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A Few New Reasons to Reunite With Twitter.com

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:36:41 +0000

Twitter is making a bid to lure us all back.

[ See post to watch video ]

Like many of the 100 million monthly active Twitter users, I tweet all the time, but I stopped doing it through Twitter’s own site, Twitter.com, ages ago. That’s because tons of desktop and mobile apps, such as TweetDeck and even Twitter for BlackBerry, are simply more feature-filled and easier to use.

Now Twitter has revamped its website, deconstructing its menus to be more approachable and easier to use, even for Twitter newbies. So I returned to the site and found three features that make a big difference. Meanwhile, two features I hoped would, by now, be available on the site still aren’t.

Twitter is a short-messaging social network that limits each user’s posts, or tweets, to 140 characters. Some people tweet such mundane things as what they ate for lunch, while others tweet play-by-play accounts of live events or links to news stories. You’ll only see someone’s tweets if you “follow” them, and followers can retweet, mark as a favorite or reply to a tweet.

The new Twitter is slowly rolling out to all users over the next few weeks, and will automatically replace the old version of the site.

Easier on the Eyes

The first thing people will notice about the new Twitter is that everything that was once hugging the right side of the screen has shifted to the left. A black banner across the top gives users the feeling of being anchored—an improvement over the past, lost feeling. The Twitter app for iPhone and Android devices also has this black banner.

Twitter ‘Stories’ helps users keep up with news.

Better Reading and Browsing

Two features (one new and one improved) found under Twitter’s Discover tab solve the problem of what to read given the overwhelming number of choices in this social network.

The Stories feature, though in its infancy, has the potential to become the first thing people skip to when they open Twitter.com. Here, Twitter displays 10 stories it thinks you’ll want to read. These are curated using an algorithm: Twitter studies the accounts you follow and serves up similar stories. Twitter also considers your location and which stories you interact with so that, over time, it will give you more personalized offerings.

Done right, Stories could solve the problem of missing news on Twitter, where tweets speed by in an ever-changing stream and can be missed unless users look at the site all the time.

Browse Categories is a redesigned, improved version of Browse Interests. It groups people you might want to follow by category. For example, Entertainment includes Tom Hanks, Chelsea Handler and the Twitter account for the movie reviews website Rotten Tomatoes. This will be a help for people new to Twitter, as it can be hard to figure out how to get started.

Following the Tit-for-Tat

Conversations on Twitter can be hard to follow. That’s mostly because when people reply to a tweet, only that response—not the original tweet—gets sent to followers. Now, users can catch up on entire conversations by clicking on any tweet to read the back-and-forth between two people.

Feeling More Popular

Social networks are, of course, far more interesting when people actually interact with you. Unless you’re famous, an avid Twitter user with plenty of followers or both, Twitter can feel a bit stale after a while.

The Connect tab has two subcategories: Interactions and Mentions. Interactions is a new feature that displays more of the hidden activities related to your Twitter account, making you feel more engaged with the network. These Interactions list whenever another user mentions your username, “favorites” one of your tweets, retweets one of your tweets, follows you or adds you to a public list.

As always, Mentions still includes only the tweets in which your username is mentioned. Some people will be frustrated that the new location for this category is less prominent than in the old version of Twitter.com.

Short on URLs

Twitter has always lagged behind other sites and apps when it comes to URL shortening—taking a long, messy web link and automatically shrinking it down. Most people think that Twitter doesn’t shorten URLs at all. That’s in part because it only shortens them to 20 characters (still too long) and doesn’t obviously notify users that it’s doing this.

Also, the tweet-composing box doesn’t show a preview of what the shortened URL will look like before you share it with followers. Without a smarter built-in URL shortener, Twitter forces people to use other services, like bitly.com, to shorten links.

Retweet, But No Comment

Twitter still doesn’t let its users retweet, or share someone else’s tweet to their followers with their own added comment. (Some apps refer to this as quoting a tweet.) This means I can only re-share exactly what someone else posted—there’s no way to include what I think of the tweet. Almost all of Twitter’s apps enable adding comments in retweets. A spokeswoman for Twitter says this feature is often requested and the company is actively considering it.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katherine.boehret@wsj.com

Is It a Tutor, a Child Monitor or a Toy? No, It's a Kibot (AsiaD Demo)

Bo Kim — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:42:29 +0000

Meet Kibot, the brand new “kid’s robot,” from Korea Telecom. Though mixing games and education is nothing new, the company hopes that this plastic monkey will push the boundaries of learning hardware.

