Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Innovate!100 back in Paris next monday. 50% discount code here !!!

 
JOIN INNOVATE!2010 THIS MONDAY FOR BACK-TO-BACK PITCH SLAMS IN PARIS

The Innovate!2010 global competition to identify the top 100 tech startups is headed to Paris, and you're invited to join us at the Microsoft Conference Centre on Monday, April 26th for a special daylong event featuring two dozen startups that are vying for a spot on the Innovate!100 list.

To accommodate the large number of qualified applicants from the local area, we will be hosting two back-to-back Pitch Slams on April 26th. At each one, a dozen semi-finalists will deliver rapid-fire pitches that will be evaluated by a panel of judges that includes, among others, Guillaume Berthet, Chipper Boulas, Roxanne Varza, Colette Ballou, Matteo Rizzi and Stephanie Bouchet.

The morning Pitch Slam kicks off at 10:00am, with the afternoon session starting at 3:00pm. Seats are limited, so sign up now to meet and mingle with entrepreneurs, investors, press and other members of the innovation ecosystem in Paris! Your registration ticket will allow you to attend both Pitch Slams, and you save 50% off by using the link below:
http://2010pitchslamparis.eventbrite.com/?discount=4PITCH

Visit the Innovate100.com site for a sneak peek of some of the Judges and Semi-finalists who will be participating on Monday, and follow us on Twitter at @Innovate100 for the latest updates.

 

French Connection #55 on LCI Radio

La French Connection #55: iPad, l'Arlésienne. sélectionné dans Actualité et Web Hightech

Taped on Friday April 16, 2010

should I upgrade my MacBookPro 15" (mid'09) to 8GB ?

In a nutshell: ABSOLUTELY. The real question is when ? and what do I do with the current 2x2GB I have installed... (FB-SODIMM 1066Mhz DDR3)

I've been monitoring my new laptop for a while with 'Activitity Monitor', and free memory is just between 15-100MB all the time. And I'm just using standard stuff: Spotify in the background, evernote for brain dumps :), a browser (firefox), Socialite (real time web client...). So indeed I need more memory, because I regularly get stuck with the beach ball. But are memory prices going up or down ? Macsales.com says up.

It's a pity, as I just got my MBP a couple of months ago. So let's check prices online at the usual places (1 EUR = 1,3641 USD today):

- Macway.fr in Paris says €399,00 (=$537 at today's forex rate) with a few extra if you reserve or ship. You can always pick it up at their store.

 

- macsales.com says only $374,99 and $60 rebate if I send in my used RAMs... Hence only $314,99 (= 234€). But those are US prices without shipping to Europe.

If we put the rebate aside (I don't see that working easily for France), it's $374,99+$27 for Fedex Int'l = $404,09 = 296€. That's still a ~25% discount on French prices, and even with a 19,6% VAT tax at customs, that is still 5% cheaper than buying local. 

So are there other alternatives ? Let's try to famous brands for memory chips :

- RAMshopping.fr is a site I've used over the years. They offer Kingston RAM for 366,40€ and 6,50€ for shipping = 372,90€ = $508 (6,5% cheaper over Macway without shipping, with a renowned brand)

- interestingly Kingston in France prices a different SKU at 440,00€ and sells indirect through retail channels. If you click through to RAMshopping.fr you do get the above reference and price.

 

- Crucial.fr offers it at 366,99€ + VAT at 71,93€ = 438,92€ (shipping free).

So bottom line,

- if you're willing to buy in France, and want to try a FedEx shipment (bypassing customs), then MacSales.com wins with 296€

- if you want to buy from France, best option is RAMshopping.fr at 376€, a nice 80€ extra (mainly VAT I suppose, and a little retail gross margin).

1. designing a backup strategy that works for me - criteria

As more and more of our life becomes digital, we've come to rely on digital files to store and represent all that we've come to love: music (either digitized old CDs or bought oniine from iTunes), video (ripped from legally bought DVDs, or bought online on iTunes), pictures (taken with your great DSLR or mobile phone), and now soon (e-)books (for the Kindle, or iPad), etc.

Haven't you wondered whether the book you just bought will be available to read by your great-grand children (I have books from the mid-19th century!); that the picture you just took will be digitally framed on a wall by your great-grand children (I have pix from the end of the 19th century in my living room) ? (pix here is my great-great-grandparents crossing to Chile on one of their trips, over 100 years ago).

