December 4, 2012
Humorous tech company party invites ∞
There’s a couple of classics in there.
Les Paul’s personal guitar up for auction ∞
It’s just $500,000.
Confessions of a The Daily subscriber
I was there when The Daily launched, and I’ve been a subscriber since day one. So it was with no small amount of disappointment that I learned yesterday that News Corp. was pulling the plug on The Daily less than two years into the experiment.
Jim sent me to cover the launch of the Daily, and I’ll take any excuse I can to visit New York City, especially if someone else is picking up the tab. On a wintery day in early February, 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Rupert Murdoch and company unveiled the new product in front of a swarm of mainstream and tech journalists. Apple’s Eddy Cue joined him on stage too. The Daily was the first publication to support Apple’s then-nascent subscription system in iTunes, so a strong Apple presence made sense.
The Daily launched initially as a free service, with News Corp. promising to take it under a subscription umbrella and then kicking that can down the road for weeks. It made sense, because from the start, there were problems.
The first and most obvious issue was that the app itself was buggy. The Daily was initially quite prone to crashing. Eventually those issues got worked out, but by the time it did, I’m sure many early adopters had fled and weren’t anxious to give it another try.
Other flaws became apparent: The Daily leveraged content streamed from remote servers – video, for example. Even its weather and horoscope data was downloaded on the fly, so if your iPad lacked cell data connectivity, you’d see big gaps in the coverage.
Content was slow to load, too. I dreaded getting notifications from The Daily app that new content was available and asking me if I wanted to download it, because I could be sure that the app would slow to a crawl until it was done. They improved delivery times, but that lack of instant gratification, especially from a news app, was irritating.
That isn’t to say that I hated the Daily. I actually quite liked it. Some of their long form content was really good, and they’d occasionally run investigative pieces that were the rival of anything you’d see in any other print media.
There was a lot of content, too – daily news, long-form investigative journalism, entertainment news, technology, sports. Often times it was presented in novel ways – panoramic imagery, cleverly-designed image galleries, use of video content (which, like I said, was hampered if you were stuck on a Wi-Fi iPad and out of range of a network).
The Daily was hamstrung by its own paywall. It went out of its way to make it difficult to share information about those pieces, which is why you rarely if ever saw anyone link to The Daily’s articles. Sometimes I’d read genuinely insightful, interesting articles there, and when I’d go to share them, I’d find out I couldn’t. I understand The Daily’s need to maintain some sort of paywall in place, but they took it to an extreme.
Sometimes the content was crap, too. But you get that anywhere. And yeah, The Daily’s pedigree as a product of Rupert Murdoch immediately left a sour taste in some people’s mouths. But you can’t please everyone.
I’ve been part of the online tech press since 1994, when I started my own site, later selling it to MacCentral and then ending up at Macworld by way of acquisition. Prior to working at Macworld full-time, I was holding down an IT job for a newspaper publisher. Since 2009 I’ve been primarily back in the online publishing sphere. So over the past 18 years, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of changes in print and online publishing.
Some of those changes have been for the better, a lot of them have been for the worse. People want information, but have demonstrated over and over again that they’re not willing to pay for it like they once did, and are accustomed to getting the content delivered to them differently. I think that’s a lesson that The Daily stubbornly refused to accept – its entire model was built around the idea that people want daily news delivered to them on the iPad the same way they get it from newspapers. Newspaper circulations are shrinking, and the demographics for them show an audience of increasingly calcified, old white guys. These people aren’t going to make an iPad publication successful.
Certainly, there are people making money on iPad publishing, including some “dead tree” publishers who have made tablets work for them by leveraging existing strengths, developing new content delivery strategies and figuring out how the new technology can benefit them and their readers.
The Daily was a bold, audacious experiment that failed. But it was still worthwhile. We have seen and will continue to see successes in tablet publishing, but The Daily was unique in its scale and scope. It takes someone with the deep pockets of Rupert Murdoch to make something like The Daily happen. It’s only a matter of time before it happens again, but this time makes a lot of money for someone with the right vision and a long-term strategy for success.
December 3, 2012
“Rupert gave up” ∞
Jack Shafer:
To place The Daily venture in scale, the last attempt to start a national, general-interest print newspaper from the ground up—USA Today—lost $600 million over the course of a decade before turning its first profit in 1994. (In today’s money, that’s more than $1 billion.) The National, the national sports daily, lost $150 million (about $250 million, corrected for inflation) in 18 months before closing in June 1991. In the late 1990s, when Murdoch was trying to crash the China satellite TV market, he had invested $2 billion and was losing $2 million a week according to his former right-hand man in that enterprise. So, please, let’s not obsess too much over Murdoch’s squandering of $30 million a year on a failed experiment. In the history of journalistic bets, this was a trivial gamble.
iTunes Music Store in 56 new countries ∞
This is great news for Apple. Mac Rumors has a full list of the new countries.
