At last — the iPad

The wait is finally over, and we have the details about Apple’s tablet computer, the iPad. (It’s not such a great name, but that was what people thought about the iPod, so I expect we’ll get used to it.) We put it on the cover of The Economist this week, with a cover leader, which I wrote. This post is the longer, geekier version of my analysis of the iPad. The new device is essentially a giant iPod touch with a 10-inch screen and a very fast but power-efficient chip designed by Apple. It has super-sized versions of the iPod/iPhone apps, with more elaborate pop-up menus. It runs existing iPod/iPhone apps, which can be expanded to fill the whole screen; it also runs new apps designed especially for its larger screen. There’s a Wi-Fi version and a version with both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. (In America, there’s a special deal with AT&T allowing unlimited 3G access for $30 a month.) There’s an e-reader app called iBooks, backed up by an Apple e-book store called iBookstore. There are also new, touch-driven iPad versions of the apps in Apple’s iWork productivity suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

What isn’t there? There’s no camera, but that’s not really a surprise; taking pictures with a device this big would be unwieldy. Instead, there’s an optional adapter to allow photos from digital cameras to be uploaded into it. Very handy if you want to post to Facebook while on holiday. Nor is there a forward-facing camera to enable videoconferencing. There’s no phone function. But there is a built-in mic, and I expect the iPad will work with the iPhone’s headphones, which also have a mic. It would then be possible to make calls using a VoIP app over either Wi-Fi or 3G. (Apple has just said that it will approve apps that do VoIP over 3G, something it would not allow before.) The ability to run multiple apps at once, which had been expected, is also absent. I think that will be added in due course, and to the iPhone too, much as copy and paste were last year. (A four-finger swipe might allow switching between full-screen apps, for example, like on the old Mac MultiFinder.) Some people were a bit disappointed by all this, but future software updates and hardware versions may fill in many of these holes, just as 3G was added to the iPhone a year after launch. And any disappointment ought to be tempered by the iPad’s price: it starts at $499, much less than anticipated. I expected it to cost $699 when I originally wrote my leader, based on my best guesses, on Monday afternoon.

The future (and history) of newspapers, continued

Argh! New technology is going to kill newspapers! In this week’s Christmas issue of The Economist I explain why people were worried about this — in 1845 — and what actually happened. The new technology in question was the telegraph, and newspapers co-opted it, rather than being destroyed by it. Will that also happen with the internet? As I have argued here previously, the internet is different because it does challenge the last-mile delivery of newspapers. (The telegraph was not a threat to papers in the end because although it delivered news faster, it could not distribute it to subscribers. The internet can do both.) So the internet may well kill newspapers; but newspapers are merely one business model for the delivery of news, and there is no reason why they should survive. The death of newspapers is not the same as the death of news. Already we are seeing new models emerge that do not depend on paper. Some publications will make the leap; many will not. If I was setting up a newspaper today I’d want it to look a lot like Bloomberg: global network of reporters, cash-cow terminals/financial information business to pay the bills, and (now) a consumer brand in the form of BusinessWeek. As this article argues, Bloomberg has a lot going for it, and it may prove to be the greatest competitor to The Economist in the medium term. Something for the next editor-in-chief to worry about, perhaps.

More “Edible History” stuff

This is me at the BBC, talking about ”An Edible History of Humanity” on The Forum, an excellent BBC World Service show which puts together three guests from entirely different fields to see what happens: in this case an Australian expert on fire, a Romanian Dadaist poet, and me. (You can hear the show here.) One of the guests is also invited to present a slightly silly “60 second idea” to improve the world, so I proposed making everyone over the age of 40 play video games. (You can hear that bit here.) After the show had been recorded, but before it aired, Charlie Brooker in The Guardian published a very good list of games that everyone should try, which is very much in the same vein; his choices were bang on. Anyway, back to the food. I recently contributed to the Spiked debate on the future of food and did a Q&A on the book for Mother Nature Network. I’m also taking part in an event in New York in January linked to the Silk Road exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ll be talking about the connections between food, trade and cultural exchange, along with a history professor and a chef. I’m the glue, I guess. I love the AMNH because of the planetarium, the whale, the dinosaur exhibits laid out in evolutionary order (take that, creationists), and because it does amazing things like this.

