Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising:

“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.

“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.

As Marco points out, this likely means they’ll insert photos from companies—advertisements—in our timelines. I’m not sure how they’ll do it otherwise.

This could be an interesting form of advertisement, if advertisers use it as such—rather than show straight print-like adverts, they could use it to tell stories about their products. Audi could use it to take well-done photos of their cars in use, ones that fit with Instagram’s purpose, to convey a more general feel of what Audi is to viewers, rather than simply try to convey specific information (e.g., “best-in-class safety!”). Of course, other forms of advertisements could be used in more interesting ways—print adverts in particular—but they tend not to be.

Advertisements could be done in an interesting and effective way, but not only is it likely advertisers won’t use it as such, but the entire concept walks a fine line. Delivering ads within someone’s timeline—a stream of photos from users the user decided to follow, and thus is inherently private—will likely end up feeling invasive. I wonder, too, if Instagram will target ads to users. What personal information do they have to target ads? And if they don’t, that makes the venture a lot less likely to be successful.

Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile phones, it blew our minds, and shifted the entire mobile industry. And laid the foundation for the iPad, which is doing the same for computing generally.

Here’s a link to Apple’s video of the presentation. Here’s Ryan Block’s coverage of the presentation for Engadget.

Idaho will require all high school students to take some online courses to graduate, and are giving each student and teacher a computer or tablet. Instead of lecturing, Idaho intends for teachers to increasingly provide guidance for students as they move through lessons on computers or tablets.

Unsurprisingly, many people are angry. One teacher doesn’t understand how this could possibly improve education:

Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a girl in a foster family in Germany during World War II.

Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?

…

She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”

She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.

Nothing wrong with the Socratic method—my favorite high school teacher used it extensively, and I learned more in that class than I did in many of my college courses—but perhaps Ms. Rosenbaum should re-consider her strategies if she has to “work each minute” to keep them engaged. There’s no way the Socratic method is effective for her if her students are so chronically disengaged.

In-person classes still require a lot of self-directed effort from students, like actually reading the material, and there’s nothing she can do if they aren’t doing it. The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology. Her problem is the same one all teachers face and that they will face regardless of whether there is technology involved or not: motivating her students.

Her job is not just to get her students through the material. Her job is to get through to them. Her job is to make them see why the piece of literature they are reading is relevant and meaningful and insightful. Without doing that, whatever teaching method she employs will be completely ineffective.

Which is why her criticism is completely beside the point: whether she has to adopt the state’s new method of teaching, or sticks with her traditional method, her primary purpose remains the same.

(Via Fraser Speirs.)

Clayton Morris hears that Apple’s January event will be about iTunes U and the textbook project Steve Jobs was working on, as mentioned in his biography.

Walter Isaacson wrote:

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believes it as an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money. (pp. 509-10).

I am incredibly excited, if not surprised, that Apple is working on a project so integral to education. Our education system, from elementary school to university, is very much broken, both in its overall intent and how it uses technology. Education today is too expensive and too irrelevant.

Fortunately, though, that also means there’s huge improvements we can make. Apple has quietly built an incredible educational resource, iTunes U. Anyone, for free, can download lectures from some of the world’s best universities and watch them on their own time. They can be taught how to develop iOS applications by Apple engineers at Stanford, cosmology from UC Irvine, economics from UC Berkeley, China’s history after the collapse of the empire from Harvard University, or even how to bake and make pastries from the International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes.

It’s an incredible resource, one that we should probably all take advantage of more often. But what it also shows is that education does not necessarily mean attending a single university, choosing a narrow major to focus on, purchasing a $200 textbook, sitting through several lectures each week and taking a midterm and a final. It could still be all of these things, but it doesn’t have to be.

We need to begin finding new models for education, because our current one is failing us terribly, and certainly not sustainable, either. I don’t know what Apple’s planning nor the extent of it, but I’m glad to see that they are trying to improve education.

In a rather dull report from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s intentions for TV, there was one line of interest:

Apple’s uptick in talks with its media partners is part of the company’s strategy to change the way consumers watch TV, just as the company transformed the music and cellphone industries. Mr. Jobs envisioned building a TV that would be controlled by Apple’s mobile devices in order to be easier to use and more personalized, according to people familiar with the matter.

