iPhone News Updated

New Yorker Cover on iPhone a Signal to Business Execs

When historians get around to chronicling the convergence of print and mobile technologies in the media industry, they’ll duly note today’s development. Artist Jorge Colombo drew the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine on his iPhone, using an app called Brushes, “while standing outside Madame Tussad’s Wax Museum in Times Square.” The magazine playfully calls it “Finger Painting.”

But the magazine’s business execs need to find similarly creative ways to adapt their product to what we’ll dub “the age of the iPhone,” while remaining fully aware that Apple’s mobile device is simply a transitional technology itself, and one that will inevitably be surpassed by coming iterations of cellphone/keyboard/digital readers.

One way to approach this strategic challenge would be for publications like the New Yorker to create their own app for the iPhone, just the way they created their own websites for the web. This sounds good to publishers, and it is consistent with continuing to think of themselves as nice little walled gardens of content, where they can harvest whatever ad revenue they can attract all by themselves, and where they can charge readers for subscriptions.

There is a serious flaw in this thinking. As publishers are discovering with their websites, online ad revenue provides only a fraction of what they are used to collecting against their print publications. In the case of Conde Nast, which owns the New Yorker, online ads account for only 3 percent of the ad revenue collected by the company’s portfolio of 27 magazines, each of which, BTW, has its own separate publisher.

(As a side note, the New Yorker’s ad revenue was off by 31.9 percent in the first quarter this year.)

None of the emerging solutions for placing ads on iPhones or other mobiles seem likely to perform much better at first than the magazines’ websites have performed, so by establishing their own app, magazines are simply continuing the walled garden approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone App Review: TwitterFon Pro

TwitterFon Pro
Mobile Twitter Client
Developer: Kazuho Okui

Price: $4.99

TwitterFon, the popular iPhone and iPod Touch Twitter Client, released a long overdue update to their app that introduced several new features, the most noticeable being ad support for the free version. But if you think you can get around the introduction of advertisements by skipping the update, you may want to reconsider due to the number of general usability issues that slow functionality and often times crash the app.

Alternately, TwitterFon released the first Pro version of the app. Gone are the load time issues that accompanied Twitter’s recent change to how often API’s can retrieve information. The pro version offers the familiar interface with a few changes to accommodate new features.

The most noticeable difference between its free-version counterpart is that it removes the advertisements. Users will also get multiple accounts support, the ability to save search results, four different themes Shake to reload (who cares?), and landscape Keyboard mode. If those features weren’t enough to sell you, the Pro version has user authenticated support for bit.ly, which can be useful if you need to track statistics while on the go, and integration with Instapaper, a site that lets you save links from your feed so you can continue scanning the bulk of updates.

The Pro version is likely to give serious competition to the likes of Tweetie ($2.99) and Twitteriffic Premium ($3.99). The strong suit of TwitterFon’s previous versions has always been the way it handles the notification of new “tweet” messages displayed with a red circle for each type and also with a different shade of color in the feed itself — something neither of the aforementioned competitors acknowledge to the same degree. But at $4.99, some still might be hesitant to purchase TwitterFon Pro, despite an obvious love for Twitter. However, those looking for a paid, more complete Twitter client should keep in mind TwitterFon’s history of fixing bugs and fulfilling requests for new features.

[Thanks: http://geeksofdoom.com]