Technology

I’ve had an iPad for a couple weeks now (sharing with my wife and two daughters; it’s a popular gadget around our house). And I’m starting to notice some patterns in buying apps for the new tablet. I’d love to know if any of you share my behavior. (Comment below, please.)

1. I don’t think much before purchasing a low-priced iPad app that is “permanent.” For instance, the Weather HD app looked cool, and even with its limited functionality (compared to the free Weather Channel Max for iPad app), I enjoy the quick look at the current weather and brief forecasts for the next few days and the app’s slick animated photo graphics. 99 cents? Sure, why not.
2. Family members and I have purchased a few more expensive iPad apps: Scrabble ($9.99); Crosswords ($9.99); Pages ($9.99); Starwalk ($4.99, and highly recommended!); and some more low-priced ones: Magic Piano (99 cents); Glee ($2.99); Set ($2.99). Again, each of those apps is “permanent,” as in they will stay on the iPad until we tire of them.

Buy a digital edition of Time magazine on your iPad! … For $4.99?

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news apps, all of them free. Frankly, the news publishers that are giving away these apps are leaving money on the table. Of the apps that I downloaded for free to my iPad, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying 99 cents or $1.99 for those from: New York Times, NPR, USA Today, BBC News. I would pay for these because they are permanent.

Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing. You can even bookmark, say, the NYTimes.com homepage and put an icon on the iPad screen permanently. The reason that someone like me would pay for an iPad news app from a specific news provider is if the experience is superior to viewing the news website on the iPad’s browser.

(At this early stage of iPad news apps, the websites as viewed on the iPad browser sometimes are as good of a or a better viewing experience than viewing the iPad app versions. NYTimes.com viewed on the iPad’s browser is quite nice, for example; in fact, it’s better than the only iPad app available from the New York Times currently, NYT Editors’ Choice.)

Within the news iPad apps I’ve used so far — and I’ll concede that it’s early, and publishers I hope will figure this out soon — the business model seems to be something that the companies will get to later. USA Today’s iPad app, for instance, has a banner ad on the homepage (Marriott Hotels at this writing), but ads don’t show up in much else. The NY Times iPhone app has ads from a single advertiser, at the bottom of the homepage (where banner blindness will make them mostly ineffective due to that positioning), and on the second screens of most news articles.

These apps are mostly “shovelware” from the news websites, and lack even web basics such as allowing user comments.

One nice ad technique used on the NY Times iPad app is an occasional “interstitial” full-page ad, which appears after you click a homepage or section-front headline and appears before you get to view your article. I don’t find this that annoying, but if I did, the Times would be smart to give me an option in the app to turn off such take-over-my-screen ads by clicking a setting and, say, paying a dollar to avoid seeing them for the next month,or maybe $5 to not see them for a year.

There are lots of ideas for “upsells” within an iPad news app to persuade (not demand!) people to pay extra beyond the initial, inexpensive download fee. Let’s say that USA Today’s iPad app had a setting where for $1 a month I could turn on a commenting feature and be allowed to leave comments on stories. This should be the topic of another blog post about how to make money from upsells in news iPad apps, so I’ll leave that for another time.

While major news brands are not taking advantage of obvious revenue opportunities with iPad apps yet, Time magazine, until this week, has been going about it wrong. Initially, an iPad user could purchase a single issue of a Time weekly edition, an enhanced digital edition of the print magazine, for $4.99 per edition. That’s compared to the street price of a printed Time magazine at $4.95.

It’s not just that the iPad single-edition price is a few cents more than the paper edition (which I think is ill-advised, considering the printing and physical distribution costs saved by Time with digital editions), but it’s also absurd that Time was selling each edition as a separate iPad app.

Getting back to my earlier comments, there’s no way that I’m going to pay for individual magazines as individual iPad apps! This approach completely misunderstands the device. First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted (since if I don’t and I continue buying iPad Time editions, my iPad screen will fill up with Time icons for various editions).