Default iPhone ringtones reproduced with an acoustic guitar ∞
Greg Pierce did a great job redoing a number of the ringtones. Available for download if you want them.
Highway To Hell live in 1979
With Bon Scott.
NASA’s breathtaking “Earth As Art” photos are now a free e-book ∞
NASA:
This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. The book features 75 stunning images of Earth from the Terra, Landsat 5, Landsat 7, EO-1, and Aqua satellites. Sensors on these satellites can measure light outside of the visible range, so the images show more than what is visible to the naked eye. The images are intended for viewing enjoyment rather than scientific interpretation. The beauty of Earth is clear, and the artistry ranges from the surreal to the sublime.
Your tax dollars paid for it so you might as well grab the PDF or the iPad app.
Steam ‘Big Picture’ feature emerges from beta; play Mac games on your TV
Valve today update its Steam software for OS X and Windows to officially support a new feature called “Big Picture.” It’s been available as a broadly released public beta, but this marks the feature’s official support in the release client. It’s automatically updated the next time you log on to Steam.
“Big Picture” enables you to go full screen for Steam. It’s more than just hitting the maximize button, though. The popular gaming client is completely reformatted in Big Picture mode, making Steam more friendly than ever if you use a Mac (or PC) as a media center connected to a television. Menus and games can be controlled using a game controller peripheral in addition to keyboard and mouse.
Other features include an integrated Web browser and a special typing mode that lets you use the buttons on your game controller instead of a keyboard, if you don’t want to take your hands off your gamepad.
Big Picture works even if you don’t have your Mac connected to a TV set; it just makes Steam occupy the entire screen. But if you’re using a Mac with a set attached, you’re bound to see things more the way the designers intended.
Steam is celebrating the release with sales on Big Picture-compatible games. Mac support is still pretty scant, though you’re in luck if you’re playing Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, or one of several indie Mac game titles available through Steam.
iTunes Holdouts ∞
Conrad MacIntyre tells the holdouts to call it what it is and not use the artistic excuse. Good point.
5 hours of airplane landings in 30 seconds
PetaPixel:
Check out this curious 25-second time-lapse/composite video that shows every airplane that landed at San Diego International Airport on Black Friday a week ago between 10:30am and 3pm.The giant planes whiz by overhead as if they’re part of a fighter jet squadron heading off to battle — not something you’d expect to see with commercial planes at an airport.
Even when you gotta go, social media goes too ∞
USA Today:
If you have found yourself using Facebook and Twitter in the bathroom, you are not the only one.Nearly one-third (32%) of the heaviest adopters of social networks — those ages 18 to 24— connect with sites such as Facebook and Twitter in the bathroom.
More than one-fourth (28%) of those ages 25-34 are bathroom social networkers, as are 15% of those ages 35-44. Both sexes are equally likely to use social networks in the bathroom, with 14% of them saying they do.
The thing is, as a social media platform like TikTok has one goal – keep its audience on the platform for as long as possible. One great way to do that is by ensuring that all of the content their audience sees is entertaining, relevant, and of high quality to get more TikTok likes.
Guess where I’m posting this from?
America’s embarrassing street names ∞
At some point you just have to ask yourself why.
Lessons from the demise of The Daily ∞
Jeff Sonderman for Poynter:
Being the first-of-a-kind is as dangerous as it is exciting in the technology world. With few or no prior examples to learn from, you’re left to try stuff and learn the hard way. With the benefit of hindsight, there seem to be at least two major lessons from The Daily’s failure.
Anytune [Sponsor] ∞
Musicians of all kinds use Anytune to learn, transcribe and practice their favorite songs!
Check out Jim’s guitar stylings in a rare solo version of a theme that fans of The Loop should recognize. Something unexpected happened when tuning the track that hints at the source of Jim’s power… You’ll have to watch the video on this page to find out what it might be.
Music Practice Perfected.
Designs of sites meant to be read ∞
Ben Brooks takes an interesting look at some of the most popular sites for tech news hounds and how much of their Web site is dedicated to the reader and how much is useless junk.
Getting the most from RSS feeds ∞
Gabe Weatherhead:
RSS is time-shifted news. It’s closer to a newspaper than a radio station. I visit a news feed when I have time to read. Like a newspaper, the value comes from being judicious in using my time. I can’t read everything but, I want to read every good thing.
