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Inkling Cuts Textbooks into Inexpensive Bite-Sized Morsels
"There are lots of schoolkids in the world," writes Tyler Cowen on the Marginal Revolution website.
We were thinking the same thing. In fact, we were thinking it a decade ago when we leaped into the e-book space: the medium is perfect for textbooks. But education had to wait for hardware and software to catch up.
It's caught up.
Hardware: Apple will lead the way. "The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys" says Cowen in My predictions about the iPad. "In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle."
Platform: We've been reading up on a San Francisco startup called Inkling. "Stacked with pedigreed veterans of Microsoft and Google, Harvard, MIT and Stanford," writes Paul Boutin of VentureBeat, Inkling surfaced after Apple's iPad launch with $1 million to seed development of software aimed not just at student's learning needs but their pocketbooks as well. The company is working with a number of textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson."First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust."
Inkling offers color, interactivity, highlighter capability, social network sharing features, talking text and dynamic quizzes. And all of this delivered lightning-fast. "The iPad’s A4 chip is even faster than the Android G2 that gets geeks so excited," says Boutin, "so rich layouts and interactive illustrations run quickly."
"But the real breakthrough," he writes, "is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks.
Are you listening, students? Modular bundles so cheap they're not worth ripping off!
Here are some details from Inkling's "About" page:
Interactive figures. Inkling lets you directly manipulate objects to explore them. Want to know if two molecules bond? Use your fingertips to pull them together and see what happens.
Custom spine. Inkling organizes content based on your assignments. It shows you everything you need to do, all at once, no matter where the content is from. It's like a custom textbook, just for you.
Reader. When it's time to read a traditional textbook, Inkling does an amazing job. Dog-ear your pages, skip from chapter to chapter with gestures, and jump from figure to figure with your finger.
Quizzes. Measure your progress with interactive tests that deepen your understanding of the content.
Note following. Ever borrow a classmate's notes? Borrow them in realtime with Inkling NoteSync™. Annotations, highlights and comments from your friends show up alongside your own, instantly.
Device sync. Want to finish up a reading while waiting in line? Anything you've got on your iPad appears right on your iPhone or iPod touch, too.
Look for iPads utilizing the Inkling platform on campuses as early as next fall.
We hate to rain on iSlate's apotheosis, but some of us are wondering about battery life.
A portable computer is only as good as its battery. A blogger with the handle of "Andrew", writing for TabletPCReview.com, said that "Whenever we review notebooks one of the questions that always needs to be answered is, what's the battery life like on this tablet? We all know manufacturers overstate the quoted battery life for a system, probably because they test for battery life under ideal conditions for getting a high number. For example, wireless off, processor underclocked, system idle, LCD brightness set to low, no DVD and so on. So when your notebook with a quoted 5 hour battery life actually gets three hours, you're left wondering what happened to those other two hours the manufacturer got?"
Andrew wrote that in 2007, but the fundamental issues have not changed since then.
A January 26-scheduled announcement by Apple, which few pundits believe could be about anything else than the imminent release of a tablet-sized computer/e-book reader, has created nearly messianic frenzy. A New York Times columnist said that some are calling the device a "Jesus tablet". But at least one authority, physicist Eric Hellmann, thinks we should look under the hood before declaring January 26th a religious holiday.
Hellman, whose popular blog Go To Hellman covers the e-book scene, has speculated on the device's power source. "The design problem is the battery," he recently wrote. "Assuming that the iSlate is a multimedia device implies that it's not an e-ink device. It's going to have a screen not so different from an iPhone screen, and that will consume power. That will in turn require a battery proportional to the iPhone battery, and batteries are what cause iPhones to be reasonably heavy for their size. The Kindle works as a book-replacement because it's light enough; I'm guessing the iSlate will be a more of a tv than a book."
Apple will undoubtedly imbed a state of the art battery in its tablet, but when you consider the load that a tabet will have to pull - movie and game videos, photo archives, videocam, multitouch screen, full color e-books, magazines, newspapers, music, plus countless juice-draining apps, to say nothing of the demands of the tablet's own operating and processing system, you have to wonder whether Apple's battery, or anybody else's at this moment in history, will be able to do the job without adding an unacceptable weight burden.
Knowledgeable insiders confirm these concerns. When a website named islate.org posted some allegedly leaked specs (you can read them here), one commenter wrote that "for as thin as the device is intended to be, there is no possible way it’ll run a HD, 2Gb RAM, and a Core 2 Duo processor. Factor in the large multitouch screen and you could expect a battery life of about 15-minutes with those specs, AND it’d be too hot to handle AND weigh a few pounds. No way."
There will undoubtedly be a stampede to snap up the iSlate, but the coolheaded will scrutinize the specs before committing to the hefty - rumored at $1000 - price of a device that, if you believe some iSlate evangelists, embeds nothing less than the spiritual hopes and dreams of humankind within its fragile case.
