Chezza is the President of pinch/zoom. She traded the sun and surf of Sydney, Australia for the rain of Seattle, in order to create the best mobile agency on the planet. She likes cats.
When I was making the series How TV Ruined Your Life, we went out and asked members of the public to comment on a new invention we were claiming was real: a mobile phone that allowed you to call through time, so you could speak to people in the past or future. Many people thought it was real: not so much a testament to gullibility, but an indicator of just how magical today’s technology has become. We take miracles for granted on a daily basis.
We’re really excited that the pinchzoom designed BBC Global iPlayer app has just been awarded the Editor’s Choice award for the best mobile app of 2011. They commented that the interface is slick and easy to use, which was one of our goals throughout the design process. Congratulations to the BBC and the pinchzoom design team.
Samsung has unveiled its newest tablet accessory – a custom made road bike with a ‘top of the range’ tablet holder positioned between the rider’s legs.
The detachable Tab holder positioned in the triangular frame is made from quality Carbon fibre featuring the same Carbon specification used on F1 cars and has a fantastic strength to weight ratio. Accessible from the side, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 holder allows for the device to be used easily whilst on the move. Applications such as dashboards tracking mileage, route planners and repair instructions for punctures, can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace to enhance everyday cycling routes or more adventurous trips – a handy addition for any cyclist.
Now admittedly I’m a fair-weather cyclist but I can’t really see myself sticking my head between my legs while I’m riding to check a map on my tablet. I also have enough issues with getting mud on my jeans during the constant Seattle drizzle so can’t really imagine what sort of dirt, muck or water would start to cover the tablet – I’m not sure that hanging it exposed to the elements during a Seattle winter is the best hardware care for expensive electronics.
There was no price that I could find for the bike, but I assume it’s many times the cost of the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Designers don’t just make things easier and simpler to use, we open up new opportunity spaces through a more creative approach to problem solving.
— Fast Company on the innovation in design in America
Distimo has released some fascinating figures around pricing and in-app purchases for mobile apps.
Just 4% of all iPhone applications feature in-app purchases but, among the 200 highest-grossing applications in the iTunes App Store, 72% of the application revenue came from those with in-app purchases. It says a lot for the “freemium” model, where developers give away the app for free, but then offer additional features with an in-app purchase.
Offering the first detailed glimpse into iPad magazine sales since subscriptions became available in the spring, The New Yorker said that it now had 100,000 iPad readers, including about 20,000 people who bought subscriptions at $59.99 a year.
This makes subscription revenue for the iPad app around $1.2 million a year, not including users who download individual weekly editions for $4.99.
The New Yorker is one of the success stories of publishing for iPad. Unlike its other Conde Nast mates (GQ, Wired), it doesn’t offer much by way if interactive features, videos or graphics, and instead lets the content speak for itself, offering an app that concentrates on readability.
$1.2 million is not a lot of revenue when compared to advertising but this is still a lot more than the initial cost of creating and then maintaining the app.
For the iPad to be a truly successful medium for publishers, it cannot exist on circulation revenue alone. “You’d need a lot higher volume if all you were doing was selling ads against it,” said Mr. Lipsman. “But when you’re getting subscription revenue, tens of thousands of subscribers are meaningful.”
These are really strong numbers. It will be interesting to see if they decide to keep their native iPad app going forward, or if they go down the FT route of offering an HTML5 mobile app and bypassing Apple’s 30% cut of the revenue.
Apple Insider reports that Qantas is trialling offering iPads as in-flight entertainment on a selected flight to test audience reaction. The iPad 2 will have a custom interface and will be “locked” so it can only be used in conjunction with Qantas’ proprietary streaming application (just in case anyone was thinking of walking off the plane with one).
While the iPad seems so obvious for in-flight entertainment (honestly, it’s the only time I ever really use my iPad), I remember a colleague was working on the in-flight entertainment system of the new A380 back in 2002. I was chatting to him about the project, and he mentioned the most challenging part was trying to predict how people would consume entertainment 5 years in the future. Their agency was doing a lot of brainstorming around offering a whole library of movies or music to choose from when you booked your ticket so you could customize your entertainment experience before you got on the plane.
What they couldn’t / didn’t predict was the iPhone and iPad and how completely it’s changed the way we consume entertainment. They were being really forward-thinking in implementing touch-screens long before the iPhone, even though touch screens in the back of an airline seat in coach class could only have been invented by a sadist. It’s so interesting to think back to those conversations and see what they got right (people will expect a library of content to choose on demand) and what they didn’t foresee (the majority of passengers carrying around their own entertainment devices).
If the trial is successful, Qantas will look to roll out iPads across more flights, and will then evaluate installing iPad brackets into the seats.
If you want to make a fortune, produce a thing like the iPad, make it very light, and preload it with stuff that people over 65 and 70 years old want to see: web addresses, apps, anything you want. Make the buttons absolutely huge and only have a few of them, and put that on the market at 100 quid for people to buy their grandmothers. You would sell millions! My mother is 93, and if there was an app on a machine that she could see properly showing all the houses that have been sold for 100 miles around, she’d be on it night and day…
