convert MOV to WMV

E book readers have stormed the market because the launch of the popular wildly Amazon Kindle. Initially the Kindle was bought out and Amazon was not in a position to keep up with the demand for the brand new gadget. Since the debut of the Kindle there are quite a few new e-book readers on the market. And more ebook readers are nearly to return out. The popularity of these devices is only increasing. What may the world of e-book readers seem like in the near future? Here are some predictions about e book readers for the near future.

We will see widespread and commonplace formats.

One factor which may happen with these readers is a typical format. This might be a common format to work on all ebook readers. This shall be vital because authors and publishers will want to have a format where they can promote to all of the hundreds of thousands of ebook reader homeowners versus just a small subset of the market for just one reader. Corporations like Amazon may be unwilling to undertake this at first. In spite of everything, if they will management the format, they have far more management over pricing. However we expect it is certain to occur especially if Amazon can sell to tens of millions of non-Kindle readers.

Varied book firms will type unique contracts with publishing companies.

One other actuality is an unique contract. A write might just publish for one system and one system only. If the author is popular enough and the incentive is high enough, this might happen. Again, this offers a level of management of business choices and pricing. When Apple created a whole music library with iTunes after which controlled distribution of the music, they instantly had the higher hand. Publishers don’t need the same thing to occur to books. They need to control distribution.

There shall be digital media with printed books.

As these new reader units develop into more widespread, many printed ebook purchases may also give you access to the downloadable e book reader model of the e book as well. This would nonetheless give printed books dominance while giving those that have e-book readers cause to exit and shop for real books. DVDs at the moment are doing this model the place you get the physical product, the DVD, in addition to the digital copy. We think that the nice old paper guide just isn’t going to disappear anytime too soon. But, like with so many nice shifts, we do think that increasingly more paper books might want to share the market with digital books.

Digital textbooks will enter the market.

It is solely a matter of time that expensive textbooks begin changing into ebooks. Faculties will want these readers for their first 12 months college students to have the ability to place textbook and homework material on them. These may turn into a part of many classrooms. Like with many know-how advances, the younger generations will embrace the change first.

We expect that ebooks are here to stay. They will not take over completely any time soon, but they will play an increasingly vital function within the distribution of information.

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Logos from the new Timeline app makers

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a host of new apps — more than 60 in total — that integrate with its new Timeline user interface. The social networking company also announced it will begin approving Timeline apps running on its Open Graph API from all developers.

“The apps launched at f8 in the music, news and video verticals have seen tremendous success so far. But really, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Our vision for Timeline is that whatever you love, whatever story you want to tell, you can add to your platform.”

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Just two days after the European Commission announced that it was investigating Apple and major international publishers for possible e-book price fixing, the US Justice Department has made it clear that it’s also launching a probe into the possibility of “anticompetitive practices involving e-book sales.”

E-book publishers are now being investigated in the US, not just Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few months ago I tweeted this: “If I were a publisher I would either: a) pull my app from the App Store or b) invest all available cash in Apple stock.” The latter piece of advice was probably pretty solid, if not very practical — Apple’s stock has been performing like no other in recent history.

But my former piece of advice for publishers – to pull their apps from the App Store – doesn’t seem to have resonated much, as many publishers keep pushing out their respective iPhone and iPad apps. That said, I’m betting this trend is a short-term fad that will eventually reverse, and here’s why:

The fragmented app world is a drain on development resources

The beauty of the Web is that it standardized access to information across machines, operating systems, and browsers. No more rewriting code to be Mac-, PC- and Unix-compatible, etc. Publish once on the Web, and the information will be accessible by all of humanity regardless of any configuration they might use to access it. Recently, the various app stores have again started fragmenting a world that had largely become defragmented. A fragmented dev world imposes costs and headaches on those that choose to support the various apps. That might not be a huge tax on tech companies, per se, but for publishers, supporting multiple apps will become a headache and a totally unnecessary tax, which leads me to my next point.

For most websites, the ROI of an app is unclear

A native app is a great way for developers to create functionality that’s not possible with a web page (or that might otherwise require the use of Flash in a web page). