinger
(version 2)
- 1 oz. Goldschlager
- 1 oz. Amaretto
- Lemonade
Shake with ice, and serve in a highball glass on the rocks. Garnish with a twist of lemon.
The 007
(Thanks to J. Darlington)
- 2 oz. Orange vodka
- 2 oz. Orange juice
- 3 oz. 7-Up
Strain vodka over ice into a highball glass; add the orange juice and 7-Up.
The Minister’s Martini
(Not really Bond-related, but it is my site)
- 2 oz. Chopin vodka
- ½ oz. Stock vermouth
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Rub a lime twist once around the lip, and place it into the drink.
The Prairie Oyster
(In Thunderball, Bond admits to having one of these about once a week)
- 1 whole egg
- 1½ oz. brandy
- Dash of Worcestershire sauce
- Dash of Tabasco® sauce (optional)
Carefully crack the egg and place inside a highball glass (the yolk should be unbroken). Add the other ingredients. When drinking, the yolk should be swallowed whole. Warning: raw eggs may contain salmonella.
The Anagram
(Parody of the Vesper, from the Harvard Lampoon’s Alligator)
- 2 oz. Wolfschmidt’s vodka
- 2 oz. Beefeater’s gin
- ½ oz. Cointreau
- 1 oz. creme de menthe
- 1 oz. Bacardi light rum
- 1 dash of Angostura bitters
- Falernum syrup
- ½ cup of sugar
- lemon twist
The glass must be pre-chilled to 28° F. Add the vodka, gin and Cointreau to a large shaker. On the side, mix the creme de menthe, rum, bitters and Falernum (not going too heavy on the syrup). Add to the shaker along with the sugar and shake firmly. Pour the contents slowly into an old-fashioned glass containing not more than two cubes of ice per measure. Rub a twist of lemon once around the lip and place it into the drink.
More to come!
DJO - Happy in Paraguay
Not for work but very funny if you were a Star Trek Next Generation fan.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Bradley Manning case: British moral authority 'at risk' | World news | The Guardian
British diplomats will express with officials in Washington for a second time MPs' concerns about the treatment of a US soldier charged with leaking thousands of sensitive cables to WikiLeaks, the government has confirmed.
Foreign Office minister Henry Bellingham said staff at the British embassy in Washington would discuss Bradley Manning's detention with the US state department.
Bellingham made the promise after Labour MP Ann Clwyd raised the matter in parliament on Monday night.
Clwyd said Manning, who is charged with downloading 250,000 sensitive cables and passing them to WikiLeaks, had been stripped at night and held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
His treatment at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia made it more difficult for the US and Britain to campaign against human rights abuses in other countries, she said.
Clwyd, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on human rights, said that the UK's credibility was at risk in "places where human rights are not nearly so well observed."
She called on the government to offer practical support to the British relatives of Manning.
"I do not want us to get drawn into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the WikiLeaks revelations. I would like us now to concentrate on the current conditions of detention for Bradley Manning," Clwyd said at the adjournment debate speech.
"Manning's case is important because of the message it sends out to the rest of the world about what kind of treatment the United States thinks is acceptable for people in detention. And, for us, it is important what we say – or what we don't say.
"That matters in places where human rights are not nearly so well observed. People will pay attention in China and in Russia – and in Libya, where we want to be on the side of those fighting for freedom from state repression.
"And most of all in Afghanistan: it matters to those UK and US service personnel fighting in Afghanistan what kind of image Britain and the US have in the world."
Clwyd drew on her experiences during the seven years she spent as special envoy to Iraq on human rights.
"It is my view that some of the greatest damage was caused to British and American efforts in Iraq when the stories of prisoner abuse emerged," she said. "It undermined our moral authority when we needed to explain that we were fighting for a better future for Iraq.
"The United States – and the UK, in the way we respond to actions of the US – needs to preserve that moral authority if we are to have a positive impact on the world and lead by example."
Praising the Guardian's coverage of Manning's treatment in the US, Clwyd said she would be willing to visit the solider if his family asked her to.
"I have read the several accounts of Bradley's treatment which have appeared in the press. Some very good accounts have been in the Guardian, and from David Leigh in particular," she said.
But the account to which she has paid most attention is Bradley's own, in which he complains of "improper treatment" and "unlawful pre-trial punishment".
Clwyd is the only politician to have directly questioned the foreign secretary, William Hague, over the government's position on Manning.
She has sponsored an early day motion calling for the government to raise the case with the US administration. The motion is supported by 37 MPs, including co-sponsors Peter Bottomley, Jeremy Corbyn, Mark Durkan and Paul Flynn.
Hague has previously said the government has not intervened because Manning's lawyer has said the soldier "does not hold a UK passport, nor does he consider himself a UK citizen".
