1. Books in the App Store – Steve doesn’t like anyone making money that he can’t dip his fingers into.  With the success of the Kindle, the Sony, and Nook eBook readers it only makes sense.
2. It’ll run a modified iPhone OS – Because of the power of the app store, it just makes sense for the tablet to run the same operating system.  The biggest issue will be to see how they scale the graphics / applications.  I think we’ll finally see the ability to background apps or run multiple apps at a time like windows widgets.
3. Sensors – Its going to have all the same sensors as the iPhone, compass, GPS, and accelerometer.  This is critical to keep all the games from the app store alive
4. Front Facing Video Camera – With the form factor of the device its definitely not going to be made to take any pictures, but it makes sense to have a front facing video camera for iChat and Skype type activities.  We may have a new application that logs you in by your face since some are saying Steve only sees one tablet per family.  The camera can’t differentiate between twins so maybe not a feature.
5. New Health Care Focus – Most of my doctors already carry an iPhone or touch in the office to look up all their drug and treatment information.  The tablet gives them a better platform to read charts, view x-rays, etc. It should really revolutionize the health care industry.  I’m not seeing a major business play yet, but someone smarter than I will come up with some killer business apps…maybe some BI real time analytics applications.
6. Wifi and 3G – This will be their place to get away from AT&T, the Verizon network just makes sense here.  Verizon learned their lesson the first time around missing out on the iPhone boat and they won’t want to miss this one.  My guess is a $50 a month unlimited plan.
7. Storage – 32 and 64 GB options for the launch, they’ll release a 128 GB version in 6-12 months.
8. Remote control interface – The tablet will be able to remotely control all the Apple devices in your house.  Whether its the Apple TV, Airport, or iTunes, you’ll be able to remotely control it like the Sonos controllers.

All of these features seem pretty obvious to me, nothing truly ground breaking.  We’ve been talking about this a lot lately and they really need a killer application to marry with it. There are two pieces that will make this a killer device. The first is cloud based storage for all your media. Using cloud based storage should be a no brainer for Apple. Their purchase of LaLa last year adds to this theory.  They sell one copy of a song thousands of times over and all they need to do is set an ACL on the server side. This way you can access your music where ever you are on the go and Apple provides your backup solution. This would finally make their MobileMe service useful to consumers. The only problem with this I can see is how to you share your collection with your family easily, the latest iTunes versions are starting to address this but their current model of signing one central account into multiple machines isn’t a longer term viable solution. With this we will see a 100% browser based version of the App Store where you can purchase directly online without having to open up clunky iTunes.
Cloud storage is the first step, but what I really see as making the tablet a killer device is what I’m calling MediaSync for lack of a better term. Imagine linking all your devices together, your iPod/iPhone, laptop, iSlate and Apple TV. Apple through their cloud service manages all the media between the devices and based on your usage patterns automatically loads the device with your most utilized media. Much of the math behind this they’ve been figuring out with Genius already.  With the iPhone over WiFi you can stream anything that isn’t stored locally in your collection. So now you’re sitting at home with your tablet on your lap with the TV running in the background, tell your wife “Hey, check out this YouTube video”, flip on your Apple TV and now you’re playing it live in your living room for your wife. You get up from the office and start a podcast on your iPhone listening all the way home. Pause it as you pull in the driveway, turn on the Apple TV and continue to listen in the exact place you left off in the car. Your wife gets home and wants to watch last nights Grey’s Anatomy so you’re forced to pull out your tablet  and continue listening right where the Apple TV left off.
This is really the only killer component that will make the tablet useful to most consumers. Without it I don’t see it being the most important device Steve has ever been a part of.  I guess we’ll all just find out how close I was 13 hours from now.  What are your thoughts on the tablet and the way it’ll revolutionize your life.Possibly Related Posts:

• Scoring Topper on the Tablet
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You may have noticed lately the push to verify / create your identity on everyone’s favorite social networking sites, twitter and facebook.  Twitter is claiming that they take impersonation of people seriously in this blog post.  However, in under a week of giving out these verified accounts people are admitting that their accounts were never verified.  You make argue that people like Mike Arrington and Chris Messina are well known on twitter and they must be the real person behind the keyboard.  No doubt that many of the people at twitter have met them in person, but that doesn’t bode well for the validity of this “verification” service.

