iPad – Page 2 – Silverton Consulting

One iPad per Child (OipC)

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Ray in Distributed computing, Strategic Inflection Points

Starting thinking today that the iPad with some modifications could be used to provide universal computing and information services to the world’s poor as a One iPad per Child (OipC). Such a solution could easily replace the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that exists today with a more commercially viable product.

From my perspective only a few additions would make the current iPad ideal for universal OipC use. Specifically, I would suggest we add

Solar battery charger – perhaps the back could be replaced with a solar panel to charge the battery. Or maybe the front could be reconfigured to incorporate a solar charger underneath or within its touch panel screen.
Mesh WiFi – rather than being a standard WiFi target, it would be more useful for the OipC to support a mesh based WiFi system. Such a mesh WiFi could route internet request packets/data from one OipC to another, until a base station were encountered providing a broadband portal for the mesh.
Open source free applications – it would be nice if more open office applications were ported to the new OipC so that free office tools could be used to create content.
External storage – software support for NFS or CIFS over WiFi would allow for a more sophisticated computing environment and together with the mesh WiFi would allow a central storage repository for all activities.
Camera – for photos and video interaction/feedback.
iPad (from wikipedia.org)

Probably other changes needed but these will suffice for discussion purposes. With such a device and reasonable access to broadband, the world’s poor could easily have most of the information and computing capabilities of the richest nations. They would have access to the Internet and as such could participate in remote k-12 education as well as obtain free courseware from university internet sites. They would have access to online news, internet calling/instant messaging and free email services which could connect them to the rest of the world.

I believe most of the OipC hardware changes could be viable additions to the current iPad with the possible exception of the mesh WiFi. But there might be a way to make a mesh WiFi that is software configurable with only modest hardware changes (using software radio transcievers).

Using the current iPad

Of course, the present iPad without change could be used to support all this, if one were to add some external hardware/software:

An external solar panel charging system – multiple solar charging stations for car batteries exist today which are used in remote areas. If one were to wire up a cigarette lighter and purchase a car charger for the iPad this would suffice as a charging station. Perhaps such a system could be centralized in remote areas and people could pay a small fee to charge their iPads.
A remote WiFi hot spot – many ways to supply WiFi hot spots for rural areas. I heard at one time Ireland was providing broadband to rural areas by using local pubs as hot spots. Perhaps a local market could be wired/radio-connected to support village WiFi.
A camera – buy a cheap digital camera and the iPad camera connection kit. This lacks real time video streaming but it could provide just about everything else.
Apps and storag – software apps could be produced by anyone. Converting open office to work on an iPad doesn’t appear that daunting except for the desire to do it. Providing external iPad storage can be provided today via cloud storage applications. Supplying pure NFS or CIFS support as native iPad facilities that other apps could use would be more difficult but could be easily provided if there were a market.

The nice thing about the iPad is that it’s a monolithic, complete unit. Other than power there are minimal buttons/moving parts or external components present. Such simplified componentry should make it more easily usable in all sorts of environments. Not sure how rugged the current iPad is and how well it would work out in rural areas without shelter, but this could easily be gauged and changes made to improve it’s surviveability.

OipC costs

Having the mesh, solar charger, and camera all onboard the OipC would make this all easier to deploy but certainly not cheaper. The current 16GB iPad parts and labor come in around US$260 (from livescience). The additional parts to support the onboard camera, WiFi mesh and solar charger would drive costs up but perhaps not significantly. For example, adding the iPhone 3m pixel camera to the iPad might cost about US$10 and a 3gS transciever (WiFi mesh substitute) would cost an additional US$3 (both from theappleblog).

As for the solar panel battery charger, I have no idea, but a 10W standalone solar panel can be had from Amazon for $80. Granted it doesn’t include all the parts needed to convert power to something that the iPad can use and it’s big, 10″ by 17″. This is not optimal and would need to be cut in half (both physically and costwise) to better fit the OicP back or front panel.

Such a device might be a worthy successor to OLPC at the cost of roughly double that devices price of US$150 per laptop. Packaging all these capabilities in the OicP might bring some economies of scale that could potentially bring its price down some more.

Can the OipC replace the OLPC?

One obvious advantage that the OipC would have over the OLPC is that it was based on a commercial device. If one were to use the iPad as it exists today with the external hardware discussed above it would be a purely commercial device. As such, future applications should be more forthcoming, hardware advances should be automatically incorporated in the latest products, and a commercial market would exist to supply and support the products. All this should result in better, more current software and hardware technology being deployed to 3rd world users.

Some disadvantages for the OipC vs. the OLPC include lack of a physical keyboard, open source operating system and access to all open source software, and usb ports. Of course all the software and courseware specifically designed for the OLPC would also not work on the OipC. The open sourced O/S and the USB are probably the most serious omissions. iPad has a number of external keyboard options which can be purchased if needed.

