As I discussed earlier, all of the big online players are moving their services into the cloud. Not surprisingly, Apple will announce iCloud next week at their WWDC keynote. I’m fairly certain iCloud will be a fusion of iDrive, Mobile Me and iTunes features, and it will be free. Free as in “available at no additional charge after you’ve paid a lot for a Mac product or iDevice”. I don’t see how Apple can keep charging for cloud services like Mobile Me when everyone else is offering them for free. Apple is smart enough to know when to build a free platform which will continue to drive sales of the products they want to be selling.

If you didn’t think cloud storage was here to stay, Amazon’s new Cloud Drive had to finally convince you that it’s more than a fad. Apple, Microsoft, SugarSync, Dropbox and now Amazon are all big players making various moves in the cloud storage space. Music players apps like DropTunes are popping up on nearly a daily basis. While it’s certainly not as sexy as new mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, the storage behind them is a valuable asset. As I wrote in an earlier post, Apple’s long-term goal is to eliminate on-board storage in their mobile devices. It makes manufacturing easier and lowers the price of their mobile devices. Will a flash-memory free iPhone 7 be cheap? Hell no. Apple’s still going to charge a premium for their products. But if all mobile device manufacturers can move to a cloud-based storage model, prices overall will drop.

What’s the benefit of cloud storage for big companies like Apple and Amazon? Usage data and the search personalization which goes with it. If Amazon can convince you to store your favorite music on their Cloud Drive, they can use your usage patterns to make better recommendations of new music they’d like you to buy from them. Same goes for Apple. You know Apple’s working on a way to move your iTunes library into iDrive.

The cloud is here and it doesn’t just have a silver lining. It is the silver lining.

So AT&T is gonna buy T-Mobile. Big deal. T-Mobile fans are threatening to bail to another carrier because they don’t like AT&T. Seriously, when did the choice of mobile carrier become something akin to the religious fervor of Mac vs. PC?

As I ranted about on my Posterous blog, the wireless carriers need to figure out that they’re become wireless broadband providers, not mobile telephony providers. Thanks to Apple’s muscle, they’re also becoming less relevant than the devices on their network. The walled gardens are disappearing. Sure, customers and equipment providers may lose out in the short term, but ultimately, wireless carriers will evolve into not much more than utility companies.

I predict that after the dust of the 4G rollouts settle, choosing a wireless company will largely resemble choosing between cable or DSL for your home broadband connection. Sure, it somewhat matters, but no one really gets that worked up about which company they choose or bitch about the customer service. Neither the phone company or the cable company are all that stellar when it comes to customer service, but as long as the connection is up and not noticeably slow, customers are happy.

Maybe Sprint will stick around and we’ll have three major carriers in the US, or maybe it will be bought up and we’ll have only Verizon and AT&T. In the end, the devices will matter far more than the carriers.

On Monday, I posted a Facebook update/tweet asking why deleting my LinkedIn account would be a stupid idea. It received WAY more comments than I thought it would, so I wanted to continue the discussion in a better forum.

Originally, I thought about deleting my account because I pretty much never use it. I only log in when I get emails because someone wants to connect with me. I figured I may as well just cut down on some social media clutter and get rid of it. As it turns out, I was taking a close-minded, social media nerd’s view of LinkedIn’s usefulness.

I tend to have few boundaries in my online social life. I don’t worry too much about who follows me on Twitter or which co-workers are friends with me on Facebook. I just figure that if I say something in the vastness of the social web, I’d better be prepared for anyone and everyone to know I said it.

What I haven’t yet done is looked at my complete social presence from the perspective of an entrepreneur. As someone who would ultimately like to wind up working for myself, I need to approach my personal social media with that mindset. Through the discussions on Facebook and Twitter, I picked up two good tips which helped me to change my strategy in dealing with LinkedIn:

1. It’s a good service for helping to segregate business relationships from personal ones. Business connections can be maintained on LinkedIn, whereas personal friendships can be kept in Facebook.
2. LinkedIn is used more heavily by business executives, even those who aren’t otherwise social media savvy. It’s social media for non social media nerds.

