better start learning the sign language...

or gesture language....because Kinect is here, and its going to revolutionize everything. no more keyboards and no more mice...touch, sound and gestures are the new modes of inputs....the screen will still remain the primary mode of output, but that too might soon change.

the possibilities of gesture are immense, it will be the primary mode of input in confined spaces like in homes and office. Imagine entering a room, and just holding your fingers up such that they form a flower...command for switching on the lights. Or imagine pointing towards the TV and then just swiping in the air and the channels change automatically, because each room has a Kinect like devices embedded in the walls, which are connected to a central machine (yep, the machine i described here) and the machine is controlling your TV and your microwave and the lights and everything else!!! 

Kinect like devices will soon be embedded in all confined spaces, be it homes or offices...the question is whether they can work in the open as well...if they can, then their goes ur traffic lights. Instead there will be these devices looking in all four directions and synchronizing...as they see a two conflicting vehicles coming, they hit the Red light for one vehicle. Or maybe when they see someone crossing the road...if only they can work in the open. 

so where will the three modes be used...well its easy to see where Voice recognition will be used...where you need to give long instructions, or where you have to type a lot. Like when writing blogs or mails, and also where the instructions are specific and not general. 

Touch is where you want to have privacy, so on devices, on your phones and your tablets and on console monitors at malls. Personal devices.

and Gestures will be at more open, public places like in malls...imagine walking into a mall, and you want to know where is the loo...well hold out that pinky and some device somewhere sees it and passes the instructions..but how?

how is the output mode...so maybe there is a giant screen which tells you where to go...but nah, i think whats gonna happen is that the instruction might be passed to ur personal device, ur mobile, with instructions, so you can hear it on that tiny dot of a earphone that is in now implanted in ur inner ear canal...

but again, what can the output mode be?? screens and voice are ofcourse the two options...but more then how you see it, the change will be in where you see it. If the output is somehow transferred to your mobile device or ur earphones, that becomes a personal output which moves along with you, which is mobile. 

so here's to the future...
that brings me to the language...the only reason that gesture tech will take time to be adopted is people learning the sign language...first the vocab is not there yet, so going to the loo could be holding up your pinky or ur index finger. and even once the vocab does get developed, it will be very limited, because we don't talk in the language of gestures, there are very few. Same goes for touch, right now the best of touch devices (which is the apple touchpad i think) use 4 fingers, and just three gestures (swipe, pinch, single and double tap) so that is in all just 12 unique touch signals. but these are good enough for now, because they apply to everything, you can swipe at so many places, webpages, pics et al. also touch can be combined with location on the screen, because you get visual clues from the screen on which you are touching. But not the same with Gestures, you will have to remember every gesture. Here also there can be giant screen guiding you, but that defeats the entire idea of having ubiquitous devices seeing you and waiting for ur gestures all the time. 
Whatever be the case...be ready to learn a new language...the sign language.
For some reason Voice has not taken off like touch, and i think that is because of the lack of a convenient language. Today most Voice enabled devices expect you to speak out the commands, but that means that you need to remember those commands, or the device needs to show them to you. Both of which defeat the purpose. I think what will happen is that there will be an intelligent engine which will be able to understand the meaning of what you say in the context of where you are, what you are doing. Not sure what that means right now...lets see.

btw, am surprised that MS came up with this tech before anyone else, and the reviews i have heard, they did an awesome job of not just using the basic tech, but also adding the bells and whistles and building an experience out of it. Now only if they will embed it into Windows 8, and change the way machines are seen (not as desktops, but hidden process centers), they would rule again. But will they take that risk, or will Apple beat them to it??!?

I think after Apple coming up with touch, this is next big fundamental thing in technology, which will change everything. But unlike touch, which only affected devices, i think gesture has the potential to change far more, building technology for sure. With people figuring out Voice, be ready for a paradigm shift in the way you interact with everything but humans, but then that is already changing thanks to FB...

take care.

rating engines...

there is a problem on the web today - it is impossible to find what might exactly match your requirements, its easy to find what everyone likes, but not what people like you like.

there are so many rating engines out there, the most used is maybe the FaceBook 'Like' engine. Rating engines in todays Web 2.0 world are very important...why?

1. the avenues for posting stuff have increased.

2. the ease of capturing information and posting it has increased.

