Author: Om Malik

Between packing up to move apartments and keeping an eye on Twitter’s Chirp conference, I’ve been playing around with a new 15-inch Macbook Pro, one of the many new laptops introduced by Apple earlier this week. The 15-inch devices, which use Intel’s i5 and i7 processors while the 13-inch Macbook Pro uses the Intel Core 2 Duo chip, look virtually no different than they did before, with unibody styling and the same screen size, weight and number of ports. The only visible change is in the design of the mag-safe power connector, which is now clearly inspired by the MacBook Air charger.

The real change in these new laptops is under the hood — in the stuff you can’t see. It all starts with the integrated (Nvidia’s 320M) and discrete (Nvidia’s GeForce 330M GT) graphics chips, which can be found in both the 15- and 17-inch machines. What Apple has done in this most recent update to its line-up is make switching between two graphics modes automatic, depending on the task at hand. For instance, a simple application such as Mail or Safari by default uses the embedded/integrated graphics engine, while more graphics-intensive apps such as Premiere or Aperture automatically switch to the more muscular graphics chips.

So what’s the big deal about this? First, you get a smoother performance. But the big impact is on the battery life of these laptops. While the previous generation of MacBook Pros used Nvidia’s 9400M integrated graphics engine, the new line-up uses the new Nvidia 320M. The old chip had 16 cores while the new 320M has 48. And yet the 320M, despite being more muscular (it provides an 80 percent performance gain over the 9400M) is 40 percent more energy efficient. That boosts the battery life of the laptops by as much as three hours, which means Apple is offering total battery life of between 8 and 10 hours on the new MacBook Pros.

I’m pretty sure Apple made more tweaks than just that in order to get those 8-10 hours, but graphic chip optimization has to be right up there when it comes to squeezing more out of the battery. Maybe because it makes both the hardware and the operating system it’s able to get more from the batteries on its machines.

These tweaks reminded me of something uber-investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who will be speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29, said recently — that by innovating around the internal combustion engine, we can substantially improve car mileage. Others believe that by writing more efficient, smarter software, more life can be squeezed from the current generation of battery technology. Apple is certainly proving that.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the machine itself, it is really really really fast. Much faster than my old MacBook Pro, which has an SSD drive and 8 GB of memory. Apps start in a blink of an eye and even iTunes works as if it was suddenly Barry Bonds. If you want to know anything specific, go ahead and ask me, and I will do my best to answer your questions.

Photo of Twitter co-founder & CEO Ev Williams by Randy Stewart via Flickr.

A few days back, I stopped by at the brand-new Palo Alto, Calif. offices of Facebook. It is a gigantic open space, with desks lined up next to each other as far as the eye could see. Interiors can provide an apt backdrop for an IKEA catalog. Big screens, Macs and PCs and engineers with headphones tap-tapping on their keyboards. To a Silicon Valley long-timer like myself, in the words of The New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra, it was like déjà vu all-over again.

You walk around their office and as an outsider you suddenly feel less smart as you feel brain waves bouncing off you. A quick chat about engagement advertising, conversation about super-sized data centers and 30-minute gab minute gab session about the future of activity streams – all this at arms length. Add suits to this mix and you are looking at a fearsome combination of brains and business. So, when I walked into a meeting with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “This feels like an old-fashioned technology company,” I said. “Congratulations!” It is old fashioned in its invention of the future.

By now you must be wondering — what has this got to do with Twitter and its problems?  How about — everything!

Why? Because the future of these two companies are intertwined! They are the Kane & Abel of our new pulsating two-way, near real-time Internet. Together, they dominate the zeitgeist. They are the future of communications and interactions. They already have a large portion of our Internet attention. To put it simply, they are competing for essentially what is the next evolution of the Internet: The People Web.

If Facebook’s vision of the Internet is about an Internet connected to Facebook’s brain via hooks, then San Francisco-based Twitter is the anti-Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and his troops are marching like an all-conquering Roman Army that will soon enough cross the billion-dollar (in revenues) threshold. And they control their own destiny.

In comparison, Twitter at present feels like a benign United Nations Force. Forget the obvious metrics such as subscribers (where Facebook has a big lead over Twitter), what I am talking about are the two companies and where they are in their corporate lifecycles. Twitter, despite its recent growth spurt, is still a pre-pubescent. The introduction of a somewhat ambiguous and tenuous business model based on an ideal called “resonance” shows how much work is ahead of Twitter.

Back to the Future

In order to understand the steep road ahead, one has to go back to the earliest days of Twitter and see how it has transformed since its launch on a fateful night in 2006. Over the past three years or so, I’ve watched it go through three phases:

Phase One: Twitter was initially a messaging service with its primary role being connecting distributed group of friends via SMS and the Web. It used the SMS clients of the cellphone and that was it. It later launched a web version of the service.

Phase Two: Twitter, when it released an API, became a platform that in turn spawned hundreds of applications that used the API, which led to several millions of dollars being invested in Twitter ecosystem, betting that Twitter would eventually become the platform of the new social web. (Read: Social Atoms and the Twitter Ecosystem)

Phase Three: Twitter is trying to be a product and then a platform. In the process of doing so, the company is “filling holes” in its current offering, as described by one of Twitter’s early backers, VC Fred Wilson. The acquisition of Tweetie was merely the start of phase three. (For a common sense explanation, check out this comment by a GigaOM reader.)

While Twitter’s actions might have raised the ire of third party developers, leading to furious handwringing, the company is doing what it needs to do: justify its $1 billion valuation and figure out a way to become a business that can be sold — either to a corporate buyer or someday to public market investors. That is why I don’t really fault Twitter trying to be a product in addition to being a platform. Now here is where things get interesting.

So far, by not focusing on being a product and instead being a platform of the People Web, Twitter was viewed as a company that would help weave a social fabric across the web by providing a social graph and an identity system. The developers then could dream up fancy products that would attract more people to the Twitter fabric. However, reality often comes in the way of utopia.

Twitter needs to build a “product” in order to make money. Sure one way to make some quick dollars is to sell its data stream to Microsoft and Google, but to me that’s like selling the mining rights to a gold mine instead of panning for gold yourself. Instead, the company has to fill-the-holes.

Herein lies the rub – the company will need time to build (or cobble together) this product, figure out a way to generate revenues and at the same time build and scale a massive infrastructure that would support Twitter and its ecosystem. And that is precisely Twitter’s weakness.

Fear of a Facebook Planet

On the flipside, Facebook is moving in the exact opposite direction. It already has a product: Facebook.com. It is making hundreds of millions of dollars from it. It has a platform, but that wasn’t good enough, so it is going to introduce a new, vastly improved one at its upcoming F8 conference in San Francisco, later this month.  In a conversation earlier this year, Facebook’s platform engineering chief, Mike Vernal told us that Facebook.com was nothing more than “info aggregation with a great photos app.”

Using the open graph API, Facebook wants to turn any plain website say, CNN, into a Facebook page, giving it the ability to collect fans, publish stories to their Facebook stream, and appear in the social networking site’s search results. (Read: Why Facebook Connect Matters and Why it Will Win.)

Liz put it best when she summed up our visit to Facebook,  “Though Facebook fan pages on the surface seem like a response to Twitter — allowing celebrities to collect fans who are not actually their real-world friends — they’re bigger than that. Facebook has trained 350 million users to publicly post-personal endorsements. In other words, it has an army of volunteers ready to organize the web on its behalf.” Now you can also understand why Facebook is building its data centers, buying thousands of servers, spending millions of dollars on developing a massive software library.

Facebook.com (or Facebook Mobile) allows the company to make money. Facebook Connect is the platform (read tentacles) that makes it possible for Facebook to collect data from across the web, organize it for the people web and in the process make more money.

What is to Chirp About?

Tomorrow, Twitter is going to host its first developer conference, Chirp. I am going to be very interested in knowing how they are thinking about the future and how quickly they are going to rev-up their machine. The good news is that they have some great people who have built awesome products in the past — Dick Costolo (COO) and UX expert Doug Bowman are amongst the most well known apart from the co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone — especially on their engineering team.

Nevertheless, what Twitter says or doesn’t say will in many ways define the outcome of this great (web) game. Zuck’s Army is on the move. Twitter is still assembling its troops. Whichever way you look at it — that is truly Twitter’s real big problem!

Photo of Twitter co-founder & CEO Ev Williams by Randy Stewart via Flickr. (CC)

Microsoft today launched a line-up of mobile devices called Kin. Built by Sharp and going on sale through Verizon Wireless starting next month, the phones are targeted at young people — mostly teenagers — and are the handiwork of members of the Danger team, which Microsoft acquired in February 2008 for $500 million.

I attended the Kin launch largely because I was curious as to what Microsoft’s response to the Apple-Android assault on the smartphone market would look like. After all, it’s not like anyone will be able to buy a Microsoft-branded Windows Phone anytime soon. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was curious — the event was packed to the gills. So like everyone else there, I gave the first two models to be launched — the Kin One and Kin Two – a try, only to find myself quickly overwhelmed by all the things taking place on the screen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start by accentuating the positive: The two devices are extremely well built and are exceptionally fast, with touchscreens that are positively spritely compared to their Android-based rivals. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the company has done a great job of cobbling together solid hardware that’s chock-full of features. The Kin Two in particular felt nice and sturdy; its slide-out keyboard was comfortable and its overall look was as appealing as the Palm Pre. OK that last bit was a joke, but it does look very much like the Palm device.

Marry that hardware to a superb 3G network like Verizon’s and you are in for a great experience, especially when accessing Internet-based services, whether they be photos, videos or contacts. Snapping photos or videos and loading them to the web using the Kin phones is dead simple.

Another excellent feature of the Kin phones is their tight integration with Microsoft’s Zune Music Service. Accessing music through the service was a totally mind-blowing experience — fast, responsive and easy to use. Whether that’s due to Verizon’s network or some under-the-hood trickery, I don’t know, but in the future I will expect all music services to be as good as this one.

Unfortunately all this goodness doesn’t add up to a great phone, because the user experience was cluttered and confusing. The opening screen, which is a grid divided into squares, is so busy it reminds me of Times Square on a Friday night.

Microsoft’s Kin can be divided into three components — the Loop, the Spot and the Studio. The Loop is essentially a social aggregation service that is very much like Motorola’s Blur except a tad more polished. It allows you to get updates from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

And as with the Moto Blur, it’s a good idea but one that causes visual dissonance — which is even more profound if you’ve ever experienced the picture-perfect serenity of an iPhone OS-based device. The lack of visual polish extends to the Spot, a sharing service that allows you to share  photos, texts and web pages with almost anyone by simply dragging them to a “spot” on your phone.

Again, a great idea, but one that needs some spit and polish.

Photo of Kin Studio By Microsoft

The most stunning part of the package is the Kin Studio. I absolutely love this feature, which offers a visually delighful way to save everything you’ve created on the phone to the Internet and then access it from any web browser. Use it in concert with a Facebook account and suddenly you have a whole new way of managing information. If Microsoft is smart, it’ll turn this into a freestanding service. Think of this as Microsoft’s version of Apple’s MobileMe, albeit one that works with all devices, regardless of their operating environments.

As you might have guessed by now, there’s a lot I like about the Kin line of phones and yet they left me feeling as satisfyied as I do after eating a quick Chinese meal at the food court. I found the overall experience to lack a certain coherence, and ironically I think the problem with the Kin line as it stands now can be summed up by this bit from the Microsoft press release:

With KIN, social networking is built into the fabric of the phone. KIN has a fun, simple interface, which is designed to help people publish the magazine of their life by making the people and stuff they love the focus rather than menus and icons.

Exactly — it’s trying to do too many things at once. And in the process, it’s defying what has become standard user behavior among young people: trying and buying applications. As AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui once told me: Apps are the new entertainment. From that perspective, Microsoft may have missed a step here, especially given its odds. Indeed, at least one analyst suggests that nearly 31 percent of American teenagers want an iPhone in “the next six months, up from 22% last fall and nearly double the 16% who wanted one a year ago.” From Fortune:

“We believe that the teen demographic is a critical component of long-term growth in the digital music and mobile markets,” wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. “And Apple is taking its leading position in music and mobile markets.”

Well the good news is that Microsoft is at least is playing in the right market now.

The growth in the number of broadband users and mobile Internet subscribers along with increased file sizes has been pushing the amount of data on the Internet for past few years. Today, one company which has a network that is spread across the world gave us a clue as to how much.

Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network today said that at peak it was sending 3.45 terabits per second of data on Friday. This is the highest amount of data they have sent over the Akamai network ever. The traffic peak of 3.45 Tbps is roughly equivalent to the capacity needed to download the entire printed contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in less than a minute.

That is not all. Akamai network hit a brand new peak for video streaming on Friday — thanks in large part to a big surge in demand for professional golf and baseball video streams. Over the course of the day, Akamai logged over 500 billion requests for content, a sum equal to serving content to every human once every 20 minutes.

At peak, Akamai supported over 12 million requests per second – a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the United States every 30 seconds, the company said.

“This new peak demand demonstrates the Internet’s emergence as a primary channel for communications, entertainment, and commerce,” Paul Sagan, Akamai’s President and CEO said in a statement.

Web’s Big Shift: From Numbers to Relevance: Mahendra Palsule discusses how the advertising is shifting from CPC/CPM to relevance-oriented advertising.

John Patrick, ex-IBM/ThinkPad:  ”The iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions — not immediately. Over time, however, it is easy to see how the world will change.”

Kenneth Yeung: How to develop a great mobile app to promote your business.

Cody Willard on Apple & Microsoft in race for #2: In 1997, Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. In April 2010, stock market values Apple at $219 billion (#3 in the US) behind Microsoft ($266 billion) and Exxon ($325 billion).

Zillow CEO Rich Barton on iPad: The jet zipping by was the iPhone.  The iPad is the Sonic Boom.

Recommended Event: Startup Lessons Learned, a conference hosted by IMVU co-founder Eric Ries. Speakers include Steve Blank, Randy Komisar, Andrew Chen and Dan Martell. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. More details here: http://sllconf.com

My Weekend Video Recommendation: The Magazine Art Direction on iPad.

iPad Magazine Art Direction from Brad Colbow on Vimeo.

Luke Biewald, while he was working for search startup, Powerset, which was eventually acquired by Microsoft, came up with an idea that eventually became the basis of the company he co-founded: CrowdFlower. The idea was the result of his need to get help doing mundane tasks. Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, he left Powerset, and along with Chris Van Pelt (now CrowdFlower’s CTO) set up shop in San Francisco’s Mission District and developed a platform that allows companies to tap into labor on demand.

Think of it as putting crowd-sourcing to work for large companies. CrowdFlower has raised $6 million in funding from Trinity Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and angels such as Travis Kalanick and Many Kumar, and now counts some of the largest corporations among its clients. It even sends work to refugee camps around the world, thanks to a partnership with SamaSource, a not for profit group. “What we have done is turned an unreliable workforce into a reliable work force, based on our platform,” said Biewald in a conversation earlier this week in our office. The company uses machine learning to make intelligent decisions.

You can watch our conversation with Biewald below. It’s the first of many Startup Sessions I’m planning to record with startups and entrepreneurs that have an interesting and unique view of technology and its impact. Their inclusion in this series means that I am deeply interested in such people and their work.

During the early part of this decade, lobbyists, former FCC chairmen Michael Powell and Kevin Martin and a sundry bunch of random carpet baggers were all very vocal and enthusiastic in pushing a technology called broadband over power-line. Never mind the fact that BPL didn’t quite work and very quickly was overtaken by other more sane and feasible technologies. Today, it seems BPL has finally been put to rest.

Today, the City of Manassas, Virginia which spent $1.6 million building a BPL network  decided to pull the plug on the network. About 500 residental and 46 business customers accessed the network that was costing $100,000 a month to maintain. They paid $24.95 a month. At one point, it was viewed as the most successful BPL network. Well, that isn’t really saying much.

About six months ago, I wrote about Augmented Search, a new way of enhancing search results. It was developed by Xmarks, a San Francisco-based company that started life as Foxmarks, a Firefox plugin that backed up browser bookmarks on its servers and allowed consumers to sync browsers on different machines. (You can read how Augmented Search works here.)

Based on that concept, Xmarks is launching a new product called SearchBoost. “As I hinted earlier, this is our business model,” said James Joaquin, the chief executive officer of Xmarks. “The paid service overlays ratings and reviews onto their pay-per-click )PPC)ads across the 450 million searches performed by Xmarks users each month.” The company currently has 4.5 million active add-on users and has a billion bookmarks in its database. Joaquin says that the company ran “an extensive 30-day test across 200K users and found that, on average, SearchBoost increases PPC click-through rates by 15 percent.”

Well now all they have to do is find customers and convince them to pay for this service.

