4 posts tagged “iphone”

By Chris A. Heidelberg III, Ph.D.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented the new iPhone yesterday in San Francisco, I had a "eureka moment" where the impact of the iPhone has really impacted two of my favorite things higher education and entertainment. For the purposes of being contrarian I will deliberately start with the field of entertainment.

Despite the fact that there is a real fight between Apple and NBC, the iPhone and the iPod Touch have enabled television viewers to view NBC, MSNBC, and USA Networks programming for free. NBC willingly gave up $15 million dollars in iTunes revenues from Apple because they wanted variable pricing from Apple which insisted on the old $1.99 download model (Apple, 2008; NBC, 2008). Ironically, Apple has begun offering variable pricing to the movie industry now, so maybe the two companies should mend fences for the sake of consumers. For NBC, this is really a lose-lose proposition because NBC and Fox just started the HULU network online to distribute their television and cable shows online (Apple, 2008; Hulu, 2008; Fox, 2008; NBC, 2008; Newscorp, 2008).

NBC should be following the example of Newscorp owned Fox which has been shrewd in selling downloads on iTunes, streaming content on Newscorp owned MySpace, and streaming on Hulu. Fox is not going to give up double digit millions of dollars when it has the most popular social network based on users, a popular Fox site and the HULU site.

The iPhone changed the debate in favor of Apple because even iPodTouch owners can view NBC content for free rather than downloading. NBC may have created more iPhone and iPodTouch owners who can view NBC content and save money during tough economic times. The fact that many young viewers of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann are becoming very politically active and are tech savvy has benefited the Obama Campaign which has relied heavily on podcasts, blogs, YouTube and the Internet to campaign and to raise record campaign donations from ordinary Americans. The fact that the new iPhone will operate on AT&T's 3G network which will make the device a fully functional convergence device with less problems than its predecessor which operated on the notoriously slow EDGE network.

The iPhone and competing devices will make it possible for new entertainment content that can air on iTunes,

Amazon, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and the Zune Marketplace. Smaller content creators now have outlets for their program offerings, and major networks can also air programming on the third screen first and wait for programs to get popular before airing them on USA, MSNBC or NBC. The iPhone and the iPod have been critical to transforming the political process and the entertainment business from a revenue generating and a pure entertainment perspective.

However, the iPhone and the iPodTouch has already impacted the biggest entertainment business of them all: higher education. If higher education can extend the best parts of its NCAA model to the academic side, it will create a business that will rival the major networks, publishers, and music content providers. Furthermore, this organization would also be a major online player too, since most of the people from the tech world have higher edudational roots.

The iPhone has already impacted the IT departments of many universities such as Duke, Colgate, and Stanford where the voracious appetites of iPhone users have placed new pressures on their networks. Now that the iPhone is $199 and $299 and the iPodTouch works via WiFi, every university will have to brace themselves for the iPhone and iPodTouch onslaught that will be hitting universities this summer and this fall. Research indicates that iPhone users are large users of online data. Do not be surprised when many college IT departments adopt the iPhone platform and the iPhone itself now that the iPhone SDK has opened up the phone to developers who will quickly improve this device through software. This will amount to an upgraded phone every month for those who want to buy.

Finally, the most important reason that higher education will change higher education is the delivery of content. Apple delivers more digital content than anyone in the world, and the company has created a future gold mine with its free podcasts which inevitably will be branded with ads from NCAA corporate sponsors on the academic side. The day will come when Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon will all benefit from residuals of ads placed strategically within podcasts. Apple's new iTunesU has been extremely successful in its first full year of operation.

The fact that major schools such as Duke, Stanford, MIT, and others are distributing their content through iTunes speaks volumes of the future of higher education through time shifting. The distance learning industry will also be forced to changed now that students can carry their class in their pocket and retrieve their classes anytime, anyplace and anywhere. The fact that high profile schools like Duke have already bought iPods for their students and now many universities are looking to the same for the iPhone at a cheaper price on a better network with GPS and software updates makes the iPhone an irresistible device for higher education. Now, if I can really convince my colleagues in higher education on the importance of utilizing these tools and making their presentations more interactive we could help stabilize education costs.

Did you hear that sucking sound? That is the sound of big media publishers screaming when colleges begin to create their own digital publishing outlets that will enable professors to teach and publish online simultaneously.
Administrators are going to have problems with the whole tenure process since they love hiring adjuncts on the cheap! The real question becomes this: what will they do when the first academic rockstar professors are born! Even if they win the intellectual property war, which is not a given, many professors will simply jump ship and sign better deals with universities because of the new crop of intellectual property attorneys. Stay tuned because I hear a storm coming!

Now that's edutainment!

