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Here are some brief thoughts on this afternoon’s announcements.

iOS 5.1
People were hoping for iOS 6, but we only got a minor update. Not a whole lot of new stuff.

Slight updates to Apple TV
Who cares about this product? Resolution increases to 1080p signals to me that this is just another step before we finally get the full blown tv with Apple TV built in, instead of just the set top box.

The new iPad
High resolution retina display – Will probably look incredible. I’m guessing similar impact of upgrade from 3GS to iPhone 4.

4G LTE – Separate devices is rough, prelude to next iPhone supporting LTE, but does this mean we aren’t going to have a universal iPhone any more? I doubt it. They’ll find a way to make it happen.

Processor speed – doubled, good stuff.

Video recording – I didn’t realize it didn’t have this already. Who uses their iPad to take photos / video?

Siri Support – Auto-Dictation will be huge on a device that is a pain to type on.

Hotspot – The new iPad just quietly replaced another consumer electronic device. Why buy a hotspot when you can buy an iPad that has it built in?

iLife Updates
Upgrades to iMovie, iPhoto and Garage Band are all great, but I don’t use any of these very often. For people who use these, they will love it. For everyone else, meh.

Upgrade?
I’m not going to upgrade, because for what I use my iPad for (mainly reading on the subway) this doesn’t change much. However, for people who still don’t have an iPad, now is definitely the time.

It’s been in the news lately that Apple’s suppliers might use child labor and some really terrible conditions exist in factories in China. This story came out estimating that the cost to produce the iPhone is about $30 per unit. All of this has sparked the conversations about why Apple and other companies don’t produce these goods in America. But Steve Jobs complained in his biography that even if cost wasn’t a factor, the lack of talent certainly was. There just aren’t the educated people to manufacture these products on the sort of scale these companies need. Interesting to consider in light of all the rhetoric during the Presidential campaign about America’s decline.

Address Book Gate, terrible name, I know. I wrote about the apps taking address book info controversy last week. Here’s a couple of updates:

• Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data
• What iOS apps are grabbing your data, why they do it and what should be done
• Apple: App Access to Contact Data Will Require Explicit User Permission

Over the past few days there has been a minor scandal brewing, which has now turned into a flame war between several prominent journalists (for clarity, I’ll use that term). It started with New York Times writer Nick Bilton, publishing a story about mobile app Path data mining user’s phones. Path has since apologized and scrubbed all user data, but that’s not really the issue here because a ton of other apps are doing the exact same thing.

After Bilton’s original story went up, MG Siegler and Michael Arrington responded (More than those two posts, but those give you an idea). From here the situation gets complicated. Siegler and Arrington work for CrunchFund, a startup fund which has Path in its portfolio. From here Dan Lyons weighed in on the controversy, although some people likened it to a straight up personal attack on Siegler and Arrington.

His criticism, is that CrunchFund cashed in on Arrington and Siegler’s status as “influencers.” This was allegedly furthered by the fund turning around and funding the tech news site Pando Daily. In his article, Dan Lyons alleges:

PandoDaily is working the same deal as CrunchFund. You invest in our site, and now we’re business partners, so at the very least you’ll have a friendly media outlet whose “influence” you can call upon.

His allegation is supposed to really serious, but isn’t this how most news works these days? A company is going to be less likely to give a scoop to an organization that made them look bad. On the other hand, a company is going to be more likely to give information to an organization that has given them favorable press in the past. People with news to break always weighs these sorts of considerations. Fox News still covers the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal, although their take is much less harsh than say that of MSNBC.

Lyons also levels heavy criticism at what he calls “hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves.” Heavy stuff. Although, writing a blog post like his which is obviously going to provoke serious responses is definitely doing the very click-whoring he advocates against. Maybe because his article is also some sort of super meta critique of the industry, it’s different?

What a mess. Chris Dixon has a good take on the original “controversy,” but be warned that he is probably also tangled in this investment web somewhere. Good read nonetheless.

My take is that you have to assume there is no longer such a thing as an independent journalist. Everyone has motivations and it’s up to the reader to educate themselves as much as possible and read differing points of view before drawing a conclusion. In an age where news stations are all owned by mega corporations, this type of thing shouldn’t be a shock to anyone anymore. The world runs on nepotism.

