There is only one holiday that Americans enjoy more than Thanksgiving Day (that would be Casimir Pulaski Day, of course), so that means that I will have to bid my loyal TNM readers adieu for the week while I travel and begin the process of ruining the holiday feast (I always do the cooking, or at least most of it).
Thanksgiving Day used to mean family, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and really bad yams with marshmallows. The marshmallowed yams are generally gone now (here's hoping your household is free of them), but they have been replaced with three, count them, three NFL games on television.
Now I'm originally from Detroit, so Thanksgiving football is part of the holiday. But three games? Come on.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade still is around, however, but now that we have entered the app era there is a need for an iPhone app. Macy's has complied with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade® 2012.
If you are attending the parade in New York you might think that having an iPhone app is a little ridiculous. You will change your mind, though, when you discover the app lists all the nearby restrooms. That has to make this an essential download!
The app also has subway maps, dining locations, nearby coffee shops (it might be cold out), weather forecasts, and more. It's quite an app, and its free.
Macy's partnered with MyCityWay to create the app, which one must admit is quite a tour de force, though users will be the final judge starting tomorrow.'s
It's time to wrap things up before the beginning of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. There is food shopping to do, I need some new Christmas lights – you know how it is.
In the meantime, so many new digital magazines have hit the Apple Newsstand as replica makers are flooding the App Store, crowding out the natively designed publications to the point where finding anything that isn't a cheap PDF version of a print magazine is getting harder and harder to find. I spoke yesterday to one publisher of a natively designed tablet magazine and asked him if he thought it was time Apple dedicated an area of the Newsstand specifically for natively designed publications. He was diplomatic and simply nodded in agreement.
One of the few new magazines to be found inside the Newsstand this morning comes from the public television station KQED which has released its member magazine for the iPad. What's amazing about it is that I think they have launched the world's smallest magazine to date, at least as far as file size: 4 MB.
The latest vendor to show up inside the Newsstand with magazines under their name os MAGetc. This is an interesting digital publishing vendor because their website says that they use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create their apps. That would, in theory, create native tablet editions.
The problem, though, is that my attempt to subscribe to their newest digital magazine, GoodChocolate, led to me getting an error message stating that there was nothing to subscribe to. This didn't prevent the app from charging me for the subscriptions anyways.
And notice that I keep calling it "their newest digital magazine?" The reason for this, of course, is that the publishers who contract with this new company sign away their magazines to the vendor and allow them to appear under MAGetc's name rather than their own. As I've said before, any publisher that would allow this should be out of the business – or at least be in porn, where hiding your name might be a good idea.
These apps may, or may not, be worth your while to check out. But my own experience has scared me away from them.
If you were like me, you grew up in a home where the arrival of the Sears and other retail catalogs around Thanksgiving Day meant that the Christmas season had arrived. I would leaf through those massive catalogs in search of goodies to beg my parents to buy.
Now retailers send catalogs monthly or even more frequently, so the thrill and anticipation is no longer the same. Today we have Amazon.
So it should come as no surprise that the nation's larger online retailer would find a way to drive its holiday sales though a more modern method of promotion – the app.
Today Amazon updated its universal iOS app, Amazon Mobile, to add some important new features for those shoppers concerned that their gifts arrive in time. In addition to some bug fixes, the app uses push notifications to send out alerts concerning deliveries.
Stay up to date on where your holiday gifts and packages are with delivery alerts. Turn on push notifications to get alerts on when your package ships from Amazon and when it’s delivered. Plus get a daily notification for lightning deals. – App description
Amazon also recently launched a new app for the iPad called Amazon Santa which lets children and parents "create personalized, holiday wish lists to share with Santa, and your friends and family."
It's way too late to complain about the commercialization of Christmas, so let's just marvel at the fact that only a couple Christmas's after the launch of the original iPad we now are in a position where we are communicating with Saint Nick through a tablet. I wonder when the first app will launch that will allow our kids to FaceTime with the bearded fellow?
The problem I've always had with Flipboard, Zite and the other apps that encouraged publishers and others to add their content is that it seemed like the only one who really benefited from the symbiotic relationship being promoted was the owner of the application. No matter how much I was told that creating a microsite or adding content would drive traffic to my own site, the more I felt I was being swindled.
Not a week goes by when someone asks me to write or share the content of TNM with them for free. Somehow this would benefit TNM because, well, it would. Just yesterday someone wrote me to say "Dan..." "As a (sic) see it it would be a perfect fit for TNW (sic)."
Gotta love the nerve of someone to get both my name and the name of the website wrong.
