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Swiss startup Kooaba is trying to bring the worlds of printed news and virtual content closer together with its Paperboy iPhone app . This app, which is currently only available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, allows users to take pictures of articles from a range of popular magazines and papers and then see additional content about these articles on their iPhones. Paperboy will also make a digital version of the article available in your Kooaba archive and users can then share this article with their friends by email and on Facebook and Twitter. Sponsor Note : Paperboy isn't available in the U.S. version of Apple's App Store. In the U.S., only Kooaba's app for recognizing books, DVD covers and other physical objects is currently available. Kooaba also worked with Wired last year to make some of the magazine's advertisements more interactive. Kooaba, which specializes in image recognition and already offers similar recognition tools for book and CDs, is working directly with a number of magazine publishers in the German-speaking world. The company plans to bring its services to other countries as well. Sadly, the service doesn't work for papers and magazines that don't work directly with Kooaba to get their content featured on the app. Kooaba needs a PDF version of the magazine to train the service's image recognition software. Besides making the article available for online reading and sharing, Paperboy's partners can also include links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as links to related articles and videos. Magazines and papers can also choose to charge their users for accessing extra content through Paperboy. In addition, advertisers can embed related links to their web sites whenever somebody scans a relevant article or print ad. Overall, this looks like an interesting concept. Even though the newspaper and magazine business is in the middle of a deep crisis, print won't go away for a while and applications like Paperboy can help print publishers to bridge the gap between their traditional publications and their online presence. The question, however, is if other technologies like QR codes aren't easier to use for publishers who just want to embed a link into an article for example. Via: Netzwertig Discuss
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Paperboy: Bridging the Gap Between Print and Online News
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One of the iPad's biggest selling points is its potential as an e-Reader. The included iBooks application and the optional downloadable Amazon Kindle app, for example, provide hundreds of thousands of books to read, all in a relatively standard format: swipe horizontally to flip a page . iPad magazines, however, are trying to be far more creative. As we've mentioned before , the new magazine-style applications include everything from video to music within their pages, plus interactive features and clickable ads. But one problem with these innovative new 'zines is that they each do their own thing, in their own way. While this early adopter applauds the innovations we're seeing on the iPad platform, the mainstream user may find the variations confusing. Sponsor Mini-Movies and More First up: the heavily praised interactive VIV mag , a standout among online newstand Zinio's offerings. Early demos were decidedly exciting. This wasn't text - it was a multimedia experience ! The article featured in the demo video , a sex-ed advice guide, used actors against a green screen to produce a mini-movie illustrating the article's main points. Worried about AIDS? A women writhes against a bull's-eye as knives fly at her. Afraid of pregnancy? A women casts a worried glance at the man entering the room while pressing her hand to her stomach. In practice, however, this format is not as much fun as expected. The cover features clickable links, one that reads "Enter Issue" and another that says "Click to VIVIFY this cover!" Sorry - what? Now I know that they mean "launch interactive content" but mainstream Dicks and Janes may not. And the iPad, if anything, is targeting these so-called "everyday" users - the content consumers whose tech-savviness is a bit lacking, if I may say so kindly. But if you don't "vivify" the mag, you miss the movies - the main attraction. (There is a "Vivify" button at the bottom of each page, too, in case you didn't see it the first time around, but the text next to it says "Tap on the 'V' to read more." Read? How about "watch" or "see?") Another problem with VIV? I'm not sure if it was an app glitch or an iPad one, but the first movie got stuck "downloading" at 16%. Future, here I come? Next is TIME magazine . A gushing editor's letter talks about the publication's embracing the new slate-computer platform of the iPad. But how they've done so is already attracting some criticism . One of the problems is that TIME decided to go with vertical swipes for reading articles but horizontal swipes for navigating from one article to the next. This is not intuitive. On an eReader, whether book or magazine, we expect to read left to right. Vertical only works on the desktop-based web. Condé Nast's GQ magazine is another specialized iPad creation I examined. It doesn't start off well: upon launch, a progress bar displays how much of the magazine has download so far. Will the mainstream user know that you don't have to wait for the download to complete before you tap "read issue?" I'm so not sure. They've also chosen to go with vertical navigation for reading articles and horizontal navigation for scrolling between sections. Meanwhile, Car & Driver's "iPad Interactive Edition" returns you to plain ol' horizontal flipping. In fact, the magazine looks so much like a color PDF that we almost missed the interactive features. Obviously, two white squares overlaid on an image surely means "launch photo gallery," right? One app that gets it right is NPR ....although that's probably because it's not really trying to be a magazine, despite the company's claims that it uses a "magazine-style presentation." While it's true that you can flip from page to page, horizontally of course, the app is more than a mere digitized mag. There's an audio player, playlist creator, program and station finder and more. The news items with an audio track feature buttons for listening and adding to your playlist. Straight text-based items do not. Simple and easy, and overall, well-done. At the end of the day, these magazines are still more fun than their analog counterparts, but, clearly, they're all in very experimental stages right now. The navigation and interactive features differ from magazine app to magazine app, with some getting it better than others. Will they eventually standardize their presentation in an effort to simplify their features? Should they? It's too early to tell what format readers will prefer: mini-movies, some interactive bits sprinkled throughout or straight-laced e-reading. In the meantime, it will be interesting to try out all the variations. Discuss
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iPad Mags: Amazing or Confusing?
