The New New Thing Is What...

TW: will drive economic growth. Perhaps the Tablet described below will be a component of the next bout of economic innovation which feeds economic growth. I believe it may.

I love the IPhone, the "ITablet" to me could be a more robust and larger version of the IPhone. An IPhone the size of a piece of paper. With things like video and data size matters. With constant connection and souped up digital transfer rates, having at one's fingertips streaming video and data in a portable yet handy fashion becomes viable. These are the innovations which make things like the traditional TV set and laptop increasingly obsolete.

Data is becoming universally accessible (one can access live video of just about any sporting event at this point), yet we have remained somewhat tethered to either a set top TV, tiny IPhone or bulky laptop (with shaky connections). Once a well-connected, easily portable device becomes real, folks behaviors will be greatly altered. New industries and firms created.

From Newsweek:
"Apple is supposedly working on a tablet computer.. Rumor has it that the "iTablet"..will be announced in January and released in June...this device may actually warrant the hype. Not because of the tablet itself but because of what it and others like it could do to the way we tell stories. Veteran editor Tina Brown, who now runs The Daily Beast, says we are about to enter "a golden age of journalism."

These devices will play video and music and, of course, display text; they will let you navigate by touching your fingers to the screen; and—this is most important—they will be connected to the Internet at all times. For those of us who carry iPhones, this shift to a persistent Internet has already happened, and it's really profound. The Internet is no longer a destination, someplace you "go to." You don't "get on the Internet." You're always on it. It's just there, like the air you breathe.

Now imagine a larger form factor, with a screen big enough to hold multiple panes of information. It has no lag time and lasts many hours on a battery charge. Here, then, is your new morning newspaper, with videos next to stories and the ability to customize the panes to deliver what you want and leave out what you don't. This device is also your TV, your stereo, and probably your telephone too.

For people like me, who produce content, this change is both great and scary. Great because the techies in Silicon Valley are giving us powerful new tools for telling stories. Scary because the old ways of telling stories are about to become obsolete, and if we cling to them, we'll be washed away. In the past we've all worked in silos. "Print people" had one way of describing the world. "Video people" had another. But the silos are getting crunched together...

The Internet today is a lot like TV circa 1950. But we are about to take an evolution-ary leap. That's why all this hand-wringing over the dying newspaper business is so misplaced. In 10 years the print newspapers we have today will seem as quaint and primitive as those old Uncle Miltie shows. Heck, the Internet we have today will seem quaint and primitive too...

..Look at how people have turned their creativity loose on the iPhone. In just 16 months, thousands of developers have created 85,000 applications for that device. The same will happen with tablets. These powerful devices with constant Internet access will enable us (and force us) to rethink media. What is a newspaper? What is a book? What is a movie? What is entertainment?..."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/217683