Time has now fixed this blunder and offers a Time iPad app for free. From within the app, the iPad user can purchase digital versions of the magazine for $4.99. Old issues are stored in the cloud for later reading, and there’s only one Time icon on the iPad screen. But pricing should be more realistic, I believe, and subscriptions offered. While I don’t think that this is the best iPad business model for Time, at least if its executives want to charge per digital issue, they should get a grasp on what’s likely to fly in digital-content pricing when there’s free content (like Time.com!) available on the iPad browser.

Count me as an iPad fan. I love the device, and more specifically I love the form factor of a tablet and can see it becoming an important part of my media life, taking much time away from my laptop. It does concern me that news publishers, out of the gate, appear to be missing the boat in working on an innovative business model for the tablet. Geez, I hope we’re not seeing the big news brands repeat the mistakes of their past when it came to adapting to new digital devices!

If any traditional news publishers are still thinking that the Apple tablet — finally, it has a (strange) name, iPad — points to their salvation by bringing a new business model, they’ll likely be proven wrong.

No doubt, the iPad is an incredible, slick piece of technology. It’s not the “Jesus Tablet” that many of us hoped for (no camera?! no multi-tasking?! no Flash support?! it won’t answer my prayers?!), but maybe by version 2 or 3, it’ll get there. But even if the iPad fairly quickly evolves to be the kind of market pleaser that Apple’s iPhone became, I don’t think that it really changes things profoundly for news companies.

If you watch Apple’s slick video introducing the iPad, much is made that this is “the best experience ever created” for surfing the web. Fair enough. I’d love to have an iPad for when I want to read news on the web (and a lot of other things); my laptop would get much less use.

But does this mean that I’m suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. I’m always surprised when I open my browser history and see how many sites and media brands I’ve hit on any given day.

So if Rupert Murdoch or any other publisher puts up a mandatory paywall to keep me away from their news content on the iPad, I will move on to a similar site that’s free. If NYTimes.com decides to strengthen its proposed porous paywall by the 2011 implementation, then there’s WashingtonPost.com, which will receive my loyalty.

Am I a cheapskate? Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each. There’s too much free choice, and I’d prefer to support the news and media brands that I like best.

So, if NYTimes.com had a premium membership that gave me special privileges, but all its web (and thus iPad-viewable) content remained free to those who chose not to pay, then I’d probably pony up in order to show my support for the New York Times, since I admire its quality journalism, read its content regularly, and want it to continue. The key for me is that what brands I will pay to support, when it comes to commodity news, will be a voluntary decision on my part.

There are so many pointers to the diminishment of news brands, though the owners of those brands don’t want to see it. We’ve seen the “atomization of content” as the news story gets tossed around, linked to, and sometimes goes viral via Twitter, social networks, search engines, and news aggregators. Just as iTunes killed the music CD and reintroduced buying single songs, our new digital ecosystem is doing the same for news stories as it emasculates old news brands.

I used Personalization in the headline, and now I’ll finally get to it. For me, news personalization offerings to date have been unsatisfactory. Sure, I can spend some time setting up, say, an iGoogle personalized page and fill it with news (and other stuff) that I want. But it and the other solutions I’ve seen just haven’t grabbed me. I get plenty of serendipity in my news consumption, but it’s not because of any personalized news service, it’s because of pointers to good news content from the people I follow on Twitter and my Facebook friends, and the blogs I read regularly (or stumble upon). Article continues below photo…

My iCurrent personalized news: Many news brands, not just one

However, I recently tried out a private beta of iCurrent, a personalized web news service that I think is pretty darn close to having what could become my home base for news. Just this week the California company opened up a public beta, so you can try it out. iCurrent also has an e-mail component (which I find to be weak in its current state), and an iPhone app is coming soon.

I’ll write another blog item another day about iCurrent with more detail, but here’s the thing that makes it stand out: iCurrent is to news as Pandora is to music. (In fact, they share investors.)

