Sitting down to chat last year with Amazon.com Inc.’s Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, television host Charlie Rose announced that the two would discuss “the Kindle,” Amazon’s e-reader. But throughout the interview, Mr. Bezos repeatedly dodged the word “the,” saying how “Kindle is succeeding,” that “Kindle is a companion to tablet computers” and touting how many e-books are “available for Kindle.”

Mr. Bezos is part of a growing cadre of marketers who conscientiously object to using articles — the tiny English words “the,” “a” and “an” that typically precede many nouns.

Nintendo Co.’s website shows gamers “what Wii is all about.” As far back as 1984, Apple Inc. said in a commercial that it would “introduce Macintosh.” Today, an Apple video enthuses: “There’s never been anything like iPad.” Some companies make the drop official. Research In Motion Ltd.’s style guide specifies that “BlackBerry” should be used “as an adjective and not as a noun or verb.” An unacceptable usage, it says: “the BlackBerry.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This debut was supposed to happen a few weeks ago in San Francisco, with Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs sharing stage time. Instead, Murdoch will show off his new publication at the Guggenheim in New York, with Apple content boss Eddy Cue stepping in for Jobs.

We’ve got a very good idea of what to expect: A newspaper that’s both old-fashioned and cutting-edge, which will sell for 99 cents a week or $40 a year. And the best way to experience the new publication will be on an iPad, not at a museum.

Still, it will be interesting to hear News Corp. pitch this one in real time, and to see how it leverages all of its resources and a very rare Apple endorsement. (This Web site, we should note, is owned by News Corp. as well.)

10:40 am: Greetings! So excited to be in the Guggenheim that I’m starting this one a few minutes early.

10:44 am: And here’s Jon Miller, who has been shepherding this thing at News Corp. Here’s some fresh scoop! The Daily will be be live onstage for the demo, he says, but won’t appear at the app store until noon.

[Note: The Daily can be found here at the Apple App Store]

10:47 am: Miller is working the room very well; now chatting up Reuters’ Ken Li.

10:48 And Steve Rubenstein, who has been handling PR for the Daily launch. He semi-taunts me by noting that there were tasty canapés at Rupert Murdoch’s private party Tuesday night.

10:49 am: If you’d simply like to watch a livestream of the event, minus my commentary, head to thedaily.com at 11 ET.

10:50 am: That sound you hear is the rustle of departing page views.

10:51 am: Cunning of the News Corp./Rubenstein/event-planning crew to split up the press by species. Gives us something to talk about.

10:52 am: BREAKING NEWS! Jon Miller says Wi-Fi here at the Guggenheim has been working “intermittently.”

10:52 am: WAAAAAAY More interesting is that Engadget’s Joanna Stern being hassled for daring to take out a camera during a press conference. She is being moved three seats back. Where that’s OK, apparently.

10:56 am: Pre-launch music, btw: Some kinda samba thing going on. Festive and, dare I say, a smidge bit sexy. Rowr!

10:58 am: Slightly curious is that registration staff told media that they’ll have “review units” available after presser. But everyone in media has an iPad, right? It’s required, no?

Perhaps the notion is that the presser will end before noon, and the Daily won’t be available until then, so if you want to get hands-on in the meantime, that’s the way to go. Which would be smart!

On the other hand, if they’re simply handing out free “review” units to the press, well, that’s kinda smart too. Because the press likes free stuff.

11:03 am: Our crack tech guy Adam Tow tells me TheDaily.com site is now saying that the app will be available at noon ET. I can’t see that on my screen, but I’ll take his word for it.

Especially because that’s what Jon Miller said a few minutes ago.