"Our standing on this matter is limited," Hague said during a parliamentary debate last month. "[Manning] is not asking for our help, nor considering himself British."
But Clwyd has called Hague's response a red herring. She points out that Manning's mother, Susan, is Welsh and lives in Pembrokeshire, where Manning lived between the ages of 13 and 17, and she points to calls from Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, for his client's detention status to be changed.
Manning's treatment in the military prison in Quantico, Virginia, "ignores the repeated recommendations of the marine corps' own appointed psychiatrists", Coombs has said. His treatment "serves no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade Bradley Manning. I regard it as cruel and unnecessary."
Human Rights Watch has called on the US government to "explain the precise reasons behind extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading treatment" that Manning alleges he has received.
Amnesty International has said "Manning is being subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This is particularly disturbing when one considers that he hasn't even been brought to trial, let alone convicted of a crime."
The UN special rapporteur on torture is understood to have raised his concerns with the US administration and is waiting for a response.
Clwyd quoted a recent column written for the Guardian by PJ Crowley, who resigned as spokesman for the US state department after criticising Manning's treatment, in which he repeated his conviction that it was "ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid".
Saturday, April 02, 2011
10 Things That Simply Need To Be In iOS 5
WWDC. It’s like Christmas for OS X and iOS developers. Each year, they flock to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, anxiously awaiting the pair of gifts that Apple annually bestows: the new iPhone, and a bundle of new features upon which they’ll build their next big thing.
If whispers and hearsay hold true, this year’s WWDC will only feature the latter; the iPhone 5, says the rumor mill, won’t be showing its face until Fall. Instead, this show is purportedly going to be all about iOS and OS X. While Apple doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty safe to assume that by “iOS” they mean “iOS 5″.
Given that we’re writing about iOS on a regular basis and talking about it with readers and friends even more, we’ve got a pretty finely-tuned wishlist for iOS 5. We also happen to know that a heaping handful of Apple folk read TechCrunch regularly — and with the feature lock stage of iOS 5′s development cycle (wherein they absolutely refuse to add anything new and just focus on what they’ve already started) presumably riiiight around the corner, we figured there was no better time than now to put it out there.
1) A Better Notifications System
We’ve brought this one up a billion times, but I’ll bring it up a billion more times if we have to. Compared to even the weakest competitors, iOS’ current notification system is absolutely friggin’ laughable. It was understandable, up to a point; back in the ol’ days before the App Store, the only notifications iOS really had to worry about were incoming text messages and the occasional alarm. Toss in a dozen third party apps all crying for your attention, though, and it becomes nigh-impossible to finish a single game of Tiny Wings without wanting to send your handset itself flying off a hill.
2) Free Turn-by-Turn Navigation
While the idea is likely one that scares the pants off of the likes of Telenav and Garmin, free turn-by-turn navigation on iOS is pretty much an inevitability. Back in October of 2009, Google turned the entire GPS market on its noggin by bringin’ free (not to mention, fantastically well built) turn-by-turn support to Android 2.0+ devices. Nearly a year and a half later, it’s still an easy argument to drop in any Android-vs-iPhone flamewar for massive damage.
Apple sort of backed themselves into a corner here. Google built the iOS Maps app, and they’re almost certainly not about to give up one of their platform’s finest, most easily pitched selling points by tacking in turn-by-turn. If Apple wants the voice guided goodness, they’ll likely have to build up a Maps app for their own — and with iOS users having grown accustomed to a Google-powered Maps for around 4 years and Apple having next to no experience in the area, they’ve got big ol’ shoes to fill. With all the recent chatter of Apple opening a $1 billion data center and hiring up Maps specialists, however, it looks like they plan on doing exactly that.
3) Custom Text Notification Sounds
Sometimes, when I’m bored enough to be wondering about hypothetical situations surrounding iOS in my off-work hours, I wonder if the absence of custom text alert sounds is a running joke amongst Apple’s iOS team. As in, I wonder if they’ve got a running list of features to build for iOS, with “Custom Text Sounds” hard-coded to always have the absolute lowest priority. Only once every other thing they’ve ever considered (including the built-in fart button and the hardware laser level) is checked off the list can they start working on custom alert sounds.
That has to be it. Otherwise, I simply can’t understand how this feature is still missing.
4) Proper Native Gmail Support
Back when it launched in 2004, its relatively monstrous storage allotment and Beta exclusivity made Gmail the “cool” e-mail service for the Geeky-but-not-too-geeky crowd. 7 years later, it still holds that label.
The crowd behind the iPhone — or any Apple product, really — is a strikingly similar one. OS X is for geeks (and the friends/relatives of geeks) who are geeky enough to want something beyond Windows but not geeky enough to swear their allegiance to Linux. iPhone is for geeks who want more out of their phone than what most offer, but don’t want to have to fight their phone to keep it working (Deep breath, Android users.) If you were to venn diagram out iOS users and Gmail users, I’d imagine the overlap would be pretty massive. And yet, iOS’ support for Gmail is pretty much bare bones.
You see, Gmail has a handful of features (like flagging, starring, labeling, and archiving for example) that really make the service worthwhile. Of those, only archiving is supported in iOS’ built-in Mail app — and even that has only been available since iOS 4. Android, meanwhile, offers Gmail support that rivals that found on the desktop. Whatever chunk of that cool-kid geek crowd Apple holds, it’s not one they want to lose.
5) Sideloading of Third-party Apps
Next to free turn-by-turn navigation, the ability to run just about anything you want on an Android phone (unless it’s an AT&T Android phone) is one of the easiest silver bullets to fire off in any iPhone-vs-Android nerd-war.
Apple’s shown time and time again that they’re willing to drop the App Store banhammer on any application that they deem offensive, or that dares use APIs that Apple reserves for their own use. And that’s fine: it’s their store, and they can moderate the content however they see fit. But when you’ve got the gall to lock down that store and make it the only way to get apps onto the device (especially when the other guy is saying “Hey, we’ll only let certain stuff on our store, but you can manually load whatever the heck you please!”), you become the bad guy.
At this point, loading otherwise unobtainable applications onto the device is one of the few remaining legitimate (read: not piracy) reasons to jailbreak. As exploit after exploit have proven, the jailbreakers will always find a way in. Rather than battling them, why not just make jailbreaking less enticing? Hide the option to enable sideloading away, and make them click through a dozen warnings. Is there some danger to letting users run whatever they want? Of course! But it’s more dangerous to leave them with running a bunch of tough-to-verify hacks as their only option.
6) Wireless Media Syncing:
The iPhone has WiFi. It has Bluetooth. It has 3G. It has so many means of connecting to other devices wirelessly that it’s almost ridiculous — and yet, transferring even a single song into the built-in music app requires a silly, chintzy cable.
With OS X Lion, Apple’s introducing a feature called “AirDrop” that allows you to drag and drop files to any other system in AirDrop mode. Hopefully, iOS 5 will get an AirDrop mode of its own. Tap a button (or launch an App) on the iPhone to drop into AirDrop mode, drag over the relevant media from your laptop, and away you go. No messy cable required.
7) Improved File Handling:
Once you’ve managed to get your files onto the device, iOS does all sorts of weird stuff to workaround the fact that there’s no real user-visible file system here. Want to put that photo you just took into an album? Nope. Want to attach a file after starting the e-mail? Nope!
8) Stop Wasting The Lockscreen
Jailbreak your iPhone, and your lockscreen can very well become one of your phone’s most important screens. See your latest e-mail at a glance! Scan blurps from your favorite RSS feeds! Check the weather forecast in an instant!
Don’t jailbreak your iPhone, and your lockscreen can show… erm, a clock.
By default, iOS’ lockscreen is pretty much just a means of keeping you from accidentally firing off garbled texts while the phone is in your pocket, with over 50% of the screen wasted. We get it: minimalism is cool. As the screenshot above (of the jailbreak-only modification, statusnotifier) show, things can be minimalist and useful.
9) NFC Support:
This isn’t so much an iOS thing as it is a hardware thing, and it’s still completely unclear whether or not the iPhone 5 will offer up NFC functionality.
With that said, NFC (the short range communication technology that will eventually allow us to pay retailers with a quick wave of our phones) is coming. With huge namesthrowing their weight behind the tech, this long promised pipe dream is closer than ever to becoming part of our daily lives.
The sooner that Apple jumps on the technology, the better. If Apple promises to support the technology — even if it’s just a promise to eventually support it — and to throw their army of iPhone users behind NFC, retailers will be that much more driven to adopt it quickly. Hardware manufacturers will be driven to add NFC to their own products, thereby driving down the cost for everyone. Developers will be able to build on the tech, taking things far beyond the standard tap-to-pay concept that everyone associates with it.
10) Automatic Content Syncing For Third Party Apps
It’s 3 A.M. Your iPad is plugged in. It’s on WiFi. It has more juice and bandwidth available to it than it will just about any other time.. and it’s doing absolutely nothing.
And yet, any time I open up an application that isn’t Mail — say, CNN, Instapaper, or an RSS reader — it has to sync all the way back to the last time the app was opened. Why make me wait when I do want to use my iPad, rather than doing the majority of syncing when I’m not using it?
There we have it — the top 10 things we’re hoping ‘ for in iOS 5. Think we missed anything? Drop us a comment and share what’s on your wishlist.
A very well thought out list. Very much worth reading.
