Having the iPad serve as a portable, simple display kiosk or showcase is terribly tempting. For one thing, now that the 16GB iPad 2 has dropped in price due to the new iPad launch, it’s more affordable than ever. For another, getting that touch interaction right in front of your customers or exhibit viewers is a great way to increase their engagement and focus.

Rule #1 of iPad kiosks is, of course, make sure we don’t lose the iPad. That’s among the strengths of lilitab’s lilipad kiosk line, which keeps device security top-of-mind throughout the design without giving up ground on ease of assembly, looks or price. I tested out the lilitab standard kiosk model, which comes in either white or black and retails for US$495.

In white, the lilitab looks a little bit like a section of a high-end shower assembly. The heavy steel baseplate keeps the unit steady and vertical once the iPad is installed (it can be bolted to the floor too, if desired), and the top section encloses the device easily and without fuss. The top enclosure comes with a set of security screws (and an Allen wrench to set them) so that nobody else can come along and abscond with your iPad. You have a choice of frontplates with or without a camera opening, and with or without a home button pinhole — you can lock in your chosen app with the fully closed frontplate and it won’t get changed inadvertently or purposefully.

Down at the base, the main pipe stalk slides into a corresponding section welded to the baseplate. That’s also where the included iPad charging cable meets up with the user-supplied iPad AC adapter and Apple charger extension cord — you do have to bring your own on those. Getting the power adapter installed was really the only tricky bit of the assembly, as it requires you to feed the AC cord into the base at a sharp angle so that both pieces fit into the available space.

Once the power is plugged in, the next security step is the two-piece cowling that attaches around the pipe fitting. Another pair of security screws keep it firmly attached. The base also has a lock fitting for both Kensington-style and conventional 3/8″ steel cable attachments. With all items set up, the iPad can be fitted into the enclosure and mounted either in landscape or portrait mode. The enclosure itself includes foam supports that can be adjusted to house any model of iPad (current or future, as long as it’s the same screen size); there’s also no metal at all around the iPad’s RF antennas, so WiFi and 3G performance should be unimpaired.

You can get additional options and branding kits from lilitab, but even the spare and unadorned kiosk made a positive impression on everyone I showed it to. Aside from the tight tolerances on the power adapter in the base, there’s not much to criticize and a lot to admire about this product; if you’re looking for a good way to get your iPad kiosks to look professional and sleek, give them a call.

Lilipad iPad kiosk hits the mark on price, simplicity originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A controversial iOS app has promptly been pulled and blocked over major legal and privacy concerns. Girls Around Me (App Store, no longer active) had advertised itself as using Foursquare check-ins and a Facebook sign-in to find nearby women who had recently checked in with publicly visible Facebook profiles. The app not only showed how to find them on Google Maps but encouraged the presumably male users to message and otherwise get in touch with these girls without their knowledge or consent….

While Electronista and MacNN intend to keep April Fools’ reporting to a minimum, Google has offered a rarity by making one of the first gags for the year and also making it truly interactive and accessible. A one-off Quest mode in Google Maps turns the navigation tool into its “NES” version. Most features continue to work, but it now has a Legend of Zelda-style overhead map and renders Street View in an 8-bit color palette like the now 27-year-old Nintendo console….

Microsoft has extended its in-store Smoked By Windows Phone contest several more days in what may be one of the first real signs of sustained demand for its mobile platform. Originally due to end March 29, it will now last until April 5. The daily free prizes for losing the device test have been capped to prevent stock-outs, however and will now see only the first 100 visitors who take the test get a phone for free….

Research In Motion Ltd.’s new chief executive faces two bleak options…

What about Apple making a billion dollars a week…

f Android devices can’t implement any of the gestures described, they won’t be competitive…

To Amazon, a tablet is just another kind of cardboard box…

Apple entered into an exclusive agreement to license the use of Liquid Metal’s amorphous metal alloys…

With Apple gearing up for the grand release of its highly anticipated…

When it comes to discussing the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today’s topic is Thunderbolt, Apple and Intel’s next-generation device interconnection standard.

Introduced with great fanfare, Thunderbolt devices are still thin on the ground. There are storage devices and ExpressCard cages, but the real promise of the speedy hybrid copper/optical interface has yet to show up on shelves. This despite the fact that Apple has integrated Thunderbolt support into its latest iMacs, MacBooks, and minis.

