The iPad’s place in spark360

As I write this, a lot of people are crowding the aisles of their nearby Apple Stores, lining up the buy the latest must-have technology gadget brought to you by Steve Jobs and company.

The iPad is getting great reviews from mainstream and tech-based media. Those who have had a chance to take it for a test spin say it may usher in a new era of not only mobile media consumption, but user-computer interface. That last point is a fancy way of saying that in the future, we’ll all be using finger-swipes, virtual keyboards and pinch-zooms on multitouch screens as ways to interact with our computers.

But it’s that former category – media consumption – that holds the most interest for those of us at spark360.

We will support the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in our development of apps for spark360′s online video portal. Blackberry and Android apps are also in the development pipeline. We know that in many cases,  smartphones and mobile devices now have surpassed the power of what laptop and desktop computers delivered just a few years ago. Consumer trends have already moved toward watching video on those mobile devices; for those of you who do a lot of business traveling, try keeping count of the people around you at the airport gates, the terminal bars and restaurants and on your plane who are using iPhones, Blackberries, laptops and other gadgets to catch up on episodes of “Lost,” watch “The Hangover” or just check on the news and weather at their destinations. Advances in processing power and storage technology have enabled all this. (A future spark360 story will focus on a digital data storage company riding the wave of all this innovation.)

Now consider the iPad’s place in all of this. Early reviewers raving about Apple’s tablet computer praise not only its elegant styling (typical, now, for any Apple product thanks to lead designer Jonathan Ive) but the custom-built processor inside that powers the online video applications already available via the App Store. An analyst told me that the iPad is launching with more apps available for it than any other recent consumer electronics device.

Imagine your company has just received the spark360 treatment, and you just went out and bought yourself an iPad. You’re at a meeting with a potential customer, investor or employee. You don’t have to be in a sterile corporate board room; it can be at your favorite restaurant for entertaining clients. You pull out the iPad and run the spark360 app, showing off your company’s story in glorious color on the device’s 10-inch screen. You’ll be able to incorporate it into a small-screen presentation on your company if you combine it with Apple’s Keynote software or PowerPoint for Mac. Even if you don’t have the iPad, you’ll be able to help with your presentation by showing off the spark360 story on your company with the smartphone of your choice. And we work up a podcast version of your story for Apple’s iTunes, so you could even show the story on your iPod Nano.

Of course, the online video distribution model we’ve come up with also includes larger-screen versions and presentations. But we just wanted you to know that we’re thinking about all the ways people are consuming their media in 2010. spark360 is determined to have a place on whatever platform can add value to the media environment and business world.

If and when 3D technology, holograms and teleportation become a viable part of that business model, rest assured that spark360 will have an app ready to go. And it won’t even require a trip to “Avatar’s” Pandora to make it happen.

- Renay San Miguel