The Economist and e-readers

This week’s issue of The Economist has a lot of stuff about e-readers in it. There’s the cover story in Technology Quarterly about new display technologies (how can you make a low-power but full-colour screen) and there’s a Business story about the new joint venture between several American publishers to make a sort of iTunes/Hulu for magazine content. Neither of these pieces was written by me, though I edited both of them. My own take can be found in The World in 2010, in which I have two pieces on e-readers: one about the market in general, and a second about whether they can “save” newspapers. (Short answer: not in 2010.) I wrote these pieces in June and then spent the next six months updating them almost every week, because things were moving so fast. I now have more than just an academic/journalistic interest in the subject, having just been put in charge of The Economist’s editorial content for mobile editions. It’s an exciting area: everything is up for grabs and it’s all moving very fast. Just like the web in 1994 or so.

A lot now hinges on what Apple does. I expect the tablet to be announced in January (upstaging everything at CES in the process) and to ship in April/May. It will have a 10-inch LCD touchscreen. It will have both a Wi-Fi-only and a Wi-Fi/cellular radio version (ie, a big iPod touch and a big iPhone). These versions will then be sold through the same channels as iPods and iPhones. Apple will add e-books/e-magazines to the iTunes Store, using the iTunes LP format (based on HTML, not Flash or EPUB or anything else). Developers will have three or four months to recode their apps for the larger screen, to ensure that tens of thousands of apps are available at launch. Lots of publishers will sign on, because Apple will offer more generous terms than Amazon.

These are all my best guesses; if you are in the mood for more predictions I recommend this post by Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, who is very good. Anyway, 2010 is going to be an even bigger year for e-readers than 2009 was. People have been asking me which one to buy for Christmas, and my answer is: none of them. The current crop will look obsolete by the end of January (there will be dozens of new models at CES). Your move, Apple.

“The Victorian Internet” on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me”

My book was used to set three questions about “old social media” (ie, the telegraph) for Rick Sanchez of CNN on the “Not My Job” slot on “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me”. What was the single non-military application that Napoleon allowed the French telegraph network to be used for? Which object did a woman try to send by telegraph in the 1870s? And what kind of messages did the Atlantic cable of 1858 carry for the first few weeks after being connected? You can find out here. I was actually asked to suggest some questions myself by Peter Sagal, the host, but my suggestions weren’t funny enough (except for the sauerkraut). Oops — that’s one of the answers.

My other big 2009 project

Aside from my food book, the project that has consumed most of my mental bandwidth this year has been my special report on telecoms in emerging markets, which is published in The Economist today, and is on the cover everywhere except Britain. The accompanying cover article highlights what I think is the most exciting aspect of the report: the potential for mobile money to trigger a second wave of economic development in poor countries, as big as the one caused by the initial introduction of mobile phones. In addition to the cover leader and the 14-page report, there’s also an audio interview in which I summarise the main themes, and a videographic that picks out some of the figures about telecommunications technologies and their impact on development. Yup, it’s a multimedia extravaganza.

You have to fight your way through to the end of the report before you get to the inevitable telegraph reference; it’s actually in the last paragraph. My point: that the project to connect everyone on earth to a single communications network, which began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of completion. Within a decade, it’s likely that everyone who wants a mobile phone will have one. The next step will be to make access to the internet just as universal.

Being able to write a special report like this is one of the best things about working at The Economist. We usually get five weeks off to do it, a generous travel budget, and 14 pages in which to lay out our arguments. (It’s also the only time we get a byline.) I took three weeks off to do this report — one was spent doing reporting in Uganda, and the other two were spent writing at home — but I’ve actually been researching it pretty intensively since the start of the year. It’s like doing a small book. And as with a book, it’s great to see it finally emerge into the world.

Invisible hands, forks… and hooks?

In his book “The Wealth of Nations”, first published in 1776, Adam Smith famously likened the unseen influence of market forces, acting on participants who are all looking out for their own best interests, to an invisible hand. In “An Edible History of Humanity”, I liken food’s influence on history to an invisible fork that has, at several crucial points in history, prodded humanity and altered its destiny, even though people were generally unaware of its influence at the time. And I have just learned (rather belatedly, because I have something of a New Yorker backlog at the moment) of Peter Leeson’s new book “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates” which, according to this New Yorker review, explains pirate customs and behaviour using economic analysis. (It’s based on an academic paper from 2007 on pirate economics.) It sounds great.

