The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”

“Let’s go. Yes, let’s go.” [They do not move.]

– Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”

In Internet terms, the removal of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz happened a dog’s age ago.

In fact, it was September 6.

Since then, it has felt like a slow slog, especially contrasting the situation with that of another troubled Silicon Valley giant, Hewlett-Packard, which fired its CEO Léo Apotheker and appointed a new one, Meg Whitman on September 22.

Since then, in comparison, the former eBay CEO has been like the Energizer Bunny, making a series of major and often difficult decisions, including: Holding onto its PC unit; reaffirming its controversial deal to buy Autonomy; promising a decision on the fate of its webOS unit within the next two weeks; appointing new execs; and even buying a company.

To be fair, Yahoo did acquire advertising start-up Interclick.

Otherwise, still no sale or investment deal. No new CEO. No Asia resolution. And, perhaps most importantly, no clearly articulated strategy going forward.

It’s not that Yahoo’s leadership isn’t working at it.

Some fervently insist to me that there is a “plan,” as if there is some clever game of Internet Stratego going on that I cannot possibly grok.

Mebbe — but of this I have no doubt: The Yahoo board has indeed been huffing and puffing away, weighing and measuring, considering and debating.

A lot.

Maybe I’m just too impatient. I am (ask my kids).

Or maybe Yahoo’s beleaguered employees are, one of whom just wrote me plaintively, “unreal how they can drag this out,” in what has become a common refrain up and down the ranks.

Or maybe it’s the Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, who are antsy and have considered a variety of nuclear options in order to get back stakes Yahoo holds in them. Said one: “The strategy seems to be to frustrate and exhaust us into submission.”

Or, finally, maybe it’s the newly frustrated recent bidders for a partial stake in Yahoo, Silver Lake and TPG Capital. Declared one to me after I warned that Yahoo might, in fact, drag the proceedings out longer than you might expect: “I thought you were kidding.”

Nope, welcome to the Yahoo waiting game, PE guys!

So, to help us all get through it, here’s a quick update primer on what’s what on the various fronts:

Who’s in Charge Here?

Technically, it is the Yahoo board, which is aided by interim CEO Tim Morse.

First, a word about Morse: By all accounts, he is doing a very good job as temporary head honcho — calming the troubled company, making swift decisions about daily operating issues and being a generally nice dude to deal with.

“He’s Yahoo’s no-drama Obama, in comparison to what was happening before,” said one exec, in reference to the more volatile regime under Bartz.

Still, despite his very pleasant all-hands meetings, such as one earlier this week, Morse had previously been Yahoo’s CFO and not an Internet-savvy visionary to give the company inspiration. No insult intended, but he’s the accountant guy.

To be fair, he is not meant to be the visionary, but many at the company are yearning for exactly that.

A role that is now being taken up again by co-founder, former CEO and director Jerry Yang, who dozens of employees tell me is unusually involved in operational details these days for a board member.

I get reports of sightings of him all the livelong day: Jerry in demand-side advertising confab! Jerry chitchatting with entrepreneurs from a possible start-up acquisition! Jerry weighing in on a variety of products. Look, over in the cubicle, it’s Jerry!

This is seen by Yahoo employees as a good thing and also a bad thing, since it’s hard to be running your little divisional show at Yahoo with the dude who invented it all looking over your shoulder, even if he means well. People naturally defer to Yang, the 800-pound Web icon in the room.

But, given the overwhelming state of stasis at Yahoo now — “No one can do anything until we find out how the story ends,” said one staffer — and employees eying the exits, no power at Yahoo really matters but the board.

You know, the board that has gotten the company to this moment of crisis and profound ennui, which is its own particularly ironic irony.

To better understand the power dynamics on the board, above is a little chart for you to peruse to give you an idea of which independent board member is running what key committee.

The only truly important one is the Transactions and Strategic Planning committee, which is headed by Intuit President and CEO Brad Smith and includes former Akamai President (and former Yahoo CEO candidate) David Kenny, top HP exec Vyomesh Joshi and other guy Gary Wilson.

And, in completely visible shadow form, Yang. Multiple sources close to the situation said he has been a key force in the strategery around a possible sale or investment.

This has caused not more than a little tension among board members, but everyone seems to like the much described nicest-man-in-the-room, Smith, and hopes his cool head will prevail.

Another important part of the board is the Nominating and Corporate Governance committee run by Patti Hart, who is energetically and simultaneously — if pointlessly — in search of a capable new Yahoo CEO.

Or, as I like to call this mythical person: The Unicorn.

The Deal

As I and many others have previously reported, there are bids on the table for partial investments in Yahoo by two very powerful private equity firms, Silver Lake and TPG Capital.

It’s a PE rumble, with a side of Microsoft financial backing! (I think Silver Lake’s Egon Durban makes a very nice Riff, while Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is the perfect Officer Krupke.)

My fervent wishes for some figurative and dance-accompanied knife-play aside, the bids are essentially the same in general and different in particular. Silver Lake is offering about $16.50 a share, while TPG is dangling a tiny bit more. Silver Lake has power entrepreneur and VC Marc Andreessen on its side, while TPG is trying to get Silicon Valley fave investor and start-up whisperer Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners and LinkedIn on its team. Both have ideas on CEOs, strategy and what to do about the Asian assets.

This type of deal could happen suddenly and you’ll hear about it quick, since the losing side will immediately trash it to the media.

As you might expect, each director has their favorite PE firm, with some not liking Andreessen, some thinking the TPG bid is a little light, some for a whole-company deal and some wanting Yahoo to hire its own CEO and run the place itself.

Of course, the last one shows a disturbing level of denial and should be a nonstarter, given the board’s abysmal record on CEO choice and its riding of Yahoo to this sad point in its storied history.

Here’s what to expect on the PE front: A lot of wrangling behind the scenes with frequent leaks to the media about what each side wants and will not yield on.