I've been bothered by the problem of data durability for quite some time (and if you browse this blog back a few years, it's a persistent theme). It's actually two separate problems :

- data integrity : this is what we usually call data backup. How do you maintain integrity of your files on your current system ?

- data persistence : but it's more than that. What happens when you change computers (or devices)? when technology changes ? when generations change ? See, I started collecting my data in the early 80s on 5"1/4 diskettes (remember those ?), then I moved them to 3,5" diskettes (I still have a drive to read them. Do you ?). Then I burned them to CDs (that have a limited life span !). I then moved the data to DVDs ! Currently I moved all my data to external hard disks. What's next ? The only question here is that I need to keep moving my data regularly onto new technologies before the previous one gets obsolete. I get worried though that I'll have a. the data, b. the software c. the devices to keep accessing all my data. Some steps I'm taking here is that I'll start printing books with my pictures.

- data repository unicity: the two points above assumed you keep all your data in the same place but that is not so. You produce very interesting and/or important data elsewhere as well on social sites and networks such as your blog, twitter, facebook, gmail, etc. I might come back to this point in another post, but online solutions such as backupify are spot-on and very useful.

So back to data integrity. The key criteria for a backup strategy should be :

- reliability vs. availability : do I want to have my data available (ie. accessible) ALL the time (such as my posts on my Facebook page - and I don't even know about that), or my data SAFE (a reliable hence usable copy)?

The best solution for 100% (or close) up-time is mirroring 2 or more disks (RAID 1), so that you get 1 more exact copy on the-fly. But it has drawbacks: a. it's expensive when you have large volumes, and might take a performance toll on your system. b. if you're saving a corrupted file (happens all the time), then you're saving several copies of a corrupted file. Not what you want.

Availability says you are guaranteed to have a recent enough copy of your data, and even several copies, scattered over time, so that you can roll back to an uncorrupted version of your data. Restoring an old copy might take time (such as getting an archive tape from somewhere, rebuilding a directory from incremental backups.

=> in my case, for my personal data (videos, pictures, etc.), my data doesn't change much once I store it: I usually only add new data, and do not work much with old data (modifying old pix for example). Hence I don't really need an incremental backup for my data (only for my system, and some office documents).

- usability: or should I say, simplicity. Most backup strategies fail because they become too complicated for a home use. You can impose procedures in corporations, but they are hard to follow otherwise. Therefore, the most automated system with automatic alarms is probably the best way to go.

I also don't like software that produce backups that are not immediately readable with the operating system (ie. restore a proprietary archive). Hence copies of my files that I can read just by plugging in an external drive elsewhere are just great. This should be just the same as inserting a data DVD. This last point becomes crucial when you are dealing with large data volumes; I'm currently working with more than 2TB which is the largest disk size on the market. TimeMachine will only allow for "backup" to ONE disk, and start deleting old copies. I don't want that. I could create a larger disk by combining several external disks (JBOD-style concatenation, or RAID0-stripping). But that is a problem in itself : if one disk fails in the target disk pool, all the data fails. Or if I want to re-read all the disks elsewhere, I need to setup all the disks just to read one file. Hence option out.

=> therefore I need a solution that allows me to backup (sync ?) specific directories to specific disks. Ideally though, a program would just say work like this : here are all the files I want to backup (from different disks, partitions, RAID arrays, directories, etc.) to this pool of disks. And the program would slice it down automatically without asking for more. The problem would however be that I would need to maintain a "master" disk with the logs and the index of all files: therefore restoring a file (smaller than 2TB of course ! which might be a problem, since my picture library for just last year is already almost 0,5 TB) would only require in worst case 2 disks: the index, and the data disk.

All backup strategies should include a combination of the following :

- on-site and off-site backups separated by a reasonable distance (think natural disaster like the earthquake in Chile, fire, theft, etc.) : we NEVER do this, but we should as our data is so much more important than the computer value these days. Backing up ONLINE is an alternative for a remote off-site, but it requires probably a very large disk for me (in the TBs, not GBs), and a very very fast line (fiber) unless I want a year-long backup. I will have to put my most precious data (pix, family videos, document archives from my work) on an external disk and put them elsewhere, just in case. I'd do this on a monthly basis at best. This is called a time-stamped archive. There's no point archiving data you can get back in some way or another.

