But it is a hot new trend, says Bill Siwicki at Internet Retailer, and the merchants are jumping onto it. As usual there is a big generational divide; a quarter of mobile phone users under age 45 used their phone while shopping in a store; fewer than one in 10 older users did so.

Middle-aged fogie though I am, phone-a-friend (or product review site) while shopping makes a lot of sense. The only reason we weren’t doing it before is that we didn’t have the right gadgets. And now we do.

On another front, we all know that newspapers are hurting, and they do not suffer in silence. A whole genre had emerged decrying the death of newspapers and worrying about the future of news.

The worries won’t be eased by a new Nielsen survey reported at SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle website). Internet users, especially in North America, are a tough sell when it comes to paying for news content.

But the same study shows that people are a good deal more willing to pay for movies, music, and games (and professional quality video, but not the user generated kind). The Kindle shows that they will also pay for books.

It seems that people are willing to shell out for content they regard as individually distinctive. If you want a particular song, or a particular book, you’ll pay for it.

The problem for newspapers is that people usually don’t care about a news story for its own sake – its sparkling style or dramatic mood – the way they care about a book or movie. They just want the news, and understandably regard widely available information as a commodity.

No, this does not lead me to a magic solution, but understanding the source of the challenge is a decent place to start.

Analysts are paid to commit truth, and Rich Doherty of telecom market research firm The Engineering Group has some embarrassing truth for AT&T, ‘I’m not aware of any company in this country that has had so aloof a stance toward quality of service.’

I get my landline and broadband from AT&T, and have no problem with them. But I have none of the warm and fuzzy feelings I have toward my computer or software. Bandwidth is a classic commodity good, without distinctiveness, something you only notice when it isn’t available or reliable. But it can’t be good for a company when the only buzz it is getting is about bad service.

In other news, people talk about having thousands of tunes on their iPods, and they can’t have bought them all from the iTunes Store at 99 cents a pop. Lee Gomes at Forbes lets the cat out of the bag. Content piracy remains pervasive – and in fact the industry depends on it.

People find music to play on all those iPods. And Gomes cites one representative from a computer maker that produces high end home theater setups, who admits that they are used mainly for viewing illegally downloaded movies.

Also in Gomes’ sights, ’some newspaper publishers’ – read Rupert Murdoch – who complain about Google. People don’t need Google News to read stuff lifted from Rupert’s rags; there are a million gossip and political blogs happy to provide it. And if they didn’t, how many readers would pay for it?

The underlying truth is that we have no problem paying to use the Internet. Mobile or landline, we pay every month, and only complain if the service is bad. What we won’t do, except in exceptional cases, is pay a second time to see particular content.

And yes, my implied stance here, which is that of most Internet users, creates an impossible business model. But if content is king, the customer is emperor, and the users will likely win in the end.

Also the article is worth reading just for the wind-up quote from William Watkins, former CEO of disk drive maker Seagate, about the content his products are used to store. ‘We’re not changing the world,’ said Watkins. ‘We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap–and watch porn.’

Of course, that is a way to change the world, too. It worked for a tech entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg.

The coming Web will be media-centric, he suggests, with ‘text-based interactions’ dwindling. But, adds Parr, social media will be its largest component. When you go online in a few years, he says, ‘most of the time you spend will be to connect with your friends.’

It is easy to hum along and nod to either one, but do they quite go together? Sometimes, yes, and there is nothing new about that. Entertainment and socializing have gone together since we did them around the cave fire. Now we can just do it at a distance, and mobile.

But usually we end up doing one or the other. We get to talking and the music fades to background, or we sit back quietly to listen to the music.

Now that we can have gadgets that let us do both, of course we will want both. But there is still a subtle paradox. The social part of social media is basically about chatting, whether it is voice or text.

Sure, we can send videos back and forth, but someone will have to make the videos. Most of us can’t come up with that many clever things to do with our iPhone cameras. (Or, in the enterprise world, send each other enough PowerPoint presentations that are actually worth the time.)

So whether we immerse ourselves in media alone or with friends, when we do it we’ll be communing first and foremost with … content creators. Who, for quality content, will mostly have to be paid one way or another.

Cloud computing, advanced analytics, client computing, IT supporting green initiatives, reshaping the data center, social computing, security based on activity monitoring, flash memory, virtualization for availability, and last but not least, mobile applications.