CEO choice or no CEO choice, that is the question!

Also a big factor are Yahoo’s major shareholders, few of whom like the partial investment deal, which is known as a PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity), because of the insiderness of it all and because they prefer a whole-company sale at a higher price.

There is also pressure from activist shareholders like Daniel Loeb of Third Point, who has attacked Yang and others on the board and is ready to pounce with a proxy fight if Yahoo tries to override shareholders too egregiously. And, of course, the inevitable lawsuits over any arrangement that seems to block a whole-company bid.

That said, such a mega-deal seems unlikely, since it is too pricey and despite a lot of noise that Yahoo’s Asian partners were ready to strike with a takeover in order to get back Yahoo’s big stakes in their companies.

That’s kind of like buying a store to get back the cool pair of shoes you sold, but bankers love to scheme up this stuff. While it certainly could happen, it would be a bear of a deal.

Perhaps more like Yogi Bear, hopelessly angling for a tasty pic-a-nik basket — but grrrr anyway.

But perhaps the biggest factor in all of this mishegas is time. There is none on a lot of levels, most especially the increasing level of brain drain and drift at Yahoo. After the New Year dawns, this is going to spin right out of control and amount to the biggest internal challenge Yahoo faces.

An Asian Solution

As I and others have reported, Yahoo is entertaining yet another proposal to sell all or part of its Asian assets back to the companies, which make up a bulk of its market valuation.

The relationship between Yahoo and its Asian partners has long been fraught, and today the difficulty of reaching an agreement remains a vexing issue. That’s because it is hard and complex and because no one wants to do what the other side wants.

I am no tax attorney, but it seems as if Yahoo will ultimately come to some deal with China’s Alibaba and Japan’s SoftBank, which could include big investors like Russia’s DST Global.

And, as I reported last week, the Asian partners want to strike a deal with the current board rather than lose leverage with a much cannier new owner.

It’s a tough decision in all aspects to strike, but would remove the focus on the fact that Yahoo’s most valuable asset is something it is not running and simply holds due to a good stock trade in years past.

Years past should be the operative thought here, since the Asian assets have nothing to do with what Yahoo needs to do with its core U.S. and global brand.

You know, the thing that allowed them to buy those lucrative Asian assets in the first place?

Strategery

And that’s the crux of all this, isn’t it? Yahoo needs a new strategy and fast.

Or it needs to clarify and hone its current strategies around advertising and media and define itself once and for all. While it often touts itself as a premier digital media company, it’s still not clear exactly what Yahoo is saying by that.

In fact, incredibly, sources told me that the board was still wrangling over the tired issue of what Yahoo is at its most recent meeting — essentially, is it a products company or a media company?

If I had to listen to that who-am-I-anyway debate again, I think I would scream, given how many important Web trends that Yahoo has whiffed in recent years, many of which were right in its own wheelhouse.

How much damage this has caused to Yahoo’s core business is a critical one to determine, with many feeling the situation is too far gone to revive it and others confident that this is simply an issue of poor execution.

I am in the middle on this one, but all the indicators of Yahoo’s business have long been heading in the wrong direction, and results in the next quarter are expected to underline this even more.

Thus, the board’s navel-gazing at this point is untoward, considering that it is presiding over the possibility of a sale that should not have had to happen in the first place. While it is not quite a fire sale, it’s no cause for celebration at all the attention, either.

In fact, it’s also pointless, since — if this all resolves as it should — the current Yahoo board will not be the one determining the company’s future any longer. Remember that: This group should and will be gone for the most part.

Yahoo shareholders and employees can hope, at least.

Then, it will be up to the next group of leaders to make the very hard choices — including what are likely to be massive layoffs and radical surgery on its offerings — for what’s to come next.

In the end, that is all that will matter. Until then, as usual, you’ll have to sit tight.

Last night, the New York Times dropped a juicy little tidbit into its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink daily update of the board mishegas at Yahoo around the deliberations yesterday over two competing private equity bids to buy a partial stake in the company.

No, not the one about Jeff Jordan — former eBay exec, OpenTable CEO and now VC at Andreessen Horowitz — possibly taking a big role at Yahoo if the firm’s bid with Silver Lake prevailed — which was mysteriously removed very soon after it posted (’cuz he will not, so good move, NYT!)

I mean the one about the venture firm’s big-kahuna partner, Marc Andreessen — who will indeed take a board seat and play a strong role in Yahoo’s future if his bid wins — getting a possible competitor in the Silicon Valley savior section of the ongoing show.

That would be in the form of Reid Hoffman, the well-known entrepreneur, VC and angel investor, who the Times said had talked with TPG Capital, Silver Lake’s rival in the Yahoo bidding, about becoming a possible partner.

Wrote the Times:

“TPG has held discussions with Greylock Partners, another venture capital firm, about a possible alignment, two people said. TPG is hoping to draw on the expertise of Reid Hoffman, one of Greylock’s partners and the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, these people said.”

Translation: If Silver Lake has a tech icon of substance on its team to give uber-geek appeal to its offer — dagnabbit — then TPG was going to raise with another one, whom the very same Times reporter who wrote last night’s article recently nicknamed “The Start-Up Whisperer” in a recent glowing profile of Hoffman.

While I am still trying to grok what a start-up whisperer exactly means (and how someone as self-effacing as Hoffman would react to such a twee moniker without snickering), it’s a move that has likely already irritated Silver Lake.

After all, TPG aiming at nabbing Hoffman is akin to two crazy neighbors trying to one-up each other in holiday-lighting lawn decor. (You have a singing Santa, so I’ll have a singing Santa — and I might even add a Lady Gaga-themed crèche for good measure!)

But it’s not a bad instinct, either, to get your own live-action Silicon Valley legend, even if it is only half true in Hoffman’s case.

Because, according to sources who know such things, while Hoffman and TPG have had conversations, there have been no commitments, and nothing is close to being agreed on to link the pair.

