July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s a little hard to believe that the publishing world has only been using WordPress for a decade, as today marks the 10th birthday for the platform.

Back in 2003, WordPress was the new kid helping those that wanted a simple publishing tool. I first became aware of it as an alternative to Drupal, mostly because WordPress was the platform that seemed best suited those with a news organization despite its label as a blogging tool.

Today, the platform is used by loads of major publications, including CNN, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and, yes, even VentureBeat — over 66 million sites total. WordPress is probably the single most important tool when looking at what’s changed the publishing industry over the last 10 years.

And while WordPress’s open-source roots continues to thrive, so has the for-profit version of the platform (WordPress.com) under parent company Automattic. WordPress (and Automattic) cofounder Matt Mullenweg recently announced that Automattic just got a massive $50 million investment to help WordPress grow its dominance in the future.

Check out the infographic from Statista that outlines WordPress’ growth over the last decade.

Infographic via Statista, Birthday cake photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Medium, the publishing platform startup founded by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, has purchased long-form journalism project Matter, the companies announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Matter was founded months ago by veteran journalists Jim Giles (formerly of Nature, The Atlantic, The Economist, and New Scientist and former GigaOm European reporter Bobbie Johnson. The site basically produces one 5,000-word long-form article per month, which it charges customers $1 to gain access to. Matter also successfully raised about $140,000 from a Kickstarter campaign that closed in February, and among the investors backing the site was Williams.

Williams himself has a solid background in publishing, having co-founded both Twitter and Google-owned Blogger platform. His new company Medium aims to offer tools, systems and services to support online publishing and create a “medium” between casual readers, contributors, and dedicated content creators. (Also, posts about Kevin Rose peeing.) Having launched in August, the service is currently in closed beta, but Medium’s purchase of Matter does shed some light on the direction its going.

“We have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish, or how much we charge for each article,” Giles and Johnson said in a statement on Matter’s website. “More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas.”

Both Giles and Johnson will remain on Matter’s editorial staff.

Via The Guardian

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Just as Wall-E used artificial intelligence to navigate a vast wasteland, Trapit applies AI to uncovering the best parts of the Internet.

Trapit launched its new publisher suite today, the startup’s first business-to-business product that lets publishers and brands create personalized, more engaging reading experiences.

“The web is generating more content per day than ever before,” said founder Hank Nothhaft Jr. in an interview with VentureBeat. “There are plenty of web aggregators and distribution networks, but as far as I am concerned, these are one-trick ponies. They are not solving problems as far as publishers are concerned. We use artificial intelligence to create branded personalized content experiences for audiences; it’s like machine-assisted editorial, and the impact on engagement is tremendous.”

Trapit was born out of the prestigious research institute SRI International, the same organization that spun out the Siri virtual assistant technology later acquired by Apple. Trapit combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and personalization technology to act as a discovery engine for the web. When Trapit launched in 2011, it was a consumer product that sorted through the massive amount of Internet content to surface articles that were specifically relevant to each individual user.

With this latest offering, Trapit will sell its tools to businesses that want to recommend content to their readers from multiple sources, without redirecting users to other sites, syndicating, or working with an ad-network. Nothhaft said that after Trapit released an iPad app in July 2012, the company received an outpouring of interest from the media industries about how they could use the technology to enhance their own native and digital experiences. Nothhaft jumped on this opportunity to generate revenue, without making money through consumers or advertising.

Using Trapit’s publishing tools, customers can curate topics that are important to their audience based on key words and topics. The engine dives into a 140,000 vetted sources that won’t necessarily pop up in search engines, and delivers the content in real-time to interested users. Nothhaft said that while social networks user other people to filter the web, that method of surfacing content often turns out to be an “echo chamber,” and search is gameable. Additionally, syndication agreements, third-party plugins, and ad networks surface “junky” content that adds little value to the publisher or the reader. Trapit’s advanced technology provides a superior, more authentic alternative.

“Trapit is able to understand the context of an article more deeply than a set of keywords and keeps the user around longer, to create a relationship,” he said. “We monitor how users interact with content and apply that feedback differently, as well as data on what they are opening, how long they are spending, what they share, what they delete etc… We develop a rich understanding of the user and those interests in real-time, and surface articles within moments. This personalizes content to each individual users. No two Trapit feeds are exactly the same, and no other service can claim that.”

Publishers appreciate the fact that app is white-labeled and doesn’t redirect users or dilute the integrity of their brand. Nothhaft said that he takes a broad view of what a publisher is, and in addition to working with traditional media properties, Trapit also has customers like Deloitte which uses Trapit to power an internal iPad reader. The app personalizes business news and internal reports, so a consultant who is out in the field can quickly access information that is relevant to them without spending the time to search.

Furthermore, the software enables publishers to extend their publishing into mobile without spending a large amount of money. Clients can publish content to branded iPad and web apps, as well as email and social networks, to build community around their topic. And of course, analytics are part of the package. Trapit is based in Palo Alto, California.

Photo Credit: Trapit

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In the eternal tug of war between publishers and readers, the readers have an enormous advantage right now.

But publishers are starting to pull the rope back a tiny bit toward their side.

The AP won a legal victory against the Meltwater Group, a news aggregation service, earlier this week, with a court decision that affirmed the AP’s ownership of its stories. Newspapers like the New York Times and independent bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have started experimenting, successfully, with partial paywalls: Their sites let readers view a certain number of stories for free but demand payment for the full slate.

There’s even some backlash against the multimillion-dollar sale of Summly to Yahoo earlier this week. While most commentators focused on the the youthfulness of Summly’s 17-year-old founder and the reported $30 million price tag, Time‘s Victor Luckerson wondered how Summly — another news aggregation service — got away with what it does. Essentially, Summly was aggregating and summarizing news stories for the benefit of its users without compensating the creators of those stories. As suggested by the Associated Press v. Meltwater decision, that might not even be legal.

These court decisions and paywall strategies are just skirmishes in the bigger battle.

Just as Napster did with the music industry and The Pirate Bay did with the movie industry, aggregators like Summly and Meltwater are hollowing out the old business models of the news industry and leaving destruction in their wake. But while musicians have started to figure out new business models, news publishers and moviemakers haven’t got there, yet.

Expect more experimentation

Never before in the history of humanity have we had so much content available for free. The Internet’s default mode of publishing is to offer content — news stories, videos, music, movies, whatever — for free. To the extent that there’s a commercial transaction involved, it’s usually the rather tenuous exchange of attention for advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising is a diminishing business: Print dollars turn into dimes on the web. And web dimes turn into pennies in mobile.

Now with the increased use of tools like AdBlock and Readability, it’s possible for readers to avoid even that tiny exchange, stripping out the advertisements and leaving just the content they’re interested in reading.

Don’t get me wrong. Although VentureBeat publishes an ad-supported website, I use these tools myself occasionally. I’ll turn on AdBlock when I have a less-than-ideal Internet connection (like at a conference or during my commute) and want to optimize download times. I use Instapaper frequently to clip articles that I don’t have time to read during work hours and want to save for later.

In fact, I was an early fan of Instapaper and Readability. These tools’ capability to strip out extraneous formatting from a web page and make it more readable pointed out a serious flaw with many content sites’ designs: They were simply too cluttered.

Instead, such tools suggested another way: a combination of minimalism and user control over design, which I labeled “undesign” in a 2010 post.

The message to site designers was clear: If you want people to read your stuff, make it easy for them to do so, or else get out of the way. If readers don’t like the way your site looks, they’ll use these tools to reformat them.

Since then, other tools have popped up to fill this gap. Amazon now offers a “Kindle” button that lets readers send a story directly to their Kindles. Another popular read-later service, Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later), works similarly to Instapaper, reformatting text into a cleaner, more readable version and saving it in a queue so you can read it at your convenience. Apple’s Safari browser even has an ad-free Reader option built-in.

In short, people are doing just what I predicted. The question for publishers is how to respond?

Embrace or resist?

Pocket this week added publisher tools that let content owners see statistics on who is using Pocket. That’s helpful (and VentureBeat is considering using these tools) because it at least gives the publisher some visibility into how people are using Pocket. And by encouraging people to save articles for later, it can increase the shelf life of a good story, encouraging people to read it and share it over a longer period than they otherwise would have.

Publishers have also started experimenting with different kinds of advertising. So-called “native advertising,” or sponsored posts, are easier to integrate into the content stream and harder to filter out. Done right, a sponsored post or advertorial should be just as interesting to readers as a piece of editorial.

However, native advertising can be a dangerous game. Publishing sponsored posts without sufficiently disclosing that they’re sponsored risks blowing any trust you have with your readers, as the Atlantic discovered recently when it published a post created by the Church of Scientology. Also, Google has made it clear that Google News will punish publishers who mix sponsored content in with news content without sufficiently distinguishing the two.

Yahoo is discontinuing the Summly app, but will fold its algorithms into Yahoo itself. Should publishers embrace news summaries by Yahoo or try to find ways to thwart it, either by using tech or in the courts? There won’t be an easy answer.

As readers get more and more control over the content they want to read, publishers are in a difficult place: Run alongside them, in the ever-diminishing hope of recouping revenues at some point down the line, or risk being left behind.

Old newspapers and Reddit alien photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The future of publishing is doomed. Or perhaps, we’re simply in the middle of a publishing transition we don’t fully understand yet.

Pocket, makers of a service that lets you save online articles for reading later, believes its latest offering could be a glimmer of hope for publishers — and potentially help change the way we consume media in general.

The company is launching Pocket for Publishers today, a new platform that unlocks a wealth of information for publishers around how readers are interacting with their content on Pocket. It also includes new features that make Pocket more useful for publishers — including embeddable buttons to encourage readers to save stories on Pocket and the ability to add custom footer messages beneath Pocket-saved stories.

“Publishers have a lot of different interests, a lot of different priorities, but the No. 1 question comes around clarity,” said Pocket founder and chief executive Nate Weiner in an interview with VentureBeat. “[Many publishers we've talked to] are users of Pocket and they’re saving content for later themselves, but they’re wondering how they can put save-it-later features to work for their sites and businesses.”

Specifically, Pocket for Publishers aims to highlight the service’s ability to significantly increase the longevity of online content. Pocket revealed a few weeks ago that it helped one large feature from BuzzFeed live on for 35 days within its service, while it only had a 10-day lifespan on Buzzfeed’s site.

“Many publishers get that this is not something competing with their homepage, this is supplementing it with additional pageviews and life,” Weiner said. “We want them to realize it [Pocket for Publishers] exists so they can start taking advantage of it.”

Pocket for Publishers lets content makers see exactly how many Pocket users are saving their stories and how many of those users are actually revisiting stories within the service. Pocket’s analytics also shows the performance of individual authors, both in terms of their overall number of shared stories and their “Impact Rank,” a figure based on Pocket’s metrics that shows their actual reach to readers.

Publishers previously didn’t have access to any of this data. It’s also not something that Instapaper, Pocket’s main competitor, offers yet. Pocket for Publishers is launching with more than a dozen major publishers onboard, including Time.com, BuzzFeed, BusinessWeek, and Wired.

Perhaps even more useful than Pocket’s analytics is the new footer text capability, which lets publishers include text and links beneath any article their readers save on Pocket. Publishers can promote features, events, their apps — just about anything — and they can have up to five footer messages, allowing them to perform some basic A/B testing.

The new “Save to Pocket” button functions like most social sharing buttons on the web. It displays a counter showing how many times a specific article has been saved on Pocket, and it’s also a simple way for readers to save articles. Pocket already allows publishers to integrate its functionality into their mobile apps, but the company will be promoting its mobile SDK even more now.

The San Francisco-based company has raised around $7.5 million in funding so far from Foundation Capital, Baseline Capital, Google Ventures, and others.

Weiner made it clear that this new publisher platform is completely separate from Pocket’s eventual monetization plans. The company now has more than 8.5 million users, up from 7.5 million at the end of 2012.

“If you can image a world where content can live beyond the first few days  … that has huge ramifications for the future of publishing,” Weiner said. “I don’t know if this is the silver bullet for publishers, but this is one of the legs they can stand on, and we want them to see that.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Pressly, a service for turning your big, dumb website into a pretty, shiny HTML5 mobile experience, has just raised $1.5 million in funding.

The funding comes from iNovia Capital and OMERS Ventures. This is the startup’s first round.

Companies pay between $200 and $500 per month for the Pressly treatment, which takes the customer’s content and their hand-picked template and churns out an HTML app for smartphones and tablets. Current customers include Ziff Davis, The Economist, Toyota, IBM, and The Toronto Star.

The funding will be used for marketing to expand that client roster and start building up Pressly’s kingdom of HTML5 content apps.

“We love that Pressly gives content publishers a low-risk, low-friction way to take their business to the mobile world and experiment. The times are changing, and that’s what’s needed to succeed,” said Pressly CEO Jeff Brenner in a statement on the news.

Pressly first launched in 2011 and is based in Toronto.

Elvis Presley 1956 publicity still from “Love Me Tender”/RCA Records.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

GDGT + AOL = ZOMG.

To make sense of the deal, we talked with Ryan Block, the cofounder of GDGT and a former editor at AOL’s Engadget, this morning. What followed was an insightful conversation on where AOL has been and where it’s headed — with GDGT’s help.

VentureBeat: What will change in GDGT’s operations? And how will the site fit into AOL?

Ryan Block: We’ve always considered ourselves a design and engineering company first. That’s different from Engadget, which was a content company, and the design and engineering were in service with that. … The fit there for us is not only GDGT as a property itself — we’re filling an interesting hole in AOL’s lineup — but it’s also about our team.

So part of what I’m going to be doing is taking existing AOL design and engineering folks, as well as the team I built at GDGT, and kind of expanding the scope of what we’re working on … We’re going to apply the same sensibilities around creating a great holistic product experience to other sites around the [AOL tech] portfolio.

VentureBeat: Is this a response to the Verge and all the money Vox Media is throwing at design?

Block: This is the biggest investment I know of that AOL has ever made in these properties and in the future of its technology content as well. It’s not just with GDGT as a property itself, but with the way we’re going to start to organize and build. Those guys [AOL] realize we’re going to compete, and we’ll continue to compete in the tech space of the future.

It’s not just about the words on the page — which is more important than ever since there’s more competition than there’s ever been — but the bar has been raised in general around design, engineering, site experience, features — all these things.

We live in a world now where everything has an app, and those apps are great and amazing holistic experiences that combine the best of the form factor with cloud services. … We’ve come to expect a very high standard of interactivity. And the reality is there’s a lot of work to be done with some of these sites, and that’s what we’re going to do.

If you’ve ever used GDGT, you know it’s highly interactive, highly dynamic, it’s those kinds of experiences we want to bring.

VentureBeat: Why is now a good time for the AOL acquisition?

Block: We’ve been continuously iterating and evolving and getting really happy with where the site was going. Around the same time as we were thinking about what could happen next, AOL reached out, and we entered conversations. We actually had some other offers, and frankly, we had offers that might have been a little more financially interesting. But we chose AOL. We thought it was the best fit. The leadership team there is amazing. They’ve really done a 180 in the last two years. And a lot of the people that I don’t think were up to the task have been shown the door, and the people there now are great.

I don’t know if you saw Jay Kirsch’s post on church and state [Kirsch is president of AOL's technology and entertainment group], but to have a high-ranking business manager who thinks about content that way, it feels very uncommon to me. It feels very rare and precious that somebody actually gets it at that level. For us, it’s the right team, the right deal, the right time, and the right place. We didn’t really want to do something else, this was the outcome that we wanted.

VentureBeat: Any chance you’ll return to blogging in your new role?

