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Posts Tagged ‘Paul Kent’

Macworld 2010: TMO’s Dave Hamilton and IDG’s Paul Kent

Filed under: Macworld, Video, Cult of Mac

Along with meeting readers and having a place to stash our laptops, one of the other novel pleasures of having a booth on the show floor this year was the serendipity of having our friends and colleagues in the Mac community walk on by — just so that we could pounce upon them and interview them on video. Case in point: late on Saturday afternoon, we enlisted Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer, Backbeat Media & the Mac Geek Gab for a quick chat, only to be unexpectedly joined by his bandmate-slash-Macworld Expo general manager, Paul Kent.

Dave & Paul each shared their impressions of the show, the expectations of vendors and attendees for next year, and the secret of putting together a great cover band when you only get one rehearsal before each gig. It’s fair to say that the outlook for Macworld 2011, from their perspective, is much brighter now than it was in the leadup to this year’s show.

Thanks to both Dave and Paul for joining us for the final livestreaming session of the week. Although this is the last interview we recorded on Saturday, it’s far from the last one you’ll be seeing here on TUAW; we have a shelf-ful of great conversations that will be posted to the site over the next few days.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TMO’s Dave Hamilton and IDG’s Paul Kent originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Macworld iPad panelists defy Steve Jobs’ snub of the show

This year’s annual Macworld conference is missing a key component: Apple. The company — very likely Steve Jobs himself — decided last year that they weren’t getting enough out of Macworld.

This year, Macworld bravely carried on without an Apple booth or a Steve Jobs “One more thing …” keynote. With Apple nowhere to be found at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, there’s a new-Apple-gadget buzz missing from the show.

But in another way, Macworld has opened up. Daddy Steve Jobs and Mommy Apple PR are gone. Let’s party!

On Saturday afternoon, Macworld editor Jason Snell brought out four serious Mac geeks to talk about the iPad tablet computer, despite the fact there were no iPads in the room, nor anywhere else at Macworld. Macworld editor Dan Warren, Mac Observer and Macfixit writer Ted Landau, GDGT co-founder and Engadget veteran Ryan Block, and roaming columnist for Macworld and the Chicago Sun-Times Andy Ihnatko discussed their expected plusses, minuses, and ultimate uses for Apple’s tablet.

Instead of real iPads, the panel handled cardboard mockups. Conference emcee Paul Kent flung one, Frisbee-style, into the audience to warm up the crowd. He also promised a free iPad to the attendee who ended up holding a large green beachball the crowd had bobbled while waiting for the show to start

Panelits dove right into praising and panning the iPad. Ihnatko, who like everyone except Landau had handled a real one at Apple’s launch event, said the iPad stands out from previous Windows-based tablets because of its build quality. “You can tell you’re handling a premium product,” he said. “The device itself disappears after the first five seconds. You feel like you’re interacting directly with the mail app.” This has one potential downside, he said: You might stop paying attention and drop the thing. “I think a lot of people will go down to Walmart or Home Depot and get that grippy tape to put on the back.”

Landau said,  ”I think the majority of people who are happy with a laptop today will be happy with an iPad in three to four years.” That’s because developers will conjure up apps we haven’t thought of yet.

“Will I be able to use it as a phone?” Warren asked. “Or a camera?” Landau added.

Panelists criticized Apple without restraint for the company’s closed, intractable approval process for apps. Landau spun a funny parable in which he tries to use his Cuisinart toaster oven as a space heater on a cold day. Cuisinart customer support tells him his extension cord doesn’t say “Made for Cuisinart,” so it won’t work. And the Pop-Tars in his pantry won’t toast, because they weren’t purchased from Cuisinart’s online store. And in fact, the terms of use document that came with the toaster forbid even trying to use it as a heater.

“I tried to tell a friend about this, but he was totally unsupportive,” Landau joked. “He’s kind of a Cuisinart fanboy. ‘They’re just looking out for your best interest,’ he told me, ‘And those Pop-Tars really aren’t good for you anyway.’” That, Landau concluded, is how it feels to struggle with Apple’s app store.

Snell argued that he likes the app store because the apps almost always work flawlessly and don’t break his iPhone. “Why not an app store for the Mac?” he asked.

The toughest topic for panelists was the iPad’s use as a reader for electronic books, newspapers and magazines. Block said the iPad reaffirmed his Kindle, a much better dedicated device for reading entire books on a computer screen. “I can see a day when the Kindle is free,” Snell said, as a means of bringing customers into Amazon’s e-book embrace. Block agreed that a cheaper Kindle would sell a lot more books.

Snell concluded that it was too soon to forecast the iPad’s success, or even its modes of operation, for books. “iBooks was obviously a work in progresss,” he said of the book-reading app Steve Jobs demonstrated at the iPad’s launch event in January. “I think there’ll be fifteen different ways to read a book” on the iPad, he said.

Ihnatko blamed the Internet for making it hard for publishers to go digital. The Net, he said, treats expensive, hard-won, tightly written and thoroughly fact-checked investigative journalism with quickie blog posts. Internet users have been trained to believe that all content should be free. Ihnatko thinks digital rights management tools will be a boon to publishers, just as they were to music and movie companies. Once people find it’s easy to buy the New York Times or a novel online, he said, they won’t mind paying a small price for much better content than what they can get for free.

But publishers, like Hollywood, he concluded, will need to come to accept lower prices for each individual item online before they can really dive in and deliver the superior content for which iPad toters will pay.

For a blow-by-blow report on the event, see TUAW’s liveblog post.

(Disclosure: Macworld is owned and mostly run by IDG, the enormous tech-topics publisher — Macworld, PC World, Infoworld — that also owns the DEMO conference now produced by VentureBeat.)

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TUAW is going to Macworld 2010

Filed under: Macworld, TUAW Business

TUAWTUAW is going to Macworld 2010 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paul Kent gives TUAW the latest news about Macworld 2010

Filed under: Macworld, Odds and ends, TUAW Interview

As a Mac-head who has attended the Macworld Expo and Conference on and off since the late 1980s, I met the announcement last December that Apple would no longer attend the event with a big, jaw-breaking yawn. Personally, I never attended Macworld for the Apple display, which was overcrowded and staffed by Apple employees who usually knew less about the new products than I did. The keynotes were usually a highlight, but hard to get into, and without Steve Jobs as the “star,” it just wouldn’t be the same. My reason for going to Macworld has always been the same; to see great new software or hardware made to work with Apple products, meet with manufacturers and developers, and to enjoy the camaraderie of the large group of buddies I’ve made at Macworld Expo in the past.

So, when I saw that registration for Macworld 2010 had opened, I immediately jumped on the website and signed up. To me, it’s a no-brainer to attend the original and only US conference that is all about Apple. Macworld Expo has been around for 25 years, and all indications are that it will continue for as long as the Macintosh and other Apple platforms exist. Yesterday, I talked with Paul Kent, General Manager, Macworld 2010 and Vice President of IDG World Expo, about Macworld 2010 and how preparations are coming along for the show.

Continue reading Paul Kent gives TUAW the latest news about Macworld 2010

TUAWPaul Kent gives TUAW the latest news about Macworld 2010 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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