Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).

As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.

Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?

From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.

The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:

How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.

If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.

No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.

The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.

Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.

Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?

iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)

iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.

But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.

The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.

Once the gold deposits are mapped, or if cheaper shovel-makers start eating into your margins, you better pivot quick and become the best gold miner in the business, or the best refinery, or the best goldsmith in town. If the gold market changes from being about discovering gold to locking up, distributing and selling it, the act of shovelling becomes a much smaller slice of a much bigger pie, and your shareholders will punish you for not adapting to the changing market.

This story isn’t about gold mining, it’s not even about shovels. But as with most of my writing, I need analogies to set the scene. This post is actually about the smartphone market, and it’s partly a response to a post by Jojo over on 37Signals, where Jojo asserts that the new Nokia N9 handset may still be successful, even though the app offering for the N9 looks sparse. This post started out as a comment at the end of Jojo’s post, then got way too long for anybody to read at the end of many pages of other comments, so here it is in full.

Here’s the thing: the N9 will find customers and will be profitable, but will it be a big enough success to do what Nokia shareholders *really* want from the company? To take back #1 place? No. And the answer lies in the way Nokia just keeps selling shovels. Or, if you prefer, keeps making TV sets…

Oh dear me. Billions of dollars, thousands of well-paid employees, and this is what you see when you first go to Nokia.com?

The handset market is changing

Being a handset maker is becoming a smaller slice of a much bigger pie, in the same way that making TV sets is now a small slice of a pie mostly made up of content production, distribution/licensing, and advertising.

By sticking to handsets and partnering with Microsoft for mobile operating systems, what Nokia has done is to commit to making TV sets, handing the content production to Microsoft (the networks, remember, are already owned by carriers).

That would be fine, if making the hardware was still a premium margin business, or if the market for content was still unproven. But a seething mass of Asian manufacturers making Android handsets are cutting all the margin out of making smartphones, and the market for content is very much proven. VERY much proven.

For Apple, meanwhile, is the fastest-growing content production, distribution, licensing and sales business that the media industry has ever known.

Shareholders expect Nokia to make the same leap and the reason it’s taking a hammering is that it’s failing to do so. In fact, it’s been failing to do so for a very long time.

Build a better marketplace

Enough of TVs and shovels, they’ve served their purpose. Nokia can be a successful and profitable handset manufacturer, but it is now clear that it won’t be the biggest brand in the mobile space unless it has the biggest content marketplace. Mobile content is now largely about music, TV, movies and, more than anything, mobile apps. How’s Nokia doing?

Not good. Nokia’s first opportunity to build an app marketplace was actually with the N-Gage platform, which it launched in 2003. Apple didn’t launch the first iPhone until mid-way thru 2007. Here we are in 2011 and Nokia’s had several attempts at building a thriving content marketplace, yet has been overtaken by every other competitor of note, most especially by Apple.

Nobody likes inertia, especially a shareholder

Nokia’s had an eternity in ‘market time’ to see the change coming, from a hardware market to a content market. It’s even had the luxury of being first to market with a content store. Yet with each strategic decision it makes, and with each product releases, it just confirms that making hardware is written so deep into its corporate DNA that there’s no room in there to become anything else.

That’s OK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Nokia’s doomed, it just means that the market will adjust its valuation of Nokia, and we see that happening right now, with shareholders pricing in the adjustment, realising that Nokia’s probably only ever going to do one thing well, and that’s make shovels.

For instance, he keeps referring to “bands” these days, like the smallest unit of commercial music is still two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer.

That was certainly the case in the past, but like the internet atomised the album into 12 discreet musical products and a video, it’s also in the process of atomising the “band” into something looser, stretchier, more of a ‘rubber band’.

A rubber band’s configuration changes more frequently than in the ’80s and ’90s, with little or no media and fan panic. Each of the members of the rubber band is an independent artist to a greater or lesser extent, and each collaborates with others outside the rubber band from time to time. Each will increasingly have separate management, publishing deals and content contracts.

