RIA Journal

I tell a lie though. The Apple iPad isn’t really $499. Just adding a power cord to the iPad will cost you $29.00. No, I’m not making that up.

On top of that, Apple will be including DRM (digital rights management) on e-books and other iPad content. I really, really hate DRM. I have this old-fashioned idea that when I buy a book, be it an e-book or a paperback, I actually own it. As we already found when Amazon deleted already bought and paid for books on the Kindle last summer, that’s not the case.

When your book, movie, music or what-have-you is under the iron fist of DRM, you can’t back it up, you may not be able to play it on all devices, and its quality may degrade. Oh, and lest, we forget, if the copyright owner or the company that created the DRMed media decides you can’t view or listen to it anymore, that’s it. Your books, music, movies, or what-have-you can either be silently deleted or it simply won’t play anymore. I don’t need this.

All that said, I agree the iPad is really cool. I predict with absolute faith that the iPad and its clones are going to kill off single-purpose devices like Amazon’s Kindle and GPS units within the next three years. How can it not work out this way? For the same price as a high-end, dedicated device, you can get a tablet that will do everything they can do and far more.

But — and this is the important bit — you don’t have to buy an Apple iPad to get all of the iPad’s goodies. ARM, a mobile microprocessor power, is predicting that we’ll see no less than 50 ARM processor-powered iPad clones by year’s end — and these ARM-powered entertainment tablets will all be running Linux.

There will be also other Linux-powered iPad clones. Some of them will be running Android. Others will be running MeeGo, which is Intel and Nokia’s combining of their embedded Linux efforts. These latter devices will have the new Intel Atom Pineview processor family at their heart.

All these Linux entertainment tablets are going to be cheaper than the iPad. You can expect to see the first of them by midsummer. Some of them will not force DRM on your content and, unlike the iPad, you’ll be able to watch Adobe Flash videos on them.

Every March, thousands of entrepreneurs and digital types descend on Austin, Tex., for South by Southwest Interactive. They’re hoping to get a glimpse of some of the newest Web and mobile innovations, and perhaps to sample some tacos.

For start-up hopefuls, capturing the fancy of the attendees is almost as important as checking out the panels and parties. The high concentration of tech savants supplies a rare opportunity for companies to woo the eyes and clicks of early adopters and influential Twitter users and bloggers capable of elevating their sites and services out of obscurity.

Their efforts have sometimes paid off: in 2007, a series of giant, glossy screens installed around the convention center displaying Twitter messages helped that service gather speed. Before that, the conference helped give blogging tools like Movable Type a boost among the digerati.

This year, snagging people’s attention won’t be an easy task. There are thousands of events at this year’s conference, including a keynote talk by Twitter’s chief executive, Evan Williams.

But it certainly won’t be for lack of trying. Many start-ups are customizing and tweaking their services to make them more useful or just more fun for conference attendees. The hope is that people who use the services in Austin will go home and spread the word.

This year, some of the most talked-about services are location-based social networks — services that allow users to “check in” on their phones and broadcast their location to friends.

For example, Gowalla, a social network that doubles as an interactive scavenger hunt, allowing users to find virtual goods each time they check in, has hidden virtual items around downtown Austin that can be redeemed for their real-world counterparts, like tacos, drinks, retro film cameras and Palm cellphones.

Foursquare, another mobile social network that doubles as a city guide and competitive bar game, has unleashed a new set of South by Southwest-specific badges for players to unlock.

In addition, the company plans to hand out temporary tattoos and teach people how to play the childhood ballgame that the company is named after.

A new iPhone application called Sitby.us will show users where their Twitter friends are sitting in a particular conference room or panel for easy coordination.

TabbedOut, an application that lets users settle bar tabs with a mobile phone, has teamed up with several venues in Austin to allow conference attendees to pay for drinks that way.

Sched.org, a free, unofficial scheduling tool for conference attendees, is also unveiling a so-called augmented reality iPhone application that allows users to point the camera down a street and see which parties and events are happening nearby.

The conference itself offers tools for quick and easy networking. Badges worn by conference-goers will be equipped with unique bar codes that, when scanned with a mobile phone, save that person’s contact information. In addition, the official South by Southwest iPhone application makes use of a feature that allows people to swap contact information between mobile phones, thanks to a company called DubMeNow.

Of course, these services will suffer if the wireless networks in the area of the convention center can’t handle the crush. Last year, AT&T’s network buckled under the influx of iPhone users. This year, the company says it has been working with conference organizers to add new temporary cellular sites and shore up the city’s existing network.

With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company’s shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month – devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs – are “better than netbooks.”

On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company’s sentiments that “Flash is a CPU hog” and including support for the technology in Apple’s mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.

However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.

The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday.

“The competition I’m really afraid of are social networking sites,” Jon Klein said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit here. “That’s an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us.

“The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information,” Klein said. “You click on links they send to you and you trust them.

“Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news,” he said. “We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you.

“That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge,” Klein said.

“So I’m far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox,” the News Corp-owned station which is CNN’s major competitor in the cable news arena, Klein said.

The CNN executive said his network’s “mission” is to drive social network and other Web users to “link back to something on CNN.”

Besides expanding its footprint on the Internet with news and video, CNN is looking at mobile devices, Klein said.

“Online is a big growth area for us, mobile has enormous growth potential and domestic US cable is actually a growth area,” he said. “There’s a lot of room to grow.

“We’re in a lot of places and I think that’s the model that can be very successful for us,” Klein said. “Everyone in the media business is actively loooking for multiple revenue streams, that’s no secret.”

Klein, a longtime producer at broadcast network CBS who took over as head of CNN’s US operations in 2004, also said that with the explosion of news outlets and the Internet just being at the scene of a news event was no longer enough.

“Simply getting there used to be a big achievement,” he said. “Nowadays, you’ve got to provide more than just being there.

“Offering the depth and analysis is harder,” he said. “It takes more brainpower, it takes more work, it takes more thought, it takes more creativity.

“People are pretty up to speed on what happened today,” he said. “You’ve got to give them more insight about what’s going on. That is where we are going to try to continue to make a difference.”