If I want to help companies who aren’t as knowledgeable about social media, I need to be available in the forums where they do participate. I also need to develop more definition around where my personal life and professional life diverge, and I need to present them accordingly in the online social realm.

Does anyone else have thoughts about the use or uselessness of LinkedIn? I’d like to see if there are more opinions, so throw a comment on this post if you have one.

In light of my recent bitching about location-based services, I was interested to see the latest news from Foursquare regarding version 3 of their apps for iPhone and Android. It seems that they’re finally branching out from simple mayor specials, adding things like newbie specials and specials for regulars (so long, loyalty punch cards!).

It’s good to see Foursquare upping their game and attempting to actually compete with Facebook in the LBS field. I hope the competition will drive even more location-based innovation.

Now that the iPad 2 announcement is a few days behind us, it’s time for me to add my two cents to the mountain of thoughts, commentary, rantings and fanboy drooling which have been published on the Internet. So, read on if you’re interested.

First, Apple didn’t make any changes to the amount of storage space in iPad 2 because they want to evolve away from on-board storage altogether. They’ve successfully eliminated the hard drives which earlier generations of iPods relied on, and now they want to quit cramming flash memory into portable devices.

What’s their long-term vision? All media will be stored on a non-portable device at home (Mac Mini, iMac, Windows PC, maybe even a portable-but-not-in-an-iOS-way laptop) and you’ll just stream it from iTunes to your iOS device or Apple TV. Even when you’re away from home, you’ll just stream media over the speedy 4G networks which will be a reality by the time Apple fully realizes their vision. They may even be considering making iTunes cloud-based and completely eliminating the need for storage at home.

Also, iPad 2 is the final nail in the coffin of the netbook segment. Really, does anyone even talk about netbooks anymore? There’s no point to buying an underpowered miniature laptop to do  things like check email and browse the web, all of which are better on an iPad anyway. Face it, iPad simultaneously created the tablet market and killed the netbook market. For proof, look at Chrome OS. It was supposed to be the heart of new web-connected netbooks. Discussion about those has pretty much vanished and been replaced with buzz about Android tablets like Motorola’s Xoom.

Google, Ima let ya finish, but Apple has the best tablet on the market.

Don't scan this.

2D codes have been the next big thing in interactive marketing/advertising/social media for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, the 2D code wave still hasn’t made it across the Pacific from Japan.

That doesn’t stop people from writing articles telling businesses how to use them and get in on “the next big thing” early. Take Jamie Turner’s article on Mashable about how to grow your sales using 2D codes. While it has a few good suggestions (2D code on the back of your business card which contains your info in a vCard), some of his suggestions amount to nothing more than just sticking codes in places where they’re less convenient than printed text. 2D code on a billboard? Not so great if you’re driving by.

But the lack of innovative ideas for using codes isn’t what’s holding back adoption of them. It’s the fact that scanning apps aren’t ubiquitous yet. Seriously, why would a business put out marketing materials which have to include instructions for how to find an app, which then has to be downloaded and installed before the user can scan a code? All that just to go to a URL?

Texting is ubiquitous because every cell phone sold in the world since 1998 can do it. Mobile web browsing is ubiquitous because every smartphone has a web browser and people learned how to type in a URL long before they had smartphones. Anyone seen a smartphone with a built-in barcode scanning app? Didn’t think so.

For 2D codes to catch on, mobile platform vendors need to start including a scanning app. Once every iPhone and Android device has a simple scanning app preinstalled, marketing with 2D codes will start making much more sense.

Having gotten that rant out of the way, I’d like to highlight the first truly creative use of 2D codes I’ve seen. Over at R and R Images blog, I saw this article on postage stamps issued by Chunghwa Post (the postal system of Taiwan) with codes integrated into the design. While it isn’t a marketing campaign, it’s a fun use of 2D barcodes. Big congrats to whoever in Taiwan thought up that idea.

