Digital Journal launches iPad and PlayBook apps powered by Polar Mobile

Digital Journal, a global digital media network with contributors in more than 200 countries, has launched two free news apps for the Apple iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook.

Partnering with Polar Mobile, Digital Journal is releasing free tablet apps that feature breaking news, blogs, image galleries and user-generated content submitted by more than 32,000 Digital Journalists around the world.

“Digital Journal is excited about the opportunity to continue working with Polar Mobile to showcase world class user-generated content on mobile devices,” said Chris Hogg, CEO, Digital Journal. “With the success of our mobile apps on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone devices, we’re eager to extend our mobile reach into the tablet space. Digital Journal’s tablet apps offer outstanding features with a sleek design, and the tablets themselves provide unique reading experiences we know readers are going to love.”

Digital Journal’s iPad and PlayBook apps showcase top news and commentary from tens of thousands of Digital Journal members across the world. The tablet apps also include blogs, special reports and image galleries featuring an up-close-and-personal look at communities, people and events from thousands of cities.

“We are excited Digital Journal has picked our tablet platform to further extend their presence in mobile,” said Jon Zifkin, Director of Customer Success, Polar Mobile. “Tablets will play an integral part in Digital Journal’s user engagement and monetization strategy.”

Digital Journal’s tablet apps boast an immersive and engaging reading experience with a stunning layout and social media features such as the ability to share content on Twitter and Facebook from within the apps.

The tablets apps also offer readers access to read and share Digital Journal’s Twitter and Facebook streams right within the apps.

Digital Journal’s iPad and PlayBook apps are available for download from the iTunes App Store (link) and BlackBerry App World (link) today.

This article was originally published on Digital Journal [Link]

Tablet journalism and ‘iPad killers’

By Jack Kapica

What does it mean when journalists talk about tablets, such as Motorola’s Xoom and HP’s TouchPad, and use the words “iPad killer”?

I’ve been playing with a bunch of tablets recently — Apple’s iPad, the BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung’s Galaxy and, more recently, Motorola’s Xoom, the HP TouchPad, and a few I’ve forgotten — and I’ve been struck by a couple of things.

First, tech journalists keep looking at all non-iPad tablets in terms of whether they are “iPad killers.” My annoyance with the “killer” metaphor has been brewing for some time, but now it just has to come out.

The way the word “killer” is generally used in tech writing is to denote a device or software that is expected to be disruptive enough to make a huge difference in the market. But it has gotten out of hand.

In the absurdly competitive tech industry, in which a company can be “killed” in a market because it fails to release its Next Big Thing on a punishing six-month upgrade schedule, the word “killer” seems appropriate. And so it has come to be a metaphor of choice, albeit one that has become so tiresomely overused that it is now meaningless as a metaphor for competitiveness. (If you think it’s overused, recall that the word is being used these days to refer both to iPad competitors as well as Anders Behring Breivik.)

The metaphor has one insidious effect: It has turned tech journalism into a binary competitive event. We expect there to be one winner and the rest losers. Tablets specifically are either iPad killers or they are not, by which we mean that unless they knock the iPad from its commanding market position, they are dead, dead, dead. Unless a tablet can dislodge Apple’s iPad commanding market lead, it is an also-ran, a failed product, and leading tech publications rush to publish lists of 10 reasons why a product, launched just a handful of weeks earlier, “failed” or 10 things an as-yet-unreleased product needs to have to be … well, an iPad killer.

You don’t have to hunt far for examples. Pump “iPad killer” into Bing and take cover. In less than a second of hunting, I found iPad Killer: When You Just Want Apple to Go Away, HP’s iPad-killer slate PC makes an appearance, Five iPad killers, and countless thousands more.

Yes, tech writers find this exhausting metaphor useful, but in such a sloppy, shorthand way that it must be having some sort of distorting effect on the market, leading us to believe that marketing a tech product is a zero-sum game, a kind of Incan death sport in which the losers also lose their lives.Professional wrestling has known this for years: The way many tech writers use the concept of “killer” is astonishingly similar to the rabid ranting of wrestling fans, who want to crown a single winner and the losers to be “killed.”

This mania exists despite all logical evidence to the contrary. Pick any industry and you’ll see that there are many competitors that somehow manage to stay alive — say, among automobiles, soaps, cosmetics, fashion and sports. Hell, even in the hottest and most competitive industry I can imagine — celebrity worship —no one is looking for a “Paris Hilton killer.”