11:05 am: Given News Corp. pub WSJ’s focus on privacy, and Apple’s, interesting to review the Daily’s:

When you use the Services, we may collect certain non-personally identifiable information about that use. For example, in order to permit your connection to the Services via the Internet, our servers receive and record information about your computer and browser, including potentially your IP address, browser type, and other software or hardware information. If you access the Services from a mobile or other device, we may also collect transactional information such as a unique device identifier assigned to that device (“UDID”), your geolocation, or other transactional information for the device in order to serve content to it. We also may use cookies and other tracking technologies (including browser cookies, pixels, beacons, and Adobe Flash technology including cookies), which are comprised of small bits of data that often include an anonymous unique identifier. Websites send this data to your browser when you first request a web page and then store the data on your computer so the web site can access information when you make subsequent requests for pages from that site. We may use these technologies to collect and store information about your use of the Services, such as pages you have visited, search queries you have run, and advertisements you have seen.

11:06 am: And we’re live. Here’s Rupert Murdoch, iPad in hand.

“Good morning. I’m Rupert Murdoch.”

Thanks for the “amazing Steve Jobs,” a man who has “single-handedly changed the world” of technology and media.

“Steve has been a champion of the Daily from day 1.”

“New times demand new journalism.” [hrm]

Trying to take best of traditional journalism, including “shoe-leather reporting” editing, “a skeptical eye” [hrm!] and combine them with awesome tech.

“”Simply put, the iPad demands that we completely re-imagine our craft”

Shooting for audience that is sophisticated and reads a lot, but not print.

We have that, but it’s niche. No “true news discovery.” The magic of newspapers “and great blog” lies in “serendipity.”
True!

Similarly, we must make the business of news-gathering viable again.

Goal is to be indispensable source for news and entertainment. “A robust new voice.”

Shout-outs to Jesse Angelo and Greg Clayman, who run editorial and business, respectively, for the new pub.

Daily will be 14 cents a day–99 cents a week–because no printing, delivery costs, etc.

More superlatives for the Daily, including a “sense of fun.”

Target audience is “tablet” audience–[note emphasis on tablet, not iPad].

And a shout-out to Jon Miller, too.

[Unless I misheard and it was News Corp. CTO John McKinley.]

“We believe the Daily will be the model for how stories are told and how they’re consumed.”

And another shout-out to “all our friends at Apple”

Okay. Here are Miller, Angelo, Clayman.

11:13 am: Miller starting off. Not a demo–this is live production.

Trying to figure out how to produce new news for tablet era. “We think we’ve developed that.”

Angelo shows off home screen of the Daily, with Egypt as main headline. Applause.

Have been doing live production for about six weeks.

11:14 am: They have a reporter on the ground in Cairo right now. Josh Hirsch [sp?].

Lots of big pictures, video embedded in text.

And here’s one of the 360-degree photos. Which look cool!

Can put audio behind them, etc.

HD video–here’s a clip about prisoners making toys in Angola prison. Note the bluesy background music. ’Cause it’s about a prison, duh.

11:16 am: Back to Miller. Have rethought navigation.

11:17 am: Back to Angelo, showing off swipey carousel. Sorta silly to describe this to you in a liveblog, but there’s a “play” function and a “shuffle function,” and a video anchor who will discuss the main stories of the day.

11:18 am: Back to MIller. “The Daily is not an island” can share to Facebook, Twitter, email.

11:18 am: Angelo: We can also pull HTML5 pages into device. Can also link out. [Subtext--we are TOTALLY NOT ignoring the Web, you dummies. We're not idiots.]

Bringing Twitter feeds directly into app. So you can see what Lily Allen (used to be semi-famous a couple of years ago) has to say about something.

11:19 am: Miller: We have apps and games section, with a link directly to Apple Store.

And we have an awesome sports section [sounds familiar!].

11:20 am: Angelo: Yes, check out our awesome sports section. Troy Polamalu talking about Clay Matthews’s hair.

“For sports fans, we really think this is the showstopper”–customizable sports filter by team/sport, brings in scores, tweets, etc.

11:21 am: Miller: Publishing once a day, with updates throughout the day “as the news warrants.”

Verizon sponsoring first two weeks of free subscriptions.

11:22 am: The art in this liveblog, by the way, is coming directly from livestream. Nice job, Adam Tow.

11:22 am: Here’s Eddy Cue. Never seen him before. A very, very, very big deal in media circles.

Running through iPad, iOs success. iPad customers are huge news eaters. 200 million news apps downloaded so far.