But what is driving these efforts, of course, is the knowledge that publishers and others want to get their content in front of iPad owners. So when the next app solution comes along that promises self-publishing on the iPad everyone gets excited, the tech sites write about it, and then the reality hits you square in the face. What's in it for me?
Tactilize is the next big thing, or so some of the articles say. "Tactilize enables you to discover, publish and share interactive content on iPad, easily and instantly," the app description reads.
How it works is that one creates a user name on the company's website, reserving your unique name – like TalkingNewMedia. Then you download the iPad and begin searching for and creating new content.
It's all very easy, and all pretty meaningless. The pages are called "cards", which are essentially like web pages. These pages can then be searched for and read.
Of course, all that content is shared on the Tactilize app, so all the traffic benefits, and presumably advertising revenue, will benefit the app start-up.
If this is the next big thing it must be pointed out that like Flipboard and Zite there is no barrier to entry, any number of these could be created which inevitably would lead one to realize that the desire to get content on the iPad can be satisfied in any number of ways including creating your own apps that have your own name attached to it. (Not the mention that the iPad has a browser, which opens up content through the web.)
I have personal experience with Williams-Sonoma, the retail and online kitchen wares store. For months I attempted to work with the company in the early naughts, trying to push the company towards incorporating online video in its promotional efforts. It was a hopeless waste of time and effort as the company is one of the more insular firms out there.
But about three years after I stopped trying to sell the company online video it's channel finally appeared on YouTube, and though they are still five years behind everyone else in the space, they are at least progressing.
I suppose it is a good thing that Williams-Sonoma is so backwards, if they weren't a lot of magazine publishers would be trembling in their boots for fear of what the company would do to their readership, and to a lesser degree, their advertising.
Company catalogs are fast becoming interactive and more magazine-like. This has been the case for a number of years as retailers learned that engaging their customers with editorial content keeps those customers coming back. But in the era of tablet publishing, the next move towards creating more magazine-like reading experiences is a natural next step.
Strangely, it is magazine publishers who own food titles that often are the ones out of touch today. Few tablet magazines from big publishers have made the jump to video, even when they have the content available, often settling for replica editions of their print magazines. This not only is opening the door to start-up titles who will use video content from Day One, but also retailers like Williams-Sonoma who can engage their customers with product demonstration videos and, of course, cooking videos.
This morning I received yet another email from the retailer. Williams-Sonoma are notorious spammers. No doubt the retailer has spreadsheets that say this is paying off, though some things can't be measured I would argue.
Today's email features iPad stands and a Bluetooth speaker, an obviously new line for the retailer. The iPad stand products demonstrate several things beyond just product extensions. It is a recognition that cooks are using their tablets in the kitchen. The result is that publishers need to realize that if their cooking magazines do not make an adjustment that those that will find their way into the kitchen will not be those with only nice photography and plenty of recipes, but also those that can layout their features in way that will take advantage of the tablet platform.
I have argued for a while that publishers need to see in the video opportunity not only its potential to add multimedia content for their tablet editions, but a step towards broadcasting. As more and more TV viewers cut the cord, new broadcast content is appearing from publishers such as the WSJ. AirPlay and GoogleTV streaming options are opening up the family room television to publishers – and, it should be added, to retailers who see the potential of creating content that can be viewed on the family room television.
These are not good days at Hewlett Packard (HP). Today the company announced its Q4 earnings, and while the financial papers will most likely focus on a comparison of the company's performance versus predictions from beanie wearing analysts, the fact is that the company is seeing revenue decline.
HP reported that revenue fell to $30.0B from $32.1B one year ago, and that for the year revenue was down 5 percent.
Earnings were seriously impacted by a massive write-down of $8.8 billion associated with its acquisition of the UK software firm Automony, an acquisition under taken by former CEO Léo Apotheker.
"The majority of this impairment charge," HP said in its earnings announcement, "is linked to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation plc that occurred prior to HP's acquisition of Autonomy and the associated impact of those improprieties, failures and misrepresentations on the expected future financial performance of the Autonomy business over the long-term."
HP's core businesses of PCs and printing were down significantly in the quarter, with PC sales down 14 percent, total units down 12 percent, consumer printer hardware down 22 percent.
But HP is demonstrating that M&A and good due diligence is fast becoming a lost art, and that PC makers will continue to struggle in an era of mobile and tablets.
If you are reading this it is no doubt because you are reading an archive story from Talking New Media. You should be made aware that the site has moved to a new, permanent address: TalkingNewMedia.com
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