3. its easy to find an audience

4. Because of 1, 2 and 3, the inherent vanity of people have suddenly found an outlet.

and because of all this, the amount of crap has increased exponentially on the web. but then what is crap for me, might not be for you.

so how do you find out what is not crap for you? and also how do you also find out what is not crap in eyes of people who know about this crap, the SME's so as to say.

and that is exactly why rating engines are important. the ones that i know of, simply count the number of likes / dislikes. but that has one big problem, the vote of 'i know shit about this subject' counts the same as of 'i won a nobel prize in this subject'.

so my solution, weightages. Every person should have a weightage, so if my weightage in a certain area is high, the vote i give counts for more then someone else who has less weightage.

but then how does weightage get decided for me, how does the engine know that i know more about this subject then someone else. but before that a little more explanation.

so i post a picture, or write a blog, which is liked by 100^x people (really big number meaning it was really liked), my weightage increases by x. so next time i like someone's picture or blog, my weightage is x (more then other's whoes pictures or posts were not that liked), and consequently, the picture or blogpost i am liking gets a higher rating.

but then the problem remains, how do you determine popularity based on mass liking and based on critical liking, today only the first gets importance.

So i take a picture of a cat, which is very cute and all the girls and animal lovers love it, but its not that great a picture, and my pics gets liked by 100 people (all simple beings who have average knowledge about photograpy, are normal humans), my pic gets a rating of 100. but on the other hand, if i take a time freeze pic of a cat jumping, and apply some techniques to it which makes the pic a really good photograph from a professionals point of view but not really cute. my pic is like by a couple of photgrapher who have a combined weightage of 100, but not by any of the simple beings, well both pictures then have equal weightage. Which means the most popular, and the most critically acclaimed have same weightages.

and how does the system know that i know more about photography then all the amateur photographers who just got a nice DSLR, well cyclic weightages. the total weightage given to a picture i liked will in turn affect my weightage as well, because if a picture i liked was liked by a 1000 people it basically says that my choice matches those 1000 people.

so for this to work, it has to be cyclic, the photographer liking my picture and then my pictures weightage hitting the roof later on should in return affect the photographers weightage as well, because his choice is good. Which basically means each weightage will in turn affect all the weightages in the system.

that is where the technical difficulty comes, imagine the computing power you need for this.

also as a last point, i am not sure if there should be a negative rating in the system, mathematically that is.

i would love to discuss this, its an idea which has been with me for sometime now and might be fundamentally wrong, please let me know if it is.

PS: a major problem i see in this working is discoverability, in the sense, i can like something only if i come across it. and for that there has to be a central place where i look for everything, a single platform. that today is maybe google, so the rating engine has to be built into google. maybe it already is which means as usual google beats me in implementation... :-)

also this has to work with tagging maybe, because then only can you categorize. Although am still not sure if categorization is required at all, or just the rating system will take care of it. well maybe it is, not sure.

the model derives a lot form darwins laws btw...

Secrets on FB

We all have secrets and the most ironic part of having a secret is that u wanna tell the secret out to someone...

And when u do say it out u also give out the standard '**' warning, it's a secret, don't tell anyone.

Well what if u could say a secret to the world and still keep it a secret.

That's where FB comes in, giving out secrets on FB. Well they are nothing more then ananymous status updates...but u can set the scope. So u, 'the person with the secret', post a secret, and set the audience scope as friends, then on ur firends wall, ur secret shows up, but they only know that secrets is from a someone, but not who exactly. The scope can be something like college x batch y, so it shows up on all friends in that scope, along with the scope, so friends know it has to be someone in college x batch y!!!

The comments on these secret posts won't be anonymosu, so u the, the person with the secret, can have some fun.

There can also be a guessing game with rewards, need to work the technicalities out though.

And this can be extended to having some kind of a gossip wall. write anything about anyone, anonymously, and comment on it!!! Need to figure out it'll work though!!!

Also another suggestion for FB would be automatic group creation. Scenario is that u make a new profile, and start adding friends. At some point fb should be able to determine that a lot of people ur adding are in common with a friend A (maybe because ur both from the same college / class and ur adding common friends) and FB should be able to determine that all these A has added all these friends to group Y and suggest B this group.

That ways there will be common groups.

Ofcourae what happens if A hadade special groups for some of these common firmeds thathe doesn't like and kept group names like 'the I hate club' or sth. Maybe not a great idea, but secrets on FB, that should work, any takers??

