Davis Shaver

This is worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology is not enough. It's tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.

Yep... that about sums it up.

We think that there's a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we're really excited about that.

Yep.

How could Apple release a third-generation iPad just six months or so after the second one? Maybe it won’t be an actual next generation model. Maybe it’s more like an iPad 2.5, or iPad 2 Pro — a new higher-end model that sits atop the iPad product family, not a replacement for the iPad 2 models (which, of course, haven’t even been released yet).

As usual, Gruber nails it.

Cool picture from Nokia's cultural anthropologist.

Apropos.

In March the intelligence company found that visits to Facebook had surpassed those to Google. And since then, Facebook's growth has continued, increasing 60% from the same time last year and making up 1 in 10 website visits in the U.S. last week alone.

Wow.

Patch spokesperson Janine Iamunno told me, "We studied daily newspapers in like-sized communities to Patch markets and found that on average we can operate at 4.1 percent of the cost." Patch doesn't pay for newsprint and doesn't pay for real estate.

The economy of the Internet.

The lab will loosely follow the model of interdisciplinary media programs like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. The new project has already won  $1-million in sponsorships from corporations like Verizon Wireless, IBM, and Mattel, which hope to use ideas developed at USC. It has also attracted a veteran of MIT’s media programs, the digital-media scholar Henry Jenkins.

But the USC lab will focus on the immediate applications of new technology and the study of its effects, rather than on building new inventions as the MIT lab does, said Jonathan Taplin, the Annenberg Innovation Lab’s director and a professor in the Annenberg school.

Sounds like an awesome program.