Apple Tablet Announcement Slated for Jan 26 - We Have a Name Sighting And It's a Good One
All eyes will be on the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 26th. That's where and when Apple is expected to introduce its long-awaited tablet. . We couldn't get odds in Las Vegas but David Gelles of Financial Times's ft.com website reports that at least one analyst rates the likelihood at 50-50. Investors liked the odds a lot better than that, driving Apple shares up by almost $7.00 to an all-time high of over $209.00 at the end of last week's trading. If you'd bought Apple last January you'd be up about $130.00 a share today.
What will the Apple tablet look and feel like? Since everything at this stage is pure conjecture, the device is literally a tabula rasa. But Jeremy Horwitz, editor in chief of iLounge.com, who has a pretty good track record in the conjecture department, speculated about it in September. Among other features he thinks we will see when the curtain is pulled back are:
It has a 10.7-inch screen
It runs on an iPhone OS
It will come in two different variations: one with 3G networking capabilities, and one without. "Think of the 3G version as a bigscreen iPhone 3GS, and the non-3G version as a bigscreen iPod touch."
It will have a 480 x 320-pixel display, enabling easy reading of full-sized book and magazine pages."Expect something like 5-6 times the resolution of an iPod touch or iPhone screen (720p or thereabouts) and 7 times the touchable surface area."
It is designed to be a slate-like replacement for books and magazines, plus all of the media, gaming, app, and web functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch
Gelles in his ft.com article adds that "Apple is working to solidify a new round of content deals with TV studios. Meanwhile, publishers have been working on new versions of digital magazines that would be viewed on touch screen computers."
We have frequently stated here that as red-hot as the e-book industry's growth may be, it will not reach its full potential until there's a tablet under the arm of every student on every campus. There is simply no dedicated reading device available today with screen size adequate to serve the educational community.
So, what's the name of Apple's tablet? Typical of Steve Jobs's secretive style the company is holding it tightly under wraps. However, a little birdie tells us it's iSlate. "It seems Apple's name was temporarily exposed as the actual owner of 'iSlate.com' for several weeks in late 2007," explains a website called MacRumors. "It was changed back within a few weeks, but MacRumors has found the historic record proving Apple ownership of the iSlate.com domain."
You can actually see the document here. But don't go looking for it online, at least not yet. We tried and got one of these:
PROBLEM LOADING PAGE Firefox can't find the server at www.islate.com.
Do we like the name "iSlate"? Well, given the epidemic of dumb names assigned to e-book readers lately, we give a big thumbs-up to iSlate. That is, unless you misread it as "Is Late." If Apple fails to release its tablet early in the new year (March is the projected date), you can expect no end of plays on an otherwise memorable name.
The Holy Grail of screen technology is the gesture-activated virtual screen portrayed in Stephen Spielberg's 2002 blockbuster futuristic film Minority Report. Technologists inspired by the brilliant effects have been laboring ever since to interact with screen images, getting them to do what we want them to do by a mere wave of the hand or point of an index finger.
The iPhone's introduction of multitouch was an astounding innovation that brought Spielberg's vision closer to actualization. But the Apple device still requires physical contact with the surface of the device, whereas the next generation of virtual screens will liberate our hands from any contact whatsoever. Where are we on the continuum between touchscreens and Minority Report's magic one?
Rebounding from an Apple-led consumer flight to handhelds, a number of PC manufacturers are developing applications designed to lure consumers back to their desks and, according to Ashlee Vance of the New York Times (PC Touch Screens Move Ahead), high on the list are touchscreens. For instance, Hewlett-Packard is pushing the TouchSmart, a desktopper with an upright screen on which you can access every function with your stylus or index finger. TouchSmart offers a variety of great applications. Vance points out that "Customers can turn these machines into bespoke kiosks for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting event or flipping through a menu while waiting at a restaurant." Indeed, touch screens are commonly used for keeping track of tables and food orders at restaurants. They can also be embedded in homes to control lights, music, thermostat, etc., and in he kitchen to follow recipes.
However, after you've worked an iPhone screen with multitouch, one-finger functionality feels pretty limited, and we have to wonder how practical the TouchSmart approach is for business offices. Here's a simple test: next time you're sitting in front of your desktop monitor, try stretching your arm out and poking the screen every time you want to open a file, drag, drop, highlight, cut and paste or perform some other task. Do we really want to reach out to our screen every time we want to move something around or shift to another function? Don't be surprised if your arm grows weary and your back strained. Let's face it: some functions are best left to keyboard commands or mouse navigation. And - sitting at a desk is not necessarily where today's sedentary or peripatetic computer users want to be. If you're thinking about students, so am I. We'll get to them in a moment.
But soon, even five digits may be passé. Enter advanced multitouch and an Israeli outfit called N-trig. Its advanced PC screen technology called "DuoSense" enables users to use both hands as well as a pen.