I don’t find that particularly surprising, but it does shed a bit of light on what Jobs meant when he told Isaacson that he had finally “cracked” the problem of making a good TV. Relying on iOS devices to control the TV would solve a couple of the biggest problems with an Apple TV: what kind of remote to use to control it and how they get around the issue that people purchase new TVs only every five years or so, which means the device’s capabilities would be quickly outdated.

It’d certainly be an interesting model. Apple TV applications could reside on the iOS device, and the TV acts more or less as a dumb display. Managing applications would be simple and so would controlling the TV, and even better, the Apple TV’s capabilities could be upgraded with each new iPhone or iPad, since what it can do would depend on them.

Horace Dediu:

Likewise, the iPod came seemingly out of nowhere but by watching the original launch you see it as part of a “media hub” strategy that envisions the Mac as a personal server. The very products which ended up disrupting the Mac/PC began as extensions of their victims.

You can trace the DNA of almost all of Apple’s products to previous products. If Apple did not have these foundations, the slow-motion revolutions would not have happened. Rather than a deliberate big bang, Apple’s disruptions are the result of a discovery process. A test, iterate and improve loop. This is why they seem obvious after the launch but also why they seem to be such an anti-climax.

Google said that they are generating $2.5 billion of revenue from mobile devices, and some mistook that to mean Android is responsible for $2.5 billion of revenue. It isn’t—that includes search ad revenue, AdSense and AdMob, all of which also generate revenue from iOS devices, and purchases from Android’s app market revenue.

The Macalope points out just how small that means revenue generated from Android is:

“Mobile” does not equal “Android.” Some Android fan sites also got this wrong, but “mobile” means ad revenue from all mobile operating systems. Further, because we know that about two thirds of Google’s mobile ad revenue comes from the iPhone we can figure that Android is generating at most $833 million in ad revenue a year for Mountain View. That is, of course, chump change compared to what Apple makes on the iPhone. Still, Android’s winning. Somehow.

“…two-thirds of Google’s mobile ad revenue comes from the iPhone” is somewhat misleading, because Google actually said that two-thirds of mobile searches comes from iOS, but it should be accurate enough. As the Macalope points out, this means of Google’s $2.5 billion of mobile revenue, only $833 million of it derives from Android devices.

That’s just three percent of Google’s $29.3 billion of revenue in 2010, and the 2011 figure will be much higher—so the actual percentage of total revenue will be closer to two percent.

Without data on how much Google spends on developing Android, there’s no way to judge how profitable it is for Google, but however much it is, it contributes almost nothing to their profitability as a whole.

The typical argument made for why Google develops Android is it expands the mobile market, so there are many more people using Google search and other services from their devices, and thus generating ad revenue for Google—which is their entire business. Yet the above shows that even with 190 million Android device activations, Google is hardly benefiting from Android.

iOS has completely overwhelmed Apple’s prior businesses, while Android contributes next to nothing to Google’s revenue.

You decide who’s winning.

Marco loves Studio Neat’s Cosmonaut stylus for iPad.

I’m intrigued by it and I’d love to try it out. I’m still looking for the perfect stylus for sketching on iPad, and this looks like it might be really good. Like Marco points out, the problem is that because they’re all closer to pens, you naturally want to rest your hand on the screen—which doesn’t work out so well. A second, slightly smaller, issue is that the foam tips (along with the capacitive touch screen) provide an inconsistent point recognition, so you don’t always know where your stylus will draw on screen when it touches down.

The Cosmonaut looks to solve both issues. The first because the Cosmonaut is more like a dry-erase marker, so you’re less likely to want to lay your hand down on the screen, and the second for the same reason—you’re treating it like a marker, which inherently doesn’t have very fine control.

Today, HP announced they are releasing webOS as open source. Meg Whitman’s memo to employees suggests HP will continue to openly develop it, too:

Since we announced the discontinuation of our webOS devices last August, the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected software. We looked at all the options in the market today and we see a clear need for a platform that is both open and has a single integrated stack.

I suppose it’s better than killing it outright, but there’s no chance of competing with Android by releasing it for anyone to use at this point. That ship has sailed.

John Gruber:

What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be. It all makes sense if you think of the label under the “#” tab as reading “Dickbar” instead of “Discover”.

In addition, the value I saw in Twitter was as more of a utility—something other people built on top of in unique ways, one of which happened to be really good native clients, like Tweetie. Clearly, Twitter doesn’t view themselves that way, and that’s okay. I only hope that the Twitter I started using in 2008, which introduced me to a bunch of absolutely wonderful people through a brilliantly simple idea and interface, will still exist in the next few years.