Taking a broader view, the rubber band is an interim step between the industrial music industry’s smallest denominator (band) and the independent artist, both in creative direction and legal entity.

The internet’s atomising effects won’t stop at breaking up the rubber band, it will move on to atomise the artist themselves, creating discreet commercial entities for each track, coffee table book, short film, app, game and item of tour merch. The eddies and surges of ecommerce will sometimes recombine these elements in traditional ways, and sometimes in surprising ways, but only because the internet has first split them apart.

The legal and business friction still holding the artist together as the smallest unit of artistic commerce will soon be gone. Not only will the art remain, it is in the process of becoming vastly richer, more collaborative and complex.

Bugherd experienced a brief outage early Friday morning AEST which apparently was unrelated to the fact that they’d been mentioned in the morning’s US tech press including TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and AllThingsD.

Some of the coverage on the investment announcement

It wasn’t news to me exactly, since there’s been talks with the 500Startups team since Alan and Matt pitched in the 500Startups Mountain View office with the Startmate crew back in April, but it was great to be able to talk about the deal finally, and especially gratifying to be mentioned alongside some other really promising startups.

Alan and Matt will be over in Mountain View in July and August, for demo days with the 500startups team and other meetings. But Bugherd’s not attending for the full incubator program because it’s further along in its journey towards hugeness.

500Startups’ decision to invest means they’re excited in the potential of the product and the company, particularly when it comes to delivering a service all early-stage web startups need: a great issue tracking tool. Interested enough that being on the other side of the Pacific isn’t too far away, even. Hope we can get Dave McClure and Christine Tsai out here soon to visit and meet some of the other great people in the startup community here.

I’ll keep track of any further coverage of the announcement at http://bit.ly/500startupsinvestsinbugherd

Try Bugherd now if you need the world’s simplest bug and issue tracker. I have it on good authority the free beta period is about to close, but beta users will get a big discount when pricing is announced in the near future.

The team at iTunes Connect frequently send out emails announcing new features or changes, and the email includes not a single link that might give you one-click access to that feature, not one trackable URL that give the Connect team some idea of who’s responding to their email relationship management.

Wow.

An email update from iTunes Connect. And no link to click on.

Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.

You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.

Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.

Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.

• Product management is mostly about translation
• Managing product development teams is easier if you can rephrase business requirements as interesting, challenging puzzles
• Good product managers are top-level guys, but with a detailed subfloor

Hmmm… some of that may make more sense if you view the presentation below. Let me know what you think…

They’re showing how little they understand when they say they want to add a follow button to the order confirmation page in their shopping cart. Look, knock yourself out, it can’t hurt, but i would expect a 0.0001% clickthru rate on that. It’s not like many of us start following companies we buy from at most once a year, especially when it’s just a retailer of products made by other companies.

Offering useful advice, however, in a friendly, conversational tone — that might well get you some followers. Can you find a way to advise customers on using the product or service they’re considering buying? Can you offer advice on the decisions made before purchase or even on the industry as a whole?

Besides, in 12mths time average Australian Twitter users will probably have 500+ people they follow on average, so for brands, being followed by a customer won’t mean that customer’s seen your message. Lifestream marketing messages are ephemeral things. There’s no way for the marketer to determine an equivalent to impressions/month. It’s like radio or TV — broadcast. Without panel research or clickthru data to show it’s been acted on, we have no idea whether it’s been seen.

Think of Facebook, Twitter and anything that displays a stream of updates as a form of broadcast media, but an unusually fractured kind. On TV, every audience member’s viewing habits are different; on lifestream media, it’s not just their viewing habits but the programming that is different, according to the number and nature of things they follow.

People ask me how I keep up to date with all the tweets I get from the 1,000+ people and brands I follow. I tell them I don’t — but that’s not the point — by following 1,000+ people I ensure that there’s always something interesting to read whenever I have time for Twitter.

(This post was my first from an iPad. Another device further dividing attention into smaller chunks. I’ll tidy it up later, promise!)