So what’s going on with Thunderbolt? Are we too early to the party, as Chris Foresman writes, or is Thunderbolt just a big name for what beloved TUAW blogger Rich Gaywood calls a “damp fart” of technology.

You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your analysis.

View Poll

You’re the Pundit: What’s up with Thunderbolt? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter late at night restored TweetDeck’s access after pulling it down over a serious bug. In a statement given to The Verge, Twitter said that there had been a bug that led to a “very small number” of users getting control of others’ accounts, up to the hundreds in at least one case. The flaw had been random and didn’t see anyone’s passwords compromised….

Nokia and Microsoft’s talk of possibly buying RIM would amount to a wholesale OS replacement, new leaks uncovered late Friday. The Wall Street Journal tip not only left the door open to a “coordinated” bid for RIM but understood they would drop the BlackBerry OS entirely in favor of Windows Phone. Microsoft would take over the server side, the informants said, implying that it would go to a direct Exchange server instead of a BlackBerry Enterprise Server….

Apple’s new LTE-equipped iPad has reportedly passed governmental certification in Taiwan and could be hitting shelves as soon as May.

In its 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Liquid Metal outlined the details of its $20 million licensing program with Apple, which began in 2010.

Apple. along with a number of tech industry leaders, took part in a discussion on Thursday to explore how a joint effort backed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Department of Education can implement digital textbooks in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

Is that a web browser?

The folks at FireCore have released a new jailbreak for the latest Apple TV iOS version that Apple released on March 7th. The set-top box’s interface was revamped alongside the release of the third-gen Apple TV, and FireCore’s tethered jailbreak will work on the second-gen Apple TV running iOS 5.0.

New versions of Seas0nPass and aTV Flash (black) have been released to enhance the Apple TV experience on the latest software.

Like RedSn0w for the iPhone or iPad, Seas0nPass is the tool used to jailbreak an Apple TV:

Seas0nPass currently provides a tethered jailbreak for the new 5.0 (iOS 5.1) AppleTV software. Functionally, both jailbreak types are identical, the only difference being that a tethered jailbreak requires the AppleTV to be connected to a Mac/PC when first powering it on. Since the AppleTV doesn’t have a battery, and is rarely ever powered off, this usually only needs to be done once.

We’ve already shown you what’s new in the 5.0 update for the Apple TV. Apple revamped the interface to make it more app-like. If you’ve jailbroken your Apple TV before and enjoyed the added features, then grab this latest version of Seas0nPass jailbreak. By warned that some plugins have yet to be updated for the Apple TV’s 5.0 software:

• Couch Surfer (works)
• Last.fm (works)
• Maintenance (works)
• Media Player (works)
• NitoTV (works)
• RSS Feeds (works)
• Weather (works)
• Overflow (not working)
• Plex (not working)
• Remote HD (not working)
• Rowmote (not working)
• XBMC (not working)

Note: Non-working items require an author update for 5.0 compatibility.

Also, the third-gen Apple TV cannot be jailbroken yet. From the looks of things, it may not be jailbroken for awhile.

You’ll need Seas0nPass to actually jailbreak your Apple TV with your Mac, and then aTV Flash (black) is used to install additional features, like a built-in browser, compatibility with more video formats, a Last.fm app, and more. The new Seas0nPass can be downloaded here and aTV Flash (black) can be purchased for $30.

To learn more about the benefits of jailbreaking your Apple TV, take a look at FireCore’s website.

You’d think at this stage of the game, most computer users would be savvy enough to have a data backup plan in place. But you’d be wrong.

That’s why every storage, disaster recovery and backup vendor on the planet has glommed onto World Backup Day, which is Saturday, March 31.

The day itself was born out of a casual thought posted to Reddit last year by Adam Jeffreson. Cynics assumed Jeffreson worked for a storage or backup company, but that is not the case, he said via email.

“Basically I knew someone who broke their laptop, and they lost loads of important documents because they had never backed it up. When I asked them about why they didn’t, they said they had never thought to. After thinking about this I realized it was actually pretty common, and that most people needed to be reminded to do it. Hence, backup day.”

Reddit commenters jumped on the topic. One group set the actual date — March 31 seemed a good idea.  Another group started the website, which implores users: “Don’t be an April Fool. Back up your files. Check your restores.”

