thenextweb: Web traffic from tablet computers is growing 10 times faster than smartphone traffic (via Adobe: Web Traffic From Tablets Growing Faster Than Smartphones)
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thenextweb:

Web traffic from tablet computers is growing 10 times faster than smartphone traffic (via Adobe: Web Traffic From Tablets Growing Faster Than Smartphones)

Magazine Group Offers Guidelines for Tablets - Tanzina Vega via NYTimes.com

Confusion in the way publishers report readership on tablet publications is being reduced by new standards:

Tanzina Vega via NYTimes.com

On Monday, the Association of Magazine Media will announce a set of voluntary guidelines developed by representatives from the magazine publishers Bonnier, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Meredith and Time Inc.

The guidelines will cover how magazines measure their tablet editions, the vocabulary used in those definitions and time frames for when reader data will be released. The measures include the total number of a publication’s digital issues and the number of readers by issue. They will also count the number of times a reader opens a tablet issue (called a session), how much time that reader spends reading each issue and the average number of sessions per reader per issue.

And readership is going up, so we can expect ad rates to do so as well.

Lean-Back 2.0 presentation by the Economist. Fascinating stats and observations.

The Economist recently promoted the head of its tablet apps to run all digital:

The Economist Hands All Digital Strategy To Its Tablet Chief - Robert Andrews via PaidContent.org

The Economist is handing control of its website to its tablet magazines controller, in a bid to unite the previously competitive units.

Oscar Grut, who was formerly digital editions managing director, has been promoted to the new role of managing director for “Economist Digital” as a whole.

A spokesperson tells paidContent it is “a role which has been created to reflect the change of business strategy within The Economist Group”.

The Economist’s tablet app editions and the website were previously run as two separate strands. Nick Blunden has run Economist.com since online EVP Ben Edwards left to be IBM’s digital strategy VP in 2010. Blunden will now report to Grut rather than to Economist UK managing director Nigel Ludlow.

It is a sign that, after years of struggling to make money and native products on the web, publishers increasingly view digital editions - familiar reversioning of their core legacy titles - as their primary digital products.

Windows 8: The Beginning of the End of Windows - Michael Mace

Michael Mace, via

Whether or not Windows 8 is a financial success for Microsoft, we’ve now crossed a critical threshold. The old Windows of mice and icons is officially obsolete. That resets the playing field for everybody in computing.

Mace is right, because iOS reset the playing field, and Microsoft is playing catch-up. But Windows 8 might be a credible response.

And Mace is right about obsoleting itself:

Microsoft will pay a serious price for the Windows 8 announcement.  Most PC users haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 7, and some Microsoft execs have been bragging in public about the revenue to come from upgrading all of those people.  Forget about it.  I think you’d be an idiot to buy Windows 7 for an existing PC when you know Windows 8 is coming.  It would be like buying a horse-drawn carriage after Ford announced the Model T.

And developers will skip Windows 7 too. And they will have to make a hard judgment call about Windows 8: will users transition to a new untried platform just because it will run old Windows apps badly? Or will users use this time of disruption to make a clean assessment of needed functionality, and opt for iOS or Android, and leave Windows 8 in the dustbin of history?

I am betting that Microsoft will retain some portion of the most entrenched Windows users and developers, but those that are less invested will move to where the action is fastest and the platform is most stable, and that is going to be Apple iOS, trailed by Google’s Android, and with Microsoft Windows 8 becoming a very distant third.

[…] it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Microsoft’s demo video shows Excel — the full version of Excel for Windows — running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more “touch friendly” all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t “touch friendly” versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface (no explicit saving, no file system, ready to quit at a moment’s notice, no processing in the background, etc.).

The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better. The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.

John Gruber,  Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad

China has by far the strongest interest in purchasing tablets, with consumers surveyed in that country suggesting an 80% interest in purchasing tablets, versus just over 40% in North America, 50% in Europe, just under 50% in the Middle East, and about 65% in Asia-Pacific.

A whole generation of Chinese consumers who have only known computing as mobile phones are going straight to tablets. Imagine how free they will be to reimagine computing never having used a keyboard or mouse.

The post-PC world is shaping up to be a very interesting one.

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