In the New Year

One of the questions to answer for the NCAA Convention presentation posed by Ronnie Ramos is what will be the big thing in 2011.

Three tech-based answers:

A) Real digital media guides. No offense to the folks that make the on-line, page turning, shockwave driven ones we've seen for a couple of years, but they are not portable, they do not work in the iSpace and they are not really what Seth Godin and others call "vooks" or "vbooks". I've enhanced what we did last year in the bowl season with our 2011 bowl guide -- it is indexed within the PDF, linked to the website for further info, and launches video (league rules would prohibit embedding it to make the document fully portable). Pull our post book down, put it into your iBooks and go to town. It's a document that can actually function in the press box, and it will be at my side on the iPad as ready reference for the Jan. 4 Sugar Bowl.

B) Mobile goes tablet. What makes that guide usable is a solid tablet. It won't be only iPad in 2011 as the category breaks out. We read on Kindles. Look, USA TODAY didn't waste one of its own full pages to make the ad photographed here. And study those numbers: 1.8 million print circulation and 1.1m iPad downloads. Sure, there's going to be a lot of overlap in those two groups. Focus on this thought:

In 2009, how many iPad app downloads were there? Uh, that would be ZERO. One year, and the game is changed. Mobile will do that

B-1) Too closely related to be it's own topic, but worthy of your individual attention: mobile done right. Nothing -- NOTHING -- will turn end users off more than crap code, bulky re-skinned interface (I'm talking to you, major providers -- we're not stupid, we can tell when you just changed the logos, the colors and the RSS targets) and products that don't present them your news and information in a genuine mobile platform. The newspapers are spending the money to get there; prepare athletic directors to spend that $20K-$200K printing budget you were counting on just becoming the NCAA equivalent of the Cold War defense bonus that the Clinton administration was counting on. If you were on the $20K end, double it to get into the mobile game.

C) Apple TV. The quote of the week read in USA TODAY was "when Steve Jobs decides Apple TV isn't an afterthought" the world changes. Of all three of these tech gear shifts, this is the one you can attack today and perhaps at the lowest cost of all. This is where I want to go next in our resources at Arkansas, and with any luck, there won't be resistance. We have run a podcast for years, now we need to think in terms of creation of video podcast as soon as we can. We have some products that could go there now with some extra effort, and not a lot of new cost.

However, there's one philosophical item that trumps all three. I'll give you that one tomorrow.