Especially now that the Wii is out, it is more apparent than ever.

Also, on the iPhone, Apple won't be the first touch screen phone to market. There is already the Prada, and there was a sweet Samsung (with slide out keyboard! better, in my opinion) on engadget yesterday. That's why they (Apple) announced so early. I'm not sure you can say they're reinventing the wheel on this one either...

I said on my blog a few weeks ago, and still believe... Apple is genius at marketing. They are able to take relatively small steps and sell them as quantum leaps.

I know that wasn't really the point of your post, though, so I'll shut up now. :D

How will it replicate the real world experience and behaviour of people needing to look at two pages side by side.

Behaviour and usability understanding is always the most difficult.

As for the iPhone, the one thing missing is tactile feedback which some of the other phone companies almost have out the door already. I think Apple will have a good fight on their hands with the iPhone and the brand name may be the only saving grace.

I was thinking about that when writing the post too!
It just sort of did not fit in, but yeah, right up this alley.

Alex

Great post and I loved both issues you posted - good examples of the blending of media.

That being said, an often over-looked aspect of these Flash-style books is the difficulty in providing good analytic metrics.. not saying these solutions don't have them, but it's an often overlooked component of digital magazines. In addition, without page-specific permalinks, many of these solutions are unable to tap into social media very well.

We work with more than 150 publishers to provide digital editions similar to what you've shown here, but also give our publishers detailed metrics and allow readers to easily share and save content on the Web. It's important for digital editions to embrace the most important aspects of the Web world.

Just wanted to make a correction about nine online. It was actually a joint effort between Novologic and us here at three squared. Thanks for the post and we appreciate you generating dialogue about the eMagazine

you are dead on about most companies missing the mark with providing functionality for capturing audience metrics, performance metrics, as well as the ability to personalize the expereince for the user.

while this sample does little around this, outside of participation metrics, the design of the technology has the ability and underpinnings to do all the above.

we can measure interactivity with elements on the page, between elments on the page, time spent viewing each element, etc. We can also provide personalization of content based on any known information about the viewing participant, or their ecosystem.

This truly is marketing 2.0, to use play on a widely and wildly overused term

It is going to be a lof of fun seeing where this type creativity and technology is used going forward. Some areas i can think of range from corporate communications, marketing, consumer focused education, employee training, to application "wizards", to entertainment.

At NovoLogic we provide a variety of solutions similar to the e-magazine we developed for Nine Online. The e-magazine is just a simple user interface that content can be exposed to an end user. That same content may in fact be found in other content packages being served by a CMS or LCMS. Tracking should include at minimum book-marking, completion stats on pages and rich-media elements found on pages, latency on pages, system information for all accessed pages, and number of unique entries into magazine.

While tracking is the first step to make true business changes, the real differentiator is what you do with the data. You could track content all day long, but if there are not quantitative or predictive models using the data on the back-end to trigger and drive changes to content and future content, then why track at all?

Just one more thing...the link that you provided to the eMagazine is incorrect it should be:

http://www.novologic.com/clients/threesquared/index.html

Thanks!

Thank you for starting a dialogue about the nine online eMagazine. I appreicate your comment on how the magazine looks likes a 'typical' magazine. It was important to us (three squared) to add elements of a typical magazine in order to keep it realistic and to keep it social. I find that no matter what the vehicle you are pushing the content through, you need that 'familiar' element to better engage your end user.
For our Q2 issue we dive into Word-of-Mouth Marketing. Again, thanks for writing about nine online.