Apple today proved the naysayers wrong, announcing that it had sold 2 million iPads in less than 2 months.

In fact, Apple is still struggling to keep up for demand.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

The iPad’s success is especially amazing considering that most tech analysts were were unenthused by the device when it was announced, dismissing it as a “big iPod touch”.

Why did analysts get the Apple iPad so wrong?

Here are a few reasons:

• Apple didn’t design the iPad for tech geeks. Tech analysts wanted Apple to check off everything on the geek’s checklist when designing the iPad – giving it more power, more connectivity, more openness. Apple took the opposite approach, refining the iPad’s capabilities and focusing on the things that it had to do well. When it was released, tech analysts didn’t get this, but customers did.
• Apple carefully optimized the iPad’s operating system – tech analysts got tripped up by the iPad’s relatively modest hardware specs and missed the fact that the iPad feels really fast.
• Time moves on – tech analysts were disappointed by the iPad’s lack of a USB connection, lack of memory expansion slot, the missing parallel port and floppy drive. Buyers just understood that the iPad connects to the Internet.
• Flash is actually sort of dead – tech analysts can’t get over Apple’s decision to skip Flash on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. They keep thinking that Adobe is finally going to optimize Flash and get it working on mobile devices.  They keep thinking that people are going to figure out how much they need Flash. Meanwhile, Apple is selling 10+ million Flash-free mobile Internet devices a quarter. It’s time to get over Flash.
• Those “iPad” jokes really weren’t very funny – some people got hung up on the “iPad” name. Because – get this – it had the word “pad” in it. Like those sanitary napkins. Get it?
• Normal people do want freedom from spam, viruses and even porn. Analysts have mocked Apple’s app review process and it’s refusal to allow adult applications into the App store. Normal people, though, are sick of spam, sick of pop-ups and sick of getting viruses on their PCs. And they don’t need porn apps, because the Internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet of porn.
• Buyers think that the iPad really is “magical and revolutionary”. Go into the mall Apple store on a Tuesday afternoon, and you’ll find the place is packed with people checking out the iPhones and iPads. Why? Because holding the Internet in your hand is magical and revolutionary. Because getting your pick of 200,000 apps and never having to figure out how to install them is magical and revolutionary. Because having your iPad automatically backed up is magical and revolutionary. And because paying $500 for a computer that doesn’t suck is magical and revolutionary.

With the iPad, Apple has prove tech analysts wrong, establishing a new computing platform in the process.

What do you think of Apple’s milestone? And why do you think it’s succeeding when so many thought it would fail?

Ever since the Apple iPad was announced, I’ve waited to see if magazines and newspapers would come up with a meaningful response.

News organizations have come up with some interesting iPad apps – especially the BBC and NPR apps. But magazine apps have either been missing in action or underwhelming.

Now Wired reports that they’ve sold 24,000 copies of their first iPad formated issue. That’s fantastic for a $5 issue – but instead of the next big thing, it’s looking a lot like the last hurrah for magazines.

Here’s why.

Five Reasons Wired’s iPad App Is A Dead End:

1. Geeks bought it, but nobody else will. The surge of sales for the Wired issue app are more a reflection of the magazines’ first-adopter audience than people embracing a new technology. There are a lot of iPad owners that have the money to try out new technologies – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those technologies have a future.
2. The Wired iPad app is way too big. The digital magazine issue is a 5oo megabytes download. WTF? That’s because it’s basically a big bunch of graphic files. 500 MB means that you’re not going to buy this from your iPad and that you’re not going to keep it.
3. The Wired iPad app is like a CD-Rom, instead of the Internet. In other words, the social networking stuff you can do if you browse Wired.com – commenting on it, twittering about it, liking it on Facebook, emailing links to it, quoting chunks of text, etc – is missing in action.
4. The Wired iPad app out of date. They just updated the website – now – but you’re not going to update that 500 MB download too many times.
5. It’s a bunch of big graphic files. Did I mention that it’s a bunch of big graphic files? That means that the designers valued their layouts more than your ability to do things like resize the text or – imagine this – support text to speech for the visually impaired.

The Wired iPad app is like the sequels to popular movies – they might be easy money, but they’re usually crappy and people eventually figure it out.