Yes, I know “killer” is just a handy metaphor and not intended to be taken literally. And perhaps I’m making an earthquake out of a verbal tic. But the concept of a “killer” creates unpleasant derivative phenomena, such as those legions of fanboys, most notably those Apple freaks who take no prisoners in conversations. And it creates artificial standards of quality that every product “must have” to survive.

As an aside, I note that Apple fanboys have become quieter recently; I suspect that they were gob-smacked when Apple started using Intel chips a few years ago, rendering the fanboys incapable of sneering ritually at “WinTel” machines. More likely it’s because iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad have replaced computers as the apple of Apple’s eye — have they in effect “killed” Apple’s computer business? Is the iPad a MacBook killer?

All of this distorts the market and its expectations, which brings me to the second thing that struck me when playing with all those tablets.

At this moment, all of the tablets I’ve been looking at are, well, pretty much alike, or at least as much alike as four different operating systems can allow (Apple’s iOS, BlackBerry’s QNX, HP’s webOS and Google’s Android). But now tech writers have revved up their confusion machines by referring to all the Android operating systems using Google’s in-house code names for them. It was hard enough to remember which was which by version number, but even harder when writers kept referring to them as Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and, soon to come, Ice Cream Sandwich. (They go in alphabetical order. If I want to buy one, should I hold out for Zabaglione?)

In an example of what I’m talking about, eWeek’s columnist Don Reisinger published his reasons why Motorola’s Xoom suffered market disappointment a scant month after it was released. In his column, called Motorola Xoom: 10 Reasons It’s Failing and How It Can Be Rescued, Mr. Reisinger reported that an industry analyst estimated the Xoom to have sold about 100,000 units in its first month, which, when Mr. Reisinger compared these sales to the sales of Apple’s iPad, were indeed poor.

I read Mr. Reisinger’s columns a lot —I subscribe to the eWeek newsletter — and I like and trust his writing. But I fear he has inhaled too much of the toxic atmosphere of tablet journalism.Among a bunch of recommendations to fix the Xoom, he suggests that Motorola “needs to stop competing against Apple” because “to even consider Apple’s tablet a real competitor is a bit of hubris for Motorola.” This comes a few paragraphs after he himself compares first-month sales of the Xoom and the iPad.

How can he say this when just about every tablet maker would give his eye teeth to wrest market share from Apple? And how can he say this when the tech press overwhelmingly talks in terms of the “iPad killer”? I searched eWeek.com’s own website for the phrase “iPad Killer” and found 242 instances of that phrase; Mr. Reisinger himself used it 17 times.

Frankly, I like the Xoom, even though I did not test its battery life and did not think to put it through stress tests to count crashes. I’m not too crazy about some of the flourishes that Motorola added to the interface — some were confusing — but if I had forked over the $500 that the Xoom sold for in Canada, I would, as a market-watcher, fully expect to get fixes for its operating system sooner or later, or I’d be upset. I’ve had worse experiences with new cars, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars more. Hell, I have a TomTom GPS unit that I got last October and I’m still waiting for a software update that will allow me to download a voice that speaks both English and metric for use in English Canada.

A similar story involves the release, in early July, of Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, which is running webOS, HP’s entry into the iPad-killer business. Its most interesting feature is its history — it’s a derivative of a mobile operating system developed by Palm in 2009. HP bought Palm a year later with the intent of using webOS to anchor smartphones, printers and netbook computers to capitalize on the industry craze for cloud computing. But HP never did release a computer running webOS because it had decided to make a tablet to compete with Apple instead.

As with Android before it, the industry speculated endlessly on whether webOS would be an “iOS killer,” but it was not to be. Sales have been underwhelming, and the company sent a morale-boosting memo to its troops, which was leaked to the media after HP’s TouchPad was found to be wanting in comparison to the iPad. The memo, which was obtained by PreCentral.net, tried to comfort HP’s wounded TouchPad team by reminding them that after all, even the Mac OS X operating system itself was released to mixed reviews.

Mr. Reisinger’s comment about Motorola’s hubris in comparing the Xoom to Apple’s tablet should have been amended to include everybody else. If it’s hubris for Motorola, shouldn’t it also be hubris for every other tablet maker, including HP, BlackBerry and Samsung?

Apple’s iPad Might be the elephant in the room, but the room is pretty big. And we don’t have to kill all the other elephants that want to join the party.

This guest post was written by Jack Kapica and was originally published on Digital Journal.

Apple issues response to concerns about data-tracking in Q&A-style press release

By Chris Hogg

Apple has been facing tremendous heat in the tech world after it was recently revealed iPhones and 3G-enabled iPads are keeping track of location information from its users. Concerns were raised about why, how and if that data was being used.

Last week it was revealed that some Apple devices have been keeping detailed recordings about where the device, and thus the user, has been. Questions immediately surfaced around why Apple was recording location data; whether the move was intentional; and if there was a security risk in having all of ones movements tracked and recorded.

The data is recorded on an iPhone or 3G-enabled iPad and then backed-up to a computer when the phone is synced. There are also apps now available that let you open and visualize your own data.

Some in the tech world simply didn’t care, others thought it was kind of cool, and others say it’s a big risk because the data could be accessed by anyone who can get to your computer.

Apple blogger John Gruber says this tracking was either a glitch or an oversight on Apple’s part.

Apple has finally responded to concerns by issuing a press release in a Q&A format to address concerns. An Apple representative sent Digital Journal the following Q&A:

The email starts out by saying, “Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.” It then outlines 10 of the top questions the company has been asked:

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?

Apple says: “Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?

Apple says: “Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.”

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?

Apple says: “The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.”

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?

Apple says: “The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).”

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

Apple says: “No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.”

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?

Apple says: “This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.”

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?

Apple says: “It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).”

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

Apple says: “Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.”

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?

Apple says: “We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).”

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?

Apple says: “Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.”

Software Update

Apple says: Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

• reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone
• ceases backing up this cache, and
• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Augmented Reality coming to iPad 2

By Chris Hogg

Fans of augmented reality (AR) won’t want to miss developments coming from German company Metaio who has put together a very cool demo using the iPad 2.

“We were really surprised to see how powerful the 3D hardware is,”  the company’s CTO Peter Meier told TNW. “It allows us to create really sophisticated virtual content and interaction concepts.”

The company believes tablets introduce new and great opportunities for AR, including businesses who could use it for professional uses such as sales, training and maintenance. For those who missed a recent example of AR being used in this fashion, check out this video.

“AR will become a part of our daily lives, when AR experiences meet people, where they spend most their time: inside their homes or inside their workspaces,” Meier told TNW. “The iPad is perfectly built for AR shopping and AR casual games.”

The Junaio AR browser is expected to launch for iPad 2 soon, but here is a demo video showing what it’s capable of:

Apple officially rolls out App Store subscription service for publishers

By Chris Hogg

Apple confirmed Tuesday a new subscription service is now available to all publishers who have content-based apps on the App Store. The subscription service will allow newspapers, magazines, video and music publishers to charge a recurring fee.

The subscription model was first announced when Apple and News Corp. announced the iPad-only publication called The Daily. Then, Eddy Cue, vice president of Internet Services for Apple, said the subscription service was being launched with The Daily but other publishers would be able to use the feature eventually. Today, Apple confirmed the availability of the subscription service for all publishers. Apple said the service will use the same App Store billing system used for in-app purchases and publishers will be able to set the price and length of subscription.

Subscriptions can be offered on a weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly basis. When users download an app using the new subscription service, they will be prompted to pick the length of subscription and are billed accordingly. Subscriptions can be reviewed an managed from an account page, including the ability to cancel a subscription that is set to auto-renew.

As for revenue-split, Apple says it will process all payments and keep a 30 percent share of revenue, which is the same percentage the company takes for other in-app purchases.

“Our philosophy is simple,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a news release. “When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.”

Apple says publishers can offer subscriptions via their website and choose their own pricing and because Apple does not manage these transactions, the company will not take a revenue share and no customer information is shared with Apple. In this case, Apple says a publisher will need to authenticate a user using their own process.

However, Apple’s publisher guidelines say a publisher who sells a digital subscription outside of an app will have to offer the same subscription at the same price or less within apps. Apple’s terms also say a publisher cannot include links within an app to encourage users to purchase subscriptions outside of the app.

“We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers,” Jobs said.

While Apple’s launch of a subscription model is being widely discussed in media circles for its potential to generate a new revenue stream, it remains to be seen if readers are willing to fork over cash to access content in apps when a lot of content is available freely on the Internet.

“[This year] is the year of media subscriptions,” said Larry Dignan with ZDNet. “The rub is we don’t know whether consumers will go along for the ride. It’s quite possible that 2011 will merely be the year of trying to do media subscriptions.”

Apple says customer privacy will be protected and users will be prompted with an option to share their name, email and zip code with a publisher when they subscribe. When a user shares information, personal info will be governed by a publisher’s privacy policy and not Apple’s, the company says.

Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads the company says iPad customers are huge consumers of news, downloading more than 200 million news apps to date.