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By benjaminchristopher, June 10, 2010 3:41 pm

A lot of entrepreneurs started young. But this young?

Sean Belnicks was possessed with the entrepreneurial spirit from an early age. By fourteen, Belnicks was already making cash selling things like Pokemon cards on eBay. Perhaps it was only the logical next step to launch a website selling office furniture.

See, Belnicks’ step-father worked at a manufacturer of office furniture. One day, fourteen-year-old Belnicks was visiting his step-dad’s work, and he had an idea. The way the company was doing things didn’t make sense to Belnicks. I imagine the conversation going something like this:

Sean Belnicks: Let me get this straight, people go into a store and pick out a chair they like, then pay for it.

Step-Dad: That’s right.

SB: Then the store calls you and orders the chair.

SD: Yep.

SB: And then you send the chair to customer.

SD: Right on all counts, Sean.

SB: So why do you need the store at all?

Belnicks’ step-father sensed his son was onto something. Cutting out the middle man is a dream a lot of whole-salers have. But how? Well, back in 2001, there was this hot new thing called the internet…

Sean, who already had some experience building websites, decided to start a site where customers could order their office furniture directly from his step-dad’s company. His step-dad agreed. So Sean locked himself in his room for a few days, and we he came out, Bizchair.com was born.

With a budget of only 500 dollars, most of which was used to advertise the online-store to potential customers, Bizchair.com was doing solid business from the get-go. It wasn’t long before Google listed Bizchair.com as the number one organic search result for online office furniture sellers.

And that was only the beginning. Today, nearly ten years after 14-year-old Sean Belnicks conceived and launched the company, Bizchair.com’s recent sales figures exceed 38 million dollars.

So what did young Sean do with his millions? Well, when he was old enough, he began attending business school at Emory University. While Sean was away, his step-dad took over Bizchair’s day-to-day operations.  Now, if I were Belnicks, and I had created a multi-million dollar business model before I was even old enough to drive, I probably wouldn’t enroll in any school, business or otherwise. But that’s the great thing about entrepreneurs like Sean Belnicks. Their appetites for business knowledge and for hard-earned success are nearly insatiable. For people like Belnicks, major success isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.

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By benjaminchristopher, May 13, 2010 5:54 pm

In 1999, there was no real online bargain store.

Amazon.com, which launched as an internet bookstore in 1996, was beginning to popularize online shopping. But even then, there was a giant hole in the market. The novelty of shopping without ever leaving your house, without ever opening a catalog, was still fresh enough that no one was complaining about the lack of actual bargains available through online shopping. But that didn’t mean the niche wasn’t there.

Enter Patrick Byrne. Make that Doctor Patrick Byrne. Dr. Patrick Byrne the three-time cancer survivor. Dr. Patrick Byrne the three-time cancer survivor with a black belt in tae kwon do. Yes, I’m being serious.

Byrne’s one interesting guy. And, as it turns out, he’s pretty bright too, because when a company called D2-Discounts Direct approached him, Byrne had the foresight to not only envision the business’s potential, but the world of possibilities waiting to be explored in the world of online merchants.

D2-Discounts Direct was an internet startup. And sure, the internet bubble had just burst, with a whole slew of start-ups collapsing almost over night. But a lot of those companies had left over a hefty amount of unused inventory. This is what made D2’s business model unique. They took the inventory from other, failed, dot-com startups, and liquidated them online. Exploitative? Opportunistic? Meh. No more than an undertaker is exploitative. Even in death and bankruptcy, there are services that somebody needs to render. And D2 was rendering away.

The only problem with D2-Discounts Direct was that they were low on money. They had made around half a million dollars liquidating excess inventory the year before, but to really grow, they needed an injection of capital, capital they hoped Dr. Byrne might be willing to provide.

“We were turned down by 55 different venture capitalists back in the day,” Byrne said in a 2003 interview on NPR. “What’s funny is, since then, we liquidated 18 dot-coms funded by the same guys who turned us down for money. If I weren’t as mature as I am, I would take some undue satisfaction in that,” Byrne joked. “The truth is, I had to sell so much of my other holdings to get Overstock funded.”

Byrne invested $7 million, the majority of his net worth, into D2, taking a 60% stake in the company in 1999. That same year, he became CEO and renamed the company Overstock.com. Within a year, Overstock had made more than a million dollars.