Korea Telecom demoed the Kibot at AsiaD, showing how the monkey can read books and sing nursery songs (in Korean) to your kid.

Kibot plays language learning games on its touchscreen belly, and if your children don’t interact with it for a few minutes, it will get bored and roam the house looking for a playmate.

Kibot’s aim is to keep kids interacting and learning — which hopefully abates any creepiness about having a child-seeking robot in the home.

Though Kibot primarily serves children ages three through seven, some features are definitely aimed at parents. Not only can they call their children to video chat, they can control the Kibot and use it to watch their children remotely.

How does it work?

After it’s switched on, the Kibot’s monkey body becomes a control panel. Holding the left ear views the next story, song or game. Holding the right ear goes back to the content you just left — an interface that makes sense if you’re used to reading Korean rather than English.

Kibot’s nose doubles as an RFID reader for special Kibot books. Swipe one and it will start reading the book aloud. There are also word cards, to teach vocabulary, and telephone cards, which allow the child to call only numbers that parents have pre-registered.

The Kibot is currently available only in South Korea. Korea Telecom hopes its smartphone-like revenue model will be a hit with parents. Kibot requires an ongoing service plan, and the add-on games, songs and stories are all for purchase.

A Digital "Magazine" With One Subscriber

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:05:42 +0000

Each morning, the President of the United States gets briefed on the day’s news by some of the smartest advisers around. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. We have to sift through newspapers, magazines and websites to find out what’s going on around us. Now, thanks to a free iPad app called Zite, the news-gathering process may get a lot easier for those of us who aren’t leaders of the free world.

[ See post to watch video ]

Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it’s used.

Wednesday, Zite launched in Apple’s App Store, and for the past week I’ve been testing an early version of it. As someone who is regularly overwhelmed by information overload, just on technology news alone, I found Zite to be a huge help. I realized every time I grabbed my iPad, I anxiously checked this app to see what new content it gathered for me. And I found myself reading stories from sources I don’t usually read.

Zite joins the ranks of other personalized digital magazines, like Silicon Valley-based Flipboard, which came out last July. Flipboard differs in that it takes data from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as other topics or people you can manually choose to set up, and builds a personalized digital magazine with this content.

Zite isn’t just a mirror of your social-networking account. It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics.

It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.

By now, you’re probably wondering what Zite does with this knowledge about your reading preferences. Zite CEO Ali Davar says the company won’t sell user data to third parties, but may use it internally on an anonymous basis for advertising purposes. The company will share aggregate data with publishers (like number of clicks on a story), for ad-placement purposes, but this won’t include a user’s individual data.

Flipboard is more polished than Zite, including images that take up the entire iPad screen and clever animations that mimic real pages turning. Zite’s animations are limited to more straightforward gestures like swiping from right to left to turn to a new page of content, though there is a cool animation on Zite’s home screen that swings several images from stories onto the magazine’s first page. Both Zite and Flipboard pull text and images from sources, but Flipboard usually just displays a portion of a story on its digital magazine pages with the original website on which content was found displayed below it.

Above, ‘Top Stories’ compiles stories Zite thinks a user wants to read. Top, a Customize option lets users add favorite sections.

Zite displays entire stories on its own formatted reading-mode pages, though some stories, like one I read from the New York Times, appeared in the article’s original Web-page format. Mr. Davar said this is because roughly 3% to 5% of articles are tagged in a way that doesn’t allow for reformatting in Zite.

There are currently no ads in Zite, but Mr. Davar said the company will begin to put ads from publishers in the reading-mode pages of the magazine in a few months. He said the site may have ads that aren’t from publishers, but publishers have control regarding ads that appear on their content.

Setting up Zite was a cinch. I entered my Twitter username (not the password) and Zite took a minute to churn and grab content that interested me, setting up sections of my magazine according to topics I follow in Twitter. I didn’t enter my Google Reader account. Users who don’t have Twitter or Google Reader accounts can skip those steps and still use Zite by selecting sections of the magazine that interest them.

