Focal Press announces Father's Day discount for 'The Photographer's Eye: The App', the iPad version of the Michael Freeman book

Publisher Focal Press has announced that in celebration of Father's Day it is discounted its book app The Photographer's Eye: The App by 75 percent. The app is the interactive version of the photographer and writer Michael Freeman's book The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos.

The app will revert to its original price of $24.99 after the weekend.

While the book is published by Focal Press in North America, the publisher Ilex Press represents the book elsewhere – and it is Ilex Press that is listed in iTunes as the apps seller. But a quick check of the UK App Store shows that the app is listed at £2.99 today, also a 75 percent discount.

The app was originally released a few months ago, but was updated last week to clean up some typos and other errors.

Despite being a Giants fan, I will be at Wrigley watching the Cubs and Yankees on Father's Day. If you have no plans then maybe spending some time with this photography could be a choice.

Besides, it's always nice to save some cash, right?

Retweet: WSJ's Drake Martinet interviews CollabraCam's Kyle Hilla; Martinet shares his tools of the trade

The WSJ's Drake Martinet today posted an interesting video interview with Kyle Hilla, the Grand Rapids, Mich. based developer behind the CollabraCam, video production app found in Apple's App Store.

CollabraCam is a $4.99 app that allows for the set-up of a multi-camera video recording situation. Think of it this way: instead of five TV cameras recording a baseball game you instead used five iPhones. Each iPhone would send its video signal to a "director", either another iPhone or an iPad. That "director" would then use their device to live edit the feeds, just as a television producer would live edit the feeds from the TV cameras.

The catch is that each iPhone would have to have the app on it – meaning each iPhone owner would have to buy the app themselves. Now $4.99 is hardly a fortune, but the App Store has kind of conditioned people to expect to pay 99 cents to $1.99 for most apps.

Martinet's interview is interesting, in general, but one line caught my attention and was worth retweeting. When asked about the idea of producing a lower cost app that would simply serve as a video camera app, while then having its original app be only a "director" app, Hilla said this:

"Holding off on that right now, didn't want to do that right off the bat – and now with the Lodsys patent (lawsuits) against developers with in-app purchase we're going to sit on the fence for a while," Hilla says.

This is the first time I've directly heard of a developer saying that the Lodsys patent lawsuits was acting to hold back app development.

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Drake Martinet, in case you are not familiar with him, is Associate Editor, Social and Multimedia at D: All Things Digital, at The Wall Street Journal. He is based in the Bay Area and, in addition to his work at the WSJ, also maintains his own website.

Martinet's last post there is also worth retweeting. Two days ago Martinet posted his last story within shows the video recording "rig" he uses to shoot his WSJ video interviews.

Now I must admit that his video work is hardly state-of-the-art, but they certainly work. Martinet uses his iPhone to record his videos, saying they that "it obeys the “Best Camera” principal, by which the best camera is always the one you have with you."

I would have liked to copy the photo he posted of his set-up but the two hour difference in time zone discouraged me (didn't want to wake the guy up), so I'd encourage you to check it out.

Martinet whole set up, he says, costs him about $90, not counting the iPhone, of course. He uses a Glif to attach his phone to a Joby Gorillapod portable tripod with magnetic feet. Attached to his phone is a wide angle lens, available from Photojojo!, and a Vericorder microphone.

I used to use a Mikey from Blue Microphones on my iPhone 3Gs, but the company currently doesn't have a microphone solution that works for the newer iPhone 4 – too bad, I really like my Mikey!

But I bought the Glif tripod attachment. The people behind Glif, it you recall, got started thanks to a Kickstarter campaign, and the Glif is a pretty essential $20 piece of plastic.

The tripod choice is up to you, of course, any tripod you like that has a standard camera attachment tool will work. The Joby Gorillapod tripod Martinet uses is nice simply because it is so portable and can be had for under $25 on Amazon.

Morning Brief: Rough times ahead for BlackBerry maker; Maclean’s Ken Whyte takes over at Rogers Media

This should be the best of times over at Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry. The company has released a fairly well received new tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, and in many parts of the world, their smartphones remain popular.

But RIM slashed its profit forecast yesterday and reported that it is continuing to lose ground to its new rivals. Worse, in a market that continues to expand as consumers replace their feature phones with newer smartphones, RIM was forced to concede that it had recorded its first quarterly drop in sales since 2005.

As a result of this, investors are fleeing the stock. Ahead of this morning's bell, RIM's share price is down sharply in premarket trading.

"As bizarre as this may sound and we admit we may be early, we believe there is risk that its much lowered FY12 guidance may still prove too optimistic," the AP reported Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu as saying in a note to investors. "That's because even the latest outlook assumes a strong recovery in BlackBerry unit shipments in the second half of the year."

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Ken Whyte, currently the publisher and editor of Maclean's will be taking over the job of president of Rogers Publishing, effective Sept. 1. Whyte will be replacing Brian Segal who announced he was leaving the company back in April.

Whyte told Marketing, a Canadian publication, "I’ve been here six years, and I think that with Maclean’s it’s the longest time in my career that I’ve been anywhere. It doesn’t feel particularly rapid or swift to me. It’s fun to be busy, it’s fun to be trying new things, chasing new opportunities and working with new people."

Rogers Media recently sold off 15 trade publications, including Food in Canada, Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, Canadian Packaging, HPAC and Meetings & Incentive Travel, to Vancouver publisher Glacier Media. Marketing reported that "Whyte said it has whittled its publishing assets down to a core group."

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Many tech writers are having fun writing about a judgement day for Amazon regarding their Kindle app for Apple's iOS devices. They say, without hesitation, that Amazon's Kindle app is not in compliance with Apple's developer rules and they the app will have to either be pulled from the store or updated.

In politics this called reporting the process, an obsession with reporting on, or inventing conflict where none exists.

Just last week, when Apple "loosened" its developer rules, writers were stating that the change was directly a result of making sure Amazon and Netflix remained with the platform. Now they are saying the opposite.

Yesterday I attended a webinar where I asked about those same rules and got a response that was essentially "we don't know" – that was probably the right answer. So why do some writers insist on writing this stuff? It's more fun than actually covering the news, I suppose.

Many publishing companies are managing their business the way the government is managing the economy, by attempting to avoid addressing the big problems

Sometimes in order to see the tree you have to look at the forest. That is what I thought when I read several posts on the economics website naked capitalism today. Two provocative posts talked about the current, depressing state of world economics and how many policy makers are avoiding making the big, tough decisions necessary to set America's economic engine straight. (awkward sentence, I will admit)

But as I read the posts in question (this one and this one), and read the resulting conversation in the comments area, my mind would return often to the situation facing the media business.

In so many ways, what is being done with the economy, failing to solve underlying problems due to a lack of political will, reminded me so much of what is happening in both the newspaper and magazine publishing business: measures are being taken that are really just ways of avoiding addressing the big issues. The more the talk centered on world affairs, the more I thought of the problems facing smaller publishing companies.

Each month I get a stack of magazines delivered to me, and without fail each month I shake my head and say "how the heck do they stay in business?" It is a rhetorical question, of course, because I know exactly what many of these publishers are doing: dropping their BPAs, cutting their circulation and telemarketing costs by not "qualifying" their readership, laying off staff, combining jobs, eliminating middle manager positions like publisher, ad director or marketing manager, cutting frequency, outsourcing work.

None of these measures in anyway address the fundamental problems these publications are facing: loss of advertising, higher production and distribution costs, reader disinterest. Instead a bunch of half measures are usually introduced that have zero chance of changing the game, but can be discussed at industry association meetings: creating marketing arms, virtual trade shows, flipbooks, and the like.

Just as some commentators claim America is becoming a "zombie nation" for failing to tackle its deep-seated economic problems, or others talk about the "zombie banks" and how they should be forced to either fail or restructure, there is such a thing, I would argue, as "zombie" media companies – companies that fail to see that that the actions they are taking today do not address the fundamental problems they are facing. Instead, they are becoming "zombie" companies because they are requiring more and more funding to keep them going, or else they are becoming "vampire" companies, because in order to survive they are forced to devour their own employees, their customers or the their vendors.

But, sadly, I see few signs that the executives at these companies are facing their problems any more than those in Washington or Wall Street are facing theirs.

Magzter launches its own Zinio-like digital newsstand with iPad app; PDF editions of mostly Indian magazines

Proving that the only barrier to entry to the digital newsstand business is stocking the store, Magzter has launched its own newsstand with the release of its first iPad app.

The free app, Magzter - The Global Mobile Magazine Store, promises more than it can deliver due to its lack of a solid online presence, and its slim pickings of magazines, mostly Indian titles. The app is free to download, but unlike its more famous competitor, Zinio, the new service does not offer online reading, or its own smartphone app at this time.

Magzter has launched with 11 different categories of magazines, in which you will find 45 titles under those categories, but some of those titles are under multiple categories, meaning the total selection of magazines is less than that.

The real problem with these types of digital newsstands, of course, is that they offer PDF versions of the print titles – unless, of course, the publisher decides to enhance their replica editions with audio or video content, interactive features, etc. But publishers rarely dedicate any effort to doing this, do they? Instead, most publishers see these digital newsstand editions as simply another outlet for their titles, ease of conversion being the chief thing in their favor.

What Magzter has going for it is that it is a regional player and the fact that there is very little risk to the publisher involved in signing up to appear in yet another digital newsstand, as joining one of these digital newsstand agreements does not involve signing an exclusivity contract. But a publisher would want to make sure their branding and pricing strategies are not upset by a digital newsstand vendor severely discounting their products, or poorly representing them in the digital store.

That also means that the key to success for any company wishing to launch its own digital newsstand is pretty much sales (selling publishers, that is) and the reader interface (creating good reader apps and websites).

So while there may be only one Apple App Store, there could be many, many different digital newsstands launched, something to keep in mind when considering the merits of going in this direction versus native app development.

Bonnier will have ten of its apps preloaded onto the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 when it launches in Sweden

Swedish magazine publisher Bonnier said yesterday that it will have ten of its media apps pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 when it appears in Telia stores in Sweden later this month.

The new Samsung tablet is scheduled to launch on June 29 in Sweden, and the tablet is loaded with tons of preinstalled material including magazines, newspapers, TV and films worth SEK 1000 (around $154), according to Bonnier's press release.

Bonnier apps that will be preinstalled include the daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenskan, business daily Dagens industri, and magazines Allt om Mat, mama, Sköna Hem, Styleby and Yourlife, as well as the on-demand TV and movie services TV4 Play and SF Anytime.

"The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the first Android tablet on the Swedish market that has a sufficiently large screen to work well with media products," said Peder Bonnier, head of digital media at Bonnier Tidskrifter. "It has been shown that there is a strong willingness to pay for products in tablet computers, and since we at Bonnier Tidskrifter believe in the power of the reading experience in the tablet, we want to make it as easy as possible to encounter our content."