Last night facebook launched their vanity urls to the public.  No longer to you have to put in a long profile ID to find me on facebook, now its as simple as typing http://www.facebook.com/matt.topper.  Some interesting ones have already been taken.  Within 15 minutes launching last night 500,000 people had already claimed their vanity url.  Meaning that over half a million people decided to spend last night in front of a computer to get a unique name on a social networking site.  So what does this have to do with a race for your identity?  I have a theory that within the  next 6 months we will see both Twitter and Facebook in a race to become the defacto OpenID providers for the web.  Google, Yahoo, and AOL have all launched OpenID providers that use your existing accounts, but none have provided a compelling reason to use them.  Myspace also launched their openid provider earlier this year, but again, failed to catch on.  There are plenty around the web.

First I should explain what OpenID is.  OpenID provides a lightweight federated single sign-on interface to your accounts across the web.  In simple terms, you can sign on in one place and never have to log into another site again.  This centralizes the authentication of your accounts across the web and helps determine what personas you portray across the hundreds of sites you may access.  Interested in a more in depth description?  Check out this wikipedia entry.

I would guess that a good percentage of users check Facebook or Twitter long before they check their email every morning.  If they could offer you a service that you log in once with them to start the day and never have to log in again why would you chose anything else?  Also, if you wanted to sign up for a new site they would allow you to share your profile / persona information with the new sites instead of filling out a lengthy form and it would update those sites with any changes to your info automagically the next time you logged in.  Sounds great doesn’t it?

It sounds like a great service to me, I can’t wait, but why would Twitter and Facebook want to provide this to me?  Wouldn’t it cost them money? One of the things that I’ve been discussing for years is a trust model on the Internet.  When a crisis comes up who do you know who to trust on the web.  If I have a problem with my GTO I go to ls1gto.com and do some searching to find who the top users are and might send them a message with my problem to see what they know.  But what happens in a crisis situation when I’m monitoring twitter feeds when a hurricane comes through Florida.  I can easily set my location on any of these services and act like I’m the middle of the action.  What separates me from being Joe Schmoe and a retired PHD meteorologist who lives in the region.  If I want an account of what things are like I’d probably want to pay attention to the tweets of the retired PHD.

Lets keep exploring why they want this info, it’s really powerful stuff.  First they have a list of the people my “friends.”   Twitter has a distinct advantage here.  They actually know who I influence and who influences me.  Through my long term tweets / status updates they know what I care about and what I am an expert on.  Now if they know the sites I visit they have the ultimate revenue machine on me.  They know my identity, they know my likes, they know my demographics, they know my friends, they know what sites I visit, and they know what sites my friends visit.  Now they can very accurately target me for potential sites / products that I should be going to.  It’s truly a world of “He who owns the data wins.”  Once they have all this information on the books they really own the world.

I have my own concerns with OpenID and having one place to “hack” to get access to all my sites.  I think any reputable provider will need both strong authentication and risk assessment added to their solution before I trust my identity with them.  To be honest I think they US federal government should start their own trusted / verified OpenID provider but thats a topic for another post.  (It’s already working in Estonia)  Before I scare everyone with that topic, what do you think?  Are Twitter and Facebook trying to be the de facto standard for your authentication and access information on the web?  Or are they introducing new services to help their userbase identify with one another?  Sound off in the comments, I’ll be looking forward to them.Possibly Related Posts:

• Comment with OpenID
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• OpenID: WebVisions 2009
• kthxbai, I just deleted 99 of your twitter friends
• I Got ID

Well, not really, if you are logged in to your twitter account through your browser right now I could have.  Ajaxian had an interesting article on everyone’s favorite microblogging site today.  One of the biggest features of the site is the REST based API it provides.  Whiles its dead simple to use, its also one of its biggest risks.