=> off-site archive is key

- father/son/grandfather strategy, more usually known as day / week / monthly backup, or hour / day / week, etc. The idea here is to rotate between different copies of a disk, because sometimes your data gets corrupted and you need to go back in time. I would keep one full backup on-site next to my computer. However, when you do a new backup, you're scratching the current backup, so for the period you're rebuilding the backup, there's no proper backup... 

=> hence you need at least 2 rotating backup sets.

There is an incredible number of backup software out there for the Macintosh. Hence, probably the only way to choose the right one, is to FIRST decide on selection criteria, then narrow down the list by

- supported features

- usability

- price

I'll test out a few programs in a second post, then in a final post I'll describe the whole final setup and proper procedures.

dealing with disk errors in OSX

First error reports from my disk tests (see posts in the past few days) by checking :

1) power supplies: two of my external disks (LaCie) were showing time-outs when I tried copying the data. I tried tons of things on them. Basically, the power supplies of both them were kaput (these were my older 2 external disks). I changed them (at a HEFTY price), and I got back my data with no problem whatsoever. So always check the power supply of your disks and try that as a cure first. There's no way to know this unless you have a spare GOOD one around (from another disk. Keep in mind I had 2 that didn't work). And, after contacting LaCie support, they sent me a spare one... but I had already bought 2 new ones. That might help (contacting support). Now, one of the disks is showing difficulties again, but I lost no data; I guess the lifetime of that disk is gone.

2) S.M.A.R.T statuses: I didn't manage to recuperate data on one of my other disks, although I tried everything (new power supply, Data Rescue). It seems to me that the disk is physically damaged. There is a standard, called S.M.A.R.T. that can alert you to this. The problem is that you can't read the status when you're attaching them with an external fireware cable (400 or 800), USB cable or eSATA cable. I "hacked" my MacPro by using 2 unused internal SATA ports, to an external port (in the USA get it form MacSales, in France from Macway). And by booting up the disk first (always with this case), then the computer, you get to read the status as if the disk were an internal disk. And guess what? S.M.A.R.T. status = FAILED !!! There was indeed a problem. A total surface scan also shows this. LaCie online support are willing to repair / exchange the disk, as long as I pay for one way shipment. Probably a good choice, as it will cost me only 10% of the price of a full new disk. Still, it sucks, as the disk is only a few months old.

3) bad blocks: Most disks have a few bad blocks. The only way to deal with them is to zero-out totally the disk with a full erase (Disk Utility), so that whenever the OS can't write to a block, it will map it out in the file system table. It's a must-do step for every new disk.

4) drivers updates: finally, I've been trying to use my LaCie eSATA cards to pilot my external disks. I've been having regular kernel panics; I contacted support for an updated driver. There is one (2009), that is not indicated in the list of drivers for the PCIe card (2008 only). The bad news is however that it is still unstable, and will have my MacPro crash whenever I do something fancy such as a RAID strip with external disks. I've nailed it down to the card and its driver, since connecting the same disks with only Firewire cables, or with my internal SATA extender (see 2)), doesn't produce this problem. It seems the only way out here is to use a great eSata card from someone else : Firmtek or Sonnet, hopefully one that doesn't need any driver (plug & play).

Bottom line, test extensively your disks when you FIRST get them (zero them out with Disk Utility, then surface scan them with Drive Genius to check everything is OK) to prevent any data disaster in the future. And set up a slave backup disk (also tested) for your master disk. TimeMachine is good enough for this.

checking the health of my disks. An indispensable step

I've been having problems with my external hard drives for a while. A few days ago I described the new setup I'm putting in place. I still have to build an external RAID-0 setup for backup, using TimeMachine. With the joy of my new Hitachi disks, I didn't INVEST the time to thoroughly test them, but I'm doing that now with my backup disks.

