This is what we’ve dog-earred for the Monday, March 29th.

If you haven’t already ordered your iPad, now you’ll have to wait til’ April 12th
via 9to5mac.com
“Apple runs out of first week’s worth of iPads, now pushed back to April 12th. In-store pickup option removed.”

iPad Guided Tours
via Apple.com
“Apple just released a set of guided video tours of the iPad taking potential customers through a bunch of the different apps. The 11 guided tours cover basic features such as Safari, Mail, Photos, and iPod that should be familiar in at least basic concept to iPhone and iPod touch users.”

Report: Apple to Unveil New Ad Format Following iPad
via Wired
“After the release of the iPad, Apple is rumored to release an advertising platform that will deliver personalized ads to the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-ship iPad. Steve Jobs apparently referred to these mobile ads as the company’s “next big thing.”Apple expects this new ad platform to have as significant an impact on its business.”

iTunes App Store comes to Facebook. Downloading apps just got easier.
via Mashable
“Interacting with the iTunes App Store just got easier, thanks to the new App Store Facebook page. The Facebook tabs allow you navigate featured apps, and Click on the “Get App” button and a browser window for that application opens up (and if iTunes is installed, iTunes opens as well), allowing you to download with a single click.”

Just for fun – The Big Picture, Earth Hour
via Boston.com
“The Big Picture featured stunning photography (check out the awe-inspiring Olympics photos). We celebrated Earth Hour, and noticed a small but significant change in downtown Vancouver. Did you? Click the image to see it fade!”

For Christmas, employees at Invoke received a welcome gift: Kindles. While some of us were skeptical about this new-fangled contraption, a few weeks of use have made converts of us all… and we aren’t the only ones. Due to the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books during Christmas than print books.

Apple’s pending iSlate promises to encourage further adoption of tablet PCs — and may even signal a shift away from netbooks. As Apple is one of the few computer manufacturers that has not hopped onto the netbook bandwagon, this may be the product that bridges the gap between the iPhone and the MacBook. We will not speculate on how the iSlate may be a “game changer”, but we do think, based on our experience with the Kindle, that tablets are here to stay.

We can’t help but wonder how tablets could change social media. Whenever a disruptive technology disturbs the media status quo, it also changes how people interact with each other. Here’s how we think tablets could impact social media.

How the Form Complements the Function

There’s a reason the average blog post is less than 500 words: reading text on a monitor is hard on the eyes. While many of us do that for 8 hours a day (and sometimes longer), few find the experience more pleasurable than a book, thanks to glare, flicker, and other maladies of the back-lit screen. Moreover, 16:9 widescreen format has always lent itself better to movies than text. On smartphones, messages must be shorter. An iPhone’s small screen means lots of scrolling for big blocks of text.

Tablets hit the sweet spot for reading. They are small enough to make for easy scanning, yet large enough for making scrolling (or “page-turning”) a snap. Most of them use a technology called “e-ink” to make reading easier, and take away notorious flicker that plagues back-lit monitors.

In addition to the publishing sector, education will be the first industry profoundly affected by tablets. Tablets will cut students’ costs and dramatically reduce their physical load. And one can only begin to imagine the impact on libraries, which will move increasingly online. These examples just scratch the surface. Who knows how tablets could affect hospitals, law offices, or any profession that requires massive consumption of text?

Where does social media fit in?

The tablet form factor is an obvious boon for long-form content. It would therefore find an appreciative userbase among professionals who use many documents. However, since most tablets will be equipped with wireless Internet, there’s no reason users should remain passive readers.

Imagine students being able to send study notes to each others’ kindles, and then be able to provide further insight. Picture chefs not only perusing recipes, but adding their own critiques: “This one’s good, but too much salt.” Because tablets complement text so well, this may strengthen online dialogue — and may even improve well known social sites like Wikipedia that are already text-heavy.

Finally, if the Kindle is indicative of a broad trend, future tablets will probably implement an iPhone-style app store. What this means is that developers will inevitably build social media apps that complement a tablet’s function. Just as apps like Foursquare are built specifically for mobile phones, so this will be the case for tablets. Want to organize a virtual book club? It could be just a social media app away.

Update: Apple has announced their tablet today — and controversially have called it the iPad. As expected, major publishers have signed on. And it is confirmed the iPad uses the same app store as the iPhone.

Posted by Saleem Barnard

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

From time to time, a company comes out with a brilliant product: clean, sleek, easy to use, and down right sexy. However, something even more rare and interesting than this is the halo brand – a brand that can do no wrong and spits out brilliant products. One worth mentioning is Apple.

Apple has proved themselves with their strong product success rate and high rate of user satisfaction. As with the case with the iPhone, just the mention of Apple creating a mobile phone created organic buzz, spin-off fan sites, and skyrocketing demand for a product that was just in the idea stage. Ultimately, few were disappointed with the final product. But the rarity lies in the amount of trust consumers vest in Apple. Everything they touch turns to cool. If Apple started selling re-bar, you would see trend setters carry around the various Apple colours like a patriot waving his flag.

Microsoft, oh Microsoft, is in a very different, and far less attractive boat. Take the Zune for example. Zune, their attempt at an iPod killer, does have superior technical specifications; but it just lacks. Brown as a core colour? Brown??

A cow in a pretty red dress is still a cow. The parent brand, plagued by “blah” publicity of their product launches and a growing increase in the love-to-hate attitude, falls flat by trying too hard to appear cool. You can’t create cool. Especially if the vision of cool is brown.

Posted by Jenn Lowther

It’s official, Canada will be getting the iPhone this year. This release has been confirmed by Rogers Wireless, the company that will be carrying the iPhone. Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers said that “We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year…We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

This ends a year of speculation on when the iPhone would be sold legally in Canada. It seemed that Apple and Rogers had reached an agreement back in January 2007, but Rogers then backed away from these statements. Well all I can say is it’s about time! I’ve got an iPhone and would love to have a proper package that allows me to fully utilize its capability without breaking the bank. Rogers has only just recently released more affordable data plans.

This announcement comes as great news as it seems that every other major company in the world had an iPhone be for we did – US, UK, Germany, France, Ireland and Austria all currently have access to the iPhone. If you want more information about the Canadian iPhone release, you can find it here and here.