Yes, it’s a fishhook lodged painfully in my nose. But it’s an Apple fishhook, so the user experience is surprisingly pleasant.

Apple’s 2011 iPhone event is today. Wired has predictions.

Image: Rob Cottingham.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

Screencast from Adobe’s new ad campaign

It’s been a few weeks since Steve Jobs wrote his public broadside against Adobe generally and Flash in particular.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen countered via the Wall Street Journal, calling Apple’s technological objections to Flash “a smokescreen.”

What’s missing though is why this, why now? What’s going on that a tiff between two technology giants should become so public? Usually the war of words occurs between the fanboys on each side. Public words of attrition by respective CEO’s? Not so much.

The technologist Charles Stross provides good insight into the matter. Simply, he writes, Jobs is betting the Apple farm that the future is not just mobile, but handheld or tablet in general:

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. [emphasis his]

While Stross believes wired broadband is generally too expensive to improve leaps and bounds, wireless broadband isn’t and will. With 4G just around the corner and hardware becoming increasingly commoditized, Stross looks five years out to predict that the industry will be mostly mobile and mostly in the cloud. Control that cloud, or control the apps being served from it and your company has a business model. Don’t and, well, you had a nice run while it lasted.

This is where the Apple and Adobe hand to hand combat begins. It’s a turf war over the application portion of a cloud ecosystem each wishes to control.

Which brings us back to Adobe, and a new campaign that fires back at Jobs’ contention that the company creates closed, proprietary software incompatible with the future internet.

From the BBC:

Adobe has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing dispute with Apple.

The co-founders of Adobe have published an open letter in which they say that Apple threatens to “undermine the next chapter of the web”.

The software firm has also started an adverting blitz in newspapers and on popular technology news sites.

Ads like the one I captured in the video above are appearing online at sites like Wired and Techcrunch. Offline, they’re appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times among others.

The fun though is in the Any Letter You Can Write We Can Write Better department. Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock play on Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash to pen, Our Thoughts on Open Markets.

Apple, they write, is undermining “the next chapter of the Web” by keeping their app garden closed to third party development kits. Adobe, of course, creates just such kits with Flash and Flex.

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.

No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.

The issues here are many and the irony is that while both companies are closed and proprietary, each is trying to stake their claim to the open Internet that has brought us so far.

The opening salvos have been fired. We look forward to seeing the turf wars head next.

About Adobe Strikes Back

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Epic Battle Balakov via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Seems like just yesterday that Google and Microsoft began to lock horns over search. Now Apple might join the fray and try to develop and internal engine for mobile search.

Currently, Google is the default search application for the iPhone and now iPad. This wins the company a lot of extra cash. It also gives them discrete insight into what mobile searchers are looking for, all the better to improve their algorithms.

As eWeek reports:

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones. This competitive advantage has not gone unnoticed by Apple. Building its own iPhone-centric search engine would help Apple shield Google from its App Store data, Munster said in a March 30 research note.

Apple’s obviously aware of the competitive advantage they’re giving their onetime frenemy, and increasing adversary, but another five-year window is quite some time to recover from.

Apple did buy mobile ad network Quattro Wireless to give them a running start but has made no mention of what they plan to do with the company.

As Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said at the time of that reported $275 million purchase:

You can’t keep squeezing more and more service revenue out of consumers. You can only grow so fast that way. There is a belief on both parties’ part that there is an opportunity for big growth in revenue coming from mobile ad and they want to be there to take advantage of it.

Still, even with an ad network in place, creating successful search to pair it with is a difficult nut to crack. Just ask Cuil. Fortunately for Apple they have the market lead over Google in mobile devices.

The question is whether entering the search game will distract them from it.

About Will Google and Apple Do Battle Over Search?

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

The wired and wireless future of media and infotainment. tsevis via Creative Commons/Flickr.

The Internet became a blanket of white noise as we hit Saturday’s D-Day for the official iPad release.

Articles about people standing in line, videos of people opening the packaging, photos of smiley, happy people with their Jesus-ware safely in hand. And then half baked reviews of just about any app a writer could get his or her hands on. Forget it, people didn’t even need to have the iPad in hand, or have used the application, any string of words that won a few extra page views would do.

Live blogging the first day of sales? Really? The New York Times and Reuters joined by the likes Gizmodo, CNET, paidContent, Tech Crunch and TUAW.

8:59 — man pressed against Apple store door.
9:00 — doors open
9:02 — man holds Jesus pad in hands, squeals like a little boy getting cupcakes for breakfast

“I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff,” writes Cory Doctorow. We’ll get back to him in a minute.

Suffice to say though, the reporting’s mostly monotonous — and embarrassing for journalists who should know better — but lurking around the edges are a few thoughtful ideas about what the device actually means, and what the iPad and future products like it might signify for the computing and media world of the near future.

Copyright

Marc Aronson writes in the New York Times that the promise of truly multimedia, immersive nonfiction won’t make its way to devices such as these unless the copyright regime changes.