I’ve been using the Daily for the last two weeks. “It’s amazing.” Amazing that it’s done every single day. More superlatives, etc.

Basically, a repeat of what Miller et al just said.

Okay. Here are the new details on push subscriptions. First time Apple has used this tech. 99 cents a day, $40 a year. [ahem].

11:26 am: And now, oddly, press conference comes to a halt for a photo opp.

11:26 am: Waiting for them to set up chairs for Q&A.

Questions and Answers

How will back issues be handled? Where will old copies be stored?

Angelo: Best thing to do is to save articles you care about. And it will also be archived on the Web. Internal archiving not there for 1.0.

Q: When will other pubs start using subscription option?

Announcement “very soon for other news publications.”

Q: How will you measure impressions, etc. for advertising?

Miller: Will have tech built into app for that. I should have mentioned during presentation that we love advertisers.

Q: For Rupe: How will you measure success?

A: We want to sell millions. But keep costs low. We have spent $30 million so far, “all of which has been written off in figures we’ll announce today.” But overall costs $500,000 a week going forward.

Q: Another question about subscriptions.

A: A non-answer from Cue.

Q: Who/what does Daily compete with? And how will other News Corp. properties be integrated?

A: Miller: Gotta compete with everything. “you’re competing with Angry Birds at some level.” [Hey that's my line!]

Murdoch: In NY, for example, we already have multiple outlets competing with each other. This is another.

Q: What about breaking news? How will that work?

A: Angelo talking up twitter feeds, sports scores, but “we can drop in a new page if we want to, and we will.” BUT! As a conusmer, I don’t like Web sites that change constantly. It’s not a great experience. [THAT IS: This is a newspaper, not a Web site.]

Q: What’s the political tone of this thing. Centrist, right?

A: Murdoch: “The editorial position will be in the hands of the editor.” Cue Angelo, who sorta hedges. On op-ed page, “We’re patriotic.”

Q: Someone wants to know if Rupert is really into this. Also, will there be an Australian version?

Murdoch. Duh.

(An Australian version “always a possibility.”)

Q: Why do this with the Daily instead of existing brands. Also, what’s up with your phone hacking newspapers in the U.K.?

A: Murdoch: Existing tablet apps are what got me excited about launching a new one. No comment on “the other matter.”

Q: You’ll be working with other tablets besides iPad, right?

A: Murdoch. Yes. And “we’ve been quite honest with Apple about that.” We’ll defnintely be on all platforms. But Apple will be the dominant one this year, in my opinion.

[Sorry, missed a Q. Seems to be about what apps Murdoch likes.]

Q: More about the editorial voice, please.

A: Angelo: Thinking it through. We know that people spend a lot of time with these apps–35 minutes, 40 minutes. “It’s unbelievable.” So how do you create content rich enough to keep people there?

Q: What did Steve Jobs say about this in the last couple of days?

A: Murdoch: “He did call me last week” and told me app was “really terrific. He was extremely flattering.”

Q: How will people find this stuff, since it’s not on the Web?

A: Cue: We’ve downloaded 10 billion apps. People can find this stuff.

Miller: We feel really good about this. We didn’t want to make compromises.

Q: I ask about what’s available on the Web.

A: Some of it will be mirrored on the Web, when it can be done technically. [Sorry, hard to type and write.]

[Sorry, now even more confused about what's available on the Web and what isn't. Going to have to follow up with the gang later.]

[Where's Greg Clayman, by the way?]

11:47 am: Q: How do you balance a subscription model with a large audience that advertisers want?

Murdoch: “They’d pay a much lower rate per thousand if it was free. They realize it’s something that people want.” And we can tell them more about who sees it. “It’s not just scattered out there….We’ll draw a better class of advertiser, and a better rate.”

11:48 am: Q: What’s the split between ad and subscription revenue?

Miller: Subscription will be larger at start, and then eventually 50-50, “which is the magic number.”

And we’re done. Will try to follow up, may have more answers/comments here, or in a separate post. Thanks for checking in!

