• Targeting The Conversation
    Every year around iPhone upgrade time, my daughter and I seem to have the same conversation, regardless the platform. This time I was using the textPlus free SMS program. The app has over 6 million downloads across iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Android and iPad platforms because it gives its young audience what it wants most: free anything. My daughter is into that, especially when Dad pays. According to Polly Lieberman, vice president of ad sales, Gogii, which publishes textPlus, my daughter and I were among two million monthly unique users on the platform. The free SMS model may be relatively …
  • 'Sports Illustrated' Takes A Swing At The IPad Magazine Problem
    Late last year Sports Illustrated whet our appetite for tablet-ized magazines with its dazzling video demo of what a touch-driven magazine would be. This version is not quite as impressive as the demo (no drag-and-drop personalized content elements or fully integrated live feeds of data), but it is taking worthwhile steps forward. I have only had a few hours to tinker with it, so I won't try to capture all of the cool aspects.
  • Fourth Time's An IPhone Charm?
    I will have to busy myself with the iOS 4 release on my iPhone 3Gs for at least another week or more. Last week when pre-orders began for the iPhone 4 device, I got caught in AT&T's account verification hell along with many others. When I was trying to upgrade, the Apple system had to check my eligibility with AT&T, and that is where the pre-order attempts hung for many of us. By the time my order got through in the evening they had already sold out of the first run and my ship date was pushed to July 2. …
  • Mobile: What the Web Should Have Been?
    Remember when we used to talk about how mobile media was all about "drive-by" content and "snackable" experiences? We don't hear that so much anymore -- perhaps because the media themselves are surprised by the unusual amount of time that people spend on their cell phones consuming content.
  • Reading Our Way To Post-Literacy
    How odd that in an age of multimedia communications, our increased reliance on video, and the decline of reading altogether, the book is making such a valiant stand on next-gen devices.
  • IAd, IConfuse, IProfit
    Speculation about the impact of Apple's July launch of the iAd platform is all over the place this week. Much of it is being caused by a kind of peekaboo Apple is playing with its intentions. Even at this stage there are a lot of things about the iAd format and model that seem uncertain. After a lot of hand-wringing over whether Apple was going to allow any third-party ad metrics at all off its system, the revised SDK seemed to open things up a bit to the other ad nets. But the revision also locks out direct rivals like …
  • Away From The Madding Crowd-Source
    While I am not really a Foursquare fan (call it "check-in aversion") I am a frequent user of Yelp and a few other local user-gen directories. In a locale where many other users contribute reviews, a decent database of opinions on local spots can be a genuine resource. But at the same time I have been impressed by a parallel but different phenomenon occurring in the e-mail segment: the local recommendation services like Thrillist, Groupon, Daily Candy, etc.
  • Apps In Context
    ComScore and Nielsen yesterday released new numbers indicating the app market's massive growth, but each of the reports also provides some perspective on just where app and smartphones sit in the larger universe of mobile content growth.
  • Phoney Sex: Whatever Two Consenting iPhones Do In The Privacy Of Their Own Conversation
    I must have missed passing that milestone in my life when erotic content simply became a source of comedy rather than an object of interest. A new iPhone app has shown me that I (and, thank God, my partner as well) passed that point some time ago. "The Rusty Bike Pump?" she says in disbelief. "That is a sexual position?"
To read more articles use the ARCHIVE function on this page.