This involves:

1. a full scan of the surface of the disks, ie. testing that you can write and read back every block on the disks. My test on a 2 TB disk from LaCie using a Firewire 800 connection took about 17 hours... and I did find 11 bad or suspect blocks, which is to say close to 0%. But if that falls on an important file, you loose the file. I use Drive Genius 2 for this.
2. the only way I've found to solve that easily is to TOTALLY reformat the disk, with a Zero Out option (ie. writing data to each block, so that the system detects again bad blocks). It's going to take at least 7 hours (it's now reporting 10 hours to go...). I use Disk Utility for this. This guy describes a faster way, but I don't want to mess up with sectors in Hexa (that was one of my engineering degree exams... analyse a core dump :( Maybe Apple will implement ZFS as a successor to HFS+ ?
3. of course, once the formating is done, re-scan the whole disk (17 hours...) to check that the surface scan is now OK ... otherwise It's probably either wiser to repartition the disk and leave the bad blocks in the bad partition, or just discard the disk. The value of my data is not worth trying to salvage one disk.
4. I then need to test 9 more external disks... and figure out how I'm going to stress test my 5 internal disks if I really want to be safe... takes forever :(

Data safety is not an easy problem, and I wish there were real solutions out there, including full online hosting for my disks when fiber gets to my place. Any joyful entrepreneur up to the task ?

Screenshots of work in progress :

saving several thousand dollars when buying a MacPro

Following my previous post on how to tune your MacPro, I did some additional research on how to save money when buying a new MacPro from Apple. Here are the key take-aways:

• your choice between buying a 4-core or 8 core computer; the speed of the computer chip is up to you if you can afford them. Base prices for a system range from $2,499 to $5,899, and I can't optimize that. My current thinking is that you should get a USED MacPro from ebay, craigslist, etc. and refurbish it for your needs, and not pay for premium prices on the latest MacPro model. Lloyd Chambers has more tips, including buying refurbished from Apple with all the guarantees but a discount in price (up to 15%). Update : in the USA, check AppleInsider's pricing engine to get up to $200 extra discount by selecting the right retailer and using coupons. DealMac.com seems to have additional tips and discounts.

• I'll only look into optimizing your wallet by looking at hard drives and memory prices, for example on www.macsales.com. Shipping there is free, for an order over $199 in the 48 continental US states

Hard drives:

• You should (in my opinion) always buy the same brand, model, and capacity for all your drives. Hitachi is doing a great job with Ultrastars (the enterprise version, which means they are thoroughly tested among all drives produced, and these are the ones that perform best, with little variance in performance. If you can, always go with these) and Deskstars (great drives still, go for these if you're on a budget, + never forget to backup).

• Except for getting only an enterprise 1TB drive for the 1st bay, it's ALWAYS cheaper to get your drive from another provider (macsales.com for example). If you buy 2TB 7200rpm SATA disks, then savings are of $240,01 per disk ! for a setup with 4 disks, then you are saving up to $760.04 compared to Apple prices. And installation takes really no time and no effort whatsoever.

Memory

• for all models, getting up to 8 GB on the 4-core and 16 GB of RAM on the 8-core is cheaper at Apple. Stick with them.

• Otherwise, get the entry lever model (3GB or 6GB respectively for 4-core and 8-core), and upgrade to a third party provider. In the highest configuration, you can save up to $1,252.01 for 16GB of RAM on the 4-core, and up to $2,550.01 for 32 GB on the 8-core. Note that third-party providers offer many more options (24 GB, 48 GB of RAM) not offered by Apple. 
• whenever you can, get 4GB modules instead of 2GB modules. The price difference is only $10-$20 total, and you get the option of being able to upgrade in the future without having to throw away your old RAM. By the way, macsales.com even offers guarantees (15-day return policies, etc.), and rebates when you buy from them (maybe I should explore a rebate option...)

PS: my current favourite store (both online and offline in Paris) for Mac stuff in France is http://www.macway.com.

mentoring entrepreneurs at the Founder Institute (about markets)

Here's the video capturing my talk last month (sorry about the audio) at the Paris Spring 2010 session of the Founder Institute.

Rodrigio Sepulveda-Schulz -Paris FI from Adeo Ressi on Vimeo.

My slides.

Market

It was fun to do, and hopefully these thoughts can be helpful to other entrepreneurs too.

tips for upgrading my MacPro

it seems that whenever I change jobs, I take the time to upgrade my computing environment.

Back in the summer of 2005, I "upgraded" from a Sony Vaio laptop, to a DELL Precision 670 tower (bi-Xeon processor, 3GB RAM) with 2 x 24" DVI screens (good enough to display 1080p). (I refurbished this machine the other day with a new 54Mb/s wireless card and a new 22x DVD read/write player, all for less than 40 euros :) I tried upgrading it also to Windows 7, but it wouldn't recognize the motherboard's host RAID controller (not even with Vista drivers), hence I had to downgrade to a 2002 operating system :( : WindowsXP SP2 ...) It's running now as a media center for the kids with Boxee.)

In the past few days, I've been looking at ways to upgrade my Mac Pro (1st generation, late 2006). I use it mainly as a web surfing machine (+ tons of open apps at the same time, such as Spotify, word, excel, and so forth). I also use it to control my almost 10 TB of data (video, music, pictures), that I manage essentially with boxee.tv, iTunes and Aperture3 respectively. The machine is shared over wifi with a number of devices including my laptop, appleTV, and so forth.

The machine was getting a bit sluggish, and I needed to do something about it, as I've been adding external hard disks along the way of all kinds, mainly from LaCie (BiggerDisk 1.2TB, BiggerDisk 2TB, Quadra 2TB, Quadra v2 2TB). Of course I started by using external USB 2.0 a few years ago, then going for Firewire 400, and finally Firewire 800. Keeping performance on your computer isn't something you do all the time, and I made a few mistakes trying to upgrade the machine.

- didn't add enough RAM : I kept it at 4GB for a long time, getting it up to 8 GB only a couple months ago. I just added 4 more GB today bringing it up to 12 GB (2GB compatible modules from Kingston or MacWay). You can check on Activity Monitor how busy your machine gets, and whether it needs more RAM or not

- I mixed connectors to external hard disks of different capacities and brands, and got very very poor transfer speeds. After some research online, this is the order you should respect : always go for the fastest connector on the device in this order : eSata (3000 Mb/s), Firewire 800 (800Mb/s max theoretical speed), Firewire 400 (400 Mb/s), USB 2.0 (although theoretically at 480 Mb/s, it runs slower than FW400). By the way, the MacPro doesn't have an eSata connector by default. Hence I did run into problems :

    a) some disks wouldn't appear on the finder when they were all hooked together in FW800 ; somewhere I read that although Firewire supports up to 63 devices, the total length of cables can be only 15 feet without repeaters :keep this in mind. Your MacPro has 2 FW800 ports, one in the rear, one in front. Create 2 separate chains for best performance.

    b) my LaCie eSata PCIe cards have drivers dating back to 2008. I'm pretty sure they are not really compatible with SnowLeopard (I wrote to LaCie's support about this : no proper reply). I would get kernel crashes whenever I tried something complicated, such as setting up a RAID 1 (mirror) with 2 disks, but none with simple read or write operations. And throughput seems to be shared by the 2 ports on those cheap cards, basically halving them. Finally, I had to go back to FW800. You can get a better card (more expensive), or go cheap with a motherboard hack with a connector. I did that today, works great. There's more discussion here.

    c) I almost lost 10 years of photography and video editing when 2 LaCie drives starting reporting problems. I managed to rescue 100% of 2 disks just by changing the power supply for a new one. simple solution ! (and I had lost many DAYS trying to deal with the disks in other manners...). I still have a problem on a faulty 3rd drive. Even Data Rescue 3 couldn't salvage it all. So I first tried a simple technique : double all disks with mirroring (RAID 1 using Apple RAID). It worked somehow, but at a big cost (double the number of LaCie drives, with gazillion power supplies under my desk); and somehow everyday there seems to be a RAID slice that needs rebuilding. So the solution here was to go for not only uniformity in disk capacities, brand, setups, but also to try to solve the speed clog. I settled today for a RAID 0 stripe on 4 internal disks (best choice is Hitachi 7K2000 - more discussion here): I bought an extra spare one just in case I don't find one in the future and in case one of the disks fails. Performance-wise, I tried a few benchmarks with xbench and Drive Genius 2. Even though they might not be the best tool to measure accurately the throughput, they measure it relatively. I tested my previous internal disk, the new disks separately (2-3x better), and a RAID 0 stripe on 4 disks (5-10x the performance !) :) The speed boost comes from a combination i. uniformity of the disks ii. 7200rpm iii. large capacity so faster on the edge iv. eSata connector instead of FW800 v. RAID 0 stripe vi. getting the best disks on the consumer market in terms of performance

