What do CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, Major League Baseball, the White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People Magazine, and TED have in common?
These are some of the leading Websites that will work seamlessly on the iPad, or what Apple calls "iPad ready."
"iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript."
Translation: If you're using Adobe Flash, you're screwed. As we've previously noted, Steve Jobs refuses to support Flash, so on Apple's mobile devices (iPhones, iPods, iPads), ubiquitous Flash videos and animations appear as broken icons or empty spaces.
Given the iPad's enthusiastic reception by influential reviewers, and pre-release customer demand, we suspect most savvy Websites will start marching to Apple's drumbeat and customize their Websites accordingly, using native HTML5 tags instead of third-party software plug-ins.
Learn how to test and prepare your Website content for iPad readiness here.
Meanwhile, take an early look at iPad's top newspaper apps (pictured), courtesy of Nieman Lab. See the variety of ways that USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Associated Press, and other major media organizations are taking advantage of iPad's screen size and touch-screen functionality. Note that these paid apps are different than their respective Websites.
Any more questions about the iPad? New York Times tech guru David Pogue is here to answer them for you.
And strictly for your weekend amusement, here's David Letterman playing with his new iPad:
Be sure to let us know what you think of your iPad ... and, more importantly, its customized content.
Mark your calendars. The Web is rife with rumors that Jan. 26, 2010 is the big day that Apple will at long last unveil its Tablet, which we wrote about yesterday.
Tablet Tuesday, they're calling it.
No sooner had the New York Times' Bits blog expressed cynicism that real-world technology could ever match that seemingly pie-in-the-sky Sports Illustrated demo video (or the one below from Sweden's Bonnier Group), than somebody let the cat out of the bag -- Apple had scheduled a big media event in San Francisco. On January 26. Just Google that date with the word Apple and you'll get a sense of the pent-up excitement among Mac fans, and techies in general.
All signs seem to point to an official announcement that an oversized iPod Touch device is on its way, for a Spring debut.
How big is it?
Again, it's all speculation -- with some saying a 7" screen, others saying a 10" screen, and others saying both.
Would a 7" provide sufficiently more viewing pleasure than an iPod Touch to warrant upgrading? Would a 10" be too big to shlep around? Each size is notably a trifle larger than Amazon's corresponding 6" and 9.7" Kindle e-book reader.
Somebody who did better at high school geometry than we did performed some calculations and concluded that a 7-inch screen will provide a viewing area roughly four times the iPhone's; a 10-inch screen will provide a viewing area about eight times the iPhone's.
In conjunction with its Tablet announcement, Apple is expected to reveal plans to partner with major TV networks to launch a subscription service for TV shows distributed via iTunes for a recurring monthly fee (a la cable TV subscriptions). CBS and Disney are said to be aboard, though Turner Broadcasting System and Viacom are reportedly standoffish. (Prediction, based on Apple's track record with the music industry: they'll come around. Ditto for book publishers.)
But it's obviously the implications for the newspaper and magazine world that fascinate us, especially considering that Time Inc. and Conde Nast have already developed prototypes of digital magazine issues. And then there's this slick new one from Sweden's Bonnier Group:
How much will the Apple Tablet cost? Good question. Estimates range from $600 to $1000 or more. So start saving your pennies. You know you want one. We do -- not to watch TV shows, but to see the revolutionary improvement it's going to bring to online videojournalism.
The journalism world eagerly awaits the now mythic Spring arrival of Apple's game-changing Tablet, or whatever they're going to call it. It's been a big hush-hush secret for so long, that sometimes it seems like maybe the whole notion was just a dream.
That hasn't stopped graphic artists -- with no inside knowledge of the tight-lipped Apple kingdom -- from imagining what this unwrapped dream toy might look like.
Ron Callari gathered no less than 20 possible designs on Inventor Spot, and frankly they all look pretty cool. We'll be happy to play with any of them -- just hurry up and get one on the market already!
Will it look like an oversized iPhone? A souped-up Kindle? A touchscreen MacBook? A Mac Pro with app-like navigation buttons? A lidless laptop? A big docked PDA with keyboard?
And what will it be called? iPad? iTab? iTablet? MacTab? MacPad? MacTablet? TouchPad? TouchTab? TouchTablet? TouchBook?
Bets, anyone?
To see what this mystery Mac might do to transform print journalism into a total multimedia experience, check out this video of a hypothetical issue of Sports Illustrated. It's like the magazine literally comes to life. Tell us you wouldn't spend a couple bucks for an app that sings and dances like this:
The smarter print publications (e.g. Conde Nast's Wired) are prepping for this day, since they know that a customer who won't spend a nickel for a print issue, or for Web content, will happily fork over a few bucks for iPhone apps -- and this will seem like an extension of that.
Steve Jobs is conditioning us the same way he got all the music freeloaders to pony up a buck a song via iTunes -- thus revolutionizing the music industry. True, the record companies and record stores still took a lethal hit, but he proved that there's a viable market for music; it was just a matter of upending the financial model by altering attitudes and behaviors. We suspect he'll do the same for journalism.
So news organizations would be wise to to learn from the mistakes of the entrenched music industry that bemoaned its fate (and hastened its demise) by cursing its customers. It fell into extinction while a savvy outsider came along and drank its milkshake. What can you do today to prepare yourself or your company for a multimedia future, so that there will be no more blood?
Here's our recommendation. Invest heavily in the best videojournalism talent, training and equipment. Make sure you and your staff recognize the value of video that is professionally produced, and represents excellent journalism standards and storytelling qualities. Newspaper- and magazine-produced online video is coming of age, in fits and starts. Because publishers didn't experience an immediate return on their (minimal) financial investment, and those pre-roll ads didn't materialize as quickly as they had hoped, a lot of them got nervous and withdrew from that arena. Or, worse, they stayed in the game with orphaned third-rate product, which nobody watched, and so they buried it deep on their Websites so nobody could even find it, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that "nobody watches serious video."
But with the new Mac whatchamathing on the horizon, now is the time to re-think video strategies. Apple will succeed where nearly every journalism Website has failed. Why? Because it will successfully integrate words and moving images, in a new and exciting way that has mysteriously eluded print publishers and broadcasters. The device's portability and touch-screen capability will help catapult the online visual experience to the next level.
But ultimately, it's just a platform -- a fancy bucket waiting to be filled. iTunes is pure genius, but it would be worthless without talented composers, instrumentalists, singers, arrangers, producers. Similarly, for multimedia journalism to succeed, we'll need talented reporters, writers, shooters, editors and producers.
Trust us, video is where the future lies. At KobreGuide, we're betting the farm on it.
Celebrated photojournalist Bill Eppridge receives one of the profession's highest honors, the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, from the Missouri School of Journalism today.
The award is "in recognition of his more than 45 years as a photojournalist, capturing for the people of the world critical moments in the history of the world."
Bill Eppridge, a 1960 Missouri alum, has covered a remarkable assortment of stories for Life, National Geographic and Sports Illustrated magazines. He was a staff photographer for the original weekly Life during the 1960s until the magazine folded in 1972. His assignment list reads like a history book of current events covering the latter half of the 20th century.
Eppridge recorded the Beatles' first momentous visit to the United States and photographed Barbra Streisand on the verge of superstardom. He was the only photographer admitted into Marilyn Lovell's home as her husband, Jim, orbited the moon in the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft.
Eppridge went to Vietnam, captured Clint Eastwood on the set of Dirty Harry and was at the original Woodstock Music Festival. His landmark photographic essay on heroin addiction in Needle Park won a National Headliner Award and inspired the motion picture, "Panic in Needle Park," which starred actor Al Pacino. That photo essay is included in "Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955," the 2005 ICP award-winning book by World Press Photo.
Eppridge is a past recipient of the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award, the National Press Photographers Association's highest honor. He was on the road with Robert F. Kennedy, covering his 1966 and 1968 presidential campaigns for Life magazine, when he took one of the decade's most poignant and iconic photographs: a stunned Los Angeles busboy, Juan Romero, cradling the candidate in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, just seconds after Robert Kennedy was shot. Those photographs are in Eppridge's most recent book, "A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties."
Kings of Arthur In rural America, in a town of 145 people, in a high school with only 19 boys, far from the world of the NFL, six-man football rules. (Sports Illustrated)
Bucharest Below Ground Close-up look at how and why hundreds of homeless live in abandoned sewage pipes beneath the streets of Romania's bustling capital. (Bombay Flying Club)
Intended Consequences After 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred, thousands of surviving women contracted HIV and bore children as a result of being raped. They tell their story. (MediaStorm)
Uprooted Mobile home park neighbors fight to save their homes, but are forced to relocate after developers take over the property. (San Jose Mercury News)
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