December 16, 2012 – 11:23 pm
Tweet Mobile audiences are large and growing. Great. But their monetization is mostly a disaster. The situation will be slow to improve, but the potential is still there — if the right conditions are met. This year, a major European newspaper expects to make around €16m in digital advertising revenue. The business is [...]
October 28, 2012 – 9:47 pm
Tweet On October 23rd, Apple announced the widely expected iPad mini. The company also surprised most by also introducing a faster “4th generation” iPad, swiftly replacing the one launched on March 7th this year, seven and a half months ago. That same day, Tim Cook proudly proclaimed a an iPad milestone: 100 million shipped since [...]
October 7, 2012 – 8:55 pm
Tweet Combine the enduring strength of media brands with emerging mobility reading habits: the result could boost digital news. The equation in the headline is based on a simple, important fact: By and large, digital users still trust old news outlets. In the new world, media brands are far from dead, predictions of their [...]
September 30, 2012 – 7:25 pm
Tweet Atlantic’s new digital venture named Quartz is aimed at global business people. It innovates in many radical ways, but its business model remains dicey. Two years ago, Atlantic Media’s president Justin Smith was interviewed by the New York Times. The piece focused on the digital strategy he successfully executed: “We imagined ourselves as a [...]
September 30, 2012 – 7:24 pm
Tweet A short week after releasing the iPhone 5, Apple’s CEO publicly apologizes for the Maps fiasco and the company’s website updates its description of the new service. As the digital inspirations blog found out, the unfortunately emphatic description that once read: Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, [...]
September 23, 2012 – 5:09 pm
TweetWhile still a teenager, my youngest daughter was determined to take on the role of used car salesperson when we sold our old Chevy Tahoe. Her approach was impeccable: Before letting the prospective buyer so much as touch the car, she gave him a tour of its defects, the dent in the rear left fender, [...]
September 17, 2012 – 3:42 am
Tweet Mark Zuckerberg admits Facebook was wrong to bet on HTML5 for its mobile app. Indeed, while the previous version was a mere wrapper around HTML code, the latest iOS app is much improved, faster, nimbler. Facebook’s CEO courageously admits the error, changes course, and promises to ship an equally native Android app in the [...]
TweetThere are a lot of questions left to be answered about Facebook’s IPO fiasco, but one thing we know is this: As consumers shift their use of Facebook from PCs to smartphones, investors worry about lower mobile advertising revenues. Is this a temporary situation that will be remedied when usage patterns settle, or do investors [...]
TweetMobile application design is hard. For websites, we have well-established graphic rules. For PC screens, the tolerance for interface mishaps is fairly broad. Mobile apps are the opposite: space is much scarcer, every pixel counts. Try shrinking a tablet app screen down an to a smartphone size: homothecy (linear reduction) rarely works. This is the [...]
TweetFacebook’s bumpy IPO debut could signal the end of a collective hallucination. Most of it pertains to the company’s ability to deliver an effective advertising machine. Pre-IPO numbers looked nice, especially when compared to Google at this critical stage of their respective business lives: Based on such numbers, and on the prospect for a billion [...]
