OurielOhayon

Magazines, news and the iPad

Fred Wilson has published a great piece about why he prefers his browser to Apps for reading news. I'd like to bring a complementary point of view since i have been using my iPad quite extensively for reading news myself.

• I believe most of the flaws describe by Fred can be easily overcome, like the lack of social sharing, the in-app linking (which is existing btw but not many developers are aware of - called URL handlers, or even in app linking like the zinio [getap.ps/zinio] interactive menu). The iPad is still a young platform. Most of it will be fixed soon.
• My personal experience is that RSS reader apps are not as good as Google reader in Safari. Why? Because they require an update which makes the Apps slow. Syncing for casual consumption is a big No-No. Or at least it should fast enough to kill the trade-off browser vs apps
• I believe the biggest issues of magazines or news apps are their weight. Take the Wired app. It probably is a nice app. but it weighs 527MB. You know why? There is 400MB of videos ads in it. So in addition of paying, i have to pay with my time waiting for the magazine to load. This is a killer price to pay. When i buy wired in the street i pay, i get it, i read it. Waiting 15 min to get the app to load is not acceptable. Let s see how many of the 24ks who bought the app the first 24h will repurchase the app again
• I am not too concerned like Fred about aggregation, indexing and leveraging search engines: most news titles have also web versions which are equally indexed. There is not, yet, exclusive content for iPad, which make also the trade off Fred points at very relevant. If i can get what an app has to offer for free on the browser, why pay for an App? Unique content is what can make a difference
• I agree with Fred that most news apps are poorly designed: no search-ability, rarely links to internet, speed, no archiving, readitlater,...you can feel many want to jump in the banwagon, but not many have thoughtfully approached the device
• I also believe the publications themselves make a very poor job in educating their readers on how to find their app. EG: yesterday i wanted to buy the "Challenges.fr" new apps promoted on their site. I was convinced this was an app. It was not. there was NO WAY to find out about it until you search the app store. What they did is actually make their magazine available in zinio or other press reader apps. Meaning you have to install an app to install their app..Painful and unclear.
• One more thing i do not understand: why news apps for publications are priced at the same price of a printed magazine? It does not make sense, the cost structure, even if you include developers and formatting costs, do NOT justify that. The fact the the delivery is more convenient is not a good reason to price it in a comparable way. It has to be more compelling than that to give users a reason to switch from paper to digital (which is inevitable for the industry). 

But there is one thing is that a killer thing for apps vs the browser: it is the commodity of offline reading. Something the browser can't yet compete with. Having the possibility (if you think of it) to have in advance a magazine you ll be able to read in the plane is a big YES YES. 

For now my favorite news app, is by far the New York Times: editor's choice. It is light, fast, and good enough for casual reading. It is also good enough to give me desire to explore more on Safari. It works offline, syncs fast and provides a great reading experience. The perfect iPad apps for news is an app leveraging the offline comfort to drive you to use their web interface. They don't kill the reading experience with heavy ads. It is a good entry gate, rather than a replacement. My second favorite is Thomson Reuters, which has a great interface, has copy/paste, search, which is fast and an intuitive browsing experience.

Many publications should learn from those

ps: pulse, just covered by TechCrunch is also a great news app, worth paying for. A good mix of offline,online, fast sync experience. Just a shame they don't keep the links in the RSS mode. yet.

When will Apple finally change iTunes name to whatever makes sense?

The monster software iTunes originally conceived to bring music to your iPod has changed way too much to keep its original name. The identity of iTunes call for an urgent new name. Today iTunes handles, movies, books, podcasts, Apps. See my point? In iTunes you have stores like ebook store, app store and in the App Store the Game section is a store in itself

the problem is that it is going to be really really hard to get rid of a name where the brand has invested millions in marketing. They could probably use the famous fade-out marketing technique that all FMCG companies like Procter or Danone are using when the brand name needs to be change. This technique brings a transition to in which a second name is introduced until the audience become familiar with it (the famous "soon to be called whatever")

I find it awkward to go download softwares or movies in a store originally called for music. Outside of the US this is not so much a big deal. But even new generation are now familiar with the Tunes word.

My guess is that Apple does not care enough about that point to change the brand name right now. They are more concerned about bringing itunes to the cloud until this maybe happens

What would be the best name? iStore. If i was running Apple Marketing this would be my first choice.

Note that if you Google iStore, the first results lead you already to Apple's site.

So something may be under way. But i doubt this happens any time soon. I think they did some SEO for people mistakenly googling that name instead of iTunes or App Store

Schumann: Fantasistuck op.12 #5

Awesomeness by Schumann

Want Android 2.2 "push from PC to mobile" on your iPhone/IPad? try Pastefire

Android 2.2 has introduced a new protocole to send/push information from your PC to your Mobile. John Gruber from Daring Fireball notices it as one of the main (and most interesting) new features

The most interesting upcoming Android feature that Google demoed at I/O is a “cloud-to-device” messaging API. Examples of how they’re going to use it:

• Buy an app (or song, or anything) from the Android Marketplace using a PC web browser, select one of your Android devices, and the item you just purchased will be pushed directly to that device over the air.
• Take the current URL from your PC web browser and push it to your device, over the air. If it’s a web page, it’ll open in the Android web browser; if it’s a Google Maps URL, it’ll open in the Android Maps app

The typical case is that you see a URL or an information your want to send from your Computer to your Mobile (a map, a Youtube, an app) and you want it on your mobile instantly

We created a few months ago the same thing for the iPhone called Pastefire. See the demo below in video

So if you are jealous of android because of that feature, now you don't have to. Just go to pastefire, download the app and (my recommendation) install our bookmarklet or the desktop client

Personally i use it every single day, specially to dial phone numbers but also to install apps in the app store without having to search for them

Anyone who tried it felt it's "magic". And it's...Free

How to handle a demo fail, without failing?

