There is a revolution in being able to hold something as fluid, advanced and convenient as the iPad while comfortably leaning back in your chair versus hunching over to use a laptop.  The iPad represents a new computing space.  A space that has been created by our rapidly progressing content consumption trajectory coupled with the inadequacy and discomfort of using the iPhone or laptop in all circumstances.  This dynamic has created the need for a device that will keep us connected, consuming, working and playing in more as well as new capacities.  If you don’t have that need yet, you will eventually, because your busy lives will drag it into being sooner or later.

Here are five reasons why the iPad will penetrate and create a new computing space.

Better Vehicle For Multi-Media Content Consumption

The portability, ease and beautiful display of the iPad make conducive for better consumption of multi-media content in casual settings. Nothing else comes close.  You can’t do it with the iPhone and you won’t (or don’t want to) do it with the laptop.

Practical, Functional, Intelligent Portability

Its unique sense of portability will penetrate key spaces, such as doctors offices, restaurants, the workplace, your home, etc — because it works, its cool and you can carry it with just one hand.  Imagine a waiter taking your order at a neat new restaurant.  That kind of penetration.

Better Than the Kindle

For the digital book reading market, it simply annihilates any other product — by miles.

Innovative Apps

The applications will soon arrive and they will leverage the fact that the iPad is mobile yet large enough to offer serious computing– a brand new dynamic.  New and existing tasks will migrate from laptop and iPhone computing to the iPad.  Imagine leaning back in your couch and flipping through a digital magazine or a new picture album.  The iPad offers a better experience for those simple acts.

Its Cool

There is something magical about holding and manipulating the Internet and various kinds of content in your hand in the way the iPad offers.  The hardware is practically non existent — feeling as if you are interacting with the application and content directly.  No mouse, no keyboard, no monitor, no wires, nothing.  Pretty cool.

On a macro level the iPad is not meant to replace the laptop or the iPhone. It is made for a new space. The casual, travel, leisure space where you can’t consume content via the iPhone and you won’t bother with a clunky laptop. The first generation has a lot of growth to do such as 3g (soon to arrive), a camera (coming), flash video (solution coming) and other features that will be added in over time. However, when the price drops and the features are there it will simply make sense to get one.

On a micro level, if you’ve formed your opinion without having held or used one — Go and hold one first.

I’m excited to announce that about 3AM PST this morning Reply.com successfully filed for its much anticipated 2010 IPO.

SAN RAMON, CA – February 22, 2010 – Reply! Inc. today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock.

Jefferies & Company, Inc. and Piper Jaffray & Co. will act as joint book-running managers for the offering with Needham & Company, LLC and ThinkEquity LLC acting as co-managers. The shares of common stock to be sold in this offering are proposed to be sold by Reply! and certain of Reply!’s stockholders.  The number of shares to be sold in the proposed offering and the offering price have not yet been determined.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities, in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. A written preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained, when available, from the prospectus department of:

• Jefferies & Company, Inc., Equity Syndicate Middle Office, Attn: Stephen M. Ficara, 520 Madison Avenue, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10022 (telephone: 212-284-3418/email: sficara@jefferies.com); or
• Piper Jaffray & Co., Prospectus Department, 800 Nicollet Mall, Suite 800, Minneapolis, MN, 55402 (telephone: 800-747-3924/email: prospectus@pjc.com).

About Reply! Inc.

Reply.com operates a proprietary auction marketplace that enables advertisers to acquire locally-targeted and category-specific customer prospects on a cost-per-Enhanced Click™ or cost-per-lead basis. By eliminating the need for advertisers to develop and maintain complex, expensive online marketing infrastructures and teams of experts to source online consumer traffic from many different channels, Reply.com simplifies online locally-targeted marketing for businesses of all sizes.

Coverage :

TechCrunch - Reply.com Files For $60 Million IPO

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday has left the island nation in complete and utter devastation with death tolls rising to a predicted 100,000.  One of the worst disasters ever seen.

Haiti needs help from everyone and the Red Cross backed by the US State Department have launched a simple viral text message based fundraising initiative to allow everybody to deliver some help to Haiti.  Simply text “Haiti” to 90999 from your phone to donate $10 to the relief effort underway.  The initiative has already raised over $1,000,000 from individuals but is still massively under equipped against the stagering harm.

Your $10 donation is a true testament to the human spirit and will go a long way in providing food, water and shelter to innocent men, women and children displaced by this catastrophe.

The Web has evolved.  It used to be a place where people came to just search for simple information.  Now it’s a place where people come to also share information.  Information today that is multi-media and more complex.  Information today that is real-time and social – recommended by people who know, and people you know.  I refer to this new place as “The Living Web” and recently our team at LeapFish debuted the web’s new search engine made to navigate this new living web.  You can find the press release here :  LeapFish Unveils Real-Time Social Search Engine that Captures the Living Web

VIDEO: LeapFish - Living the Web

Although there are many ways to search and share information, the current experience is fragmented, ineffective, and ultimately inefficient.  On the search side, there are a growing number of disconnected sites for traditional search, niche interests, audio, video, imagery and more.  On the sharing side, there is a universe of segregated social networks, blogs, real-time content, multi-media portals and more.  This growing disconnection and segregation is the challenge that LeapFish has embraced.  By providing a single, connected, multi-media experience for both searching and sharing traditional and real-time content, the new web will be easier to find and easier to share.  Take a look at this video that sums up the challenge that the web and consumers face today.

VIDEO: LeapFish - How it Works

LeapFish benefits everyone online.  Existing portals and services will benefit from a new found search integration that offers them more user engagement and stage time.  Consumers will benefit with access to more of the information the new web has to offer, that was previously tucked away in pages 5, 6, etc of traditional engines.   But most of all, it benefits you the consumer, those living the web by searching and sharing the freshest, most relevant and most interesting content available anywhere.  Take a look at this video to learn more about how the new web is being brought in to one place with LeapFish.

