The first mobile call was made 40 years ago today, on a device based on the communicators used in the original "Star Trek," and the iPad was apparently introduced in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 45 years ago this week. It's a good thing that show business invented the future for us so long ago, because god knows we can't come up with anything on our own.
These days, professional content curators have to go through a lot of crap to find that one thing that can be successfully blockquoted or very slightly rewritten to maximize SEO revenue streams—yet a cursory glance at the nation's best performing aggregators finds an unsatisfactory maximazation of cross-platform responsive environments.
Brand management and audience engagement depend upon early conversions with the youngest consumers. Is your company losing eyeballs to competitors with better internals targeted to the post-diaper pre-toilet demo? Supercharge your mobile audience social sticky by adaptive dynamic layouts to lasso the tablet-potty market before you are literally destroyed and physically torn apart, limb by limb, by your eternal rivals. The [...]
"Apple’s Newsstand launched with the release of iOS 5 on October 12th, and by any measure, it appears to be a big win for Apple and for publishers alike. Since the iPad took the technology world by storm 18 months ago, it’s been an interesting time for publishers with several notable App Store rejections, industry confusion about how to implement tablet subscriptions, and a fair amount of criticism of Apple’s 30% revenue share. It appears now that Newsstand is the real deal, delivering on the iPad’s promise of a new dawn for publishers. Huzzah!"
That was from November 29th, 2011, just over a year ago, and it came with the [...]
As you know if you have been near the Internet, everyone is discussing The Daily, the Rupert Murdoch iPad publication that launched yesterday. You can meet the man who runs it, much-beloved of the Murdochs! The reviews are… all over the place. There is love! There is hate! I have not yet truly indulged but I have been reading some of their web-published stories, such as this very unusual feature: "AMISH SMUGGLERS' SHADY MILK RUN"! It's very bizarre stylistically. It has the short paragraphs and quirks of the Post—it opens with an "intriguing" and cloudy scene: a mysterious man delivers "contraband" to Manhattan! Oh gosh! But [...]
"For a time, the iPad made everything worse. It was too easy to check social media, for example. When Dustin began feeling like an internet widow as I walked through the apartment, silently moving from device to device, we set rules on usage, which included talking to him again. The iPad then quickly disappointed: A visit to Hulu asked me to pay for something I could watch for free on my computer. My current print magazine subscriptions did not transfer to the iPad—I would have to either repurchase my magazines, an unpleasant idea, or switch to the iPad-only version, and at only a slight discount compared to the print-subscription rate. [...]
I have no iPad and I doubt I ever will, so I rely on some first impressions regarding the New Yorker's iPad version from others: "$5 per week? That is very expensive!" And: "Paid $3 for Lumines, which has nearly endless replay value, unlike Gladwell-on-Twitter game." There is also a very strange video starring Jason Schwartzman. Shirtless. And sometimes pantsless. The magazine itself says something wise and reasonable: "Right now, editing for the iPad feels similar to making television shows just after the Second World War, when less than one per cent of American households owned a television." Semi-relatedly, I am very much enjoying "Bored to [...]
The first time you hear a very clear Chinese woman's voice say "Sou Sou!" in your living room while you are supposedly alone, it is natural to brush it off. There are so many things making noises all the time! The second time, weeks later, when you're sitting alone by the fireplace reading at midnight, is terrifying. At this point, it is natural to wonder if this is how Moses or Allah or Jesus or Neale Donald Walsch or Oral Roberts or Ted Nugent or Charles Manson felt, when they first heard voices telling them what to do. But what did "Sou Sou!" even mean? It seemed less like [...]
Google's Android phones are used by more people, yet Apple's App Store sells 400% more than Google's online store for Android apps. How is this even possible? Consumer tech experts say it's because Apple started early and has stringent quality control and also has a whole lot of iTunes account holders who typed in their credit card information before they even owned a smart phone.
Consumers are more willing to fork over their money for an iOS app, because they know they’ll probably get their money’s worth, says app developer Zak Tanjeloff with DLP Mobile. “The App Store has a higher proportion of quality apps, thanks to the [...]
