iPad name's taken in Brazil

[The "ipad" in Brazil refers to a semi-automated external defribillator. Currently, Apple's iPad does not have an app that functions as a external defribillator. Apple is attempting to register the "iPad" name with the Brazilian authorities through their representative, IP Application Development (or IPAD). ]


Apr 13, 2010

SAO PAULO - FOR most of the world, the iPad is seen as a spiffy new tablet computer worthy of fawning adoration, but in Brazil the device is capable of jolting hearts - literally.

To Apple's chagrin, the name 'iPad' is already registered in Brazil to denote a South Korean-made defibrillator used in hospitals.

The Brazilian company that sells the heart-starting iPads, Transform Tecnologia de Ponta, based in Sao Paulo, told AFP on Monday that it has been selling the units for more than two years and registered the name with Brazil's National Industrial Property Institute (INPI) in 2009. 'No one has been in contact with us about the iPad name,' the company's sales chief, Alathea Silva, said.

She said a Brazilian law firm was working to protect brand names sold by her firm, but added that the iPad issue would probably be handled by the Korean company which makes the defibrillator, CU Medical Systems Inc.

The website of CU Medical Systems shows the Ipad, calling it a 'semi-automated external defibrillator' that gives voice prompts to users. That cardiac-corrective function is apparently beyond the capabilities of Apple's iPad, despite Apple CEO Steve Jobs calling his device a 'truly magical' product.

A Brazilian newspaper, Folha de Sao Paulo, said Apple was trying to register the iPad name for itself with Brazil's INPI through a representative company calling itself IP Application Development. That front company has lodged a request to have the name transferred from the Brazilian company by a deadline of the end of May. If the bid fails, the newspaper said Apple would likely have to buy the iPad name. -- AFP

US not plugged into cellphone revolution

Apr 11, 2010

By Anand Giridharadas

What if, globally speaking, the iPad is not the next big thing? What if the next big thing is small, cheap and not American?

Americans went gaga the previous weekend with the iPad's release. But even as hundreds of thousands in the US unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding elsewhere on the cellphone.

Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation in the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message, borrowing and lending money and receiving salaries on cellphones, and employing their phones variously as torches, televisions and radios.

And many do all this for peanuts.

In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than US$25 (S$35), with one-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and one-cent text messages and no monthly charge - while earning fat profits. Compare that with iPad buyers in the US, who pay US$499 for the basic version, who might also have a US$1,000-plus computer and a US$100-plus smartphone, and who could pay US$100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Not for the first time, the United States and much of the world are moving in different ways. American innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are heading towards fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.

The US does not share the romance of the phone that prevails elsewhere - even in wealthy Europe. Since returning last year from India, I have been struck by how often calls drop here and surprised that text-messaging, so vital to Indians, has yet to entrench itself in the US, where so much messaging travels on the Internet.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Insead, the French business school, concluded that the US ranks below 71 other nations in its level of cellphone penetration, even though it leads in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all.

But millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: They own one, they use it but they own other devices, too, and the phone is not the be-all and end-all.

But from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology. These countries are the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks that have linked Americans for a century.

The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International

Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

Because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and shareable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier in global innovation.

Two organisations - Babajob, in Bangalore and India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories in Israel - offer job-hunting services via text message. Souktel allows users without Internet access or fancy phones to register by sending a series of text messages with information about themselves. A user who texts in 'match me' will receive a listing of suitable jobs, including phone numbers to dial.

In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West but projects like PesaPal and M-Pesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone.

These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa. But they create the possibility of peer-to-peer finance in the developing world that could be useful even in wealthy countries - for example, allowing small businesses in rural areas to collect money without credit-card systems.

The cellphone has also moved to the centre of community life in many places. In Africa, urban churches record sermons with cellphones, then transmit them to villages to be replayed. In Iran and Moldova, those organising popular uprisings against authoritarian governments turned to the cellphone. In India, the cellphone is now used to allow citizen election monitoring and to equip voters, via text message, with information on candidates' incomes and criminal backgrounds.

Recognising the role of cellphones in developing nations, the White House made a point last year of releasing President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo, in 13 languages via text message. It has made no similarly publicised gesture in the US, even though not everyone has Internet access. (The administration proposes to remedy that by widening broadband access.)

All of which suggests the presence of an innovation gap between the world's richest societies and the poorest - not in device design so much as in usage. And there is a question about whether the US, which gained so much from the Internet revolution, would similarly profit from the entry of billions more people from the developing world into a massive worldwide middle class - consumers now but not yet rich, with a simple cellphone and a less-is-more sensibility.

Certainly, innovative new devices may find important roles in the US - for example, as platforms for distributing news and books and entertainment, which have struggled to adapt to the digital age. That alone could make their invention revolutionary.

But is desire replacing need as the mother of American invention? Will domestic demand for even sleeker, faster, fancier devices over the long run make it harder for Americans to innovate for the vast, less opulent world outside, still dominated by frugal wants? Perhaps.

British entrepreneur Ken Banks, who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way: 'There's often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.'

Well, yes. Then again, the cellphone itself began that way. A quarter-century ago, when Michael Douglas famously carried one in Wall Street, it was an exorbitant gadget for high rollers.

Now it's more common than a toilet.

