Time to get paranoid about Android?

Posted on by John Helmer
Android logo Followers of this blog will have read quite a bit about Apple products for which we make no apologies. After all, Apple has been making most of the running in developing both the smartphone and the tablet computer as serious platforms for publisher content. Up to now, that is. Recent reports show Apple is facing some stiff competition from Google’s operating system, Android. In the smartphone category, Android has been ‘surging’ since last year according to Wired. Last October, Neilsen reported that Android was the most popular operating system among people who had bought a smartphone in the previous six months, with Blackberry RIM and Apple iOS tied for second place. When it comes to tablets, Wired has quoted a Wall Street analyst as saying: “Long term, we believe Android could surpass the iPad in tablet market share”. Now Android looks to be winning the content battle as well. Distimo’s report said that Google’s Android Market eclipsed Apple’s App Store for iPhone in terms of free applications. At current rates of growth, Google Android Market looks likely to beat Apple into second place for overall number of apps available later this year. Those who dislike Apple’s ‘closed’ model and the tight control the company exerts may well be cheering at this news. Android is open source after all: isn’t it? Well, up to a point. Some think that Android is becoming less and less open source, and for publishers this might not be bad news. Continue reading →

The IPL and the end of the web as we know it

Posted on by Rob Yates
IPL cricketerWatching the Indian Premier League cricket the other evening (and loving how they have branded the language: a 6 is not a 6 any more but a ‘DLF maximum’ and a half-century a ‘Citibank moment of success’) I was struck, in the numerous ad breaks, by the stream of brands that drive consumers straight to Facebook, dispensing (in their advertising) with their standard URLs. Coke, Lucozade and Dulux all employ the Facebook.com/brand URL; and the Army simply suggest that one Googles ‘Army Jobs’. Though we can’t quite yet tell who will be the victor in the so-called platform wars, we know that someone will, and we can probably predict a date when the idea of a ‘corporate url’ will become anachronistic. I am not surprised by this trend. In the 15 years I spent working with consumer brands online, the mantra (from New York to London to Mumbai to Beijing) was always ‘experience’: define moments when the consumer is open to brand communications and then create experiences that meaningfully intersect those moments with the brand. Continue reading →

Reading in the 21st Century part 2: keep taking the tablets

Posted on by John Helmer
Ancient Urartian Tablet

Ancient Urartian Tablet

It’s over a year since Apple launched the iPad, since when sales of the device have outstripped analysts predictions by a factor of five. Tablet device shipments as a whole are now predicted to experience 66.5% annual growth until 2014 (source: Onswipe via Mashable). For many publishers, this latest addition to the burgeoning family of web-enabled devices upon which their publications can be read will have added yet another aspect to an already multi-faceted problem. But are the problems presented by this jostling of new devices and form factors completely new? Once again, the Discovery blog delves fearlessly into the historical record to provide fresh perspectives on the challenges of today. Continue reading →

Plagiarism, disintermediation and a busy future for digital publishers

Posted on by Megan Toogood

There simply must be a blog post in here somewhere, thought Marjorie as she reached for another scotch egg.

Of all the tasks I perform as Semantico’s marketing executive, curating our presence on LinkedIn is my favourite. I never know how the thousands of people who read the blog pieces we put up are going to react, but I know they’ll always give me something unexpected. So it was with our recent post on discoverability and robot waiters. In the Publishing Professionals Network group the discussion moved quickly from discoverability to plagiarism and it became clear that for some, publishing anything in the digital arena is fraught with risky danger. While, personally, I tend to think of users as researchers and professionals with legitimate access, I realise that others see only a seething mass of plagiarists and pirates out there, just waiting to sink their teeth into the innocent little ebooks. Continue reading →

Integrating taxonomies with search

Posted on by Richard Padley
We’re all familiar with the difficulty of finding relevant information inside huge sets of search results. The sheer scale of many information resources forces us to iteratively refine and adapt our search queries until either we find the information we need or we abandon our search. Using taxonomies, thesauri or ontologies to tag our information resources allows us to help users find information more quickly. This in turn leads to increased usage, driving renewals and additional sales of information at the point of discovery. Abandoned searches are clearly a failure in this context! Here are the four most important techniques for improving search by leveraging taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies. Continue reading →