Content Matters: Technology

August 22, 2011

Cool Opportunity for Superstar Graphics Designer

Do you know any great graphics designers, looking to get in at the early stages of a rapidly growing NYC startup?

Crowd Fusion is hiring a designer to to design engaging and effective messages to drive sales, marketing and business development.

This is a great opportunity for a creative and innovative design professional with both online and offline skills. Candidates should have at least 2 years experience developing compelling graphic designs, excellent communication skills and the ability to understand and simplify complex technologies. If you understand that business doesn't have to equal boring and that the right images can tell a story, we'd like to talk to you.

Crowd Fusion is the publish-everywhere platform that powers sites like TMZ.com, Best Buy's Tecca, Essence.com and News Corp's The Daily tablet app. We are growing rapidly and need people who can step in and make a difference.

While this role will work largely from a home office, our preference is to find someone in the New York area who can come into the office 1-2 days each week to collaborate with the team.

You can find the full position description here. Interested candidates should send their resume and a link to their portfolio to jobs-at-crowdfusion-dot-com.

Barry Graubart on August 22, 2011 in Crowd Fusion, jobs, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Crowd Fusion, graphics design, jobs

August 18, 2011

Hewlett Packard's Massive Tablet Fail

There have been no shortage of studies of how Bill Hewlett and David Packard, working out of a garage, built a great company that helped make Silicon Valley what it is today. And in the years to come, there will be no shortage of studies of how former HP (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd destroyed shareholder value and ripped apart that once-great company.

Today's news that HP would look to spin off its PC business, while shuttering its Palm and tablet division was predictable. Yet the sad part is that HP was positioned to succeed in tablets, but they followed the wrong strategy.

It's clear that HP totally misunderstood the market. They looked at the iPad from a technical perspective - features and capabilities - without understanding the emotional response that Apple products generate. No one will buy an iPad wannabe that's priced $100 less than the original.It's why you don't see *skips* priced $5 less than a pair of Nike Air Jordans. In reviewing their marketing site, the biggest advantage they pitch is better multitasking than the iPad. Seriously?

There were three ways to get tablet market share, and HP chose to follow none of them. As I see it, the options were:

1) Be super-low cost. This is a tough one, as it costs HP (and anyone else) more to create a tablet than Apple pays, due to the volume Apple is selling and that it has locked up agreements with the big suppliers. Yet, if HP really wanted to go after the consumer market, they could have subsidized the purchases by pricing their tablets at $249, half the price of an iPad. They might have lost $250m per year for a few years, but they could have bought their way into the market. This would not have been my preferred approach, but it would have worked and been less costly than the current writedowns.

2) Innovate. Another way to gain market share is to do something truly innovative. This would be a big challenge, in that much of the innovation around the iPad comes from the ecosystem of developers. There's a big iOS development community and a growing one for Android, but nothing there for WebOS. But, there are always things you could do. What if HP struck a deal with a movie studio to push releases out to the Touchpad before they were on DVD? I think this would have been the toughest course for them to take, as it would have to be a game-changer to draw an audience away from Apple.

3) Focus on a different market segment. This is the strategy that I believe HP should have pursued. There are a number of b2b opportunities for tablets that are not being fulfilled by Apple or Android devices. In particular, I'd start with the medical community. I've no doubt that in a few years, all nurses and doctors will use tablets to capture and maintain patient data. But with HIPAA privacy laws, an open platform like the iPad wouldn't work. HP, meanwhile, has deep relationships with hospitals and health care organizations who use its servers and software for various applications. It would have been easy for HP to go after that segment. Other interesting segments could be legal, government, aerospace, etc, where specialized needs and high security are critical. HP was better positioned than any other vendor to take that market and they instead tried to beat Apple head-to-head.

Building great products is important. But more important is understanding your markets and choosing to go after segments you can win. HP has clearly failed.

Barry Graubart on August 18, 2011 in General Business, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 11, 2011

What Your CMS Says About You

Adweek included a pretty cool infographic in an article published earlier this week entitled The Trouble With Back-Ends. Under the heading “What Your CMS Says About You” they profiled some of the leading CMS platforms along with some generalizations about the types of users for each. Of course, as with any stereotype, there’s often truth in those generalizations.

I’m pleased, of course, that Crowd Fusion was shown as an innovative, early adopter platform. But more important than that was the accompanying article. The author points out two conflicting trends: first, that publishing platforms are becoming more essential – both to traditional publishers and to brands; and second, that legacy systems, whether built in-house or licensed from traditional vendors, are not equipped to manage the multitude of platforms and devices required for reaching your markets.

We’ve seen those same challenges in our customers’ environments. For years, content management systems were focused on publishing to a single platform – the web – and its unrealistic to expect that they can simply bolt-on solutions for mobile and tablet devices, integrate payment systems and play nicely with all the social media platforms.

Another clear theme from the article is that there’s no “one size fits all” solution on the market. In the blog arena, Word Press comes close to that, but most publishers want more flexibility and power than you can get from a blogging platform. Instead, they want to leverage their vast databases to create topic pages, track user preferences to customize the user experience and build really cool widgets and apps to meet the needs of their advertisers.

A key reason why I joined Crowd Fusion is that our solution addresses the challenges faced by today’s publishers and brands. By providing a platform, not just an application, we give publishers the flexibility to create a vast array of products. Some clients rely on our team for services, while others build out ongoing products themselves. Our business model, in which enterprise plugins are shared across our customer base, helps future-proof our clients, as we will always be building the hooks into whatever platforms come next.

While I think it’s great that Adweek recognized Crowd Fusion as a “bright, shiny object” I’m looking forward to next year’s article when they can talk about how we’ve helped more publishers break out of the “failed CMS” rut. In the meantime, if you're looking for a platform to drive innovative new apps, give me a call.

Barry Graubart on August 11, 2011 in Content Business, Crowd Fusion, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Adobe CQ5, CMS, content management, Crowd Fusion, Drupal, Joomla, Methode, Movable Type, Vignette, Wordpress

July 29, 2011

Why Spotify and Pandora, not Turntable.fm, will win the streaming music market

There's never been a better time for music discovery than today.

In my college days, I was on top of all the newest, most obscure music. Those were the post-punk days and while most of SUNY Albany were listening to Bruce or the Dead, I was into the Chameleons, Echo & the Bunnymen, Ultravox, the Style Council the Replacements and more. When Kate Bush's Running Up that Hill got commercial airplay and everyone "discovered" her, I was devastated.

Since graduating college, my music discovery abilities have diminished dramatically, until recently. But today, rather than my informal network, I have a bunch of great tools which I use for music discovery. If I hear something I'd never heard before, I use Shazam to find out what it is. Then I can check out that band on Last.fm to hear some of their other work. For true discovery, I depend upon Pandora and music blogs like the Hype Machine. To find live music from bands I already love, I use Wolfgang's Vault. And I purchase digital downloads, mostly from Amazon.

Of course, two new services have gotten me excited, Spotify and Turntable.fm.

Now, I'd used Spotify heavily whenever I'd traveled to the UK. The ability to listen to whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to, was incredibly compelling. And, contrary to the music industry fears, it often prompted me to buy a digital download from Amazon.

Turntable.fm, on the other hand, is a very compelling social music service. You can start a room or enter someone else's room to find up to 5 DJ's queued up to play music. Participants vote on songs they like/disklike and there's a running chat commentary in the lower right. For those of us who spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours making and sharing mixtapes in college, Turntable.fm is perfect. But most people would rather just listen to music than to program it. I showed Turntable.fm to both my wife and daughter (admittedly a small sample) and neither of them got it. It was too much work and they had no interest in debating music. They just wanted it to play.

That's why I think Spotify and Pandora will win the streaming music market. My 12-year-old daughter likes Pandora and has set up a few channels and is quick to like/dislike a song to drive personalization. My wife runs Pandora on her iPad, though has done limited personalization. While neither of them have yet to install Spotify (they both listen mostly on mobile devices), I've no doubt they will do so in the coming months.

With both Spotify and Pandora, there is no need for the user to do any work. Typical radio listeners will find Pandora a natural fit. Just pick a channel and listen, perhaps adding likes, dislikes and skips. Those who'd more typically play a CD will find that same experience in Spotify. Mixtape creators will find a comfy fit with Spotify, where we can create and share playlists (like this Post-Punk playlist I've created). Of course, streaming music will be a crowded field, and Amazon and Apple will clearly be among the market leaders, but Spotify is a strong contender, with Pandora a likely acquisition target for one of them (Amazon?).

There's probably a niche for Turntable.fm but I don't see it ever getting widespread use. Most people view music listening as a passive experience and won't put in the effort that it requires.

Barry Graubart on July 29, 2011 in Content Business, Music, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: music, Pandora, Spotify, streaming, Turntable.fm

June 27, 2011

Semantic Technology Driving Real Revenue for Publishers

For the longest time, semantic technology has seemed more hype than reality, more future than today. Well, that’s not really the case. Publishers have been tapping into semantic technologies for more than ten years.

Wednesday, the SIIA will be sponsoring a half-day event focused on exactly that:

Driving Revenues with Semantics: How Semantic Technologies Boost ROI for Digital Media Companies

Evan Sandhaus of the NY Times R&D Labs will provide the opening keynote.

The afternoon event will do a deep dive into two areas where publishers are leveraging semantic technologies: semantic advertising and content enrichment. The semantic advertising panel features speakers from Peer39, MediaMath and AppNexus, who will share case study examples of ways in which publishers and ad networks are increasing the value of their existing inventory.

I will moderate the second session, focused on generating new revenues through content enrichment. I’m thrilled to have three great panelists, each of whom is using semantic technology in a different space:

Hitesh Chitalia has been spearheading use of semantic technology at various business units of McGraw-Hill
Stewart Wills, of AAAS.org, publisher of the journal Science, has just recently begun a project that leverages semantic tagging, both to improve internal editorial processes and to enable better content discovery.
Ken Judy, of Simon & Schuster, a pioneer in the ebook space, have begun to use semantic technology to improve discovery.

Daniel Mayer, of Temis, will then provide a quick overview of how content enrichment can be applied to improve search, navigation and knowledge discovery.

And then... COCKTAILS and networking.

I hope to see you there.

Barry Graubart on June 27, 2011 in Events, Search, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: semantic, SIIA, tagging

June 17, 2011

Being Digital First

The Guardian Media Group yesterday announced its intent to go Digital First. Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told staff that they would need to “move beyond the newspaper, shifting focus, effort and investment towards digital, because that is our future".

The Guardian makes this move from a position of strength. Despite a financial loss of £33m, they are among the only newspapers to have seen their print circulation rise in the past year. Of course, GMG have been among the leaders in embracing digital openness and the web for a long time. While others have set their strategies around digital barriers, the Guardian were pioneers in the move to digital. In 2006, they announced a “web-first” service, where news was posted online prior to the print edition. While that hardly sounds shocking today, they were the first UK newspaper to do so.

It’s clear that newspapers are starting to divide themselves into one of three business models:

Gated
Metered
Open

The Times of London and NY Newsday are probably the best examples of the gated model. The strategy for this model is clear – protect the core business. In the case of the Times of London, the focus is on staving off the erosion of the print product. For Newsday, it’s a mixed strategy. Slowing the print decline is certainly part of the equation, but by providing free access to Cablevision subscribers, they are also using Newsday as a loss-leader to hinder competition from Verizon.

