David Emery OnlinePush Pop Press: Al Gore's Our Choice
Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.
I’m a fan of both eBooks and eMagazines, and consume quite a lot of both on my iPad; this makes all of that look a bit trivial. The potential of tablets as a new medium for information really excites me.
Also, the site has a lovely little design detail – on a desktop it says “Click” and “Rollover”; on the iPad it’s the same design but it says “Tap” instead.
Visit ➔Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available
We’ve had the pleasure of using Photosmith during its beta period and it has already joined our list of must-have photography apps for Apple’s tablet. If you use Lightroom and own an iPad, we strongly recommend checking out Photosmith.
I do hope Apple have something similar up their sleeve for Aperture and the iPad (and I’d be pretty happy if that involved iPhoto for the iPad at the same time…).
Visit ➔I Just Facebook Like You
Brands dramatically overweight the value of the ‘likes’ their campaigns accrue and treat it as pure social signal. And they make spending decisions based on these unformed notions of community, commitment, sociality. They play for the wrong endgames (high like counts, ‘virality’, shares) without architecting deeper, long-lasting experiences that break out of stream thinking.
Facebook “Likes” are a pretty weird thing now they’ve been turned over to marketeers, aren’t they? Speaking from the position of a marketeer, of course.
In the space of a year they’ve managed to completely own and redefine the meaning of the word “like”.
Visit ➔Spotify takes the axe to its free service – can it now claim to slash music piracy?
However, this feels like a bad move. In one feel swoop Spotify is reducing its ability to say, with much credibility, that it is out to reduce the amount of piracy. If you can only listen to 10 hrs, and then only five times to one track, how can Spotify claim that it can significantly eat into the massive amount of file-sharing out there?
Obviously there’s little positive to be drawn from this move, but it was inevitable that Spotify was going to have to make some concessions to be able to launch in the US. The success they’ve had in Europe has made those discussions pretty difficult I imagine, as you’ve got the majors trying to weigh up whether they want to let the genie out of the bottle again.
Personally, I think that the limiting hours aspect of this makes sense, but I’m less keen on the pre-track limits as it just makes the whole offering a bit too complicated from a consumer point of view – I can see the 10hr limit making people upgrade, but the per-track limit making people just listen to something else.
Visit ➔The often-rumored Apple HDTV
I’m wrong a lot whenever I speak in absolutes about Apple’s future plans, but I don’t think they’ll ever release a TV.
I think, for all the reasons Marco lists, that Apple will enter the TV market. It’s fractured, difficult and confusing for the consumer – it reminds me exactly of the pre-iPhone mobile phone market. And the pre-iPod market. And the pre-iPad market.
Visit ➔Speculation on an Amazon iPad competitor
I’d bet on Amazon releasing a true tablet, competing more directly with the iPad than the Kindle currently does, in the possibly-near future.
I think it would be shocking at this point if Amazon didn’t release a Kindle branded Android-based tablet this year. I think they’re the only ones out there that have the marketing reach and volume potential to compete with Apple, but I think they’re behind on hardware and software design (sure, the Kindle is the best eReader out there but it still feels like an Apple product of about 5 years ago).
Visit ➔Amazon: Look at ads and we’ll knock $25 off the Kindle
You agree to use sponsored screensavers and ads at the bottom of the home screen and Amazon gives you $25. I’m convinced a Kindle will eventually be free.
I, too, am convinced that the Kindle will eventually be free.
Visit ➔Streaming or Buying Books: Will Readers Choose a Subscription Model for E-Books?
A Spanish startup called 24symbols is launching this summer with the promise to do just that: provide a subscription service and become the "Spotify for e-books."
I’ve been wondering when someone would do this. I’d argue that for most people they’d be more into the idea of not owning books then they are into the idea of not owning music; I know I certainly don’t re-read books that often, and I for one would cope with tasteful adds contained within if it meant a model like Spotify could work.
Visit ➔Lockers vs Streaming Services
I don't get the idea of music locker services like the one Amazon just announced. If I'm going to stream music from the cloud, why should I continue to buy files and collect them? I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for something like 11 or 12 years and although it has taken a while to get used to, I vastly prefer subscription streaming services over file based music. I've just stared using rdio on my Android and on the web and I love it too. I've used Spotify and it is also excellent (once it is fully licensed in the US).
Amazon’s service is certainly interesting, but if you’re going to pay for a cloud-based music service why not use Spotify?
Personally right now – and this makes me sound pretty backwards, I know – I’m quite content with neither; having music on my iPhone which I have with me all the time eliminates the need for a locker-style service, and I pretty much just listen to new music so Spotify isn’t that useful.