Here is the press release announcing the Daily:

Introducing The Daily

First National Daily News Publication Created for iPad Launches today in the Apple App Store

New York, NY, February 2, 2011 – Today Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of News Corporation, unveiled The Daily — the industry’s first national daily news publication created from the ground up for iPad.

“New times demand new journalism,” said Mr. Murdoch. “So we built The Daily completely from scratch — on the most innovative device to come about in my time — the iPad.”

“The magic of great newspapers — and great blogs — lies in their serendipity and surprise, and the touch of a good editor,” continued Mr. Murdoch. “We’re going to bring that magic to The Daily — to inform people, to make them think, to help themengage in the great issues of the day. And as we continue to improve and evolve, we are going to use the best in new technology to push the boundaries of reporting.”

The Daily’s unique mix of text, photography, audio, video, information graphics, touch interactivity and real-time data and social feeds provides its editors with the ability to decide not only which stories are most important — but also the best format to deliver these stories to their readers.

“News Corp. is redefining the news experience with The Daily,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think it is terrific and iPad users are really going to embrace it.”

Led by Editor-in-Chief Jesse Angelo and Publisher Greg Clayman, The Daily is the first application made available on the App Store as a subscription — which will be billed directly to an iTunes account. And because this paperless paper requires no multi-million dollar presses or delivery trucks, it will be priced at just 99 cents a week (or $39.99 for an annual subscription).

“The Daily launches at a moment when advances in technology are changing the job of the modern editor,” says Mr. Angelo. “These advances are giving us new ways to tell stories. We intend to take advantage of all of them, and make The Daily the new voice for a new era.”

Each day The Daily will publish up to 100 pages focused on six key areas: news, sports, gossip and celebrity, opinion, arts and life, and apps and games. It will offer views from across the political spectrum. They will come from across cultures and generations, across America and the world.

The Daily will feature Sudoku and crossword puzzles, localized weather reports, and a customizablesports package that captures news on the user’s favorite teams. Subscribers will also be able to leave comments on Daily stories in either written or audio form — as well as bookmark them in-app to read later.

As readers move through The Daily’s content, they will be helped by several highly intuitive navigation tools. And while The Daily lives on the iPad, most of its articles can be easily shared via Facebook, Twitter and email. The Daily will link out to the web, as well as bring the web into the app.

“In short, says Mr. Murdoch, “we believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed in this digital age.”

The Daily has bureaus in New York and Los Angeles, as well as stringers across the country. Full companybios are available at TheDaily.com/about. Executive staff includes:

John Kilpatrick – Executive Creative Director
Steve Alperin – Managing Editor
Mike Nizza – Managing Editor, News
Richard Johnson – LA Bureau Chief
Sasha Frere-Jones – Editor, Arts & Life
Chris D’Amico – Editor, Sports
Elisabeth Eaves – Editor, Opinion
Peter Ha – Editor, Apps, Games and Technology

The Daily is also changing the way advertising is offered and consumed within a news publication. Full-page ad units are completely interactive, customizable, and offer a rich mix of branding and direct response opportunities. Launch advertisers include HBO,Macy’s, Paramount, Pepsi Max, Range Rover, Verizon, and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

“With The Daily, Rupert Murdoch has given us the chance to rethink the entire experience of news delivery and consumption,” said Mr. Clayman. “The ability to actively listen to and engage with our audience means we can continually provide an experiencethat consumers value in this fast-evolving tablet space. Together with our customers, our advertising partners, and the team at The Daily, we are excited to create a new form of media.”

About The Daily
The Daily is a first-of-its-kind daily national news publication built exclusively as an application for tablet computing. It provides readers the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the immediacy of the web and the need-to-know content of a newspaper, all while elevating user experience beyond the printed word. The Daily is a subscription-based news product, published 365 days a year, at the cost of $0.99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. For more information on The Daily go to: www.thedaily.com.

Finally, here are screenshots from The Daily’s listing in the App Store:

It’s about IBM’s years-long effort to build a computer smart enough to beat the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. And we’ll know how it turns out next month, when the quiz show airs a series of pretaped matches between Watson–IBM’s machine–Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, “Jeopardy”’s most successful champions.