I use RSS everyday and find it very useful — that’s why I offer an RSS feed for The Loop and a full text feed for members. Sometimes it does get out of hand though, so maybe these tips will help you.
Marketing your app ∞
Brett Terpstra offers some advice for new developers on how to release and market their app.
Hijacked Web site ∞
Scary when this happens.
Eye tracking in design ∞
Fascinating when you see all the things that go into making up a Web site design.
News Corp. kills The Daily ∞
Peter Kafka for All Things D:
The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a newspaper for the iPad era, is shutting down after less than two years.
The media giant, which also owns this Web site, said it will “cease standalone publication” of the app on Dec. 15.
The Daily launched amongst great fanfare in a New York City event at the Guggenheim Museum featuring News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Apple’s VP of interactive services Eddy Cue. The daily newspaper, delivered via iPad, was the first publication to feature Apple’s one-click subscription service.
While The Daily launched as an iPad exclusive, it later became available for Android tablets as well. Still, News Corp. couldn’t get the traction they needed to make the publication a success.
Murdoch says in a press release that The Daily couldn’t “find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.”
Murdoch says that they’ve learned from the experience, though, and plan to use that knowledge in their other publications going forward.
Eddie Van Halen talks about his solo on “Beat It” ∞
Van Halen was a surprise guest on “Beat It,” the album’s third single. His blazing guitar solo lasted all of 20 seconds and took half an hour to record. He did it for free, as a favor to producer Quincy Jones, while the rest of his Van Halen bandmates were out of town.
Eddie is one of the greatest guitarists that has ever picked up the instrument.
Interview with SMS pioneer Matti Makkonen ∞
Leo Kelion for the BBC:
In a world first, on 3 December 1992, an engineer sent the message “Merry Christmas” from a PC to a mobile device using Vodafone’s UK network.
But the origins of the idea date back further to Matti Makkonen. Over a pizza at a telecoms conference in 1984, the former Finnish civil servant put forward the idea of a mobile phone messaging service. This was to become the SMS (short message service) standard.
Dubbed the “father of SMS”- a title he dislikes because of the work others did to develop the technology – Matti Makkonen rarely gives interviews. However, he made an exception for the BBC’s tech team with an interview via SMS.
iPhone 5 available in more than 50 additional countries in Dec. ∞
Big news for holiday shoppers and Apple’s financial quarter.
December 2, 2012
8 banned children’s toys from yesteryear ∞
BuzzFeed:
Only available from 1951-1952, this science kit for CHILDREN included 4 types of uranium ore, a Geiger counter, a comic called “Dagwood Spits The Atom” and a coupon for ordering MORE radioactive materials. One of the four uranium ores included was Po-210 (Polonium) which, by mass, is 250,000 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. “Merry Christmas Kevin, here’s that giant box of poison you asked for.”
That’s pretty bad but what might even be worse is the fact that, I’m sure like a lot of you, I actually had many of those old Hardy Boys books they talk about!
USS Enterprise taken out of active service ∞
TIME:
The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was retired from active service on Saturday. The Enterprise was the largest ship in the world at the time it was built, earning the nickname “Big E.”
The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was the eighth U.S. ship to bear the name Enterprise, but it won’t be the last.
My dad was in the Canadian Navy for many years and I still remember getting a tour of the ship as a ten year old.
December 1, 2012
Should Apple include a visitor’s center in its new HQ? ∞
SiliconBeat:
As Apple dreams up details of its new spaceship-shaped headquarters in Cupertino with the starchitects over at Sir Norman Foster’s shop, big-time fanboy and computer historian David Greelish has a suggestion:
“Hey,” he wrote in his blog, “you know what Apple needs? A visitor’s center, that’s what.”
Greelish has gotten something else for all his hard work: a big fat “Thanks but no thanks” from Apple.
And yet, even after being told no by the company, he’s still petitioning Apple online to include this “feature” on their new campus. Anyone else think this is a really bad, dumb idea?
Ringer for iOS and Mac ∞
Many thanks to Pixel Research Labs for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop with Ringer.
Ringer for iOS and Mac. Effortless iPhone ringtones, text tones, and alert tones. Easily select just the right part of your song to turn into your ringtone. See the waveform for your media so you can quickly find the spot you are looking for. Control fade in and fade out. Choose the gap between rings. Auto volume balance keeps ringtones from being too loud or too quiet. Ringer on the Mac lets you use just about any media including video and automatically imports tones into iTunes, ready to sync to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
November 30, 2012
Learning from your mistakes ∞
David Barnard, founder of App Cubby, explains and apologizes to users of Timer for one of his decisions.
Much respect David.