Some waking from a coma this week might think the Apple Tablet is able to find the cure to cancer or create world peace due to all of the attention that it’s getting. There are articles popping up left and right telling us all about this new tablet, even though we still don’t have real confirmation that it exists. It’s overshadowing everything, including President Obama’s speech tomorrow – which seems to be a lot more important then Apple’s rumored new device. Has a gadget ever received so much attention before it was launched or confirmed?
Sure, the Apple Tablet sounds cool – I admit, it should be good for newspapers and magazines if it can provide them with a decent revenue model, but it’s not like people are going to need to purchase this product – it’s very much a luxury. First, it will likely be very expensive, just like all of Apple’s products. This means then a very small percentage of the population will actually purchase one. Second, is a tablet the right product for right now? People have been purchasing smaller mobile devices (smart phones), not larger ones. Since the Tablet won’t fit in your pocket, it simply replaces a laptop, or becomes another gadget for the living room.
I understand that people follow Apple’s every move, but this time it seems a bit overdone (how funny would it be if tomorrow’s announcement is about a completely different topic!) Can we please see the Tablet for what it really is: another device Apple wants us to purchase and add to our collection of gadgets so that we can post tweets and brag about which gadgets we have and how cool they are.
I’m not against the Tablet (although the constant talk is getting pretty old at this point), I’m just questioning how it can possible live up to the hype. If it was some other lesser known company that was developing it, there would be a lot of questions brought up instead of people drooling over the chance to see some photo-shopped picture of the device.
So let’s take a step back and see what the Tablet is all about before we credit it with changing the world.
Disclosure: Racepoint Group works with Sony’s eReader division.
I’ve written before about the need for press releases to evolve. Yes, the formal release that some folks still cling to may be dead – but there is a growing need for social or digital media releases that distribute multi-media information to consumers and media members.
At Racepoint Group we’ve been using PitchEngine for several of our clients who are interested in distributing announcements and news via a more social, cost-effective platform. The service has been good for the most part. The free service that PitchEngine offers, in it’s most basic form, distributes social media releases that live for 30 days. The use of this platform (which gets picked-up by Google News), in addition to a release going live and living on a corporate Website, has been a good mix for most companies.
PitchEngine allows you to add images and links to video to each social media release – in addition to making it easy to share on social networks. However, despite the growth of the service (they note 14,000 brands have created thousands of releases since it launched in October 2008 ), the ability to physically embed video and other multi-media files is still a challenge. The overall feeling you get is that the text is still more important than the visual – which in this day and age seems backwards.
This is where PressLift enters the equation. The new service and platform created by Drop.io - a New York-based, social, file-sharing service – will officially launch during Social Media Week in February. However the Beta or Meta version of the Website is now live at PressLift.com. PressLift aims to be the simplest and best way share multi-media with press and consumers – all of which will be easily embeddable.
While it doesn’t appear that PressLift, will offer a “free service” – its Drop.io creator Steve Greenwood noted recently that it would be competitively priced (although not subscription-based) – the paid service may be appealing to brands and digital-minded agencies who realize the need to address a better delivery mechanism for rich content.
Unlike PitchEngine’s customizable news rooms (paid service – ($35/mo or $400/yr for standard archiving/hosting for unlimited releases), which offers a slightly customized experience (Vanity URL’s often have numbers attached, video is hard to bring in); PressLift aims to create a real customized experience that offers a real sub-domain for brands (company.presslift.com).
In fact, one way to look at PressLift is as an “informational micro-site” rather than a press release or even a press room. One of PressLift’s promises is that creating a PressLift page “is as easy as creating a Facebook page.” Will the service deliver on its promises? Time will tell. We’ve begun to try out the service in its meta form and will have more to report back over the next couple weeks.
Last week, only a few days before Apple declared record sales for its iPhone, The White House entered the fray of iPhone applications. The administration’s iPhone app “puts the latest information from the White House in the palm of your hands,” according to its pitchman – White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
In addition to listing out the applications functions, such as: accessing exclusive photos, videos and Webcasts; Gibbs takes the opportunity to take a lighthearted shot at the White House press corps.
“In fact, if you want to see me set the White House press corps straight every day, live, now there’s an app for that,” Gibbs coyly delivers before walking into a daily press briefing.