International Herald Tribune

Amazon strikes twin electronic book deals

01 April 2010 1145 hrs (SST)
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/technologynews/view/1047241/1/.html

SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon.com is letting two more major publishers raise prices of electronic books for Kindle readers in deals struck just days before Apple releases rival iPad computer tablets, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The agreements with Simon & Schuster and Harper-Collins break from Amazon's practice of holding the price of popular new titles down to US$9.99 each, according to the newspaper.

Prices for Kindle e-books can now be set at US$12.99 or US$14.99 in deals similar to those that Apple has with publishers providing digital works for iPad devices that make their US debut on Saturday.

Amazon did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

US book publishers are smiling again, after years of watching digital versions of their titles sell for below what they thought they were worth.

A host of rivals to the market-dominating Kindle electronic reader has given publishers leverage to finally be able to dictate their own terms after being at the mercy of Amazon.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp stable includes publisher Harper-Collins, could hardly contain his glee during an earnings call in the weeks after Apple first showed the world its iPad in late January.

Apple's iPad tablet computer doubles as a full-color e-reader of books, newspapers and magazines.

"Without content, the ever larger and flatter screens, the tablets, the e-readers and the increasingly sophisticated mobile phones would be lifeless," Murdoch said. "Without content these ingenious and wonderful devices would be unloved and unsold."

Unveiling the iPad, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced deals with five major publishers and an agreement that allows publishers to set higher prices while Apple settles for a 30-per-cent cut.

The so-called "agency model" is a departure from the way Amazon has been doing business with book publishers.

Since the release of the Kindle two years ago, Amazon has sold digital versions of hardcover new releases and bestsellers for US$9.99, a move primarily aimed at driving sales of the online retail giant's e-reader.

Publishers were generally opposed, believing the price too low, but were not in a position to argue while Amazon was the only game in town.

That is no longer the case.

Just days after the wraps were taken off the iPad, Macmillan informed Amazon it wanted to begin charging between US$12.99 and US$14.99 for e-book versions of most hardcover new releases and bestsellers.

Macmillan said it would give Amazon a 30-per-cent cut, as with Apple.

Amazon protested, temporarily pulling Macmillan titles - both print and e-books - from its online bookstore, but acknowledged that "ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms."

Another major publisher, Hachette Book Group, quickly followed Macmillan.

- AFP/sc

[Here's an interesting example of how competition does not result in lower price or a better product, but a higher price for the same product!

Of course, economic models still work - somewhat. E-books retailing was a monopsony with Amazon being the only "buyer/reseller", so Amazon could set prices. But now there's competition and the sellers can ask for better prices.]

Eccentric but effective Steve Jobs pitches iPad to NYT execs

4 Feb 2010

By Prince McLean

Apple booked a quiet dinner reception for fifty executives at the New York Times, but the VIP guest ended up being Steve Jobs.

The gathering, as reported by New York magazine, was booked at Pranna, a cellar basement restaurant featuring a southeast Asian menu. The restaurant wasn't tipped off that Jobs himself would be in attendance.

The Apple executive reportedly arrived wearing a “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing,” and ordered penne pasta with a mango lassi to drink, sending the staff scrambling to accommodate his unusual request. Jobs sat at the head of the table of Times executives as he demonstrated the iPad's functionality to executives in an "intimate, family-style gathering."

While newspaper executives are reportedly wary of entering into an exclusive deal that they fear might install Apple as the content broker of print media in the same model as iTunes' music and video businesses, they're also facing tough times monetizing their content as the Internet eats away at their display ad model.

After decades of selling their own ad space in print, they're now facing the problem of trying to make money on the web, where Google dominates ad sales and advertising space is effectively in infinite supply, and therefore worth very little. Jobs is pitching iTunes' paid downloads model to print and broadcast media companies with the iPad, an idea they like but also fear, apparently much more so than the alternative of Google's virtual monopoly on online ads.

Jobs faced similar fears in hammering out deals with music and movie executives, which balked at the company's plans to sell their content without ads at relatively low prices to an audience millions of iTunes users.

Music labels' own digital plans all failed until they teamed up with Apple in the new iTunes Store. Immediately after the company saved their future however, they began complaining about the control Apple exercised over prices and marketing, demanding that users buy songs only in albums and lobbying for "variable pricing" that would give the label suits the power to charge more for new acts and threaten their own talent with cheap pricing that would devalue their work if they didn't play the labels' game.

Movie studios similarly dragged their heels in joining the iTunes Store, with early adopters limiting the number of movies they made available and worrying about the prospect of digital downloads and then rentals hurting their lucrative DVD sales. Jobs used his influence at Disney to help pave the way for broader adoption of iTunes by other studios, but it still took years to win the movie executives over.

In print media, Jobs is now working to convince publishers to embrace digital distribution, particularly for the new larger format iPad, although Jobs also reportedly said "he likes to hold the Sunday edition in his hands."

Jobs has also brokered deals with booksellers and continues to talk with print and broadcast publishers about getting their content in iTunes and customized for use with the iPad. Clayton Morris of Fox News just tweeted today that Jobs had made an appearance at his company: "It's not everyday you walk into work and see Steve Jobs standing there."

[The print media particularly newspapers and magazines are wondering if their days are numbered and fighting for survival. So far all the business models with the new media has not worked to their advantage. So along comes Apple, the iPad, and Steve Jobs with a proposal. It will take some convincing.

The problem is convincing people to subscribe to news. That requires a mindset change. ]