I’ve been working on a site that looks through all your friends last tweets and sorts them by the timestamp of their last update.  Not very powerful, but a quick, nice to have, when you’re looking to clean up the ever growing list of virtual friends.  If you have an active twitter session in your browser, I give you the option to unfollow them.  All of this is done with javascript right in your browser, and the only time you hit my server is to load the initial page.

Now if I was malicious I could have just grabbed your first 100 friends, parsed the returned xml, and delete the first 99 of them.  I could do more, except twitter limits you to 100 requests an hour.  Pretty scary, huh? Do you read every line of javascript for every site you visit? How about doing more, like posting a status for you (…is visiting theappslab.com), making you my friend, update your picture with my corporate logo/ad.  What gets scary is that I can also update any attribute on your profile. So I could update your email address to one of my liking and send a request to reset your password sending your new password to my account. (This could be fixed with an extra challenge question)

OK, now that I’ve scared you now here’s the fix…well, to be honest, there really isn’t one.   Some have proposed OAuth as the answer.  To me, its no different.  I could trust one of the many twitter apps today and tomorrow the owner could get a wild hair and decide to start making money off of my trust.  Twitter could add something like OAAM and OES, Oracle’s risk assessment engine and entitlements server to help with establishing application request patterns and ask the user to provide additional authentication factors when they trust a new site or the site starts behaving out of its norm. 

Really the best thing you can do is install something like NoScript in Firefox and make sure you know what site’s you’re visiting, and log out of twitter when you’re done.  Personally, I can live with the fact that someone might tweet for me or make changes to my account.  Twitter should rethink the ability to update profile attributes through the API.  I don’t think anyone would complain in return for the added security.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of things you can do without users knowing with XMLHttpRequest.  Figuring out what sites people visiting a site have already visited.  How scary would it be when your salesman calls and says he heard you visited the competitors product page recently and wanted to talk about how their product differs.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any easy way to solve the problem.

It’s a wild wild web2.0 world out there, be safe my friends. Possibly Related Posts:

• Google Friend Connect Adds Twitter
• Posting to Twitter, Take 2
• On JavaScripting
• Add TweetSuite to Your Blog
• Social Hacking is Primetime

While Jake is busy working on his super secret project he’s asked me to fill the rambling spot for him.  Hopefully, I can make this a regular place to spout my technolutionary thoughts.

In a previous life I did a lot of work with Oracle’s Location and Spatial products.  There really is nothing like putting a map in front of an executive to show him what’s going on in his company.  In my previous post I mentioned about Google’s Gears supporting the new W3C location API.  Today, Mozilla announced a new plug-in called Geode that uses Loki’s location data to bring that info into Firefox. They use the wifi access point MAC addresses within range of you to calculate your location vs. the triangulation / gpi hybrid most cell providers use.

I’m still a closet location geek.  I really love the ability to find out whats going on around me at any given time, who’s there, what events are up, people I should meet who happen to be at the same place.  It gets me all giddy to see things like this come together.  Back in my travel days I too wondered what it would take to solve the OpenLocation.org manifesto problem. I wondered all too often how many times another car guy was sitting 2 seats behind me on a plane, or an IdM expert was staying at a hotel up the street from me who I could have picked his brain over dineer.  If only I had known they were there.

Today everything from cell phones, to automobiles, to dog collars have a GPS onboard.  Services like TripIt and Dopplr know about the trip I have coming up, iTunes has all my music, and facebook has all my friends.  How do we put them all together and have a good time.  It has long puzzled me why the airlines and hotels haven’t gotten into the social network space with their rewards programs.  It seems like it just makes sense.  They have a ton of info on you already, know when/where you are traveling and can predict when people with similar interests are going to be in the same location.  Plus it gives them an avenue to make you a more happy customer that 3 hour layover in Detroit doesn’t seem so bad when you can shoot the breeze with another Apple fanboi.  Plus they could then offer discounts at your meeting place like 20% off food or a free drink at the hotel bar.