Continous authenticating Armband

I have always wondered what is the most secure and convinient way of authentication. Basically requirement should be that no one should be able to steal it, and it should be accessible to you always.
Was thinking of how bluetooth devices and automatc discovery works and the idea came. Long time back we had come up with a business idea where we implant a chip in a persons body and it continually monitors some vital stats and emits a signal. As long as ur alive, the signal is live, u die, signal changes. Going a bit further, the position of the signal can be tracked, so it works like a honing device. Good for armed forces, people into adventures, explorers et al. Am sure this must be in some Bond movie already. Anyways...
The idea now is that instead of a chip implant u wear an armband, which monitors ur vitals, not just to see if ur alive, but also for stress, like a polygraph. In turn, if the armband thinks ur normal, it emits a signal like in Bluetooth, and ur automatically logged in on devices in range.
Imagine the potential, the armband can be configured to hold ur identity. So no more passowrds for anything. Also the armband can be configured to log into services, devices of ur choice. As soon as u walk into work, ur work machine identifies u and logs u in. Ur phone is always locked, unless in range of ur armband, which is basically u. Walking into a shopping mall, the armband emits ur identity, which in turn is captured by the services in the mall and accordingly ur served with advert et al.
On the security side, since this is monitoring ur vitals, there is no question of theft or breaking under pressure, because it's basically connected to ur subconscious.
And the armband will have to be self learning, so it will start differentiating between stress levels, and will recognize ur moods.
A couple of problems...subconscious can be manipulated under the effects of medication.
The armband itself can be tampered with, or in worst case stolen, in which case u basically loose ur identity, no one can steal it, but u don't have it either.
Also am wondering if there should be a manual override, well gut feeling tells me for all practical purposes there needs to be (because the armband learning program can never be faultless), but that might cause a lot of problems, because a manual override can be misused one, it leaves the armband vulnerable.
Maybe for every armband there is a period of learning before u give full control of ur identity to the armband!!!

PS: another advantage would be airport security, the airport security systems will be configured to read the vital stats as well, and so if ur a terrorist with a bomb, they'll pick up the heightened stress level...no more full nude x-ray pics of u required. Am in a flight and just though of this!! might not work for secret agents trained to beat the polygraph though :-)

FB in 3D

Now that we have 3D screens or sources, the only hitch for 3D to become mainstream is 3D viewers, right now you need glasses which are uncomfortable, but maybe soon the Source might change in a way that you don't require glasses at all. 

anyways i don't have a solution to that, what i do have is ideas around what FB will look like in 3D.

so when you log into FB, you will basically be entering a space. The space will have things or artifacts littered around. Just like you home and you room, there will be gaming zones, friends zone, communications zones, productivity zones et al. 

Friends will be littered around, the distance from you (or your eye sight as seen in many games) will determine their activity, and their closeness to you. This is very similar to the FB algo for status updates, just that the priority of the status update will be measure in terms of distance from you rather then the 2D how high it is on the list terms. 

So what happens when you go to a friend, yes, you will actually walk up to him / her. Well tap them and they a blog roll of their current activities will open up, tap twice and their pics will open up and so on. Gestures will be used for other things, like showing their linkages to their friends, maybe some kind of lines extend to other people in that space, again here, people close to them will have a shorter line ( i am actually imagining threads going out of this one person to other people in his / her friends list) and of live chat will be enabled.

Each zone will have a door, you open a door by providing credentials, by signing in some form. 

There will also be tunnels to let you import stuff into your FB account, tunnels are nothing but 3D representations of today's interfaces into other apps. 

Input methods, well notice i said tap and gestures, yep, has to be touch. how to turn, well think of a small imaginary wheel on the screen, rotating it clock wise will means you rotate clockwise and so on. How to move forward or backwards, well here's the trick, you don't move forward or backwards, the world moves closer or away from you, and that happens by pinching in or out (which is used to zoom today). what about looking down or looking up? well pressure on the wheel (ends of y axis) will enable that. press on -y and release +y and you look up, and so on!!!

and so on and so forth, all tech is already there, only needs to be implemented. 

take care

 

Future of devices...

already written about this, but refined it a bit more so putting it here again.

----------

Only three type of devices, one, central controlling machines (your present desktops with inbuilt processing and storage) and slate / iPad like devices which just give you a view into the cloud with only enough storage for caching / basic security storage like for passwords, bank details et al, and networking capabilities and a way to authenticate the user. Of course the third will be ultra-mobile devices like the iPhone. No laptops...they will die soon.

