Murdoch was right claiming that the iPad was going to be a "game changer": it's been dominating the "tablets" market ever since its release in 2010 (From the second quarter to the third quarter 2010, the overall media tablet market grew 45% percent and has been driven "almost exclusively" by the iPad (1)) and has had a tremendous impact on how people consume information. As of December 2010, 14.79 million iPads have been sold, making the iPad the best-selling tech gadget in history. iOS and its "exclusive" apps have definitely contributed to its success, and have drastically changed the way we experience Web browsing, gaming and media. I don't know about you, but I haven't purchased a single magazine (nor read news on my computer) since the iPad introduction. I've been purchasing, reading and sharing news & articles right from the comfort of my couch. The iPad has become my breakfast companion, and I thought I'd give you a tour of how it got there in this regard, app by app.

The pioneer

Wired Magazine (now Wired Reader for iPad)

Wired for iPad was the first (good) example of what publishers and content creators can achieve on tablets, offering additional value compared to the print version (explanatory animations, videos inside the content, gesture-driven reading, animated/video ads etc.). Although this first attempt at a tablet magazine wasn't appreciated by everyone (many disliked the fact that users had to purchase every release as a new app), it kicked off the wave of "newsstand" apps.

Personalised social magazines

Pulse News Reader

Pulse was introduced as a "clean and elegant news reader" and redefined the way we consume news feeds on a mobile device. By providing a manageable grid of boxes on the iPad display - each row being a new feed - coupled with its snappy interface, it transported Pulse News Reader into the "top paid" category in just a matter of weeks.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a more personal, social magazine. It integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and displays news in an easy-to-read, magazine-like format. Flipboard got notorious for it's animations and simplicity (e.g. you "turn" pages just like you would do on a paper magazine). Flipboard is still my favourite way to consume news on the iPad and keep in touch with my friend's activities.

Flud

Flud is the latest visual news-reader app coming to the iPad, and describes itself as "a modern, beautiful and personalized mobile news ecosystem with the vision to empower it's users to engage and broadcast relevant news topics to their social networks". Flud takes Pulse's concept one step further, offering a much tidier experience to it's users.

The big name's magazines

Popular Science

Published by Bonnier, Popular Science on the iPad continues in Wired's footsteps: bringing a paper magazine to life on the iPad. Its interface is amongst the best around, offering a nice level of interaction possible with the content.

Project Magazine

Project Magazine, produced by Virgin, is one of the most recent additions to the magazines category on the iPad. It's an incredibly polished magazine, covering a rather broad array of topics, with really great content and few advertisements (especially compared to Wired). Definitely a tablet magazine done right.

The Daily

The latest arrival in the magazine category is no less than Rupert Murdoch's creation: The Daily. With a $30 million initial investment, and costing around "half a million dollars" to produce each week, The Daily has been highly anticipated. It's also the first app to introduce and rely on Apple's new subscription system. Unfortunately, The Daily suffers from numerous crashes and slow (to say the least) startup times. Hopefully, these problems will get addressed in coming revisions.

What's next?

Far from being monotonous, there is still room for improvement in this category of apps, particularly in the area of interface design and how the content is experienced. I think this is where companies like Push Pop Press can enter.

Push Pop Press was founded in February 2010 by a team that includes ex-Apple genius designer Mike Matas. They present themselves as "[…] bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface".

We know very little about it yet, but John Gruber from "Daring Fireball" has made laudatory comments on what he has seen from the app so far. Judging by his post, it looks like they have done an amazing job, and it could very well be the precursor of the next generation of tablet-specific "newsstands" & magazines. It's definitely an app to keep on your radar.

The iPad has changed, and is still changing the way we consume information and media, yet we're just at the beginning of the tablets era and I am sure we will continue to be amazed by future tablet-specific creations. Just like Sinatra would say "the best is yet to come"!

(1) Data sourced from http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/01/tablet-market-grows-45-quarter-over-quarter-driven-by-ipad.ars

Back in April I wrote a blog post about the then impending Times Paywall, pontificating on the approach that Murdoch has taken and whether I thought it would work or not. A couple of months have passed since the paywall went up so I thought I would stick my nose in again to see how things are shaping up.

News International are being pretty cagey with both statistics and an official assessment of the first 2.5 months of paid for content. Snippets of information have escaped, and external sources have claimed knowledge, revealing figures which, on the face of it, don’t look too promising for advocates of paid-for news content on the web.

Figures suggest that only 15,000 subscribers had signed up by the end of July despite running an initial (and ongoing) promotional offer of £1 for 30 days access. The Times were, it is said, prepared for such a brutal dropoff, with some sources claiming they were anticipating a 90% fall in uniques. But low user numbers will surely be the cause of wider problems, with Advertisers understandably reticent to buy space on a site with no traffic, ad sales revenues will plummet. Similarly PR firms will look to other publishing streams to push their content rather than let it sit away, undiscoverable by the scuttling spiders of the Search Engines in the empty, echoey halls of The Times.

Rumour has it that the journalists themselves are by no means thrilled by their move, unhappy that their work is reaching fewer and fewer people. The chat rooms are empty, the copy reaching precious few eyes and the discontent is almost palpable in tweets such as this by Caitlin Moran, sent during a temporary lapse in the paywall in early September.

Hopes that the paywall would increase sales of the print edition have also been dealt a blow with sales figures down month on month since it launched in July – it must be worrying times at News International.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope… by the end of July, 12,500 people had downloaded the Times iPad app on a £9.99 per month subscription basis. Not bad, particularly given that the penetration of the iPad – in fact is it currently 7th in the top grossing iPad apps. This goes some way to confirm my belief that paid-for apps are the way to monetise news content as they are tangible products with perception of value. Furthermore, the Times iPad Application is unique – there are no other quality UK news publishers out there doing the same thing on the same platform. The biggest issue that Murdoch is facing in trying to monetise his website is that there are dozens of competitors out there giving the same stuff away for free.

I doubt Murdoch will be quick to retreat, however, and at the time of writing there are plans afoot to erect a paywall around the Sun and News of the World sites. This would surely be a foolhardy move, certainly in the light of the statistics mentioned above. If the Times demographic is proving reluctant to part with it’s cash, then I doubt the average Sun reader will be throwing his hard-earned lucre towards Docklands.

Newspaper owners across the land must have been breathing a sigh of relief when Rupert Murdoch stuck his head over the parapet and declared that he was no longer prepared to give his company's journalistic content away for free. Finally someone was standing up and saying what the vast majority of Fleet Street must surely have felt for a decade; if we want to prevent the newspaper industry going the same way as the music industry, we need to start putting a price on quality journalism.

To fill you in if you don't already know; Murdoch's plan is to erect a pay-wall around the Times Online and Sunday Times websites this summer so users will need to pay a charge of £1 per day or £2 per week to access the content online. He is also threatening to remove News International's content from Search Engines due to his insistence that Google et al are leeching it and becoming absurdly rich off the back of it - a fair accusation despite the rallying cries of the 'free web' evangelists.

Let me pin my colours to the mast; I believe in rewarding the quality, integrity and thought that goes into top-tier journalism. I believe we need to safeguard it as a legitimate career to prevent the next generation of free-thinking reporters becoming bankers, lawyers and web designers. I don't, however, want digital journalism wrapped in a sickly layer of advertising and i do want to dive in and out of content from different providers without paying for the bits i don't use. Demanding, aren't I?

News International's move is brave for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they are taking the gamble that the rest of the mainstream press will follow their lead. What they are demanding is a change in mentality of internet news consumers.

But in my view Murdoch's assumption of how online consumers perceive news is way off the mark. Rightly or wrongly, we simply don't attribute the same value to content discovered towards the top of a Google search or via a bookmark as we do to a tangible product we purchase in a newsagent. As such, if similar content is available for free from any of his mainstream competitors, Murdoch is going to lose all but the most partisan of his readership. So far, some months after the Wall Street Journal became the first of the mainstream to charge for its content, only the Economist has joined him in the UK and unless the figures start to look good pretty quickly, I would expect a fairly dramatic about turn after just a few months.

Whilst I don't think the traditional web user is ready to voluntarily pay for content they have been getting for free for a generation, I do think that the acceleration in uptake of mobile devices could be the catalyst that the newspaper industry is looking for in their hunt for revenue streams outside of advertising. The main reason for this is the emergence of the applications market. Suddenly digital content is available in product form. It is portable, available offline and, crucially from a revenue point of view, free from an expectation of freeness.

Apps such as the Guardian's are also superior to their mobile web cousins due to faster load times and the ability to tailor the content through the setting of personal preferences making it a smoother user experience.

When done well, the result is a premium product which users are willing to pay for. The Guardian iPhone App, priced at £2.39, for example, racked up 100,000 downloads within 10 weeks of launch and although that cost is a one off payment I believe that a licensing model where users pay a couple of pounds per month for the App would be met with a sizeable uptake and provide an ongoing and sustainable financing model.

Furthermore, if he carries out his threat to shut off the Search Engines, Murdoch is stifling a significant and valuable conduit to his content - latest estimates are that a third of traffic to the Times comes through search engine referrals.

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with the premise of what Murdoch says but his approach is a metaphorical bludgeon. I believe that the way to monetise content is to look at the traditional web as a shop window, supported in part by a conventional advertising model. The main revenues should come outside of this traditional format and away from the expectation of free content and the enormous amounts of open source alternatives. It should come through the creation of paid-for applications for an ever-improving world of handheld devices, providing easily accessible content with real differentiation and quality that can be accessed where and when the user wants it; be that on the daily commute or on the loo.

In the words of Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater, "Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial [to the future of journalism]".

We did it again: this time for Tepilo. The company that we started last year with TV's Sarah Beeny has been ranked as a top start-up business by Smarta.

A judging panel that included Dragons Den's Deborah Meaden and the Founder of Bebo, Michael Birch, has ranked our property selling website as one of its top 100 in their inaugural awards.

According to the blurb:

"The Smarta 100 is the ultimate business accolade, recognizing the UK’s smartest small businesses. Smarta.com has uncovered remarkable companies who have gone the extra mile to differentiate themselves from the market or found clever ways to compete, from their marketing plan to their ethical stance. The result is a fascinating insight into the unique business ideas that are thriving in the current economic climate. The finalists proved to the judges that they have what it takes to run a successful venture, from spotting a new opportunity to making it a reality."

Tepilo really has gone from strength to strength since we launched it in the summer of 2009 and we've got some great initiatives that will be revealed this year. Not just a pretty face...

Is that a Jeroboam of champagne in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us?!!

Last night codegent scooped the FITC Award for Motion Graphics for our work with 40|30 at The Gherkin.

We beat off some really strong competition to win this award as we were short-listed with Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers so a huge congratulations to the codegent team for an amazing job – it makes me really proud!

Next up: the Webbys! You can help us put our trophy cabinet under further strain as there is also People’s Choice Award - you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com. Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first).

I'm off to iron my tux...

When it comes to opinions, we've got plenty! And none so more than our creative director,  Mr. Matthew Jukes :)

Today New Media Age have published his diatribe sorry, whitepaper, on the declining numbers of facebook and the future of the social web. It's a genuinely interesting read and will certainly get you thinking, you can download it here.

Since we launched our new website we have been featured on quite a few portals as an example of good web design and coding standards. Its been great for traffic as well as the ego!

However, today broke boundaries as our global reach stretched as far as China and Japan! That's why I love this medium, things crop up in the most unlikely of places :)

More column inches

This is becoming odd - four bits of press in the last 7 days. This time a double page spread in today's Guardian. Not about 'us' exactly (or at all, really if we're honest), but about the site we designed, built and developed over the last 2 years or so for Meet the Author.

Whilst it's still available, you can check it out on the Guardian Unlimited website here:

Read the article about Meet the Author in the Guardian »

Almost famous

It's been quite a good week for us in terms of press. We were in Marketing magazine for our latest Detox with Evian campaign. Then yesterday we were in New Media Age about the Passport to Music project we won for Youth Music. We also heard something is being written about us in AMO magazine.

"Codegent ... has enjoyed another year of growth and is quietly establishing a strong reputation for itself as an integrated digital agency" 
       - New Media Age, September 2006

Our hard work was acknowledged today when we were included in New Media Age's "Ones to Watch" list from their annual Top 100.

Agencies in the Top 100 are there by virtue of their turnover, but the "Ones to Watch" category has a particular accolade. According to New Media Age, this category is for "agencies that we think you'll be hearing more of in the future".

We really, really agree with them. :)

Read the full article here »