With Pandora, you pick a musician, song, or genre that you like, then the application selects similar music that it thinks you might like. Pandora learns what you like as you click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a song that’s playing; it lets you tell it to stop playing a particular song or artist. It’s dead-simple to create new channels of music. Most importantly, it makes complicated personalization technology super-easy to use.

ICurrent applies Pandora’s model to news. Initially you choose a few topics of personal interest, but then as you use iCurrent over time, it learns what you want to see. Like Pandora, stories that it selects for you have an up and down arrow to click, if you want; click the up arrow and you get a few choices about what you’d like to see more of — simply “more like this,” or more about specific components of the story that it’s filtered out.

iCurrent’s homepage also devotes 2/3 of the space to your personalized news, and the other 1/3 to important news that everyone should know about (Haiti, Afghanistan, top political stories, etc.).

We’ve been talking about personalized news for a long time; you may remember “The Daily Me” project from MIT in the early 1990s. It’s taken a long time, but I think technologists are close to getting personalized news right.

So, back to the iPad. Assuming I get one (oh, I’ll probably succumb), I doubt that my behavior toward news using it will be much different than it is on my laptop. I’ll bounce around from story to story, not always aware of the news brand that’s hosting a specific story.

From what I’ve seen of iCurrent, it could be a great news home base for my iPad usage.

The iPad, it seems to me, leaves news publishers in much the same predicament as the PC web. Their content will become more and more atomized, especially if — as is my prediction — personalized news advances to the point of real value and Pandora-like simplicity.

The trick to survival for many news organizations in the digital world, then, will be in figuring out how to monetize their content as it flies the coop and first shows up in a consumer’s news stream outside of the news company’s property line. This issue will be as critical to solve on the iPad and like devices as on the PC web.

One last point: The iPad does represent an opportunity for news companies to develop apps that iPad users can buy. Just as selling apps for the iPhone has become a massive business, this will probably repeat for the iPad. I would suggest to (non-niche) news providers that they’ll have an easier time selling specialized applications than selling content. I’ve written this before, but consumer psychology favors spending money on things you can keep (an app, a song) than commodity content that is viewed but once then forgotten.

If I had an iPad, an app I’d pay for: iCurrent. I wouldn’t be paying for the news content, but rather for the convenience and value that a really good personalization app would provide.

Yeah, I know, that’s not what journalists want to hear.

My wife, Suzanne, has long had to put up with a husband who’s a new-gadget hound. I’m an early adopter but not a super-early adopter. We’ve had a TiVo DVR for years, but I wasn’t among the very first to purchase one. I waited for the iPhone 3G to come out before catching iPhone fever. (Suzanne has one, too.) She tends to tag along, patient with me when I enthuse about some new gizmo. (Like the Roku box I bought as a family Christmas present. No one else in the family had a clue what it was supposed to do.) Eventually Suzanne sees the wisdom of (most) of my new-gadget purchases.

Since she’s a school librarian and avid reader, I thought that an e-book reader would be a special holiday gift. So I ordered Suzanne a nook from Barnes & Noble, preferring the virtual screen interface to the Amazon Kindle’s many physical buttons.

In observing her use of the nook in the first couple weeks, I’ve come to predict that the nook (and the Kindle) will not win over huge chunks of the population. While the devices and their E Ink screens make for a wonderful reading experience (my opinion) and are easy on the eyes in a way that reading lengthy prose on a backlit screen is not, they’re still not quite ready for truly mass-market success.

Perhaps Apple will debut the Kindle- and nook-killer later this month. I’m looking forward to seeing what Steve Jobs is hiding from public view.

Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of Suzanne’s first couple weeks with the nook (as observed by me):

• Initial enthusiasm and “that’s so cool” reaction
• Love for some features like tap on a word to get a definition; add notes to sections as you’re reading; highlighting key passages; etc.
• Some disillusionment: “You mean you can’t read it in bed in the dark? You have to have a light on to see the screen?”
• After she played around with it a bit, the nook went in a bedside drawer, not seeing much use

The final point needs some explanation, because it’s not a rejection of the product. Rather, Suzanne has a pile of books on her reading and book-club list, waiting to be picked up. What’s the point of spending an extra $10 for a nook e-version? Books on nook will have to come later, when the paid-for or from-the-library printed versions have been read.