In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Unless we nonfiction writers are lucky and hit a public-domain mother lode, we have to pay for the right to use just about anything — from a single line of a song to any part of a poem; from the vast archives of the world’s art (now managed by gimlet-eyed venture capitalists) to the historical images that serve as profit centers for museums and academic libraries.

The amount we pay depends on where and how the material is used. In fact, the very first question a rights holder asks is “What are you going to do with my baby?” Which countries do you plan to sell in? What languages? Over what period of time? How large will the image be in your book?

As the publishing world latches onto the iPad as a possible industry savior — or at least a final bit of light in an otherwise gloomy economic reality — the urge will be to further restrict copyright.

Doing so will put most content out of reach of most multimedia authors.

“Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print, it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books,” writes Aronson. “After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated.”

Aronson’s solution is somewhat of a radio model. Pay the copyright holder some royalty per play.

Better would be to readdress our fair use laws and how best to shape them for a truly digital, multimedia age. Our current regime is not built for 21st century mashup culture. Instead, its built to protect 19th and 20th century business models.

Computer as Appliance

As I mentioned above, we’d get back to Doctorow. He wrote Friday about why he wouldn’t buy an iPad. More importantly, he wrote about why you shouldn’t either.

The crux of the matter — as many have pointed out — is that the iPad is for consuming rather than creating. The history of the open Internet, and the reason it’s been so disruptive is because anyone could create anything, stick it online and potentially shape an industry or create entirely new ones. Think YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Amazon, Blogs, eBay, Netflix and any other online service or application that’s upended the status quo over the last 10-15 years.

The iPad flips all this on its head and creates a walled garden appliance. Apple, not the iPad owner, has the final say about what applications can be created for and therefore used on it.

Imagine where the Web — or personal computing as whole — might be if anyone who wanted to create new content, try a new business model, create a new application or do anything of creative interest to him or her had to apply to some governing body in order to do so.

That is the digital dynamic the Apple has created with the iPad.

As Doctorow writes:

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology…

…As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.

Jonathan Zittrain wrote a book a few years ago called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. In it he dealt specifically with turning the open Internet into closed, proprietary systems. Appliances like the iPad would lead that way. Pick it up and give it a read when you have the chance.

So those are the two important stories that our journalists should be talking about.

Unfortunately, they’re getting drowned out in OMG fanboy squealing about yet another app.

About OMFG, Another iPad Story

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

SebaKito via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Why is HTML5 Important

Pete Spande, Federated Media.

With preorders for Apple’s iPad rolling into the company’s coffers the future of HTML5 and its native support of video is just about here.

Apple famously does not support Adobe’s Flash video technology on the iPhone or Touch, and will continue to ignore the Web’s most popular video delivery mechanism when people get their hands on the iPad in April.

The background for all this is long and colorful. It includes barbs traded between Apple and Adobe with Steve Jobs first calling Flash software “buggy” and later going on to say that Adobe itself is simply lazy.

Adobe, of course, quickly shot back with Flash marketing manager Adrian Ludwig writing on the company’s blog, “It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers… without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

This sniping occurred during the iPad launch and soon developers and technologists were sparring over — and dissecting — which side is right. There are some delicious ironies of course. Notably that Apple, which is famous for creating hyper-closed, proprietary systems, is pushing for the open platform that HTML5 promises: a platform where no one needs plugins or other proprietary technologies in order to view or interact with content.

HTML What?

For a somewhat technical grasp of the what HTML5 is, try this page from Dive Into HTML5, a book in progress by Mark Pilgrim.

While HTML5 is about much more than video, the native browser support it promises for Web video will have tremendous repercussions for publishers and consumers in the immediate future. Think VHS versus Betamax, BluRay versus HD DVD. Among others, Dailymotion and Vimeo have released HTML5 players and support. So too has YouTube, the site most responsible for turning Flash into the defacto Web video delivery platform in the first place.

Blip.tv is also working on an HTML5 solution.

“We have an HTML5 player in development that should be out soon,” says Justin Day, Blip Co-Founder and CTO. “Right now it’s more of an experiment than anything else. Because we don’t have integrations for advertising or for analytics it’s not all that useful. It does work pretty well with the iPhone/iPad though.”

The inability to serve ads in a world where publishers need cash flow immediately is, of course, a major impediment for adoption.

This May we’re doing a deep dive on HTML5 at Streaming Media East. Join us if you can.

“The biggest reason ad serving would be difficult would be the cross-domain restrictions that exist on the browser,” Day explains. “Flash can make calls on remote ad servers more easily than Javascript can. Not to say that it’s not possible, just more difficult.”

Another reason for slow adoption is the nature of video itself. When preparing video for Web delivery, producers need to decide which codec to compress them with. Leading varieties include h.264 (often used with Blip, Brightcove and YouTube among others), VP8 which was created by recent Google acquisition On2 Technologies, and Ogg Theora, a freely distributed (as in no licensing fees) video compression format.

That’s all well, good and bit confusing in and of itself. The rub though is that our leading HTML5 browsers don’t all support the same codecs. For example, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari support and can therefore play back h.264. Opera, Chrome and Firefox — true to its open source ethos — support Ogg Theora.