The world runs a little bit more smoothly without troublesome humans mucking up the works. Consider the least sexy sex scandal of all time, 60-year-old David Patraeus and his various middle-aged twin Florida gal pals and wives and shirtless old FBI agents trying to figure out this whole "sexting" business. Why not just have drones do the war fightin', right? OH WAIT THIS IS OBAMA'S PLAN.
Meanwhile, in China, there is trouble at the factories that produce our beloved iPhones and iPads and those iDevices currently manufactured in a compromise size between that of the iPhone and the iPad. The workers want the jobs, because of the [...]
"Looking back I wish I never would have bought it." —El Paso consumer Hector Camacho, a former firefighter, agrees that the iPad is the hot new product of the season, claiming that the overheated device gave him a physical burn. Be careful out there, you trend-sucking Apple acolytes.
I hate David Hockney's iPad "paintings" that are being shown in Paris now. The reason you keep hearing about Hockney and his iPad drawings is that it is really remarkable that a painter who recently had an auction result of $7.9 million (for, to be fair, a really good painting) starts making things that have no or little value, it does screw mightily with the natural expected order of things! This is the equivalent of Justin Timberlake walking around Williamsburg handing out hand-burned flash drives basically. (Which would also be cool.) So that's all marvelous and awesome and unexpected and confusing. But it doesn't change the fact [...]
As things are currently set up, people with iPads who want to buy a magazine on their shiny device have to go searching for it. There's no magazine rack, or what have you. Still, I'm not sure you can put that sunny a face on the figures for sales of magazines on the iPad, as reported by Ad Age. Wired at least started extremely strong, at 100,000. Now they do about 30,000 an issue. Still pretty good! People is doing 10,000 an issue (and that includes free digital issues to print subscribers). Vanity Fair does about 9000 an issue. Other magazines are doing even fewer sales; many are [...]
Are you a "selfish elite" or an "independent geek"? It all depends on your attitude toward the iPad!
If you enjoy reading Kindle-brand electronic books on your iPhone or iPad, you've surely had moments when the best idea seems to be just erasing all your ebooks. There's something about the shoddy copy-editing and optical-character-recognition errors and lame single jpeg of cover art and terribly rendered illustrations that really puts a spotlight on the bad corporate non-fiction titles you've somehow spent $13 a piece to accumulate "in the cloud." Wouldn't it just be better if Kindle developed a "killer app" that would erase all of this garbage?
"In shipping the latest version, apparently the company's QA testers somehow missed a bug that can delete your entire book collection from [...]
Australian police are warning the people down there to stop using Apple's terrible maps program, because the app is so worthless that people could easily die if they believe the ridiculous maps have any connection to earthly reality. For example, Apple Maps is telling gullible Australians that an entire city, Mildura, is hidden within a vast and terrible wilderness 44 miles away from the actual city.
Police have received calls from motorists who have been stranded in the park without adequate food and water for as long as 24 hours. The park does not have a water supply, police said. Combined with the fact that temperatures in the [...]
Okay, so the bear stole an iPad. I can understand why an animal would be attracted to a sleek, shiny object that is more form than function. What's your excuse? Also, how excited is the anchor here that he gets to say "pic-a-nic basket"? The little joys in life: most days, they're all we've got.
Today's the day, and we're covering it live!
1:03 PM: Steve Jobs takes the stage. Audience goes crazy.
1:05 PM: Jobs waits for sustained applause to end, calls crowd "suckers."
1:09 PM: Jobs shows audience a white ball attached to a white paddle via a white rubber band. Product name is "iPaddle."
1:10 PM: Audience applauds enthusiastically.
1:11 PM: Jobs: "That's right, you trend-sucking freaks, worship at my altar. I could connect two Dixie cups with a string and you'd pay extra for the privilege of advance ordering it. You sicken me."
Here is your caption of the day: "Apple iPad 2 gossip, commence! According to a Taiwanese newspaper, Apple is readying an iPad 2 for a 2011 launch. At left, a regular old iPad is shown at a store in Moscow." It is hard to even remember now what the world was like when they released the first iPad way back in April of aught ten. We were all so much younger then, so much more full of hope. I can't believe we've had to wait so long for a new version.
Everything is covered in doody, but especially your cell phones and touch screen iPads and all the other digital chazzerai.