But Baker and publisher Houghton Mifflin aren’t waiting for the end of the show to start selling the tale.

You can buy an e-book version of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” via Amazon or Barnes & Noble today, and start reading immediately–you just won’t get the last chapter, about the climactic battle.

Then in mid-February, immediately after the face-off has aired, the booksellers will send readers the end of the book, either beamed directly into their e-readers or shipped to their PCs.

(And if you’re into delayed gratification, or paper and ink, you could also just wait till mid-February to buy the complete edition in hardcover.)

Novel, right? Sort of. For e-books, the serial approach is a new one, and both booksellers had to be coaxed into doing it.

But selling books on an installment basis is a really old idea, dating back at least to the 1800s, when greats like Balzac and Dickens used to serialize their stories. New Yorkers supposedly gathered at the docks to ask incoming passengers for updates on Dickens’s characters.

And perhaps we’re headed back that way, since digital media allows creators to put out work in as long, or short, a format as they’d like, at whatever pace they want.

Amazon is already playing around with this with its clever “Kindle Singles” format, which sells mini e-books (i.e., novellas or long magazine articles) at mini prices.

And in Baker’s case, the strategy theoretically allows him to piggyback on a wave of publicity that IBM and “Jeopardy” are generating in advance of the shows. If you watched the NFL playoffs this weekend, there’s a good chance you saw, or at least fast-forwarded past, this spot:

Now the trick is to figure out how to turn that kind of media into book sales, which isn’t a given.

But Baker’s a clever guy–prior to writing this book, he was a longtime BusinessWeek writer and editor, and spent the last several years of his tenure covering technology–so I give him decent odds. He was able to get me to write this piece, for starters….

Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110113/topsy-hands-out-real-time-search-widgets/ http://allthingsd.com/20110113/topsy-hands-out-real-time-search-widgets/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:00:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2327 Real-time search engine Topsy today is launching customizable widgets for publishers to display topical tweets.

The company’s “social modules” dynamically populate with fresh content on any topic.

So, for instance, a news organization could automatically input the tags associated with its articles into a module, and on each page it would show relevant tweets about similar topics (and not just lame redundant retweets of the article itself, like you often see).

Or a site could show a live-updating widget that displays its most tweeted articles that day. Publisher IDG is already using the modules on some of its sites.

Anyone can create a self-service module, and Topsy will offer premium features such as analytics and revenue-shared advertising. Content within the modules is automatically filtered for profanity and language preference.

You might ask why Topsy and its random blog widgets are important. For one thing, Topsy is among the few independent players remaining in real-time search, with OneRiot pivoting to focus on ads, and Ellerdale acquired by Flipboard. Twitter does have its own search service, but it stores only a week of tweets at a time.

Topsy organizes its index of eight billion tweets using social signals, such as figuring out which accounts on Twitter are influential and which tweeted links are important, something Google and Bing are only starting to do. That’s a change from the dominant PageRank mindset, where a parent domain carries a certain weight without differentiation for all the different people who have accounts on it, from influential authorities to spammers.

And while it’s true that few Web pages need any more widgets than they already have, prominent tech publishers like Business Insider and TechCrunch use Twitter sidebar widgets from PostUp (formerly TweetUp) that show a rotation of promoted accounts. A more timely and dynamic alternative like Topsy Social Modules might be more useful.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110113/topsy-hands-out-real-time-search-widgets/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/conde-nast-takes-another-crack-at-the-ipad-with-a-single-serving-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/conde-nast-takes-another-crack-at-the-ipad-with-a-single-serving-app/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:31:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27908 Okay. So iPad magazine apps aren’t going to magically solve the publishing industry’s problems, after all. But that doesn’t mean publishers can’t find ways to take advantage of tablets.

Here’s one–instead of selling digital versions of paper magazines people can already get in their mailbox or at newsstands, cobble together special-edition apps using stuff you’ve already made.

That’s what Condé Nast has tried with its new “Best of Italy: Condé Nast Traveler” app. It’s a $4.99 compilation of the magazine’s earlier articles, and based on a brief flip-through, it works quite nicely.

