The iPad Newspaper is out

Apple’s VP of Internet Service, Eddy Cue officially described the features this morning, Wednesday, Feb 2, 2011. The app was available in the iTunes store as of 12:00PM EST. It’s the first online newspaper designed for the iPad.

The new digital newspaper has an initial budget of about $30 million and a workforce of about 100 people. Most of its contents will be original although the newspaper also will use contents from other media owned by News Corporation such as sport videos from the Fox channel, according to The New York Times.

The Daily will offer about 100 pages of news and sports, with naturally, a high level of interactivity, breaking news, HD video and 360-degree photos. Users will have two subscription choices:  they can be billed either 99 cents a week or $39 USD for a year’s subscription. No news yet if  Apple’s iAds will be running on The Daily or if  News Corp. will be selling its own ads. For now, no one is talking about a print version – thankfully.

While Apple dominates the tablet market, competition is increasing. Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. are making devices to rival the iPad – running on Google’s Android operating system. Global tablet sales may total 54.8 million units in 2011 and 208 million in 2014, according to Gartner Inc. Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads since its release in April, Cue said today.

Interested? Read more … A first look at The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper -Poynter ; Bloomburg.com ; News Corp’s ‘The Daily’ launches on iPad with Apple’s in-app subscriptions -Apple Insider; Apple and News Corps. “The Daily” Newspaper Hits the iPad, for $0.99 a Week or $40 a Year -Fast Company

Recently, I found myself in a room with Charles Sirois, Chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) on the future of banking. His message: Mobile is the future for banking. Here’s and example of why?

Kenya is a world leader in mobile money. As a result, Kenya is to mobile money what Silicon Valley is to software due to a little service called M-PESA which has emerged, for all intents and purposes, as new currency along side the Kenyan shilling (KSH).

M-PESA was launched in 2006 by Safaricom, Vodafone’s subsidiary in East Africa. The service allows customers to transfer phone credit wirelessly through SMS. The M-PESA is equal to the KSH and is exchanged for cash in special locations across the country.

It’s revolutionary for a number of reasons.

With 6 million plus users, M-PESA allows mobile customers to store cash value on their mobile phone, exchange cash with anyone via SMS and cash out without the involvement of any bank or the need for a bank account. Although there are no fees for holding an account, customers pay a small fee for every transaction.

What started out as a micro-finance platform is now a full-on currency in Kenya. Image this… You own a coffee kiosk in Nairobi. Your customers buy your fabulous coffee by completing an M-PESA transfer to you – on the spot – via SMS. You no longer have to carry shillings only to put them under the mattress or have your money stolen, because, carrying cash is simply too dangerous! In the unfortunate situation you do get robbed, you know the account you transferred your money to because you’ve got his/her phone number!

Almost four years after the launch of M-PESA, people are not only paying each-other with their mobile phone, but they’re asking to be paid salary in M-PESA. So image, now Vodofone, a relatively unregulated mobile company finds itself with more cash on-hand than all the Kenyan banks combined.

Curiously, only yesterday an interesting development for M-PESA made the news: M-Pesa to get Sh384m from Bill Gates charity Why a charity would be funding Vodafone’s most profitable pay-per-use service remains to be seen.

In Canada, a more recent mobile money start-up is Enstream, which is a mobile money play and collaboration of the major mobile carriers. After 100 million dollars (rumored)  investment, Zoompass hasn’t recognized much adoption.

“Zoompass is a unique mobile person-to-person money transfer service that uses a stored value account to send/receive/request money quickly and securely for all 21 million mobile phone users on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo Mobile, or TELUS networks.”

Personally, I look forward to ending the hunt for coins to ride the TTC or reading a novel at the parking meter as it takes forever to authorize my Visa,  but really, it might be more about reversing the ubiquity of credit cards in Canada before similar mobile innovations will be in reach for Canuks.

• Should financial institutions bother with Social Media?
• Is Social Media a revolution?
• Do communities dominate brands? And who is generation-C?
• What is a Social Media strategy?
• Will the combination of technology and strategy change the basis of competition?
• What are the next practices for Social Media in financial services?

Among the spectacular-ness of gestural is a way of navigating data (as seen in Minority Report). Here you can take tabular data and apply it to geo-spacial information so the data can be understood and made meaningful. The collaborative design work demonstrated is also amazing.

To paraphrase Underkoffler regarding his inspiration: We create and our technology is a combination of design and efficacy that allows us to do that.

HTML5 is what user experience should have always been without plug-ins and the sometimes excruciating “loading…” times.

Imagine never having to be confronted with another “click here to download plugin” or “loading…and still loading…” message again. User experience utopia? Maybe not, but definitely user experience relief.

In the near future, using HTML5, we’ll be able to do all sorts of things that are hard or next to impossible to do with download-able plug-ins currently. HTML5 brings new flexibility of user experience, and promises of semantics, JavaScript APIs for drag and drop, offline storage, image generation, plugin-free video and that’s only to name a few.

It’s hard to find many examples of websites built in HTML5 today. To give you an idea of what’s possible, check out Mugtug.com’s sketchpad.

No Flash support, just like the iPhone. I can put up with blue boxes in the place of websites on the iPhone, but not on a tablet that I’d like to use for surfing! (Not to mention Jobs single highhandedly contributing to the demise of Flash – but that’s anther story.)

No multi-tasking. You can’t have two applications open at the same time! It feels like 1994 computing.

No camera for video conferencing. No camera for taking pictures. Nada.

No widescreen mode. Movies formatted for widescreen are squished into the 4:3 aspect ratio making it unusually painful to watch.

Apple only applications. The iPad will only run applications from the iTunes store, unlike any standard mini-laptop that runs all kinds of applications.

Side loading only. Think you can download whatever you want off the Internet onto your iPad? Think again! The only way to download anything to your iPad is by hooking yourself up to another device using a cable. (Come on Jobs!)

It’s not perfect, however there are a number of wonderful things about the iPad. For everything you need to know check out Gizmondo.com

The even bigger question goes beyond the availability of digital content, but begs the question of  paid content. Will consumers pay for content they currently get for free? Do people pay for water? We’ll see…

More about Apple’s “news” tomorrow:

Apple iTablet rumour round-up – Telegraph

The Apple Tablet: a complete history, supposedly — Engadget

Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry » Nieman Journalism Lab