The talk of the town today is most definitely the buzz around the Saint’s victory in yesterday’s XLIV Super Bowl. But of almost equal discussion amongst those in the marketing community is Pepsi’s absence as an event sponsor.

In the past 20 years, Pepsi has been the single most important advertiser at the Super Bowl, spending over $135M on sponsorship. Last December, Pepsi surprised everyone by announcing that it was pulling its sponsorship and instead will give away $20M to "worthy causes", including health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education.

To me, this signals two interesting trends:

1. Mass media is really in trouble. This is far from "news" to anyone, but worth bringing up as a fair number of skeptics are still “waiting for the good times to come back after the economical crisis is over”. I am even more entrenched now in my position that new media will prevail, not necessarily due to the advancements that traditionalists expect us to deliver, but simply because the old way of doing things no longer works.


2. Pepsi didn’t announce that they were going "2.0" or putting their ad dollars into "social networking". There is no doubt in my mind that ad dollars will progressively flow from broadcast style communications to pointcasting (a term used back in the 90s to explain personalized asymmetric communications), but it would be wrong to assume that Twittering and Facebooking are the new ways of approaching the market. They are merely transitions to better and more relevant ways of acquiring and serving new markets.

Pepsi chose a very altruistic approach, which I hope will trigger more thought around the ultimate goals of a corporate citizen in this century.

I feel it would be wrong to let this week go by without at least commenting on the launch of the iPad. There is no question that Apple has become the master of hype. Everyone wanted Apple’s new gadget, even before we knew what it was.

But now that we’ve seen the iPad and heard more about it, the question I ask is “who is this for”? I see what Apple’s trying to do by finding a sweet spot in the market between their current offerings. The iPad does fit a niche today that’s populated by cumbersome, workhorse netbooks that aren’t pretty, but they get the job done, for a reasonable price.

To me, the iPad is missing a few things to really make it work. Is it an eBook reader? A web browser? A digital lifestyle device? It’s really a jack-of-all-trades, master of none in my opinion. It’s pretty and it offers more real estate than an iPod Touch or an iPhone, but how much more functionality does it really bring to the table?

It’s supposed to be a great web browser. However with so many sites leveraging Flash and Silverlight and the iPad not supporting either of these, how much of the web experience are you missing?

It’s also pitched as a great tool for email and photos. But it’s still missing a viable data entry device for emails. The on-screen keyboard is fine for short text or messages, but not for much more. Even support for handwriting with a stylus would have been helpful. For photos, it’s missing two key features as well - an SD slot and USB port. Sure there will be accessories from Apple in the future, but these are more things you will need to carry around.

It’s not an eBook reader either. As much as the publishing industry is hoping that Apple can do for it what the iPod did for the music industry, I just don’t see it happening. Even with its faults, the Kindle has a better screen and battery life for reading books.

So what is the iPad good for? It’s great at promoting the concept of the tablet to the general public. There are a slew of these offerings coming to the market and everyone will benefit from the hype Apple’s created. The iPad has helped bring mobile back into the spotlight and give it some much needed credibility.

Over the past couple of years there’s been a lot of hype about Apple releasing a tablet computer product. In recent weeks more details have been leaked to the press that Apple will be holding a press conference on January 26th. It’s speculated that Apple will announce a new product called "iSlate", that would likely ship in March with a price in the range of $800 to $1,000. Gizmodo has put together a very good a article entitled The Exhaustive Guide to Apple Tablet Rumors, that tries to illustrate what the product will be based on patents and other details that have been leaked over the last couple of years.

While most conversations revolved around Apple when discussing Tablets, a large number of companies have released tablets in the past few days at CES 2010.

Dell has released a tablet called "Slate", that is essentially an oversized iPod Touch running Android with a slot for a SIM card.

Microsoft and HP have announced a very impressive joint product called "Courier" that is a large book format tablet with multiple screens running Windows 7. Gizmodo has the first details on this new device.

On another, yet very similar note, there have been a number of netbooks announced that have touch screens where the keyboard can be folded below the monitor, similar to older TabletPC's. Lenovo has also announced a notebook tablet called the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid that is in the rough stages of development, where the monitor can be completely removed to be taken with you, leaving the keyboard behind.

It’s been quite a while since I was excited about a new type of device; however the possibility of having a tablet is very interesting to me. With the development of Smartphones it’s become much easier to always stay connected without having to have a laptop with you, however the screen real estate can be very limiting when trying to take notes, read lengthy material, and reply to long e-mails.

I can definitely see a big market for a device roughly the size of a notepad for those occasions when a laptop is too big and our phones are simply too small. We’ll see what materializes from these rumors and prototypes.