Now as to how to supply broadband to rural hot spots around the 3rd world, we must leave this for a future post…

64GB iPad is not enough

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Ray in Data, Data growth

I currently don’t have an iPad but I have seen the videos and played with one at the local BestBuy but IMHO, 64GB is not enough for a laptop killer. My current desktop TAR file backup of documents, pictures and music is ~61.5GB and shows signs of cracking the 64GB barrier sometime next quarter alone. Of course that’s compressed and doesn’t count the myriad of applications and O/S that’s needed for a desktop/laptop replacement.

I have a similar problem on my 8GB iPhone. I occasionally tweak the photos and music iTunes sync parameters to be able to get the latest photos or genius mix I want. But the iPhone (bless its heart) is not a laptop killer.

The iPad has both streaming video and non-streaming video available from iTunes. A quick look at download sizes for video’s on iTunes shows that the relatively recent “Blind Side” takes up about 1.8GB. Download a dozen movies and your over one third full without any photos, music or O/S & applications. Start loading up your vast photo library and music collection and you’ll be running out of iPad storage quickly.

But that’s just for fun. What about adding all the other Pages|Numbers|Keynote|PDF|Office documents you need just to work and it just can’t hold it all. I would say this doesn’t take up as much storage as the media stuff but maybe 10% of my backup data is office work.

Not sure how you even move data to the iPad on a project basis but I assume there is a way to download these files (iTunes Pages|Numbers|Keynote sync option page?) I suppose worst case they could be emailed. In any event, the iPad laptop killer needs to be able to work with data that’s created elsewhere.

If one runs out of iPad storage, what’s can one do?

Put your self on a [media&work] information diet and cut back. Maybe only the top 100 genius playlists, the 3-4-5 stars photos, the latest half dozen movie purchases and only load data for the most current/active projects to the iPad. Whatever you do, how much iPad storage to devote to fun (media) versus office (work) could be flexible, managed in real time on a daily/trip sync basis.

Now if your only using your iPad only for fun this may not be as much of a problem. But keep in mind, all those videos add up quickly. Given all this, I guess I’m waiting for a 256GB iPad before I get one.

Future iBook pricing

Posted on February 5, 2010February 5, 2010 by Ray in Business economics, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points

All the news about iPad and iBooks app got me thinking. There’s been much discussion on e-book pricing but no one is looking at what to charge for items other than books. I look at this as something like what happened to albums when iTunes came out. Individual songs were now available without having to buy the whole album.

As such, I started to consider what iBooks should charge for items outside of books. Specifically,

Poems – no reason the iBooks app should not offer poems as well as books but what’s a reasonable price for a poem. I believe Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within used to charge $0.25 per poem. So this is a useful lower bound, however considering inflation (and assuming $0.25 was 1976 pricing), in today’s prices this would be closer to $1.66. With iBooks app’s published commission rate (33% for Apple) future poets would walk away with $1.11 per poem.
Haiku – As a short form poem I would argue that a Haiku should cost less than a poem. So, maybe $0.99 per haiku,would be a reasonable price.
Short stories – As a short form book pricing for short stories needs to be somehow proportional to normal e-book pricing. A typical book has about 10 chapters and as such, it might be reasonable to consider a short story as equal to a chapter. So maybe 1/10th the price of an e-book is reasonable. With the prices being discussed for books this would be roughly the price we set for poems. No doubt incurring the wrath of poets forevermore, I am willing to say this undercuts the worth of short stories and would suggest something more on the order of $2.49 for a short story. (Poets please forgive my transgression.)
Comic books – Comic books seem close to short stories and with their color graphics would do well on the iPad. It seems to me that these might be priced somewhere in between short stories and poems, perhaps at $1.99 each.
Magazine articles – I see no reason that magazine articles shouldn’t be offered as well as short stories outside the magazine itself. Once again, color graphics found in most high end magazines should do well on the iPad. I would assume pricing similar to short stories would make sense here.

University presses, the prime outlet for short stories today, seem similar to small record labels. Of course, the iBooks app could easily offer to sell their production as e-books in addition to selling their stories separately. Similar considerations apply to poetry publishers. Selling poems and short stories outside of book form might provide more exposure for the authors/poets and in the long run, more revenue for them and their publishers. But record companies will attest that your results may vary.

Regarding magazine articles and comic books there seems to be a dependance on advertising revenue that may suffer from iBook publishing. This could be dealt with by incorporating publisher advertisements in iBook displays of an article or comic book. However, significant advertisement revenue comes from ads placed outside of articles, such as in back matter, around the table of contents, in-between articles, etc. This will need to change with the transition to e-articles – revenues may suffer.

Nonetheless, all these industries can continue to do what they do today. Record companies still exist, perhaps not doing as well as before iTunes, but they still sell CDs. So there is life after iTunes/iBooks, but one things for certain – it’s different.

Probably missing whole categories of items that could be separated from book form as sold today, But in my view, anything that could be offered separately probably will be. Comments?