N-trig is the only industry provider to offer a combined pen, touch and multi-touch solution, having overcome the technological hurdles of combining the two seamlessly in a single device. DuoSense is an intelligent digitizer, fully compatible with Microsoft natural input standards. N-trig's DuoSense digitizers are are easily integratable, support any type of LCD, keep devices slim, light and bright, can support numerous applications, and can be implemented in a broad range of products ranging from small notebooks to large LCDs.
For a cool demo check out this video of N-trig. By the way, if you're fascinated by the possibilities and have some clever ideas of your own for Windows 7 apps, N-Trig offers a $900 touchscreen kit that software developers that can use to develop their own. Note that N-trig's demonstration is being performed on a tablet computer, as well as on a convertible laptop/slate. Why tablets? Aren't they just a niche? So far, yes. But that's going to change big time. There's a whole population of computer users that is simply not deskbound. It's called students, and, as we have stated in these pages again and again, the only viable computer product for students is the tablet. "Textbooks and other illustrated books simply cannot be crammed into anything smaller than a screen close to the size of a laptop," I wrote. "Tablets have all the virtues of laptops PLUS touchscreen functionality. For students, reading books on an e-reading device is highly desirable but not as imperative as the ability to handwrite notes on their device's screen."
Students will certainly give N-trig's DuoSense two thumbs up, plus the other eight digits as well. "Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do," writes Vance.
In anticipation of a major push into the tablet market, Microsoft is reported to have invested $24 million in N-trig, and the forthcoming Windows 7 (look for it in 2010) "supports gestures such as pinching and fingertip scrolling,"reports Wired. "Other Windows programs, such as Paint, will also include new brushes designed for multi-touch and features such as panning across a page in Internet Explorer." But the outer limits of known touchscreen tech is Microsoft Surface's Cynergy Labs, and it's likely that Surface will dominate the field until 3D replaces it. Check out these dumfounding videos.
Microsoft's Surface is probably the direction consumers will go over the next few years, but shimmering on the distant horizon is a means of projecting action onto a screen without any contact whatever. We caught a glimpse of this with the wearable "Sixth Sense" device demonstrated at a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. But for a mind-bending look at the state of the art of virtual, check out Project Natal by Microsoft designed for XBox 360. Stephen Spielberg, eat your heart out.
Richard Curtis
This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.
Obama Health Plan Prescribes Tablets at $50 Billion a Pop
I've been carrying the torch for Tablet PCs from my very first glimpse a decade or so ago, but like the object of a crush who's just not that into you, my passion has been unrequited. Despite a huge array of potential applications - education alone is as rich in possibilities as Alaska's fabulous El Dorado Gold Mine - developers and manufacturers have stubbornly resisted commitment to tablets. It's a big relief to find out I'm not alone, to learn in fact that I'm in such august company as Bill Gates. I urge you to read Conrad Blickstorfer's expert analysis of just why, for all its superb qualities, the "slate" (another term for tablets) has not yielded to our protestations of abiding love.
One sector of the computer-using community that has kept the embers burning, however, is the medical profession. As soon as Microsoft released the first version of Tablet PC, doctors seized on it as the answer to their prayers. At last they were liberated from the bondage of paperwork that cost them one hour of clerical duties for every hour spent attending to patients. With its portability, handwriting recognition and easy interfaceability with centralized databases, doctors could make their rounds with Tablet in hand and enter information in real time. Tablets even recognized the traditionally execrable handwriting of doctors, but e-ink and virtual keyboards have replaced the pen and all but eliminated the possibility that the computer could read "atropine" for "aspirin."
And now, with President Elect determined to create a $50 billion national computerized medical archive at the heart of his health care initiative, the tablet will at last find its place in the sun.
A microcosm of this world to come can be seen in Steve Lohr's New York Times examination of a small Wisconsin clinic that in 2003 introduced wireless tablet computers to its medical staff and required it use them. Lohr describes the many virtues of the program:
A paper record is a passive, historical document. An electronic health record can be a vibrant tool that reminds and advises doctors. It can hold information on a patient’s visits, treatments and conditions, going back years, even decades. It can be summoned with a mouse click, not hidden in a file drawer in a remote location and thus useless in medical emergencies.
Modern computerized systems have links to online information on best practices, treatment recommendations and harmful drug interactions. The potential benefits include fewer unnecessary tests, reduced medical errors and better care so patients are less likely to require costly treatment in hospitals.
The widespread adoption of electronic health records might also greatly increase evidence-based medicine. Each patient’s records add to a real-time, ever-growing database of evidence showing what works and what does not. The goal is to harness health information from individuals and populations, share it across networks, sift it and analyze it to make the practice of medicine more of a science and less an art.
"There are lots of schoolkids in the world," writes Tyler Cowen on the Marginal Revolution website.