“I think most consumers use a search engine the same way they brush their teeth — with 90% of their attention on something else, with impatience, boredom and frustration with the whole category of search. They begin with unreasonable expectations about the quality of the result and with minimal patience for any request to contribute to the input.

As search product designers we find it very hard to really live inside that mindset since our work requires that we have 90% of our attention on the product we’re designing. It’s really a kind of method acting to get inside the head of a search user.”

That’s me, talking to Kat Mackintosh in a two-part interview on Nestoria’s company blog. Read on for more bold assertions about how personalisation, recommendation and geolocation might change the world. Again.

Apple asks you to print out and sign a 70 page contract, in duplicate, for each geographic market iTunes services (US/Canada/Mexico, Europe, Japan, Australia/NZ, then you have to FedEx that stack of paper to Apple in Cupertino, where they will manually review each signature page, countersign each contract, and FedEx back your copy. They then scan and store their copy in some vast archive.

Apple feels this stack of paperwork and penmanship is necessary before you enter into the business of selling digital content over their digital distribution network.

Sadly Apple has yet to adopt digital signature technology

See, what will make the iPad successful is not the list of technologies included in the specification list. When the iPhone was launched, sceptics pooh-poohed the lack of hardware (especially the low-res camera and lack of a front-facing camera). The iPhone went on to sell millions. It was because of how the included technology was implemented, not which technologies were included.

First, Apple provided a high-quality app development toolset that allowed third-party developers to write so many different apps, not just operating on the OS but addressing the hardware in the phone in a consistent and reliable manner. (See “The best camera to have is the one with apps on it” http://doingwords.com/?p=1995)

Next, Apple provided a great retail experience for consumers and developers in iTunes Store, leveraging the iPod’s vast community of music, TV and movie customers to rapidly create a new market for iPhone apps. There’s never been a simpler, more seamless click-to-buy experience than finding and buying a new app from your iPhone. Apple knows the best way to sell iPhones is to market apps not iPhones — when was the last time you saw an ad for the iPhone itself?

I’m predicting the iPad will be an even greater success as an entertainment device than the iPhone because it’s not a compromise between a phone and an entertainment device.

It has a brighter, clearer screen with a far wider viewing angle because it doesn’t need to fit in your pocket, so it allows two people to watch a show together, read a book together, compete or collaborate on a game together. It has a 10 hour battery life because it doesn’t need to keep a 3G radio powered up and connected to a tower.

Unlike a MacBook Air, the iPad has no ‘up’ orientation — we can pass it around a table without needing to re-orient the screen or input area, making collaboration faster and more natural.

Unlike a MacBook, it’s light enough to make no significant impact on your shoulder bag, it doesn’t need a power brick to get through the day, it’s awake instantly and it’s significantly faster at all compute-intensive operations than your iPhone.

Multi-tasking? Please, the only common purpose I can think of for multi-tasking on a portable device would be polling an imap mail server while you’re reading an ebook or surfing the web, and Apple provides for that with push and pull email services. If you get an email while you’re reading, the iPad (and iPhone) will pop up a badge. Click on the badge and the iPad (and iPhone) will hold your front app in its current state and open the email for you. Other apps (such as eBay or Facebook) can access the same push notification services to push you a badge notification that you’ve been outbid on an auction item or that you’ve been tagged in a Facebook photo.

You don’t need multi-tasking to do this and leaving it out makes the device simpler to manage and preserves battery life. Try explaining to Nanna why her battery’s only lasting three hours because she’s minimised instead of quit her mail app. No thanks.

The iPad converts your next Economy plane seat to a Premium Economy seat. It makes a bus or train journey a potentially collaborative, social experience. It makes a visit to Nanna’s a chance to go through the latest family photos without having to teach Nanna a single thing about using a computer. It allows a classroom to get straight into educational play without first installing patches, removing viruses and debugging the network and printer connection.

And that’s the single most important benefit of an iPad: it puts real-world use first. It hides computing from the user. You don’t need to learn how to use it.

The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.

