Usage;

1. "That guy's a total deckhead, dude can I, like, get the last hour of my life back?"

Most of the predictions about Apple's anticipated entry into the smart-tv market predict some form of physical gesture based interface model like Microsoft's Kinect, and or a Siri based voice control interface model and basically iOS in a TV. 

However, given the much slower frequency with which people change their TVs compared with their smartphones, it's unlikely that Apple will enter this market with a basic product offering that they then iteratively refine over three of four version updates as they did with the iPhone. It has to be pretty much perfect and fully baked at launch, which is probably why they're not rushing to get something out to market. Besides, it's likely to depend significantly on high bandwidth connections and the longer they wait, the faster and more broadly available that becomes.

But broadband aside, if I was tasked with defining Apple's much anticipated TV strategy, I'd abstract most of the brains out of the display and into smart tablet device, like an iPad. 

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This would address a number of things.

• Kinect type interfaces are great but they're not perfect. How they deal with multiple moving bodies in a wide field of view without generating lots of false gesture reads is still patchy, I'd say. Not quite ready for primetime.
• Equally, driving a TV through a Siri voice interface model also sounds like hell on wheels, not least because the microphone would be based in a device that's likely to be pumping out lots of sound, generating perfect conditions for a distant voice direction to be misheard.
• Abstracting most of the brains, UI and control to a smart remote like an iPad combines both a touch and gesture based UI along with near field voice control, as well as dumbing down the display and mitigating the chance of obsolescence. 

Apple shouldn't build a smart-TV, they should de-risk the purchase for the consumer by building a dumb TV and focusing all the innovation and soft updates to a smaller, iPad like device. The only cleverness the TV will have is the ability to handle Airplay content both ways. As well as receiving content from an iOS device as with Airplay today, I'd guess they'll Airplay transmit conventional TV programming from the onboard tuner to the mobile iOS devices so that you can watch your regular TV programming anywhere in the home in your lap.

Existing TV manufacturers are centralising all the complexity and technological redundancy inside a big, expensive display unit with a shitty UI that will be obsolete inside of two years. Apple will go the other way with a dumb hardware display with minimal onboard intelligence combined with an iOS remote device.

That would be my bet. Indeed, I'd double down on that and say the next generation of iPad will bring a TV app and co-incide with the launch of a bunch of large Apple dumb-TVs.

Kindle 4 lit with lamp on lighted case.

Like a product management leap of faith which on the surface looks crazy and ill considered (not to mention impolite), but is actually quite smart. As Steve Jobs said, it's all about focus - choosing what leave out is often just as important as what build in.

I wouldn't regard myself as a power user but I thought the old Twitter iPhone app was perfect and the new one is shit. However, I'm also in the category of user that doesn't follow hashtags or respond to Promoted Tweets and so it's fair to assume that Twitter makes zero dollars from me. In spite of the fact I'd probably pay to have Tweetie back (Tweetie was the iPhone app purchased by Twitter a couple of years ago), but that's just impractical in Twitter's business model and I'm therefore unmonetizable.

Bonus (and totally unconnected) Observation

Some CEOs employ agents to tweet on their behalf to give the impression they're down with the kids. It stands to reason therefore, that the inverse must also be true and that some CEOs are really Twitter agents who employ other people to do their day jobs for them. Different sides of the same coin.

My sense is there's some kind of big post-honeymoon, cognitive correction due one day when we collectively realise that all this unleashed creativity actually just conforms to the same quality distribution curve that creative output has always conformed to, and all that creative democratization achieved was the elimination of distrubtion friction and a ballooning in market participation. There certainly will be more good quality output as a result of the creative democratization of journalistic/software/musical creativity but it now just swims in an ocean of mediocrity compared with what was just a puddle, pre-web.

There's an extent to which the democratization of traditional media distribution whether that be journalism or music, of creative photography with smartphone apps like Instagram and of software development and distribution courtesy of app stores is to be welcomed as some grand utopian liberty as much as we should be wary of it.