That could certainly change, and quickly, but Hoffman or Greylock aren’t currently in TPG’s proposal to Yahoo.

That’s in contrast to Andreessen, who is all in (I am not even going to bother with “sources said” here, since everyone and my mother has seen the proposal) with Silver Lake on the deal to purchase 19.9 percent of Yahoo for about $16.50 a share.

As I reported earlier this week, for Silver Lake’s money and expertise in fixing broken things, the bid includes: Silver Lake getting three board seats; cash going to a buyback of stock or granting of a dividend to shareholders; the ability to select a CEO; approval of its strategic plan for Yahoo, and its solution to come to terms with Yahoo’s unhappy Asian partners; and all the purple wearables you could ever hope for (perhaps Yahoo’s best asset, IMHO, especially worn by such obviously cool dudes, as seen here).

Also, controversial Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang gets to stay around on the board (but only if he becomes very, very quiet, so as not to rile the activist shareholders).

TPG’s bid is less formed, although its price is slightly higher. And the PE firm has yet to check the “Big Geek Included” box.

Hence, the floating of Hoffman as a contender to take on Andreessen, who was once dubbed the “Golden Geek” by Time magazine.

I hope TPG does, soon, since what a matchup it would be!

But, for now at least, the pair — who share big investments in a range of Web companies, most especially Facebook (Andreessen is on the board of the social networking giant, and Hoffman was an early investor and adviser) — are at peace.

Dagnabbit.

The weekly is rolling out an “all-access” plan that kicks in Thursday. It will give readers a chance to purchase bundles that will give them access to the magazine in multiple formats: Print editions delivered to their mailboxes, app versions beamed to their iPads and other tablets, and Web versions at Time.com.

This is the second time Time Inc., Time Warner’s publishing unit, has rolled out a print/digital bundle. Earlier this year it announced a similar “magazines everywhere” package for Sports Illustrated.

You can read pricing details in the press release below. What you won’t see there: News that, along with the bundles, the magazine will put up a paywall on its site which will keep non-subscribers from reading the print version for three months after it hits the newsstand.

If that sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Time.com put up a wall for its print magazine content almost exactly a year ago, and said at that time it would be doing that for most of its titles.

It’s unclear to me when and why the title knocked down its Web barriers — right now, for instance, you can read all of Time’s most recent issue for free — but they are going back up this week, and some Time staffers I’ve heard from are grumbling about the move. But as I’ve said before, it’s likely that the vast majority of Time.com’s visits and page views come from stuff that isn’t in the magazine, and that will continue to be free, so most site visitors may not notice any change at all.

Also worth noting is that while last spring’s Sports Illustrated announcement focused on Time Inc.’s deal to sell magazine subscriptions via Google’s Android platform, today’s news notes that the subscriptions will also work with Apple’s iPad.

That is: Even though Time Inc. isn’t using Apple’s new iTunes subscription service, it’s able to use Apple’s new iTunes subscription terms to deliver iPad subscriptions on its own. Time won’t sell subscriptions to the magazine through iTunes or via the app, but it will encourage readers to head to a Time Inc. Web page to sign up for a bundle. That means the company loses a marketing resource, but retains 100 percent of its subscription revenue, and all of the subscriber information it treasures.

TIME LAUNCHES “ALL ACCESS”
Readers Will Now Pay A One-Time Subscription Fee To Get the Print Edition
Plus Access to Tablet Apps and the New Magazine Channel On TIME.com

(New York, July 19, 2011)—TIME announced today that, starting this week, subscribers
will now pay one price for an “All Access” subscription to TIME magazine content wherever
they want to read it: in print, online and on tablet apps. This subscription model rewards loyal
customers with more choice and quality at no additional cost.

With TIME’s “All Access,” current subscribers to TIME will continue to receive the print
magazine, plus have access to a new paid magazine channel on TIME.com and be able to
download their issues on Apple iPad, HP Touchpad and Samsung Galaxy Tab. The TIME.com
magazine channel will be a paid section of the website that will contain all new magazine
content on an ongoing basis beginning with this week’s issue. Subscribers will activate their “All
Access” accounts using their existing magazine account number or mailing address.

New subscribers will have three options to access TIME magazine content:
1. Subscribe to TIME “All Access” for $30/year and receive 56 print issues, full online
access and all tablet apps
2. Sign up for a 1-week short term pass to access magazine content on TIME.com for $4.99/
week
3. Sign up for a $2.99/month “All Access” subscription. Each month readers get all of the
print editions of TIME, the tablet editions and access to magazine content on TIME.com.
This subscription can be cancelled anytime.

The new magazine channel on TIME.com is one of a series of new content verticals the site
has launched in the past year and a half, including Newsfeed, Swampland, Lightbox, Techland,
Healthland and MoneyLand. TIME.com has 95% original content separate and distinct from
magazine content and has broken multiple traffic records in 2011. In June, the site had 93 million
pages views, up 31% year over year, and 11.3 million unique visitors, up 27% year over year,
according to comScore. TIME is up in ad pages and revenue for the first six months of the year,
up 8.1% in pages and 11.2% in revenue. TIME is the #1 magazine brand on Twitter with more
than 2.6 million followers.

TIME is the second Time Inc. title to launch a subscription plan allowing consumers to pay once
and access their content across multiple platforms. Sports Illustrated announced a similar “All
Access” plan in February 2011.

An updated version of that magazine’s iPad app lets users subscribe to the weekly magazine for $5.99 a month, or the equivalent of a $1.50 an issue. That’s a steep discount from the app’s old model, which only sold individual issues for $4.99 a pop.

Conde Nast is selling an annual subscription to the iPad app for $59.99; a yearly subscription to the print version of the magazine costs $69.95. Very important: Conde says print subscribers will get iPad access for free.