That said, this bright new world comes at a cost. I’m now paying $60 a month for 60GB of data on a DSL2 connection and about $40 a month in iPhone data charges, of which a significant chunk is accessing cloud resources. But that’s just the beginning — I’m now paying about $2,000 a year in SAAS software subscriptions!

Back in the bad old pre-SAAS days, I paid about $600 for a copy of Microsoft Office. Granted, it was buggy as hell, I couldn’t access my files from another machine, and it didn’t do any of the collaborative, CRM or media functions that some of my cloud apps will do. And I should also note that a big chunk of my business is made possible by Google Apps, which I get for free even though I am apparently the only person in the world who doesn’t click on sponsored listings in search results.

Still, thank goodness the cost of cloud storage and processing is coming down so fast, because the cost of subscribing to the software is more significant than I realised. I’m not complaining, mind, I’m just thinking twice about ordering that shiny new iPad+3G because I think I just spent the money on the cloud.

Very little trickery used here, just the iPhone in my pocket with the apps Darkroom (for minimising blurring in low light) and Tiltshiftgen (for a touch of blur, saturation and brightness).

Check my Flickr feed and you’ll see a significant percentage of my photography in the past year has been low-resolution because I’ve been taking more shots on my iPhone than my DSLR.

It’s certainly not the quality of the lens or the performance of the shutter and sensor that make the iPhone my camera of choice; it’s the programmable power of the apps I’ve installed, the fact that I can post photos direct to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly it’s the way the iPhone is always in my pocket, on the arm of my chair, in the glovebox of my car, and since it became my alarm clock, on the side of my bed.

If I were a futurist I’d predict in the next five years, the photography industry will be dominated by devices that have lenses and sensors, but also have SIM cards, 3G and WIFI radios, address books, calendars and browsers. Quality of lens and sensor will still matter, but quality of OS and apps on your ‘camera’ will increasingly matter more than the lens and sensor.

It may be tough for a phone maker to make good cameras, but it’s well-nigh impossible for a camera maker to make good phones. Unless you’re a premium professional brand like Leica or Hasselblad, better merge or seek to be acquired by a Samsung or Nokia. Yes, Nikon and Canon, I’m looking at you.

The future of photography is not about what happens in the process of capturing the image, it’s about whether there was a camera present at all, and about what happens to the image after it’s been taken.

In one way or another I’ve been working on selling products online since ecommerce was born in the first internet boom of the last decade. At first it was incredibly hard, but one-by-one the barriers to entry have been crumbling and costs have been coming down.

In Australia, only two barriers remain: the relatively high cost of maintaining a merchant account with an Australian bank, and the relatively high cost of delivery, whether by Australia Post or courier, domestic or international.

Tinypay.me in action

Tinypay.me does an end-run around merchant account fees by processing your transactions through PayPal, which means you’re subject to PayPal fees per transaction, which are relatively high per-transaction (2.4% + $0.30 AUD per transaction on transactions up to $5,000) but at least you’re only paying when you sell something. A bank’s merchant account comes with monthly fees, transaction fees and a gateway or EFTPOS rental fee.

In addition to the PayPal fee, Tinypay.me charges 5% of the total sale price. That’s much higher than I’d like to see, but you’re paying for the convenience of having the world’s simplest ecommerce setup, making it no harder than publishing a photo to Facebook or publishing a blog post.

On Tinypay.me, someone as non-technical as your mum, armed with a few product images and a PayPal account, could have a product page up and ready to sell stuff in five minutes. It has easy sharing for social media and adding a product from your Tinypay.me to a web page or blog is as easy as copying and pasting a single line of HTML.

It even allows you to put a percentage of each sale towards a charity.

Only thing lacking I really care about is support for shipping tables (and I’d like to see the Tinypay.me fee more like 2-3%). Otherwise I think it rocks.

Now, please buy a Milkooler!

I’ve seen iCal do some stupid things before but this about takes the cake. What’s worse is I don’t know what I did to deserve this or what I need to do to get my hourly reminders back. For Pete’s sake.

Hey, Apple? When you’ve finished buffing your floor-to-ceiling mirrors to a flawless shine so you can bathe in the glory of the iPad, do you think you could possibly spare a couple of developers to knock some of the rough edges off iCal’s unholy seething mass?

Secret: I’ve never moderated at an event before (I’m usually either speaking or heckling the speakers) so this might be a refreshing change, at least for the crowd and the speakers. Please come along and heckle me — I am a large and slow-moving target.

The one frustration is it’s a topic close to my heart. I’d love to wade in with my own opinions and evidence but I hate it when other moderators do that — it’s not me you’re paying to listen to. But I’ll happy debate it with you afterwards over drinks

The evening begins with an open discussion of “what’s hot on the social web” and then we’ll get into the main topic.

If what’s hot on the social web is you, sweetie, I’d appreciate it if you could be on time.

The four speakers I’ll be wrassling are Karalee Evans, Mark Chenery and Nic McKay. We’ll then take questions and open the debate.

Bring an opinion, bring an idea, bring a question or just bring a good heckle, but please bring yourself.

RSVP and learn more about the panel.

Waiting to go on as Easter Bunny at my son’s childcare centre. A 2m, 100kg man in a bunny suit? Deep emotional scars for everyone.

About the speakers

Working as a communications and public relations professional for nearly ten years, Karalee Evans has developed successful communications models for the corporate and government sectors and most recently a not-for-profit organisation. During three years working for social good at headspace, Karalee developed and delivered a successful social media and marketing campaign (recently awarded Silver and Bronze at the 32nd International Caples Awards) focussed on advocating youth mental health issues.

Mark Chenery is communications manager of anti-poverty agency ActionAid Australia and former digital marketing journalist at AdNews magazine. He’ll be speaking about Project TOTO, ActionAid Australia’s attempt to give poverty a voice through social media tools such as Twitter and blogs, giving Australians an insight into the realities of poverty and to give poor and marginalised people the opportunity to tell their stories on the world stage.

Nic Mackay is currently the Managing Director of The Human Race, a social entrepreneur and a thought leader regarding the future of “corporate social responsibility”. He co-founded The Oaktree Foundation, Australia’s largest and most successful youth-run aid and development organisation, founded an Australian/South African non-profit organisation called Key Change Music, which is creating positive social change through music. Nic recently received the Rotary Club of Melbourne and Sir Albert Coates 2010 Young Achiever Awards.

First, my usual word of warning: nobody really knows yet.

No matter how impressive the social media guru or digital strategy expert, this is still shortly-after-dawn in the Age of Social Media and nobody really knows anything for certain yet. Social Media was born as a means of subversive online communication — it only recently and reluctantly began to bend to the will of marketers. The industry is still developing the methodologies that will one day tell us for sure the answers to these big social media questions.

In the meantime (as Quasimodo said to the archdeacon) I have my hunches. Here they are.

Please don't judge him by his Twitter followers.

Relax, don’t do it

No, I don’t think a follower list full of spambots and pornbots reflects poorly on you. I don’t think you should prune your follower lists. I believe in most cases, people will not judge you by the calibre of people following you on Twitter.

If someone does judge you on the kinds of people who follow you on Twitter, it’ll vary greatly by age, industry and nationality. You won’t find the same standards applying in Paris as you do in Texas, or between tweens and seniors. Twitter is a very international community and there’s no easy way to track location or demographics of the people who view your Twitter profile unless they also choose to follow you.

So why worry about unmeasurable opinions of people you can’t identify?

There are more productive things you can be doing

For most of us, the investment required to curate our follower list will not equal whatever return we get from having a ‘clean’ follower list or the risk we take by not having a ‘clean’ follower list. (This may not be true for conservative politicians, church leaders and captains of industry.) I have 1,700 or so followers currently and I’m not even going to try to keep so many followers in line. The spambots and pornbots will eventually wither and die from neglect if Twitter’s own anti-abuse team don’t get to them first.

You won’t see me saying this often…

Let’s take a leaf from the pages of Old Media History. If you own a television set, TV networks can’t stop you watching their programming. There is no ‘block’ button on the control panel at your local TV station. Yet the demographic composition of a TV audience is essential to the success of a television when courting advertisers.

