The old objection from dogged print Luddites has always been that digital will be the equal of dead-tree “when I can fold up a display and stick it in my back pocket.”

That day is nearly here (h/t CyberJournalist)

The video is in Korean, and, as some of the commenters point out, the batteries for such a display would have to also be invisible, weightless and almost infinite. Which, I’m guessing, is something of a stumbling block at this time.

Still, it’s pretty cool.

samsung tablet, bendable, transparent, video, watch

Aquafadas creates digital publishing tools that create Apps for the iPad and other mobile devices.

If you’ve been thinking about creating an eBook App, the first thing to do is to take a look at the books and magazines already in the iTunes App store.

From Wired Magazine to Al Gore’s new “Our Choice” eBook App to Inkling’s digital textbooks to the interactive Dr Sues books, there are many great examples of where things are headed in the world of interactive media.

So how do you jump on this bandwagon and play along? What does it take to create an App for the iTunes store and do you really have to create different Apps for each device?

Yes, yes, and you don’t have to do it all yourself. As any new media market emerges, so do the tools that make it easier to produce new forms of digital content.

In the world or producing interactive eBooks and magazines for the iPad and other devices, there are three tools worth considering:

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite:  
One of my favorite interactive Apps, the one created by Wired Magazine, was done with Adobe’s Digital Publishing tools. I’ve already created a couple of prototypes with these tools, but that was before Adobe announced the pricing model for these tools, which many designers find prohibitive. These tools have much to offer, but until the price comes down, they’re really only viable for big companies, like Wired.

Aquafadas 
This French company is creating tools that work with InDesign and is also getting good attention and already being used by big magazines in the App store. Their pricing model is a little more reasonable.

WoodWing
Also of interest is WoodWing. Like the other two, they are focused on publishing apps for the many mobile devices. 

These tools are great for the iOS and Android, but I believe we’ll see diminishing return trying to produce new versions of every eBook App for every device… One way to manage this is to create a great iPad App, an Android version or two, and then create a Web App version that works in a browser in HTML5 for all of the other OS’s appearing into the tablet world. But that’s another story. 

To App or Not to App

If you’re interested in learning more about when it’s worth creating a Native App vs a Web App (I think the best approach for eBooks today is a combination), this table helps explain the differences between an App for the iTunes store and a Web App that plays in a browser.

The newsroom in your pocket

Obviously, the subject of using mobile phones to cover breaking news is one that has sparked a lot of interest in radio & TV reporters; not least because smartphones have already made a major impact on coverage of things like the Iran riots in 2009, or the wildfires in Southern California, or particularly with the huge revenues reaped by news organizations that had smart mobile strategies for the World Cup soccer tournament.

NECESSARY CAVEAT: My rundown of useful apps for reporters to have on their smartphones does not constitute an endorsement by me of those apps. If you install one of them and it has a bug that melts down your phone, that is between you & the app store and/or the coder(s) who made the app. I’m experimenting in this space just like you are, and all I’m trying to do here is highlight some of the things that you might want to get your hands dirty with too. I’m not getting paid by any of these people, nor am I getting paid by the hardware manufacturers.

Now about the questions from the audience: as expected, a lot of them fell along the lines of “What phone is the best?” Like I explained, this is a hard one to answer. I like the iPhone for its ease of use; I’ve played with the Nokia N95, and while that handset can do some amazing things, it takes an engineering degree, patience of a saint, and the willingness to wade through a thick instruction manual written by writers for whom I can only assume Venusian was their first language. (Kinda like that last sentence, eh?) However, I do recognize the limitations of both the AT&T network and of the EXTREMELY limiting restrictions of the iTunes store.

CASE IN POINT: We’re hard at work on the iPad/iPhone Web Design Book. We’ve got some cool new designs we’d like to see, along with all kinds of apps that we’ve downloaded directly to the iPad. But when we hook the iPad up to the desktop to try to load the new designs, iTunes blockheadedly insists on trying to completely wipe all the content & apps off the iPad. There seems to be no logical way to tell iTunes, “Hey, we’ve got some new stuff on the device, some new stuff in the library, now we’d like you to combine the two and play nice with each other.”

Replace the words "Trusts" on the sashes with "Carriers" and "Tech Monopolies" and you'll get a pretty good approximation of the mobile content monetization strategies in play these days.

No. iTunes is an absolutist, and it seems to be proceeding from the assumption that all its users are criminals with vast stores of pirated content on their iPods; further, that to allow the users (who have, after all, paid good money for these sparkly little devices) to freely move content on and off the deck would be equivalent to a slave uprising. Bad for business, that.

You let users start to believe that they should actually be the ones who own their data, and who knows where that will stop? They might (gasp!) object to these hateful, poisonous EULAs that are becoming so ubiquitous.