Back then, Overstock.com was selling less than 100 products. Over the years, the company has expanded, and so to have its product offerings. The company now offers over 800,000 products. And they’ve moved on from just liquidating the inventories of failed businesses. Continue reading 'Overstock.com'»

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By benjaminchristopher, April 20, 2010 10:18 am

Thought I would share this with you, dear readers. Last week I received an email from our friend Alison Levine at Daredevil Strategies. Alison was the basis for one of my first stories on this blog.

Alison Levine was born with a life-threatening heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. As a teenager, her health was so unstable, that she couldn’t do many of the things that her peers took for granted. Simple things, like driving a car and climbing stairs. But Alison eventually underwent two heart surgeries. Within 18 months of her second heart surgery, Alison made up for all those lost years of climbing stairs, and she did it all at once; she climbed a mountain.

Alison Levine founded Daredevil Strategies. You can hear the Why Didn’t I Think of That story on Daredevil Strategies here.

The long and short of it is this: After climbing numerous mountains, and even serving as captain for the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, she “realized that many of the strategies employed in the business world are the same strategies used when climbing the world’s highest and most challenging peaks,” she says on her company’s website. “Foresight, focus, and flawless execution are equally important in the jet stream as in corporate America.”

Using the skills she’s amassed during her 20 years in business, as well as her numerous adventures in the wilderness, Alison speaks to corporations and companies about focus, teamwork, and more.

But the reason Alison emailed me, was to let me know that she had decided to return to Everest.

“I really never thought I’d go back,” Levine wrote on her blog, “but this time I have a huge advantage going into the trip, and that is because I have a secret weapon. My friend Meg Berté Owen is coming with me–in spirit. Meg passed away on October 15, 2009 of a lung infection.”

Alison is climbing to honor her friend, Meg Berté Owen. But what’s even cooler is that she has started a blog to chronicle her return. The blog is called “Alison Levine: Return to Everest,” and it’s worth your time. She updates the blog every few days with tales of her climb, as well as some amazing pictures (left).

Here at Why Didn’t I Think of That? we’re always inspired by people willing to take risks, people willing to put their all into something they love. For Alison Levine, that something is climbing the highest mountain on Earth. Her company may be called “Daredevil,” but there’s nothing foolish about it. Climbing a mountain requires undivided attention and focus. She’s been able to take her focus, her passion, and the lessons she’s learned, and apply them in the business world.

So what about you? What’s your passion? What are you willing to risk everything for? Email me at bc@thinkofthat.net with your story. I’d love to hear it.

Well that’s all for today. Best of luck, Alison. Keep us posted!

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By benjaminchristopher, April 11, 2010 8:14 pm

I shared this article on Why Didn’t I Think of That’s Facebook Page a couple weeks ago, but it’s worth exploring further.

The article is “The Rise of the App Entrepreneur” from BBC News. These “app entrepreneurs,” or “appreneurs,” as I’ve decided to call them, are growing in number by the day. These are the men and women who design and program apps for your beloved gadgets, mainly smart phones like Apple’s iPhone. But with Amazon’s Kindle opening up their device to App-designers, as well as Apple’s new iPad–which only runs “apps,” as I’ve griped about, the field of play is opening up even further.

For those of you wondering what Apps are, they’re much like the computer applications that you’ve grown to know and love. But “Apps” are specifically designed for certain devices using proprietary technology.

Look at the iPad for example. At first glance, it seems that the iPad is just like a computer, but flat and with a touchscreen. And it is, more or less. But unlike a normal PC or Mac computer, you can’t just go to the store and buy a new piece of software for it. It can only run “Apps” purchased through the Apple App Store. And, while many of these apps are designed by third-party developers, it’s not really free-reign. Apps for the iPhone and iPad can be made available at the sole discretion of Apple.

Okay. So what do apps do? Just about anything. There are GPS apps, there are word-processing apps, there are apps for email and apps for shaking virtual babies. (Well, the Baby Shaker app created such an outrage that Apple pulled it from its store. But it did, at one point, exist.) There’s even a new app for the iPhone called “Bump.” Let’s say you meet someone and want to exchange contact information. If you both have the Bump app, all you need to do is bump your iPhones together, and each person’s contact info is stored in the other person’s phone.

What’s really interesting, though, is that some people are making a living creating and selling apps. These “appreneurs” are finding success far and wide, often in unexpected places. One such example is Smule, a company which makes apps that turn the iPhone into a musical instrument. Click here to listen to Why Didn’t I Think of That’s Smule story.