The Metered approach is gaining the greatest attention, with the New York Times and, to some extent, the FT adopting this model. For the Times, the model is pretty clear. They want to remain digitally relevant, but hope to add value to print subscribers and generate digital subscription revenue from their most active users. To strike this balance, the Times has put up a fairly porous pay wall, where users can avoid the meter via Google’s “first click free” and use of social links. My guess is that the strategy will do more to slow print erosion than generate digital-only subs, but time will tell.

While technically a metered approach, the FT model is quite different from the NY Times. Originally, unregistered users could get 3 clicks per month, while registered users could view 30 pages. Over time, that has been cut back where unregistered users get a single click and registered users only 10 clicks per month. Social media links are treated no differently, so there are no easy ways to bypass the wall. Of course, for the FT, which is largely a b2b product, the drivers are very different. A primary goal for the FT are to protect the enterprise sales that they make to large financial institutions and corporations. That’s their core business and they are aggressively looking to protect that.

So, what is meant by open?

Open encompasses more than simply an online access strategy. Yes, it starts with full and complete access to the guardian.co.uk website. But openness goes way beyond that. It encompasses their open platform, which includes free access to their content API, encouraging customers and partners to integrate their content. For partners, the Guardian also provides a MicroApp Framework, which allows partners to add functionality and content directly on the Guardian website.

But openness is more than just a technological framework. It’s a mindset that drives all decision making. And that mindset seems to be that if there is a way to make their content and tools more useful to their audience, they should do so, even if there is risk to an existing business.

Your business model drives your level of innovation. If everything is centered around protecting the print business (as in the gated approach), innovation is snuffed out. Every decision is made through the lens of “will this help us retain our print readers?”

Which brings us to Digital First.

More than anything, I believe that too is a mindset for decision making. The Journal Register Company adopted a digital first approach last year. According to CEO John Paton,

our Digital First transition strategy is centered on the cost- effective creation of content and sales and not the legacy modes of production.

Journal Register set a goal of removing themselves from any process not focused on their “core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers.” Paton adds that “To be in the news business now means you must run your business as Digital First. And that means Print Last.”

Digital First is much more than simply creating an iPad or iPhone app. The market is changing every day and it’s not enough to have a website and a phone app. Today’s publishers must be prepared to publish to n-devices. Today, that may be web, iPad, iPhone and Android. But it’s also Facebook; and Chrome; and Flipboard; and the 10 partner sites where you may be able to reach new audiences. And tomorrow will bring dozens of new platforms and devices and more opportunities to connect with your audience.

Being Digital First means a commitment to creating the infrastructure and the mindset to be able to easily deliver content to n-platforms, in each case optimized towards creating the best possible user experience for your audience. And it means doing so nimbly, so you can explore new platforms and create exciting new opportunities for advertisers and partners.

The Guardian have embraced mobile. While their website is free, they charge a nominal fee (£3.99 per year) for their iPhone app. According to their latest statistics, the Guardian iPhone app has had more than 400k downloads, with an impressive 17% conversion rate. Mobile now accounts for 10% of their web traffic. That iPhone-centric strategy has served them well until now, but in moving to a Digital First world, the will have to embrace a multi-platform, multi-device strategy.

While many publishers have taken the ostrich approach, the Guardian Media Group have shown an understanding of where the media business is heading and a willingness to take the risks necessary to get there. I look forward to watching their transition to Digital First.

Barry Graubart on June 17, 2011 in Content Business, General Business, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Digital First, Guardian Media Group

June 07, 2011

Running With a New Crowd

Last week, I joined Crowd Fusion, in the newly created role of Vice President, Customer Development. (The official press release is posted here).

Crowd Fusion offers a cloud-based content management system. But, really, it’s much more than that. One client described Crowd Fusion as the “glue” that holds all of their existing content management system together. Another described it as a platform for “collaboration on topics”. Yet a third I spoke with called Crowd Fusion a “platform for creating the next generation news room”.

