New tablet editions: Portugese digital publisher brings an English edition to the Newsstand and Android markets

The Portugese company DigitalMags launched an English version of their tech magazine. The Portugese version of iTech was released into Newsstand two weeks ago and this morning an English version which is being called iTech - first person technology (because Apple requires that each app have a developer have a separate name) premiered inside Newsstand.

Digital Mags may be more comfortable on the Android side of things, their two version of iMags appeared in Google's Android store a month earlier than the iOS side.

Tablet editions provide an incredible opportunity to reach foreign markets, which is why this release deserves some attention. The cross border nature of the app stores not only makes international distribution a snap, but pretty much makes moot any costs associated with shipping and distributing print magazines into a foreign country, but also lowers the barrier to foreign publishers where there are ownership regulations.

An example of this would be Canada which has foreign ownership rules that have stood in the way of U.S. B2B publishers coming in and establishing lines of publications in the country. Foreign ownership is not banned outright, but advertisers can not deduct their advertising unless the company they are advertising with is also Canadian. But a magazine that has a paid content strategy would be less reliant on advertising and could, in fact, get enough multinationals to support the digital product that it could prove a workable model.

In any case, back to iTech. It has created a promotional video with music that I would consider bad enough that you might want to lower the volume before clicking. Here it is: