This week Apple announced their highly anticipated iPad – a revolutionary new device that creates an entirely new category someplace between the laptop and smart-phone. While the media and pundits may have been more focused on the name – my mind has been on fire the past three days thinking of nothing but the potential. I have never been more convinced that The Interactive Dept. and it’s partners of creative designers and developers – as well as photographers, videographers and writers, have a long and exciting career ahead of them. I have also never been more convinced that now is the time to work for yourself or with a small collective of creative types – because the publishing revolution has begun!

The title of this blog post comes from the title of a book by Bill Gates, written in 1995. I was a senior in high school at the time – and Bill Gates was the richest man in the world. It seemed unlikely that a dork such as this would be the richest man in the world, so a dork such as I was quite fascinated, and ran out to purchase this book the moment it hit the shelves. In it, Bill Gates explained his vision of the content revolution – of an internet that everyone participated in – video cameras and interactive touch-screens allowing for instant access to knowledge from anywhere and instantly.

“For more than 500 years, the bulk of human knowledge and information has been stored as paper documents. On the information highway, rich electronic documents will be able to do things no piece of paper can. The highway’s powerful database technology will allow them to be indexed and retrieved using interactive exploration. It will be extremely cheap and easy to distribute them. In short, these new digital documents will replace many printed paper ones because they will be able to help us in new ways.”

While a statement like this seems trite today – one has to remember that 15 years ago, the declaration that paper documents would be replaced was almost ridiculous.  Let’s recap technology for just a second:

1995 I use my parents IBM Aptiva Desktop with a 386processor, a 4800-baud modem and a dot-matrix printer and I go online for the first time with 5-hours of overpriced internet via AOL.
1996 I go to college and get a Gateway Desktop with a ginormous monitor, a bubble-jet color printer and a T-1 line
1997 I buy my first scanner – a giant flat-bed that takes up my whole desk.
1998 I buy my first digital camera.  Under 3-megapixel and a battery life of about 5 minutes it seemed.
2000 I purchase my first cell phone that just makes calls, sometimes…
2002 I get my first laptop – where I can take my computer with me. A giant, heavy Dell.
2007 I get my first smart-phone, the iPhone.
2008 I replace my broken iPhone with a new iPhone.

When Bill Gates declared I wouldn’t need paper anymore – if I had wanted to bring a map with directions on a drive, I had to go down to the basement of my house, fire up the Aptiva – connect via the phone line to Poughkeepsie ($0.35/minute at the time) – wait for Webcrawler to load up – find a mapping service via the search engine – and then try to print the map on my crappy dot-matrix printer. Today I would simply turn on my iPhone, pull up the map, and have it find me or any other location in the world and easily map the route. No need to print it either, as I can simply bookmark it and take it with me.  I haven’t had a printer setup in my apartment in 5 years. Bill was correct.

Along the way Bill obviously got side-tracked, because Microsoft certainly hasn’t been on the cutting edge of this revolution.  I like to think Bill’s philanthropic desires overshadowed his otherwise prophetic business mind – but regardless, it has been Apple that has carried the torch of this great evolution in information to our current moment.

It was Apple that changed the music industry forever – by allowing me to put every song I could have ever wanted to hear in a device I can carry along anywhere.  While Sony Executives were bragging about the endless bounds of their CD-Discman’s Skip-Protection capacity (”We’re up to two whole minutes of shaking!“) – Apple realized folks might wish to carry more than a single CD’s worth of music with them.  Oh – and while we’re at it – why not create a marketplace that makes the purchasing of music a gazillion times easier. I can now listen to music from bands who have never stepped into a corporate recording studio, whom I have never seen live.  The transaction, if any, can be conducted between us.

It was Apple that changed the telephone forever – by creating an entirely new interface and experience with a phone that for the first-time ever made having a cell phone truly useful. I could now listen (or not) to voice messages in the order I wanted to, with actual useful controls that didn’t require me to remember bizarre number combinations.  They created a phone that could be used for all the things you never imagined a phone could be used for.  And again they created a marketplace where I could easily purchase or download thousands and thousands of applications to make my life easier or more fun.

With the iPad – I truly believe Apple has created a device that will change the way we interact with tons of things we take for granted today – especially all those documents that still require paper.  For example, I still bring a notepad and pen into meetings. I don’t like the sound of typing or looking at my screen when I’m trying to discuss a project with my client so the laptop doesn’t work for me.  I would however take digital notes, or even record the audio of the meeting with a device like the iPad.   It would result in less scraps of paper around the office – I could immediately sync it with the clients files – and the ability to pull up samples of work or other websites right there in the meeting would be huge.

At home – I can finally see myself using an eReader.