Today, the app market is worth 2.5 billion. But is it sustainable? Some people, including app developer Don Castelnuovo, have their doubts.

“When something generates a ton of excitement at a certain point people are entering it because of the excitement not because there’s anything solid there,” he says.

“It’s a lot like the internet bust,” he says, referring to the share price collapse of internet companies a decade ago.

“A lot of people are doing a lot of crazy ideas… it could end up being a bubble,” he says. But he also believes the app economy “could take off”.

The likelihood of the App-market collapsing on itself isn’t very clear. But Apps aren’t going away anytime soon. They’re becoming more and more commonplace on more and more devices. And, while I’ve never personally developed in App, the process is a lot more accessible than software-programming was at the dawn of the personal computing age.

Indeed, the BBC News article quotes David Yoffie, a technology expert at Harvard Business school, describing the typical app development company as “two kids in a garage.”

So maybe the app-community is in its Wild-West phase, a free-for-all of ideas and innovation. Well, almost. Just so long as Apple decides to let you sell your product.

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By benjaminchristopher, March 24, 2010 2:30 pm

A couple more updates:

When we first ran our story on Batter Blaster, the organic pre-made pancake batter in an aerosol can, the company had made $9 million dollars. Well, as it turns out, their expected revenue for last year was almost twenty million dollars.

As I reported in my blog entry, Batter Blaster had a hard time getting off the ground. But it was determination and ingenuity that pushed Sean O’Connor and his quirky startup to the top of the aerosol-breakfast food world.

CNN Money reports:

Through word of mouth, social networking and publicity stunts — traveling 180,000 miles in an Airstream trailer to visit county fairs; rallying a team to cook 76,382 pancakes in eight hours to set a Guinness World Record — O’Connor and his 16 employees have gotten Batter Blaster into 13,000 outlets nationwide, including Costco (COST,Fortune 500) and Whole Foods (WFMI, Fortune 500) stores.

It’s a good product, too: It tastes good, is convenient, isn’t terrible for your body or even the earth. It’s really everything you could ask for from a can of pancake batter. Unfortunately, I still see it in grocery store aisles only rarely. It’s possible, though, that I’m going down the wrong aisles.

Meanwhile, our Why Didn’t I Think of That story on Pandora Internet Radio has had some interesting developments. A few weeks ago, I posted a fairly in-depth look at Pandora’s beginnings and inner workings. While the station is a popular staple of streaming music, it wasn’t always that way. Things were particularly grim, according to the New York Times, come the end of 2001. Pandora founder Tim Westergren “had 50 employees and no money. Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.”

Thankfully for the company, those hard times came to an end. Pandora has already invaded the iPhone and is on its way to new, internet-ready televisions. Recent annual revenues have been around $20 million. But that’s all in the past. Now it’s time to look to the future.

And the future, some believe, is streaming services like Pandora directly into your car. Well, “directly.”

Here’s how PC World describes it:

The Pandora service will be integrated into two car stereo systems to start – one from Alpine and one from Pioneer, both of which will go on sale next month. Conrad says the Pandora app will run on your smartphone, but will plug into the car stereos by way of a 32-pin cable. When the smartphone is plugged in, the screen will lock on the smartphone and the Pandora will be displayed on the dashboard of the car.

Ford has also made Pandora part of its new driver interface and dashboard design called MyFord Touch. Here too, the Pandora app runs on a mobile phone, but once plugged into the Ford system, a voice-recognition system can be used to interact with the Pandora app, and the car’s pre-set radio buttons can be assigned to Pandora’s virtual stations.

Um… Playing it through your phone? With a cable connecting the two? That sounds like a hassle, or at the very least a little archaic. If the phone is going to be communicating with your car stereo and display, why not make it automatic, wireless, and holistic? You get into your car and all of your calls are automatically transferred to your stereo system, all of your apps are available from your touch screen console, etc. Maybe I’m asking too much. But, if you haven’t noticed, I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy.

That being said, this could mark the beginning of a new phase for Pandora. And to think, Westergren probably never would have imagined such success when he started the Music Genome Project a decade ago. But, as countless other business owners have discovered, for better or worse, a big part of the journey is not knowing where you’re headed.

Congratulations to Batter Blaster and Pandora on all their success.