Some items on this list are well known buzz generators: the cloud, social computing, and mobile. Advanced analytics comes close, at least in the enterprise ‘verse.

Others are less obvious. Flash memory is nothing new, but it is getting cheaper and taking over jobs once reserved for hard drives, with implications not only for mobile devices (more memory!) but also spillover effects on important little details like power supply and cooling.

‘Reshaping the data center’ isn’t really about technology at all, but firms being more careful about paying for fully installed capacity they may not use for years. Provide the infrastructure, says Gartner, but don’t fill the space till you need to.

‘Virtualization for availability,’ on the other hand, is an interesting twist I hadn’t heard before – keeping a virtual machine’s memory updated in more than one location, so that if the machine hosting the VM itself crashes a backup physical machine can step right in to keep the VM running.

Read the original to fill in the rest of the story. It is a good reminder of the variety of fronts that technology is advancing on – some of them all over the news, others less obvious because they work at the back end, and sometimes not technology itself but learning how to handle it.

Once before at TecTrends Monitor I looked at the SEO business, and a second look is prompted by a new piece on Demand Media by David Carr in the New York Times.

The story is again about astonishing output – five times more YouTube videos than any other source; a million articles floating around online. And the remarkable, semi-automated way it is produced, with search algorithms spitting out topics (mostly in the how-to genre) for ’sharecropper’ writers and videographers who then grind out content in bulk.

A number of firms have jumped into this business, and AOL may be about to join them. The problem is that much if not most of what is produced this way is junk, produced in haste by people who don’t know or care much about the subject, but know how to crank out boilerplate text filled with search terms.

A  search fail described by the always useful Farhad Manjoo at Slate illustrates the problem. During a recent scandal the top search result for a celebrity plus mistress’s pictures rewarded salacious searchers not with the pictures, but merely an illiterate SEO spam ‘news’ article crammed with text repeating the celebrity’s name and ‘mistress’s pictures.’

This works, in a nutshell, because Google (and Bing) have not yet figured out how to identify this sort of junk and filter it out of search results. Just give them time, because SEO spam detracts from the quality of their product, namely good search results.

Search engine algorithms aren’t going to be literary critics in the foreseeable future. But linguists will probably be able to work out the pattern and density of keywords that marks spam or semi-spam, not substantive text, and adjust search results accordingly. Which will be the end of the SEO spam business.

The bottom line here is that usable work has to be created by and for humans, not with automated shortcuts. And while many labors of love can be had online for free, the rest you have to pay for, and pay enough to get coherent results, not SEO spam or other kinds of junk.

Rachel Mets of Associated Press declares that the iPad is more than just a bigger iPod Touch. Meanwhile Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle says, ‘You mean it’s a big iPod Touch? Basically.’ Which, Kim adds, is just fine.

As noted previously in this blog, there is a long back story to the iPad, an industry fascination with devices – call them slates, tablets, or now presumably pads – that are bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Michael Malone of ABC News calls it a Holy Grail quest, even speculating that this size corresponds to a deep rooted human impulse going back to the first data processing technology, the Sumerian clay tablet.

Opinions on the iPad may be all over the map, but digging a bit under the surface reveals a pretty consistent underlying topography. Love it or hate it, the reviewers identify much the same strengths and weaknesses. The differences in opinion come from how they weigh them.

The iPad is not ‘a computer.’ It runs a version of the iPhone operating system, and like the iPhone it completely hides the file structure from the user. If you like simply using a functionality with a minimum of fuss that is a plus; if you like knowing where your content is, and being able to move it, this hidden-ness will be a minus.

Likewise, all reviewers seem to agree that Apple has not solved the keyboard problem. If you only expect to use it to send the occasional instant message or tweet, this won’t be an issue, but if you want to write paragraphs, this is probably not the device for you.

Put another way, based on the early reviews the iPad is a good device for consuming online media while on the go – reading the news or an e-book, surfing the Web, watching video, and the like. But for interacting with online content – playing with it, mashing it up, creating it – the iPad’s limitations are more serious, perhaps fatally so.

In short, if you wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, the iPad may be what you are looking for. If you wish your laptop were lighter and easier to carry, it probably is not.

[Original post]

Steve Jobs knows what I am thinking: Does the world really need a tablet computer? The idea has been around forever in geek years. Jobs’ former nemesis Bill Gates predicted in 2001 that tablets would be the most popular type of PC within five years.

