This past Saturday was the >Play Conference at UC Berkeley, which is an impressive all-student-run conference that happens annually. The line-up of speakers included Wired's Chris Anderson talking about the iPad, and a wide variety of panel discussions stocked with luminaries from Silicon Valley and the digital media community in the Bay Area.
Penguin, the fabled English publisher, is plunging head first into the world of iPad content. Not iPad books, exactly, as these things are not recognizable as books in the normal sense - they are closer to games and full-fledged apps. Even in the case where they are adapting existing print books, there is enough new stuff going on where it diverges significantly from what we normally think of as "book". A Kindle ebook these are not. Check out the video above for an intriguing peep into what they have planned.
The notion of a casual computer (as my colleague Mark Rolston described the iPad to the Wall Street Journal) is actually not a new one. Companies of all shapes and sizes have been trying to figure it out for quite a long time (including Steve Jobs and Apple...since 1983).
The launch of the iPad yesterday put an exclamation mark on an increasingly obvious point: Apple is the company that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. The massive hype leading up to the event - apparently achieved in a groundswell with very little effort on Apple's part - shows that they really are the "It" company right now.