To simplify things, I just grabbed my former internal boot disk, hooked it in an external enclosure with eSata, and booted off with my 4 new internal disks. I might optimize the boot disk in the future (new disk, clean OSX setup). I'm currently transferring my data to the internal stripe, and will then set up an external (using the former LaCie disks) stripe with Time Machine (what I really need is data reliability, not 100% up time, hence the mirror (RAID 1) was an overkill); I'll also work out a routine for offsite backup for my most crucial data (pix, and family videos). More on this maybe later.

So, that's work in progress, but my MacPro feels definitively more reliable already (no more LaCie problems... :), and much much faster. I'll be serene though when my external TimeMachine setup is done, and when I'll have done my first external full backup. I might also set up an Aperture3 vault on external disks as well.

Again, I almost lost all my multimedia and personal data. This makes you realize that a few extra bucks in your system are worth every penny in case of a disaster (I bumped into an old friend today on the street; he told me how his house was broken in last year, and how they had stolen his computer + BACKUPS !!!).

Going though this upgrade exercise, I jolted down a few points :

- there's really no point in buying high-end from Apple (AppleStore or online); make sure you get the computer you like (MacPro or Macbook pro) with the MINIMUM hard disk size and memory size. You can then upgrade both components yourself quickly with third party reliable parts ; tons of money to be saved here. You can buy refurbished or second hand a recent model (not the latest one) at a great discount also and then refurbish it yourself with fast components.

    Example: if you get on the Apple Store a new MacPro (the cheapest one), it comes with 3x1 GB and a 640GB 7200rpm disk. Price is 2299 eur with tax. Getting the same machine up to 4x4GB RAM and 4x2TB disks would cost total of 5764 eur, ie 3.465 euros more ! oups ! Adding the memory yourself would be 4x179eur= 716eur. Adding the disks yourself, would be 4x135 eur = 540 eur. There you've just saved 2,209 euros for the SAME configuration, even having 3 GB spare and a 640GB spare (you can boot off with it in an external enclosure for less than 100 eur!).

- there's no point either in buying branded enclosures for disks (like LaCie); you're paying more or less double. Get an external enclosure, and the best disk you can. Always go 7200rpm instead of 5400rpm. Try to get the max capacity always even you're not planning to use it. This has to do with mechanics. Speed tends to decrease mechanically as drives fill up. I discovered this by reading this report. I also tested it with xbench, by partioning the disks differently : the closer to the center, the slower, period. Also go internal always before going external on a MacPro. I wonder why I never realized this. There are plenty of videos on Youtube showing you how easy it is to upgrade your drives. It's a bit geeky at first, but very very easy to do.

    Example : a 2TB LaCie disk is 330 euros on the AppleStore. The Hitachi disk above with an enclosure is only 135 eur + 79 eur = 214 euros. you save 116 or 35% off the brand price ...

- HFS+ filesystem seems to be the norm (although from 1998!). I couldn't find a good discussion relating to performance regarding case sensitivity or not (HFSX), and journaled or not. I opted for journaled.

- I couldn't find a way to change (although there seems to be a command line command) block size on disks. It defaults at 4K. RAID 1 configs (mirrors) allow you to change the RAID block size (64K seems a good compromise), although I couldn't find it for stripped disks (RAID 0).

- not all drives / brands behave the same. Same for memory. Check online reviews for best performing components suited to your needs. Example here and here.

- I almost bought a "better" RAID software from SoftRAID, based on reviews; but decided in the end not to, as my RAID 0 setup is simple enough to manage with Apple's Software, and I don't look forward to OSX 10.7 being not compatible with my disks (SoftRAID are said to be great engineers, but they come out LATE to market with updates). More discussion here and here.

Any other trick I missed ? Anything you'd like to share as well in the comments ?

my thoughts on the iPad launch today (updated)

"Happy iPad day everyone!", said an AppleBlog tweet a moment ago.

I was on French radio yesterday discussing my thoughts about the iPad, in a heated discussion. I might be right, might be wrong, but here are my arguments for it to become a revolution; and I'm putting them up here for future reference ;) make sure to make fun of me if I'm wrong !

