Keeping It Cool: Texterity iPhones It In.

Source: Min's B to B, Dec 3, 2007 v10 i46 pNA.

Title: Keeping It Cool: Texterity iPhones It In.
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Electronic Collection: A172029364
RN: A172029364


Full Text COPYRIGHT 2007 Access Intelligence, LLC

By Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor for min, min's b2b and min's Digital
Media Report

Sometimes being cool for cool's sake is good enough for me. Take for instance
digital magazine provider Texterity's impressive new iPhone versions of 52 of
the digitized publications in its stable. While generally I find most mobile
extensions of B2B products to be more sexy and novel than actually mission
critical and functional, this experiment in mobile design succeeds in charting
a path for more portable business pubs.

The version 1.0 of an earlier, less robust Texterity for iPhones greets you at
the door (IPHONE/TEXTERITY.COM/MAGAZINES) with the covers of scores of titles,
including Baseline, Pizza Magazine and even Powder Bulk Solids--not your usual
hip iPhone fare. Enter into any of the mags and a top line menu lets you see
full thumbnails of every page in the book or a menu of more precise
navigational tools. There is a full search function and a TOC as well as a
sharing mechanism for email links. The search tool is particularly good,
because it lets you search against specific issues of a title and customize
the appearance of the search results. The results themselves are beautiful
thumbnails of the relevant page with a quote that locates the keyword.

Because of the Safari browser interface, the actual pages look fantastic, and
a tap on any area of a page zooms in easily. The only thing missing, and this
is a limitation in Safari, is a cut and paste utility that lets you create
your own clippings. Generally, you can push and pinch, zoom in and out of
pages as you do with any Web site via the great Safari interface.

While Texterity's is one of the most deft Web applications I have seen for the
iPhone, there is a new world opening up to content providers on the platform.
Apple forced third parties to use "off-deck" Web-based applications to appear
on the iPhone in the original design, but the company recently announced it
was opening the iPhone up to third party developers by releasing a software
development kit (SDK) in February. This means that designers cannot get direct
access to the Apple deck and design full-fledged software applications that
integrate content with communications, mapping, calling, etc.

But why do iPhone applications matter at all to B2B publishers? After all,
with an estimated 2 to 3 million iPhones in the U.S. by early next year, this
is a pretty small target. In fact, the business utility of the iPhone is
limited, since it doesn't work well with many business networks and internal
e- mail clients. Apple made no secret that it is a consumer-facing device.

In fact, the target is broader than the iPhone, since all of the Web
applications that work on the iPhone also work on the new iPod Touch
multimedia player. The "Touch" is a phone-less iPhone essentially, with all
the touch screen interface and WiFi-enabled Web browsing of the phone.
Arguably, the Touch may sell more units than the iPhone, and it is that
platform of WiFi multimedia devices where the Texterity design gets
interesting.

Increasingly, mobile devices will have larger screens, fatter pipes and more
flexible interfaces. All of our content will move from the limitations of the
current WAP page and SMS messaging into mobile broadband on richer receivers.

When I spoke recently to Cimarron Buser, VP of marketing at Texterity, he said
that with good marketing and awareness of the alternative, up to 15% of B2B
readers are showing a preference for the digital versions of their business
pubs because of superior convenience and searchability. When the company sends
its e-mail ticklers to digital subscribers reminding them a new issue is
available, Texterity sees typically a 30% to 80% email open rate for the email
and a 10% to 50% "read rate," which indicates the user clicked through to
engage the magazine. Compared to the usual read rates of print versions of B2B
pubs, Buser says that percentage is pretty good.

The digital magazine format has always been in need of a technology on which
it can work more effectively. Back in 2001 when many of these companies first
emerged, the likely target was the laptop. Downloadable magazines (the early
model for this platform) sold themselves as fully portable apart from the Web.
You could read your stack of magazines from the laptop on the plane. When the
Tablet PC came out in the early 2000s, that too was touted as the perfect
reading device for digital magazines because of its oblong orientation and
book- like format. The new Amazon Kindle book reader also has magazines in its
mix.

The iPhone and iPod Touch, along with new mobile Internet browsers from Nokia,
are helping to revive interest in the portable multimedia device coming from a
different direction. While previous attempts try to shrink the desktop to
portable size, the newer approach seems to expand the mobile phone platform
upwards to embrace more robust browsing. Given the ubiquity of cell phones,
this looks like a better bet than Tablets or portable book readers. Hybrid
cell/WiFi devices could well be the sweet spot that digi-mags have been
waiting for. Experiments like Texterity's in iPhone magazine design could be
shooting just ahead of the tech trajectory, but our guess is there is
important learning here for the day when design and technology come together.

[Copyright 2006 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]

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