gordon’s posterous

Gordon Bowman

I'm in Sales Planning and Development at Pandora.

I'm also a co-founder at BlastGroups.

Things I'm passionate about: making things of value, venture capital, technology, startups, product strategy, simple design,   branding, creative advertising.

Other things I love:
music, investing, screenwriting, running, cycling, good food, wine, reading, San Francisco.

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The Next Big Thing Is Touch

I was catching up on some links I've been storing up in Instapaper and came across this article by John Doerr on the iPad and the the expansion of Kleiner Perkins' iFund.    

The whole article is great so I recommend reading it in it's entirety. However, I felt Doerr and team really nailed it with this graphic and section titled under "The New World." It really resonates with my last post about the future of computing being Touch:

The New World

We’re going from the Old World to a brave New World.

  • From the Old World of the traditional, tired window interfaces… to the wonderful new world of TOUCH.
  • From the Old World of Point and Click to the new SWOOSH of Fluidity.
  • Instead of old, artificial, indirect interfaces, the iPad is direct and NATURAL.
  • Instead of WYSIWyg – what you see is what you get – it is WYTIWis. What You Touch… IS what IS.
  • Instead of holding a MOUSE, you’re holding MAGIC.

The second bullet is my favorite here. With iPad, HP's Slate, Google's upcoming tablet, and other future Android-powered tablets, Touch is entering our worlds in a big way.

Need more evidence on the growing importance of Touch? On a day when Apple updated their Macbook Pro line, typically a very noteworthy announcement, the Apple homepage looked like this:

Expect the trend to continue.

 

 

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Filed under  //  apple   iPad   product design   touch  
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Posted 3 months ago

Great iPad UX Analysis From a 2.5 Year Old

I came across this great video on Laughing Squid of a 2.5 year-old using an iPad for this first time.   

Granted, the author mentions she is already used to an iPhone. Yet with an entirely new form factor she still takes right to it — quickly finding and playing her favorite spelling game, figuring out how to enlarge iPhone-only apps to full-size, navigating from one app to the next, and scrolling through photos (there's a really cute moment when she sees a picture of "her and doggy").

It's just fascinating to me how she interacts with the iPad. She really is one of the new Children of Cyberspace. This first line from that article stuck with me:

"My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader."

Unlike you and I, these children are growing up completely comfortable with multitouch interfaces. As the Laughing Squid author mentions of his daughter: 

"Her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world."  

And he's right. For these children it will no longer by point-and-click. It will be TOUCH-and-SWIPE.

 

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Filed under  //  iPad   product design   touch  
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Posted 3 months ago

The iPad Is The First Personal Computer... What You Have Is A Work Computer.

People have asked what the killer app of the iPad is. It’s obvious! The killer app of the iPad is chilling out. You don’t sit it down in your lap, the screen doesn’t come up and block reality- it’s something you pick up and hold. And, like a book, you can simply put it down.

Reading a Kindle in a coffee shop is a casual thing, you can sip your coffee as you linger over the words, taking breaks now and again to people watch a bit. Reading on your laptop is intense- you fall into the world of the glowing rectangle, and shifting away from that world feels awkward, stilted.

The iPad lets you use a computer like a book. You pick it up. You watch a YouTube video. You watch a tv show. You play some music. You check your email. However, each of these things happen in isolation. You are checking your email, you are watching a YouTube video, or you are reading Huffington Post. There’s no in-between. You aren’t consumed by the device, because there’s no ability to be efficient while working on it. It is a device that’s functional enough to be useful, and stilted enough to be inefficient. It’s the first Personal Computer- good for hanging out in the living room, terrible for ‘real’ work. That’s why it’s fantastic! You can leave your ‘pad on the kitchen table, wake up, make yourself a cup of coffee, and browse a couple sites as you sip coffee. Then, when you’re done, you walk away and go to your ‘real’ computer to get work done.

The iPad is there for 1 or 2 hours a day, after work, before work, at the coffee shop, on a plane. Everywhere that your goal is specifically not to be efficient, but rather to chill out. The iPad’s a personal computer. Right now, we only have work computers.

via spreadsong.com

Great post. Sums up my feelings on the iPad.

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Filed under  //  apple   iPad   product design  
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Posted 3 months ago

Pandora: Coming To An iPad Near You

The iPad version takes advantage of the large 9.7 inch screen of the device. Rather than having to switch views to see things such as your stations, they can reside on the left hand side of the screen as your album artwork and artist information is on the right hand side. Artist information is a particular area of emphasis with this new app. The top player looks similar to iTunes now, with play and pause buttons, as well as thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. There is also an easy-to-access search box along the top.

On top of the new iPad app, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tweeted earlier today that the service has just signed up its 50 millionth user (up from 40 million this past December). Good timing, they’re potentially about to get a whole lot more from this new device.

Find Pandora in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

via techcrunch.com

That's right. Pandora is coming to an iPad near you.

Here's the official Pandora blog post on the release.

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Filed under  //  iPad   pandora  
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Posted 3 months ago

With The iPad, Apple Gets Into The Mobile CPU Business

But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year’s new iPhone, look out.)

Apple doesn’t talk much about the technical details of the iPhone. They never talk about CPU speed or the name of the chip being used. They don’t tell you how much RAM is in there. Part of their vision for moving computers from technical culture to popular culture is about getting away from defining these things by their technical specs. So the prominent talk about A4 is telling. This is something they want us to notice.

I mentioned this year-ago quote from Apple COO Tim Cook the other day, but it’s apt here, too. Cook told BusinessWeek, “We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.

via daringfireball.net

Apple is now in control of their own processors. Thus, they're finally in charge of the whole system, top to bottom. This is a big deal.

The quote from Jobs says it all, “Apple is a mobile devices company.”

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Filed under  //  apple   iPad   mobile  
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Posted 6 months ago