Devices will be general, that is anyone can make the device their own depending on the login information, which actually gets authenticated at the cloud level. Once the device authenticates you, then the device will log you on to the spaces you have access too.

Within your ‘profile’ you will have different spaces mapped in, a home space, an office space, a personal space, and  you will have different rights in each of these spaces. You might or might not be able to move stuff between spaces. You might Share spaces with other users.

Each of these spaces will have different services like FB, IM et all mapped in it. The Space will pass on the credentials and authorizations to the service.

So why the controlling machines, because will be a need for local clouds, I would call them hubs, which would be used for providing processing / storage but most of all control, to the appliance / machines within that physical area, like your TV, your music player, your washing machine, your AC’s et al. The controlling machine will provide a full interface to everything for everything, and not everyone will have it.

The tablet will be more of a device for entertainment and interaction with the rest of the world. Input methods will be change. Touch, Voice and Gestures will take over. Ultimately, the device will have a plug into your thought stream, but this won’t happen over our lifetime.

The mobile will be a communication device and a remote control more than anything else. Communication through integrated apps such as Wave, and Remote control for your fridge, washing machine and AC.

You will have to buy...the bandwidth to access all of this, the Storage / Service for each of your spaces, and subscriptions for services which plug into each of these spaces.  

More over part of the cost of the appliance will actually go into the service for that appliance, for example when you buy an AC, you can also subscribe to a service to change the temperature, or pre-cool the AC.

creating delight...

Sometime back, an old friend who today is confined to being a count in my friends list in FB wrote about creating customer delight, and gave an example of Apple, something about Apple have a big glowing Apple on one of its store to mimic the glowing Apple symbol on the front lid of its macbooks. 

Customer delight, as one of my favorite marketing profs, Chandan Chatterjee, had explained long time back is the top tier of customer satisfaction...give value which was not only expected, but not imagined either. Something the product or service did for you surprised you, shocked you even. "How can a product do this for me, why would it do this for me, what is the catch" are the things which come into you mind. 

and as you find out that it was just done to please you, you like the product / service, and you start adoring it and thats how obsessions like Apple are born. 

but lets take a step back, what is it in for the company marketing the product / service. They might or might now be loosing money on it, most of these features are innocuous little things, which don't cost a lot, but leave a lot of impact. But the main investment is in the creative part of it. Coming up with something that the customer might not even have imagined takes a lot of thinking or...

or maybe it just takes a love for the customer and the product. Yep, if you love what you are doing, if you are passionate about what you are building, then making sure that you customers also love your product becomes a bigger motivation then just selling the product, and thats kick in a natural cycle of creativity. you love the product, and you are so passionate about it that you want everyone else to love it, and so you put in those small litter additions which make people love it. 

btw as i write this, another thought, there are two levels of customer delights, one is a product which every time you use, makes you feel good, makes you feel like 'wow, this is a work of art' or 'this has made life so much easier' and the other is the surprise kinds, 'wow, i can do this as well' or 'how good of them'. An example of the first of course is the iPhone, and locally Airtel's service. The second would be Google's Pacman thingy. 

Another thought, why is the second kind so rare, well first is not seen too much either but second is just rare and so, why??  well me thinks people in large corporations don't love their products, they might love their companies, but they are not passionate about the individual ideas, individual products. and thats why most of the customer delight today comes from startups, or companies which run like startups or a bunch of startups...thats where google and apple come in.

agreed, some products are so old, its difficult to surprise the customers, like there are few things you can do with a car today, but then think again. 

towards a no transaction world...

so went to this huge humongous mall with hundreds of huge shops, and while coming back with lots of bags, a friend suggested that there should be a way for all the shops to just deliver the stuff bought to your car in the parking or something...and i said maybe something like a airport baggage system.

anyways one thing led to another and i was telling him of my belief that in some years, there will not be any transaction. there won't be any exchanged of money, or any cards or anything. everything will be done by apps on ur phone or some other mechanisms.

and then this struck me.

so imagine that you go to a shop, you see a shirt that you like, you try it on and you want to buy it. so you whisk out you phone, which has a barcode reader scanned, and you scan the tag. as you scan, the phone gets the information about hte article, the price, availability et al, and one you see all the info, if all is well, you say buy.

now the phone sends out a buy request, which is picked up by the wifi enabled store servers in someway, the store in return gives the account no to the phone, the phone now contacts the bank servers, checks if there is enough money to buy this, and if so, just transfers the money to the account of the shop.

in addition, the phone also gives information about the purchaser, who he is or a token or something.

the shop, sends a signal to the warehouse robot to pick that stuff, and put it in a bag of that purchaser.

this happens for every store of the mall, and finally when the purchaser is done shopping, s/he simple says leaving, and all the bag of all that he has purchased is delived to a common area to which he can drive and pick it up.

simple.

