Venerdì 2 dicembre 2011, alle ore 11.15, presso il Centro Congressi del Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale, via Salaria 113, sarà presentato in anteprima il film tv “Il delitto di via Poma”, di Roberto Faenza, in onda in prima serata il 6 dicembre su Canale 5. Alle 13.15 seguirà la conferenza stampa di presentazione alla quale saranno presenti, oltre al regista con gli attori,  Silvio Orlando, Giulia Bevilacqua, Michele Alhaique, Astrid Meloni, Giorgio Colangeli, Massimo Popolizio, Imma Piro, il regista e sceneggiatore Roberto Faenza,  il produttore Taodue Pietro Valsecchi , il direttore Fiction Mediaset  Giancarlo Scheri,  il  direttore del Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca sociale Mario Morcellini. il rettore della Sapienza Luigi Frati.

Gli studenti che intendono partecipare non devono accreditarsi

La locandina

Ufficio stampa Mediaset - Serena Scarfone 3316749337 - serena.scarfone@mediaset.it

Sabato 3 dicembre, alle ore 17.30, presso il Punto Einaudi di Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 94 (Piazzetta Barracano) a Salerno, avrà luogo la presentazione del volume Neogiornalismo. Tra crisi e Rete, come cambia il sistema dell’informazione, a cura di Mario Morcellini

Il libro, edito da Mondadori Università, all’interno della collana “Libri per la comunicazione”, rappresenta una riflessione sulla crisi di mission e di legittimità del giornalismo nell’Italia di oggi; un dialogo a più voci che chiama in causa studiosi e professionisti dell’informazione nei diversi settori dell’industria culturale italiana (stampa, radio, televisione, web).

All’incontro, moderato da Anna Bisogno, docente a contratto in Scrittura e Cultura della Comunicazione presso la Sapienza Università di Roma, intervengono Mario Morcellini, Direttore del Dipartimento Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma e curatore del libro, Paolo Di Giannantonio, Giornalista Tg1 Rai, Antonio Preziosi, Direttore Radio Uno e Gr Rai, Raffaele Rauty, docente di Storia del pensiero sociologico presso l’Università degli Studi di Salerno e Maria Pia Rossignaud, Direttore di Media Duemila.

Apple‘s market cap rose to a record high of $400 billion on Jan. 19, 2012. With its earnings report due later today, Apple may be delivering even more financial surprises, perhaps a new sales record.

Did you know the corporation is already worth more than Greece? This is quite the achievement for the 35-year-old company, which only had a $10 billion market cap 10 years ago.

We’ve found seven more things Apple is worth more than — prepare yourself to be very surprised. And be sure to check out the awesome Tumblr Things Apple Is Worth More Than for more examples. What other examples can you think of? Let us know in the comments below.

1. 4,000 Trips to the Moon

It costs a mere $100 million to travel to the moon in a $1.7 billion space shuttle (of which Apple could afford 235). With 60,400 full-time Apple employees, can you say "company picnic in outer space?"

Image courtesy of Marcin Wichary.

Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Håkan Dahlström

More About: apple, earnings, features, stock market

Several websites are flexing their digital muscles Tuesday, offering interactive ways to watch, learn about and participate in the State of the Union address on your browser or phone.

Aside from having the option to see President Barack Obama‘s 9 p.m. ET speech on TV, you can jump into the political dialogue surrounding it before he speaks, learn more during the address via online features and even get involved with post-SOTU activities such as the Republican response.

So here’s our quick breakdown of where to watch the address and interact with fellow viewers before, during and after Obama updates Congress, Americans and the rest of the world about the nation’s condition and his legislative priorities. Will you be tuning in? Let us know in the comments where you will watch the speech.

1. Before

• Watch Behind-The-Scenes Footage: The White House’s YouTube channel has posted several videos leading up to Tuesday night’s address. This one gives you the inside scoop on the speech-making process.
• Write Your Own State of the Union in a Tweet: Yahoo’s election blog — The Ticket — is challenging readers to describe how they feel about the state of the nation using just 140 characters, including the hashtag #sotu140. The example Yahoo provided was, “Jobs numbers up, but many, esp. veterans and small biz, still hurting. No clear exit in Afghanistan; Iraq over. What’s up with TSA? #sotu140.” Can you do better?
• Ask the President Something: You can submit questions about any topic via video or text using YouTube’s Moderator tool, and Obama will answer the top-voted ones after the speech during a Google+ Hangout on Jan. 30 on the White House’s new Google+ page.
• Join #BarackTalk at 7:30 p.m. ET: On the League of Young Voters’ UStream channel, you can participate in the group’s #BarackTalk viewing party and panel discussion.

2. During

• Watch the Address on Mashable: Take in the speech via PBS News Hour’s UStream embed below.
• Check Out Mashable‘s Live Tweets From the White House: Mashable reporter Alex Fitzpatrick is in Washington, D.C., for the State of the Union tweetup, where starting at 7:30 p.m. ET he’ll tweet about the address and subsequent panel with advisers. Follow his tweets in the embedded Storify at the bottom of this post. The panel includes White House Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council Mark Zuckerman, Special Assistant to the President for Education Policy Roberto Rodriguez, Deputy Director National Economic Council Brian Deese, Deputy NSA for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes and Deputy White House Communications Director Jen Palmieri.
• View the “Enhanced” Version of the Address: At WhiteHouse.gov or on the White House iPhone and Android app, you can watch Obama’s speech live while simultaneously viewing graphics, data and stats as the president speaks. A standard broadcast is also available for people with slower Internet connections.
• Tune in on Facebook: Using the White House Live app, you can watch the address and discuss it with fellow Facebook users all in one place.
• Use Relevant Hashtags on Twitter: Aside from #SOTU, use these ones during Obama’s speech.

The @WhiteHouse has identified hashtags for tonight’s SOTU, including #jobs, #manufacturing, #energy, #education and #fairness.

— Matthew K (@ProducerMatthew) January 24, 2012

3. After

• Watch the Republican Response: Head over to this YouTube channel to watch the post-speech comments from Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.
• Submit Questions to White House Senior Advisers: The White House encourages viewers to use Facebook and Twitter to submit questions about Obama’s speech for senior advisers to answer. On Twitter, use hashtag #WHchat. On Facebook, go to the White House Live app.
• Help Translate the Speech Into Other Languages: Be part of PBS News Hours subtitle team by translating the address in any language. Last year’s speech was translated into nine languages.
• Hang Out With Obama on Google+: Less than a week after the address, Obama will participate Jan. 30 in his first Google+ Hangout in which he’ll respond to questions from YouTube users. Click here to find out how to watch the Hangout and even be invited to join the Hangout. “This year when we started discussing a post-SOTU YouTube interview with the White House we threw in the new availability of Google + Hangouts,” a Google spokesperson told Mashable on Monday. “The White House agreed — it seemed like a great new use of technology to connect people face to face with the president.”

[View the story "The State of the Union, Live From the White House" on Storify]

Photo from WhiteHouse.gov, Chuck Kennedy

More About: 2012 election, barack obama, Live Stream, Politics, state of the union

1. Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington’s constantly updated Facebook Timeline gives us quite a view of the Huffington Post founder's busy life. Not only do many of Huffington’s updates include personal photos, but she’s also created Timeline events dating back her whole life to represent her achievements and the Huffington Post’s milestones.

Click here to view this gallery.

While the rest of the world worries about the looming deadline to switch to Facebook Timeline, these celebs have already got it covered.

Not only that, we’ve seen celebrities experiment with adding more photos to their posts, and showing their personal sides to fans. Timeline integration allows us insight into the lens of fame, and it’s exciting to see so many celebrities embracing this level of access.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Timeline Roll Out: Everything You Need to Know

We gathered together 11 famous faces that are setting the pace for Facebook Timeline, so click through the gallery to see why we picked each one.

Is there a celebrity you follow on Facebook that you think is doing a great job curating his or her Timeline? Tell us in the comments.

More About: celebrities, Facebook, facebook timeline, features, web celebrities

Apple makes its product packaging with stealthy love. An advanced copy of Adam Lashinsky’s book, Inside Apple, reveals product packaging is another thing Apple keeps under lock and key. The tech giant has a secret room — accessible only by security badges — dedicated to hundreds of variant prototype product packaging options for products like the iPad.

“To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks – opening boxes,” NetworkWorld’s iOnApple blog quoted from Lashinsky’s book.

Packaging designers must open box after box to test the positioning of the invisible stickers stuck to the top of iPod boxes. The invisible tape must be placed exactly, Lashinsky explained.

Packaging is taken more seriously at Apple than other technology companies because Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who died in late 2011, cared about every last detail. He wanted customers to feel a certain emotion when opening Apple products.

