Treesaver | Design for reading. Startup Challenges Murdoch’s Daily to Drop the App and Try the Web | Epicenter OnSwipe, a stealth startup working to allow publishers to make interactive, finger-friendly tablet versions of their online publications, has a few questions for Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-only newspaper, The Daily: Why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate the web? And why aren’t you using our technology? OnSwipe, led by entrepreneur and writer Jason Baptiste and backed with $1 million in venture capital, is working on technology that turns any website into an interactive, slide-and-zoom, constantly updated read on a tablet, without the need for readers to download an app as they do with The Daily, Popular Mechanics and even Wired magazine.
That model requires that users download updates via Apple’s app store and that the content is static. So, for instance, if there’s breaking news that The Daily writers cover, readers won’t get it until the app is updated the next morning. “Make a version of The Daily that lives in the browser on tablet devices. HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship. HTML5 versus native apps.
It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail. But what if that never happens? Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. It’s not even remotely close. In fact, you could argue that the discrepancy isn’t much smaller than it was three years ago. Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward.
These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android. Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling. Apple is basically all-in on native apps. And that’s not all. The Newsonomics of apps and HTML5. Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. Apps are all the rage, with The Daily’s taking center-stage this week. With tabletmania sweeping the country, you can almost hear the howls of publishers across the country, as they implore their IT chiefs: “Get me an app, pronto!” Consequently, there are many busy hands at companies like Mercury Intermedia, Verve, Mediaspectrum, Bottlerocket, Mercury Intermedia, DoApp, WonderFactory and the New York Times’ Press Engine operation, all of which are meeting the demand.
Apps are a wonder, a come-out-of-nowhere phenomenon that Apple invented for the iPhone and has been perfecting ever since. Apple just passed the threshold of 10 billion app downloads, and has spawned an entire new industry of entrepreneurs and rival (Android, Blackberry and Amazon) stores. Beyond Apple vs.
The app conundrum Why? A balancing act “Give it a year” Laat Apple Zinio met rust? - Ereading. The iPad newsstand that works. Zinio's digital revenues have grown 350% since last April. Will Apple put a stop to that? When we wrote a few weeks ago about the signal failure of Apple's iPad to halt the magazine industry's downward spiral (See Why digital newsstands stink), we had forgotten about Zinio. Zinio, which has been giving publishers a venue to sell their wares online for nearly a decade, is the exception to all the rules of iPad publishing: Apple (AAPL) doesn't let publishers easily sell subscriptions on the iPad, but Zinio will.Apple won't give publishers the names, addresses and billing information for iPad readers, but Zinio does.While sales of high-profile titles like Wired's iPad edition have collapsed -- from 100,000 in June to 23,000 in November -- Zinio's digital revenues have shot up, it can now be revealed, 350% year over year.
Many of Zinio's iPad titles are enjoying an even bigger bump, albeit from a quite modest base. All that may be about to change. The business grew slowly at first. See also: TRVL - Choose Your Own Destination, completely Free on iPad_