And because it’s not a literal translation of a current title, the app sidesteps some of the problems that have plagued magazine apps: Print subscribers don’t feel like they’re being gouged by paying for something they’ve already bought. And jaded iPad owners can’t compare it to an existing issue and utter a bored sigh.

Meanwhile, Condé has signed on pasta maker Barilla to sponsor the app, so there’s not a whole lot of money at stake here for the publisher.

Condé already sells some paid iPhone apps, and has a couple of in-app purchases available for some of its free apps, but you should expect to see more paid, standalone apps this year, most of which will utilize stuff the publisher already has in its archive.

Meanwhile, more optimistic publishers hold out hope that Google’s Android will give them what they want–the ability to sell subscriptions for magazine apps, and keep most of the revenue and all of the consumer information. And that once that happens, Apple will come around, too. Theoretically.

But even if magazine subscriptions get resolved, I’m not sure that solves publishers’ magazine app problems. The industry’s hope, at least for much of the last year, was that the iPad and other tablets would allow them to roll back not only the “content = free” ethos of the Web, but also the “subscriptions = really, really cheap” precedent they’d set up on their own.

But since publishers are still giving away print magazine subscriptions at fire-sale prices, it’s going to be hard to convince tablet owners to pay a penny more. And you can’t blame that one on Steve Jobs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/conde-nast-takes-another-crack-at-the-ipad-with-a-single-serving-app/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:22:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=956 Yesterday, I wrote about Pulse, a news-reading app with innovative design, going social by integrating Facebook.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101103/saving-web-articles/ http://allthingsd.com/20101103/saving-web-articles/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:09:13 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=774 Q:

What program would you recommend for saving Web articles such as yours and which also provides for filing them by classifications such as technology, taxes, health, investments, etc.

A:

There are a number of programs that will let you quickly and easily save links to Web pages you want to save or read later.

One is called Instapaper. Another, which I have recommended in the past, is Evernote. The latter allows you to categorize Web links or any other notes with tags, or to store them in different notebooks that you could label and organize for different topics. Using these tags and/or notebooks, you can quickly find all saved links to Web pages on different topics.

Q:

I always am wary of installing any Microsoft program on my Mac because of viruses. I have, however, been thinking of getting the new Office 2011 for Mac that you reviewed because I have not been happy with the iWork program from Apple. Should I have these virus concerns?

A:

Microsoft’s Office for Mac is a purely native Mac program and doesn’t involve running the Windows operating system, which is the platform on which nearly all viruses operate. So, when it comes to the danger of viruses, Office for the Mac is like any other Mac program—highly unlikely to expose you to viruses.

The one exception is that, years ago, there was a rash of viruses that spread through the use of macros, or automated features, in certain Office files. These could theoretically still plague you, but Microsoft long ago took steps to snuff out most of these, and you can choose to disable macros in any documents you open.

Q:

Several times a year, a group of my friends rents a house in England or France. None of the houses has Wi-Fi. What is the cheapest and easiest way to access the Internet on our computers?

A:

Assuming the houses also lack wired Internet connections, I’d investigate cellular data connections, either via cellular modems for each individual computer, or devices like the MiFi, which create a Wi-Fi network for multiple computers using the cellular data network. I cannot say whether this would be a “cheap” method, as it would likely vary depending on which carrier you used.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101103/saving-web-articles/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101020/starbucks-now-serving-special-blend-of-digital-content/ http://allthingsd.com/20101020/starbucks-now-serving-special-blend-of-digital-content/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:20:14 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31317 Starting today, Wi-Fi-equipped Starbucks patrons will have access to the free Starbucks Digital Network, developed in connection with Yahoo and delivering a mix of consumer-friendly content that should keep loiterers nursing their lattes for hours. Among the offerings: Free access to subscription news sources (including The Wall Street Journal), music from iTunes, wellness articles from Rodale, check-ins via Foursquare and reviews from Zagat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101020/starbucks-now-serving-special-blend-of-digital-content/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101012/its-like-an-e-book-only-smaller-amazon-announces-singles-for-kindle/ http://allthingsd.com/20101012/its-like-an-e-book-only-smaller-amazon-announces-singles-for-kindle/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:50:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24400 No reason not to do this: Amazon is carving out room on its digital shelves for “Singles”–essentially, mini e-books for its Kindle platform.