So why is the iPad going to become a revolution ? 

• the iPad is not just a computer : I believe Apple made a mistake during its launch Keynote on the iPad about positioning it as a 1) computer in the 2) netbook category challenger, between laptops and phones. Remember Apple changed its name from "Apple Computer Inc." to "Apple Inc." a while ago ? Apple is not about being computers anymore, but about devices. Indeed, Jobs in the same keynote stated that Apple had become the largest mobile company in the world (including phones, laptops, etc.). It's interesting since Apple has also become the 4th 3rd largest US publicly traded company, behind Exxon, Wal-Mart and Microsoft (updated). We are talking about a serious player here to change an industry, and by extension the world.
  Therefore, all criticism to the Apple iPad lacking features that belong to a computer should be taken with a grain of salt: no multitasking (actually it can, since Music can play in the background), no webcam (well, it seems a v2 will have one), no USB support for devices (the device is there, it's only a matter of allowing other device manufacturers... just an economical ecosystem problem), lousy on-screen keyboard (well, I still believe the keyboard on an iPhone is just great compared to Android), no support Flash (remember that is a PROPRIETARY format, but Apple is going full-speed for standard HTML5), some features lacking in their professional apps (such as no rules in the built-in email software : so what? the next version will have them...)...
  All this said, the iPad should have been introduced to the market as a competitor to a great invention, the Kindle. But... with colour ! with multimedia support ! and... it also supports other applications to extend the device to other usages. What? it can already run 170.000 apps that people love on the iPhone... That would have been a killer introduction, and taken away all that criticism. (update: Rafi has great insights into the evolution of computers, I like particularly the bottom-up approach from phones thought instead of a top-down approach from computers)

• the iPad is not another device for the CURRENT users of computers. They already have tons of devices to play with such as desktops, laptops, phones, etc. It's targeting a whole range of new users who do not already own their OWN device. Specifically, after the initial craze from early adopters, this device is targeted at expanding the marketshare of Apple elsewhere (remember the Blue Ocean strategy?) where it is not yet mainstream with computers.
  1) senior people, ie 65+ years old. They need simple applications if they had not been exposed to computers earlier. They don't need Powerpoint, spreadsheets, word processsors (although Apple is selling iPad specific iWork apps). They want to experience leisure: books, magazines, music, maybe browser the web in a fun way, look at pictures... and they have expendable income. Great target group. (again, Rafi mentions the parallel with ADSL - it's asymmetric in behavior. There's a rule out there about 1% producing, 9% interacting, 90% just consuming)
  2) kids. Have you noticed how comfortable kids from 3 years old onwards are with the iPhone. Intuitive, native. Publishers got it, check this Penguin Books video. Software vendors get it. Check this game by FreshPlanet. And of course, parents are willing to spend premium money on their kids, to educate them, in the same way they used to buy an encyclopaedia for them. It's a brilliant move by Apple by the way. Once you get used to Apple's interface, ecosystem, design... would you ever want to go elsewhere and experience less than beautiful devices or software. A bit like hooking you up early when you are a tobacco company.
  3) lastly, most families still have just one computer at home. So your spouse doesn't have one. now he/she will have one. definitively, since it's not meant to be a "serious" computer, just a web/multimedia/entertainment device. Remember them just 2 years ago, still using their first or second mobile phone? a brick from Nokia or other vendor, only using it for voice and text ? and now, when you look at them, they are happily browsing the web away, doing tons of things on their iPhone, consuming tons of data. BUT noone calls that their mobile computer (like Nokia once did). It's just their new phone, that does TONS of things extra. I believe this is how Apple should have introduced its iPad : a fantastic eReader, that happens to do tons of things. And by the way, critics mentioned Apple had only signed up 60K books for launch, vs. 400K books on the Kindle. Well, the Kindle app launched for iPad today. There goes that criticism.