So HTML5 video producers need to decide which codec to use in order to target different browsers and platforms. This isn’t necessarily an easy task and some providers are keeping mum about how they’ll handle it.

“Support for HTML5 is just a TestTube experiment and a starting point,” YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale vaguely explains. “We can’t comment specifically on what codecs we intend to support, but we’re open to supporting more of them over time.”

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to see what Microsoft’s Internet Explorer might support. Since it controls much of the browser market, the company’s decision could be a game changer.

“Microsoft has not yet officially announced how they will support the video tag,” says Michael Dale, Senior Developer at Kaltura, the open source video platform. “But their support is likely and they have been participating in the HTML5 working group.”

Interesting Thoughts

John Gruber of Daring Fireball recently wrote, “I’ve been writing about this saga for two years. My fascination with the subject is fueled by the fact that it’s so polarizing, and that it encompasses both technical and political issues.”

Morgan Adams, an interactive Flash developer, thinks the whole debate is besides the point because Flash interface metaphors don’t make sense on touch screen devices anyway.

Dale believes HTML5 makes it easier to integrate web technologies with video and the company has been rolling out interesting HTML5 solutions through its work with Wikipedia. An example, he explains, is “using HTML text in subtitles so people can add links to Wikipedia articles when using closed captions in Wikipedia.”

Beyond that, the company is making an HTML5 Video library available for Web developers. Part of the solution is to push forward with HTML5 support while gracefully falling back to Flash when users without the proper browser hit a page set for video delivery.

“This lets you take advantage of HTML5 video today with existing browsers,” says Dale, “without having to worry about how playback is supported across the underlining platform or browser.”

Confused yet? There’s no reason you shouldn’t be.

With the release of the iPad and various articles asking whether the device will be publishing’s savior, much depends on the future of video delivery. Video, after all, has become the Web’s most lucrative ad delivery format and publishers are increasingly trying to create more of it for their audiences.

“While HTML5’s video tag offers promise that there might be a single unified standard for video playback, early signs point to more, not less, complexity in the years ahead,” says Dave Wegman, CTO and Co-Founder of Twistage, a white-label video delivery network. “The straightforward nature of the video tag itself belies the fact that it is implemented and supported differently in each of the major browsers.”

As demand for HTML5-based services grow, he says, publishers and consumers shouldn’t have to concern themselves with which browsers support which codecs.

“Put simply, he says, “the video tag is an implementation detail.”

If only, for publishers and consumers, it were so easy.

About What Does HTML5 Mean to Video Publishers?

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Related posts:

1. All Video All The Time
2. Content Delivery Network Pricing: The Going Rate for Video Delivery
3. Online Video vs ISPs: How Much is Too Much?

Google “iTablet” and you get a neat 634,000 results. Try the more generic “Mac Tablet” and you get 19 million more. It’s the type of hype money simply can’t buy. But borrow from the pre-release marketing strategies of movie studios and you can get it done.

Over on Mac Observer, former Apple Marketing Manager John Martellaro tells us how he used to do it: keep it quiet, keep it sneaky, no emails and maintain plausible deniability for both the company and the publication that’s leaking it.

The communication is always done in person or on the phone. Never via e-mail. That’s so that if there’s ever any dispute about what transpired, there’s no paper trail to contradict either party’s version of the story. Both sides can maintain plausible deniability and simply claim a misunderstanding. That protects Apple and the publication.

In the case of yesterday’s story, Walt Mossberg was bypassed so that Mr. Mossberg would remain above the fray, above reproach. Also, two journalists at the WSJ were involved. That way, each one could point the finger at the other and claim, “I thought he told me to run with this story! Sorry.”

Twitter’s currently in a huff that such things happen. The issue is that with wink and nudge, news organizations are in bed with Apple. It’s a legitimate gripe but more interesting right now is how Apple plants the viral seeds to create an absolute need for whatever product they are (or are not) rolling out at their January 26 event (if it’s happening at all).

The strategy is one we’ve seen used by the movie studios. Cloverfield comes to mind. The pre-release tidbits leaking across the Web created a feeding frenzy of early fans trying to piece together the plot. It became a giant viral treasure hunt that spread from movie sites to sports sites and beyond. Blair Witch accomplished the same remarkable feat over a decade ago.

The trick now is living up to the hype. Fans are amped. Critics are ready to pounce. The tablet has become a mythical creation worthy of a name (”iSlate”) and pseudo renderings created by publications to demonstrate what it would/could/should be.

After so much foreplay, the company has to deliver or the collective let down will suck the wind out of whatever it does for the rest of the year.

Related posts:

1. Jason Calacanis’ Rant Against Apple
2. Will Downturn Take a Bite out of Apple?
3. Apple Bows Before our Chinese Overlords

With the hype and hyperbole surrounding the start of tomorrow’s Macworld (DRM free iTunes, new Mac Mini’s, possible new product lines), the Onion hits it squarely on the head with this biting satire of the great Mac fetish.