Apple’s [AAPL  286.091    -2.849  (-0.99%)    ] iPad sold three million units in the first 80 days after its April release and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter, according to Bernstein Research. This sales rate is blowing past the one million units the iPhone sold in its first quarter and the 350,000 units sold in the first year by the DVD player, the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product. “The iPad did not seem destined to be a runaway product success straight out of the box,” said Colin McGranahan, retail analyst at Bernstein Research, in a note. “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”

At this current rate, the iPad will pass gaming hardware and the cellular phone to become the 4th biggest consumer electronics category with estimated sales of more than $9 billion in the U.S. next year, according to Bernstein. TVs, smart phones and notebook PCs are the current three largest categories.

“This is much bigger than I thought it would be,” said Pete Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com and a ‘Fast Money’ trader. “It’s really a total media device and there’s not much a PC can do that you can’t do on an iPad.”

To be fair to the DVD, they were a bulky, pricey change from video recorders that had become a staple of most American homes. It took five years for the DVD to reach the unit sales pace that the iPad reached in just its first quarter, according to Bernstein. The iPad had the advantage of being the extension of Apple’s ever-expanding ecosystem of iPhones, iPod touches and Macs that are marked by ease of use and a familiar style.

Bernstein’s McGranahan covers Best Buy [BBY  40.76    -0.12  (-0.29%)   ], the first major retailer to sell the iPad. His analysis found that not only are the iPads cannibalizing the netbook/notebook category in stores, but could also be hurting sales of TVs and digital cameras.

“It is the rare American household that would spend $600-plus dollars on an iPad and buy a TV or a PC or a digital camera in the same month, or the same quarter, or maybe even the same year,” said McGranahan. The cannibalization of computers by tablets is one of the reasons Goldman Sachs downgraded Microsoft [MSFT  24.19    -0.16  (-0.66%)   ], sending the shares to the worst performance of any Dow Jones Average [.DJIA  10931.74    -12.98  (-0.12%)   ] member today. “The company needs a credible iPad answer in the near term to allay concerns that tablet proliferation necessarily cannibalizes Windows sales,” wrote Goldman analyst Sarah Friar in a note. “To compete with Apple, and Google [GOOG  530.7136    -7.5164  (-1.4%)   ] through Android and Chrome, Microsoft would likely benefit from collaborating with hardware manufacturers on an instant-on, always connected device that has longer-than-PC- battery life and a vibrant ecosystem of applications.” Apple has been the rare company that keeps the “first mover” advantage. As tablets from Microsoft and Research-In-Motion soon flood the market, and Apple’s market capitalization approaches Exxon Mobil, the company’s going to need the next big extension of that ecosystem. Apple TV is on sale now.

By: John Melloy
Executive Producer, Fast Money

The New York Times is offering a platform that other publishers can use to produce their own apps for devices starting with the iPad and iPhone.

The first publishers to sign up to use the platform, which The Times is calling Press Engine, are the Telegraph Media Group and three A.H. Belo newspapers: Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Press-Enterprise in Southern California. The publishers keep any advertising and circulation revenue the apps bring in; they pay the Times a one-time license fee for the platform and then a monthly maintenance fee.

New revenue
The platform is the latest bid by a media company to derive revenue from sources beyond the traditional core streams of ad sales and circulation. Most often the recent attempts along those lines have involved providing agency-like services -- whether built up internally or acquired, as Meredith and Hearst have done -- but this platform is a new way for a media company to provide services to other media companies. And it's a new way for a media company to make money from the booming app economy beyond making its own apps. The Times decided to offer the product after inquiries started coming from other publishers, said Christine Topalian, a director of the News Services division at the Times. "Over the last year there's been a particular amount of interest from different clients asking whether we would be willing to license the code of our own New York Times application," Ms. Topalian said. The Times is not exactly replicating its apps for others, however, Ms. Topalian said. "We're taking, for lack of a better word, the DNA of them and the functionality of them."

Decisions about paid content
The Dallas Morning News was one of the papers that sought out the Times to see if it could help with an iPad app, said James Moroney, CEO and publisher at the Dallas Morning News. "When a company like ours, that doesn't have the resources and scale of The New York Times, went looking for a partner, the first place we looked was to The New York Times because of their track record and because they are in the same business we are in." The Dallas Morning News plans to introduce its iPad app, built using the Press Engine platform, near the beginning of next year, Mr. Moroney said. First it has to decide how to reconcile charging for the iPad app, as it plans to do, with posting all its content free on the web, as it currently does. Consumers aren't likely to pay for an iPad app to access the same content they can get free on the iPad's web browser. "We are looking at how and what we might do about taking some of our content and making it available only to people who have either paid for a print subscription or who are paying for some kind of digital access," Mr. Moroney said.

Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack. A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.

Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”. Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on). The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together. The user interface reminds me a lot of Pulse, another great news consumption app for the iPad. Hawthorne Labs plans to expand Apollo to the iPhone, the Android platform and in the form of a general Web application at a later stage. The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes. World domination plans aside, the startup does seem to have a great team with relevant experience on their hands. The three Hawthorne Labs co-founders are Evan Reas, a self-declared ‘Stanford MBA turned Bizhacker’ and former Google News and Bing engineers Shubham Mittal (the top ranked student at IIT-Delhi and a Gold Medalist at the International Physics Olympiad) and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan (who was a Google World Code Jam finalist, twice, and has far too many ‘a’s in his name to be healthy).

Fun factoid: these guys built the app before the iPad was even released, and as soon the tablet computer hit the market they tried to provision iPads in stores to test the early versions, only to get yelled at a lot. How’s that for some bootstrappin’ persistence?

via: techcrunch.com

It’s all the rage these days. You fire off an email to Apple’s Steve Jobs, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest and most secretive technology companies, and to your astonishment, the great man himself replies. You then publish said email, sit back and watch as the tech press dissect each and every word. It’s quite the media spectacle, especially when you factor in that Steve can’t (and doesn’t) reply to every email he receives. Instead, he gets to pick and choose, using those email replies to get the message out in-between official press releases and product launches. Those replies are usually sparse and occasionally cryptic.

Steve’s reply to my lengthy email was no different.

We will keep making the best computers on the planet. We love it.

Sent from my iPhone

 

 via http://techcrunch.com

There's only 2 million iPads in the market, but the iPad's share of the global browser market is already bigger than Android, BlackBerry, and the iPod touch, according to this chart cited in a recent Morgan Stanley research report. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty says iPad usage is closer to a PC than a smartphone, which is not really surprising, since it's designed for web browsing. However, we were still surprised that iPad browser share is already ahead of the popular Android and BlackBerry platforms.