Upon opening Zite, a section called “Top Stories” appears first. This is a compilation of the stories Zite thinks I’ll find most interesting, and its content refreshes about every 30 minutes depending how often I use Zite.

My auto-generated magazine had a list of topics including Gadgets, Mobile, iPhone, Google, Mac, Social Media and Technology. I tapped a Customize icon to pick some additional sections for my magazine. I could choose from over 2,000 topics ranging from Wedding Photography to Gardening, from Wine & Mixology to Celebrity Gossip & Industry Rumors. A search box lets users look for even more topics, like “Martha Stewart,” which I added to my Zite. Topics can’t be manually added.

I ran into a couple bugs while using my early version of Zite, which Mr. Davar said are being fixed. A Mashable.com article crashed the app four times in a row when I tried to read it. And though videos from major providers like YouTube and Vimeo are watchable in Zite, I had trouble playing a video that used HTML-5 playback.

For now, Zite is limited to Apple’s iPad, just like Flipboard. Mr. Davar said he plans to get Zite on other tablets by this summer and on mobile devices and Web browsers before the end of this year.

If you’d like a smarter way to handle information overload, Zite can do the dirty work of amassing relevant content for you. It’s designed to get more personalized over time and I certainly plan to keep using it to see what it uncovers for me.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Zite at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Email her at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

1000Memories Funded by Greylock, Angels

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:00:49 +0000

1000Memories, the social media site for friends and family to memorialize loved ones who’ve passed away, is disclosing today it has raised $3 million worth of funding, including a Series A round led by Greylock Partners.

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

Rupert Murdoch Introduces the Daily, His iPad Newspaper

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:40:14 +0000

It’s time, finally, for News Corp. to show off the Daily, the iPad newspaper it has been building for some six months.

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:

Perfect Market Raises Another $9 Million to Help Papers Sell Old News

Peter Kafka — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:00:32 +0000

Perfect Market doesn’t promise to save the newspaper business. But the company says it can help papers wring more money out of the stuff they’re already making.

That pitch has been enough to raise $19 million for the Pasedena, Calif.-based company, and now it has added another $9 million in a round led by Comcast’s venture capital arm. Earlier investors Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Tribune Company and Trinity Ventures have all re-upped as well.

Perfect Market‘s main offering is a service that hosts big publishers’ old stories in a Google-friendly way, and sells ads against the archived content. The very short pitch: Why let Demand Media and its ilk get all the search ad dollars?

Things are getting more interesting now, though, as the company rolls out analytics and a dashboard that is supposed to help writers and editors figure out how to make the stories they’re writing now make more money in the future, via SEO-like tips.

And they’ll get very interesting down the road, as Perfect Market gives writers and editors the ability to help choose stories that are more likely to generate ad revenue down the line.

That’s either cunning or creepy, or maybe both, but the company isn’t there yet. It has been testing a version of its analytics package with the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel, and says it is working on a 2.0 version of its software for release this year. We’ll check back with the company later on….

Man Bites Dog! Web Publisher Pays Writers

Peter Kafka — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 14:00:01 +0000

It’s a time-honored Web tradition: Build a business by getting people to give you interesting content to publish, for free. And it’s still a very popular one. See: Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, Quora, etc.

Which is why this qualifies as news: Financial commentary site Seeking Alpha is going to start paying some of its writers.

The seven-year-old site, which relies on a pool of several thousand contributors to stock it with chatter about stocks and anything else you can trade, will now offer them a chance to get paid for their work. It’s a one-size-fits-all rate: $10 for every 1,000 page views a story generates, as long as the story doesn’t appear anywhere else on the free Web.

That’s not going to make any of the site’s writers rich. Seeking Alpha CEO David Jackson says “it’s possible” that his most popular writers could generate a couple of thousand dollars per month, but most are going to make much less.

Jackson, on the other hand, is potentially on the hook for a decent-size bill.

Quantcast pegs his site’s daily page views at around two million. Not all of those views come from contributors–Seeking Alpha’s free transcript service, for instance, is popular and useful, and I assume the site gets a decent chunk of direct traffic. But if, say, half its page views were from volunteers who now want to get paid, that’s an outlay of $1,000 a day.