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By benjaminchristopher, March 17, 2010 5:43 pm

Hello again, dear readers.

It’s been a while. There are a number of reasons for that. Namely, as some of you may have noticed, a “security breach” occurred on the Think of That Blog last week. We were lucky enough to get the problem resolved over the weekend, but it was a bit scary while it lasted.

In the news, there have been some interesting updates on a lot of the stories we’ve ran recently.

Starting with cloud computing. I wrote a post in January describing cloud computing as the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way we access our data. Recently, Google–itself no stranger to online applications and documents–took  another step toward getting us all up in the clouds: It has opened an online App Marketplace for businesses.

As you likely know, Google already offers free applications like Google Docs, which users can access and use from any computer with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. Well the App Marketplace takes it a step further, offering third-party “cloud applications” for small businesses, from software providers such as Intuit, eFax, and more. These are affordable internet-based programs that small businesses can use to set up a virtual software infrastructure to increase productivity and mobility. Phew. That was a lot of buzzwords.

No? Well here’s how blogger Rajan Chandras describes the role that Google’s new App Store might play in small businesses, from his recent blog post:

In this fierce and fearful economy, small businesses — and that includes you and me in our moonlighting activities, and small developers looking for a profitable outlet to their creativity — need all the help they can get. By tapping into this mushrooming cloud of computing and by thinking outside the box (the one underneath their desktop, that is) they should be able to eke out some nice savings without sacrificing effectiveness, and/or earnings without standing to lose their shirt.

Well said, Chandras. And benefits like that could be seen on a very big scale if cloud computing and cloud-apps become an more dominant force.

Speaking of apps, the Amazon Kindle will soon be offering unique “Active Content” for the slim, black and white e-reader. I complained in my review that the Kindle didn’t offer something as basic as a word-processing program (after all, it has a keyboard). With third-party developers now able to create apps for the device with the Kindle Development Kit, it shouldn’t be too long before someone hears my prayers.

This “active content” has its limits. Namely- the amount of bandwidth they can use (an abysmally small 100 KB a month) which makes it unlikely that this will help the Kindle much against the impending iPad release. At the same time though, it makes this cost-effective alternative even more versatile than it already is.

Remember the good old days, before “Apps,” when there were just applications, before proprietary technology became what it is today? Sure, there were always fundamental format wars, Mac Vs. PC, etc. But now, every device we own is becoming more and more like a computer. I predict that, in ten years, even our televisions will be indistinguishable from a computer. Even so, the idea that you could buy one application and have it work on all your devices would be laughed at today. Everybody wants to have the number one technology, and nobody wants to share. Just a fact of life, I guess.

More updates to come soon, such as– which Why Didn’t I Think of That story has nearly doubled their sales figures, and which internet radio station might soon be segueing from the information super-highway to the real life highway.

All that, plus some great original stories, coming soon.

Thanks for reading!

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By benjaminchristopher, March 2, 2010 3:47 pm

Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank both worked for a Southern California home-improvement chain called “Handy Dan” in the 1970’s.

While there, they experimented with heavily discounting products in one of Handy Dan’s locations. The experiment was a success in every sense of the word, and it was their intention to expand it to more stores. But they never got the chance.

Sanford Sigoloff, a “turn-around artist,” took over Daylin Inc., the parent company of Handy Dan. Sigoloff had a reputation for gutting the upper-level management of companies he took over, and Handy Dan was no exception. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank got the boot, and their days in home improvement stores came to an end. Or so it seemed.

Fortunately, Marcus and Blank weren’t quite ready to throw the towel in altogether. In fact, quite the opposite- their little “discount experiment” had inspired them. They wanted to create a new, nationwide chain of home-improvement stores that would sell a wide array of home-improvement and construction goods for as cheap as possible. Moreover, they wanted to provide the best customer service in the industry. Their employees would all be thoroughly trained, ready to give customers the kind of specialized information they needed at the drop of a hat.

To enact their vision, Marcus and Blank used money from a New York City investment firm to prep and stock their first stores. There were over 18,000 products on their shelves, ranging from painting products to building and plumbing supplies, their prices marked down as low as they could be. To fill even more space, empty boxes were piled to the ceilings, creating the illusion of an even larger inventory.

The inventory was in place, the sales staff was trained and ready, and their name was picked out. So, in 1979, the first two Home Depots opened their doors.

