Mossberg, Carr, Arrington, Frédéric Filloux – on the iPad
it's interesting to see all three of these influential voices—Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal; David Carr, a columnist for the New York Times; and TechCrunch's head honcho Michael Arrington—discussing Apple's upcoming device in one forum. And what emerges is that all of them, to varying degrees, are excited about the iPad's promise. At one point, David Carr says, "I think there's a revolution in the fact that you lean back and read something," and this, the possibility of a more casual version of computing, seems to be the iPad's greatest promise in the minds of all three journalists.
David Carr summarizes the value to this by saying " The Gadget disappears and you are looking into pure software"
NOTED: This is true. All of them , Hp Slate, Joojoo and iPad all have this inherent pure screen button-free picture frame design. The value perceptions will all be the result of software engagement. Very observant, this is the crux of the CTN PageBlend creative effort, that the device must be made to perform up to our user experience engagement need to get longview Time Spent stats for advertisers.
A place of superb insight i just discovered is http://www.mondaynote.com – now a must-read for me.
an excerpt of future predictions within :
The iPad Media Expectations
Here is the general backdrop. In 2011, the typical news site largely remains freely accessible. For the most part, publishers see their sites as mass audience products. These are built on a basic design, relatively light features and supported by all possible forms of advertising. These free sites are targeted at occasional readers who come from search engines or various referrals, and see one, two or four pages once in a while. It’s delusional to expect them pay for anything. If they hit a paywall, they’ll simply go elsewhere to find the news they want. For them, information is just a commodity that can be found more or less in the same form all over the web. They have no brand loyalty.
Most publishers don’t want to conceal their product behind a paywall. As the Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger explains in his brilliant Hugh Cudipp lecture (an absolute must-read):
“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world”.
But as pragmatism finds its way to the P&L, paywalls have started to show up on the web. They are targeted to the 10 or 20% fraction of heaviest users, those who are willing to pay for slightly more content, perhaps, and, definitely, for a better user experience.
A great mobile one, for instance.
Enter the iPad application. In this spring 2011, all major news brands have one. I’ve got many on my brand new device. Here are some of the common features I enjoy.
snip ..
In 2011, new book formats began to show up. The hybrid type. A year earlier when the device was introduced, I was reading Too Big to Fail a remarkable account of Wall Street’s rescue. Great book by New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin: 600 pages, 700 grams. With the public debt global crisis hit back the world economy, Penguin Books decided to publish a sequel — with an iPad version. Instead of yesterday’s “official” players’ black and white photographs extracted from the first paper version, now the iPad-format book comes with 16 video clips of decisive moments — provided by Bloomberg and Reuters. In addition, I’m getting 12 interactive graphics from the New York Times. It didn’t cross my mind to orders the books from Amazon as I did 18 months earlier. I’ve got my enhanced electronic version for the same price as the physical book (for the publisher, the extra cost of multimedia content was offset by savings on print and distribution).
(note: I guess that means PageBlend is a "hybrid"… ? - either way, you do not have to wait till 2011, its here now. )
Kevin Pereira talks to Mark Wilson from Gizmodo and tech correspondent Dave Mathews about the iPad