I’m quickly finding out that Crowd Fusion solves many different, yet related problems for its clients. But there are a handful of common elements that cut across each of them:

Publish everywhere: it’s not enough to have a web and tablet strategy; today’s publishers need to publish to n places – the web, iPad, Android, iPhone and whatever comes next.
Scale and flexibility: built in the cloud, Crowd Fusion can easily scale to meet the demands of even the most heavily trafficked sites
Multi-title: Crowd Fusion lets multi-title publishers share a single platform without giving up the unique brand-specific features of each title.
Collaboration and community: Crowd Fusion enables collaboration around topics, driving community and creating high-traffic evergreen pages.

So, why join Crowd Fusion?

First, it’s an amazing time for early stage companies in the New York area. I’ve spent the past weeks meeting with entrepreneurs and venture investors and it’s probably the most exciting time I’ve seen in the NYC tech community in over a decade. People may debate whether we’re in a bubble, but regardless, there’s a huge amount of innovation going on and people are building some great companies. But in choosing the right opportunity, I looked at three key areas:

The space: Crowd Fusion brings together (“fuses”?) a number of key themes that have been important to me throughout my career: big data, the cloud, mobile.
The product: as above, Crowd Fusion is solving real problems and has some fantastic customers. Early clients include TMZ.com, News Corp’s dedicated tablet service The Daily, Myspace, Essence and Best Buy. Sites powered by Crowd Fusion serve more than 50 million uniques per month.
Most important, however, is the quality of the team. Ideas are great, but execution is what matters. Crowd Fusion has an amazing team, led by CEO Brian Alvey (co-founder of Weblogs, Inc, sold to AOL), COO Craig Wood (technical experience at AOL, Netscape and Did-it.com), CK Sample (Weblogs, Inc, AOL and Mahalo), Chris Swenson (Noble Systems, ChoicePoint, etc) and others. The company has great energy and focus, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join this amazing team.

If you want to learn more about Crowd Fusion, drop me a note at barry-at-crowdfusion-dot-com.

Barry Graubart on June 07, 2011 in Content Business, Crowd Fusion, Mobile, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: content management, Crowd Fusion, publishing, startups

April 25, 2011

The Cloud Doesn't Eliminate the Need for Redundancy

Last week's failure of Amazon Web Services has led many pundits to question the validity of the cloud model.

Anyone who believes that the AWS outage means that companies are better served managing their own data servers has probably never managed a data server.

Those who have managed data centers know that failures occur. And those failures can occur for many reasons - hardware failures, rack outages, power failures, software maintenance failures and network failures, in worst case those occurring among Tier 1 networks or the IP backbone.

For companies using traditional data centers to host their applications, the solution is to have a strong redundancy plan. A solid redundancy plan generally involves using two or more data centers, often in different geographic regions and connected to different backbone providers.

So, why is it that when many companies move to the cloud, they ignore that approach and use simple zone redundancy (if that) from Amazon? One company that withstood last week's AWS outages with virtually no impact was Netflix. And that's not suprising. Last December, Netflix posted about their approach to using AWS and "designing for failure". Among other things, the Netflix system automatically adjusts what it displays to users, based upon system availability. If the recommendation system is down, they automatically show popular titles rather than personalized suggestions. While Netflix uses AWS, they've not ceded responsibility for planning to others.

Amazon and other major cloud hosts provide for regional redundancy. This ensures that when a region goes down (as happened last week), you can automatically shift your traffic to the region that is still up. Had Quora, Foursquare and others used that approach, the AWS failure would not have had a serious impact on them.

Now, that's not to absolve Amazon from what was a major failure last week in their North Virginia AWS data center. A multi-day failure at a major cloud data center is not acceptable. Yet neither is absolving yourself from the responsibility to build an operations plan that can withstand major outages.