Visit ➔Worldview is here, and it's awesome
Every time you send a campaign, we'll show you who is opening it, clicking links, forwarding it to their friends, liking it on Facebook or mentioning it on Twitter. Here's the cool part—we'll show you this on a map, in real-time, all wrapped in a gorgeous UI.
This is totally awesome – I love a bit of real time data visualisation. Makes me want to switch to Campaign Monitor (although with the amount of mailing lists we operate I think that would be a bit prohibitive).
Visit ➔The Universal Sigh
The Radiohead album ‘The King of Limbs’ will be available for purchase in all good record stores everywhere on Monday 28th March, except in the United States of America and in Canada, where for reasons beyond the purview of this writer it will be available from Tuesday 29th March. On VINYL! On COMPACT DISC! As a DOWNLOAD!
To commemorate this momentous occasion, Radiohead have produced a newspaper which will be given away, free, gratis, without cost to the consumer by accredited vendors from a multitude of locations WORLDWIDE!
This is what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks.
Should be a lot of fun on Monday – I’m particularly excited to see how the photos element turns out. I’ll blog about it in more detail in due course…
Visit ➔Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.
Personally I don’t mind the Quick Bar as a way of surfacing trends, but that’s only because it’s my job to be aware of these things; you should be able to turn it off.
The reason why you can’t turn it off though is the key problem here – it doubles up as Twitter’s stab at monetisation. As Marco mentions, advertising is not the problem here, it’s the implementation in the iPhone client but I think that misses the bigger issue: ‘Promoted Trends’ has got to be one of the worst forms of advertising you could come up with.
From an advertisers point of view you get a tiny amount of characters to get your message across, which is never going to be effective (have you ever clicked on a promoted trend? I haven’t.), with no targeting (when they could be doing very targeted ads as they know what you’re interested in by what you follow and tweet).
Come on Twitter; just have done with it and do in-stream ads and let me pay to be able to switch them off. Simple, effective and not dickish.
Visit ➔Rebecca Black Means The (Internet) Fame Game Has Changed
Earlier today I had lunch with a musician friend who was lamenting the trouble her band was having booking shows in San Francisco. When I asked her how she planned on getting the word out she said, “Get a publicist, or have a video go viral.”
I love the way it’s just ‘have a video that goes viral’ as if that’s something you can just ‘do’. The only thing you can control is whether the video – or your music, for that matter – is any good, so how about focusing on that?
Visit ➔Piracy doesn't fund the mob or terrorists
A scholarly report funded by the Canadian government and the Ford Foundation investigates the alleged link between copyright infringement and terrorism and finds none. Basically, counterfeiters can't compete with free, and so there's no money in it.
I imagine that the counterfeit market is far more price sensitive then the legitimate market.
Visit ➔Apple working on magazine app template for developers?
According to Anthony Morganti Apple has been so inspired and excited by the latest stream of iPad-optimized magazine applications that they are now working on a magazine-app template for use by developers in Xcode.
Seems like a no brainer to me – they can’t be too happy with Adobe being the mina player in this market. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they come up with a consumer aimed offering for this as well, to sit alongside iMovie, Pages et al.
Visit ➔Saturn fly-by video
There is no 3-D CGI involved in this amazing Saturn fly-by video...it's made from thousands of hi-res photographs taken by the Cassini orbiter.
I scarcely believe this is real:
Visit ➔Introducing Solo
Introducing Solo, the project management tool for the modern freelancer. We're designers and we've loved making Solo. We think that if you try it you'll love it too.
This looks beautiful – I wish that 1) I had a use for it and 2) all web apps looked like this.
Visit ➔iPhoto for iOS
So, will we see the rest of the iLife suite on iOS? It’s worth mentioning, first of all, that the whole idea of a “suite of apps” may be falling off Apple’s radar very quickly. High-volume, wide-market, affordable and convenient apps make bundles financially unnecessary. Still, we know - and Apple knows - what the idea of iLife is and has been: apps to organize, enhance, and share your digital life.
iPhoto seems like the obvious next step for iOS, but personally I’d love them to go the whole hog and just skip straight to Aperture; considering GarageBand runs better on my iPad 1 then on my 3 year old MacBook Pro I can see it working on an iPad 2.
Visit ➔Web Developers Will Now Be Able To Tap Into the Power of Rdio
If you’re a developer interested in integrating music with a social bent into your web apps, start your engines: Super-social music subscription service Rdio is opening its Rdio.com API and affiliate program to developers.
Seems very nifty – certainly more expansive then Spotify’s API. Although, with Rdio’s lack of a free, ad-supported option a little bit less interesting as well (do you really want your user to have to have a $4.99/m account to be able to use your app?).
Visit ➔