Color released their new app, after their failed launch earlier this year. Their new idea is this: you can “broadcast” what you’re doing with live video on Facebook.

It’s a fine idea, but this isn’t something that stands as its own product. It’s a Facebook feature, at best.

Which is, I think, exactly the point. Color’s strategy is to get acquired. Their goal is the pay-off. And that is the reason I will never support anything they do.

We don’t need more companies whose entire reason for existing is a quick pay-off. We have enough of those.

Horace Dediu:

So if history serves as a guide, the displacement of the PC won’t come from a direct substitution but a more sinister and hard-to-predict subversion through new applications and a re-definition of what a PC is. The driving forces are not just volumes but new input methods, new user interfaces, new jobs to be done, new software and many innovative companies working within an ecosystem.

Disruptions first appear to be no threat to the product types they end up upending. The iPhone couldn’t replace the Blackberry initially, because it was not nearly as capable for enterprises—but it didn’t need to be, because it was really, really useful for consumers. A phone which could browse the web, and replace their iPod was huge, and so it took the consumer market.

Over time, it gained the features necessary for enterprise success—Microsoft Exchange support, remote-wipe, et cetera—and now RIM has no growth market. The iPhone and iPhone-like competitors took the consumer market from them and are taking enterprise, too.

That’s how disruption starts: it begins in an area that doesn’t seem connected, but then grows until it encompasses the market it is disrupting, and by that point there’s little the incumbents can do. The rules have changed.

Path re-imagined their network and app, and it’s incredibly nice.

They just released the new version, and it’s very well done. I hope more people start using it, because I’d much rather use this than Facebook.

Jean-Louis Gassée wonders if there’s a bigger reason for a Facebook phone than defending against Google:

I can’t help but think that there’s more to this hypothetical Facebook phone than a play against today’s Google+ in defense of today’s Facebook money pump. There must be something else in Facebook’s future, a new revenue stream that it will eventually need to promote/protect. But what?

The obvious reason is to make Facebook independent of Apple or Google; currently, Facebook relies on iOS and Android devices for people to use their platform, and Apple and Google could theoretically block them in the future or make moves which inhibit their business.

That’s defensive. A bigger reason is that currently, Facebook is largely an app on these devices, and not a platform in and of itself. iOS and Android are the platforms, and Facebook stands on them. But Facebook doesn’t want to be an app—they want to be the platform for people to use and other applications and businesses build on top of.

Last year, I wrote about Facebook’s strategy and what it means for society. I wrote:

That is a lot of information. As Facebook integrates with more devices and applications, and as we begin sharing more information, they are building a map of society. They are building a map of how people live, what they do, what they like, who they interact with and how, and how society is evolving. Our information is their business, not just our attention.

What better way to get more people using their platform and using it even more than they do now than by (1) making the other platforms—iOS and Android—commodities, and (2) making a device that makes Facebook the operating system?

They’re trying to do the first object by making Facebook applications that are HTML5-based and thus that can be run on any OS with modern web standards support. This would, if successful, make Facebook where people go to get some of their applications, and thus would make the underlying operating system much less relevant. If all of your applications are web-based and come from Facebook, what device you use doesn’t matter nearly as much as it does now.

But a Facebook phone could be even more convincing. Imagine a device where everything is pulled from Facebook. Your contacts come from your friends’ profiles. Your photos are stored on Facebook’s servers. All messages are sent through Facebook, so you don’t need to worry about text messages. Your calendar is hooked up to Facebook and can see what events your friends are attending.

For people that like Facebook, that’d be pretty great, and they would certainly use Facebook a lot more. If Facebook releases a phone, that’s what it’s about: making Facebook into a platform on the same level as iOS and Android, and one that can grow into the platform for everything on the web.

James Wilson:

That is, the reason the user picked up the device to run your app and the end result they wanted, was perfectly and intuitively accessible to the user without thought of what the app can do and how that might translate into what they wanted to do. Invisible UI, intuitive user experience, knowing how to use an app the first time, etc, etc; they all require the same thing: for the users intent and the applications features to be one.

That’s the key to a great iOS app: remove the translation in the user’s head from what they want to what the app actually does. What a great way of explaining what an “intuitive user experience” means.