Or, if you prefer, you can think of them as very long magazine articles. Here’s the company’s description of the new program:

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today’s announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

Amazon being Amazon (AMZN), there’s nothing else of substance in its press release, but I have asked the company to answer some basic questions. From my email to Amazon PR:

1) Please provide an anticipated pricing range
2) Please explain how wholesale pricing will work
3) Is this program directed at conventional publishers, or does Amazon anticipate that most of the Singles will be self-published by the authors themselves?

UPDATE: Here’s Amazon’s response. Apologies for not getting these up sooner: Amazon sent them along shortly after I posted my story Tuesday morning, but somehow they were swallowed up in an email vortex–some sort of recurring problem I have with Apple Mail client and Google App email.

Anyway:

1) Prices will be less than a typical book.

2) With any particular publisher, pricing and terms will be consistent with our general terms with that publisher.

3) We expect to work directly with publishers and also for writers themselves to publish Kindle Singles.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101012/its-like-an-e-book-only-smaller-amazon-announces-singles-for-kindle/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/creating-a-magazine-over-a-weekend/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/creating-a-magazine-over-a-weekend/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 16:30:01 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24886 Creating a magazine from start to finish in two days sounds like an insane, nearly impossible task. But that’s what a group of writers and editors did this weekend to produce the first issue of the appropriately named 48 Hours Magazine–an experimental project that aimed to use the Internet to shake up the way a print magazine is made.

The concept behind 48 Hours was relatively simple: Most magazines traditionally take weeks to produce. But with the Web and things like digital photos, editors could put out a call for photos and articles with a 24-hour deadline and then spend another 24 hours editing and laying out the magazine.

The creation of the magazine is part of a trend called “crowd sourcing”–in which tasks that have traditionally been done by a small group are instead posted to a large forum, with the best ideas and products from the overall group winning the day. It’s a technique best known for the creation of online reference site Wikipedia.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/creating-a-magazine-over-a-weekend/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12235 The New York Times’s model for content creation, which revolves around well-paid professionals who rely on their experience and judgment, looks increasingly threatened. What does a new model look like? Perhaps one where a computer spits out assignments to day laborers who work furiously for low pay.

That’s the worrisome conclusion you can draw from Dan Roth’s excellent profile of Demand Media in the new issue of Wired. The piece is well-worth reading, but here’s the very short version: Demand has figured out how to generate a massive stream of low-cost stories designed to extract the maximum dollars from Google’s (GOOG) advertisers.

The company has plenty of competitors that do similar stuff–Associated Content, Mahalo, and About.com, owned by the New York Times (NYT)–but Demand’s secret sauce is an algorithm that helps it figure out the most valuable stories to assign, based on search terms and keyword prices. Which leads to stories like “Where can I donate a car in Dallas?”

Demand currently produces about 4,000 new stories a month, paying the freelancers who create them between $15 and $20 a piece. But CEO Richard Rosenblatt wants to up that to a million per year. At that point, Roth notes, “the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.”

Which is why Demand is constantly floated as a potential acquisition candidate for the likes of Yahoo (YHOO), at price tags of $1.5 billion or more. Investors, who bid up Times stock a bit after the company announced plans to cut its newsroom headcount by eight percent, currently value the publisher at $1.3 billion.

All of that make you queasy? Then you’re going to hate reading paragraphs like this:

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database–the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it–perhaps an impossible proposition–the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

I think there’s an equally worrisome story–worrisome, that is, from the admittedly self-interested perspective of content creators like me–about the pressure from advertisers, armed with their own technology, to push the value of online content down even further. But we’ll save that for later. One downer a day is plenty.

