Rush Is On to Be First in iPad Apps

Companies, individuals, dogs, cats and even some aliens , I'm told, are tripping all over themselves to get apps on the iPad!

BRAD STONE and JENNA WORTHAM, writing in the Technology Section of the New York Times, sheds some light on all those clamoring to be a part of this new media-changing device:

It can be difficult to write software for a gadget without being able to touch it. But that has not stopped developers from rushing to create applications for the Apple iPad.

For small start-ups and big Internet and media companies alike, the iPad, and tablet computers in general, beckon as the next wide open technology frontier.

For many of them, getting apps onto the iPad will be a challenge, at least at first. Apple has provided only a few companies with iPads on which to design and test their software before the device’s release on April 3.

The rest have had to make do with software running on a Mac that mimics the iPad, a disadvantage when dealing with a device that Apple is pitching as a new way of interacting with media.

The few companies that did receive the device — including Major League Baseball, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times — have been subject to Apple’s long list of rules. The companies must agree to keep the iPad hidden from public view, chained to tables in windowless rooms. This although the basic look of the iPad stopped being a secret in January.

And Apple has told all other developers who have downloaded its iPad programming tools to remain silent about their apps until later this month.

Apple’s addiction to secrecy does not seem to have damped enthusiasm among developers.

“There’s something about the newness of the iPad that’s driving an even greater level of excitement than what existed in the last year for the iPhone,” said Raven Zachary, president of Small Society, an iPhone software company in Portland, Ore.

Mr. Zachary has organized workshops for iPhone developers and plans to do the same for the iPad. “People see this as an opportunity to do things that have not been done before and get that first mover’s advantage,” he said.

Some companies are even opening up and talking about their iPad plans, risking Apple’s reprisal. Sure, they are salivating at the prospect of the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen and fast processor — but also at the demonstrated willingness of Apple customers to pay a few dollars to get apps onto their devices.

Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are working on apps for buying and reading electronic books, even though both companies sell their own e-reading devices and Apple will offer its own iBooks app. The expectation is that the iPad will give a big lift to the e-book market, benefiting the whole industry. Neither company was given an iPad for testing.

“We have actually developed a tablet-based interface that redesigns the core screen and the reading experience,” said Ian Freed, vice president for Kindle at Amazon. “Our team had some fun with it.”

The Kindle app for the iPad, which Amazon demonstrated to a reporter last week, allows readers to slowly turn pages with their fingers. It also presents two new ways for people to view their entire e-book collection, including one view where large images of book covers are set against a backdrop of a silhouetted figure reading under a tree. The sun’s position in that image varies with the time of day.

At the offices of Barnes & Noble’s digital unit in New York, 14 developers have occupied a windowless room since January, completely redesigning the company’s iPhone app for the iPad, according to Douglas Gottlieb, its vice president of digital products. The developers hunch over Macs around a big table, and printouts and notecards are taped up on the walls.

The new app will let users flip through books quickly with finger swipes and customize fonts in multiple colors and sizes. Mr. Gottlieb said the company was talking to publishers about adding multimedia to digital books.

Apple said last week that it was starting to accept submissions from iPad developers who want the chance to get their apps into the App Store before the iPad’s release. But both Amazon and Barnes & Noble say they plan to wait and test their software on an actual iPad before submitting it for Apple’s review.

Developers know from experience how important timing can be. Some of the earliest developers to release programs for the iPhone were also the most successful. Then the number of apps in the App Store — currently 150,000 — became overwhelming. A developer who is out in front with an application that is tailored for the iPad stands a better chance of getting noticed.

But there is the chance that an app that ran just fine on the simulator will have glitches or just feel wrong on a real iPad. Many developers say they do not want to take that risk.

“As much as we’d love to be there on Day 1, a misstep could kill the train before it even gets out of the station,“ said Wade Slitkin, chief executive of Panelfly, which makes a digital comic-book reader for devices like the iPhone and has deals with publishers like Marvel Comics and Sterling.

There are real-world factors that may go undetected with a simulator, like the weight of the device and how people hold it. To compensate, engineers have been printing out sample pages and pasting them onto magazines, “to get a feel for holding it in our hands,” said Stephen Lynch, chief technologist at the company.

Shervin Pishevar, founder of SGN, a mobile gaming company, tried to get a jump on the competition by attending the iPad’s unveiling in San Francisco in January, then spending every possible moment using one in a demonstration area. Mr. Pishevar said he believes that the large iPad screen will allow families to sit around the device and play turn-based Monopoly-type games.

His company is also developing games that players will operate by linking an iPhone or iPod Touch to the iPad over a wireless network and using the smaller device as a game controller — somewhat like the motion-sensitive remote for the Nintendo Wii.

“We are going to be able to build games and entertainment applications that are as good as a console-type game,” Mr. Pishevar said.

Among large media companies, The Journal, The Times, Time magazine and NPR will have apps for the iPad available when it goes on sale, according to people briefed on those companies’ plans. Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Most of the existing apps for the iPhone will run on the iPad as is, either stretched to fit the screen or in a smaller window. But many developers are focusing on revamping their most popular iPhone titles for use on the iPad.