At least, I think that’s the case. I’m basing all of this off the New Yorker app’s description in iTunes, but I haven’t been able to get the updated app to work yet on my iPad. The information syncs up, though, with what both AdAge and the New York Post reported last week. (UPDATE: After some futzing about, I’ve got it to work, as advertised. The app still allows you to buy an individual copy for $4.99.)

Assuming Hearst goes through with its plans, Time Warner’s Time Inc. will be the most conspicuous magazine holdout. Time Inc. and Apple just agreed to a deal that allows print subscribers to get app versions of Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Time for free, but they still haven’t agreed to subscription terms–which they’ve been stuck on since last summer.

Other big print publishers who have agreed to Apple’s terms include the New York Times, which has said it will start using iTunes to sell subscriptions in June. In February, Conde also announced it would sell digital editions of its magazines for Google’s Android platform, but has yet to do so.

Publishers–and other media companies–have previously balked at both Apple’s proposed cut–it will take 30 percent of each sale–and its control of subscriber data, including credit card information.

But it’s possible that Apple has backed off some of its original terms. Last week Hearst suggested it had gotten Apple to modify at least some of its conditions. And if that’s the case then Apple may be offering revised terms to all subscription partners. I’ve asked Apple and Conde Nast for comment.

The notion of iPad apps enthralled magazine executives a year ago, but sales have been underwhelming for many titles. One common complaint: Publishers have sold the digital titles at the same price as paper-and-ink versions, while most customers have expected to buy them at a steep discount, and to get them free with existing subscriptions.

Now that big publishers are starting to actually do just that, we’ll see if sales improve.

UPDATE: Just got some clarity on the agreement Conde hammered out with Apple. Apple’s fundamental proposition hasn’t changed, but the publisher has gotten a few concessions out of Steve Jobs and Co. Examples via people familiar with the publisher:

• Apple still controls crucial subscriber information, and only allows Conde Nast to ask for name, zip and email. But the publisher now has two chances to ask for user’s email: The first as a standard opt-in screen, and then again on a screen that asks for email and a password in order to get exclusive content.
• Conde has more flexibility on pricing than Apple originally offered. For instance, at one point, Apple didn’t want the publisher to be able to offer a print+digital bundle at a $10 premium to digital-only, but wanted all prices to be the same (which they will be when GQ offers subscriptions later this month: $19.99 a year for digital-only, or digital + print).
• The agreement extends to international markets, etc.

Small stuff, but important to the publisher. Meanwhile, Apple gets what it wants without giving up much it cares about. Steve Jobs wins.

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Yes, it is perverse, but I really want to come in dead last in Time magazine’s “140 Best Twitter Feeds.”

Why? Well, there’s no way I am getting near the top with the likes of Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga in the same list, so I felt the 140th–get it?–slot on a Twitter poll is the next best thing to aim for.

Here’s the deal, according to the magazine’s Web site:

“TIME picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation. Take a look and vote on whether you think these top tweeters should be on our list.”

The list is split up into categories, such as authors (Neil Gaiman, who is #1, and Margaret Atwood), celebrities (Gaga and the inevitable Justin Bieber) and companies (Zappos and Whole Foods).

There is also a technology group, with luminaries such as New York VC Fred Wilson, man-about-Web Kevin Rose and, of course, the King of Tweets Robert Scoble.

I am in that group too, with the description: “When this woman reports a rumor, you can pretty much count on it to be true.”

Thanks…I think–although I prefer to call it reporting a fact.

In any case, early on, I was doing badly in the voting–as I had hoped and is entirely correct considering I am unknown to anyone but certain geeks–and was right near the bottom with some suspect deal sites.

But by last night, GigaOm’s Om Malik had dropped below me, along with Wilson. I was at the unacceptable 131 spot.

This will not stand! Thus, so I can shoot the moon, I urge everyone to vote for:

132 Mike Allen
133 Om Malik
134 Amazon Deals
135 Fred Wilson
136 DealDivine
137 Nieman Lab
138 Best Buy Deals
139 Coupons.com
140 Steven Johnson

A well-known writer and entrepreneur, Johnson has 1.4 million followers on Twitter and does not deserve this ignominious loss as much as me.

Tweet that.

At least once a day, BoomTown gets a call from investors, analysts or other troublemaking types–you know who you are!–wondering why Yahoo is still plugging away in search.

With a declining market share in the arena and a search technology outsourcing deal with Microsoft, it’s not a bad question to ask.

But Yahoo begs to differ, introducing a new feature called Yahoo Search Direct at a press event in San Francisco today.

I liveblogged it, natch.

10:14 am: I was late, as per usual, but walked in just as the session was getting started.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving–looking fetching in a purple cashmere sweater–was talking about search.

He immediately turned it over to Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s head search dude, who immediately said: “Answers not links.”

Huh?

Actually, the product is pretty nifty, showing a lightning-speed box that shows more robust search results, although not unlike offerings from both Microsoft’s Bing and, of course, Google Instant.

While both have different takes, it is essentially a direction in which search brings in maps, photos, and–of course–advertising.

You can see a movie times example here (click to make the image larger):

10:23 am: Wait, it was over before it started! Whoa. No more bells and whistles?

And I still was enjoying Irving’s sweater and I wanted to touch it, but that would have been wrong.*

Seth then took questions from the reporters.

“We believe the next generation of search…people are looking for answers,” he said.

Very true, but perhaps not so much from Yahoo anymore.

Still, Yahoo Search Direct is a laudable try and it’s also nice to see some innovation from the long-troubled company.

“We are the premier digital media company,” said Seth, parroting a new description of Yahoo that the Silicon Valley company is now using since its recent sales meeting in San Antonio.

I asked a question about whether there is a dedicated app for the tablet of Yahoo Direct Search, which sources had also told me was shown to the troops in Texas.

Yep! It will be ready later this year.

I also asked about how much all this search innovation was costing compared to return on the investment.