You have worked to prepare yourself for weeks for this public demo where you are about to launch/announce your new product. But something is going to fail. You're not sure yet why or for what reasons. But a big fail will happen and you need to get ready for it.

 

Here are a few tips i came up with, after the demo fail i experienced myself at Techonomy (a great conference organized by my friend Orli)  thinking i covered every single case of fail [btw i did not apply all those tips myself, but i had the time to think about them afterwards...]

I assume her you know your pitch by heart, have a little ability to improvice and have decent presentations skills and material

• Make sure you have a private, unshared internet connection. Usually the host will take care of it. But ask for it in advance (a week in advance) just to make sure
• In case internet fails prepare > screenshots, video demo hosted locally of your product, get it ready to start at any moment of your pitch
• Avoid demoing on the live version of your site, if you launch it the same day of the demo: use a locally installed version or the production site itself. usually the day of launch unexpected bugs can occur for X reasons. If you launched a few days before and tested the site all around, then fine.
• Make sure you can run the whole pitch without at any moment referring to visual elements. Yes, it is hard, but you can captivate your audience by explaining well what you want to do. Your audience will feel you are excited and that s already a winner.
• If you run a demo on an iPhone/Mobile app, forget about demoing on an iPhone. Unless you are Steve Jobs with a top secret way to connect your iPhone live to a huge screen, the setup is not good. You can use DemoGod for Jailbroken iPhone but that s not a good experience and i do not recommend it. My suggestion: prepare a nice shot video along with a few screenshots.
• In case of fail: try to react with humor. People will feel as tensed as you. Do no panic (easy to say when 500+ people look at you) and try something to relax the audience. They are more tensed than you.
• Get the audience involved: if everything screws up, start talking with people, ask them questions. Fill the blanks :)
• Don't wait for your time to finish> finish faster. Get a bit.ly/TRYMYAPP URL ready and invite your audience for a demo online available later

Most important tip: Don't worry. EVEN if everything totally screws up, you panicked and could not say a word, what really matters is what happens next, not what happened in that room. In our case a couple of days after the show, our traffic went x10 and we received stunning feedback on our new site.

The ability to succeed and the ability to make a nice show are totally unrelated. So don't worry

10 things we urgently need in Facebook pages

update: i understand the post was read by Facebook management at the highest level. expect changes soon

We started to use Facebook pages more and more in our business. It is a great tool, since already plug to a fantastic easy to jump in social graph. But in 2010 this is one of the poorest tools i have ever seen for professionals to manage. Those pages are managed by brands and companies, used to higher level of controls and features (eg: blogs...). Facebook pages need to turn more sophisticated (not a lot more).

Here is what we urgently need

> Ability as administrators to receive notification on interaction: this is a MUST have and there are lots of...pages on that. I want to know when someone like or comment our page

Today you need to go each time to your page and try to figure out what changed. Not scalable

> Create a better notification systems for fans: getting that in the middle of the news feed is not enough. There should be a page by page notification system by email.

> better Fan management: arrived last, demographics,...

> Ability to throw in HTML, including JS code for rich widgets. FBML application is too limited and only allow HTML. Comments should allow that. Side columuns should allow that.

> Ability to collaborate. You can have several admins but have no real co-management tools. hootsuite allows some part (delegate, scheduling) but hootsuite has an organization problem and the interface is too cluttered

> Stats: the stats provided by Facebook are not enough. I want time spent, interest profile, geography, browser

> Allow a page to be independently own and not associated to one FB account: tomorrow the person who created that page leaves your company and deactivate its FB account and you re in deep trouble

> Create an internal Verified pages: for a single request you get tones of me toos. Twitter did it already. this is a must for real brands to stand out

> Create an internal SEO for pages: allow administrators to add metadata to their pages, and create a rank of relevancy for queries

> Facebook URL management: when you book a Facebook page, you are stuck with the same name forever and no ability to change. This is not decent in the modern world where brands change name all the time (all the time is not every day, but rebranding is a universal thing...)

A Facebook page is like a web site. it has to provide a decent set of features to be managed correctly. There are 10s of thousands of pages. In Israel every single brand has a Facebook page promoted ON TV...it is time Facebook put that on high priority to accelerate the business opportunity

Facebook will be tempted not to move so fast. After all once you re there and hooked to their graph, why bother? It is unlikely you remove it or move out there. There is no better place. But this is a wrong calculation

Facebook pages are the new corporate blogs and deserve better treatment.

Hello Baby

It was about time we changed our site

tip: What is the best moment to redesign your website?

Don't rely on what your competition does, or what people tell you, or what even your users tell you.

I personally have a very simple rule. I think the best moment to redesign a website (a site, a blog, an app,...) is when you wake up in the morning, you're looking at your current site and you don't like it anymore, or worse. If you can't look at it anymore or don t even enjoy using it for yourself then move on.

If you feel your product and your customers, it will come from the guts. Save your market studies and deep focus groups. If you own a site, the best to grow a website to the next stage is when you feel the cloths do not fit any more.

This is what i have been feeling for a while with AppsFire..