Advantages: No checkout counters, no people to man checkout counters, more space for actually putting the stuff, no individual inventories, common basement inventory. Shopper doens't have to carry stuff, purchases are directly debited from account, cannot buy more then allowed. and so on.

adding another level, maybe there is no store system, but instead the phone maps with location of each store, and GPS. so if the purchaser says buy, the phone already knows whoes account to put it in. as there is no interaction between people, but only machines, no data theft. or so i think.

next level, bar code embedded in you, as you enter, shop also knows who you are. so now both parties know each other.

yea i know, going to far!!!

later.

magnifier in maps

so the problem with maps and a slow connection is that it takes ages to Pan or Zoom, and search really doesn't work that well, well atleast not at present time, because unless every spot on the map is tagged by someone, its not searchable. and we are not there yet.

So the Pattern of Usage that I have seen is that people mostly search for the name of the area and then Pan / Zoom, looking for the exact spot they want. Well thats where a magnifier would help.

If there were a magnifier glass which appears, and you can move that around on the map, you wouldn't have to Zoom out in a map, and wouldn't have to Pan out either. That would make looking around for things simpler.

I am not sure if from a performance point of view it would be better or not, since i guess the entire zoomed version of the map will have to be loaded for this to work, still worth a look.

the business of AOL...

Art of Living that is...

well i am not cynical, but i did notice some nice marketing funda's built into the Art of Living course, whether by design (by which i mean whether they were intended to be marketing fundas) or just part of the course, i can't decide.

anyways here goes...

so the main breathing exercise, Sudarshan Kriya, has a short and long cycle. The short cycle can be done at home, but the main Kriya is the long cycle, which needs to be done at the center, and on a weekly basis. They provide the facilities free of charge, but the point is, that since you keep on coming back every weekend, a connection is made, and the AOL community keeps on growing. Thats building brand loyalty.
During the course a lot of cross selling is done. We have these other courses, you should do this, and that, et al.
the money that they take, they take as a 'Donation', it makes you feel good and i am sure there are tax implications to it for AOL.

Cynical as i may sound, i really liked the way they pushed their idea and business. and frankly, if you have an idea, it needs to be marketed. There are a hundred ideas which died off because of lack of marketing.

making URL's memory friendly...

So have been thinking of a very long time of how can we make web page addresses more memory friendly. Bit.ly is one way, but then that basically shorten the URL for clickability, but doen’t necessarily make it more memorable, easier to remember. Actually it makes it more difficult.

So why, well internet is the place to get if you need any information about a product, a company. It’s also become an interactive platform, so if you wanna complain about Subway, then you would ideally end up at Subway site and complaints / user feedback section.

Also now a days companies put these URL everywhere, so when you see the Oscars, u see Visit www.oscar.com. Well that is fine, its easy to remember, but what Enfiled wants to advertise its Enfield Classic 500 microsite. What does it say, goto Enfiled/Classic500.com. Would it be better, if could have said, goto ‘Classic500’. That’s more memorable, and even intuitive.

Well you can always go to Google.com and search for Enfield Classic 500, if the search engine is as good as google, it should be the ‘I am feeling lucky’ link. But what about obscure products, or things you might want to do, like ‘Subway Complaint’ doesn’t return the complaints page as the top link on google.

more then anything, if i had a product, lets say 'a deo which also acts as an insect repellent' to advertise, i would just want to say a big 'GOTO RepelloDeo', thats it. instead of 'Search for RepelloDeo'. and people who might want to, can just go to a browser and type 'URL: RepelloDeo' and thats it.

So here’s the idea.

In US, car numbers / telephone numbers are changed to words. So have the same for web sites. This is known as Vanity numbers. well thats what i am suggesting, have a redirection service which basically converts 'terms' to 'numbers' and then 'numbers' back to actual URL's.

So RepelloDeo = 7373556 = http://LifeUtil/Products/RepelloDeo.aspx. how it helps is that people can store these names like simple numbers on their phones, in a scratch pad.

well yea i know, i can myself poke a thousand holes in the idea. why convert into numbers in the first place, well easier to store, and also easier to enter on mobiles.