No answers from either Irving or Seth.

Someone then asked if there would be a lift in market share from the feature.

That’s the plan, Stan!

10:41 am: More questions about the comparisons to Google Instant. Of course, it’s the same type of thing, in the contest to win the King of Relevancy crown among consumers.

Google Instant. Yahoo Search Direct. Quora. My dentist, who seems to know everything. In case you didn’t know, dentists are very erudite.

Seth noted that even though Yahoo has only 15 categories covered in Yahoo Search Direct, there will be hundreds to come, as well as more features on top of this feature.

Personally, I want my search delivered to me on a silver tray by a man in a purple cashmere sweater.

Speaking of purple, the demo dude kept putting Elizabeth Taylor into the query box, which depressed me. Violet eyes now closed forever.

That was the real story today.

As if to round out the event, someone asked whether critics are right about whether Yahoo should still be in search.

“We’re in this for good,” said Irving firmly.

“Look, we are not focused on the past,” added Seth, who was not here in this very room at a similar Yahoo search event years ago, when similar promises were made about search going away from a page of blue links. “I don’t even know if you’d call it search in three years.”

What would you call it then?

“Find,” joked Irving. And later, “It’s actually ‘found.’”

Apparently, Yahoo was lost and now is found via Yahoo Search Direct.

*By the way, I touched the sweater, which was–in fact, Blake–periwinkle, which is a twee version of purple.

(You can see a video interview I did with Seth after the demo here.)

Extrabux, a price comparison site that pays you cash for making purchases from particular retailers, has compiled a list of the best and worst states for e-commerce customers.

The company said it evaluated four factors when making its list: Shipping time, including the location of many warehouses; shipping costs; sales tax rates; and states where you don’t have to pay sales tax at all.

The top five states were generally praised for having the lowest shipping costs, the fastest shipping times and the cheapest sales tax rates (if they charged at all).

1. Delaware
2. Mississippi
3. New Hampshire
4. West Virginia
5. Oregon

The five states at the bottom of the list ended up there because of long shipping times and high costs due to shipping or sales taxes or both. The results may surprise you, since the group includes two states with big populations and the state where Amazon.com is based, among other e-tailers.

1. Hawaii
2. Alaska
3. California
4. New York
5. Washington

A full breakdown of the reasons these states were chosen can be found on the Extrabux Blog.

HP has agreed to let Time Warner’s publishing unit provide subscriptions for magazines on the device maker’s new tablet, due out this summer, according to a Time Inc. source.

Time Inc. will initially sell four magazines via the HP device: Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People.

HP is about to show off the new device, built using Palm’s webOS platform, at an event today, so we should get a few more details then.

But for now the deal means that HP is the only tablet maker to give a big publisher the subscription terms it wants. Time Inc. and other publishers had expected to sell subscriptions via Apple’s iPad/iTunes ecosystem last summer, but those plans fell apart, and negotiations haven’t gone far since then. The crucial sticking point was control and access to subscribers’ billing information and other data that are crucial to publishers’ business model.

Publishers are also expecting to work with Google and its Android platform, but have yet to announce anything.

It’s worth noting that this arrangement is between HP and Time Inc., and not Next Issue Media, the joint venture that is also supposed to represent publishers in their discussions with tablet makers.

While BoomTown was running around the endless floors of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I jogged right over to the folks at Nike, to see their new Nike+ SportWatch GPS.

The device is yet another step in Nike’s long march to try to digitize the running experience.

Nike put sweat into its digital efforts in 2006 with its wireless in-shoe sensor, which communicates with an Apple iPod.

Since then, it has moved on to its popular iPhone and iPod app, as well as an earlier watch called the Nike+ SportBand.

Now, in partnership with TomTom, it is upping the game with the new watch, which sends even more information back to the app and also its Nike+ Web site.

Nike is hoping to turn that destination, which has about four million members now, into a kind of inspirational social experience for runners of all levels.

The watch is part of that, of course, chronicling geo-location information and also a wide range of performance stats, such as time, pace, distance and calories.

Here’s my video interview with Stefan Olander, VP of Digital Sport at Nike in which we talk about it all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nike-digital-sports-stefan-olander/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/viral-video-cnbcs-the-facebook-obsession-features-more-mark-z-plus-boomtown/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/viral-video-cnbcs-the-facebook-obsession-features-more-mark-z-plus-boomtown/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:05:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39268

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in the midst of a media bonanza.

Aside from all the heat over its recent investment whatever with Goldman Sachs, the young entrepreneur has been touted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and been selected Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Oh, yes, and that movie–”The Social Network”–which you just know is going to win some Oscars on February 27.

Now CNBC has just aired a documentary on the huge social networking site, titled–appropriately–“The Facebook Obsession.”

There is no new interview with Zuckerberg, and it’s essentially the same story about the Silicon Valley wunderkind, told yet again. But all the old video clips and photos collected all together on another television show are nice.

Also, I always enjoy the Winklevii spouting off hambone arguments about why they are owed more than $65 million for Zuckerberg’s kneecapping of them back at Harvard University.

And, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearance, I also make a showing, apparently as the grumpy one.

But I did not see it, as CNBC did not deign to post the entire report online, as “60 Minutes” so kindly did.

CNBC did do a preview and provide some clips, which are embedded below, as well the the much funnier Jon Stewart take on it all on “The Daily Show,” titled “The Anti-Social Network”:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
The Anti-Social Network
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/viral-video-cnbcs-the-facebook-obsession-features-more-mark-z-plus-boomtown/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/ http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:02:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39049

Of course, he won.

Dominating tech’s mindshare and press coverage in 2010, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs also handily took the No. 1 slot of a reader poll conducted by BoomTown in the last days of year.

Jobs–who introduced a range of innovative products, such as the iPad, over the course of the 2010–garnered just over 30 percent of the votes for the question that asked: “Who are the 10 Most Interesting People in Tech in 2010.”