However, universal empowerment does not equal universal ability and the problem is, as an amateur [insert instant web enabled profession], you don't know what you don't know; you only look like you do.

The supposed positive outputs of creative or entrepreneurial democratization are, aside from giving millions of people more interesting hobbies, the chance that the next great inventor, performer, author or business genius may not remain undiscovered as they would have done before the web. The shitty end of that stick, though, is the encouragement of incompetence, however undeliberate or excusable it may be, in the provision of products and services.

It used to be the case that if something looked like a duck, swam like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then it probably was a duck. Today it could just as easily turn out to be a dog.

My sense is that there's a chunk of stuff going on, some of which runs in parallel with similar effects the web has had on other creation and distrubution models, some of it could be unique to software. And a host of things have yet to iron themselves out.

One of these aspects is curation or more broadly, deciding what's good and what's bad.

Curation used to be simple - it was called print marketing and went something like; build something, sell some and make a little profit, invest that profit in telling more people about your product and maybe making some more products; rinse repeat. In time the remit of your marketing mix would mature and expand to encompass shiny glass office buildings and other classic shop-front artefacts upon which someone could base a decision about whether your company and product were good or not.  

And that was a generally fair and democratic way to provide a regulate curation in old world markets. If you built a shitty product, you wouldn't make enough to be granted sufficient market approval to fund the development and marketing of even more shitty products. However, over time it was also possible for the competency mix to trend more to the marketing department than the R&D department and it wasn't uncommon for businesses to grow to scale off the back of great marketing and mediocre products. Growth through acquisition is another common way software businesses grew, but this behaviour really just a form of corporate marketing, too. Instead of spending £5m on a customer acquisition marketing campaign, just spend £5m on a raw customer acquisition.

It's more complex than that but all up, I think it's a good thing that the web reset those particular characteristics of market dysfunction.

I think the really interesting thing is that the market - and for that matter vendors - retains that old world muscle memory in that it generally still operates the same way even though we all see and understand the effects of web distribution.

We're in this middle zone where the new measures of value have yet to be fully defined. As a metaphor it's as if there's been some grand reset and every business can present itself online just as effectively as every other business (some still don't, but actually it's not that hard). So, using the old world mechanics it's as if every company can afford full colour double spread adverts in The Times (if only people still read newspapers), Superbowl ad spots or towering glass office buildings.

The old shopfront way of seeing the world is pretty ineffective online but we haven't yet defined a replacement set of values, nor the understanding of how to apply them to filter what's good and what's bad.

My sense is that we'll end up in some mix where modern brand assets like a great website (shop front) packed with thousands of five star reviews and tons of social media validation (word of mouth) will combine with the surety that comes with confirming that some stores on this new high street aren't just the same as those wild west saloon bar facades they used to make movies with.

We just haven't worked out a new language for that yet.

Every few days Netflix sends me emails about movies I've ordered, sometimes you email me asking me what I thought about movies.

The thing is, I'm not a Netflix customer.

Some Netflix emails, earlier today

Someone else who shares the same name as me - and who can't type - keyed my email address into your system. It might well be the same Gary Turner that signs me up for other annoying stuff, which really isn't your fault. But it's kinda douchy that you didn't ask to confirm the email address at registration, because if I'd gotten a registration confirmation email, I would not have have confirmed it, obviously. But you don't have a registration confirmation step in your sign-up process.

And so, I tried looking for a customer service link on your website but being all clever like you are, your website detects my IP address as being outside the US and auto-flips me to a 'sorry but Netflix is not available in your country" landing page that has zero functionality on it.

So, then I try to message you on Twitter but all I get is the sound of crickets.

It seems I have zero means of communicating with you to ask you to amend the other Gary Turner's registration info to remove my email address and replace it with his.

Now, I could try to log in to the other Gary Turner's Netflx account, say I've forgotten the password and you'd happily mail me a password reset form. But that would be to undermine the steps to which you go to protect the private identifiable information you hold on your customers and it would make me feel a little dirty.

So, Reed, please make it stop.

Have someone in your team drop me a note to garyturner [at] gmail.com