One book on her to-read list is already in hand in digital form, purchased from Amazon for reading on her iPhone. She was disappointed that that purchase couldn’t simply be ported to her nook.

More alarming (to me) was an e-mail receipt showing up in my inbox from Amazon.com, showing that Suzanne had ordered a printed book after receiving the nook. It turns out that it was a cookbook, with color photos, and that didn’t seem like the right kind of book to order in digital form for an e-reader than only displays black, grays, and white.

Magazines and newspapers? Nope, she told me; won’t use the nook for that, especially since the monthly subscription prices per publication are ridiculously high, and she can read most of them on the web for free.

I’ll continue to spy on my wife’s nook usage (or lack thereof), and I suspect that I’ll see her make the transition to digital books read on the nook, in time.

Suzanne was, I guessed, the ideal nook/Kindle convert: librarian, book lover, and not a techno-phobe. Alas, it was not love at first sight.

This makes me think that we’re not quite there yet. What will become a mass-market hit, I believe, will be a thin tablet computer that does everything an iPhone with a big color screen could do (i.e., a full-fledged wirelessly connected computer), and is an outstanding form factor for reading books.

The trick will be getting the price down to a few hundred dollars, and that may take a while.

The ultimate tablet, I think, would be that large, thin iPhone/iTouch device with a stunning color, backlit touch-screen. And it would have a switch to turn the screen into a paper-like E Ink experience with no backlight, for comfortable book and other long-form reading.

Alas, unless Mr. Jobs has some magic up his sleeve, that may be a pipe dream.

Strike those last two paragraphs in my original of this blog item. It seems that a single screen that can be both back-lit color and E-Ink quality reflective display for reading in light is possible; indeed, it exists. Pixel Qi showed off such technology at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Here’s a Gizmodo report on this amazing development.

And then there’s Mirasol displays, which could be the technology that moves media tablets where they need to go. Exciting stuff!

Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the best content on media sites. The idea and design seem a bit old-school to some critics.

I like Fast Flip a lot, for several reasons:

1. It’s an “alternative Google News” for those not wanting to be overwhelmed with selecting from thousands of media sources.
2. It’s a more comfortable interface for some people, especially, I would guess, older online users who are still most at ease with print-like design than with lists of headline links to choose from.
3. It’s not a replacement for Google News, but an alternative for those looking for a different way to find and read the best content from a selected group of quality sources.
4. It’s Google’s first time in sharing with publishers some of the money earned on its own pages. The search giant doesn’t share revenue from links to news websites’ content on Google News, so this is a significant change in policy, even if only experimental — a way for Google to directly support media publishers, including those who complain that Google is eating their lunch by profiting from links to their news.

Frankly, I’m feeling a bit vindicated by Google’s introduction of Fast Flip. Last April, I wrote several blog posts suggesting that it would be in Google’s self-interest to turn Google News into a news search service that shared ad revenue with publishers that are included in Google News:
Google could come to the rescue, but won’t?
How can newspapers help Google?
To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

I also sent e-mails in April to Krishna Bharat, Google Distinguished Researcher and creator and leader of Google News, suggesting that revenue-sharing with news publishers would be a good thing for both the news industry and Google (and, thus, society in general as citizens remained well informed by a healthier news sector). I never heard back from Bharat, even though I’d met him in person a few weeks earlier at Stanford University during a fellowship interview.

If you read through the comment threads on the blog items above, you’ll agree that this was not among the most popular ideas I’ve ever floated in my writing over the years. I got lots of pushback, much of it to the tune of: Google is just smarter than media publishers; Google owes the news industry nothing because it’s already giving news sites millions and millions of user visits, but the publishers aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make money from that.

You can read the links above if you care about my original (unpopular) argument, but the crux is that by sharing revenues, Google would prevent angry and scared news publishers from locking down their content online, AND it would make it politically possible to turn on the ad spigot for Google News because it would share some of its new revenues with the creators/publishers of the content it links to.

While Google didn’t follow my suggestion for opening up Google News for revenue sharing with news publishers, it has done so with a few dozen selected media companies that are taking part in Fast Flip. It’s a variation of what I suggested last April to a generally vigorous assault on the idea.

It’d be nice to think that my humble blog had something to do with the Fast Flip revenue-sharing model, but that’s likely wishful thinking. (If it did, perhaps some nice Google executive will share some of that big pile of G-cash with me. Ah, but life doesn’t work that way.)

Anyway, I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.

I think the iPhone 3G is gonna be big. … D’uh! That’s a pretty safe statement. After today’s announcement, and after drooling over its new features on the Apple website, I tried to check my AT&T account to see when my 2-year contract is up, so I can upgrade to the new iPhone without paying an exorbitant price to do so, and check on data plan pricing. wireless.att.com was so overloaded I couldn’t log in even with repeated attempts.

Assuming Apple can produce enough of these things to satisfy demand, I’ve got to believe that there will be enough iPhones out there (1st-gen and 3G) to support development by news and media companies of services specifically for the iPhone platform. In fact, I’d say any publisher not getting ready to serve an onslaught of iPhone users should have his/her head examined.

I also think that the state of the new iPhone is such that it will cause a lot of its users to abandon reading print newspapers, if they haven’t stopped that already. Traditionalists can pooh-pooh the idea of a tiny phone replacing a print newspaper, but I have no doubt that for many people, it will.

(Hmmm, I seem to have neglected this blog for quite a few days. Back to it…)

This afternoon I listened in on a webinar by Widgetbox.com, which develops free tools for anyone to use in creating web widgets. The company and its offerings are impressive. The widget-making tools are super-useful for publishers large and small — but especially the latter.

Something I find interesting is the company’s business model. It offers its widget-making tools and services entirely free. You might expect a company like this to offer some basic free functionality, but charge for upper-tier services. But as the webinar presenters explained when asked about Widgetbox’s business model, there’s a one-price-for-all plan: Free.

The company plans to make money with programs where developers who use Widgetbox to create their own widgets can optionally participate in programs where Widgetbox sells ads to accompany widgets, and shares the revenue 50/50 with the widget creator. If you don’t want to participate in those programs but plan to sell ads around your widget, as I understand it, that’s fine with Widgetbox and they’ll let you use their technology for free.

It’s a great deal for users, that’s for sure. I’ve included a screen shot of a little widget I created using Widgetbox for a comic-strip project I’m working on. It took literally a couple minutes to create it. (It’s just a screengrab because that site isn’t live yet.)

Earlier today I listened to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, where the topic was online business models, with an emphasis on how to make a business from free content and/or services. A more typical model, according to the panelists, is giving away 90-99% free, with paid premium content or services. That’s sometimes called a “fremium” model.

Widgetbox seems to have eschewed even that. I hope its model works, because it’s a win-win for everyone involved. Let’s just hope the company can make it work financially.

On one of my current projects, I made a bad choice of web hosting company. Fortunately, we figured out how bad this service was before launch, so transition to a new host didn’t disrupt anything. Whew!

I just want to give a little shout-out about a great service that helped me transition the website (which is built using Wordpress) to the new hosting company. EZSiteMove.com came to the rescue after my failed attempts at figuring out how to move everything over and have the site be completely operational.

They did a great job in the time advertised, and the rate was reasonable. Two thumbs up!

The flamboyant new owner of the Tribune Co., billionaire Sam Zell, visited one of his properties in Virginia, the Daily Press, yesterday, and (according to this report) told employees this:

Tribune’s smaller newspapers, including the Daily Press, would serve as a ‘petri dish’ of innovation, where new ideas would be tested and incubated before being passed along to the company’s big three: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Newsday of Long Island, N.Y.”

I have to say, while I think Zell is on the right track with trying to shake things up at Tribune, he’s got this backward. Letting the smaller properties in a chain try the innovations and then passing them along to the flagship papers is something the newspaper industry has already been doing — and I think that’s part of the reason the industry is still in such a mess. It’s not bold eough.

Some of the largest newspapers are bleeding badly; layoffs and buyouts are the order of the day, and quality of the product is deteriorating. (My local paper keeps getting thinner; the day is very near when it’s no longer worth it to renew my subscription.) Zell should be telling his flagship papers to stop stalling and start innovating big-time. Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.

Zell is known for being a change agent. So why doesn’t he demand that every paper in the Tribune chain innovate like there’s no tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to suck if they don’t.

Look, pure-play Internet companies have demonstrated that there are billions of dollars to be made from innovating. I’m sure that Zell believes the newspaper industry can reinvent itself and take part. So why would he take such a conservative approach? How odd.

What do you think?

From NYT today: “Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic.”

Apple’s iPhone, of course, is the first mobile phone that has a decent web browser. So it’s predictable that buyers would be using that function a lot. (I use a Blackberry, but the web interface — not to put too fine a line on it — sucks in comparison to the iPhone’s. I seldom use it for general web browsing or searching because it’s so clunky.)

The figures cited by the Times show that iPhone owners use the web a lot. Even with only 2% of the smartphone market, iPhone web traffic to Google outdoes the more widely adopted smartphones. I notice a friend who has an iPhone surf on it constantly, so I’m not surprised.

There’s an obvious recommendation to be made to media companies as a result of this story: Get ready for serving many more mobile customers with your content and services. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg, and more iPhone-like smartphones are coming soon. Now’s the time to gear up.

Since it’s winter and much of my exercise has been indoors, I’ve been watching DVDs to pass the time while on the treadmill or bike trainer. Right now I’m watching old episodes of “My So-Called Life,” a great drama from 1994. In case you don’t remember it, Life was a “realistic teen drama series that takes a look at a 15-year-old girl and her trials and tribulations with being a teenager and dealing with friends, guys, parents and school” (description from the Internet Movie Database). While critics loved the show, it nevertheless got canceled after only one season.

I fell in love with this show when it came out, but re-viewing it more than a decade later, it’s even more poignant. (That could be because my eldest daughter is now 15, and Life’s fictional family is identical to mine right now: married couple with 2 daughters, and the youngest TV daughter is about the age of my youngest daughter.)

But I’m not writing this blog item to recommend the show. (Well, I do; it’s good.) Rather, watching the episodes I’ve been struck by how much things have changed since 1994. That was the first year after I left the traditional newspaper world and started working an Internet career. I was one of those rare birds who dived in to the online world then. Most people still didn’t understand it, much less made it a big part of their lives.

I suggested to my 15-year-old that she watch the first episode of My So-Called Life, and she did. What surprised me is that she thought the show was OK, but it didn’t reflect her life. 1994 suburbia was different enough from today that she couldn’t relate to it.

Part of her “that’s how it used to be reaction” is probably because of the technology differences between then and now. (The emotional and relationship story lines certainly haven’t changed.) In 1994, no one had a cell phone, and certainly not every other teen you know. The Internet wasn’t part of a teen’s life (unless you were a tech geek). The computer in your house was probably shared by everyone, and was pretty lame compared to today’s. There was no MySpace or Facebook, and teen relationships were still based on personal interactions, not digital ones. Most everyone still got their news from the daily newspaper and TV news.

As we enter a new year, I can’t help but look back to 1994 and marvel about how far we’ve come. Digital technology now so pervades our lives that even looking back only to 1994, it seems like a very different world. It was one that today’s teenagers can’t relate to, because it seems foreign to them.

As news and media companies embark on figuring out how to survive and prosper in 2008 and beyond, they might want to keep this in mind if they hope to be relevant to my daughters’ generation.