Among the reasons he was selected, from comments posted by those who took the survey:

“With the iPad, he’s re-inventing the personal computer. Again.”

“Because he never stops.”

And my favorite: “Because if he had to be dictator of the world, he’d actually take doing a good job of it seriously.”

And, despite not acing him out for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” WikiLeaks head Julian Assange got 16.3 percent for the No. 2 spot, followed by Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at 10.1 percent.

Said one voluble commenter: “Whether one agrees or not with the how, governments and the individuals in power tend to do things that, we as a public, need to know, given that their actions, ultimately, impact how we must live our lives. Assange, is merely bringing to light things that many would rather not have brought into the light of day. One could argue that we do not need to know, for security or other reasons. However, negotiations, diplomacy and conflict, are all simply ways or resolving issues. Since, as a public, we allow these people into power, should we not know they are acting on ‘our behalf’?”

Arguing for Zuckerberg and his increasingly powerful social networking site, one person said: “Changed the way we looked at the Web and added another layer of connection between user and the Web, as well as sites connecting to each other.”

A wide range of people, not included by name on the list I compiled, got the No. 4 slot with 7.3 percent. They included Google Android head Andy Rubin, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Arianna Huffington and, um, me!

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was No. 5 at 6.3 percent.

“Visionary as a grad student, very successful as an entrepreneur, now doing some really interesting things as a VC,” said one person.

The red-hot attention around social buying start-up Groupon–and its gutsy choice not to take Google’s offer of billions of dollars–got co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason the No. 6 slot with 5.7 percent.

Pure curiousness about the future outcome spurred one choice: “Is he really lucky or really good? I’m guessing 2011 is a fairly decisive year. I’d like to know more about him…”

The mishegas around Yahoo and its voluable CEO Carol Bartz put her in the No. 7 position.

Said one commenter: “She’s taken the impossible job and will succeed. However, rewiring is taking more times than expected…”

Innovation put social magazine iPad app Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue at No. 8 with 2.3 percent.

No. 9 was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the same percentage, with the inevitable Betty White clocking in at No. 10 with 2.1 percent.

The reason for picking the longtime Hollywood movie and television star, after lobbying by rabid Facebook fans got her a gig on “Saturday Night Live”?

Simply put: “She rocks.”

And, indeed, she does.

Here’s my lovely bar chart showing the winners, which, perhaps most fascinating of all, did not include anyone from search topper Google or software giant Microsoft or microblogging leader Twitter (click on the image to make it larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/viral-video-julian-assange-is-a-samantha-but-a-charlotte-to-the-swedish-police/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/viral-video-julian-assange-is-a-samantha-but-a-charlotte-to-the-swedish-police/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:15:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38785 BoomTown was deep in meetings at the Dow Jones mother ship in New York yesterday with more suits than you can find at Barneys, so I failed to get up this latest Julian Assange spoof from “Saturday Night Live.”

Here the WikiLeaks leader comments on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently beating him out for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The faux Assange is not happy that social networking beat out classified documents.

This skit–the third so far–seems to be getting funnier each time:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/viral-video-julian-assange-is-a-samantha-but-a-charlotte-to-the-swedish-police/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101215/glassy-eyed-zuckerberg-is-time-person-of-the-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20101215/glassy-eyed-zuckerberg-is-time-person-of-the-year/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:31:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1300 Apparently deciding this whole WikiLeaks hubbub will blow over, by declining to pick readers’ choice Julian Assange, Time Magazine picked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. (Zuckerberg and his team also helpfully gave Time tons of access, resulting in photos and videos and sidebars galore.) Assange placed No. 3, after the Tea Party.

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel writes:

In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.

There’s not much in the way of new info about Zuckerberg and Facebook in all the materials. It’s pretty much the standard stuff from the great Zuckerberg relatability tour of 2010 after his sweaty meltdown in an April interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D8. (Many mentions of the longtime girlfriend, recounting of childhood pranks, highlights of interests listed in Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, etc.)

Time profiler Lev Grossman works hard to get to the heart of Zuckerberg (whom he seems to have fallen in love with, just a little). Here are a few of Grossman’s more interesting assessments of how Facebook sprung from the mind of Zuckerberg:

On inspiration:

The reality is that Zuckerberg isn’t alienated, and he isn’t a loner. He’s the opposite. He’s spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome. Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn’t build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his.

On the big goal:

Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You’ll be working and living inside a network of people, and you’ll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.

On privacy:

Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/glassy-eyed-zuckerberg-is-time-person-of-the-year/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100819/when-it-comes-to-new-ipad-app-people-who-read-people-are-the-luckiest-people-in-the-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20100819/when-it-comes-to-new-ipad-app-people-who-read-people-are-the-luckiest-people-in-the-world/#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:15:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=46771 Looks like People magazine’s rumored iPad standoff with the photo agencies that supply it with paparazzi shots is over. The publication’s app for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad (iTunes link) debuted early this morning, and with an interesting twist: A subscription-verification interface that permits current People subscribers to download the issues for free. Non-subscribers looking for the latest Lindsay Lohan rehab photos will need to cough up $3.99 per issue and they cannot subscribe via the app.

Seems resistance from photo agencies trying to squeeze People for some extra money to allow their images to be used on the magazine’s iPad app wasn’t quite as bad as it had been made out to be. Either that or the publication agreed to pay photographers an additional iPad usage fee that acknowledges the device isn’t simply a promotional tool, but a new distribution mechanism and revenue stream.

Notably, the People iPad app is the first Time Inc. (TWX) offering free to print subscribers. The rest of the company’s flagship mag iPad apps are expected to join it in the next 30 days or so. As will the rest of the publishing industry’s for-tablet offerings.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100819/when-it-comes-to-new-ipad-app-people-who-read-people-are-the-luckiest-people-in-the-world/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:59:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20996 Sports Illustrated’s iPad app, which the company first started showing off in concept form last winter, is now in the iTunes store.