At a Council of Foreign Relations event in New York, Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Verizon Communications spoke to Alan S. Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Online, Wall Street Journal. He touched upon various topics including iPad and the iPhone. His comments on iPhone were pretty telling — revealing a kind of wistfulness.

“In our view, over time, is that as the devices come to a common architecture, we would be eligible for Apple to consider putting their devices on our network. It’s their shot, their call,” he said. “We’re open to doing it. eventually our view is we’ll get to carry the Apple standard when Apple’s ready to make that decision. We have expressed to Apple an interest in doing it; we have explained that our network is capable of handling it. But those of you who read about Apple — a great company, they operate on their own frequency.”

His comments about iPad were very telling as well.

But here’s the thing about the iPad that’s very interesting. So we look at it as a fourth screen. So you got your TV; you got your mobile device, right; you got your PC; and now you got a fourth screen. So it’s not clear that those four could become three, or those four could become five, but at this point it’s another screen in the marketplace. Now, the interesting thing about the iPad, from how Verizon looks at it– from a network person, first of all, it has no hard drive, right. It’s got flash memory. So that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means a lot. It means they can produce a lower-cost device for the technology they put in, and the battery will last longer.

Seidenberg also discussed the net neutrality and the gulf between Silicon Valley and the phone companies. He also discusses the new found kinship with Google.

So if you look at Silicon Valley, they’re view was anything that Verizon, or AT&T, or any of the carriers did was an encroachment on the software business. So the best thing is to come up with a strategy that defines “network” and segments it away from software, and therefore you create a whole argument around Net neutrality. What we know is that the technology is not that easy to separate. Things are more integrated.

Here is the interview: I recommend you watch it.

A self-disciplined employee will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference.  – Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin group of companies, which includes Virgin America. (# via)

Facebook, the social networking company has long been the champion of iPhone and iPod Touch, using those devices as a way to grow its presence in the mobile world. Whenever the new iPhone launched, they were always ready with a brand new version of Facebook Mobile — whether as a website or as an application, thanks to super-hacker Joe Hewitt. And perhaps that is why everyone assumed that there will be a Facebook Mobile app for the iPad.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Instead, the consumers are buying an app called Facebook Ultimate for $2.99 a pop. It is the eight most popular download at this minute and let’s just say it is horrible — or at least that is what the people who spent the money on the app are saying. The reviews of the app are universally bad and the app is getting 1.5 stars in ratings in the iTunes store.

Given the popularity of the app, I wonder why Facebook themselves didn’t release an app. Have the relations between the two companies have cooled? Or is Facebook betting that the browser-based access to the uber social network will suffice?

So I was going to go to the Apple Store and stand in line to buy an iPad — if I could. Instead, I ended up staying up really late, playing around with the review unit I received from Apple and as a result, didn’t get to sleep till 3:30 a.m. And now I’m extremely tired. So I will get to the Apple store a little late, check out the retail display and if I can, will buy an iPad.

So much has already been written about the iPad that I wonder if my review will really say anything new. I mean, what’s the point of repeating the feature-oriented stuff that’s already been written? Most of it is banal and predictable. Instead, I wonder if you have any questions I can answer. If you do, please leave them in the comments and I will try to respond as quickly as possible. Now remember, this is based on less than a day’s use of the iPad.

Now let me give you some of my impressions of the device. They may seem a little disjointed but bear with me, for it will be a while before I can make up my mind. One of the hardest things about the iPad has nothing to do with the device itself — but rather is about the legacy of computing we have in our head. (Related: Why I Am Excited About the iPad.)

Almost inadvertently, you will start out looking for the keyboard, the mouse and essentially a less interactive experience with this device. This isn’t going to change anytime soon — don’t let anyone tell you it will — because our brains have been programmed to type on a keyboard and use a mouse/trackpad to navigate through the computer. It will take a long time before we are completely de-programmed. Perhaps that’s why it will feel absolutely normal to kids and others who don’t typically use computers all day.

Since I like to store bookmarks, PDFs, photos and videos — everything, really — in Evernote, it was the first app that I downloaded. I started writing my blog post in Evernote — a very typical thing for me to do. I wasn’t sure how I would take to the virtual keyboard on the iPad.

Sure, I can type really really fast on the iPhone keyboard, but the iPad keyboard was an unknown. In the past, when using virtual keyboards on tablet-sized computers, I’ve been disappointed. So with some trepidation, I tried typing on the iPad. So far, what was virtually impossible for me to do on other devices feels almost natural on this one.

