I’m a huge sucker for new technology and I think there are thousands of products that need an update. In fact, the very old (two years) Bluetooth keyboard I use every day could be donated so that I can buy the snazzy aluminum/titanium/polished metal version sitting in my abandoned Apple shopping cart.

The “new” mobile offerings from Apple today left me feeling less than impressed, but there’s very good reason for the minimal changes being sold this week. For starters, the MacBook Air is very new and the form factor can simply not be duplicated until at least a 120-day retail cycle happens.

In terms of the specs, there is a feature that makes me look forward to the next MacBook Pro that I purchase: the multi-touch pad. However, by the time they get to what I want, it’ll be eight machines from now. I would love a programmable multi-touch pad. I’m pretty sure that this can be done by using current hardware.

Next up: The iPhone SDK. Today’s 1.1.4 iPhone firmware update weighed in at a healthy 162 Mb.

It’s funny when we get into a debate with a client about their own audience. We often find out in these situations how much both sides don’t know about the customer.

In these cases, we lean on both the statistical data and the experience we’ve collected and take a shot at running tests to see how close we can get. We usually get pretty darned close.

But what happens if the client isn’t willing to disclose certain information or the audience is not allowed to see the new interface design until it goes out to beta?

Design to the user.

It’s at the point where I say this in my sleep. I design user experience. It’s based on the user and their experience. End of story. I don’t design applications or Web sites or software UI to meet the specifications of a machine or a database. That’s left to the capable hands of the back-end development team.

What I expect them to return to me is the data the USER needs in order to make the EXPERIENCE as painless as possible.

Our lives are filled with applications that spit out millions of data points and while a user’s interaction is much more savvy on the Web than it was ten years ago, it’s not so savvy as to correctly guess at what they’re supposed to do without some sort of roadmap.

It’s still ok to hold hands and it’s still ok to give them a map.

Keep the user experience useful.

You could smell death in the air the moment Warner chose to support Blu-Ray. With five major studios and a major game system (Playstation 3) behind it, Blu-Ray was picking up steam and slamming press release after press release in the face of Toshiba, Microsoft and Intel.

But this victory may come at a significant cost to the consumer. As much as it would be lovely to think that supporters of the new format would be competing against each other in the hardware space, this may not be the case. Blu-Ray will be less expensive, eventually, just like all technology based items. However, the road to affordable personal development of high definition DVDs will be bumpy for sure.

I have seen both formats and have been swayed by the marketing effort of Blu-Ray. They simply did a better job with their brand. With a tip to my cap to Toshiba, congratulations to the new / old next best thing.

If you are one of the billion people in the world who accept the Apple method of control and, admittedly, the epitome of electronic distribution then Steve Jobs has news for you: they’ll handle your software applications for the iPhone and iTouch as well. No problem. They’ll take it all.

Why? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen once the SDK finally reaches the masses and those masses clamor to strut their stuff.

Small development and creative firms will try to create the next $1.99 killer application and larger development firms will try to close the gap between business productivity and one of the coolest devices ever created.

Will this mean that there won’t be any freeware?

Of course not, but consider the stronghold of Apple in their distribution of electronic content. They’ll be certain to set strict guidelines surrounding QA, pricing and size than any standalone development shop. And, if they’re going to have the opportunity to charge you for their control, then they should implement best practices to refund or allow credit for items which do not meet specifications or the promise to customers.

The development community, as always, has the say on whether or not they’ll sign on for distribution with Apple. The choice to not join, however, would be detrimental to the bottom line. In reality, it could stop all means of getting the product out the door.

Very quietly, under cover of broadband, Yahoo! yesterday purchased Maven Networks, Inc. of Cambridge for approximately $160 million.

The sale itself isn’t so much of interest, it’s what the technology will mean to Yahoo! as they drive towards competing (if you can still call it that) with Google.

The partnerships created by Maven include Fox News and Hearst, so the client list is impressive enough. The video on demand (for professional media companies) is still lacking and seems to be a wide-open market. Without any hard data to go on, I’d love to see how advertising numbers look for on-demand Web video, what the conversion rates are for sports versus news, etc…

Unfortunately, those numbers are hard to get unless you work for the actual media company.

This should at the very least give Yahoo! a proven technology that allows them to best use their advertising department to alter the revenue models and build another cash queue.