How do they change their audience composition? Through means much more subtle and yet even more effective than a ‘block follower’ button. They use programming changes to change the content being broadcast and when it is broadcast. And they use audience research to learn more about not just who their audience is, but what sort of content they need to offer in order to reach the audience they aspire to.

What is the Twitter equivalent of ‘programming changes’? Change what you say, change when you say it. Change what you reply to, and how rapidly you reply to it. Encourage interaction with the followers you aspire to have more of. Seek less interaction with pornbots. Respond less often to phishing scams. Please, for all our sakes!

‘Audience research’ on Twitter is not dissimilar to TV: time-consuming, inaccurate and prone to erroneous conclusions. But it’s still worth a try. Pick a follower who typifies your ideal audience. Take note of who they follow and what they reply to. Mimic. Repeat.

No undo

Remember, I’m making this up as I go along, based on what I observe every day and what I can find in my hunch bag, but here’s the big take-away: I am not a fan of the ‘block’ button. If you decide to block followers who your business contacts won’t approve of, what next?  because there’s no ‘undo’.

What if you’ve just blocked someone still finding their way around social media etiquette the hard way? What if that person might have become a valuable business contact or customer if you’d just given them another chance? Even if you keep following them after blocking them to see if they turn over a new leaf, you’ve sent them a message: you don’t want them following you. It’s a small thing to not follow someone, but a very large thing to not let them follow you. There’s no undo.

No wonder TV sets don’t have a ‘block viewer’ button.

With clients I’m often talking about the importance of sprinkling a little personality into all things you offer customers. Many new brand owners are too worried about harming their brand equity and won’t add any personality. Please! Unless you really want to establish yours as a brand without any personality, best to get started experimenting early, when you have relatively few customers and less to risk.

Too much personality can be bad thing, but no personality at all is always worse.

Below is a beautiful example of a nugget of personality added to a brand experience without risking any damage to the brand. Online music publishing platform Bandcamp offers some great reports and charts that’ll show you how many people have viewed, listened to and purchased music from the artists you manage on Bandcamp. For a bit of personality in an otherwise dry series of reports and graphs, if you click the right link, you get to play Defender instead. Here’s a video I prepared earlier.

Bandcamp Defender from bigyahu on Vimeo.

You stay within the Bandcamp website while playing Defender, so there’s no risk of losing the user. And these days, there’s no longer any risk of upsetting people if you manage to slide your attacking spaceship into a crowd of tiny, 8bit outlines of people. To reward the early-adopter users who discover Defender for themselves, Bandcamp deliberately didn’t make a big deal of this in a blog post or a news release.

A little bit of personality goes a long way!

Even so, I can tell that much of the reaction has been negative, with many writers and bloggers disappointed about a lack of innovative new technology, about lack of 3G at launch, about delays to international availability, even about the name.

Well hell, it all sounds very familiar to me: it sounds a lot like the pundit reaction to the launch of the first iPhone. Like the iPhone, the iPad is more a case of existing technologies re-imagined than bleeding-edge next-generation. Critics at the time lambasted the iPhone’s camera as too low-res, the storage as too small, the battery life as insufficient, and aside from the multi-touch interface, there was nothing cool and new for a hardware geek to fall for.

Here’s a great reason why there’s no bleeding-edge gizmos in the iPad: like the iPhone, it’s designed for a broader market of regular consumers, not geeks like me who are prepared to download a new patch every week for the first year while that bleeding-edge technology comes of age. Do that to a regular consumer and you’ve lost a customer. Apple incurs a significant cost in maintaining its high level of post-sale support and it has no reason to convert millions of new customers into frustrated, angry queues in an Apple Store the way Google has managed to do with their first consumer hardware product. (OK Google doesn’t have physical stores, but poorly curated support forums are bad for your brand, possibly worse).