MacRumors quotes Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, from Walter Isaacson’s bio on Steve Jobs: “You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”

Apple’s package designs have sophisticated utilization of white space, which differs much from Microsoft’s fit-a-lot-of-information-on-the-box approach. A YouTube video reveals how Microsoft might package an Apple product.

So the next time you open an Apple product, remember a packaging designer spent hours selecting the perfect box and precise placement of stickers. Watch the video to find out more about Apple’s packaging details.

More About: adam lashinsky, apple, ipod, mashable video, packaging, steve jobs, Walter Isaacson

For more Dev & Design coverage:

• Follow Mashable Dev & Design on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Dev & Design channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Dutch appeals judges ruled Tuesday that Samsung's Galaxy Tab tablet is not a copy of Apple's popular iPad, handing the Korean consumer electronics maker its latest legal victory over its American rival.

When it was launched in August, The Sims Social was the toast of Facebook. This social network-based version of the classic Will Wright game, where you get to guide your avatars toward the twin goals of advancing their careers and acquiring more stuff, was pretty damn hot. A month after release, it had overtaken nearly all those Zynga games at the top of the Facebook tree. Only CityVille remained more popular.

Fast forward to January, and that early growth hasn’t quite panned out. The Sims Social has settled into 4 million players a day, according to metrics firm App Data — impressive numbers, but down from the 4.6 million players it had daily at launch, and below such Zynga hits as FarmVille, Castleville and Words With Friends.

But that doesn’t mean the Sims haven’t racked up some impressive stats on Facebook. Herewith, an infographic from Electronic Arts offers everything you wanted to know about The Sims Social but were afraid to ask: How many times Sims have sex daily (a PG-rated, sheet-covered activity known in the game as “woohoo”), how often those gossipy avatars share secrets, and what the most popular personality traits and shopping items are.

So the EA game may not have toppled Zynga, but with this kind of activity — and 22 million users logging in a month — it’s hard to say it isn’t still a hit, with a solid fan base.

More About: electronic arts, Facebook, sims social, the sims

Social TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs has raised $12 million in a Series B round of funding, which means the company will be expanding its resources to help TV networks and marketers keep track of how audiences are responding to shows via social media sites.

Time Warner Investments led the round with participation from new investor SoftBank Capital and return investors Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Bluefin Labs is best known for its flagship product, Bluefin Signals, an analytics platform that analyzes and organizes social media conversations about U.S. national television. The dashboard interprets the social media response — including tweets and Facebook posts — to more than 11,000+ TV shows and 346,000+ individual airings of those shows. It looks at 5 billion public-facing social media comments each month and then pairs those comments with more than 2.5 million minutes of linear TV time.

Although the product debuted in July 2011, Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 and came out of the MIT Media Labs, with the goal of applying machine learning and cognitive science to the broader goal of understanding how audiences respond to TV shows and ads.

SEE ALSO: Bluefin Signals Measures the Social Media Response to Television

Companies that use the platform — which include mix of television networks, marketers and agencies such as CBS, MediaCom and MTV — gain access to social data about TV shows and commercials to inform the buying and selling of TV media.

Bluefin Labs said in a press release that it plans to use the new financing to accelerate growth of its sales and client services efforts. The company will also “continue to invest heavily in technology and R&D [research and development] to lead further innovation in the field of social TV analytics.”

“We are witnessing a huge shift in consumer behavior, as people now naturally turn to social media to voice their opinions about what they are watching on television,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO, Bluefin Labs. “We are continuing to build out Bluefin’s services that allow us to provide enhanced data which enables our clients to glean more of an understanding of their audiences and target consumers.”

More About: Social Media

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Dutch police have arrested an Estonian man in connection with the Megaupload case into massive online piracy, Dutch prosecutors said Tuesday.

A Colorado judge has denied a defendant’s argument that the Fifth Amendment protects her from decrypting her computer upon authorities’ request.

The decision came during a criminal trial in which the defendant is accused of bank fraud. She argues that allowing authorities access to the data on her computer would violate her constitutional right protecting self-incrimination. But the judge disagreed.

“I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” U.S. District Court Judge Robert Blackburn wrote in his ruling Monday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant’s Fifth Amendment plea. In it, the organization said:

“EFF’s interest in this case is the sound and principled application of the Fifth Amendment to encryption passwords and encrypted information stored on computers. EFF submits this brief to help the Court apply the Fifth Amendment privilege against selfincrimination in a manner that ensures the constitutional rights of those who use this technological measure to protect their privacy and security.”

