• Ladies & Gentleman…finally there’s something worth writing about.  After literal years of rumors and predictions, Apple has unveiled its tablet-based computer, appropriately titled the iPad.
• Watch a quick video overview of it here.
• Price starts at $499 for the 16GB WiFi ranging all the way up to $829 for the 64GB WiFi & 3G.
• Does this signify the soon-to-come death of Amazon’s Kindle?  Will the device be widely adopted by the health industry? ….only time will tell, but surely it will be exciting to see.

• Apple recently filed a patent for technology that allows users to move an image by moving their hands or body. So instead of using a mouse, you simply turn your head to see behind an object. Beyond saving my wrists from the soon approaching carpel tunnel from typing all day, this technology would be great for doctors viewing X-rays, MRI scans, etc.

• To help visualize this, Houston Neal of SoftwareAdvice has put together a clip of this in action. Thanks for the tip Houston.

• I know, I’m sick of the Apple tablet rumor mill as well, but I couldn’t let this story slide by. It even brought me back to blog for a day, breaking my 3 month blog hiatus while I work on my Y Combinator startup.
• While the whole tech news world sits around waiting to see what the official deal with the Apple tablet is and if anyone is going to buy this thing, Apple has been quietly ensuring the instant success of their tablet device. How? Apple has been going around targeting their first major paying customer for the device, which is not the average consumer, but the Healthcare industry (sorry fan bois, you’re not first priority here). This is a move widely overlooked by the media, since Apple has generally tried to own the consumer arena, and besides the film industry, hasn’t dominated enterprise. Well, now that they own the music, mobile, laptop and every teenager market, the medical industry is the next up to take over. [What's my intel? My Dad plays golf with Cedas-Sanai hospital execs, who say they have been getting frequent visits from Apple about a new device in the last 6 weeks].
• Let’s talk this out. First, this makes perfect sense. The iPhone has already served as a great platform for medical applications. Companies like LifeScan have an app for users with Diabetes. Epocrates is another medical app which  let’s doctors view continually updated clinical data, check for drug-drug interaction, identify pills by physical characteristics and perform medical calculations such as BMI and GRF (pictured*). Then we have iChart, a “personal medical assistant,” which stores everything from patient data to charts and lists of medications in a streamlined, organized fashion (oh, and it regularly updates with new medical data pulled from healthcare networks).  The problem with the iPhone is that it is too small to handle all of this data, not from a processor standpoint but just overall screen size. The tablet can pave a whole new way for medical applications and the way we interact with our doctors. You can certainly bet the iPhone will interact very well with the tablet, so syncing information back and forth with your doctor via both devices should be a breeze.
• Second, there is already a huge market here with real competitors (not just a Microsoft Courier). In 2007, a company called Motion Computing Inc. launched a product called C5, a tablet computer for doctors that claimed to eliminate the clipboard, scanner and cart-mounted computer on wheels often used in hospitals today. The product is widely used today, but it’s dated, weighs over 3 pounds and sells for $2199. Even at the highest speculated price, Apple’s tablet will cost only $1000.
• Third, Obama. The President is on Apple’s side here with this one. He has made electronic record-keeping a key feature of his health-care reform effort (hint hint). Electronic records available through Apple’s tablet will save time, mistakes and lives.
• Come on. Did you really think Steve Jobs was going to make a grand comeback just so you could play Doodle Jump on a 10 inch screen? Also, Joe Wilcox of Beta News, yes the world IS ready for a tablet.

• Looks like we’ll be seeing Rock Band on the iPhone / iPod Touch relatively soon.
• From the above shot, looks very similar to Tapulous.  Do you smell an app war?
• Another interesting thing the post point towards (via MobileCrunch) is that Verizon has something to do with it.  Which further contributes to my suspicion that Verizon will launch their service based off the 700 MHz spectrum when they get the contract for the iPhone in 2010.
• Your thoughts?