We are still waiting for them to break the 1 percent barrier, but the wait could be over tomorrow, when Apple is expected to make the public launch of its tablet, rumored (by Slate magazine) to be the iSlate.

So, does the world really need a gadget that is too big for your pocket or even your purse, but too small to have a true keyboard? Steve Jobs knows that my opinion doesn’t matter, since I’m not a mobile device user and don’t own iAnything. I’m not the target market.

The consensus seems to be that no, there really isn’t much market out there for a tablet computer – but Apple will probably manage to create one. I have to agree with the conventional wisdom.

The Apple mystique has always eluded me, but there is no doubting that it exists. The iPod transformed music listening, and the iPhone is transforming the way we think about smartphones, so no one will be surprised if Apple also transforms the way we think about tablet PCs.

They have a rare talent for guessing what consumers will like, and they certainly have everyone’s attention. I wouldn’t want to bet against them.

This is the flip side, so to speak, of all those news stories about 100,000 apps in the Apple App Store. Most of them are no doubt pretty frivolous, and those of us involved in the tech industry in whatever way must sometimes feel as if we are in the toy business. And not infrequently we are.

So, from more then one perspective, it is good to see how this technology and the people who create it can make a real difference in one corner of the world.

A remark about ‘reading the New York Times online,’ seems like a journalist’s rather wishful ideal of online reading habits. As I noted a couple of posts back, online reading habits (at least mine) do not show much brand loyalty, instead following links outward to other sites. If a site doesn’t have those outbound links, no problem: Google does.

And, says Manjoo, a decade ago ‘a computer was something you used at the office or for schoolwork, not to goof off.’ But one of the first surprises I had when I went online in the mid 90s was that forum traffic was highest during working hours, lower in the evenings and on weekends. People might have gotten their computers as business tools, but were goofing off on them plenty.

Really what Manjoo is arguing is that the way we goof off on computers is changing – that with YouTube and ebooks, computer goofing-off is becoming more like TV, a couch potato activity. (The TV marketing euphemism is ‘lean-back.’) So who needs a keyboard or mouse?

The flip side argument is made by Kathy Sharp in OMMA, writing about interactive TV ads. ‘Somehow it was always assumed,’ she writes, ‘or perhaps just fervently prayed for, that the Internet would simply turn into a TV with keyboard.’ Instead, as the wall sized screen gets an Internet connection, TV is becoming more like the Internet.

What does this mean for the future of notebooks, netbooks, and other devices bigger than a smartphone and smaller than a full laptop? Portable devices are always going to pose a tradeoff between two different meanings of ‘handy’ – easy to carry around versus easy to manipulate.

The classic desktop and the smartphone mark the two endpoints. What goes in between is still being worked out, and will depend less on technology than on user habits and preferences. But I suspect that we will want to interact with our toys, big or small, more rather than less, and the most successful design innovations will reflect this.

Suffering from tech news overload? Let TecTrends and TecTrends Reporters be your Sherpas as you climb the upper slopes. We read the tech press because you don’t have time.

It was not in search. Bing avoided being scoffed at, but it has not upended search or put any real scare into Google. Wolfram Alpha never understood my queries the handful of times I played with it.

Social media are in contention. This was the year that Facebook and Twitter made the big time. My brother in law offered an alternate view, unkindly calling Facebook ‘AOL for the 21st century.’ Sites that depend on coolness are always at risk from a newer, cooler site, but having an online social presence has gone mainstream, like email a decade ago.

Mobility has also gone mainstream, and the iPhone edges out the Kindle as Gadget of the Year – not its debut, but the year you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to. But as one commentary noted (alas, I forgot to bookmark it so I can’t link it), the more powerful smartphones become, the more they become just another way to go online. Mobile will merge into the Internet.

Which makes this the year of the Cloud. It isn’t a gadget, and it doesn’t have the pop culture visibility of social media, because cloud computing is inherently a back end technology. Most of the time we don’t know, care, or think about where our applications and data are stored, only that we can get at them (and other people can’t).

But as I’ve suggested previously, mobility reinforces the push toward the cloud. So long as you only have one computer, local storage is simple and convenient. But once you also have a mobile device, you want handy access to your apps and files – meaning they have to be available to you online, and it no longer really matters where they are stored, only that they are secure.

So I designate cloud computing as our official TecTrend of the Year for 2009. Stay on top of industry news with TecTrends Reporters, and you won’t have to wait for another New Year’s Eve to know next year’s trends.