What Does The iOS Newss...

The iOS Newsstand may be annoying to some but to publishers it’s a dream come true. They can place their magazines front and center, ensuring eyeballs on their content and display ads without much fuss. I talked to Mark Edmiston, CEO of Nomad Editions , about their new Newsstand-compatible titles (including Good Dog , an iPad magazine that I presume is about cats) and how placement on the newsstand can make or break an app. Nomad Editions found that many of their “app-only” titles were lost in the morass of lifestyle apps and were passed over by readers. By placing them front and center, Edmiston believes the numbers can only improve. He’ll get back to us in a week or so with the verdict, but here’s a quick video interview with him about the move.

The iOS Newsstand Is Op...

Folks who have upgraded to iOS 5 will note that the iOS Newsstand is now running and available as a standalone app. If you’ve already downloaded any of Apple’s official magazines – most Conde Nast titles are using Apple’s own service, for example – the magazines will now appear within the newsstand and the standalone apps will disappear from the desktop. Non-newsstand magazines like the Economist remain as standalone apps although you will may not be able to buy or subscribe to content through them. UPDATE – The folks at the Economist told me they are using Apple’s subscription service but have opted out of the Newsstand. Apple announced this functionality last February with the launch of iOS 5. The move force content providers who wanted to sell content through their apps to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, leading to changes in almost every ebook and magazine app. Apps that use the subscribe feature must pay their cut while apps like Kindle and Nook have circumvented it by creating web-based purchasing systems and, in Amazon’s case, a web-based ereader. As an emagazine convert, I love me some newsstand and I love being able to perform in-app purchases. However, I’d be more than willing to eschew them in order to get cheaper books and magazines. That said, the newsstand is clearly no walled garden as content producers can go either way and, more important, the experience is seamless to the end user. That said, if you woke up today missing your fix of Wired’s rarely timely but always interesting tech news, now you know where your ecopy of the emagazine ewent. Crunchbase APPLE Company: Apple Website: apple.com Launch Date: January 4, 1976 IPO: October 12, 1980, NASDAQ:AAPL Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with... Learn more

Pressly Turns Websites ...

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is an HTML5-based platform that turns online publications into tablet-friendly websites that work on the iPad, Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook. The sites it produces are nearly indistinguishable from their native counterparts, like Flipboard and Zite for example, offering a similar experience for browsing through articles, images and videos. Navigation is designed for the tablet interface, using common gestures like multi-touch swipes and pinches. Pressly’s platform includes five customizable templates as a starting point, each designed with the needs of different publishers in mind. One template is more text-driven, while others are better for browsing through photos or videos. Like native apps, navigating a Pressly-built site uses intuitive gestures, like a 2-finger swipe up or down to reveal quick navigation and a pinch to close articles. The templating engine can pull in a variety of data feeds, too, like JSON, XML, RSS or Twitter and WordPress content. Despite the end product’s similarities to today’s popular tablet magazines, Pressly isn’t designed to be an alternative to building a native app for the iPad or another tablet. In fact, the company isn’t even a big proponent of saving URLs as homescreen icons. Instead, Pressly wants to leverage the popularity of tablets’ most popular application, the browser, to immediately deliver tablet-optimized experiences to those surfing the Web. In addition, because these sites are just HTML pages, publishers can integrate all the common functions found in a traditional website, including analytics, advertising, payment processing, store finders and more. And Pressly includes its own ad platform which lets publishers and advertisers insert rich media ads into the tablet-friendly site. These ads can include videos, photos, links, hot spots, social sharing buttons, detailed tracking mechanisms and they can even be displayed as 360-degree immersive views. Pressly is currently working with Canadian Living Magazine, Transcontinental Media Group and The Toronto Star (Canada’s largest daily) as well as with the The Economist’s digital team in New York on a new, yet-to-be-announced product prototype. If you’re on a tablet computer, you can see a demo of Pressly in action here . The company’s founders include CEO Jeff Brenner, CTO Peter Kieltyka, Marketing and Media Lead Tobin Dalrymple and Business Development Lead Chi Chen. Brenner and Kieltyka previously founded a consulting business called NuLayer , which built over 17 successful Web and iOS projects including the popular sports app for theScore, as well as social photo sharing startup Crowdreel , winner of the 2009 Twitter Chirp conference. NuLayer has a minority partner in theScore, but Pressly itself has no direct funding. Pricing for the platform has yet to be determined. Judges Q&A Expert Judges:  Aileen Lee  (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers),  Dustin Moskovitz  (Asana),  Michael Parekh  (MPi Capital),  Joshua Schachter  (Jig) AL: Really beautiful. Need to focus on certain verticals. A: We feel publishers need this. This isn’t competing with Flipboard directly. DM: I’m Flipboard investor, not sure your product is there yet. A: Flipboard is iPad. Pressly is a Web tech (HTML5). Also, publishers can control content better. There’s room for us. Flipboard does content discovery on iPad, Pressly uses Safari or a Web browser to deliver tablet-friendly site. MP: From user perspective, looks great. Biz model question about revenue share. A: No upfront costs on revenue share with publishers - a win-win situation for both. If consumers love and is engaging, publishers can increase CPM’s. Can start bringing ad inventory to publishers. JS: I like the ads. Worry is people with dev shops can build whatever they want, leaving you with newspapers, those without tools to build this. A: Built platform where publishers can build on top of. Publishers are good at telling stories, not great at innovating like this. Crunchbase PRESSLY Company: Pressly Website: pressly.com Launch Date: September 13, 2011 Pressly is an HTML5 publishing platform that automatically transforms online content, such as RSS feeds and social content, into interactive, cleanly-designed web apps for tablet web browsers. Pressly is currently optimized for the iPad. Pressly’s web apps give publishers an easy, turn-key vehicle for displaying full-page, stylish tablet advertisements, that are more engaging than traditional online ads and are more effective with readers. Learn more