A letter from the Attorney General’s office opposed the Fifth Amendment plea and reveals the effect the ruling could have on future cases. “This is not a situation where the government seeks to compel a defendant to produce items that may potentially be incriminatory and her act of producing them arguably has evidentiary value to authenticate the items,” it said.

“Public interests will be harmed absent requiring defendants to make available unencrypted contents in circumstances like these,” it went on to say.

Check out the video above to learn more about the case and ruling.

[via Wired]

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, forgiss

More About: laptop, legal, mashable video

Facebook announced Tuesday that profiles, as many of us have known them for years, will be gone in a few weeks — replaced by Facebook Timeline.

Facebook Timeline, the new interface equipped with a plethora of features, was introduced last September at the annual f8 conference in San Francisco. Eager Facebook users could previously test out the new design by activating developer accounts.

In December, Facebook began giving all users the opportunity to switch over. All you had to do to get Facebook Timeline was click the Get Timeline button on the Introducing Timeline page, rather than going through the multi-step process of creating a developer account.

Facebook Timeline, for those of us already using it, has meant a whole lot of changes and new features. Timeline neatly packages your life events in the form of photos, status updates and wall posts.

Here’s an overview on how to fill in your Timeline’s new features:

1. The Timeline Menu Bar

As you scroll down your new Timeline, a floating menu bar will appear at the top of your screen. Use it to add new events.

Click here to view this gallery.

If you’re dedicated to your classic Facebook profile, you may be weary of the implications of losing Facebook as you know it. To help ease the transition, we asked a Facebook spokesperson some of the pressing questions that may be on your mind as you transition to Timeline.

Everything You Need to Know About the Timeline Roll Out

How long until the roll out will be complete?
While Facebook hasn’t specified an exact date the roll out will be complete, they have confirmed the day will come within the next few weeks. In other words, it’s safe to start counting down to the end of the Facebook Wall.

What does the home page notification message say?
The notification lets you know you now have Timeline and will have seven days before it will be live for your friends to see (you can also publish it earlier, should you prefer). It will also direct you to go to the Introducing Timeline page to learn more.

Who will receive it first?
Facebook is starting with a few smaller countries to test performance and then they’ll start rolling everyone over in the next few weeks.

Is there any way for users to go back?
No, Timeline is the new Facebook profile.

What steps do you recommend Facebook users take before they publish their Timelines?
Facebook advises you take the time to review your Timeline and choose what you want to show and what you want to hide (by selecting to “hide” a story or by managing your activity log). Here are two ways you can get started:

1. Choose a Cover photo: Your Cover is the first thing people see when they visit new profiles. It’s a space for you to fill with an image that represents you – the sunset over the ocean on your vacation, the day your baby took her first step, anything you want. Think of it like the cover of a book or album. Your cover photo is in addition to your Facebook profile photo.

2. Manage your Activity Log: Your Activity Log is list of everything that is on your timeline plus activity from the apps or websites you use. The log itself is visible only to you. From your Activity Log, you can choose which stories you want to feature and which ones you’d prefer to hide. To find a specific story or type of story, simply filter by content type or application. You will also find your pending posts here and can quickly approve new content tagged by your friends.

If someone were to not log on to Facebook for three months right now, would they sign on in April with a Timeline they didn’t recognize?
Facebook doesn’t have the specifics figured out for people who haven’t logged onto Facebook for a long time. However, Facebook says it will have to start the seven days for them at some point.

What happens to Facebook Mobile users? Is it the same procedure?
Mobile users will not receive the home page notification message; however, Timeline does appear on Facebook for iOS version 4.1 (or later), iPhone and iPod Touch and Android (version 1.8.1+) devices.

More on Facebook Timeline

Concerned about your privacy with the new Facebook? We’ve got you covered. Take a look through Facebook’s new privacy features to make sure you’re only sharing the information you want public.

Privacy Controls: Profile Editing

You can edit the visibility of individual parts of your profiles right from the profile editing page. In the past, this had to be done from the Privacy Settings page.

Click here to view this gallery.

Ready to get your hands dirty with the new Facebook Timeline? Here are some lovely design ideas we’ve seen that can provide you with some inspiration.

1. Janet Medina

We like the simplicity and the warm message that Janet's profile delivers.

Click here to view this gallery.

1. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn

Playful and fun, we're big fans of Ekkapong's rainy creation.

Click here to view this gallery.

Do you have any more questions about what the Facebook profile overhaul means for you? Let us know in the comments below.