More “Edible History” coverage

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, in part because I’ve been in rural Uganda researching mobile phones. It was also a good opportunity to see subsistence farming close up, and find out what farmers in the developing world are doing on the ground. Anyway, in the past month the Los Angeles Times has run a Q&A with me in which I am described, strangely, as “the ultimate foodie”. Time Out picked “Edible History” as one of its “best new food books”. The Guardian ran a favourable review. The Daily Telegraph picked up the “farming was a big mistake” discussion. The Financial Times included the book in its “hottest holiday reading” selection.

I also wrote an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, drawing parallels between 18th-century concerns about the potato and modern worries about genetically modified crops. Yup, historical analogy again. There was one point I didn’t have room for, which is worth mentioning. I am in favour of GM in theory although, as I note in the piece, so far the technology has not really delivered the goods in practice. That said, I think one of the risks of an over-reliance on GM is that monocultures are vulnerable to the appearance of an unexpected disease or predator. The Irish Potato Famine is, of course, the single best example of the danger of monocultures in food history. So that’s another lesson from the history of the potato.

How can we learn from it? What we need is lots of different GM crops to provide variety, rather than dominance of a few strains from a couple of big companies. And there’s no reason, as I point out, why future GM crops might not come from government research labs, which could do a lot to neutralise anti-capitalist opposition to GM. If the government of Mexico or India, say, produces a GM wheat that is drought-tolerant and requires very little fertiliser or pesticide, gives away the seeds to farmers and allows them to reuse seeds from one year to the next, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Food and drink, continued

This has got to be the most unusual book review I’ve ever had: Paco Calderón, a Mexican cartoonist, has reviewed “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” in the form of a cartoon (left). As an occasional cartoonist myself, I think this is an excellent use of the art form.

Meanwhile, I am still on the road promoting “An Edible History of Humanity” with various personal appearances and radio interviews. This week I was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and I was also interviewed by NPR affiliate KUOW in Seattle, in a wide-ranging conversation that also covered some of my other books.

While on tour I have been doing a fair amount of culinary tourism. In San Francisco I visited TCHO to pick up some chocolate (I wrote a story about the company last year), and went to Ritual Coffee Roasters to try coffee made with a Clover machine. I had a cup of Fazenda Kaquend, the winner of the Brazil Cup of Excellence competition. Normally I put sugar in my coffee to take the edge off it, but there was not a hint of bitterness. In Berkeley I had ice cream at Ici, which was also excellent. But I have to admit that my favourite discovery was that Anchor Liberty Ale was available on tap at SFO. It is my favourite beer. I am now in Iowa. Time for some corn.

UPDATE June 6th: After an on-stage conversation about my book at the Printers Row Literary Festival in Chicago with Mike Gebert of food blog Sky Full of Bacon, I asked Mike for a lunch suggestion, and we ended up going to Frontera Grill. Chef Rick Bayless is the dean of “white table-cloth Mexican food”, apparently. We had ceviche and tostaditas, after which I had poached eggs with masa boats, black beans and crumbled chorizo. With some Goose Island “Summertime” beer. A delicious and suitably American end to my tour. Thanks, Mike!

“Edible History” on tour

I’m now on the road in America for 10 days promoting “An Edible History of Humanity”. The tour kicked off last night with a very elaborate launch party at Bouley organised by The Economist (thanks, everyone!). I explained how the potato famine overturned the Corn Laws in the 1840s (which The Economist was founded to campaign against), thus cementing Britain’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Chef David Bouley (left) provided some astonishing food (I loved the black cod buried under a layer of powdered black onion) and foodie tales (including one about a legendary sushi restaurant in Tokyo with only two tables). Today I’m at BookExpo America 2009, speaking on a panel about the future of publishing with Chris Anderson, Steven Johnson and Lev Grossman. The rest of the tour looks like this:

May 31st, 3pm: Reading at Mrs Dalloways, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley

May 31st, 6pm: Reading at Green Arcade, 1680 Markert Street, San Francisco

June 1st, 7.30pm: Reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz

June 2nd, 3pm: Signing at Omnivore Books, 3885 Cesar Chavez St, San Francisco

June 2nd, 6pm: Reading at Book Passage, Ferry Building, San Francisco

June 3rd, 3.30pm: Reading at Microsoft Campus, Redmond

June 3rd, 7pm: Reading at University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, Seattle

June 4th, 7.30pm: Reading at Magers and Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Avenue S, Minneapolis

June 5th, 7pm: Reading at Prairie Lights, 15 South Duboque Street, Iowa City

June 6th, 10.30am: Discussion at Printers Row Literary Festival, University Center, Chicago