As for the original “controversy” regarding phone data, probably a subject for a future blog post.

A few months ago I wrote about the eventual death of television. This morning on the way to work I read this story about BitTorrent Live, a new project from BitTorrent found Bram Cohen. From the story:

“My goal is to kill off television” Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo session I hosted. Afterwards he explained to me in rhyme, “Television’s physical infrastructure is inevitably going to go away, but TV as a mode of content consumption is here to stay.”

It’s great to see another legal application of BitTorrent technology, which is usually just blasted for perpetuating illegal activity. It’s also great to see another nail in television’s coffin. The industry’s death is inevitable.

I now regularly use three different computers over the course of my day. At home I’ve got my MacBook Pro. At home and at the office I have a MacBook Air, but in the office I also sometimes need to use an iMac.

Anyone have a suggestion on how to easily sync bookmarks, online logins, dropbox files and evernote across three machines like this? Ideally a method where I can also log out of all these services, because in the case of the iMac, different people use it from time to time.

I hate having to log in and out of everything so often. There has to be an easy fix to this, any ideas?

I switched from Firefox to Chrome a few months back and haven’t switched back. In a nutshell:

-faster, uses less resources
-better bookmark manager
-search from the url bar

Makes me wonder, what other services that I’ve used forever should I reconsider?

The internet will eventually disrupt all existing industries. Think about the ones it has already fundamentally changed forever: music, software, retail, travel and your phone. What’s next? Television.

Consider the following:

• The average American still watches over five hours of tv a day.
• The cost of producing professional looking content has plummeted (my phone shoots HD video).
• Companies like Netflix are going around traditional content providers (cable industry) and producing original content on their own.
• Kids ages 12 to 17 spend one third of their time online watching video.
• Online video advertising spending has doubled in the past two years and estimates say it will increase by 33% this year.
• 1.3 Billion Videos are watched every day.
• The entire tv viewing experience is archaic and frustrating for the user (commercials, programs in time slots).
• Yet, over 90% of American households still pay for tv, because there is no serious alternatives (yet).

And now there is this Washington Post story about Steve Jobs talking on the subject. Television is definitely the next big industry to be disrupted by the internet. It can’t come soon enough.

David Pogue writing in the New York Times recently said the following:

Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.

I feel that way about a lot of web services. The service Pogue mentions is Dropbox. I recently was telling my Dad (and new iPhone owner) about it. Then a few days later I was telling a friend about it. I’ve used it forever and can’t believe there are still people out there who haven’t heard about it or people didn’t realize that this was the service they needed to make their lives much easier. David Pogue’s review makes a better case than I could ever do, I urge you to check it out if you need some convincing. Or just click here to sign up and try it for yourself.

Every few weeks I like to re-evaluate who I am following on Twitter. The idea is that my attention is limited, I want to be constantly adjusting the signal to noise ratio of my Twitter feed. The easiest way to eliminate people is just un-follow them when I see them tweet ten times in a row. For other people I just take away their retweets. Other ways to manage the stream are less obvious.

I usually use Friend or Follow or a similar service to establish who is still following me. Some of the people I follow are in this grey area where the content the put out isn’t great, but I feel some sort of social obligation to continue to follow them. A simple check of who isn’t following me is a quick way to justify dropping these people.

The final way I would like to further hone the feed doesn’t exist, but it should. I would like to see someone build a third party app on the Twitter API that sorts my followers my more complex methods. The one I would use specifically would be something like sort by “tweets per day over last 30 days.” See all of the people I follow sorted in this fashion would be a great way to quickly evaluate which ones to drop and which ones to continue to follow.

On this note there is definitely a future need for automated curation here. There needs to be some way to tell Twitter to selectively filter out tweets from my own followers on certain subjects. For instance there are a lot of sporting events I don’t really care about. On Saturday my feed is cluttered with people talking about College Football games. All those people who watching shows like American Idol? I could definitely go without those. At this point I tollerate it and continue to follow these people, but if there was a way to further tweak the signal to noise like this I would be a huge fan.