As a promotional stunt, Marcus and Blank had their children hand out $1 bills at the door to shoppers. They assumed the money wouldn’t last to lunch. But come sunset, the kids were still out there, now in the parking lot trying to wave down potential customers, offering them money to come into the store. Blank recalls the moment as “a crushing disappointment.”

Of course, anyone familiar with the Home Depot–which is probably everyone reading this–knows that Marcus and Blank’s crushing disappointment was unfounded.

Word of mouth quickly spread about this new low-cost, customer-friendly, home-improvement chain. Furthermore, Marcus and Blank were determined not to let their customer base stop at professionals. To attract more “inexperienced” homeowners and the like, the Home Depot began offering classes to their customers–similar to the training Home Depot’s employees went through– to teach them all the “handy” skills they would need to fix their own plumbing, do their own carpentry, and tackle all of the home improvement needs that people usually passed along to trained professionals. In so doing, Marcus and Blank hoped to create a whole new set of customers for their growing chain.

Within several years, Home Depot had expanded to the Miami market. In 1981, the company went public. Sales, originally projected at $9 million, were coming in well over $17 million. Growth seemed inevitable for the Home Depot. And grow it did. Within a decade, there were 118 locations in the US. Sales were at almost $3 billion. Things were looking good, and they were only going to get better.

To put the amount of money that Home Depot makes a year–and it’s an awful lot–into perspective: I recently spoke about the chain with a friend of mine who buys, fixes, and sells realty properties for a living. He does much of the handiwork himself, and frequents Home Depot probably more than he’d like to. He recently totaled his receipts from a year’s worth of expenses and determined that he annually spends about $100,000 at Home Depot alone, to say nothing of the other hardware and supply stores he goes to.

So think about all the people like my friend Matt, people who utilize one or more of Home Depot’s 2000 US locations on a weekly basis. Then think about all the average folks who go to Home Depot, just to pick up a new door knob, or a can of paint, or a house plant. All those patrons, all those dollars, and all those door knobs add up. They add up quite a bit. Despite the recession, Home Depot’s recent sales exceeded $71 billion dollars.

So there you have it. A low-cost home-improvement chain, made to fit the needs of specialists and laypeople alike. Now why didn’t I think of that?

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By benjaminchristopher, February 17, 2010 12:40 pm

A radio station that learns from your preferences, and only plays music you like.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Ten years ago, such an idea would have sounded like science fiction to most people, but not to Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora.com.

Westergren was a musician. He went in and out of bands that saw varying degrees of success. At one point, he took a job composing scores for films. Making music for movies, Westegren found, was a lot different than just jamming out with band mates. It was more direct, more calculating. He found that different directors liked different styles of musical composition. Westergren began to wonder if he could “codify” the tastes of the directors he was working for, to somehow break them down into something predictable, formulaic even.

This new, analytical way of looking at music became more than just a curiosity for Westergren. It led him to start a company that focused on decoding music, what he called the Music Genome, in order to bring people more of the sort of music they liked.

“We tried to build a business on different ways of using the Music Genome,” Westergren says. One of the ways they envisioned utilizing it was to integrate the technology into listening kiosks in music stores. This business plan quickly evolved, and with the help of some venture capital, the “Music Genome Project” was born in 2000.

The Music Genome Project is the backbone of Pandora Internet Radio. The goal of the project is to take music and boil it down to quantifiable data. Well, sort of quantifiable. Every song in the Genome’s library (there are over 700,000 with roughly 10,000 new songs being added each month) is analyzed by a “musicologist.” These musicologists are usually musicians themselves with strong backgrounds in music theory. They break down and rate over 400 attributes of every song, from the “soulfulness” of the vocals to the rhythmic and key changes in a given song.

Within four years of starting the Music Genome Project, Westergren was ready to launch Pandora.com.

Pandora is a free “Internet Radio” service. You start by picking a song or artist that you like. Pandora then creates a music station based on your selection. The station streams music that’s similar to the band or song you chose.

Maybe the coolest thing about Pandora is that it learns from your preferences. If you don’t like a song, you say so, and Pandora will refine the station with its newfound “knowledge” of your preferences.

Note: If you haven't listened to it yet, check out the Why Didn't I Think of That? story on Pandora.

It will also tell you why each song is appearing on your station.

For instance: I create a radio station based on the band The Small Faces. Then the song “In a Foreign Land” by the Kinks comes on. “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality and electric rhythm guitars.”