Fortunately for Wired, their initial issue is a big enough success that they’ll have an opportunity to tweak their approach.

If they want this to be around in a year, they need to figure out what the real benefits of a magazine app are.

The one big advantage a magazine app offers is fast browsing, even when disconnected. A great iPad magazine app would give you the interactivity and timeliness of the Web, but would also degrade gracefully when you were disconnected.

Beyond that, the potential for new types of interactivity, which the app currently teases you with, is definitely there.

What do you think? Is there a future for big magazine apps?

Apple announced today that you can now self-publish iBooks to the iBookstore.

Here are Apple’s requirements for publishing an Apple iBook:

Technical Requirements:

• An Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5 or later
• At least 1 GB RAM
• QuickTime 7.0.3 or later. This is so you can encode and deliver content using our dedicated software.
• At least 10 GB of available hard drive space (more for larger catalogs) is recommended.
• A broadband internet connection with an upload rate of 128 kbps or faster is recommended.

Book Content Requirements:

• ISBNs for all titles you intend to distribute
• You must be able to deliver your book content in EPUB format, passing EpubCheck 1.0.5.

Financial Requirements:

• A US Tax ID
• A valid iTunes Store account, with a credit card on file
• Apple does not pay partners until they meet payment requirements and earning thresholds in each territory. You should consider this before applying to work directly with Apple as you may receive payments faster by working with an Apple-approved aggregator.

Apple lets you sell your iBooks in multiple countries at the price that you set.

via MacLife

Podcasts are about to break into some new territory.

Commercial Radio Australia and Beijing Jolon Digital Media Broadcasting today announced plans to develop a DAB+ digital radio application that will allow podcasts to be sent via the broadcast band directly to a listener’s radio, without the need to connect to the Internet.

The technology, called Push Radio, will send an audio file directly to a DAB+ digital radio receiver via the airwaves, instead of requiring listeners to connect their iPod or mp3 player to the Internet or to sync via an Internet-connected computer.

The two organisations will set up a task force to test the current technical standards for DAB+ and DAB+ Push Radio and hope to have a trial of the system in Australia late in 2010.

“To free listeners from the necessity to connect to the Internet to receive podcasts and other specific information and targeted programming is a major step forward for DAB+ digital radio,” according to CRA’s Joan Warner.

“Push Radio will make a podcast even more accessible for all digital radio listeners.”

What do you think of CRA’s plan to deliver podcasts via digital radio? Is this the future of podcasting or the last hurrah for radio?

Image: A. Germain

WordPress developer Danilo Ercoli has announced WordPress for BlackBerry version 1.2, an update that adds mobilecasting features and more.

Here’s what’s new in version 1.2:

• Ability to show comprehensive site stats for WordPress.com sites and for self-hosted sites running the WP.com stats plugin
• Ability to add audio recordings to a post/page
• Ability to post media files that are not tied to post/page
• Ability to add a signature on posts created from the mobile app
• “1- click” share to WordPress within the native BlackBerry Browser and File Explorer
• Improvements on GPS support
• Redesigned GUI with touch support
• Expanded multi-lingual support

The audio podcasting support and baked-in stats are great features. It’s also nice to see versions for various mobile platforms leap-frogging each other. It can’t be long before audio and video podcasting support is standard for WordPress apps across the leading mobile platforms.

Have you used WordPress for BlackBerry? If so – what do you think of the update?

Note: WordPress for BlackBerry requiress OS 4.2.1 or higher.

Internet video – content stored and distributed over an IP architecture — will eclipse the consumption of broadcast TV by 2020, according to research from The Diffusion Group (TDG).

According to TDG data, while the amount of time spent viewing TV has remained relatively stable, the amount of time consumers spent watching online video increased 84% between 2008 and 2009. When extrapolated across the entire TV-viewing population, the average time spent viewing online video in 2009 was 52% more than in 2008.

TDG expects that this rate of growth will actually increase during the next 5-7 years due primarily to the increased use of the television as the platform of choice for web video viewing.

“The total amount of time spent watching video from all sources, including PayTV and Internet video, will hold constant during the next 10 years at around 32 hours a week,” xccording to TDG’s Colin Dixon. “With online video usage accelerating, we expect the amount of Internet video watched to eclipse the amount of live broadcast TV around 2020.”