No point in going into detail about it when you can see it for yourself.

But it’s basically what editor Terry McDonell promised last fall and what the magazine’s peers are also delivering on Apple’s (AAPL) platform: All of the weekly magazine is there, plus some bells and whistles, like additional photos, an extra story and some videos. (The ads, though, are not the same as those in the magazine, which is different from rival Condé Nast’s strategy.)

In this case, the app it also looks and functions quite a bit like Time magazine’s iPad app, with good reason: Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. unit is using the same outside collaborators, The Wonder Factory and WoodWing Software, for all its magazine apps.

So if you liked the Time app, you may like this one. The price is the same, too: $4.99 an issue, though a subscription plan in the works will end up shaving the per-issue price down a bit.

But here’s the thing: The “magazine plus” app concept, which works nicely for titles like Wired, feels like a liability with Sports Illustrated. Because much of the magazine’s content is dated as soon as hits the page, and SI is happy to let it stay that way on the iPad.

Every mag app grapples with this, of course. And so far all of them are trying to steer away from the Web model, where they’re expected to provide timely updates, but don’t make much money doing so. Better to resell the magazine they’ve already made without having to create much in the way of new stuff.

When you hold a print version of SI, timeliness doesn’t feel like a problem. Presumably because you don’t have any other expectations. But when you’re reading it in digital form, on a device connected to the Web…

Case in point: Today’s issue has a feature story on the U.S. World Cup team’s exploits. But it was written before the thrilling Algeria game. So there’s no mention of that result.

And while the app does have some links into SI’s Web site and the ability to provide updated scores, it does so in a limited way: Right now, it’s only offering up baseball scores. So when the SI team was demoing the app for me this morning, I heard oohs and aahs from a nearby office, where people were watching the Italy-Slovakia game. But the app couldn’t give me the score of that match: If I had wanted to check it out, I’d have had to head out of the app and into Apple’s Safari browser.

The SI guys say this is a very deliberate design choice. McDonell says the app provides readers with a “curated experience” instead of the “firehose” of data flooding from the Web. I’d buy that for some titles, even for a news magazine like Time.

But not here: If Sports Illustrated really wants me to pay up for this one, it needs to plug in, too.

Chris Hercik, the SI creative director, who listened to all of my gripes yet remained good-natured about it, sat down for a quick interview this morning. Apologies for the poor lighting — one thing you get on the SI app that you don’t get here is video made by people who know what they’re doing:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/ http://allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 18:12:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19692 Sports Illustrated hasn’t come to Apple’s iPad yet, but the magazine is already showing off a new version of its future: A digital version designed with Google in mind.

This one, which Editor Terry McDonell showed off at Google’s I/O developer conference today, looks a whole lot like the one the publisher says it is bringing to Apple’s gadget soon. The real difference here is the way readers/buyers get their hands on the thing: Rather than buying it from Apple’s App Store and downloading it to your iPad, you would access it via your Web browser, after purchasing it from an app store Google manages.

For most users, this may not matter very much. Regardless of which store you buy it from, the magazine should function the same way. (Don’t get hung up on the fact that it’s a Web-based app.)

But for publishers like Time Inc., the Time Warner (TWX) unit that puts out Sports Illustrated and titles like Time and People, it’s potentially a big deal: It opens up a much wider audience for the company’s publications, since they should work on any device that supports Google’s Chrome browser. Just as important, it gives Time Inc. another vendor to work with, one that might be willing to grant it concessions Apple (AAPL) won’t–like control over subscriber information, perhaps.

But all of this is a little speculative, as neither Time Inc. nor Google (GOOG) has released concrete details about the app store or the magazine. But the hope is that both will be ready in the fall.

Meantime, here’s McDonell’s presentation. He’s introduced at the event by Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management.

And here’s cleaner version of a similar demo, which McDonell taped in advance:

This doesn’t look remarkably different from the tabletized magazine demos Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated have shown off before. That is, SI (and mag publishers in general) are still primarily concerned with porting their printed product to digital form, adding some audio and video, as well as selected links to the Web. This makes sense given that both demos were produced with the Wonder Factory design shop.

See for yourself: Compare and contrast today’s demo with the one SI showed off last fall:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100405/some-publishers-are-wary-of-sales-on-itunes/ http://allthingsd.com/20100405/some-publishers-are-wary-of-sales-on-itunes/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:00:37 +0000 Shira Ovide and Russell Adams http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=23522 Newspaper and magazine companies rushed to prep their titles for the debut of Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPad last weekend. But while publishers hail how the tablet computer lets them showcase their wares, some are working to develop ways to sell their publications separately from Apple’s iTunes.

Tablet editions of Time and Popular Science magazines–each priced at $4.99–were among the most popular paid downloads for the iPad over the weekend. The thousands of iPad applications available so far also include editions from GQ, Outside magazine, USA Today, the New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal.

The majority of magazines and newspapers for the iPad are downloaded through iTunes, the channel to purchase music, movies, books and other entertainment for the iPhone and iPad. The more than 125 million iTunes account holders can order iPad periodicals with just a few taps on a screen, instead of pulling out their credit cards and signing into multiple Web accounts.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100405/some-publishers-are-wary-of-sales-on-itunes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/ http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:40:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18035 Many Web publishers are scrambling to make some or all of their sites “iPad ready,” which basically means stripping their homepages of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash. Some, but not all, are being rewarded with a shout-out from Apple, via a page that identifies “iPad Ready” sites.

Here’s the list of publishers Apple (AAPL) says “deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad”:

CNN
Reuters
New York Times
Vimeo
Time
Major League Baseball
The White House
Virgin America
Sports Illustrated
Flickr
People
TED

Apple acknowledges that this isn’t a complete list of iPad-compatible sites–both NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are overhauling their pages for the gadget–and it’s unclear whether Apple has any criteria for calling out these sites in particular. (For the record, I’m told that All Things Digital should work just fine, too).