More About: Facebook, facebook timeline, trending

Formspring, a 28-million-member platform for asking and answering questions, is launching its first Android app on Tuesday.

From the app, users can ask their friends or specific users questions, answer questions they have been asked and view their news feeds. It’s a screen-by-screen duplicate of the startup’s iPhone app, which it launched in September.

Though Formspring is mum on how many users its iPhone app has, it says that users on average spend 1.5 hours per session using it. A recent Nielsen report found social media mobile app use to be up 30% and unique mobile visitors on social networks to be up 47% since the same time last year. Formspring is in many ways a social network, so it makes sense to prioritize its mobile accessibility.

Formspring is also launching a new homepage on Tuesday that highlights Formspring features that go beyond asking and answering questions.

“With the new homepage you’ll also be able to see the various Interest channels we created to give members a new way to meet and interact with each other through shared interests,” explains Formspring Founder and CEO Ade Olonoh. “The new redesign also spotlights celebrities taking time to respond to their fans’ most pressing questions and thousands of people building conversation around the Formspring question of the day.”

Incidentally, these are also the features most likely to help the startup establish positive income. The platform has experimented with sponsored questions of the day, which it delivers to all users. Taylor Launter’s account, for instance, once asked users “Have you ever felt like you were living someone else’s life?” and included a link to a YouTube trailer for Abduction, his latest movie. Twitter has shown how sponsored trending topics could be lucrative. And interest channels, which the platform launched in November with partners such as MTV, Hearst and The Huffington Post, could help make Formspring a more friendly environment for advertisers by giving a fuller picture of user interest graphs.

More About: formspring, q&a

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Israel Vasquez, 12, has no computer or Internet access at home, but he needs both to do his homework.

The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and Twitter and other social networks are already reacting to the news and the surprising new Oscar nominees.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is aiming to tightly integrate the whole affair within the social and digital world. Today, Oscar.com is kicking off the first of five live digital specials looking at the awards and the social commentary taking place online.

I’ll be joining What’s Trending host Shira Lazar to discuss the nominations today at 3:00p.m ET/12:00p.m. PT. Watch along below, and let us know in the comments what you think of the Academy’s picks this year.

whatstrending on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

More About: academy awards, oscar.com, Oscars, oscars 2012

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Based on lean startup methodology, Lean Startup Machine is a weekend-long startup competition, as well as a workshop for educating entrepreneurs on lean startup best practices. Founded by NYU business school drop out Trevor Owens, Lean Startup Machine plays host to a list of tech royalty, who come in to advise participants and teach teams how to understand their customers, quickly build, validate or invalidate their initial assumptions and then persevere or pivot, based on that feedback.

Check out our interview to learn how Lean Startup Machine has helped participants figure out if their ideas are valid and pivot if they’re not. Owens elaborates on why he feels that sometimes the best way to give entrepreneurs a dose of reality is to kick them out of the building and what he looks for when reviewing applications for his program (hint: demonstrate that you’re truly dedicated to being an entrepreneur).

Thanks to Mike Brown, Jr. for hosting our shoot at AOL Ventures.

Follow Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor. To join Venture Studio’s Facebook page, click here.

More Recent Episodes of Venture Studio:

• How a Startup Is Revolutionizing the Outdoor Ad Space [VIDEO]
• How One of New York’s Hottest Coworking Spaces Got Started [VIDEO]
• How a Professional Pain Point Led to a Disruptive Business Idea [VIDEO]

More About: entrepreneurs, mashable video, pivot, Startups, Venture, venture studio, Video

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

On Facebook? Like the Mashable Facebook page and check out our favorite articles covering social media, tech news, and digital culture!

If you were a Super Bowl viewer in 1984 who left the room during Apple’s famous “1984″ ad introducing the Mac, you would have soon discovered you made a massive mistake.

In those days before YouTube, if you missed a Super Bowl ad, you really missed it. That was especially true for Apple’s ad, which ran only once. In 2012, of course, it’s a different story. With about two weeks before the big game, some ads are already available online. As for the rest? Try not seeing them after the game.

That’s because even if you avoid YouTube, chances are one of your Facebook friends is going to post one. That’s the upshot of a survey by ad agency Venables Bell and Partners. The San Francisco ad shop polled 1,000 people online who watched the 2011 Super Bowl and planned to watch this year’s as well.