 

 

     I love it when the mainstream media, also known as the MSM on the net, finally grasps a concept that I have known in my professional, my academic research, and my professional research: convergence has not only linked the world it has transformed the world. The United States literally went wild this year with the introduction of the iPhone, the iTouch iPod, the classic iPod, Google Apps, the Wii and new marriages of Digg and Facebook with Microsoft. In fact, the iPhone was named the invention of the year by Time Magazine as the first massively adopted convergence device that has an ease of use and innovative features like touch screens, iTunes and You Tube with the Mac interface.  A report by the USA Today demonstrates the power of convergence worldwide, and how it has already conquered Japan and people are turning to handhelds like smartphones, handheld media devices like the iPod, gaming devices, and cell phones instead of personal computers.

    Experts like Tapscott & Williams, (2006); Steve Jobs, (2007); Bill Gates, (2007); Marc Prensky, (2006); Henry Jenkins (2006); James Paul Gee, (2003, 2004, 2005); and others have been predicted the convergence avalanche. The recent development of the Internet, the iPod, the personal computer, and web-based tools like You Tube and Facebook into single convergence devices that can held in one's hand is the clearly the future of entertainment, learning, government, commerce, home, and work in one device with a quality web camera and video camera with note taking and large memory capacity (Gates, 2007; Jobs, 2007; Pavlik, 2000; Tapscott & Williams, 2006).

     The personal nature of cell phones has now extended past the traditional web experience provided by the personal computer. Personal computers, like laptops, are portable, but lack the personal portability and the ability to make calls on the run. Increasingly, our cell phones are becoming portable handheld electronic extensions of our minds, our personalities and our core beliefs and values. McLuhan (1967, 1968) suggested that would occur in the 1960's that we would live in a connected electronic global village and that the medium would be the message.

    To be sure, we are moving closer to Star Trek than any of us ever could have imagined more rapidly than most people could have ever thought.

Here is the USA Today article below.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/computing/2007-11-04-japanpcs_N.htm?csp=Tech

By Chris A. Heidelberg III

Well, this weekend the first real shot of the handheld digital revolution will begin with the iPhone which appears to be quite an authentic device. One thing for sure is that it is true convergence because it seamlessly has combined the Internet, the computer, the phone, the television, film, the audio recorder, the still camera and the music player into one small package (www.nytimes.com; www.usatoday.com). Is it the perfect device? No!

However, the initial iPod was not a perfect device and look what it was at that time and what it grew up to become. The iPod was easy to use, easy to charge and it had the fun factor that other music players simply did not have, and frankly few music players have been able to get this basic concept. It is the ease of use stupid! When a product or service is easy to use and it seamlessly functions as it is designed to do people tend to adopt it according to the technology adoption model (Davis, 1989).  This is a factor that many tech magazines and professional web journalists keep missing, and it is the point that will cause them much pain when this device becomes an unbelievable success.

Steve Jobs according to several online sources held a meeting to commend his employees and to admonish them in part of the importance of this product to the future of Apple, and then he reportedly promised iPhones to all Apple employees with a year of service or more in July 2007. Love him or hate him, Jobs is the real deal because he gets it! This is why Apple devotees love this man and his products because he gives the customer what they want within reason and creates a business model in the process. Is he perfect no? Who is? He has probably done more to keep the music business from totally tanking despite some self-destructive tendencies when the RIAA, the industry's trade group, began its ill-advised crusade against piracy by suing its customers and future customers. Jobs' response was an open online letter to the music business to remove DRM, also known as digital rights management protection scheme, from music and to take the risk and trust the customer. Thus far, EMI has joined him while the rest of the Big 4 have adopted a wait and see approach while the television networks are making a nice chunk of change from iTunes without having to go the traditional retail route.

The iPhone will set off the alarms at Nokia, LG, Motorola, Microsoft, Sony and everyone in the converged media world to step up their games or become irrelevant, because this product will be improved quickly because of its ability to create updates through the OSX software and it already has the iTunes and YouTube connections. Jobs wants 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008. I think that Apple and AT&T could get a major headstart on the competition and even kill one or two competitors with this device and its second generation that will debut in Europe and Japan early next year with their higher rates of broadband penetration and better products.  I think the iPhone could sell 15 million if they simply execute the plan and 20 million if they continously improve and fix the bugs and address consumer problems. The second generation iPhone in the United States, however, will probably be the phone that gets us closer to technology nirvana because Apple and AT&T will have learned the lessons in Europe, Asia and the United States and will incorporate these lessons with innovations such as voice, business applications, editing of Microsoft Word, 3G and limited high definition because the entire broadcast, video and film businesses will be forced to finally adopt high definition by law in February 2009. Can Apple and AT&T do it? My vote is yes but it will be tough.

That is my take what is yours. For the record, I am going to get mine in late August for road testing. To my fellow bloggers and journalists who have been so negative: please stop the hating until someone else can get something that is easier to use and integrates multiple features at a significantly lower price. The United States is finally trying to close the gap on our technological divide with Asia and Europe and this is a start that even the Asians and Europeans will have to respect when the iPhone hits Asia and Europe later and Apple improves the product, and you know they will! The iPhone will not be a flop unless Apple and AT&T decide to rest on their laurels and do not listen to their base.