While I have yet to use an iPad, I’m expecting the experience will be great. And while I think the experience will be more important than the feature set, there are still a few features of the iPad that stood out for me. Not many pundits have picked it, but the iPad isn’t the Kindle competitor we expected, the e-book and newspaper reader the media publishers were hoping would save their shrinking fiefdoms.

No, it’s all these things but they are in fact only a small part of what the iPad truly is. It’s not an e-book reader and it’s not a large iPhone. It’s not even a tablet PC as we have come to know them. After a bit of a think, I think I understand Steve Jobs: this is a new class of device — the world’s first dedicated social media device (not hella zingy as a category label, but it’s late, it’s been a big week, gimme a break.)

In this still from the iPad launch video, Scott Forstall (Snr VP iPhone Software) shows more clearly than words can say that he’s worked hard to ship the iPad.

What’s a social media device and why is this not an e-book reader or a tablet PC? Because of all the cool technology which was nevertheless not new enough to excite the geekosphere. Me? Frankly I’m amazed the authorities still haven’t discovered the growing pile of dead engineers Steve Jobs must be quickliming away in his basement to keep the others shipping this cool stuff so fast and so elegantly. Here’s what was worth a few hardware and software engineers:

iPad uses Apple’s own A4 chip instead of similar ‘ATOM’ chips from Intel

Apple’s built its own CPU before, but not since the 1980s. It’s been so long since the company shipped a product with a CPU developed in-house that Apple hasn’t just hired a new department full of top silicon designers, it even acquired specialist chip manufacturer PA Semi back in 2008. That’s a costly investment sunk in fabrication plants and people that can only be recouped over a very long-term on sales of a device on tiny margins.

It’s also a big risk for Apple to take if it wants to maintain its close relationship with Intel, which cuts the chips for the Apple desktop and laptop lines. Not only does Apple mention the A4 in their launch, they make a big deal of it and then include it in their online promotions. In contrast, there’s no mention of the chip supplier in the tech specs on the iPhone. Rub, rub, rub, in goes the salt.

Industry insiders will tell you: you don’t fuck with Intel without a very good reason. I think it means Apple isn’t viewing the iPad as “an iPhone without the phone” but as a new class of device that may be bigger than the iPhone and MacBook markets combined. The A4 chip will be the first of many such chips.

The iPhone has two orientations — portrait and landscape

But there’s only one ‘right way up’ in portrait orientation. On the iPad, any way up is the right way up. It might seem no big deal but I believe it’s huge  — it was worth the extra complexity and cost required to redesign ports and remove buttons in order to do this. Why? I think because this is the first device that can be passed from person to person without the receiver having to then adjust the orientation.

See, I can hold onto my iPad by the bottom when I pass it to you, and if you grab it by what is currently the top, when you lift it up into the vertical, the screen flips — you don’t have to flip it. Whether we’re in portrait or landscape mode. That’s a costly investment in a small detail for individual use, but it makes a significant difference if your aim is to make the iPad a highly social device.

Another big investment in making iPad highly social: an LED-backlit display with IPS

Together, these create a very bright screen, visible from a very wide viewing angle. Why? Apple wants you to be able to sit on the couch with a loved one and pore through your photos together without one of you having to sit at the far end of the couch. They want you to be able to hand an iPad showing a Keynote slide presentation to a client so they can flip through the presentation themselves, while you can still see clearly enough to talk them through it. They want children in a classroom to hand around an iPad as a collaborative multimedia learning tool (bam!, didn’t see that coming, didja? All previous tablet PCs have been corporate field devices. The iPad is a natural in the classroom or any learning environment. iPad is the device Aussie kids should get under the Federal government’s ‘a laptop for every child’ program.)

The iPad screen is 132dpi

From memory the pixel density is a little bit less than on an iPhone but still nearly twice the density of a laptop screen. Everything will be crystal clear. I think you’ll be happy lying together in bed watching a TV show or playing with an app on the iPad  — it’s light enough to hold with one hand for quite a while, and that display means if you rest it on your chest, your partner should be able to see the picture clearly. Which is why I’d hope the iPad 2.0 comes with two headphone jacks. In the meantime, you can get one of these for $30.

