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While most people are curious about and looking forward to seeing Apple’s iPad launch in March, we bet some people are not as excited.

That would be publishers.

Presently, when readers subscribe to a digital version of their favorite newspaper, it is the newspaper publisher that gets the revenue while their cost of distribution is virtually zero.

With the iPad, it is more complicated. By reading periodicals on the device, not only are users going to give money to the newspapers, but also to Apple. It appears that thirty percent of the revenue would be go to Apple, with what is left going to the publisher. It makes sense for book publishing, but for a newspaper, whose subscriptions must be renewed every year, it is a bitter pill to swallow.

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Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands.

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I count myself among the growing number of people who are dissatisfied with netbooks.

Wrist pain, poorly formatted and slowly loading web pages, sound so low that watching films just doesn’t work, lack of a DVD drive, the “Pez-dispenser” keyboard . . . all work to offset the device’s low price and portability.

Maybe consumers are starting to see this.

Fifty-five percent of consumers don’t view netbooks as viable replacements for a laptop, according to Pricegrabber.com (PDF). The main reason is the cramped computing area: fifty-four percent replied that this is the primary reason they wouldn’t replace their laptop with a netbook. The other major reasons are lack of a CD drive (50 percent) and minimal storage (49 percent).

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When Apple opens the iBook store in March to coincide with the launch of its computing tablet, the iPad, book buyers will experience something familiar to iTunes store patrons. FairPlay, the digital rights management system that was used for iTunes music purchasing (discontinued last year), will now be reinstated for digital book purchases.

Created to deter piracy for songs, Apple and partnered book publishers hope that FairPlay will benefit sales numbers for iBooks. This goes contrary to the opinion of O’Reilly Media, publishers of technical and do-it-yourself titles, who argues that digitally locking media is harmful to sales, reports the Los Angeles Times. O’Reilly, who is in discussions with Apple regarding iPad publishing, as well as other publishers in agreement, may opt-out of DRM for their content.

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Officially announced today, Google Buzz is an integrated Gmail feature that brings Twitter-like functionality to one of the more popular Webmail services. At the Google Event this morning, the announcement team showed how Buzz is for conversation and updates as well as sharing images and videos.

The Gmail Blog explains that the service is all about real-time, social sharing. As the service rolls-out to more Gmail members, users will find that they are automatically following the people that they email and chat with the most. Conveniently, Buzz also connects with Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter.

For anyone who has been using the real-time features of Twitter or Facebook status updates, Buzz is the same suit in a different color. The service even uses Twitter’s signature @replies to send updates directly to a contact’s inbox. A few more subtle options set it slightly apart.

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More than 36 million Americans have been the victim of identity theft in the last four years, according to Javelin. Usually, the way you find out our ID was stolen is when your bank account or credit is affected. ID Watchdog’s idCHECK, promises to change that by alerting consumers that their ID has been stolen before damaging transactions occur.

“Identity theft impacts millions of consumers every year, but often goes undetected for months or even years, giving thieves plenty of time to do serious damage,” said Daniel Mohan, President and Chief Operating Officer of ID Watchdog.

idCHECK crawls thousands of consumer databases to examples of the theft of a user’s identity. By scraping all of the data on the databases, idCHECK quickly identifies suspicious uses of customers’ data. Think of it like a credit report, but about the privacy of your data.

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Facebook started rolling out navigation updates to its user homepage yesterday, with an emphasis on making the menu bars more powerful and quick to use. Since the new features are still being phased in, most users will still be stuck with the previous design and other people’s screengrabs of the new look, just like yours truly.

As staff engineer Jing Chen explains on the blog, the top menu will have little icons that trigger pop-up menus for notifications, requests and messages. When there is a new notification, etc, a red bubble will appear on the left near the search bar.

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Fifty-seven percent of consumers are likely to abandon an online purchase if they can’t find quick answers to questions, according to Forrester.

“If 50 percent of customers can’t find the answer they’re looking for on a site, they leave the site and become what eBay calls ‘silent sufferers,’” says Mark Gaydos, VP of Worldwide Marketing for VirtuOZ, a Paris and San Francisco-based virtual avatar (VA) company.

Most consumers want to find the information themselves on a site, whether through search or FAQ’s; email and call centers are often a last resort.

VirtuOZ merges the two, fusing the facility of search with the engagement of conversation, providing companies with virtual avatars that turn customer service search and FAQ’s into a dialogue with a virtual representative personalized to the brand.

The goal is to increase customer engagement, while reducing the time involved in answering customers’ questions and resolving their problems.

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Recently it was revealed that the most popular password for online sites is ‘123456.’

Not exactly Dan Brown-level cryptography.

Even more eye-opening is that consumers aren’t even careful with the stuff that’s really vulnerable – their bank passwords.

Seventy-three percent of people reuse their bank passwords on other, non-financial, sites, according to online security firm Trusteer (PDF). Forty-seven percent use both their banking password and user ID on nonfinancial sites.

This just makes it too easy for criminals, who can hack into less-secure sites like email or social networks to get bank passwords or other sensitive information.

While some institutions try to increase users’ protection by choosing unique IDs for them, 42 percent of those users end up using that unique ID with at least one nonfinancial site. Sixty-five percent of users who create their own unique user name use that name on at least one nonfinancial site.

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So it’s official. The Apple tablet rumors have ended.

At this morning’s Apple event in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled what Silicon Valley has been whispering about for years. Dubbed the ‘iPad,’ Apple’s tablet could be just the thing to launch smartphone-notebook hybrids into the mainstream.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” Jobs said at the event.

The iPad is fundamentally a netbook-sized iPhone. Outside of the design, the most impressive thing about the iPad is its 10-hour battery life, which is pretty representative of what we should expect from the category. Also impressive is the weight – 1.5 pounds.

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