Last year was the first World Backup Day but it seems a lot of people still don’t get it. Sixty percent of 640 small and medium businesses surveyed recently don’t even budget for backup. And just 15 percent have any kind of automated online backup plan in place, according to the research which was conducted by Compass Partners for Mozy, an online backup vendor.

Many companies leave whatever backing up is done to the discretion of individual employees. That means a lot of files are stuck on USB drives or emailed to personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts. Sound familiar?

Jeffreson sounds happy that people took his idea and ran with it: “Posting an idea on the Internet is giving it away. I’m happy it went somewhere.”

It sure did: Vendors from Backblaze to Trend Micro to Spideroak were all aboard with their World Backup Day pitches this week. As self-serving as all that is for them, just ask yourself: When was the last time you backed up your files?  There’s no time like the present — or  maybe March 31.

Some rights reserved by Phil Aaronson

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Violin Memory is a force to be reckoned within the storage world. The company, which sells high-end storage arrays loaded to the gills with flash memory, just closed a $50 million funding round. This is its fourth similarly sized round in two years  putting the valuation of the company — slated to go public later this year– at about $800 million. If it follows through on those IPO plans, CEO Don Basile told me, the company will be valued in the billions.

It’s not just the industry shift toward solid-state drives replacing slower, less-efficient hard disk drives that’s driving Violin’s value through the roof, though, it’s also the company’s very strategic set of investors.

The latest investor to get on board is software giant SAP, whose mission-critical ERP and database products are deeply entrenched within large enterprises and could benefit greatly from the price-performance increases Violin’s systems offer over traditional HDD- and-DRAM-based systems. There’s also SAP’s new HANA  in-memory analytic database, which is the focal point of SAP’s big data push. “To the extent that people view HANA as a big data technology,” Basile said, “it fits into our core thrust that we started last year [around big data].”

That “thrust” Basile mentioned is to build the “biggest, fastest, densest” big data systems in the world for technologies such as HANA, Hadoop and NoSQL databases. Violin has worked with various vendors to eliminate the I/O bottleneck in Hadoop that limits throughput into the processor to a few hundred megabytes per second. Using a Violin system, he said, “instead of needing 100 Hadoop servers, you might need 10.”

Violin also counts Juniper Networks among its strategic investors, although flash-memory manufacturer Toshiba might well be the most important. While other enterprise flash-storage vendors must react to consumer demands that regularly change what flash fabricators produce (generally, smaller, less-reliable NAND memory products), Violin gets to plan ahead. Basile said Violin manufactures four generations out because it knows what Toshiba has coming down the pike. Being the company’s only U.S. investment and one of its only strategic tech investments in years, “if you do business with us, you’re also doing business with Toshiba,” Basile said.

Of course, Violin’s chances of a successful IPO aren’t hurt by the story of a Fusion-io, a somewhat competitive company that sells solid-state components that plug directly into servers and serve as high-performance caching layers. Fusion-io has been experiencing major revenue increases and, as of late February, was trading at 160 times earnings.

As Basile explained, everyone involved in the flash space is riding the wave of ever-lower flash memory prices and the entry of mega companies such as EMC, Oracle (e orcl) and HP into the space. “The argument [for flash adoption] becomes not if, only when,” Basile said. “And then, how much?”

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Is Apple's e-textbook ecosystem ready for the 2012 – 2013 school year?

Many schools in the U.S. haven’t even had their spring break yet, but school administrators are already planning for the next school year. For public schools that means determining how best to allocate scarce financial resources and trying to determine how far they can push their budgets before the residents and homeowners in their district will vote them down. School IT departments meanwhile are beginning to consider what major projects and upgrades they’ll be doing over the summer recess.

Although this decision-making process tends to run like clockwork for most schools and districts, this year there’s a new factor to consider: Apple’s iPad-based iBooks 2 e-textbook initiative (as well as the iPad itself).

Apple announced its textbook strategy more than two months ago. Since then both the company and schools have been pretty silent on the matter. If anything from that announcement gets discussed in most circle, it’s iBooks Author, the free Mac application for creating interactive books and listing them for sale in Apple’s iBooks store.