Forget Freelancers, Hir...

With newspaper and magazine ad revenue on the decline, publishers are expanding their repertoire in order to make up the difference. They’re setting up deal sites, selling digital subscriptions and now they’re selling marketing services and not just to ad buyers. Last week, Conde Nast, publisher of The New Yorker, GQ, Wired and dozens of other magazines, launched a new division called Ideactive. What they’re offering is a one-stop shop for all your digital marketing needs including mobile app development, websites and social media consultations. Companies who advertise with the publisher will get better rates, but they’ll take money from anyone who wants to hire them. Poytner followed up on this idea and found several more publishers moving in this direction including the Grand Island Independent . If you’re a business in the area, you can pay this small, Nebraskan newspaper to set up a Facebook page and Twitter account for you. Since launching in March 2010, the program now has about 40 clients that pay $99 a month for the service. That means the paper is collecting roughly $48,000 a year with very little overhead. Not a bad side business. On one hand, it’s a wonder publishing companies didn’t start doing this sooner. They’ve always had ad departments dedicated to helping business show up in print, so why not extend that to the digital space? Maybe because they’re publishers and not web designers? And it’s one thing to help a current client build a Facebook page to go with their print ads, but when they get paid to do work for non-ad buyers, then you’re just another ad agency, aren’t you? You do have to give credit to these old-school publishers who are fighting to stay alive in a digital world, but as Poytner’s expert points out, “Newspapers still will have to find ways to capture a larger share of Internet advertising, for advertising is where the money is.” It seems to me that publishers would be better off finding ways to sell what they do best, which is create informative and entertaining content.

Video Demo Of Spin Play...

Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions , more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app ( iTunes link ) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video). It’s a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year’s subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin’s rockstar photo shoots. But it’s also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin’s music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them. The one thing that always bugged me about music mags is that the writers sing the praises of bands, or alternatively trash them, and it all sounds convincing enough, but you buy an album based on their suggestion and it’s awful. Or they dismiss the songs that speak to you. Music is so subjective anyway. Now you can actually play some of the songs they are writing about, while you read the review. And you can decide immediately which music reviewers share the same musical taste as you and which ones need to clean the wax out of their ears. Are 60 streaming-only songs a month worth $1.99 when you can get millions of songs on Rdio or Rhapsody for $4.99 or $9.99 a month, respectively? If you get the $7.99 annual subscription, it comes to less than 75 cents per months, but you can’t really compare the two. Spin is offering a highly curated playlist. If it’s editors really do have better music tastes than the rest of us, then it could be like getting the best mixed CD every month from your friend who is in a band. If the music is meh, then people are not going to renew their subscriptions. And that’s why this app is notable. Spin’s iPad magazine won’t live or die based on the quality of the writing or the photography or even the “behind the scenes” videos (who really cares about those anyway?). It will live or die based on the musical taste of its editors and how good or awful those playlists are. The main reason people read music magazines are for the recommendations anyway. With the iPad app, now you can just listen to the song recommendations and judge for yourself. It’s a music magazine in its purest form. CrunchBase Information iPad Information provided by CrunchBase