"iPad hoopla" has passed, according to a survey by electronics shopping site Retrevo, and consumers have lost interest after the product's unveiling less than two weeks ago. More than twice as many respondents said they were uninterested after the iPad was announced compared to a week prior. Of course, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics—three times as many said they were confident they would buy one after finding out the product's details.
Retrevo did similar surveys to gauge interest in Apple's new portable touchscreen device both before it was announced and after. The week prior to Apple's big media event, 26 percent of those surveyed said they knew about the device but weren't interested. After the announcement, that number jumped to 52 percent. However, 3 percent said they would buy an iPad sight unseen. The number that would buy an iPad after Steve Jobs showed it off went up to 9 percent.
I don’t normally blog about gadget hardware, but zoomMediaPlus‘ new zoomIt SD card adapter for iPhone and iPod Touch fills a gaping hole of utility. Not only does it let Apple handset owners look at photos, play music, and read documents off an SD card, it has smart software that optimizes the experience.
When you first connect the adapter, it prompts you onscreen to download a free iPhone app that controls the media on your memory cards. For photos, you have pushbutton options to email them, post them to Flickr, or upload them to your Facebook account. For each of these cases, the app will shrink giant photo files down to an email, Flickr, or Facebook-appropriate size to make transfer from the card to the iPhone or iPod as quick as possible without sacrificing any more image resolution than is necessary. (Apple’s proprietary 30-pin connector speaks standard USB protocol, but isn’t as blazing fast as a full-sized USB port. Plus it’s a serious waste of time to upload full-size photo files you won’t be able to see at full resolution anyway.)
ZoomMediaPlus CEO Chris Fisher told me in a phone call today that the zoomIt will also play any unprotected music or video files on an SD card. So it’ll work with Sandisk’s pre-loaded 1000-song slotMusic cards, but not the DRM-wrapped slotRadio cards. Same for video. If it’s unprotected, it’s possibly playable. But video on SD is much more complicated than the music situation, so I’m wary of overpromising there.
The company takes online orders at $59.95 list, and Fisher says they’ll toss in a 4 gigabyte SD HD card with the first 250 orders. No units in stock at Amazon yet, but my hunch is that will likely change. Fisher says they’re working on enabling future upgrades to the app to play popular forms of DRM-protected music and video. A 16GB card would carry more than enough of my iTunes library, leaving room for me to shoot photos and video onto my iPhone’s built-in memory. I could go for that.
Ooh, one youthful blogging network takes on another!
Tumblr, the uber-simplified blogging platform that has more than 3 million accounts, kicked off a 48-hour experiment today. It’s letting people reply to others with photos, instead of regular comments or re-blogs.
The blog owner has to turn on the feature by checking “Let people photo reply” every time they publish a post. If a post is photo-enabled, a camera icon will appear in the reader’s dashboard. Then they can just drag-and-drop a photo from their desktop to the icon and upload it instantaneously to reply.
The extra feature is vaguely reminiscent of the core functionality that has powered another microblogging network popular with teens, DailyBooth. DailyBooth is kind of like Twitter for photography. People take a photo or so of themselves a day and can follow and respond to other people’s photo streams. It raised $1 million in October from angel investors.
It’s interesting that the company decided to debut this for just a two-day period. It creates a nice sense of urgency to start experimenting. Tumblr last raised $4.5 million from venture capital firms including Union Square Ventures in December 2008.
People with anxiety and depression are most likely to use a shade of gray to represent their mental state. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Medical Research Methodology describe the development of a color chart, The Manchester Color Wheel, which can be used to study people's preferred pigment in relation to their state of mind.