This would have to be a centralized service, or at least the register needs to be mentioned centrally, and maybe the redirection service as well. Also their will have to be an expiry date to every such redirection.

So i know this is the answer to the problem stated, but believe me if you can get a good answer to this problem, u would make ur million.

take care

ank

Or maybe dial a website.

The iSlate…err, iPad.

After a lot of speculation, which for once came true, Apple launched its highly anticipated, and potentially game changing multi touch tablet, which most probably, would cystallize the tablet as a product as the iphone did for the smartphone..

I have not held it, and being in a ‘thrid world country with low demand’, I might not hold an iPad (atleast legally) for a long time (the iPhone 3GS is still to launch in India after almost 1 year of launch in the US), but from what I read and seen, the iPad seems a tad bit disappointing or is it so??!?

It looks ultra sexy, but is not revolutionary from Apple Standards, the iPad in looks is just a giant iPhone 3GS, what with the single home button in front and the rounded ‘makes it easy to pick up’ backside, so much so that even the button placement on the sides is very similar to the iPhone. Apple is known for their path breaking designs, and also for majorly changing designs between versions, the Apple Shuffle / Nano being a point in case.

The much talked about iBook should revolutionise the way we read information, already you see newspapers in the US which have embedded videos, and dynamic reporting, the iPad will crystallize this. I have long believed, in a few years from now, any paperback will be a rarity, so save that copy of the Chetan Bhagat ‘best seller’, it will also soon become worth something. But in addition to revolutionizing the way we deal with books, the iBook application will also help apple sell the iPad for as cheap as it is, can you imagine Apple, which unabashedly charges a huge premium on its products and is generally considered very elitist, selling a device at a price point which will enable every tom, dick and harry to buy one…I can’t, and that’s why I think that Apple wants to make its device so ubiquitous that majority of the world read and purchases books online throught he iBook, which means more online books sold for the publishers, which means more percentage profits for the Apple. It’s the iTunes stores story all over again!!!

But very few are talking about the iBook on the iPad, the iPad is today talked about more for its missing features then the ones which are there. No camera, and no multi tasking is just sacriledge. I take personal offence to the latter, is Apple assuming the general netizen to do one task at a time, I don’t think so. well think again Bose...

Apple has always been known to miss features, there were some glaring misses in the iPhone, but they also have been known to have their own ideas of a user today should be interacting with a device, should be using a device, and they have in the past shown the way. and so i ask, were these actually misses, or well thought about omissions?

I believe and have written about this before, in not very distant future, everything will live on the net. A perfect device will be a one for all purposes device, one which enables you to just connect to the net, gives you enough processing power to render it ultra fast, minimum local storage for the most important information like that ‘publish a reveal all autobiography after my death’ draft, and offcourse for offline support of online apps and a UI which matches up to the sexy net apps that we see today. In addition, it will be have ultimate multi user support, and will be able to communicate to other devices including your house appliances, you car, hell to you shaver. Google Chrome OS was the software which would enable this, Apple iPad has provided both the hardware and software…! Apple has a vision, and they are very subtlety making sure that people adopt that vision.

also i think the iPad, or tablets in general will bring slow death to the Laptops, i forsee the smartphone, the tablet and the desktop as the three computing platforms in the future. the desktop, with a very large screen, integrated strongly and completely with the gadgets in its surrounding and acting as a brain and contorlling point for all. the tablet as the medium to connect to the net, also a less stationary but mobile entertainment device (i don't use it when walking or cycling, but mostly when i am stationary) and the smartphone as my on the move device.

Do I have a wishlist for the iPad…well yes, offcourse I expect the UI to be ultra sexy, and as intuitive as the iPhone, I also expect a million apps which provide everything, but more then anything else, the one saving grace against the sacrilege of not providing multi touch is if the iPad can provide native support for running gadgets, well lets see, the google homepage already provides that, so do a lot of browsers, so maybe safari 4 would….lets see. and yea i would like to have a really good web cam. Other wise i would be really disappointed.

I expect the touchscreen to be more reliable, my iPhone died a sad painful death, and I hope my iPad does.

Yes my iPad, because I will buy one, I like it, and I know once I have it in my hands, with Apples penchant of giving less, but exceeding ur imaginations in what it gives, i am gonna love it.