Venables Bell extrapolated those responses and found that there will be a tremendous amount of sharing going on after this year’s game. Most notable: Some 35 million people are likely to post their favorite ad on Facebook. Since the average user has 130 friends, that comes out to 4.5 billion impressions. All of the sudden, the reported $3.5 million for a 30-second spot during the game seems like a huge bargain.

What do you think? Do you intend to share your favorite Super Bowl ads? Let us know in the comments.

Click the image to enlarge.

More About: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Super Bowl

Apple's foray into the e-textbook business started off with a bang, according to a Monday report: The company sold more than 350,000 textbooks through its new version of iBooks in its first three days of availability, an analyst said.

Il 19 gennaio alle ore 18 si terrà il workshop "Condivisione e collaborazione per lo sviluppo dei territori?", organizzato in occasione della recente uscita del libro “La Mano Complessa” di Claudio Cipollini.
Alcuni cittadini, esperti, amministratori, studenti, rispondono in 3 minuti alla domanda, proponendo le loro idee. Intervengono alcuni rappresentanti delle istituzioni.

Rispondono
Federica Alatri, Padre Caesar Atuire, Riccardo Bichara, Bernardo Bini Smaghi, Matteo Caroli, Paolo Cespa, Antonio De Martini, Riccardo Deserti, Luigina Di Liegro, Natale Forlani, Claudio Gagliardi, Andrea Granelli, Romolo Guasco, Alberto Mattiacci, Luigi Mastrobuono, Francesco Montera, Mario Morcellini, Camilla Mottironi, Antonio Romano, Franco Rossi, Giuseppe Sciarrone, Fabiola Sfodera, Giuseppe Tripoli, Cesare Vaciago, Riccardo Venturini
Intervengono
Antonio Buonfiglio, Ferruccio Dardanello, Silvia Godelli, Giovanni Legni ni, Giuseppe Pace, Giovanni Quarzo

Conducono
Claudio Cipollini e Giorgio Santilli - Il Sole 24 ORE

Scarica il pdf con tutte le informazioni
segreteria@associazioneitalia2020.it

When Apple releases its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012 late Tuesday, we’ll learn just how much the tablet market has changed since the release of the Kindle Fire in November — one of the main reasons tablet ownership shot up over the holiday season.

With its bargain-basement price ($199) to the plethora of Amazon services on tap, the Kindle Fire was a hot gift this holiday, and Amazon says it sold a record 4 million Kindles in the holiday (thought it doesn’t separate ereaders from tablets in those figures).

Just how many people opted to buy a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad? At least one investment bank has already weighed in, and we’ll have a better idea in a couple of hours.

Looking back a year, iPad sales over the 2010 holiday season were 7.3 million, up from 4.2 million the previous quarter — a 73% increase. Last quarter Apple sold 11.1 iPads, so to match that the previous year’s spike, Apple would need to have sold 19.3 million iPads.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that if Apple comes up short of that figure that iPad sales have come up short, though. Demand for Apple products is so high that the company regularly has issues keeping up supply, so just being in the neighborhood of that mark will be quite an achievement. But if it’s appreciably short, then Apple have a problem.

A lackluster iPad figure would mean that Apple is seriously challenged by this new low-priced competitor. That would be a big blow to what otherwise is expected to be a big earnings season for Apple, since whatever happens with the iPad, the iPhone 4S is widely expected to give the company its best iPhone sales ever.

It might also give a hint as to Apple’s strategy with iPad 3. For the first two generations of the product, Apple has been consistent in keeping the price stable, just adding features and performance. If the Kindle Fire is seriously cutting into iPad sales, though, that could change.

If its new competitor is a real threat, we might see Apple focus more on aggressive pricing, with merely incremental upgrades to the design. That, or perhaps Apple might take the iPad line in two directions — the original, high-end model and a smaller stripped-down version that will give anyone considering a Kindle Fire reason to head to the Apple Store instead.

Of course, there’s also the very real possibility that iPad sales were barely affected by the Kindle Fire. That would mean tablets have become a two-tier market, with Apple dominating the top and Amazon gobbling up what’s left on the bottom. Anyone thinking about competing (Microsoft, take note) will need to first figure out where they want to take their fight.

Wherever iPad sales end up, we’re going to learn something new about the tablet market, and if we’re lucky CEO Tim Cook might even let slip a hint or two about iPad 3. Mashable will have complete coverage of Apple’s earnings, which the company’s due to release at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Stay tuned.

More About: apple, ipad, ipad 3, kindle fire, tablets, trending

For more Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad