I learn so much from watching my kids work with technology. I learn about the future. Having kids is like living with your own personal crystal ball. I also learn a great deal about user interface and ease of use in tech products. My daughter, when she was just nine, picked up my iPhone and knew just what to do with it, no instruction needed. That’s when I knew it was a most amazingly built device. I think every technology company should have kids employed in their labs to do their user testing. If the 5 year old can master it, you’re ready to ship.

Tyler Gray realized the same thing and put it further to test with his iPad and his 5 year old son Cash. I’ve included the video in this post, and here also is a link to the original Fast Company article.

RedBox has been a massive hit without large stores because they put their vending machines where people already are, like the supermarket. No extra trip or hassle required. And at $1 a movie, Blockbuster doesn’t stand a chance. It’s interesting that Blockbuster has watched all this go on in the past few years but has not been able to do much of anything about it. They’ve experimented with a few things, but halfheartedly and they have been failures. Someone at corporate didn’t want to hurt the mainline retail business, which was really bad strategy because that business is dead now anyway and they have nothing to show for it.

Blockbuster has misread and misunderstood most every new business reality of the digital age. There CEO talks a good game but somehow I doubt they will have the boldness and smarts to actually do what it takes to catch up. The only thing they have going for themselves is a still strong brand name. If they can just find the guts to capitalize on it.

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There are indications now that Amazon may try to make a new Kindle with color and multi-touch technology, bringing it much closer to an iPad. I think it’s very dangerous for Amazon to rush headlong into a competition with Apple on their own turf. Maybe the smart play is to remain the dominant player in black and white e-ink technology and let Apple have the rest. Amazon’s strength has always been traditional black and white books, not magazines or comics. Here’s an even smarter play, make a full iPad version of the Kindle reader. Amazon needs to remember their focus, they are a bookstore not a hardware manufacturer. By making a great Kindle reader for the iPad, they stand to sell more books from their online bookstore, even possibly cutting into Apple’s store.

2010 will be THE year of the tablet computer as Sony has also said they want to enter this market. No doubt there will be others. 2010 could also be THE year traditional publishing makes the turn to digital distribution. People have been predicting the death of traditional publishing for years now. These new tablet machines go a long way to bringing that prediction to pass.

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I try not to spend my time chasing fireflies. I try to zoom in on business value. Could this be of use to any of my customers and if so, how? Because an application is “cool” or is even fun doesn’t mean it has business value. Time is precious and you should be careful not to invest too much time in things that are just not going to make it. Now that’s a tough call to make sometimes. After all, I didn’t think Twitter had any value when I first saw it. But that’s why my ear is always to the ground and my eyes are always open. When I saw Twitter continue to flourish, I jumped back in and went deep with it. I found the value. An open mind the flexibility are critical aspects of surviving in this new chaotic time.

Beware of bright shiny objects. Focus on real business value. Focus on your customers.

From as early as I can remember, I have been most passionate about three main things. Technology, media, and communications. Media and communications could be considered one in the same and they predate technology so let’s take that first. I love media, all kinds of media. Print, radio, tv, magazines, all of it. I was a big fan of the “zine” trend that I first connected with in the 80′s. Enabled by new technology like personal computers and the first laser printer, ordinary people started producing their own magazines, often about very niche topics and distributed them online and via small indie bookshops. Some people still used the even older school technology of manual paste up and copiers to produce zines. This was one of the first examples of regular people using technology to produce their own media for a specific audience. It was the beginning of the media disruption. I produced my own zine using Quark Express and Adobe Acrobat. It was digital only and was briefly distributed on a website of mine. I only did one issue but it was a fun experiment. What distracted me was the web. But I digress.

I also grew up a great lover of radio. In Los Angeles, I was fortunate to have some of the best radio personalities to listen to. This was also a time of greater creative freedom in radio before the industry started killing itself with computer programed playlists and robot dj’s. We had radio greats like Jim Ladd, Mary Turner and Frazer Smith. Sports radio legends like Chick Hern and Vin Scully were better to listen to than watch the tv broadcast. Finally, CBS Radio Mystery Theatre brought dramatic productions to light during the late night hours. I can’t count the number of nights I fell asleep listening to these stories.

I am old enough to remember life before cable tv. I very clearly remember the day we got cable installed. The man finished and there we were watching Australian rules football from Australia. It’s hard to describe how amazing that was. I was there to see firsthand when MTV was truly revolutionary.

Then, my friend’s mother brought home a Commodore PET computer from her school for us to play with on the weekends. This computer was so ancient that it used cassette tapes to load programs. But it had a great Monopoly game which we played all the time. Don’t let anyone tell you games are not a valuable experience. It was these early video games that fueled our continued interest in technology. It was a few months later that my personal tipping point happened. I convinced my parents to get me an Apple //e and I installed a modem into it. When I first dialed out on that modem and connected to my first old school BBS is when my life changed forever. I could connect on this computer. I could connect to people locally and around the world. I could connect to people with similar interests that I would never have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. I love people, I love discussion and interaction. This intersection of communication and technology is where my passion truly lives. I love any kind of gadget or gizmo that enhances our ability to connect and communicate. Obviously the web was a watershed event for me as has been the explosion of connected mobile technology.

These are the forces that lead me straight into the social media world. And so it made sense for me to form Connected World Media and make it my career. Another one of my passions is helping people understand technology better so I have made training a cornerstone of the business. I’ll be working harder on in person training and online screencast training videos as we near the end of this year. As always, I’d love to work with you or your company on social media strategy, training or media production. Don’t hesitate to contact me and we can talk about how I may be of service to you.

So, what is your passion? Are you pursuing it actively? It’s something worth spending time thinking about.

So the question we always want to answer here at Connected World Media, what does this mean to your business? It means the world of the big screen TV may be opening up for you. In the past there was virtually no way anybody but the largest businesses with the most money could get onto television. TV advertising is just too expensive for most businesses. But now, the TV is open to the Internet and services that nearly any business can participate in. Already there is opportunity with YouTube as Apple TV will show those videos. I can’t imagine it won’t be too long before the Vizio connected TV starts supporting YouTube and possibly other Internet video services. You could develop a Boxee application and gain access via that route. Bottom line, there are effective and inexpensive ways for your company, your brand to get onto peoples big screen TV’s. But don’t hit them with the same old garbage from your marketing department (sorry marketeers). You had better be engaging, relevant and entertaining.

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The app itself is very well done and after purchasing my first Kindle book, opening the app synced my purchase right over to the iPhone, easy as can be. The reading experience on the iPhone is surprisingly good. Of course it’s no match for a real Kindle with the larger screen and eInk technology, but I was perfectly happy with the experience. You can control font sizes, create book marks and the software remembers where you left off.

It’s a significant development because it effectively drives the price for a Kindle reader down to $199 from a regular Kindle price of $359. For people who already own the iPhone, which is far more people than the Kindle device, the app to add Kindle functionality is free. This is going to put Kindle books into far more hands far quicker than Amazon could do on it’s own. It will also likely sell more Kindle hardware as well as people want to upgrade to a better reading experience. As I said in the last podcast, Amazon is in the book sales business not the hardware business. This is a great first step and I can’t wait to see where else Kindle technology shows up.

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