I’m sorry Kindle fans, but when I look at one compared to the iPad, I think “how 90s.” I’m psyched that Amazon has had so much success, but the market for a solid eReader was WIDE-OPEN, and I think Apple has just taken over. Not only does the color screen allow for supplementary photography, video and audio – but once again they have created a solid marketplace for purchasing and downloading books from the comfort of your bed – and I’m particularly interested to see what happens to the publishing industry, as lessons from the music industry are learned, and new under-discovered writing talents begin creating their own marketplaces for selling their writings directly to the public. There is no art-form that requires so little to produce, but so much to share, as writing – and a solid eReader has been the last hurdle for unleashing the full potential of the publishing revolution.

Imagine students no longer having to lug around text-books. Think of a world where you can search for thoughts or ideas through endless epochs of written word, find something of interest, and begin reading it in its entirety – all while sitting on the train during the morning commute. Imagine a world where our need for paper is diminished, and our forests flourish.

The way scientists perform research, students study, academics write papers or even simply how a child writes a book report is going to change gradually but profoundly. Upon completion of a book, rather then a written page of “other books by the author” – those will be links – and those links will have links – and a new type of dewey-decimal system will develop of its own design based on our informational needs as knowledge is reorganized and rediscovered.

I look forward to playing video games in my hands – watching movies from my bed – and showing large and gorgeous photos and home movies to my parents.  I look forward to the next round of devices that will expand upon what Apple delivers.  I anticipate shared touch-screen applications in all sorts of places and locations we don’t experience them now. I look forward to seeing the ways we replace old technologies and concepts with touch-screen applications.

In this new world, a screen on the wall could be my light-switch, my music remote, my phone, my weather, my recipe, my security, my door bell or my art work. Apple has made the first step, with an earnest attempt to remove the keyboard and mouse. How will we develop products and interfaces that have no bounds?  That first digital camera I bought in 1998 looked like it still had film inside of it. They wanted it to feel like a camera still.  Now most digital cameras are slim and have redefined how a camera should look and work.  With the iPhone – the camera took on a whole new shape.  So many other devices still cling to their industrial heritage – but as the iPad begins to acquire their tasks, new applications and interfaces will be devised to create efficiencies that were impossible in a physical world.

Steve Jobs said in his speech this week that there will be a new gold-rush.  While I agree that there will be plenty to be made producing applications and tools for these devices – I disagree with the terminology of a Gold Rush.  Yes, there will be some wave of success at first – but this isn’t some new patch of territory that is going to be quickly discovered, claimed and cleared.  Rather – this is a new economic era.  For thousands of years, man has traded goods and services.  These primarily have been tactile items – foods, clothes, tools, etc.  Over time, things like education and knowledge became prized.  The arts flourished, and someone could be paid for their creativity.  However, there could only be so many books published, so many painting painted, so many students taught.  With the publishing revolution – that changes.  Suddenly there is an endless supply of a whole new world of products never before imagined.  I can design and build a game of my own imagination – produce it myself – sell it on the App Store – and make a full-time living having never left my home or created anything tactile.  The more our money chases virtual products of the imagination – the quicker our economy will have to evolve.

The solution to unemployment isn’t getting the old jobs back – it’s awakening to the new economy.  It’s acknowledging the publishing revolution has begun.  It’s educating the next generation of children not simply how to memorize, but to learn. I was lucky that Bill showed me the Road Ahead when I was 17. It shaped my path through college, it gave me focus in my 20s as I bounced from various start-ups.  It gave me the confidence to start The Interactive Dept – and it fills me with overwhelming excitement when I see a product that will transform the way we communicate and share ideas.

I have seen the road ahead – and it is beyond exciting.

As someone who spends a good deal of his time in front of a computer (that coincidentally is next to another smaller computer) I spend a lot of my time online.  While there are a whole variety of websites I might use on a semi-regular basis to manage my life, inspire my imagination, or simply pass the time while I’m waiting for a .zip file to download – there are a handful of sites that have become so valuable to me, that I can’t imagine going through a single day without them.  Similar to the way I ponder how anyone managed to find a particular location before GPS or at the very least MapQuest – I’m beginning to forget how on Earth I accomplished any tasks before I started using these website.

LogMeIn
www.logmein.com
cost: FREE

In a perfect world I would have one computer in a mystical realm of the internet, and at home and at work and everywhere in between, I would just have monitors and keyboards that could connect to my computer – and so all my files and applications would be available from any location, any time I needed them.  While that world is rapidly approaching – in our current moment I would often find myself getting home only to discover I had forgotten a file I needed back at the studio.  I have struggled with .Mac accounts, MobileMe accounts, and iDisk accounts – and nines times out of ten the file I needed was never where I needed it.

With LogMeIn I simply register my various computers (currently three of them) with my account – and once logged in, I can control the desktop of any of those machines through the web browser.  I close down applications I may have left running – I can post or email files that are only on one machine – I can even use software that I only have a single license for.  I’ve converted video files, for example, using my Mac Pro in the studio, from a web browser on my MacBook at home.