• a family will own more than one iPad. This is a prediction I have been debating for a few days. I have a digital frame from Parrot that I have been playing with for a few weeks. It displays my pictures from Flickr randomly every few seconds. Great way to see my big archive of pictures; but it's not programmable, I can't extend it to see for example my PRIVATE pictures of my kids for example. It makes total sense though as a picture frame in my private living room (a tool to select which portfolio to display, etc. It could be done with a third-party app, that redistributes a new RSS, etc.). In addition, this frame comes with 2 other apps, that are useless to me. Why not more apps ? why isn't it an open platform for developers? and by the way it costs the same price as an entry-level price for an iPad. Hence this weird thought : I have 4 computers in my home. I own 2 phones, 2 TV sets. My household could sustain a 3rd TV set (I actually stream TV on my son's computer). Probably a few more phones. Hence, shouldn't I be having a picture frame in every room, connected to the Internet, that could do many other things ? Indeed. (update: Benoit said something along these lines when the iPad was introduced)
  I believe there is a target market of a few iPads to be just that in every household : 2-3 picture frames in your living room, dining room, bedroom, TV room, home office... right there recharging, acting as picture frames, but becoming great devices once you need to / feel like reading something, interacting with the web, checking a fact, answering a voice (Skype) call ! I believe the real difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 was when we moved away from dial-up (30 seconds to connect) to permanent connections to the internet with broadband. The iPad is bringing another revolution : access to information in a second by just extending your arm to grab a device, vs. going to a computer, and launching an app.
  Of course there is an issue with the price of each device. Of course. but the market will take care of that : prices will come down when the iPad 2.0 comes out (well, you can buy the 1.0 cheaper), when competitors try to imitate this tablet's success, when middle men (think mobile companies, retailers) give them away or at a fraction of a price, bundled with something else. There was an interesting tweet the other day : someone said he never had to update the hardware of his phone (iPhone) since he bought it 2 years ago (because of software upgrades), but he would have had to with any other brand. Finally, these vision of access to your own environment from multi-devices brings in great opportunities in the cloud, and software vendors to give you great experiences from anywhere, whatever the device (more on this another day - multi-device syncing in the cloud).

• Marc Benioff wrote a great piece on the impact of the iPad on the cloud. Actually in that article he pointed how touch was changing the UI. Indeed, he's right : the text mode interaction we had with a keyboard during the 60s, 70s was changed when graphical UIs came out with windows and mouse controls. It's time for a new UI paradigm change. It's about touch. I don't mean your finger replacing the mouse pointer. It's about rethinking interfaces, interactions. The iPhone introduced this : see all apps use the same elements such as lists, big buttons, etc. It's absolutely not a web or desktop app interface redesign with bigger buttons. I believe indeed we need to invent new ways to interact with graphical interfaces with touch. A bit like the minority report movie or like in this Jeff Han video. And remember, people are very comfortable using this touch experience on their iPhone. The iPad brings a much bigger touch surface: it will be used as a great input device for example for controlling MIDI instruments, other equipment (think remote control) or just simply interacting with our environment (think how "pinch" has already changed our way of interacting - so many people try that on the Kindle that doesn't support it...). And of coursenew games make use of the touch interface ! I also believe that touch will expand beyond tablets, and become a standard UI to the world surrounding us : the Microsoft Surface table is an example. The CNN TV set for displaying election results is another. There is a start-up out there transforming any window into a display with touch ! 

• Finally, there are a number of predictions about the number of iPads sold this year. Anywhere between 8 and 10 million. That is a small number compared to recent numbers for netbooks (50 millions), smartphones, etc. The real impact of iPad success cannot be measured on this number alone. Most if not all of AT&T's growth in the past few quarters comes from the iPhone (talk about impact in terms of churn reduction, ARPU, etc.). The whole mobile industry has copied the iPhone model with its AppStore (think Android Market, GetJar, what Samsung is trying to do with Bada), it's graphical UI, its form factor. Almost everything but its exclusive business model with operators (hard to copy and rejected by EU courts). Finally with less than 100m devices sold (iPhone and iPod touch), Apple has revolutionized totally the mobile market. with its beautiful laptops, it has over 90% marketshare in device over $1,000). Its approach to multimedia (iTunes Music store with movies, TV films, Music), has revived shrinking industries. Expect it to do the same in the book / publishing industries, and even software development market for casual apps (KPCB launched a new $100m fund for iPad apps this week; the mobile apps market being estimated at $17.5b by 2012...). Another interesting metric would have been to know how many people came to the Apple world though the iPhone, iPod, enabling Apple to post recently their best quarter ever in revenue and profit in history !