But for whatever reason, the list appears to be particularly heavy on sites owned by Time Warner (TWX). CNN makes the cut, as do Time Inc. magazines Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

One other note: Check out the description Apple uses for each of the sites it calls out and you’ll see that “iPad-compatible” doesn’t mean “completely free of Flash.”

In many cases, Apple can’t say that all of the sites’ videos will play on the gadget. Just “most” videos, or “recently published” ones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100311/pink-floyd-wins-court-case-will-money-leave-itunes/ http://allthingsd.com/20100311/pink-floyd-wins-court-case-will-money-leave-itunes/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:03:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17273 Want to buy Pink Floyd’s “Time” on iTunes but don’t want to pay for all of “Dark Side of the Moon”? You’ll want to make that purchase soon.

A ruling in the band’s lawsuit against EMI Music Group may mean that the band’s songs will only be available online in album form. BBC:

The rock legends, signed to EMI since 1967, said their contract meant their albums could not be split up without their permission.

A judge agreed, saying the contract contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.

EMI has been ordered to pay £40,000 ($60,000) in costs, with a further fine to be decided.

…In court, Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt declared that the contract means EMI is not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd’s consent.

As of this morning, you could still buy much of the band’s output on a track-by-track basis at the online music stores that Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) run.

And just because the band has won the ruling doesn’t mean that’s going to stop–its entirely possible, for instance, that a check of a certain size could allay the band’s concerns. Other album-only holdouts like Metallica and Radiohead eventually held their noses and allowed their stuff to be sold by the song on iTunes, too.

But if you really want to buy “Pigs on the Wing Pt. 1,” but not all of “Animals” (apologies to fans of the album I offended earlier in the week), you might want to buy now, just to be safe.

UPDATE: EMI says it hasn’t been ordered to stop selling individual tracks, adding that this will be hashed out in the courts for a while. Here’s the full text:

Today’s judgment does not require EMI to cease making Pink Floyd’s catalogue available as single track downloads, and EMI continues to sell Pink Floyd’s music digitally and in other formats.

This litigation has been running for well over a year and most of its points have already been settled.

This week’s court hearing was around the interpretation of two contractual points, both linked to the digital sale of Pink Floyd’s music. But there are further arguments to be heard on this and the case will go on for some time.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100311/pink-floyd-wins-court-case-will-money-leave-itunes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/dark-side-of-the-download-pink-floyd-sues-emi-over-online-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/dark-side-of-the-download-pink-floyd-sues-emi-over-online-sales/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:45:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17195 It’s standard operating practice for the music industry: Musicians sue labels, claiming they got screwed out of royalties.

But from a writer’s perspective, it’s always nice when the plaintiff is a well-known act whose catalog includes a hit called “Money.”

Pink Floyd’s suit against EMI is technically about online royalties and the fact that EMI has been selling the group’s work as singles instead of albums at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store.* This detracts from the fact that much of the band’s output consists of “seamless pieces,” in which “many of the songs blend into each other,” the group’s lawyer told Bloomberg.

The band isn’t always opposed to people picking and choosing its songs, though. Tune into “Cold Case” on CBS (CBS) on March 21, and you’ll be treated to the following: “Hey You,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Mother,” “Marooned,” “Time,” “The Thin Ice” and “Wish You Were Here.”

In any case, EMI has much bigger problems to worry about. Like staying out of the clutches of rival Warner Music Group (WMG).

“We’re huge fans of Pink Floyd who we have been working with for 40 years and whose great catalog we continue to represent and work for internationally,” says a shy EMI spokesperson.

*We should note that much of “Animals,” which has a great cover but crummy songs, is only available if you buy the entire album.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/dark-side-of-the-download-pink-floyd-sues-emi-over-online-sales/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/ http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:41:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15921 If you’re waiting for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad to rescue the magazine business, you may have to wait a very long time indeed. But the present-tense magazine industry–the ink-and-paper version everyone has left for dead–may be limping its way to a recovery.

It’s not close yet. But we are seeing signs that things are at least getting less bad. As Nat Ives notes, the slide in newsstand sales seems to have slowed in the second half of last year, and some titles are even reporting an uptick.

Meanwhile, industry heavyweight Time Inc. also had comparatively good news to report today-things are still down, but not as dire as they have been.

The numbers: The Time Warner (TWX) unit says Q4 subscription revenue was down six percent and ad sales were down 12 percent. Not stellar, but better than Q3, when they were down 13 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

The bottom line, in the meantime, helped by two rounds of major layoffs, stayed steady, with an operating margin of 14 percent.

It’s hard to tell how widespread the recovery is, because different titles have different stories to tell. Time Warner did note that its News unit–that includes Time, Fortune, etc.–lagged behind and that its Style group–overseen directly by CEO Ann Moore–did well.

“Well,” that is, by magazine standards: Revenue was flat in Q4, aided in large part by People magazine. (Now you can see why the Time Warner executive I talked to last year said it was hard to see the company dumping that title in particular.)

The company said that while ad dollars were down nine percent in the U.S., ad rates only shrank by “low single digits,” which is a bit encouraging. And Time Warner said numbers for the current quarter are improving over Q4.

Requisite caveat here: These numbers, and the ones you’re going to see for the next couple quarters, are being compared with really terrible numbers from previous quarters. So the fact that Time Inc. can’t show actual growth tells you that this is still an industry with really big problems. But maybe they’ll be more manageable than we thought–even without the help of a “magical and revolutionary device.”

Here’s the Q4 breakdown (click tables to enlarge):

And, for comparison’s sake, here are the Q3 numbers:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100123/weekend-update-01-23-10-the-bated-breath-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20100123/weekend-update-01-23-10-the-bated-breath-edition/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:26:59 +0000 Drake Martinet http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=33320

We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

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