Neil Young, co-founder and head of the iPhone gaming studio Ngmoco, said his company was updating several games, including a multiplayer game called Charadium where players draw items and take turns guessing what the picture is. It will get new controls and a roomier blank pad to draw on.

“There are so many more places to touch on the screen,” he said. “We can have a lot more fun with it.”

Texts Without Context OR Mashed-up Fragmented Mish-Mash!

Are copyright laws and intellectual property things of the past? Are they fading into the past as we rush, giddy and awestruck, into the new-tech, fast-and-fun world? Will well-researched and fact-checked content give way to piecemeal, out-of-context and mashed-up text that is empty of fact?

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times has a lot to say about this growing problem:

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”

It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Read more at http://alturl.com/zej4

Publisher Says Print Not Dead Yet...Elsewhere, Publishing Wars Heat Up: Apple Offering Kindle on iPad

Two intriguing topics today re Apple, publishers, Kindle and other e-readers:

By Ross Marowits of Canadian Press: Transcontinental (TSX:TCL.A) says the print medium isn't dying even though digital media is forcing Canada's largest printer to adjust to rapid transformation in the communications and advertising business.

"We see print and the new media co-existing for a very, very long time," chief executive Francois Olivier said in an interview Thursday following the company's annual shareholders meeting.

The Montreal-based company said that the printing, newspaper publishing and marketing firm will continue to evolve to meet the changing needs of customers.

While printed flyers will remain a primary way for advertisers to reach customers, book publishing faces dramatic challenges.

"We believe that things like the Kindle (and) iPad are probably going to take anywhere from five to 20 per cent of the printed market away . . . in the next couple of years, so it's a big big big thing for us," Olivier said.

The impact would be significant, he cautioned, but it won't mark the end of printed books. The market already has overcapacity and will lose further volumes.

Transcontinental recorded $150 million in book printing revenues in 2007, the last year it was broken out separately from magazine and catalogue revenues.

Transcontinental continues to see rapid growth of new media but Olivier is cautious about pursuing dramatic changes to its operations.

"We've got to be careful because sometimes we and our customers get carried away," he said.

The company has created a new sector that is focused on one-to-one advertising and new digital communications such as email-based marketing, e-flyers and custom publishing.

Digital media generated about $150 million last year, less than seven per cent of total revenues. But the sector grew by 30 per cent in each of the last two years. Its email marketing business has doubled its sales annually.

Olivier believes new media will increasingly be used to complement flyer printing, which remains popular and well-read.

Next month, Transcontinental will launch a web version called Dealstreet.ca for English consumers and Publicsac.ca in French.

The goal is to help retailers get more bang out of their advertising dollars while giving consumers another venue to search for and compare shopping deals.

It will also give the company a further window to changes in marketing spending and allow it to adjust to any impact on its traditional business.

Founder Remi Marcoux, who has endured several recessions, said change is inevitable but there will always be printing.

"Transcontinental was born out of change," Remi Marcoux told shareholders.

"We will continue to evolve in pace with our customers, whether businesses or consumers, to meet their new needs and new expectations."

Transcontinental acted quickly to counter the effects of the recession by closing plants and shedding 2,000 workers. The moves will trim $110 million in annual costs, including $80 million in savings last year. More jobs could be lost as the company shifts work to more efficient operations.

It also plans to dramatically reduce its U.S. footprint by agreeing to sell its direct marketing business. It remains the leading direct marketer in Canada.

The company expects its key printing sector will continue to grow slowly with a gradual recovery of advertising, which directly or indirectly drives more than 80 per cent of its business.

"What we have seen so far in the beginning of the year is no further deterioration but so far we don't have a whole lot of growth," he said at a news conference.

While Olivier said Transcontinental is willing to consider acquiring a portion of Canwest Global Communication's (TSX:CGS) newspaper assets, it has no interest in becoming a daily newspaper publisher.

"We have no interest if the assets are sold as a block. If they are sold as a piece there might be a few pieces of the Canwest assets that we might be interested in," he said.

Transcontinental is Canada's leading publisher of consumer magazines and the second-largest community newspaper publisher. Its digital platform delivers content through more than 120 websites.

On the Toronto Stock Exchange, its shares gained 10 cents to $12.67 in trading Thursday.

And in other publishing circles:

By Chris Seabury of Financial Advisory.com: Amazon and book publishers have been having heated discussions about how to sell the different e books using Kindle. At the heart of this issue, was the overall amount that would be charged to access the different e books. In the case of Amazon, the fee was determined to be $9.99 (which is to low according to the publishers). In a move to offer e books on the i Pad, Apple opened independent negotiations with publishers. The company agreed to sell e books through Kindle for: $12.99 to $14.99.

What this shows, is that various ebook readers are becoming a common feature that will be offered with different electronic devices. The news from Apple is significant, because they have been known as an innovator in technology over the last ten years. As a result, it would not be surprising to see similar deals that Apple made with publishers, involving Kindle in the future with key competitors.