But why pay anything at all? Jackson’s longtime strategy has been to get people like newsletter publishers and money managers to give him free stuff, and offer them exposure/leads in return. Why change now?

You can read Jackson’s explanation of the move, along with some other details, in a letter he’s distributing to his writers today. But maybe he’s just following this sound advice from the Joker:

Dear Seeking Alpha contributor,

I wanted to let you know personally about three new initiatives that have rolled out on SeekingAlpha.com this morning:

1. Sharing revenue with contributors

I’ve always viewed Seeking Alpha as a partnership with our contributors: you provide us with outstanding articles, and we invest heavily (we now have over 70 employees) in technology, web design, editors and traffic partnerships to get your ideas in front of a large and valuable audience and drive customer leads to your business. But we’ve always known that some of our contributors don’t have businesses we can drive leads to, and that many contributors would appreciate additional direct income from their articles.

We’ve spent over a year building a direct sales team, and our readership has hit an all-time high and continues to grow (see: http://www.quantcast.com/seekingalpha.com). As a result, we can now share meaningful revenue with contributors: you’ll earn $10 for every thousand page views to articles which are published by Seeking Alpha and given to us exclusively (i.e. they don’t appear for free elsewhere on the Web). We call payment for exclusive articles our “Premium Partnership Program”. It’s on an article by article basis, so there are no contracts or forward commitments, and if for any reason you don’t want to receive payment yourself, you can pick a charity to receive your earnings instead. And if you don’t want to give us exclusivity for articles, nothing will change from the way we publish your articles now.

2. Upgrade to our leaderboards and reputation system

We’ve introduced a new reputation system and set of leaderboards, called “SA Opinion Leaders”. You’re now ranked by page views (trailing 90 days) to your articles according to the themes you write about. For example, if some of your articles are tagged “Media”, you automatically appear in the Media Sector leaderboard and are ranked by the number of page views you received to those articles. You can appear in multiple leaderboards, determined by the themes your articles are tagged with. Additionally, if you’re ranked in the top 5 for any theme, that information is displayed on your articles and also on your profile page.

We think this new reputation system has strong advantages. First, we’ve discovered that the number of followers a person has on Seeking Alpha (and, parenthetically, Twitter also,) doesn’t necessarily equate to reader engagement or influence. In contrast, the number of people who read your articles is a direct measure of reader engagement and thus your influence. Second, reputation is far more meaningful when measured in specific areas of expertise. So if you focus on media stocks, it’s far more valuable to know (and tell people) that you’re the number one on Seeking Alpha in the Media Sector than that you’re number 33 in some general ranking. We think that measuring real engagement and ranking contributors in categories will be valuable for contributors and — critically — valuable for readers.

3. Access to stats

You can now view detailed stats on Seeking Alpha, including total page views, page views by article, and page views by category. Additionally, you can track your page views and earnings for exclusive articles.

The future

Any major change carries risk, so why are we doing this? After all, churn in our contributor base is remarkably low, we’re about to add our 4,000th contributor, traffic is at an all time high, we recently crossed our 600,000th registered user, we have over 40,000 comments on the site per month, and our audience is of outstandingly high quality.

The answer is: this is about a vision. Investment research has been dominated by the sell side, but there’s a world out there of other people who have considerable knowledge and insight about stocks, options, bonds, ETFs and investment strategy. Whether you’re a fund manager, financial advisor, industry expert or a smart individual investor, we want to be the partner that brings that insight to light and unlocks value for contributors by offering exposure, reputation, customer leads and direct income. If this is successful, it should transform the investment research industry.

Thank you for your partnership with us, and wishing you a happy and prosperous 2011,
David

New Nook Brings a Little Color to E-Reading

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:44:47 +0000

Book lovers nowadays fall into one of two camps: They either eschew e-readers altogether, preferring the look and feel of print books; or they dive wholeheartedly into e-books, instantly downloading and racing through more titles by the handfuls. If you count yourself in the latter category, you’re in luck.