According to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, Apple will unveil iPad 2 at an event on March 2nd. That’s cool. While it sounds like iPad 2 isn’t going to be a complete redesign of the iPad, it seems like it will have some good evolutionary features such as a camera and thinner display. But that wasn’t the part of the article I was most interested in.

The most revealing part of the article was her comment on competing Android tablets:

…Apple will be facing increased competition with the launch of a passel of tablets coming from numerous manufacturers, most of which are using the Honeycomb version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

That says a lot about why Apple dominates the tablet space and why Android-based devices are facing a huge wall standing standing in the way of their success. In the minds of consumers, journalists and critics, there is the iPad monolith and there are fragments of Android.

A multiple device, multiple manufacturer approach has been fairly successful for Android in the mobile phone space, because that space was a fragmented mess contained within walled gardens before smartphone platforms showed up. Anything was an improvement over that crap. But the tablet space was nearly nonexistent until Apple defined it with the iPad and did to the netbook category what the iPod did to the MP3 player market.

I predict that Android tablets will have about as much success against iPad as “desktop Linux” had against Windows throughout the last decade. The fragments vs. monolith comparison is similar and although Google is a much stronger unifying force behind Android than the open-source community was behind Linux, the results will be similar.

I admit, I’ve been a big fan of location-based services for a while now. Foursquare was my gateway drug, and that lead to abuse of services like Gowalla, Whrrl, SCVNGR and a few others I’d like to forget about. What did all that LBS use get me? Nothing except Foursquare mayorship of my house and the realization that Facebook Places are going to kill all the other services.

Yeah, I said it. Facebook Places is going to make the rest of the LBS gang irrelevant for two reasons. One, everyone is on Facebook. Literally. Lord Zuckerbeast has consumed nearly all of the Internet-using humans on the planet, especially the ones who care enough about social media to use a location-based service. Unfortunately, the social media nerds aren’t going to keep using services which are frequented by a few of their fellow nerderati when all of their other friends are checking in on Facebook. Maybe a few will, but not enough to keep a company profitable.

The second reason is the forthcoming Facebook Deals. This is a check-in rewards program that is way more useful than offering a mayor special on Foursquare and isn’t as confusing as trying to add checkin offers on top of it. Facebook Deals actually reflects the ways in which businesses want to get more people in their doors. As a bonus, it can be managed through the Places interface, which any social-media savvy business is already familiar with.

In preparation for the death of the location-based services, I’ve quit using all except for Foursquare. OK, I actually quit using them because I’m tired of them. None of them really enhance my social experience unless I tweet my checkin. I don’t need an LBS for that, I have a Twitter client. Facebook Places is socially useful, because my checkins there generate comments and communicate my personality to my friends (yes, I really do go to Pita Jungle and Giant Coffee that much).

Image by annamatic3000 on Flickr

Why keep using Foursquare? Because it’s the biggest service and because the game of maintaining a mayorship is still a little bit fun. I anticipate it will die out sometime, but for now I’ll stay on and keep mayorship of my own house, if nothing else.

So goodbye, Whrrl, SCVNGR and the rest. You helped evolve social media, but you’re digital Neanderthals now.

My t-shirt today

This is my t-shirt for today. The fact that there’s so many closed-minded people to piss off says something about what America has become over the past nine years.

In 2001, religious extremism killed 3,000 Americans in our own front yard. So why do so many people now react to that with their own extremism? Burning the Koran, protesting mosques and a general hatred of anyone Arab isn’t just restricted to crazy fundamentalist Christians anymore. America seems to have upped the religious extremism ante with some old-fashioned, home-grown racism.

Are we only motivated when we have someone to hate and an enemy to kill?

Here’s some facts which will piss off closed-minded people:

• Arabs (Muslims and non-Muslims) are people too
• Islam isn’t a religion of hate
• The Koran is not an evil text
• Most people who live in the Middle East don’t actually want to kill anyone, even Americans

Hopefully next year we can remember those killed on September 11th with more sorrow and less hate.

UPDATE: This news story is the complete opposite of everything I bitched about here. A Christian church in Memphis actually living what they say they believe. Total win.

Thanks to Chad Swaney for the link!

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