Block: I’m definitely going to contribute to Engadget, TechCrunch, and other sites within the network wherever I can. Peter [Rojas, GDGT's other co-founder] is definitely going to contribute, probably more than I will, and taking more of an active advisory role in the direction of editorial across the group. That’s actually very similar with what we’ve done with GDGT. … I’ll be more like a columnist than anything else.

I’m not taking a direct editorial role. For example, Tim Stevens is still in charge of Engadget. The way I’d think about it is in terms of a mind/body duality, where the words on the page and everything having to do with the edit product is the existing Engadget team [the mind]. My team are the personal trainers, and we’re going to work out the body. We’re going to take everything that surrounds that [the mind], all the experiences that encompass it, and work on that.

VentureBeat: Are you worried at all about how the GDGT community will respond to the acquisition? I noticed that you made it really easy for existing members to delete their accounts.

Block: I think that’s the right thing to do. I think that’s the polite thing to do for people to give them a chance to opt out — and to be very clear about that up front. AOL has been really cool, really supportive throughout this entire process. I have to hand it to them.

We’ve done this before. The last time we brought it into a group that understood our business and then almost immediately, that whole management team was reshuffled, and we got stuck with a bunch of people who really had no business running a Popsicle stick. That’s changed enormously.

Even back then we were able to take a property within AOL and make it great. Engadget ultimately won out against all its competitors, and that was with not a terribly impressive investment on AOL’s part in 2005 and 2006. I’m not super-worried about it. I think AOL is a pretty good place for certain brands to land. I think they’re going to be excellent stewards for GDGT, and they’re going to be a good home for our team.

I think they have the receptors necessary for our DNA. That is maybe the most important thing to me.

Photo: Kris Krug/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Guy Kawasaki is perhaps the consummate entrepreneur.

He’s built and sold three companies, invested in dozens more as a venture capitalist, still runs a few startups fairly actively, and worked for Apple in the early breakout years of its 1984-style fight against Big Brother (aka IBM). But he’s also a prolific writer, with books like The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries that have been must-reads for founders and intrapreneurs for years.

Put the two together, and you’ve got someone who budding authors should listen to about what it means to write  books in 2013. Especially if you actually want to sell any.

Kawasaki put all that entrepreneurial and authorial perspective into his latest book, Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish Your Book. APE came out recently on Kindle and is launching in dead tree format tomorrow. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and spent some time chatting yesterday with Kawasaki about the changes he’s seeing in writing and publishing.

Short version? We ain’t in Kansas anymore.

VentureBeat: What’s your main reading modality today?

Kawasaki: I use a Nexus 7, with the actual books in Kindle Reader. For me the 7″ format is the largest format that when I fall asleep and it hits my face, it doesn’t hurt. Full-size tablets … not so much.

VentureBeat: Talk to me about the timing of the book … author, publisher, entrepreneur. There’s something going on here that’s new.

Kawasaki: I had a very bad experience … I recently self-published a book called What the Plus. I had this idea that self-publishing was easy — bring your Word file to Kindle and you’re done – but, especially if you’re writing nonfiction and have tables, bullets, lists, images … it’s extremely non-trivial.

So I thought that if I, with with my background in technology, was having a hard time, others would too. And I wanted to help.

VentureBeat: Of course, it’s not just the technical bits … you’ve got three parts there — author, publisher, and entrepreneur. Is the entrepreneur piece the toughest for most authors?

Kawasaki: For a novelist the publishing is not hard. For nonfiction it is, but even then you can find someone who can do it.

But the marketing part … I guess you could hire someone, but it takes nine to twelve months of concerted effort to build a platform. Which means having lots of followers, and fans, and subscribers … and that has to be started the moment the you begin.

VentureBeat: And on the publishing part …

Kawasaki: I really want authors to understand that traditional publishers used to provide two to three main sources of benefit:

First, they were a filter of what was good. Someone smart and talented picked what was good from what was crap, so the best stuff came to market. (I no longer believe that’s true, by the way. Now people go to Amazon, see 4 stars, click, and the book is bought.)

Second, they were very good at getting dead trees to retailers. The only problem is, there are far fewer retailers now.

So for an author today, you have to question whether it’s worthwhile to go through this rigamarole of finding a publisher — which takes maybe six months — and then be forced to wait another 12 months while your book winds its slow way through the massive publishing machine.

Now, maybe plan A is to find a traditional publisher, get a big advance, and and editor, and write the book. Almost no-one can do that. Plan B is to write it, upload it to Amazon, and make $2 out of every $3 the book takes in.

Plan C — which is a great plan, by the way — is to do plan B, and then, when your book is successful and being downloaded, go to plan A.

VentureBeat: You’ve done all three. What are you seeing with sales of your own books … digital vs paper?

Kawasaki: I’ve written 12 books now, and the best data I have is with Enchantment, where the ratio of print to ebooks is two to one.

There is a myth that more ebooks are sold than paper books, but generally speaking the total U.S. market for books is about $25B, and roughly 10 percent is ebooks. The place where ebooks really dominate is adult fiction.

I think that it will be 90 percent ebooks someday … but that’s not true today.

Venturebeat: Amazon is so dominant in digital publishing. Should you just focus on Amazon?

Kawasaki: For a novice author, the answer is probably yes: Amazon is roughly 80 percent of the action. The Nook, Apple’s iBooks store, and Kobo is the rest.

Plus, you do get some significant benefits if you go exclusive with Amazon, like the Kindle Direct Publishing program. It’s much simpler … if you’re successful, then go to the other platforms.

VentureBeat: About print … it seems sometimes that the book is the artifact, the souvenir, while authors are making much more revenue around it in terms of speaking, consulting … is that a good reason to write a book?

Kawasaki: I say it’s bad reason because it’s unlikely that most authors will make significant money.

I also believe that it’s bad karma. A book is an end in itself … if you think of a book as a means to an end, I just think that’s bad karma. For example, in a marketing sense, if you pretend you are on Amazon, and you’re seeing books by famous authors and you see your book — the Shmoe Way by Joe Shmoe from Schmoe Publishing — you have to ask why should anyone give a shiitake about my book?

No-one wakes up in the morning and says I’m going to give Joe more money, more business, more speaking opportunities. They don’t buy it to help you.

So the only way the book is successful if it’s helpful.

VentureBeat: One of the problems authors face when they publish themselves is pricing … how much is my baby, the book I’ve been working on for so many months, worth?

Kawasaki: Well, first you have to understand that pricing is witchcraft, not science. But there are some guidelines.

If you’re a novice novelist, go $0.99. After you’ve built some track record, you can bump it to $2.99.

For a non-fiction book, the sweet spot is $9.99. A hardcover would be $26, and you have to be lower to make people feel they’re getting a good deal when buying digital. But anything less, and people start thinking: how could it be worthwhile?

But there are some exceptions — if you’re an iOS developer and you write a book that’s going to help someone build the next Instagram … that book can cost $99.

(Laughing)

Try that the traditional route: go to a New York publisher and tell them you have a $50 iOS book … and then it takes 12 months to get it out, and it’s out of date before it’s ever published. Not going to work.

VentureBeat: Is today the best time ever to be an author?

Kawasaki: I don’t know if it’s the best ever in financial sense … but I would make the case that it’s the best ever in terms of independence. Today, publishing is pretty democratized.

photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Wired is one of the first big magazines devoted to technology and the Internet, so it’s fitting that it’s generated half its ad revenue from the web in Q4 2012 — a first for the magazine.

The news was part in an invitation to meet new Wired Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich at the Consumer Electronics Show next week.

“Join me in celebrating a major milestone for the Web site: We just booked 50 percent of our ad revenue on the digital side during the last quarter of 2012,” wrote Wired.com Editor Evan Hansen. “Yes, the beams are about to cross at Conde Nast, but we’re not expecting the world to end. Just the opposite, actually.”

The 20-year-old magazine first made a serious attempt to concentrate on digital sales in 2006 when media giant Conde Nast purchased the Wired News website for $25 million. At that time, the publication was generating a mere 10 percent of its revenue from the web, Wired tells VentureBeat.

Wired said the majority of its digital ad revenue (90 percent) comes from the website, but revenue from tablet apps and digital magazines is growing. That makes sense considering the influx of affordable tablets on the market as well as Conde Nast’s success on digital stores like Apple’s Newsstand.

“Hitting 50 percent is proof that there is a successful template inside of this industry that can be followed by others and that having a magazine doesn’t necessarily need to be an analog anchor around your technological neck,” Wired publisher Howard Mittman told AdAge.

It’s worth noting that the 50 percent digital revenue share also didn’t come as a result of a decline in print advertising sales. While total print ad pages did experience a decline in 2012, the company also raised its base ad sales rate, meaning print revenue stayed flat.

Photo via Wired

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apparently, Amazon isn’t cool with any self-published book with the appearance of copyright infringement — specifically, something related to Star Wars.

This is what happened to Gib Van Ert’s memoir “A Long Time Ago: Growing up with and out of Star Wars” yesterday. Amazon yanked the ebook due to an “unspecified trademark issue,” according to the author. The book isn’t telling a story about the characters in George Lucas’s series of films or even the “expanded universe” characters that appear in various sanctioned novels, video games, and graphic novels. It’s about someone’s life experiences and how Star Wars affected them.

“[Amazon's] emails are vague, but they seems to being saying that I have to have Lucasfilm’s permission before selling on their store a book that talks about Star Wars,” Van Ert explained. “It’s a crazy position – Star Wars is a massive pop, cultural, and generational phenomenon, as my book tries to explain through a personal narrative.”

What’s more puzzling about this situation is that Amazon continues to sell the print version of Van Ert’s book, as BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow points out. The only real explanation is that Amazon has some sort of system in place that automatically flags content that may be in violation of infringement — much in the same way that Google has set up a system for media company’s to do with search engine results and infringing videos on YouTube. The real question is whether Amazon also permits its self-published authors to challenge the claim, and how long it would then take for the book to reappear in the ebook store.

It makes sense that Amazon wants to grow its self-publishing business, which is more lucrative for both authors and Amazon than going through a publisher. But an automated copyright infringement system isn’t the way to go, if that’s indeed what’s currently in use. We’re reaching out to Amazon for more information about how it flags ebooks, and will update this post with any new info.

Image via Lucasfilm

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Matthew Mather started his career at the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines. He founded one of the first tactile feedback companies — Haptic Technologies Inc, which he eventually sold for $10 million – and won a $2 million “best new video game” prize in 2007, and has worked on nanotech, genomics, and cybersecurity.

He’s also the author of a chart-topping Amazon book that sold 40,000 copies in its first eight weeks of publication — and shot to the top spot in Amazon’s science fiction charts — by following a very strategic publishing and publicity model, which he shared with me when we chatted a few weeks ago.

This is a hot topic right now. Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki just published APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur), which gives step-by-step instructions on how to self-publish. And an astonishing 27 of the top 100 books on Kindle are self-published.

Here’s how Mather did it.

“I have a background as an entrepreneur and as I was writing the Kindle came out and I wanted to try it,” Mather said. “Traditional publishers have the connections into the bookshops, and pay for printing … but now creators can access the market directly.”

Mather had started writing his novel in 2010, and by 2012 had 150,000 words and 600 pages of The Atopia Chronicles. But he didn’t just throw the novel into the massive Amazon ocean of titles and hope for the best. Using his background in startups and his savvy as an entrepreneur, he created an 11-step program to market and launch the book.

“If you go the self-publishing route, it’s definitely the year to get started,” he told me. “But you need to start with good reviews and get early sales … if you start to become popular, you get into the recommendation system, and the system feeds itself.”

So Mather created the Shakespeare system, an 11-step process to get to number one. Briefly, it outlines the key tips to getting attention, getting reviews, and getting sales:

1. Serialize
   Attention spans are short and readers don’t necessarily trust a new author. Consider breaking your novel into smaller, bit-sized chunks
2. Hook
   The first part of your story needs to be punchy and leave the reader wanting more.
3. Amazon only
   Focus only on Amazon first, because it’s the biggest and sells the most. By focusing, you can promote better, and you can move up rankings quicker. After some success you can consider other platforms.
4. Key networks
   Promote the book in your personal networks. Ask people to re-post your free book offers. Email people. Share it on LinkedIn. Email top-selling authors, and ask them to review your book or even share it with their audiences.
5. Empathy
   You must create a character that people can connect with
6. Select Program on Amazon
   Choose the Amazon Select Program because you can offer your book for free for 5 days in every three months. Then promote it on the free books websites.
7. Perceived value
   Create perceived value by offering a deal … for instance by pricing six serialized parts at $0.99 each, and the entire book at $2.99
8. Editing
   You will get killed in reviews if your book is not well edited. Go on Craigslist, find some unemployed English major, and pay a few bucks to get it edited. Use a real editor if you have the cash, but it’ll be expensive.
9. All free posting sites
   Get feedback on your book from 20 or so people by paying the $10-20 for reading your book. Bonus: they’ll probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews for you later. And use the free press release sites when you release your book.
10. Reviews
    It’s critical to get reviews as these have a direct impact on Amazon ranking and recommendations. Don’t do fake reviews — you’ll get caught. Do ask friends and relatives and contacts to review the book.
11. Engage
    Engage with readers via a video blog, or any blog (here’s Mather’s). Show progress on future books. Get them engaged somehow.

By using this system — and by working a 14-hour day when his book was released — Mather ensured that his book launch didn’t disappear into the vast Amazon machine without a ripple. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the Shakespeare system, check the first letters of each step.)

“You need to prepare beforehand and do it all at once, at launch day,” he told me. “I started at three AM, sent out three to four press releases, ran through the whole marketing program in 14 hours, and by the next day I was number one in science fiction.”

One thing that is critical, Mather says, is pricing.

“I talked to a lot of science fiction readers, and it’s sort of like the music industry,” he told me. “A book from a big publisher is $10-15  … so people will pirate them. But if you price it at $2-3, they won’t. And, since you’re getting 70% of the purchase price from Amazon versus maybe 20% from a regular publishing deal … you’re better off in the end.”

The results are pretty obvious: a book that went to first in Amazon’s science fiction list in a day is still on three different top-ten lists and is currently ranked 1,813 on the overall Amazon’s best-sellers list. Not bad for a first-time author.

Of course, it’s not all about the system. One thing that Mather did add when we chatted: it helps if the book is good.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In the US, biscuits go with gravy. In the UK, biscuits go with tea. In Germany, biscuits go towards  mobile publishing, or at least Netbiscuits do.

Software company Netbiscuits has raised $27 million for its technology that efficiently adapts web applications to smartphones. These days, it is important for companies to have a mobile presence, but creating native apps can be time-consuming and expensive. The Netbiscuit Mobile Cloud Platform powers, optimizes, and delivers web applications across a range of devices, so the business doesn’t have to. It also offers analytics, hosting and monitoring solutions.

Currently, Netbiscuit has a global network made up of 110,000 mobile web apps and sites. It will use this investment to expand further into the US and European markets and work on research and development. Stripes Group led this round, a New York based Venture Capital Firm. Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people consume content, as well as the way writers and editors create it. Today, Contextly has emerged from stealth mode to change the way digital journalists provide context in their stories.

Contextly was founded by Ryan Singel, a veteran journalist who cofounded the Threat Level blog at Wired. After a decade as a writer and editor, Singel is leaving to run Contextly full time. The guiding principal behind the company is the belief that context is everything, and the tools available to reporters are inadequate.