The current location services are just a pain to use.  I’m forced to open an application to update my location for most of them, but that should change with the W3C spec.  Pretty soon all our browsers will have plugins to update them on a regular basis, then we need those plugins to tell us when something important is happening next door, or next month when I’m in Omaha.

The current iPhone location apps are getting there, but in tech savvy towns outside the valley, like DC, the adoption is just slow.  The potential is there, even for enterprise apps, to use this data to their advantage.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know someone you worked on a project with for years is coming to town next month years after you lost touch?  Or that your boss just landed early and is on his way into the office (time to get out of bed).  Or some co-workers in another group are heading to the same concert as you.  The possibilities are endless.

So I’ve rambled long enough.  What are your hopes, concerns, and wishes for location enabled systems?  How are they going to change your life?  or just make it more complicated?Possibly Related Posts:

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• En Fuego: Location Aware Services
• 3 x Location
• Geolocation: Cool or Creepy?
• What’s Your GPS Do?

Our guest blogger, Matt Topper, is a friend of the Lab, an ex-Oracle Ace, turned Oracle employee who always has something to say. He’s currently running the identity management team for Oracle’s National Security group, playing with Collok in his free time to fix the conference experience.

The other day Eddie tweeted that he was installing the new Facebook on his iPhone. It got me to thinking about why so many of the Web 2.0-type sites are developing custom iPhone applications instead of building a mobile version of their website. I remember Kevin Rose talking about Digg’s iPhone application, a simple web app, instead of a custom Cocoa application. It took them less than 48 hours to roll out the slimmed down web based interface, I can guarantee if it was a native iPhone app it would have taken much longer.

In going through the list of apps on my phone I realized that nearly 20% are traditional web applications thinly disguised as “custom” apps. I can understand the games, notes, and calculator apps being thick, but what about Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipanion, Sportacular and even Twinkle (twitter).

It just seems that the development resources for those apps would have been much better off staying with what they are good at…building web applications with a slimmed down interface to run over Safari. Instead they learned a new language, probably had to add additional APIs, ran the risk of Apple rejecting their app, and then dealing with the app store. They have to add another layer to track readership, integrate a new ads platform to pay for their app, etc., etc., etc. I just seems like a lot of work for little reward. Yes they get the distribution and the “coolness” factor of the Apps Store, but how hard would it be for Apple to create “Certified Web Apps.”

I can even take a web bookmark and make an icon on the iPhone home page as I’ve done with my Google calendar.

With the launch of Android and the strong presence of Symbian on the Nokia phones in Europe, thats four separate platforms (plus the countless others, PPC, Palm, J2ME, etc.) that developers have to learn, maintain code, provide support, the list goes on. It’s quickly going to develop into a major headache for most of these companies, most of whom could just extend the controllers and views of their existing apps based on the HTTP request User Agent.

I don’t know, maybe its just me, but I tend to look towards the long term effects of developing additional software interfaces instead of jumping on the bandwagon of the next cool thing. If it makes sense and drastically improves the user experience I’m all for it, but none of these apps have anything to offer over their web based cousin. Maybe faster load times, maybe caching of images and authentication data, but that’s not enough to sell me.

Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a place for thick apps on the iPhone. Google Maps is definitely a good example of that, then again, with the W3C Geolocation API and the integration into Google Gears that might be going away too. Feel free to call me crazy and point out the pieces I forgot. I just feel that its the start of a slippery path that ultimately ends up with dissatisfied users and too much code to maintain. Hopefully I don’t stir up too much trouble and the AppsLab guys invite me back for more guest blogs in the future.Possibly Related Posts:

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