To be honest, I haven’t spent much time creating content — instead I have been consuming content voraciously. I have downloaded about 25 apps so far and most of them are oriented around reading, watching and entertainment. The vivid colors of the gorgeous 9.7-inch screen do actually make a lot of difference and make consuming content more enjoyable. Among the apps I’ve downloaded:

• Kindle for iPad: I think it’s a great substitute for those of us who have invested heavily in the Kindle ecosystem. I have been buying fewer and fewer books on Kindle lately, mostly because I prefer the old-fashioned book format. But I see the iPad as a perfect way to carry my Kindle books when traveling.

• Netflix for iPad: Even though it has some rough edges, Netflix for iPad is a perfect app for this platform. I normally stream a movie or television show to my laptop before falling asleep and I can easily see iPad becoming an even easier way of watching movies. Last night (or was it this morning?), I watched the BBC show “Wire in the Blood” (season 5) before I got some shut-eye. I felt more immersed in the show compared to watching it on my laptop.

• This morning, I read all the papers I normally read on my laptop on the iPad: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Now this is where things get exciting. With a few taps and a little touch, I am interacting just with the story on a one-on-one basis. It does feel more personal. I am not yet convinced why I should really pay for the apps for these outlets, though.

That’s it for now. I will be back soon with further impressions.

Related iPad content from GigaOM Pro, including our exclusive forecast of iPad sales and sales of iPad-related applications

It goes without saying that I spend an inordinate (and sometimes ungodly) amount of time online, reading and consuming content. Whether it is news reports, opinions or simple musings on blogs, I love the written word. From Apartment Therapy to UI musings of some of my dear friends, I view reading online as a way of constantly stuffing my brain with great ideas.

In recent years, my media consumption has gone up drastically, thanks to the iPhone. Now, whenever I get a chance, I fire up my Newsgator app and start checking out some of my favorite blogs and news sites. However, one thing the iPhone has not been able to do is become a convenient way to create content.

Sure, I have posted full length blog posts from my Blackberry and I covered the launch of the iPad (ironically) with the new Blackberry Bold from T-Mobile. But I wouldn’t recommend it, and given the state of my tendinitis, I don’t really want to 🙂

When I have to write, I need to carve out some time, remove all means of mass distraction — Twitter, Facebook, Email and Skype — think and then write. I usually refer to the notes I scribble down in my Moleskine notebook, which I normally carry around with me everywhere. I have a battered old Montblanc and for me that represents the most organic form of creativity.

However, between the time I jot down notes & thoughts and the time I actually end up turning them into articles and blog post, something gets lost. A thought misplaced, a cue-lost or simply passion about something — I never quite get around to capturing the moment.

This morning, I woke up with a deluge of press releases about the iPad – many of them simply fantastic applications such as the Netflix app – but there was one email which caught my eye. It was from my friend Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress, the blogging tool we use to publish GigaOM. (See disclosure at the bottom of the post.) I have been haranguing him for past few months on doing more on mobile devices. As if to shut me up, WordPress team today announced its iPad app.

The screenshots made me wonder if somehow the iPad would help me overcome the shortcomings of the iPhone. In one of my earlier posts about the device Steve Jobs calls “magical,” I had pointed out that the iPad would enable anywhere computing. It would change the very idea of working on a computer all together. Just like cell phones have made the idea of making calls from a fixed location almost seem ridiculous, iPad could do precisely the same for computing.

The increase in the number of persistent distractions now force me to use pen-and-paper to actually craft some of my longer posts — a pleasurable activity mostly because it forces me to be economical in thought and secondly when I finally input the piece, I end up doing some (Carolyn, our managing editor would say much needed) self editing which almost always makes the post better than originally drafted.

In many ways, iPad’s lack of multi-tasking makes it worthy of focusing on just the task at hand. In my brief usage of the device at the time of the launch, I felt a near complete interaction with an email or a document or a web page. That was near nirvana when it came to consumption of content.

The new WordPress app now makes me wonder whether blogging on the iPad could make it yet another powerful (yet simple) tool for content creation. Sure, there are some shortcomings — I am not quite sure how to upload photos or videos to our blog, or how I actually get them onto the iPad without a computer without jumping through a few hoops. It is still not clear how effective one can be when typing for long lengths of time on a touch screen. One thing I do know, I won’t have an excuse to not blog about something just because I didn’t have a laptop handy.

