Just in time to hit the new iOS 5 Newsstand, The Guardian has launched a swanky new iPad edition. The app delivers content mirroring The Guardian's Monday through Saturday papers, but the design is all digital. Pages swing smoothly between portrait and landscape modes, the ads are interactive, and photos and videos abound.
The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.
A new study from BBC.com and Starcom MediaVest finds that tablets do wonders for news consumption. Tablet owners report reading more stories from more sources on more topics than non-tablet users, they enjoy the experience more, and they go straight to the source more often, rather than relying on aggregators.
But the study also found that the benefits of tablets extend beyond news. Subjects reported a range of improvements tablets brought to their lives, and many of them were unexpected. The study broke down tablet owners based on how long they've had tablets and found that all of the positive effects increased over time. Tablets aren't a fad; they're fundamentally changing the way people use the Web.
Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr may have been eclipsed by Facebook as the world's most popular photo sharing site, but there are some things Facebook is probably never going to be able to pull off. For one thing, the creation of a giant public repository of rights-liberal photos available for re-use. Flickr announced today that it has hit 200 million Creative Commons licensed photos, making it the world's largest CC photo collection. Creative Commons is a series of easy-to-use licenses that communicate the conditions that your creative work may be re-used under without asking you explicit permission. (E.g. "with attribution," "for non-commercial use," "no derivatives.")
What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.
Adobe announced today that it has acquired Typekit Inc., provider of ready-to-go Web fonts for designers. It's a natural fit for Adobe, which produces the industry-standard suite of design software and has a long history of producing fonts.
Typekit allows Web developers to load and display a vast range of fonts on the server side, enabling websites to go far beyond the limited range of Web-safe fonts installed on most computers. Its flexibility and easy implementation has transformed the use of type on the Web.
Yahoo and ABC News have joined their online news efforts to leverage Yahoo's large audience and ABC's worldwide news production. The two media giants estimate they will serve over 100 million U.S. users per month.
ABC's morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.
Earlier today, Dish Network CEO Joe Clayton made official what most observers already knew to be true: that the company would be launching a movie streaming service built on the remnants of Blockbuster, which Dish acquired in April.
What was less clear before today's press conference was exactly what the details would be. Those are now revealed, and as it turns out, what Dish and Blockbuster have planned is hardly the "Netflix killer" many predicted.
In the ongoing debate over Web vs. native mobile and tablet apps, it would appear the Web just racked up a few major points.
When Apple changed their subscription rules to require that publishers fork over 30% of the revenue generated from apps sold in the iTunes store, many media companies played along, hoping that making their content available on iOS devices would help them survive the transition from print to pixels.
Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.
The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.
Wadah Khanfar, the director of Al Jazeera, announced his resignation today after Wikileaks released documents that could prove embarassing to the news organization, the New York Times has reported.
According to the documents, Khanfar held particularly close ties with the U.S. government, to whom he promised the network would provide less critical coverage. He steps down today after running the network for eight years.
Today, a mere 48 hours before Facebook's f8 Conference begins, the Wall Street Journal has launched a Facebook app called WSJ Social. According to the most credible chatter, Facebook plans to unveil a media-focused redesign at the upcoming developers' conference, which bears the slogan "Read, Watch, Listen" - a fairly obvious clue. The WSJ has decided to preempt that launch.
The app presents a grid of WSJ stories, though some of the slots are occupied by ads. In the left sidebar, users can subscribe to "editors" - who can be WSJ staff or other Facebook members using the app - to customize the story feed. Currently, the stories can be viewed in full for free from within the app. The New York Observer's Anna Sanders - who was cool enough to be invited to the WSJ Social launch party - reports that the app will go behind a paywall after the first month, despite the fact that it is (heavily) ad-supported.