[ See post to watch video ]

Starting this week, Barnes & Noble will ship its $249 Nook Color (nookcolor.com), a luxury model in the e-reader world currently dominated by the $139 monochrome Amazon.com Kindle. While the original Nook offered a gray-scale reading screen and a thin, color touch strip for browsing the bookstore, this model is one big color touch screen. It connects to the Web using only Wi-Fi and costs $100 more than last year’s comparable Wi-Fi Nook, but a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said that preorders online and in stores are far exceeding company expectations, with over twice as many as for last year’s Nook.

I’ve been testing the Nook Color over the past week and I like its book-size build and stylish design. Its user interface is inviting and its digital bookstore is redesigned to make shopping for books enjoyable. Nook Color is aimed at people who are primarily focused on reading but crave the iPad’s color and some of its versatility.

Like the Kindle, the Nook Color has a Web browser and some apps but no dedicated email program or way to access an app store. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble says a full email program and app store are expected early next year.

The Nook Color is unapologetically focused on reading. It accesses Barnes & Noble’s library of two million downloadable books and over 100 magazines and newspapers (fewer were available during my pre-release testing). The reader has a feature called ArticleView that displays magazine articles in a clear, readable format. You can highlight passages from books and then share them with friends through Facebook, Twitter or a limited, in-book email system. A LendMe feature gives users an easy way to digitally lend their books to friends for 14 days. And for kids, there’s a feature where popular stories are read aloud by people rather than a computer voice.

The Nook Color is more than just a bright, color screen: It’s built on the Android 2.1 operating system—the same mobile OS used to run many smartphones. This gives the device access to a full Web browser for tasks like reading favorite sites or checking Facebook, which I did easily. Early next year Nook Color will upgrade to Android 2.2, allowing it to play Flash videos.

The Nook Color

Eight apps found in a section called Extras come loaded on the device including apps for Pandora Internet Radio, chess and Sudoku. I logged into my Pandora account, quickly retrieved my saved list of stations and played a QuickMix of music. I was able to work on a crossword puzzle or read a book or magazine on the Nook Color while still listening to Rihanna on the music app. Quickoffice software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint comes built into the Nook Color so users can view—but not edit—documents in these programs if they’re loaded onto the device with a MicroSD card. Until the Nook Color’s app store launches early next year, there’s no way to download free or paid apps.

Navigating around the Nook Color is a cinch. A tiny “n” just below the screen returns you to the home screen, which can be customized with photos loaded via a MicroSD card. The Daily Shelf is a dedicated horizontal section at the bottom of the home screen that updates whenever possible with new versions of newspapers (daily), magazines (weekly or monthly, if you subscribe) or books lent to you by friends. Anything on the Daily Shelf can be dragged out onto the home screen, placed anywhere and resized by pinching two fingers out or together. A Quick Nav button displays the Nook Color’s six sections: Library, Shop, Search, Extras, Web and Settings. A helpful “Keep Reading” prompt at the top of the home screen shows the last thing you were reading; selecting it sends you to right where you left off.

Nook Color weighs just under a pound, or twice as much as the Kindle but still a half-pound lighter than Apple’s larger iPad. It felt a bit heavy in my hands as I read from it for a long period of time, but I solved that by leaning it against a desk or pillow.

While reading Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” I found a particularly interesting tidbit about first-century B.C. marriage contracts requiring wives to vow not to add love potions to their husbands’ food or drink. I highlighted this passage by tapping once on the screen and dragging highlighter handles around it, and then sent it to friends via email with a built-in shortcut for sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter. I selected another passage and posted it on my Facebook wall for friends to read. All these posts had links to buy books from Barnes & Noble.

I really enjoyed reading magazines on the Nook Color because these appeared much as they do in print. Brightly colored pages appeared one at a time when I held the device vertically, or two pages at a time in horizontal view. Magazines can be bought per issue or via subscriptions; a single current issue of House Beautiful was $4.50 or $1.99 with a subscription. The Quick Nav button works in magazines, too, so you can flick a finger right or left to skip ahead to specific sections or articles.

If you love reading and want to share your books with friends or reading updates with social networks, the Nook Color has you covered. It will also give you a taste of tablet computing with functions like browsing the Web, using some apps and eventually, full emailing. Just remember that Nook Color is laser-focused on e-reading.