Contextly offers a plugin for WordPress that makes it easier for writers to include related links. Right now, connecting to other articles involves search engine queries, multiple tabs, and copying and pasting. These steps make telling a full story more time-consuming and frustrating than it should be. However, telling the full story is necessary not only to engage readers, but also to relay the news with as much truth and value as possible.

“Readers crave context in news, even as a reporter’s job of putting the day’s story into a larger picture is hard to do when speed is essential and the news cycle never stops.” Singel said in a blog post announcing his departure. “But writers — good ones — know that the day’s work is just part of a long-­term story that they and their co­workers have been telling for years.”

Online journalism has been descried as a step down from print publications, where information had to be verified by two credible sources and every article was fact-checked. However, one of the benefits of consuming news online is that readers can track down the truth for themselves and find background information and alternative perspectives. It also puts a massive store of knowledge at the disposal of reporters who can use it to inform their writing.

“Writers like related links because they make them feel like they are not just putting out yet another story that feeds the Internet beast, but that they are telling a larger story,” Singel said during an interview with VentureBeat. Those links are more important than people give them credit for. If you are reading something in a newspaper, it is not easy to go find out more information. Links can help readers discover new content, learn more about topics that interest them, and verify original sources.”

While building Contextly, Singel approached the design from an editorial perspective. He said writers have a deep institutional knowledge and need an efficient way to express it and tell a more connected tale. The widget “marries editorial control with serendipity,” and according to early beta testing on Wired, Contextly increases page views, as well as time-on-site. 

There is also a data analytics component. The engine gathers data on site visitors and produces readable reports that writers and publishers can use to inform their work. Use cases range from large online publications like Wired to individual bloggers to companies that are using their blogs to engage customers. As with any form of digital media, more traffic means more revenue.

“There is so much going on in online journalism,” Singel said. “There is so much experimentation and so much demand on writers. What we are hoping to do is make writers’ and publishers’ lives easier and more profitable, as well as explore fun new things. The online journalism world hasn’t totally figured out what the business model is and what readers want, and hopefully we will play a good part in figuring that out.”

Down the road, Contextly will release a series of other tools for digital publishing, but right now, Singel and his team are focused on related links. Monday will be Singel’s first day as a full-time entrepreneur in over 10 years, and while he expressed sadness about stepping out of the daily news cycle, he said he’s looking forward to the journey ahead. Read his full blog post here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With New York Comic-Con in full swing this weekend, undoubtedly lots of comic book fans are anxious to show off their own self-published work. But they have only a few digital publishing options in which to do so.

However, digital comic book reader Emanata yesterday rolled out a new store within its iPad app, which allows independent creators to sell their work. The move comes just as digital comics industry leader ComiXology announced its own plans to begin selling self-published work in its store.

Emanata started out as an iPad publishing platform from Churn Labs, created by two former AdMob employees, George Chen and Ehren Kret. The app’s first step was to build a solid application for reading visual storytelling, and the second was to provide a solution to the large number of independent and aspiring comic book creators who were limited to selling a small number of printed comics at local shops and conventions.

“We wanted to create something we would use ourselves,” Chen told VentureBeat. “In this case, we want Emanata to bring us all sort of unexpected new artists, and comics everyday.”

As for the app itself, it’s a free application that requires users to sign up for an account in order to make purchases. The store, which is the first thing you see after launching the app, is set up like a continuous horizontal comic book page. Each panel represents a different book, with the title appearing on top and the price in the lower right-hand corner. It’s difficult to distinguish any kind of order, and the concept of letting the cover sell the issue is completely lost.

Clicking on one of the panels in the store brings up the first three pages of the comic. When trying to scroll to the fourth page, a notification pops up with the pricing. The reader is also very smooth, but it lacks a ComiXology Guided View-like optimization that zooms in on each panel separately. But this wasn’t an issue for the comics I sampled because the panels were all pretty large.

Emanata’s strategy for profitability is different from ComiXology, which focuses on mainstream comics with a side of quality-screened, self-published work. Essentially, the two digital comics stores should be able to co-exist, assuming creators make the effort to put their work on Emanata, and comic fans then buy that work.

Founded in 2012, the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup has seed funding from AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and Sequoia Capital.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

RAMP is hungry and has filled its belly with $15 million in new funding.

The company helps online publishers get the most out of their content, just like tossing a little olive oil on tomatoes amplifies your absorption of lycopene. RAMP is the olive oil to content’s tomato.

Its patented MediaCloud platform ingests audio, video, images and text and digests it with natural language processing technology. The result? Search engine optimization, enhanced advertising capabilities, and greater returns. And reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, if you continue with the tomato-olive oil analogy.

RAMP works with major media customers like CNBC, FOX, Comcast, Thomson Reuters, the Hearst Corporation, and PBS. With its latest meal, the company will focus on enhancing its solutions for digital video.

This is its third round of institutional financing, bringing its total capital raised to $40 million. StarVest Partners, Hearst Interactive Media, and EDBI were added to the investor roster, with existing venture firms Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Comcast Ventures throwing in again.

Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Every place has a story, and Dave Elchoness is on a mission to tell it. Or at least to let the Internet tell it.

Elchoness is the CEO of Tagwhat, a startup that strives to create a “mobile tour guide for the world.” His team is attempting to geo-tag the web, connecting content across any and all online platforms to specific places.

“Our core belief is that people are curious about the world,” Elchoness said in an interview. “Information, images, video, audio, and text reside on the web in billions of different files that have been collected over the past 20 years that are unconnected to the location where the materials could be the most meaningful, and there is no easy way to discover those stories about your surroundings.”

In an effort to bring those stories directly to those who want to hear them, Tagwhat culls information from sources like Wikipedia, FourSquare, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and attaches the data to exact spots. The company also has partnerships with tourism bureaus, universities, and historical societies — but no compelling mobile delivery methods.

Users download the Tagwhat app to their phones and it delivers relevant information depending on location.

Elchoness cited the example of Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City. A tourist strolling past the famous deli could check out menu information and Yelp reviews, but also peruse content about When Harry Met Sally, since a famous scene from that movie was filmed there. The experience of the deli entails more than just their pastrami sandwich, and Tagwhat helps bring it all together.

Today, the company is announcing a new publishing tool that enables the worldwide community to help with this enormous undertaking. By embedding a Tagwhat button into their browser, similar to the “Pin It” functionality of Pinterest, users and businesses can help tether content.

Another fresh feature are push notifications, which people can use to create custom tour guides. Users can personalize their feed by selecting specific topical channels, such as art, food, and heritage. It also has a Travel Log, where users can save places they want to visit and be notified when they are near that place.

The team has been building out the database for 3 years and have tagged 900,000 stories. The app is available for iOS and Android. Tagwhat is based in Boulder, Colo.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Writing is the easy part. It’s distributing your work it effectively and attractively to a range of mobile devices that is the challenge. Cloud publishing company GENWI has added $2 million to it first round of funding to tackle this problem.

The additional investment was spearheaded by from Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate Partners and Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners. It adds to the $4 million GENWI took last fall from Nexus Venture Partners, Inventus Capital Partners, and Quest Venture Partners.

GENWI helps outlets like magazines and blogs easily create apps to distribute their content on smart devices. According to CEO PJ Gurumohan, online content creators may want to have an engaging mobile presence but do not have the resources to launch their own mobile apps. GENWI, which stands for Generation Wireless, takes care of this for them.

“With the proliferation of mobile devices, consumption of content happened in apps,” he said in an interview. “Publishers get the idea, but are not moving as fast as they could because it is confusing and expensive. We offer a quick, low risk, easy way for them to get there.”

Publishers upload their content to GENWI’s cloud platform and from there build mobile apps. Editors and designers can manage and curate content and make necessary changes in real-time, while the app is run behind-the-scenes by GENWI.

Distribution is possible across multiple platforms and devices. Customers do not need to create separate apps for separate devices; GENWI will do that for them.

Today, over 15,000 apps use GENWI. Major media outlets like Conde Nast, The Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, and PBS Kids are clients, as are companies like Deloitte that also have content marketing needs.

The first round of funding went toward improving the product and expanding the client base. The added $2 million is strategic investment, Gurumohan said, from investors who appreciate the importance of high-speed publishing.

“We believe strongly that we are in the Twitter world,” he said. “Magazines have to operate at Twitter-speed. Mike Maples and Roger McNamee understand that.”

GENWI is based in Los Altos, Calif.

“We’ve got about 10 minutes. Please keep your questions focused on Techonomy,” one of them said.

Dorsey spoke at Techonomy last week in Detroit. I was there to hear him, among others, and visit Detroit startups. But I had a very specific question for Dorsey, and it had nothing at all to do with Detroit, or tech economies, or the speech he had just given.

It had much more to do with what Twitter is becoming.

The social network of now has massively tightened down access to its API recently, reducing the amount of Twitter data that third-party developers can use in their applications. Applications need to be certified, and authenticated, and likely, at some point, paid for. That’s causing some angst for developers, who — with some justification — feel that third-party applications are part of what made Twitter a massive success in the first place.

Source: John Koetsier

Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey at Techonomy Detroit

The tactic seems to be part of a larger strategy that takes Twitter away from its roots as a communication utility with open access for all and towards an old-school media and publishing company that jealously guards its crown jewels. O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill calls it a “bait-and-switch,” saying that Twitter is now cable TV, or even Comcast, Verizon.

In other words, no more rip-mix-burn here.

So I decided to be a little rude. And I asked the question: what, with the API changes — and extended tweets that suck even more content into Twitter, discouraging user exits — is Twitter becoming?

Dorsey answered thoughtfully, as he always does.

“Whatever its users want it to be,” he said. “Twitter is a communication utility … ask 100 people what Twitter is and you’ll get 100 different answers, and that’s OK.”

Dorsey said that this was just the same as asking what the world is — again you’d get hundreds if not thousands of different answers, as each replied according to his or her own perspective.

“We’re just focused on building the best platform and making sure it’s up and stable,” he finished.

There’s no question that throughout Twitter’s history, users have played a huge role in determining the uses of the site. Retweets, hash tags, lists, search, and many other Twitter features were started by users and migrated into the core product as they gained traction.

But it’s hard to believe that users have asked for the Twitter API to be restricted.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen any demonstrators outside of Twitter headquarters asking the company to shut down small third-party apps in the consumer space that Twitter has claimed for its own. Nor have we seen hundreds of thousands of retweets on a Twitter-would-be-so-much-better-if only-we-killed-RSS-access message.

And so it’s hard to believe that the it is only interest for users that is driving the future of Twitter.

photo credit: ~Ilse via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The rise of the e-book has always been synonymous with the decline of the paperback. It’s the storied zero-sum conundrum for booksellers.

But during yesterday’s Kindle press event, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos presented an alternate scenario. As he did last year, Bezos flashed a slide that showed not a decline in physical book sales — but a steady increase.

“I see this, and I say ‘wow,’” Bezos said, referring not to the physical book sales but to the other, hockey stick-shaped line.

That line, of course, represented sales of Kindle books, which just last year surpassed those of physical books on Amazon. This year, the story is largely the same, but this time it comes with a shift: Kindle books are undoubtedly leaving physical books in their dust. (We’ll forgive Amazon’s failure to provide a y-axis once again.)

Maybe none of this is surprising, but it is worth noting that the chart above is proof that Amazon is bolstering, not killing, sales of physical books. At least for now.

That Amazon has managed to prevent this sales cannibalization may seem unlikely, but the feat is actually a result of one of its core strategies: Remove the barrier to entry, either via price or sheer convenience, and consumers will pay attention. How the strategy applies to books is perhaps too obvious: Amazon, by making the process of buying and reading books far easier, has simply gotten more people reading — both on Kindle and on paper.

So what does all of this mean? The most obvious conclusion is probably the most simple: The book isn’t dead, not in substance and certainly not in structure. In fact, outside of the traditional e-book model, Amazon is also experimenting with projects like Direct Publishing and Kindle Serials, both of which show that the company is interested in shaking up how the book publishing business is run.

The same convenience-equals-sales strategy, by the way, applies to movies and television shows, segments that Amazon is also heavily targeting with its latest tablets. That, along with the company’s tablet-as-service strategy, is helping Amazon make its strongest attempt yet to topple Apple’s ecosystem dominance. It’s going to be an interesting competition to watch.

Photo: Amazon

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos laid out some pretty impressive numbers for its Kindle Singles program during a press conference in Santa Monica, Calif., today.

To date, Amazon has sold 3.5 million Singles, Bezos said. Thirty-five of the titles have even hit the Kindle top 50 charts, proving that the format has attracted a lot of attention from Kindle owners.

Launched last January, Kindle Singles are essays, memoirs, and short stories that are longer than the average magazine article but shorter than the average novel. Priced between $0.99 and $4.99, Singles cost a lot less than the average e-book, which adds to their appeal (and also pushes them up in the Kindle rankings).

“There’s a funny thing about physical media. Short things work — they’re called magazine articles. And long things work – they’re called books,” Bezos said during the event today. Singles has been successful by sliding between the two categories.

Sprout Queue makes it easier to coordinate and schedule content for delivery in advance. For brands and companies that have large marketing teams and multiple social media accounts, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. The automated future delivery tool makes it easier to manage pending posts.

“We are starting to see a lot more large teams that need to manage complex social channels,” said CEO Justyn Howard. “A year ago, it was one or two people in the marketing department managing a small handful of profiles. Now, a lot more companies have 20, 30, 40 users managing dozens of profiles. They need tools to do that effectively and collaborate.”

As the strength of marketing campaigns relies heavily on their reach, Sprout Social developed ViralPost (patent still pending). The technology looks at people’s engagement patterns, content velocity, and a series of other “levers” to determine the exact moment when publishing will have the greatest impact. The algorithm takes some of the guesswork out of marketing strategy and has proven to increase audience engagement by more than 30%. Sometimes, even a half an hour can make a huge difference.

Sprout Social works with startups like Twilio, Yammer, and Asana, as well as massive companies like Nike, McDonalds, and Nokia.

“In some cases, our product is used by a small handful of people managing customer service and in others, it is a global team,” said Howard. “Use cases are wide, and that is a testament to the tool.”

The company raised $10 million from New Enterprise Associates last February and has since expanded both the team and the product. It launched and received its first round of funding in 2010, led by Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Bray Keywell’s venture fund Lightbank. It currently has around 50 employees and is based in Chicago.

I’m just wondering why it takes six months to report that news.

The 2012 report shows that adult fiction is dominated by e-book sales, outperforming paper and other categories, such as audiobooks. However, somewhat surprisingly in the age of Amazon, Kindle, and Nook, actual brick-and-mortar bookstores remained the primary distribution channel for publishers.

BookStats isn’t releasing more detail publicly, but that number must be decreasing.

Source: Amazon

Kindle Fire

Amazon’s ebook sales outgrew paper sales back in 2011, and the online retailer believes it has the market share lead for digital books.

Just a few months ago, Association of American Publishers data showed that ebook sales doubled from January 2011 to January 2012.

An interesting twist: Publisher revenues from direct-to-consumer sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s a significant accomplishment — and a direct challenge to Amazon and other online retailers.

Amazon, of course, dominates online bookselling, and sold about five million Kindles this past Christmas season on its way to selling perhaps as many as 20 million in all of 2012.

BookStats is a partnership between the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group that launched in 2009. Almost 2,000 publishers contributed data to this year’s report.

With the industry moving so quickly, the organization would do well to release 2012 data early in 2013, if not regularly throughout the year.

VentureBeat contacted BookStats for comments, but has not yet received a response.

Image credit: Rob Stark/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s no secret that digital magazines are gaining a foothold among consumers, and thanks to some new consumer data released today digital magazine storefront Zinio we have a small window into how people are consuming these digital publications.

The company says it’s put over 120 million digital magazine issues in the hands of consumers in the last year, which I’m assuming includes both paid and free promotional magazines. Of the people who subscribe to magazines through Zinio, 85 percent had never subscribed to the print version, according to the company. Also, nearly everyone actually reads their digital magazines month-to-month, which is probably a much higher number than print. (I have old issues of Wired stacked up somewhere still sealed in plastic packaging. So, Zinio’s return rate is pretty good — assuming the company is only counting when people finish the magazine cover-to-cover.)

Zinio’s move was done to promote its subscriber rewards program, but I suspect the information might also have something to with rumors that the company is putting itself up for sale. Fortune reported earlier this week that the San Francisco-based company hired investment bank Montgomery & Co. to manage a potential sale worth $50 – $100 million. And with Apple’s Newsstand showing strong growth as well as Google Play now offering digital magazines for purchase, Zinio putting itself up for sale might be a smart move.

While we don’t have an official confirmation about a potential sale, we do have Zinio’s digital magazine consumer data infographic, which we’ve embedded below: (Click image to enlarge)

News Corp’s entertainment business is surging. Its newspaper sector — not so much.

This is likely why News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is considering splitting the company’s publishing and entertainment divisions, the Wall Street Journal reports.

With the split, News Corp.’s film and television businesses would together become an entirely different company from its book publishing, education, and newspaper businesses. Murdoch, however, would retain control over both companies.

The News Corp. CEO has reportedly never been too keen on the idea but has recently  ”warmed” to it, due to a number of unavoidable realities.

First, as the Wall Street Journal notes, News Corp.’s entertainment business is a significantly larger money-maker for the company. Nearly 90 percent of the $4.2 billion operating profit in the first nine months of the current fiscal year came from the entertainment division alone. A paltry $458 million came from the publishing side of things.

Added to that is the ongoing fallout over the phone-hacking scandal that hit the company’s British newspapers last year. Not only did the scandal result in the closure of tabloid newspaper News of the World , but it also forced James Murdoch to step down as executive chairman of News Corp’s U.K. newspaper arm. Clearly, there’s an oppressive cloud hanging over New’s Corp newspaper division.

The possible restructuring also shows that News Corp.’s investors, like a lot of people, aren’t confident in the future of newspapers. That’s likely a major disappointment to Murdoch himself, who started the now-sprawling News Corp. empire from inauspicious, newspaper-based beginnings.

Photo: Shutterstock/RBilton

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Most people who see a $1.65 billion exit of their company would be content to retire from the business world, but that’s rarely the case in the tech industry, as YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley demonstrates.

Hurley is scheduled to launch a new service called Zeen next week that creates digital magazines and publications, according to TheNextWeb. He made the announcement at the Le Web 2012 London event today, but remained mum on details of the new service.

What we do know is that Zeen will launch under Hurley and fellow YouTube co-founder Steve Chen’s company AVOS. Hurley’s plans for Zeen were first unearthed by Fusible back in April after the site discovered that the YouTube founder had purchased the Zeen.com domain.

Visiting the site today also doesn’t provide much additional information. Visitors are met with a Zeen splash page and are asked to pre-register for the service to secure their preferred user name. Presumably, the service will notify you when it does launch, which according to Hurley, will be very soon.

It’s hard to say whether Zeen will have much impact on the world of digital magazines, which is quickly becoming a crowded space. It’s likely to face competition from the likes of Flipbook, Pulse, Google Currents, Editions by AOL, and CNN-owned Zite.

It’s also worth noting that Hurley’s last venture didn’t exactly have smooth sailing, either. AVOS purchased iconic bookmarking site Delicious just over a year ago and unveiled a relaunched version back in September that wasn’t well received by long-time users. That said, it’s usually difficult to reinvent a social network/sharing site once it’s past its prime. (Digg, Myspace, Newsvine, and many others can attest to this.)

With Zeen, Hurley and crew are starting something fresh. And with mobile consumption of media only increasing, there’s still plenty of room for innovation when it comes to digital magazines.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Looks like somebody really “Nookd” this one up. A recent Nook version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel War and Peace replaces the word “kindled” with the word “Nookd,” an apparent attempt to get rid of references to e-book’s competitor Kindle.

The bizarre mistake was first noticed on the Ocracoke Island Journal blog. Blogger Philip Howard writes:

I had read about half of the novel when I was given the gift of a Nook, the e-reader from Barnes and Noble. Although I am committed to supporting my neighborhood independent book store (Books to be Red), and enjoying honest-to-goodness books, the .99 Nook edition was so lightweight that it has made reading War and Peace a genuine pleasure. For those of you who have not tackled this tome as yet, it is a page-turner.

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern….”

A commenter on Howard’s post explains that it was probably an error by publisher Superior Formatting Publishing rather than Barnes & Noble. Most likely, the publisher created a Kindle version of the book first. Once it decided to move the 1,100+ page book over to the Nook platform, it lazily copied and pasted “Nook” for “Kindle” without realizing the word “kindle” was used eight times in the translated text.

We’re sure there are worse mistakes to be found in e-books, but this is certainly one of the more outlandish ones. I’m sure Mr. Tolstoy (pictured) would not be impressed.

Leo Tolstoy painting: Ilya Efimovich Repin

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Source: Flickr/Cliff1066

This isn't going to end well.

The recent anti-trust suit against the big five book publishers reminds me of the scene in the movie Titanic where the lifeboats are pulling away from the gasping survivors in the water. We all know what’s going to happen and it’s painful to watch.

What surprises me is how little discussion there is about what happens to the authors in all of this. For sure, advances are going down. Way down. But that has been happening for a while. Even before the Kindle, Amazon was dominating print sales, which meant the publishers had a lot less control over how their book sold.

Publishers have no idea how drive online sales

For years, as book sales moved increasingly online, the responsibility of the sale has increasingly moved to the author. Publishers can’t drive sales because they have no idea who is buying their books online. With offline bookstores, publishers knew the location of their buyers and based on location, they could extrapolate demographics. With online sales, print publishers have no location-based information, and Amazon doesn’t release any customer data to publishers.

Publishers have resorted to un-trackable promotion such as print ads, and television. While book publishers have no way to track direct traffic from television spots, bloggers do, and bloggers know that TV and radio translate to much fewer clicks than online publications. This is because, for most people, there are simply too many steps from hearing someone speak on NPR to going to the person’s web site.

I know this because my personal blog gets about a million views a month. When I write a post like this, promoting a book, I can tell exactly how many sales I made — more than 1,000, in this case.

This is really bad news for publishers, because I make almost as much in commission from Amazon when I sell a book I didn’t write as I would make on the sale of one of my own books after the publisher takes out their cut.

So book publishers are largely ineffective at selling books, and they can’t get better because Amazon is not sharing data that would reveal exactly what works and what doesn’t.

The list matters more than the advance

Right now the only non-celebrity authors who can get book deals are people who can drive their own sales figures, almost always through online means. Besides, that, most nonfiction authors are not making their money from their books. Their books are more marketing tools for their higher profit-margin products:  speaking or consulting.

That means that people who are getting book deals need their mailing list more than they need their book advance. People who write nonfiction books will make more money from their mailing list than from any Amazon-whipped book industry advance. The problem is that Amazon keeps the list.

So here’s what happens. An author who is good at driving book sales gets an advance from the publisher. The publisher has no idea how to market a book online so the author is driving most of the sales on Amazon.

But only Amazon knows the email addresses of the people who bought the book. Moreover, Amazon knows what else this customer would want to buy and can sell it to them. Amazon is keeping — stealing, really — the mailing list away from authors.

Pro tip: Go around Amazon

So it would behoove all authors who can sell their book to sell it on their own website and not on Amazon. Amazon is using ebooks as a marketing tool for the Kindle, and if you drive your list to Amazon, you’re merely driving them into Amazon’s Kindle-centric sales funnel.

There is already a trend for authors with their own audience to go around Amazon. Leo Babauta publishes his own books and sells them on his own site. Ramit Sethi not only does that, but it’s hard to find his books to buy on his site because Ramit is one step ahead of everyone. He collects names first and sells books later. And those books are not on Amazon.

Emily Gould is using her reputation online to sell books that she didn’t write. She’s a publisher, of sorts. But she doesn’t sell the ebooks on Amazon.

So the trick is not to write a book and get it published. That’s no longer difficult, or even clever — the whole world has a book today. The real trick is to build your own audience to the point where you can sell directly to them.

That’s much harder to do than publishing a book. But face facts: Building your audience is becoming the only way that makes financial sense to sell books.

In other words, build your own lifeboat, and do it now, before the Titanic sinks.

Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers, and she is the author of a bestselling career advice book. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons.

Top image of the Titanic: via Cliff1066/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As the buzz around the new iPad launch continues, both traditional and online publishers are “caught between the gravitational pull of the legacy tradition and the need to chart a faster digital course.” That was a key finding in a recent Pew Research Center study on the state of the publishing industry.

That “pull” was highlighted by Paul Rossi, the Managing Director and Executive Vice President of the Americas for The Economist at a recent digital publishing conference. Asked by the moderator, “What keeps you up at night?” he answered, “What worries me is the flurry of excitement over an iPad giveaway and there are a pile of The Economist magazines outside on the table.”

But in the recent Pew Research Center study, the outlook of publishers is troubling. Executives were hesitant to risk change due to “cultural inertia,” which makes adapting quickly to new technology advancements difficult. “Some of those we talked to seem frustrated and even uncertain about how to proceed,” said Tom Rosenstiel, Director of the project. “But we also found signs that, if you can break out of old cultural patterns, there is another way.” The question is, are publishers ready to explore the new territory of tablets?

The tablet is here to stay: it’s time to adapt

For publishers, the tablet is a game changer. It’s a mobile device that has a form-factor big enough to deliver truly engaging experiences that can be monetized in new ways. IDC projects that there will be over 106 million tablets shipped in 2012, up from its previous forecast of nearly 88 million. In a recent report from Rhythm New Media, full-page display ads on tablets have a 21 percent engagement rate compared to a 9.4 percent engagement rate on the same ad unit on smartphones. Clearly, these are promising signals that the tablet, after many false starts over the years, is finally ready for prime time.

While publishers are waking up to the opportunity, they are slow to capitalize on this burgeoning new channel, in great part because of two reasons. First, they are daunted by the complexity of delivering their content to tablets that requires a completely different content curation and engagement strategy than for the Web or smartphones. And second, publishers are concerned that mobile advertising on the tablet might negatively impact CPMs.

Today marks an important inflection point. If publishers fail to move quickly enough, or create flat experiences that fail to take advantage of the inherently interactive nature of mobile devices, then they are putting their businesses at risk.

Embrace evolution: tablets require a new approach

It’s seductive to think that publishing on a tablet is easy. Hypothetically, all content publishers would need to do is extend their existing publications and deliver them onto a tablet as they appear in print. And, online publishers might be tempted to create heavy apps that dynamically query and deliver content from their existing content management system. Both approaches fall short.

What publishers need to deliver is, in the words of Paul Rossi, “print plus” — a tablet experience that combine the dynamic and interactive capabilities of the web with a print-like elegance and sophistication. At this point, there are several tablet apps that demonstrate the power of “print plus” such as The Economist, Zappos Magazine, The New York Times, PopSugar, Wired, and Tweek from IndiaTimes.

The payoff: Greater engagement and monetization

Consumers are often spending more time reading publications on their tablets (or searching for apps that are not created yet) than with the print edition, which bodes well for incremental advertising sales. While more digital advertising networks are offering mobile extensions, publishers still think about the web-based model of traditional banner ads that don’t take advantage of a tablets’ valuable real estate and uniquely “lean back” experience.

For example, The W Magazine, a property of Conde Nast, has evolved their engagement and advertising strategy, as evidenced in their recently launched tablet app–The Daily W. Each month, they work with an exclusive sponsor, such as Calvin Klein or Michael Kors, to deliver a beautifully branded rich-media experience persistently available throughout the app. And, it doesn’t feel like an ad–but an exclusive video. By moving beyond traditional banner ads, publishers can create immersive and engaging experiences that are well monetized.

Publishers can thrive in the next era of tablets

The savvy content publishers are smart to understand that tablets are not a threat, but an amazing opportunity to extend the their business and engage more deeply with readers while creating new monetization models. Now is the time for the industry to make an evolutionary leap forward.

PJ Gurumohan is CEO and co-founder of GENWI, which focuses on cloud publishing for mobile. He manages the overall strategy and operations, with an emphasis on growing the brand and business. He has held various engineering and market analyst positions at IBM, Arizona Tech. Enterprise, and US Airways.

Photo Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Daily, which began life as Rupert Murdoch’s first stab at a tablet only newspaper, has found a new life as a custom app developer. Today it’s releasing the Android version of its guide to the much anticipated Angry Birds Space, the new game from Rovio that debuts tomorrow. I chatted with The Daily’s publisher, Greg Clayman, about the role of custom apps in his business.

“It’s something we came to accidentally. We built a custom CMS and put together a great team of developers, designers and editors. We realized, doing things like our special app on Elizabeth Taylor, that the team could respond very quickly and build a high quality experience around things besides news.”

Angry Birds Space is the fifth custom app The Daily has created, and like the Pro Football Guide it created earlier, it’s a partnership with a big corporation who can act as a sponsor.

“There are a lot of angles for us,” said Clayman. “We can sell sponsorships to these apps, and we have also found that they are a great way to drive new subscribers to The Daily.”

While it hasn’t built a paid app yet, Clayman says that is another possibility for The Daily. And while they have only worked with big blue chip partners so far, Clayman says they have considered a self-serve option. “We have a very flexible CMS that makes it easy to publish a sharp app in a short amount of time, but for now self-serve is just something we’ve talked about, not tested. It would be a natural place for us to expand.”

One thing which Clayman says has not been noticed, is that the Angry Birds Guide was published on both iPad and iPhone. “We started life focused on the tablet, and that is still key for us, but our readers rely on their smartphones and tablets at different times and for different experiences, so we are definitely going to be providing them with a full, multi-platform offering in the future.”

As to what The Daily on iPhone might be like, Clayman was coy. “If it resembled the guide we built for Angry Birds, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Image via SocialFlow

SocialFlow, which helps brands and publishers optimize their performance across Facebook and Twitter, is launching its self-service platform today. The company has had a banner year, growing from just two employees to more than 30 and graduating from the Betaworks building to its own office on the east side of Manhattan.

To get a sense of how the company works, let’s take the example from one of their clients, The Economist. With SocialFlow, which guides which messages The Economist puts out to its followers and when, the venerable publisher has grown its social media fan base five times faster than average and increased engagement with its audience at a rate eight times greater than before it used Social Flow.

“The best performing tweet The Economist sent out last year was between three and four in the morning on a weekday,” SocialFlow co-founder Frank Speiser told VentureBeat. “It was an article questioning the value of a PhD. No human would ever have predicated that was the best approach and the most significant article for their audience. Only an algorithm can key into an opportunity like that.”

SocialFlow’s new product allows anyone to tap into its platform for an affordable entry price of $99 a month. “We think this is something that could benefit a lot of individuals, not just big brands,” Speiser said. “If you have tens of thousands of followers, you don’t want to pollute their stream with errant noise.”

The company’s new office’s on 45th and Lexington will put it in close proximity to Facebook and Twitter’s New York outposts, allowing for increased collaboration. With 2,000 paying accounts, SocialFlow has a sizable revenue stream for an early stage startup. But Speiser says the company is likely to raise another round of funding this year. “We have so much demand for the product, it just makes sense to hire sales people to capture all that potential.”