You’ve evolved, the web has evolved, and LeapFish believes its time the search experience evolves too.

Here are four ways LeapFish has helped evolve search :

Real-Time Search Engine : A fresh multi-media real-time search engine capturing results from all containers of real-time content (e.g., Twitter,YouTube, Twitpic, Flickr).

Searching and Sharing : Easy and convenient sharing features empower users to merge traditional content into the social and real-time Web as they search and find content anywhere online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Digg).

Variety of the Web : Delivering rich multi-media content from the deep and wide new Web via integration of leading authorities in website aggregation, videos, images, news, blogs, tweets and much more on every search query (e.g., YouTube, CNN, Twitter).

Personal Internet Dashboard :  Technically advanced customizable personal homepage allowing consumers to build their own dashboard to the Internet by adding multiple news feeds, blogs, applications, tools and more (e.g., Facebook Application, Twitter Application, Mashable Feed)

Reply.com lifts Beta off its locally-targeted online marketing platform as it posts enhanced features and significant profits.  In the face of a struggling economy, Reply.com has posted over 50 percent revenue growth in the Automotive and Real Estate categories and significant profits over the last several quarters.

Reply! Homepage

Since its founding in 2001, Reply! has been a leader in pioneering locally targeted online marketing, including lead generation, in Real Estate, Automotive, Lending and Home Improvement, driving multi-million annual revenues and profits.  Its Enhanced Click(TM) and Per-Lead Marketplace combined with its state of the art technology infrastructure have led to rapid category deployment, precision live auction bidding and significant recent growth.

Reply.com eliminates the need for complex and expensive online marketing infrastructures and empowers businesses with the ability to purchase category specific Clicks and Leads from their local area as easy as purchasing raw clicks from Google.

To learn more about the Reply! Marketplace and setup an account for your business, visit www.reply.com

With all the publicity around WolframAlpha’s engine there has been a lot of buzz in the search space around what the next successful search engine will look like. It was great to get some coverage today from ChannelWeb as they covered WolframAlpha, LeapFish and the Search space.

Here is a snippet from the post :

“With all the publicity recently about Wolfram Alpha, the CRN Test Center came across the relatively new Web site of a search aggregator called LeapFish. Wolfram Alpha is, to use its own term, a computational knowledge engine, which actually bases the results strictly from its own internal knowledge base — no searching of the Web at all. Conversely, LeapFish uses hyper-threading to communicate with multiple search engines simultaneously, in real-time.”

You can find the rest of the article here : ChannelWeb on LeapFish

San Francisco Business Times :  “Reply.com’s online sales lead system tallies big growth”

As a founder and former CTO and Chief of Product of Reply!, it was great to see Reply! featured in the San Francisco Business Times today.  Reply! was founded in June of 2001 by Payam Zamani, Myself and John Truchard and is a product of now nearly 8 years of creativity, talent and production.  Since then Reply! has been on a relentless mission in pioneering the migration from CPC (cost per click) marketing to CPL (cost per lead) marketing for 

advertisers in real estate, lending, home Improvement and other industries.  The article highlighted some of the company’s great growth and great advancements that are being offered to the lead generation space.

Here are some excerpts :

“Zamani says in seven months that despite the hardship hitting his two main verticals, the system has helped grow his business at Reply to the point where he expects to have $40 million in revenue in 2009, versus $24 million in 2008. As a result, Reply has hired 30 people since December, bringing its total headcount to about 100.”

“It gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility in what you need to do to make yourself successful,” said Fenster, who admits to keeping Reply a secret so competitors won’t drive prices up.”

“Sharon Wienbar, managing director of Scale Venture Partners and a member of Reply’s board of directors, said the company is “nicely profitable.”

Read More on the Reply San Francisco Business Times Article Here…

LeapFish received a great post as part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series last week.  The post was written by Ben Parr, who highlights some of our innovative new search features including the No-Click Search. 

Here are some excerpts from the article :

“Genius Idea:  When you’re performing a Google search, you are displayed information in a simple and clean interface. However, usually it’s just search results. Occasionally it will show you image results or news results. Many times though, you want to see everything at once – images, videos, news, and more. Additionally, why should you have to type in the entire word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to see your search results. Isn’t Google smart enough to detect and load what you’re looking with just the first few letters?…These are some of the many problems that LeapFish attempts to solve with its fast and comprehensive search interface. ”

“Every letter you type reloads the search results to match the keywords. And don’t worry about load times- it does this at lightning speeds. So instead of typing in full words, you can get the result you’re looking for in half the time. Video, news, blog and image results line the page neatly and cleanly, making sure that you don’t need to go searching multiple pages or queries to find information.”

“In the end, it combines the good aspects of Google Search results, YouTube, Yahoo! News, and more into one simple interface. It makes searching quick by automatically loading results. It is not a Google replacement, but rather an enhancement. If you’re looking to get your information even faster, especially images and news, then LeapFish is an effective search tool to consider using.”

Read More on the Mashable Post Here…

The March Twitter MacBook Air Random Giveaway is now officially complete and the winner has been selected!   

A big thank you to over 1500 contestants and participants, even those that joined Twitter simply to be eligible for this Apple Laptop giveaway.  Thank you for all the great tweets, follows and fun comments.  So who’s the lucky winner?

Congratulations To :

@ShawnaCoronado

You Are The Lucky Random Winner of A Brand New MacBook Air!

Send Shawna a Congratulations Tweet!  Once again, a big thank you to all the participants and friends!  But there is more…  Stay tuned at @BenBehrouzi for more giveaways coming up very soon…

Thanks for entering,

Ben