AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I know that Apple has made it easy to design, code, and publish apps for the iOS devices.  Three hundred thousand apps and likely five hundred thousand apps by the middle of 2011 is a testament to how Apple can really shine when it wants to. However, outside of iTunes and the App Store, Apple's effort into other media has been met with mediocre success as with TV and movies.  And it has so far floundered with ebooks.  What should Apple do? How about an iBookstore SDK?

In the last week, we saw some major moves by big companies getting into the iPhone app business. Obviously, I'm talking about CBS's TV.com app and the just released Kindle for iPhone app. Slow but surely, folks in the upper echelon of the corporate realm are beginning to realize that mobility, fortunately for us the iPhone, is how people will get their information, video, and other forms of entertainment. So, what does the future hold? A month down the line? Six months? A year from now? Frankly, both of these apps surprise me. Not the apps themselves but the fact that Apple allowed them to be released into the wild just blew me away. First, the TV.com app. CBS, by offering albeit limited quantities of full episodes of videos to be stream free to iPhone and iPod Touch users, therefore, potentially bypassing the iTunes stores for some of its offerings was "okayed" by Apple's store sentries. Recall not long ago, the biggest news was that Apple was rejecting ap...

It's been widely known that when approached about ebooks, Jobs said Americans just don't read anymore. I initially took offense to that until I realized there might be some truth to that. I don't know if reading is now an elitist thing to do but I was at Borders last night and I did see a good crowd there.  I was at a different book store last week and I saw quite a line at the checkout counter.  So I think it isn't that folks aren't ready anymore. The truth is, people aren't reading ebooks.  Ebooks have been around for quite some years now.  And digital growth for books are not growing as fast as other media like music. Can Apple Make America Read Again?  Maybe.  According to Forbes, Apple may have overtaken Kindle with respect to the number of folks using iPhones to read ebooks.  I encourage heading over to look at it a bit. I don't like the flippant use of download numbers to suggest that more folks are using iPhone to read books t...