It’s cheaper than it could be

The iPad is much cheaper at US$499 than it could be, which is because Apple expects to earn that back many times over in content and app sales. The latter’s not so surprising, but since the market was prepared to consider a US$1000 price point, setting it at US$499 says loudly and clearly, “we want this in the hands of everybody, as soon as possible.”

It could be a real laptop competitor

Early reviews of the iPad agree that this is one fast device. It’s not multi-tasking in the precise sense of the word, but it’ll still tell you when a new email arrives while you’re working on a spreadsheet, and without a much larger screen (with the corresponding balance, integrity and portability penalties) you can’t easily multitask without lots of keyboard combinations (which are hard to do in a Multitouch interface). Trying to multitask and forgetting how much crud you have sucking cycles is a great way to slow down a device and leave a non-technical regular consumer with a problem they’re unable to solve for themselves. Besides, I’ll take 10 hours of battery life over true multitasking any day and in the meantime, Apple’s well thought-out push and badge notification system is all I really need.

iPad-specific versions of the iWork suite (also available for the first time as separate apps) means Apple may finally be serious about pushing this as a hardware/software bundle competitor to the latest ultra-mini PC laptops, Google’s OS aspirations, MS Office and Google Docs.

MobileMe cloud storage/collaboration, Office import and Office/PDF export might make this something you use instead of a laptop as well as an ebook reader.

Another clue: the first wireless keyboard accessory for an Apple Multitouch device — something we iPhone users have craved for years now. An iPad with a wireless keyboard seems functionally equivalent-plus-more than Apple’s MacBook Air. Am I wrong?

All your data, on all your devices, in sync, all the time

What use is yet another device category if it means you have to spend even more time trying to make sure you have the latest version of everything on desktop, laptop, mobile and now tablet device?

Sorted. MobileMe and several iterations of iTunes Store licensing system later, Apple is the only vendor who offers a way to have all your docs, mail, contacts, schedule, photos, music, movies, TV and apps synced across more than one device. Yes, all your iTunes content and apps are DRM-protected, but you can now buy that stuff once and then authorise, say, your iMac, your iPhone, your Macbook Pro and your iPad to all have a copy, and still have one authorisation left-over to share a game app with your kid on their iPod Touch.

While the AppleTV still has a way to go before it’s as good as the other products wearing an Apple logo, it integrates really well with the iPad. You can start a movie, TV episode or podcast on your AppleTV, pause it, and it’ll sync with your iPad, so that on the train the next day, you can hit play on the iPad and it’ll pick up exactly where you left off on the AppleTV the night before. (AppleTV already does this with iPod Touch and iPhone, though it’s not often mentioned. I think it’s a great feature, though I hope one day it’ll sync content wirelessly, not just data.)

Cool features a-plenty but there’s one thing more important than any feature

See? There are some interesting features in the iPad product launch information, but to return to the opening paragraph of this post, it’s not the list of features that make an Apple product a winner, it’s the way they’re integrated. I like to describe the typical Apple product experience as “smooth and creamy” — meaning I rarely find something illogical, interfaces are generally consistent across devices and contexts, and problems only rarely occur. Even better, with an Apple product, you experience many little “oh wow!” moments that are like chocolate sprinkles on that smooth creaminess.

If you’re underwhelmed by what you’ve read about the iPad in the last 24 hours, do yourself a favour: reserve judgment until you’re able to play with a friend’s iPad for ten minutes, or until you can walk into the nearest Apple Store and try one out. Better still, bring someone with you, because this is a social machine. If I’m right (and very occasionally I am) the smooth, creamy experience of using the iPad and sharing it with a friend will close the sale before the Apple Store staff member even has a chance to ask if they can help you with anything.

MG Siegler puts it really well on TechCrunch today, so I’ll close with a quote from his article (emphasis is mine):

When the iPhone first launched in 2007 I was sure I wasn’t going to buy one. Then I played with one. 15 minutes later I was $600 poorer. It was arguably the best tech purchase I’ve ever made.

…go play with one!