Exact Editions Blog

We are hearing reports of what may be the first significant competitor for Apple’s iPad: the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Here are some comparative notes from Tim Bray (who is likely to be pre-disposed for an Android tablet and against Apple’s iPad), and here is a brief overview of a Tab being put through its paces at a Trade Show by Noah from PhoneDog.

I do not know whether the Galaxy Tab is good enough to provide significant competition to … Keep Reading

One of the best magazines of all time and the acme of American style, The New Yorker, this week they launched an iPad app, and it is in some respects a brilliant effort. There are some very strong aspects:

1. A sensational front cover by David Hockney, painted on the iPad with Brushes and with a second interactive page where you can see the way he painted it (brush strokes re-played). One might say that this is a very

There is a brilliant and highly perceptive article on Apple’s strategy by Mark Sigal over at O’Reilly Radar. Read it all, but here is an excerpt:

In the real world of building products and attacking market opportunities, market segmentation is the process of defining and sub-dividing the aggregate, homogeneous market into addressable, targeted needs and aspirations buckets. Buckets that are in turn, thresholded by demographic, psychographic and/or budgetary constraints.

Market segmentation strategy enables a company to drive complete, unified

There has been a spate of news stories in the last few days about Apple preparing (or discussing) a central kiosk for newspapers and magazines. See Bloomberg and the WSJ. This is mostly speculation, but it may be well-informed. It is surprising that Apple have not already launched a common framework for delivering newspapers and magazines via subscription. Many observers assumed that it would be there when the iPad was launched, in much the same way that the iBooks … Keep Reading

Dan Franklin of Canongate recently noted the potential Barthesian “writerly” nature of apps. Having written to death (pun intended) on Barthes’s seminal essay as an undergrad, I geek out a bit when literary allusions are still pertinent outside the academic world (take that Avenue Q and your hurtful song).

Franklin suggested that books have the opportunity to be more “writerly” as an app than in hardcopy, because they “can be much more thoroughly explored on multimedia devices”. With some … Keep Reading