• On July 7th, Fred Lalonde, the founder of openplaces.org announced in a tweet that Apple had bought the company that produced the Maps API that his company used in their software [CW]. Pushpin is the name of the software API that Openplaces uses and it is made by a company called Placebase. How did everyone find out? Simply a Tweet from the former founder which said “Apple bought PlaceBase – all hush hush.  Pushpin site taken offline.  Hyperlocal iPhone?”
• How do we know it’s true. For starters, the former CTO of Placebase is now an engineer at Apple as well and the site has been pulled offline. Here is what Om said about the company last year:

Waldman thought differently. He decided to compete with Google and other free mapping services by doing two things: One, by offering customizations and tons of features that integrated private and public data sets in many diverse ways. (He knew it would be a while before Google would get around to offering customization). His other twist was to offer a way to layer commercial and other data sets (such as demographics and crime data) onto the maps using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). The product is called PushPin.

• Here’s a video of Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman demoing his product at an O’Reilly conference last year. A good example of the software in use is http://policymap.org.  Like Openplaces, Policy Map uses the Pushpin API that Apple purchased as the underlying technology in its mapping product.

• Popular car sharing service, ZipCar, just made it that much easier for you techies out there with their new official iPhone app.
• You can find, reserve, and even control your ZipCar through the app.  Users are able to unlock and lock their car, and even beep the horn if you forget where/what car you were driving.
• The app’s free and is currently in the Appstore.  Go cop that ish!

• Steve Jobs wants to change the way companies’ environmental records are calculated.
• For the first time, he’s spilled the beans on exactly what Apple’s carbon footprint is: 10.2 million tons per year.
• This may seem like a huge number when compared to other tech industry front runners like HP (8.4 million tons) and Dell (471,000 tons).
• What the difference?  Apple’s not only taking into account the emissions from manufacturing, they’re also adding the carbon emitted when consumers use their products.  Apple’s competitors rarely take this important aspect into account when sharing their emission numbers.
• In a recent interview by Business Week, Steve Jobs had this to say:

A lot of companies publish how green their building is, but it doesn’t matter if you’re shipping millions of power-hungry products with toxic chemicals in them. . . It’s like asking a cigarette company how green their office is.

• He brings up a great point.  Let’s keep the numbers honest.  Well done Steve, you’re putting us all on a better road to the future.

• Oh no folks, this could be bad.  T-pain just dropped his new iPhone app, appropriately titled: I am T-Pain
• The app allows you to sing along with T-pain’s songs in your own auto-tuned voice.  You’re even able to record your own custom track and share it with your friends on Facebook & Myspace.
• App costs 3 bucks.  Go cop it, then you can be exactly as talent-less as he is   ….respect though, he did help make auto-tune pop, so there’s something to be said for that.

• Today is one of Sony’s biggest achievements in the digital music player market in the last 5 years. They have managed to outsell the iPod lineup with its latest version of the Walkman. According to Tokyo-based research firm BCN Inc., for the week ending August 30th, the Walkman series had a 43 percent share of the personal music player market versus 42.1 percent for iPods. Congrats Sony, but BCN forgot to tell you that iPhones don’t count as iPods, so they title will be forever left with an asterik. The iPhone 3GS is currently the best-selling phone in Japan, so if you combine those figures, Apple is sure to have their crown back. Congrats to Sony though, this is not something that should go unnoticed. I didn’t even know they were still making a walkman. (Engadget)

• Major Chinese news portal 163.com is reporting that Apple has finally signed a deal with China Unicom to bring the iPhone 3G to mainland China in October. China’s market contains 700 million mobile phone users, the biggest in the world. We have around 270 million here in the US. Expect an announcement tomorrow. CG

• Bryan Appleyard had an interesting profile in the Times of London today. He wrote about the inner workings of Apple and “painted a picture of a company so strange and dysfunctional it makes most Communist dictatorships look like fantasy football leagues” (John Biggs, CG)

One of the best paragraphs describes Apple’s development style:

The answer is that, along with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”

• Black cloaks and red lights over your head? Sounds like a scene out of a movie. At least when you slip up in the US, the worst Apple can do is kick you out of Cupertino. A few weeks ago, when word got out that a worker in China at an Apple manufacturing facility ‘lost’ what may have been the new iPhone, he was found dead the next day after ‘jumping from his apartment’. Funny how that story never went any further than that and post-news of an investigation were kept quiet.
• The more popular Apple becomes, the more public scrutiny follows (e.g App Store). It will be interesting to watch over the next 5 years how the true fanboys stick around Apple as their super-stardom propels them past Microsoft’s sinking ship. Just this week, I ditched my iPhone for a Blackberry Bold. I’m tired of the trend (more on this on another piece)

Rumor has it, the guy in the picture above is who comes to deliver the prototypes to your desk at Apple.