Anyway – all this to say that you’re going to have to play with these devices to see which one feels the best and does the job that you want it to do. The Android has the reputation for being open-source, and you can treat the storage on the phone basically as another external hard drive. Not so anything made by Apple.

The iPhone 5 and the iPad 2 are rumored to have some kind of a card-reader slot whereby you can input/output information from the device. I’ll believe that when I see it.

But beyond the hardware concerns, I kinda expected more questions about best practices when trying to gather good multimedia content while out in the field — and more importantly, how to train/encourage your audience to produce & contribute good content themselves. We’ll address this issue in the next couple of posts, but I think that it is going to be key over the next five years in determining not only which media outlets survive (an audience that contributes photos/video/comments is more engaged – and much more valuable to advertisers), but also in determining which journalists build recession-proof audience followings that they can take with them to whatever job or platform they choose.

I’ve seen Latino road warriors in their Armani Army uniforms fumbling through a briefcase with four phones, trying to answer the one that’s ringing, chiming or texting. Models with slots for multiple SIM cards are already taking significant market share.

Browsing the web via mobile is going to take off in LatAm for the same reasons that wireless phone usage exploded. (Picture by Janine Warner)

Which makes it surprisingly not-surprising that the launch of Nokia’s new flagship N8 happened first in Latin America, rather than in the U.S. market. Sometimes I wonder if the disconnect between the way mobile is used everywhere else around the world, and the way it still kinda jolts & judders in the U.S., is ever going to reconcile…

Nokia's new Symbian 3 OS - it's *HUGE* in LatAm... The N8 here has a 12MP camera, 680mHz processor and 48 gigs of storage. And is (not yet) available in the crowded U.S. "brilliantphone" market.

Some would have you believe that the differences aren’t really differences at all:

The hubris of technological determinists is their presumption that hardware will inspire and channel new behaviors. In fact, culture tends to shape technology uses around the values, habits and traditions of a given context.

They tend to focus in on the usual suspects. Japan. Eurozone. U.S.

The hardware companies know better. The economies in Latin America are posting double-digit growth even now, when the rest of the world groans and staggers from the mortgage-debt hangover. Moreover, unlike Japan, Europe or to a certain extent, the U.S., LatAm countries are full of young workers just entering the workforce; not ever-expanding retirees on fixed pensions, squeezing every penny until Lincoln winces. Latinos have over-indexed for a long time on mobile usage and devices like the N8 are going to accelerate that trend. Already, Latin America is the #2 mobile market in the world, overtaking Western Europe.

If you’re a designer looking a long-term growth and opportunities, paying attention to design trends on the regular web is a good move. The color schemes tend to be more vibrant, the navigation choices deeper, with less “branching” than on U.S. sites. If you’re a content publisher or especially a big-brand retailer, well, having a version of your site optimized not only for mobile, but for Spanish, makes all kinds of sense.

UPDATE:

The big internet players are starting to realize that there are huge revenues in play in the LatAm market:

A repeated theme was how online advertising spending in Latin America isn’t keeping up with the fast growth of those connected online.

Google’s Hohagen said Latin America is the fastest-growth area globally for the search powerhouse. Internet penetration in Latin America is 34 percent, which is about 200 million out of about 593 million people, Hohagen said. In the United States, more than 70 percent of the population has Internet access.

“Think about it from a business perspective,” Hohagen said. “How many countries you have with 400 million people not connected — or 400 million potential customers?”

With only about 5 percent of advertising spend going online there, “it seems very disproportional,” Hohagen said, asking the audience to think about what they can do to change that.

But Latin America is now where the U.S. was in 2003, he said. The barriers tend to be lack of internal consensus regarding advertising investment, as well as firms lacking tools and resources to develop successful campaigns, he said.

Mobile Web Design For Dummies by Janine Warner and David LaFontaine

After much research, writing, editing, and testing, Mobile Web Design For Dummies hit bookstores this week.

Pick up a copy at a bookstore near you.

Table of Contents

Part I Designing for Mobile Devices

Chapter 1: Understanding What Makes Mobile Different

Chapter 2 Designing for the Mobile World

Part II Following Mobile Web Standards

Chapter 3 Creating a Simple Mobile Site

Chapter 4 Introducing XHTML and CSS (was Chapter 3)

Chapter 5 Comparing Mobile Markup Languages

Chapter 6 Developing Multiple Mobile Designs

Chapter 7 Testing and Publishing Mobile Sites

Part III Multimedia, Marketing, and E-commerce

Chapter 8 Using Images and Multimedia in Mobile Designs

Chapter 9 Creating Mobile Friendly Blog pages

Chapter 10 Mobile Marketing and Social Media

Chapter 11 Adding E-commerce to Mobile Sites

Part IV Part of Tens

Chapter 12 Ten Mobile Interface Challenges and Opportunities

Chapter 13 Ten Great Mobile Sites

Appendices

Appendix A: Interviews with Mobile Design Experts

Appendix B: Image Optimization

No matter what phone you use, you can test how your site will look on an iPhone with any computer and the latest Web browser. Just visit any of the iPhone emulator sites listed below, type in the URL of the site you want to test, and it will display in the little window that looks like — you guessed it, an iPhone.