There is also a paid version of the website that has more features – like being able to drag files onto the browser to place on another machine – or creating a virtual network between all your machines online.  However – I’ve been fine with the free version.

FunctionFox – TimeFox
www.functionfox.com
cost: $35/month

Time is money as they say.  Never is that expression more true than when you run your own services business such as myself. While we typically quote a flat price for larger projects such as websites or branding packages – much of our time is actually spent making smaller updates to websites and applications we’ve created for clients in the past.

On any given day I might do work for 6 or 7 different clients.  Some of these might be multi-hour tasks, while others might take as little as 10 minutes.  However – over the course of a month those smaller tasks add up – and if you’re not counting them, you’ve just lost a good deal of revenue.

There are a lot of Time Tracking applications and websites out there and I’ve used a variety of them over the years.  But I haven’t found anything that works for my needs like Timefox.  It is purposely under-designed and under-featured, to handle the one thing I need it to do – record my time for various projects from numerous clients. It is then super easy to generate a variety of reports, so I can quickly determine what I need to invoice each of my clients – or how we are doing on a particular project based on initial estimates, and what time we’ve put in to date.

Plus – about a year ago my colleague Jessica and I were contacted by the CEO of the company, Mary-Lynn Bellamy-Willms because she was going to be in Portland and wanted to take a few of the long-time customers out to breakfast at The Heathman.  Now I’ve spent a lot of money on a lot of services over the years – and never received so much as a thank you – let alone a complimentary breakfast and some great conversation.  Take a tip from a Canadian company – that simple breakfast not only made me a customer for life – but also a part-time sales rep, as I now recommend FunctionFox even more than I did before.

Mint
www.mint.com
cost: FREE

While I can’t say I’ve been the best accountant for my ever growing small-business (and as of 2010 have handed most of those reigns over to a spectacular new CPA) I have always been good about keeping track of every expense and income the business made, using Quickbooks.  It is a pain sometimes to muscle my way through it, but since the very beginning I have known exactly what my business made and where that money went – and that knowledge was vital.

When it came to my personal life, however – that was another story.  The closest thing I had to records was my monthly statement from my bank – and when I went paperless a year ago – I all but lost any record of where my money was going.  I was like the federal government – only without the capacity to print more money. That’s where Mint.com stepped in.

Mint is like a very slimmed down version of Quickbooks (and as of late last year, is owned by the same company).  You attach your various personal checking and savings accounts, any credits cards or investments, car payments, etc. – and Mint.com does most of the rest.  I was able to quickly create a monthly budget by entering in the various recurring bills (rent, cell phone, netflix, etc.).  When those transactions occur – Mint.com updates my monthly budget so I know how much I’ve spent in the various areas of my life.  Once you’ve identified what type of an expense each transaction is (and it actually does a pretty good job guessing) – the next time you go back to that vendor, it fills in that information for you.

Best of all, Mint.com is free!

So now I can very easily determine how much I’ve spent on food, or utilities, or even beer.  It’s a lot easier to understand what you’ve been doing (or at least spending your money on) when your personal life is broken into a pie chart.  Other tools on the site help you to create strategies for working off debt, building a saving and more.

Smashing Magazine
www.smashingmagazine.com
cost: FREE

There are a lot of great websites out there to gain inspiration from in my field.  I’m lucky to be a part of an industry that is rapidly changing at every moment and in almost every facet.  New trends form in web design almost every day – and the trap of falling into your same style or layouts is always present. That’s why I start out almost every day checking out Smashing Magazine.

Not only does their Twitter feed drag me to their site several times a day – but anytime I find myself hung-up on a technique, or trying to find a simple design solution for an eNewsletter or campaign site – their lists of “Best Of”s always have something that solves my dilemma.  And no – I’m not just saying this because they featured our website for Aviation Gin on a blog post about websites for the alcohol beverage industry.

Some of my favorite posts have been:

25 Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

50 Fresh Portfolio Sites For Your Inspiration

Web Design Trends for 2009

Expecting Rain
www.expectingrain.com
cost: FREE

This is probably the site I go to every day that would be the least useful to anyone else.  That is unless they happen to be a fanatical Bob Dylan fan.  Expecting Rain takes its name from a line in Dylan’s classic “Desolation Row” (Everybody is making love. Or else expecting rain.) The site is a collection of all Bob Dylan news stories and ramblings from across the internets.  On any given day, 15-20 links will appear, ranging from blog posts on obscure bootlegs to concert reviews from German press outlets.  It never ceases to amaze me that one man could have so much written about him on a daily basis – but apparently the world of Bob Dylan never stops.

The site also posts links to stories about Dylan collaborators, cover songs and great YouTube clips (which are usually removed from YouTube a few days later at the request of Columbia Records).  Certainly not for the casual fan – but for those with a bit of a Bob Dylan obsession – this site is a life saver.