• Not official, but you can bet your ass this is close to what will be sitting on your desk come Q1 2010. Thanks Giz for the photo.

• BGR today reported more news today of what is in store for iTunes 9. First,  Apple supposedly “has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social” application that they plan to release in the future. It was said that the application (separate from iTunes) will be similar to Yahoo’s OneConnect offering and consolidate all your social networking services. (iPhone application? Desktop app? Wasn’t clarified to us). The application will also allow you to broadcast what music you’re currently listening to, allow you to share your music with people on your network, connect with your friend’s friends (no clue on that one), and update all of your statuses at the same time. ITunes 9 will let you broadcast music statuses as well”
• This seems like quite a vague rumor, but one that makes sense. The above quote from BGR makes it sound like Apple is going to launch their own version of TweetDeck that ties music playlists/reccomendations/updates directly with iTunes (I guess more of a ’social genius’ hangout). If Apple does decide to go down this route, they need to consider either making some small key acquisitions (Pandora, Last.fm, HypeMachine, etc), or opening up their API’s to let some of these applications interact within iTunes.
• When I first began using iTunes, it was the only place I’d play music. I would upload burned CD’s and download music off of people’s network from my dorm room all day to get the latest and greatest stuff. However, iTunes now has become what my Reel player used to be to me in the 90’s; a real pain in the ass and something I only open if I have to. It’s slow, my owned music has gotten boring and I think the Genius function is no more of a cool feature than Amazon’s reccomendation system that is just trying to get me to spend more money.  In my entire existence, I have maybe spent $6 total in the iTunes Store (not including apps, which is somewhere around $60-70 and from my iPhone, not my desktop). Today, my friends and I spend all our time listening to music on HypeMachine, Pandora and even YouTube as opposeed to opening iTunes. This should be a serious concern for Apple as I along with my generation of 18-30 year olds are getting used to the concept of giving up ownership of our music in favor of the cloud (and not paying).
• There is no reason Apple should not be able to strike the kinds of deals that Pandora or MySpace Music have done to enable ad supported streaming to let users play the latest music for free and interact with their Facebook, Twitter, etc groups. As of right now, there is nothing social about my current iTunes catalog. As I said, it’s boring and people have heard of mostly everything in it. If iTunes was a one stop shop for my music streaming, Facebook/Twitter updates, trending music lists and social Jukebox type Kevin Rose reccomendations, I just might think about opening iTunes once again for more than just updating my iPhone (which I’m getting a Blackberry today, so you can kiss that last one goodbye). So, what is really in store for iTunes 9? There’s no saying for sure, but if I were you Apple, I’d be reading this post. Cheers

For those bored with their iTunes library, make sure you start using HypeMachine

• Piper Jaffray senior analyst Gene Munster issued a report to clients today that included some sales projections and photoshop renderings of  what he thinks the Apple Tablet will look like. He seems to have done his research, and is confirming with an Asian supplier close to the deal that we will see the new device as soon as February 2010.

“Last week we spoke with an Asian component supplier that has received orders from Apple for a touch-screen device to be fulfilled by late [calendar year] 09,” he writes. “This data point underscores our thesis that a tablet will likely launch in early [2010].”

Here is his play by play of what he thinks will happen with it:

• Be similar to an iPod touch, only larger, capable of running most of the 70,000 applications on the iPhone App Store plus a new category of apps designed for the bigger screen.
• Will be used primarily for Web surfing, e-mail, and digital media, competing with netbooks without being a netbook.
• Will be priced between an iPhone and a MacBook — between $500 and $700.
• Is likely to include a 3G cellular modem and could be subsidized by a carrier — either AT&T (T) or Verizon (VZ).
• Will sell better than Apple TV did its first year (1.2 million units).
• Could in fact sell 2 million units at $600 each to generate $1.2 billion and add about 3% to Apple’s revenue stream in calendar 2010.