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The iPad has made quite a splash, another announcement from Apple creating buzz and curiosity from gurus and Apple fans alike. Here at Scout Labs, we love this kind of stuff. We scouted over 25,000 blog posts with the word “iPad,” just on 1/27/10 alone. That’s about .7% of the entire blogosphere, trumping the State of the Union in both volume and share of voice. While there were undoubtedly mixed reviews, the overall sentiment analysis goes to positive with about 1000 posts trending positive and about 320 trending negative. It will be interesting to watch these numbers as people keep talking about it and the iPad is actually released.

A few graphs from my Scout Labs workspace:

The whole world is talking about it - so we thought we’d dig into the conversation a bit. The conversations are across the board - the iPad name, functionality, accessories and competition. Pretty interesting to see how these topics compare to each other.

Functionality wins for Share of Voice with the main themes being developers, apps, connectivity and the overall “reader” feature. It didn’t take long for accessories to get into the mix - Griffin, Apple, Belkin, and messenger bag designer Tom Bihn all announcing iPad must have’s. While the name iPad is a only 3% of the initial share of voice, its being called everything from questionable to terrible to baneful. Ouch. A few other quotes we found:

The competition is getting some buzz - about 13% of the iPad conversation. Amazon, HP, Dell, Barnes and Noble and Acer all have products on the tablet and reader market or will be entering soon. There’s no question that Apple has expanded the tablet market and they have the added advantage of buzz. Everyone’s talking about it and no one has spent a dime yet.

The pundits, gurus and late night talk show hosts might have a field day with the iPad name but something tells me that Apple doesn’t mind one bit and will be the one laughing all the way to the bank, even if their stock price is a little bit down today.

@erinkoro / erin at scoutlabs dot com

Here at Scout Labs, we know there are some big corporations out there that are still standardized on IE6. We work with some of them, which is why to date we’ve supported IE6. We didn’t want to cut off IE6 users or subject them to a substandard application experience. We know most of them are stuck on IE6 because of IT admins who overinvested in proprietary apps that ONLY work on IE6, have NEVER been updated and never will be, are purposefully holding them back.

But the time has come: Support for IE6 is officially over. Not only is IE6 subpar with respect to speed, stability, and security, it limits the options we have in developing new functionality that relies on more modern, standards based browsers, specifically Javascript dependent interactions. As of our Feb 2010 release, we will finally have hit the wall with IE6: IE6 just doesn’t support the Javascript dependent interactions that our new Assignments functionality, and to a lesser extent upgrades to our graphing and collaboration features, require.

This is a decision point that old skool internet companies like Yahoo and Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and bellwethers in the SAAS space like Salesforce have already gone past. Hell, 37signals phased out IE6 support in October of 2008, which is the Internet equivalent of the Nixon era. Even Europe is following suit. But for those of you still using IE6, here are some options:

• If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use any browser more modern than Internet Explorer 6. You can download Firefox or Chrome for free. As of Feb 2010 Scout Labs officially supports IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.


• Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Even IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6. Though we’d pick IE8 over IE7 any day.


• If you don’t have the necessary permissions on your computer, find the person who does. If they wont help you, send them this link: http://www.ie6nomore.com/ Or this one: http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com/ Or this one, from a Microsoft employee: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IE6WarningStopLivingInThePastGetOffOfIE6.aspx Or….you get the picture.


• If you are denied permission to upgrade past IE6, go find a company executive who believes in the future. This is a great way for some up-and-comer to make everyone in the company more productive via upgraded internet tools and experiences, and themselves wildly popular (with all non-IT personnel) in the process.
  

The cool part is, now we get to support Chrome- which is a fun browser, and great news for users of Microsoft OS products of a more recent vintage. And for all you network admins who just can’t seem to get everyone off IE6 and Win2000? Better hurry up, before every SAAS app your workforce relies on becomes standard equipment on the corporate smartphone- and no one gives a hoot about that big old box with a ten year old browser on it, anyway.

For those of you that are simply interested in getting a better idea of what Scout Labs is, and would like to see it live before making the choice to sign up, we are offering a daily demo (roughly 30 minutes), at 11:00am PST Tuesdays and Thursdays.

During each session, you will get the back story of what Scout Labs is all about; What we do and how we do it, and also a demonstration of the application.

We believe that Scout Labs is so easy to use, that anyone can dive in and start using the app, without our help. Usually, that is the case. But we’ve also heard that people really benefit from a product walk through where they can see the big picture. During the demo, we’ll address questions like: How are different businesses using Scout Labs? What are the core functionalities? and How is Scout Labs different from other applications out there?

Anybody can join a session - prospective or existing customers. Please register here for the Scout Labs Live Demo - there are sessions scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday so that you can chose which day works best for you.

More importantly, we THANK YOU for your interest in Scout Labs - and look forward to getting to know you too.