Feeding a business demands information, the awareness that you find in articles and reports. This is a Mac experience at its best these days, using the Web, but the iPad can become a tool to make that task more mobile and more easily shared. It’s also richer, as Wired magazine shows in a video today. (Beware, that’s a Flash video below, so set your Mac’s processors on Stun. Sorry if you’re using an iPhone. You can see the video at the Wired site, too.)

We’ve got an ally in the enterprise reseller marketplace who sent us this video link with a simple note. This fellow, who talks with IT directors and enterprise managers about their future tech needs simply said after seeing the iPad in action, “Now I get it.” (more…)

Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was. (more…)

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010’s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity. (more…)

More than anything else, more than news of IT asset tracking software or a tiny mic to power an iPhone’s recording of meetings, or the reports of the $6 spreadsheet-plus-word processor for iPhone or transcription software for the Mac, people wanted to know if Macworld was healthy after one day without Apple. It would appear the patient was too busy frolicking to stop and have his pulse checked.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life’s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

Macworld Expo gets rolling this evening with a pair of media receptions, the start of The New Era that show organizers IDG are promising. Half of the world’s largest Mac and Apple show venues has been removed to the Moscone West hall, evidence enough that things will be new and changed here in San Francisco. The expo may spill into Moscone South, but the hall above that arena is not a conference venue.

This is my fifth Macworld but the first without an Apple mothership hovering in the expo’s molten core. We’re all waiting to see what the impact of the missing lead vendor will be on this 25-year tradition. Registration lines seemed light this afternoon, although the media desk had a steady stream of reporters and bloggers. It might just be a feeling, but the attitude at the press registration desk smacked of genuine gratitude for our attentions.

(more…)

Analysts and pundits are holding forth on whether the iPad is going to be a Kindle killer. My colleagues wonder if I’ll have any use for my Kindle 2, once the iPad arrives in my offices. Both can be pressed into service for business work; reading business books is a natural on a long flight, and even without seeing or using an iPad yet, I can make a case for putting the Kindle in my carry-on.

First, it’s lighter. The iPad weighs three times as much the smaller model of the Kindle. When I’m packing a carry-on, every ounce counts since it will be on my shoulder.

Second, it’s likely that the Kindle will easier to read for long stretches. The resolution of the device is 167 ppi, while the iPad is just 132 ppi. The bigger the number, the closer you come to genuine ink on paper.

Beyond that, there’s a secret but brute-simple tool inside a Kindle. The device that has a free data plan and a crude browser capability. You won’t mistake it for a complete Internet experience, but high-text Web sites like Google News or a simple mail browser interface are possible, if not comfortable.

All that said, the extra 25 percent of ppi and the 1-pound drop in carry weight are going to pale in front of a mature iPad for business travel. When I land in San Francisco I’ll want to know which BART stop gets me closest to the Macworld hall at Moscone. I can’t do this with a Kindle 2. (more…)

Content is king of the communication over the Internet, be it on a traditional Web browser or in the screen of an iPhone or iPad. While it’s easy enough to just point Safari at your Web site or blog, if you communicate with customers and prospects using news, there’s a new tool that can let the less-technical business person create a mobile app.

It helps if your blog already has an RSS/CSS feed, apparently, something that most blog services include as a tick-box. Yapper promises a means to create that brand-specific app for smartphones and perhaps the iPad too.

We’ll have a look at the tool when it makes its debut at Macworld next week. Early feature sets in the teaser information tout:

APPER (Your APP maker) is an online self-service for bloggers, newspapers, pod casters and others to make their own native mobile apps in WYSIWYG fashion. Key features:

• No coding required use existing RSS/ CMS feeds
• Multiple mobile OS support: iPhone, Android and Blackberry
• Optimized for mobile user experience: Mobile optimized UI (mobile friendly entire article content with images and videos), Content caching (users can read offline), Fast (no straight RSS feed parsing), Location enabled
• Customization options: colors and branding
• Push notifications for breaking stories and events
• Monetization and analytics support

It was a surprising gaffe to see an Apple demo with a hole on Wednesday, when Steve Jobs did a demo of the new iPad. But there on the screen were holes in “the best way to browse the Web.”

Those holes on the browser’s screen were Flash videos, built in to sites like The New York Times and Time magazine. Flash is everywhere except the iPad and iPhone. Apple doesn’t like it because Flash is a hog, a tar-pit that brings the iPhone to a crawl. And apparently the iPad, even with the hot A4 processor Apple built to drive the device.

What’s a business need Flash for, anyway? Well, information presented quickly. Hit the Wall Street Journal’s front page with an iPhone to see what you’re missing. All the video, that’s what. A 2-minute video summary can be the best way to find an overview of a business story. It’s a stubborn oversight for the iPad and Apple to sneer at Flash. At the WSJ site it’s especially important, because the paper is now owned by News Corp., which runs a little thing called Fox News.

There will be a lot of business information on the Journal’s site that won’t appear on an iPad. Jobs’ blinders during the demo were among the most un-Apple-like facets I’ve seen from the company. Especially in front of an audience of journalists in the media.

The articles are starting to appear today about Flash being missing. The LA Times posted an item this morning that compared Apple’s absence on the Flash team with Adobe’s desire to put the product onto iPads and iPhones. The disconnect shows two things to a business customer. First, Apple wants a video standard they can control or influence, like the pretty-green HTML5. Second, that no matter how fast you think your hardware is on your business tool, there’s always something to stop it dead. (more…)

There’s apparently a lot to complain about since Apple launched the iPad era yesterday. A gauntlet of Engadget writers gave a series of ho-hum, “who-needs-it” reviews today. Some wanted to chide Apple for not reinventing the personal computer, especially after the rumor mills and hypesters had lifted this tablet to breakthrough status.

It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.

In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)

The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.

But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too. (more…)

Apple’s new tablet is called the iPad. The breakthrough device is starting at $499, somehow — a price point nobody predicted, although larger memory capacities (up to 64GB) will be more. The base model is 16GB, still a lot of storage until you start downloading video. The pricing points kick up a lot for access to a 3G network-enabled version of the iPad. Add $130 to be able to access data — and that’s books, magazines, video and movies and TV, music — from anywhere you can get a 3G signal (ATT’s, although there’s no contract required.)

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

(more…)