Before you use these iPhone testers, be ware that if you visit a site that uses an auto detect to direct sites to an iPhone optimized version, these online emulators may not detect it, because you’re using a computer to visit the site… kind of a serious limitation IMHO, but if you just want to get an idea of how your site looks in an iPhone, these are a good place to start.

http://www.iphonetester.com/

http://www.testiphone.com/

Just a few examples:

1. One of the big segments I wrote lumped Alternate Reality and Apps into the same category. This was obviously before Apple’s App store completely blew up.
2. QR codes were this crazy technology that strange Japanese advertisers were using. Seemed like Sea-urchin sushi. Something that would never really catch on here.

• 3.And the biggest one of all – mobile is now an actual line-item in marketing and advertising budgets, not just a throw-in with “digital media.”

So here’s something that I just couldn’t figure out what to do with – the touchscreen guys just pinged me last week and showed me some stuff about multitouch displays that allow you to use all ten fingers to manipulate & add things.

Now, I’m not sure – yet – if this really represents some kind of massive leap forward in getting the damn central processors to recognize input from the user … or if it’s like the ridiculous razor-blade wars, where Schick & Gillette seem locked in a strange battle to cram more blades onto a razor than you see in The Bride’s big samurai-sword fight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1.

Anyway – 3M has a 22-inch monitor that can recognize all ten of your grubby digits, and a whole gallery of videos showing how the Microsoft Surface-type tech is making its way into your pocket. Wish I could show them to you here directly, but 3M has not provided any sort of embedding functionality.

Even if you don’t have time for all that, I recommend creating at least one special version of your web site that is mobile-optimized, or at least mobile friendly.

Then you just set up an ‘auto-detect’ script on your web server and deliver one version to computer users, and the other to cell phones.

That doesn’t mean you have to completely recreate everything on your web site for mobile, but put the most important information — like you’re phone number and a map to your office or restaurant — where people can find it when, say, they want to call you from the mobile phone they’re using to try to find you on the way there…

As you plan for a mobile site, consider how your visitors are likely to use your site when they are mobile, not just the limitations of the screen. If you get a lot of traffic to your pet store or accounting firm, make sure people can find you easily when they’re mobile.

I am dedicated to helping you find practical ways to redesign web sites for mobile phones that work today

If you have the time, budget, and a complex interactive web site, the more you can optimize it for the differences among the limitations of a feature phone, the new opportunities of a touchscreen, and the easy access of smart phones, the better.

If you want to be able to show off your photos or other creative work, create a mobile-optimized slide show or add video (YouTube is one of the best places to post video that works on mobile).

If you use lots of CSS, background images, AJAX drop-down menus, or other interactive features, you’ll probably need to strip those down to a simpler design for mobile.

And make sure to test any site you design for mobile on as many devices as possible…

With all the new devices on the market this year — from the last version of the Amazon Kindle to the Apple iPad to the Barns and Noble Nook — there have never been more ways to explore content in the palm of your hand.

With the advent of the Vook  (which combines text and video in a new book format) to new models for newspapers and magazines (check the Apple App store for great examples), it’s time to reinvent how we use computers by touch.

If you want to see what a next generation, multimedia publication might look like, check out this inspiring video by designers from Bonnier’s Research & Development team on how to make text, images, and more come to life in the emerging world of the touchscreen.

Longer video with intro and narration

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Shorter version, focused on interface

Mag+ (video prototype footage only) from Bonnier on Vimeo.

So far, so good. It’s even flexible.

My main fear, however, is that since this is coming out in connection with the Hearst Corporation, they’re going to saddle this otherwise peachy-keen device with a whole buncha maddening DRM crippleware that’s going to ruin the User Experience.

This is not just paranoia – it’s the sad result of buying an early version of Windows Vista loaded onto a Sony Vaio. Back in the spring of 2007, the hardware companies, particularly the arm of Sony (where the movie/music/TV guys were screaming like banshees about online piracy), put all manner of toxic DRM into their products. Here’s a small sampling:

Certain high-quality output paths–audio and video–are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem.

With the hysteria over paid content (i.e. charging consumers to read stories that used to be ad-supported), I fear that once again, we’re going to have the legacy side of media companies cramming paranoid DRM down the consumer’s throats, trying to simultaneously preserve the paper circulation, while throwing a meatless bone to the future of their media. Of course, all this really does is incentivize pirates to come up with cracks & hacks to strip off the DRM.

Skiff Reader, DRM, Hearst corporation, paid content, newspapers, more than cellphones, mobile content