Even after the major failure at Amazon last week, the Cloud offers the same benefits that it did previously in terms of scalability, hardware and software management, physical (hardware) redundancy and more. For almost any web-centric business, the Cloud is the most effective way to deploy. But that doesn't get us off the hook for avoiding failure. It's still up to all companies to understand the various levels of redundancy offered by the host and choose accordingly.

Barry Graubart on April 25, 2011 in Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Amazon, AWS, cloud computing, EC2

April 21, 2011

News.me: a more personalized social news app

News.me launched today, from the Bit.ly and Betaworks team.

Social Relevance

Before you say "not another iPad news reader", News.me is different. First, it uses the data exhaust from the bit.ly service. In other words, News.me can filter your stream by applying a "page-rank-like" score (called "bit-rank", naturally) applying social relevance to your reading.

Bit-rank alone would separate News.me from Flipboard, Pulse and Zite, but they've added a few other really cool features that make it even more compelling.

See what others are reading

Key to News.me is the ability to follow individuals and see what they are reading. When you first login to News.me it surfaces other News.me users among the people you follow on Twitter. It allows you to then follow them (and other suggested users) on News.me. Unlike Twitter, where you're following only what they choose to share, with News.me you can follow what they're reading. If I want to see what Fred Wilson has read today, I can instantly see it (glad to see that Fred was reading the same Onion article that I was this morning).

News.me has a nice clean interface and makes it easy to quickly navigate through lots of content.

In order to read what a specific user has read, you'll need to select their Twitter icon from the top menu. This may suggest that users will want to pick easily identifiable icons and not change them frequently. Those in the tech community will easily identify at least 10 of the dozen images below, but might have a tough time with the one on the far right (it's Clay Shirky).

What came as a surprise to me was how News.me was born. It sprung from a partnership between the New York Times and Bitly, as described in this John Borthwick post. It's great to see the NYT team being so creative AND realizing that they were not the best ones to actually build the app, eventually selling the concept to Betaworks for a stake in Bitly.

News.me is a paid service ($0.99 per week with a free 7-day trial) and licenses content from more than two dozen news providers. Since bit-rank is computed by clicks on bitly links, News.me serves as an inducement for these publishers to embrace bitly for link shortening on their core news sites. It's a smart way to increase adoption of the core product.

It will take a few weeks for me to see how News.me fits into my news flow, but at first glance it seems likely to take a key spot. Download your copy at the app store.

Barry Graubart on April 21, 2011 in Content Business, Mobile, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: bit-rank, Bitly, data exhaust, News.me, social relevance

April 19, 2011

Rating the Tablet Readers: Flipboard, Pulse News and Zite

The tablet news market has been heating up in recent months.

Flipboard has become the market leader, moving ahead of its rival Pulse News, while upstart Zite has gained some initial traction. Of course, this is a nascent market – market estimates suggest Flipboard may have seen 1 – 1.5m downloads, with Pulse probably slightly fewer.

While all three apps have many things in common, I’ve found they are useful for different purposes. I will describe below how each may best be used and how the market may evolve.

Pulse News, from Alphonso Labs, was the first of its type and gained huge exposure when Steve Jobs demoed the app as part of the initial iPad 1 launch event. Of course that was followed by a C&D from the NY Times, which probably brought them even more attention. The Pulse UI is clean and takes advantage of the swipe and the visual nature of the iPad. At its core, it’s very much an improved Google Reader. Pulse also spotlights “featured” sources such as the Wall Street Journal, Salon, CNN and others to help newbies get up and running. They also offer a set of “top X” lists where they curate the top stories in categories like business, technology, music, sports and more. Pulse also allows its users to integrate their Facebook and Twitter feeds. As with all of the new readers, Pulse offers a number of social tools to make it easy to share a story via email, post it to Twitter or Facebook or save it to Instapaper.