I guess I will find out in a few days — and so will you.

Postling, a New York-based startup co-founded by David Lifson (CEO), Chris Maguire (VP of Engineering) and Haim Schoppik (CTO) — all ex-Etsy folks — has raised $350,000 in seed funding from angel investors including Dave McClure, Chris Yeh, Gary Vaynerchuk and Thomas McInereny.

The company has developed a web-based dashboard that can be used by small- and medium-sized businesses to manage tools and web services. From Twitter to reviews on Yelp and CitySearch to who’s checking into their retail locations to what deals are being made available on sites such as Groupon, Postling will essentially be a meta-tool for everything.

“There are 100s of tools out there that could genuinely provide value to local businesses, if only they had the time and inclination to research them all and use the best ones (which none of them do),” Lifson told me via email. “Instead, we are finding the best ones and using their APIs to create a super easy to use dashboard that combines everything into one place.”

Until very recently, Postling’s focus was entirely different. “We pivoted 3 weeks ago once I realized how quickly the social media management space was commoditizing and all of the competition was compressing into targeting the few companies that would consider paying for such tools – media, PR, agencies – which would put them in a position to ask for all kinds of customizations and services,” Lifson explained, adding: “The real story is this pivot came right before SXSW and I raised about $200k in the 5 days of SXSW – a successful trip.” Indeed.

“We are building an advice recommendation engine to give them guidance,” Lifson said of the companies Postling is targeting as customers. “We want them to turn to Postling and, instead of shoving metrics and numbers in their face, recommend them tangible things to do in 5 minutes, like respond to blog comments or post a photo on Flickr.” I think this approach is a smart one. While I am always skeptical of revenue models based on small- and medium-sized businesses as customers, Postling is providing a truly valuable service for that market.

Two final observations: First, Postling’s business is less about technical wizardry and more about creating a community around the product. Second, the team needs to have flawless execution — lest copycats come in and steal their lunch.

“I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career — it’s a life!”

Steve Jobs in a conversation with actor/writer Stephen Fry.

Tiny Speck, an online game company based in San Francisco and Vancouver has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Accel led this recent round of financing. Accel’s Andrew Braccia will join the board of the company started by Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of popular and ground breaking photo sharing site, Flickr. Tiny Speck is one of the more high-profile start-ups, thanks to presence of former Flickr staffers such as Cal Henderson, Serguei Mourachov and Eric Costello and former Digg designer, Daniel Burka.

The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Accel Partners, and a half a dozen angels including Marc Andreessen; Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn; Rob Solomon from Technology Crossover Ventures and the former CEO of Sidestep; as well as Brad Horowitz, who is VP of products at Google.

Tiny Speck’s first offering is Glitch, a browser-based massively multiplayer game. When I spoke to Stewart earlier today he said that the company will use the money to expand its operations both in Vancouver and in San Francisco, where he hopes to establish an engineering beachhead. Stewart visualized Canada as the center for company’s creative productions. Tiny Speck, which currently employs eight (along with a dozen contractors) already has quite a few open positions. Stewart said those numbers are going to swell. He hopes to launch the beta version of Glitch in December 2010.

In an interview, Stewart told our own Mathew Ingram that the company would develop ” companion applications for mobile — so iPhone and Android — that give you a more limited amount of gameplay but allow you to kind of interact with the game without having the whole client open.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Tiny Speck

Days after chip maker MaxLiner raised $104 million and Petaluma, Calif.-based broadband gear maker Calix Networks went public, another networking equipment maker has successfully tapped the public markets. Meru Networks, which makes Wireless LAN equipment, today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of some 4.4 million shares at $15 each.

The company itself is offering 3.58 million shares, while selling shareholders are offering 811,784 shares. The 8-year-old company has a long list of venture investors including NeoCarta Ventures, Clearstone Ventures and DE Shaw & Co. Meru competes in the wireless LAN business with the likes of Cisco Systems, Motorola and Aruba Networks.

According to Redwood City, Calif.-based research group, the Dell ‘Oro Group, wireless LAN market revenues are expected to rebound in 2010, reaching $5.5 billion. So perhaps from that perspective, it was the right time for Meru to go public.