Want to know what the face of new media looks like? Here’s a 2008 interview Kara Swisher conducted with the preternaturally peppy Rosenblatt:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090910/sb-nation-launches-real-time-updates/ http://allthingsd.com/20090910/sb-nation-launches-real-time-updates/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:08:56 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=15222 SB Nation, the network of sporting sites owned by Sportsblogs Inc., is getting a makeover focused on real-time updates, a bid to increase traffic between its Web properties.

The redesign went into effect late Wednesday and includes a “storystream,” similar to Facebook’s news feed, that wraps up articles, blog posts, videos and other content about hot topics like Melanie Oudin’s U.S. Open advance and Brady Quinn’s starting for the Browns on Sunday. Editors monitor news outlets, Twitter feeds and SB Nation’s sites for each storystream and keep them frequently updated, said Jim Bankoff, the company’s chief executive.

A recent storystream on Allen Iverson’s move to Memphis, for example, pulls from Sports Illustrated, ESPN, a Reebok commercial on YouTube and one of Mr. Iverson’s own tweets. “Effectively what we’ve created here is a blog on the Allen Iverson story,” Mr. Bankoff said.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090910/sb-nation-launches-real-time-updates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090421/google-launches-service-experiments/ http://allthingsd.com/20090421/google-launches-service-experiments/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:01:39 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11045 Google (GOOG), which been pruning some early-stage products amid slower growth and the downturn, introduced two experiments Monday: a service that displays news search results in a chronological timeline and a way to find more relevant images.

The first of the two, called Google News Timeline, presents the globs of content already in Google News–including articles, blogs, photos, scanned newspapers, magazine covers and more–in a draggable timeline. Users who search for a topic like the Iraq War will see a history of articles, photos and videos arranged by date, week or month and can scroll through them quickly with their mouse. Users can refine their search to specific sorts of news, like newspapers or blogs, and search some non-news sources like Wikipedia or movies.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090421/google-launches-service-experiments/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:04:07 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been a solid success. The device can access a catalog of over 200,000 digital books, including most current best sellers, according to Amazon (AMZN). Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.

In recent months, e-book offerings have especially exploded on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which, like the Kindle, have excellent screens and an easy and well-organized system for directly downloading content. Apple’s App Store, which carries everything from games to business software, has hundreds of e-book offerings (in addition to the audio books available through the iTunes store).

Some of these e-book apps, or programs, constitute just a single book, while others are digital-reading portals that can access anywhere from a handful of e-book titles, like the collected works of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes tales, to many thousands of titles.

Two of the most popular e-book apps for the iPhone and the Touch are Stanza and eReader. They are pretty basic and straightforward, with little in the way of fancy formatting. But they get the job done, allowing you to download tens of thousands of titles from a variety of sources.

But, as with past cellphone or PDA e-book systems, most of those on the iPhone and Touch focus primarily on older, classic, or out-of-copyright titles, rather than on the sort of current, in-demand titles available on the Kindle. Some fresher titles are available, but the selection of popular books is relatively thin.

Now, two companies are launching new e-book apps that aim to bring current and popular titles from major publishers to the iPhone and Touch. And they add interesting features, including fancy formatting and community tools. I’ve been testing both.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

I found that reading books from these two services was OK, but not nearly as satisfying as reading them on a dedicated, large-screen device like the Kindle, which also offers free excerpts. But it was more convenient. I was able to knock off a chapter or a few pages while commuting or waiting in line. The apps use the iPhone’s touch features to allow you to navigate.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,” current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and blog posts and magazine articles.

Iceberg’s claim to fame is its handsome appearance. It has just 14 titles available now, including the “Eragon” fantasy trilogy, and each must be downloaded as a separate app, which risks cluttering your iPhone with icons. The company is promising thousands of titles eventually, and has signed deals with major publishers. Prices hover around $10 or $11, but range to $27.

Books by Iceberg try to preserve the formatting and pagination of the printed title, and stress easy skimming to any page, searching and annotating. Pages are tinted and flip with a visual effect that apes a physical page-turn.

But there are missing features in both. Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.

The iPhone isn’t primarily an e-book reader, and these new apps still can’t match Kindle’s full catalog. But they add yet another dimension to a very versatile gadget.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

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