Flipboard, which recently raised a $50m venture round at a $200m valuation and struck a deal to feature content from Oprah's OWN, launched in July, 2010, a few months after Pulse News. Positioning itself as a “social magazine”, Flipboard initially was focused on providing access to the stories that were linked to in your Twitter or Facebook stream. They subsequently have added integration of other content – featured categories (similar to Pulse), Google Reader, Instagram, Flickr, and the ability to add any blog or twitter user.

The Flipboard UI is among the best I’ve seen for the iPad. They have one-upped Pulse in creating a compelling swipeable interface that makes it a pleasure to browse content.

I read Flipboard on a daily basis. I use it in two key ways:

First, I’ve created a number of Twitter lists, focused by industry, which I feed into Flipboard. So, when I want to see the latest articles on Big Data, I simply open the Big Data page in Flipboard and I find the articles linked to in the tweets of the people on my Big Data list. I have similar lists where I can easily track the pharma/biotech and digital media space. I get an intelligently curated magazine of the latest news in any given sector. Of course, it requires you to build and maintain these Twitter lists, but for information junkies, it’s a great tool.
Second, I use Flipboard as a “read later” bookmark for Twitter. Any time I want to read a link from a tweet later, I simply favorite the tweet. I have a “Twitter Favorites” panel in Flipboard, where I can then read those stories. Sure, I could use Instapaper for that purpose (and I do use Instapaper for longer and offline reads) but there’s no quicker way to “bookmark” a link in Twitter for later reading.

The latest entry into the tablet readers category is Zite.

Zite takes a very different approach than Pulse and Flipboard and comes closest to the “serendipity” model of browsing. Rather than having you punch in a bunch of feeds to read, Zite asks for your initial preferences, by category and/or by providing your Twitter and Facebook Ids, then pulls content from thousands of sources which it feels might be relevant. Zite learns from your personal usage – from every story you read. And each story allows you to indicate whether you like or dislike it, and whether you want more stories from that source or about that topic. I was skeptical at first, but have found the relevance of Zite content went up significantly for me after just a few days of usage.

Zite, like Flipboard, has become a key part of my daily routine.

While these three are clearly the key apps to watch for tablet-based news, there’s a recently launched company which is sure to gain traction this year.

OnSwipe is a platform to enable publishers to easily make their content tablet-friendly. Its UI will be familiar to Flipboard, Pulse or Zite users, but OnSwipe is built in HTML5, meaning there’s no need for an app. In fact, publishers can have a site that looks like any other website through a desktop browser, but then has the swipe interface when viewed on any tablet. With a hyper-competitive market for mobile developers, this should be particularly attractive to publishers, who’ve often struggled to build compelling products.

OnSwipe did a preliminary launch of a WordPress plugin, to allow any WordPress blog to be “swipe-able” when viewed through an iPad browser, but their full product is a few weeks from release.

While each of these apps are slightly different, there are many commonalities which provide guidance for content companies looking to develop tablet apps. First, the swipe-centric user interface is here to stay and it’s being widely adopted. There’s no need to come up with your own navigational methods – these are quickly becoming the standard and all publishers should adopt them in their mobile devices. The second key element is that they are all very visual. It’s time to get rid of the text-heavy page. That’s evident even on the web, where companies like Newser and Huffington Post have succeeded with more graphics and less text. Third, and perhaps most important, is that social sharing and discovery of content has arrived.

In my estimation, the battle ground for the coming year will be between Flipboard and OnSwipe to see which can gain the most market share among publishers. Their models are different, with Flipboard aiming to draw publishers into its environment, while OnSwipe allows publishers to have their content accessible via the browser. The latter seems a more attractive model for publishers and I wouldn't be surprised to see Flipboard providing white-label versions of their product to publishers.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement in each of these products. For enterprise and publisher adoption, they will need to create stronger authentication capabilities, as well as better personalization tools. But these readers have already made a huge impact in the way that content will be consumed on mobile devices and every publisher should be paying close attention.

Barry Graubart on April 19, 2011 in Mobile, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Android, Flipboard, iPad, OnSwipe, Pulse News, tablet, Zite

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