You know, I spent a lifetime refining my musical tastes. It’s almost insulting to have them broken down and reduced to their parts so calculatingly. Almost. Truth is, Pandora has turned me onto more good music than most of my hipster friends have.

And Pandora works with all kind of genres, including rap. When Raekwon comes on my Ghostface Killah station, Pandora’s reasoning for the song’s inclusion is: “because it features east coast rap roots, gangsta rap attitude, R&B influences, funk influences and danceable beats.” You can see why Bob and Greg refer to the categorizing system as “pseudo-scientific” in their WDITOT audio story. I can’t think of many things more subjective than “gangsta-attitude” and “danceable beats.” These aren’t quantifiable attributes we’re dealing with here.

It has the human touch you could say.

As great of an idea as Pandora is, it hasn’t been particularly smooth sailing. Westergren and some of his colleagues went for long stretches without getting paid, just to keep the startup afloat.

Thankfully, Pandora has been growing in popularity. Today it bosts over 35 million listeners. The release of the Pandora iPhone app helped seal the deal. The potential to stream Pandora straight to users’ phones was too much for music lovers to ignore, and the Pandora app quickly outsold the SiriusXM Radio iPhone App.

Though a 2007 ruling threatened to bury Pandora in soaring royalty prices, the matter was finally resolved last summer. “The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio,” Westeren wrote on Pandora’s blog. “The system as it stands today remains fundamentally unfair both to Internet radio services like Pandora, which pay higher royalties than other forms of radio, and to musical artists, who receive no compensation at all when their music is played on AM/FM radio.”

Even so, after a large lobbying efforts on the part of Pandora and other Internet radio stations, the royalties were reduced by several hundreths of a cent per song. It may not sound like much, but with thousands upon thousands of songs streamed every day (Pandora claims they get more than 65,000 new users alone in a 24-hour period) all those little fractions of pennies add up.

With recent annual revenues are around $20 million, the folks at Pandora are expecting to finally turn a profit this year.

No one said being a pioneer was easy. And with more and more competitors everyday, like Last.fm and the like, it looks like Internet radio might be the future of listening to music. Who knows? It may not be long before Pandora is streaming into your car stereo.

So if you haven’t done so already, check out Pandora for a few days. Let me know what you think. The way we listen to and consume music has already changed so much in the last 20 years, it’s possible that the change has just begun.

RESOURCES

“The Song Decoders” — NY Times Magazine

“Pandora” WDITOT Audio Piece

“Pandora” — How Stuff Works

“Important Update on Royalties” — Pandora Blog

“Q&A: Tim Westergren”  — Electronic Musician

“Interview with Tim Westergren” — nPost

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By benjaminchristopher, February 1, 2010 12:27 pm

I guess you could say I was taking a gamble by banking on an unreleased, unannounced product as being the Number 1 Most Important Screen of 2010.

I guess you could also say that I lost the gamble.

Last Wednesday, Steve Jobs and company released Apple’s newest, long-rumored product: a tablet-computer called the iPad.

It's called the iPad? Unfortunately. One of the other speculated names Apple was considering, and a far better choice in my opinion, was iSlate. But some feared "Slate" would sound too ancient and heavy for such a modern, lightweight device.

So what is it?

Well… It’s a giant iPhone.

More accurately, it’s a cross between an iPhone and a laptop. If you really don’t know anything about the product, I’ll let Apple sell it to you themselves. Head over to the iPad site for details, videos, and demonstrations. In the mean time, I’m going to try and keep this as brief as possible.

The iPad is certainly a slick little device. And it’s almost affordable. The bare bones version, with no 3G and only 16 GB of memory goes for $499. Another way of saying this is: It’s over 800 dollars if you want 3G Wireless, and 64 GB of memory. As a point of reference- my iPod Classic, which is at least a year old and was not even the biggest model when i got it, has 120 GB of memory.

The revolutionary Apple iPad is… not revolutionary. The iPhone was revolutionary. And it was my thinking, along with a lot of other bloggers, consumers, and tech-enthusiasts, that Apple was going to be presenting something really groundbreaking here, something that would make the iPad not just a neat gadget, but a state-of-the-art must have.

It’s got some cool features, and I’m sure some of the new apps that people will develop will be truly revolutionary. Will it work as an e-reader? Sure I can hold it in my hands, but it’s not going to be any easier on my eyes than a computer screen would be. It doesn’t have the easy-looking effect that the Kindle does.