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The App store for iPad is live and it includes a number of apps for business use.It's a mixed bag, with media publications alongside apps from Cisco, LinekdIn and Box.net. We got a demo of the Box.net app, and it provides a glimpse into how the iPad changes the customer experience, compared to the iPhone or a laptop. Sponsor We're not sure how a customer may actually use the app. The Box.net team says it may have an impact when a salesperson brings it to a sales meeting. They say the "business meeting" use case is there. But we agree with them when they also say that there will be a lot of use cases they did not anticipate. Box.net focused on taking advantage of the larger screen and so it can be used in a number of orientations. Initally, people will have the capability to view and share documents . Eventually, we can expect to see some of the new features that Box.net introduced in the past few months, including its viewer for watching videos in the Box.net environment. That would be interesting if no other reason than to see an enterprise-focused company adopt HTML5, as the iPad does not support Adobe Flash. In the next few weeks, the company will add more features for the app: Download files from Box.net to the iPad Upload files from the iPad to Box.net Work with iWorks suite Ability to open third-party apps to edit certain files Launch the Box.net Ipad app from third-party apps The iPad is not designed for creating documents. It looks like it better for viewing and sharing more than anything else. The keyboard is a shift that will take time to adjust to. Is the keyboard going extinct? If so, we still have a long way to go with the multi-touch experience. The app is available for free from the App Store on the iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/ . Discuss
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iPad Business Apps: A Look at Box.net
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Our top story this week was "Digg's iPhone App Might Be Better Than the Website." The review? The app is a little buggy, lacks features, but is still quite good. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format. Sponsor Story of the Week: Digg's iPhone App Digg's iPhone App Might Be Better Than the Website More Twitter Analysis: Influencers Don't Retweet Can You Hear Me Now? Check This Crowd-Sourced Mobile Coverage Map Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data Twitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France (UPDATED) More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com , Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates - only $295. Mobile Web Opera for the iPhone? We Sure Hope So. Google Voice Goes Real-Time (Well, Almost) That's Not a Phone, It's a Tiny Computer: Global Mobile Data Surpasses Voice More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Augmented Reality Among Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010 Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Real-Time Web My6Sense Releases API: 'Digital Intuition' for the Real-Time Web More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. What Does Health Care Reform Mean for Startups and VCs? How Entrepreneurs Can Make Better Use of Email The Art of the VC Pitch: A Roundup of Advice from 6 VCs ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. IBM Partners To Offer $190 Cloud-Connected Netbook For Emerging Markets Microsoft Testing OfficeTalk - Microblogging Service Much Like Twitter ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Canonical Ubuntu One Music Service Goes Into Public Beta Dell: Build Your Own Cloud Enterprise Cloud Control: Q&A with Eucalyptus CTO Dr. Rich Wolski That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss
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Weekly Wrapup: Digg's App, Who Retweets,Twitter Hacker, And More...
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Ten year old local business rating company RateItAll has released a white-label location based mobile social networking platform called DoubleDutch . Events organizers, companies that work with multiple locations and others can work with DoubleDutch to offer their patrons a branded check-in app targeted specifically to their use case. You might say that DoubleDutch is to Foursquare what Ning is to Facebook. I think it's a smart effort to make location based social networking more mainstream. We caught up with CEO Lawrence Coburn at SXSW and found out how the service works. Sponsor DoubleDutch customers get to remove all branding from the apps but their own, they can design custom badges and they can weight their favored geo-location data higher for their app users than data for other locations in a given area. A college could have dorms show up higher on a list of nearby places than bars in an area, for example. Customers also get a tab on the app interface that they can populate with whatever content they choose. Events schedules might be a good fit, I suspect. RateItAll says it has 5 million business reviews in its database. Coburn hopes that local reviews plus mobile geo-location will equal more meaningful context for both sides of that equation. If geolocation is truly useful for people other than just geeks, then offering event-specific geolocation apps sounds like a great strategy. Everyday people may have little interest in checking-in to every place they go during real life, but night time events or lunch at a trade show? That makes a lot of sense. If anything's going to make location sharing and check-ins mainstream, custom apps specifically targeted for keeping in touch with your friends at topical events could be it. In addition to his work on RateItAll and DoubleDutch, Coburn is also co-authoring The Next Web's new sub-blog about location services. You can read a more in-depth interview with him about the service there . Discuss
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DoubleDutch: Build Your Own Check-In App For Your Event, Business or School
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