Apple may not have said much about its e-textbook plans since January, but it did launch the new Apple Configurator tool for deploying and managing iPads (and other iOS devices) earlier this month. Having worked with many school IT departments over the past decade, my first impression of Configurator was that it was practically tailor made for K-12 education in general and for cash-strapped schools in particular.

Configurator itself is free – a fact that makes it an attractive option compared to many mobile device management suites that, while excellent, are aimed more at business needs and can easily incur licensing costs beyond what many schools can easily afford. Configurator is capable of deploying, backing up, and managing up to 30 devices at a time, which dovetails nicely with the  learning lab kits from Apple as well as other iPad cart and charging systems on the market by companies like Datamation and Bretford, whose primary customers are schools. Configurator also is designed to facilitate library-style sharing of devices in which users receive their documents, files, and settings regardless of which device they use – very similar to how schools work with laptops in the classroom when 1-to-1 deployments are beyond a district’s means.

Many schools have already done iPad deployments, either in a shared in-classroom system or a 1-to-1 style program where each student gets his or her own iPad for the duration for the entire school year or their entire time at that school. Shared programs are most common at the elementary school level while 1-to-1 programs are seen most at the high school level. Middle schools tend to vary depending on the resources and prevailing opinions of the school or district.

While there are noted advantages to the iPad in education, managing the initial deployment can be challenging for schools and IT departments on technical and logistical levels. 1-to-1 setups offer the most challenges because each iPad needs to be delivered to a student and someone at the school (IT team members, teachers, administrative staff, or interns) must ensure that the device is properly enrolled with a management system. Regulations mandating filtering software for student computers and devices is also a challenge, particularly when devices leave the school’s network and connect from home or public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Mobile device management vendor MobileIron offers a recorded webinar with officials from the Lexington One school district in South Carolina that describe the challenges and experiences of the district’s mass roll out of 7,000 devices in a 1-to-1 setup (free registration required).

Apple’s e-textbook initiative goes beyond a simple roll out. It includes buying textbooks for each student and deploying them. The roll out isn’t a particularly trying task. It’s essentially just another small component of the mass deployment process. But vetting, choosing, and purchasing the textbooks is a different story.

Apple’s textbook section of the iBooks store is still very small. As of this writing it has just over 30 titles and doesn’t completely cover the needs of a single grade level. That means schools face a choice of going into next year with a hodgepodge selection of both electronic and printed texts if they adopt both iPads and iBooks e-textbooks.

Given the expense involved and limited selection, schools may be better off going with just printed texts for the coming school year with the hope that Apple’s selection will grow significantly over the course of the next year. In that case, schools could do a full or partial iPad deployment to students this coming year without e-textbooks. That would reduce the initial cost compared to going whole hog into Apple’s new ecosystem and it would allow a year for teachers and IT to work out any kinks while printed texts are still the primary references.

Obviously, Apple is not the only game in town for electronic textbooks in the classroom. Amazon offers its own selection of electronic textbooks through its Kindle store and has a larger selection at this point and it allows users to rent many of them, though renting textbooks may appeal more to college students than to school districts.

Amazon’s Kindle devices can also be bought at much less expensive price points but aren’t as well suited to education as the iPad. The iPad’s versatility and selection of apps are two advantages for K-12 students. The bigger advantage is the iPad’s manageability, which is a must-have in the K-12 market.

The Kindle iPad app does make Kindle textbooks an option beyond Apple’s e-textbooks, which brings up the issue of standardization. Any school or district is going to want to create a single source ecosystem to streamline purchases, deployments, classroom use, and troubleshooting. That means one e-textbook platform be it Apple’s, Amazon’s, or printed textbooks.

It also means picking a single device platform that schools can buy with a level of trust about future software updates, new models, and easy device replacement if needed. The platform most also be secure and manageable. This gives Apple a big leg up over the Kindle as well as Android tablets because it produces everything in the chain – hardware, OS, app purchase and distribution, and updates. Apple is also a proven name in the education space that schools are most schools feel they can trust.

What decisions will schools make for the next budget cycle and summer IT projects? Most likely, many will choose iPads if they choose a tablet or e-reader strategy. Most probably won’t jump into Apple’s e-textbook system for the 2012 – 2013 schoolyear, however. The system is almost certainly too new and too unproven for more the test or pilot program. As to how will win in an e-textbook battle between Apple and Amazon? Stay tuned.