And I’m not crazy about the fact that the the only Apps you can run are through Apple’s App store. That made sense with the iPhone. After all, it was a phone. This is a computer. And make no mistake, the third-party software’s availability is controlled entirely by Apple. Anyone familiar with Apple turning down the free, game-changing Google Voice App for the iPhone can see the danger here. Any App, no matter who developed it or what it does, can be rejected by Apple for any reason, or for no reason.

So what do I do, here? I’m excited by the iPad, but at the same time, I am quite underwhelmed. I would have been happy to give the iPad almost any spot on my silly little Top 5 Most Important Screens of 2010 list.

Except the number one spot.

Might the iPad signify a shift in computing? Yes. Tablet computing very well could be the way of the future. It makes perfect sense to me. And if any existing product is going to kick-start the tablet-computing craze, the iPad would be it.

But what is the iPad really going to do for you and your business that a laptop couldn’t do? The iPhone introduced a slew of features that the mobile phone world had never known. The iPad does not provide anything comparable.

It is cool. Really cool, even. But not much else. So…

Sorry, Apple. Maybe next time.

Until further notice, this countdown will remain in limbo. As I said, if I had started knowing what I know now, I would have happily gave the iPad a spot on the Top 5. And it still might earn a number one spot. I’d love to see how people wind up using the iPad, and what sort of Apps are developed for it that can truly make a difference in the computing world.

In the mean time, let’s get back to some stories that really scream, “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Because hey, that’s what we’re about here.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to yell at me in the comments.

apple.com/ipad

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By benjaminchristopher, January 26, 2010 11:50 am

The number two “most important screen” of the new year isn’t really a screen at all.

Or more accurately, it’s every screen.

If you haven’t heard the term “Cloud Computing” before, that’s okay. It seems at first glance to be little more than a buzzword. And it is a buzzword. But to many,  it’s also the future of computing. It will change the way businesses and consumers alike use their devices and access their information.

What is Cloud Computing?

According to this article from Infoworld, the problem with Cloud Computing, much like “Web 2.0,” is that everyone uses the term, and nobody means the same thing.

So what do I mean when I talk about Cloud Computing?

Well, if something is “in the cloud,” it’s online. The internet is the cloud, basically. When you listen to streaming music on Pandora, when you watch streaming TV on Hulu, when you watch an instant movie on Netflix, you’re accessing media that’s in the cloud.

In fact, as I type out the first draft of this story, I’m using Google Docs. There’s no word application installed on my computer. The document doesn’t exist anywhere on my hard-drive. It’s on some unknown server out there.

It’s in the cloud.

Years from now, it will likely seem ridiculous that people carried around “their own” computers and “their own” data everywhere they went. In the future computers will be little more than faceless portals to the cloud- a place where all our data is, where all our media is, where all the information is. We’ll have access to everything, all the time, wherever we go.

Online Applications. (Software as a Service)

We started to see this aspect of cloud computing rise in popularity during 2009. Google Docs, which has been around for several years, along with Microsoft Office Live and other such services are asking us–or letting us, depending on how you look at it–move our basic applications and documents onto the internet.

Why would we do that, you ask?

Well there are a number of reasons. The main one is so that you’re not tied down. Ever. Work can be done from any computer, anywhere in the world. All you need is internet access.

Businesses won’t need servers. They may not even need IT departments.

Juggling different devices will become arbitrary. It won’t matter what device you have with you. Going from your phone to your laptop will be seamless. There will be no transfer of data, because there will be no physical data to transfer. It all stays put, in the cloud, and you just tap into it whenever you’d like.

Google, Apple, Microsoft– Everyone’s betting money on Cloud Computing. Bloggers and magazines are lauding it as the immediate future of technology. And yet, sales are not booming. This is a fascinating article on the disparity between what people and businesses say in polls about cloud computing, and what they say with their pocketbooks.

And yet, I believe this will be the year when we’ll truly start to see a paradigm shift. The rise in popularity of netbooks, online applications, and mobile computing are all signs pointing the way to a future that’s more all-pervading than it is portable, where your data follows you, whether you like it or not.

There are so many resources available on the topic, if you’re interested. Below are just a few.

Resources

Cloud Computing Wikipedia Entry

What Cloud Computing Really Means

Protect Open Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Sales Slow