The Xplanation

Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are smartphones, social networking, and LMS platforms. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.

(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)

It could be that the biggest news in mobile is not Apple’s iPhone 4. Verizon and Motorola launched the latest Android smartphone Thursday and it is a big hit.

The Motorola Droid X launched Thursday and is already sold out, exceeding Verizon’s demand expectations. The carrier had said that there would be no Droid X shortage, but the initial online stock of the hot Android smartphone is now exhausted, with the next shipping date pushed back to July 23. Many Verizon Wireless retail stores and Best Buys around the U.S. are reporting low or no stock. The Droid X is this summer’s flagship Google Android phone, selling for $200, after a $100 online discount on Verizon’s site. It has a roomy 4.3″ display, an 8-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, and runs on a 1GHz processor with Android 2.1 on board.

Of course, the other breaking smartphone story on Friday was Apple’s announcement that is would give users free cases in order to remedy reported antenna problems. In a public statement, Steve Jobs said, “We’re not perfect, and phones aren’t perfect either, but we want to make all of our users happy.”

In other technology news:

• Facebook Will Announce 500 Million Users Next Week With “Facebook Stories” — “Facebook confirmed that it expects to announce its 500-millionth user next week, and will mark the occasion with new consumer marketing initiative called ‘Facebook Stories.’”
• Google Buys Metaweb To Bulk Up Search Results — “Google has purchased Metaweb, a heavily-backed startup which has been compiling a grand database on more than 12 million ‘things,’ from movies to locations, which it then provides to site owners so that they can add the information to their sites.”
• A new America through broadband — “Equipment such as the iPad and technological developments such as 4G wireless and massive computing power mean that the technology needed for such a platform is available today, at costs cheaper than providing material that Gutenberg could have produced. For the sake of our children, and for the competitiveness of the nation, America ought to be aggressively developing a new category of educational content, delivered using high-speed Internet access.”
• Look Out Windows, The Enterprise Is Warming Up To The Mac — “Some 79% of respondents said their firms were likely to allow more users to deploy Macs as their enterprise desktops in 2010-2011, versus 19% who said they were not likely to allow more Macs.”

One of the critical themes running through these articles is the growing social nature of the Web. Paul Adams, who works on the Google UX team, discusses some of the social shifts in the Web ecosystem and how those changes affect products and development.

Another important theme is intelligent search and aggregation. Many see this as the future of content publishing and one group of ex-Google and Bing engineers have set out to build the newspaper app of the future using new search and aggregation tools.

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.

On the education front, Michael Feldstein has posted an interview with Desire2Learn CEO John Baker that merits watching. In addition to the interview, Michael shares some interesting takeaways from the recent Desire2Learn conference. “First of all, I was astonished at how much D2L is growing. Based on what I saw at the Sakai conference, what the market surveys have been saying, and what I know from talking to people, it was already clear to me going in that there’s a big shift happening in the LMS market. I expected to see D2L benefiting from that. But I wasn’t prepared to see the number of new clients they’re on-boarding. I’m trying to get a list to illustrate the size of the growth. In his keynote, John had three slides’ worth of new logos. These aren’t expanded client relationships, which is the kind of thing that Blackboard tends to highlight these days. These are new clients.”

Speaking of e-learning, I spent some time playing with NIXTY this weekend and it looks to have lots of potential for self-learners and those pursuing CEUs. Here’s a description of the product from their site. “NIXTY is the Virginia-based startup that is revolutionizing education. The co-founders wanted to create a service with the outrageous goal of empowering education for everyone. They had experience in the eLearning/LMS market, but needed to learn more about open education. They consulted with several thought leaders, professors, and students around what a next generation learning platform might look like. The result is NIXTY! NIXTY combines powerful technology with open education to meet the audacious goal of empowering education for everyone! NIXTY provides an educational platform that students, educators, and institutions harness to meet their learning goals. Primary products include ePortfolios, Courses, WikiCourses, and Continuing Education Courses.”

On a related note, you may want to check out The WikiPremed MCAT Course, a robust, open course in undergraduate level general sciences. “Undergraduate level physics, chemistry, organic chemistry and biology are presented by this course as a unified whole within a spiraling curriculum.”

Finally, The Nation has this interesting article on Amazon and its troubling vision and relationships with publishers and consumers. To be honest, many of the issues raised here remind me of complaints agains Wal-Mart in the brick-and-mortar world, but that does not necessarily diminish their legitimacy.

The accumulated effect of Amazon’s pricing policy, its massive volume and its metric-based recommendations system is, in fact, to diminish real choice for the consumer. Though the overall number of titles published each year has risen sharply, the under-resourcing of mid-list books is producing a pattern that joins an enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles) to a Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles), with less and less in between. Responding to the effects of price wars last fall the American Booksellers Association warned, “If left unchecked…predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public.”

Authors, too, can be added to the list of price-cutting’s victims. In the fall of 2008, as the crisis of publishing began, a boss at Scribner, where I was a senior editor for two and a half years, announced at an editorial meeting that when it came to advances, “$50,000 is the new $100,000.” Speaking with agents at this spring’s London Book Fair, I found widespread corroboration that advances had indeed dropped precipitously.

Suggested Reading

Droid X Proves a Hit: Sold Out | PCWorld

Apple’s iPhone 4 Solution: Free Cases For Everyone! | Beth Callaghan | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

CHART OF THE DAY: Look Out Windows, The Enterprise Is Warming Up To The Mac

Google Buys Metaweb To Bulk Up Search Results | paidContent

Blair Levin and J. Erik Garr | A new America through broadband

Exclusive: Facebook Will Announce 500 Million Users Next Week With “Facebook Stories” | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

Interview With Desire2Learn CEO John Baker

NIXTY | Empowering Education for Everyone

The WikiPremed MCAT Course

Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

PowerPoint Versus Books | aLearning Blog

The Trouble With Amazon | The Nation