A correction was made to this column on 11/17/2010 to reflect that Quickoffice is not owned by Microsoft.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

The New York Times Officially Starts Construction on Its Pay Wall: "Metered Model" Coming 2011

Peter Kafka — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:39:05 +0000

After much consideration, the New York Times has finally decided to start charging readers for access to its Web site. But not for a while: The Times says it will introduce a “metered model”–which offers a certain number of free visits to NYT.com before requiring a payment–in 2011.

The publisher hasn’t said how much it will charge readers and isn’t offering many other details for now. But subscribers to the print edition will be able to access the site for free.

By adopting the “metered model,” the New York Times (NYT) is emulating the Financial Times, which lets readers peruse up to 10 stories a month before forcing them to buy a subscription to the online paper.

That model isn’t all that different from the subscription strategy employed by News Corp.’s (NWS) Wall Street Journal: While much of the Journal is theoretically behind a pay wall, it’s a fairly permeable one designed to give both casual readers and search engines access to the content. (News Corp.’s Dow Jones owns both the WSJ and this Web site).

Both are have-cake/eat-cake strategies: Generate as big an audience as possible to sell to advertisers while extracting a second revenue stream from hard-core readers. The Times, which is reportedly generating $100 million a year from Web display ads, wants to do the same thing.

The paper has tried a pay wall before. In 2005, it rolled out “Times Select” whereby it cordoned off access to op-ed columnists like Thomas Friedman and to archived stories and other features. That strategy generated around $10 million a year. But it was considered a failed experiment, and the Times dropped the wall in September 2007.

Now, of course, $10 million a year sounds like a nice boost for a paper that lost more than $35 million in its most recent quarter and saw print ad revenue plummet throughout the year.

A New York Magazine story published on Sunday predicted the timing of the announcement, even though New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told me the piece was “long on speculation.”

The New York Times Announces Plans for a Metered Model for NYTimes.com in 2011NEW YORK, Jan 20, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The New York Times announced today that it will be introducing a paid model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011.
The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.
Through 2010, NYTimes.com will be building a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms. Once the metered model is implemented, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.
“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”
“This process of rethinking our business model has also been driven by our desire to achieve additional revenue diversity that will make us less susceptible to the inevitable economic cycles,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO, The New York Times Company. “We were also guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.”
More details regarding the metered model will be available in the coming months.

[Image credit: etoile]

AOL Automates Its Story Factory. Does That Kill an Associated Content Deal?

Peter Kafka — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:45:46 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, AOL told Wall Street it will be cutting its payroll by one-third, via buyouts and layoffs. Now comes its plan to make the remaining employees more productive: New technology that assigns and even edits stories automatically.

CEO Tim Armstrong tells The Wall Street Journal about plans he has previously hinted about–“a new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers.”

The idea is that even a brain-dead editor knows that people want to read about Tiger Woods–and AOL’s coverage includes a 500-slide (!) slide show. But there are plenty of other stories that will go unassigned without a computer’s help. For example:

AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was “crib recalls,” following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.

This is the flip side to AOL’s hiring binge of the past year, where it scooped up a small army of veteran writers and editors. And it has a certain logic to it. Why wouldn’t a publisher want to publish things that readers want to read and advertisers want to sponsor?

Of course, this also creeps the heck out of people with traditional notions of journalism, or even “content production.” Including some of those recent hires. The company has been trying to soothe employees’ fears, but given that AOL is letting lots of people go, you’re not going to hear many writers and editors carping about this openly.

Investors who are going to own AOL after it spins off from Time Warner (TWX) next month are supposed to be cheered by the plan. It has a hint of Google (GOOG) to it, which makes sense given Armstrong’s long tenure there. And it sounds very similar to Demand Media, the much buzzed about content-creation factory.

AOL’s plan also sounds very similar to Associated Content, a search-driven content mill run by Armstrong’s former co-worker, Patrick Keane. Armstrong also happens to be an investor in the site, which raised a $6 million B round last spring that valued the company at $43 million. And earlier this year, AOL explored a purchase, sources say.

But while Armstrong ended up buying Patch Media, another start-up where he was an investor, he never pulled the trigger on Associated Content. Question: Does his new platform make a future deal more or less likely?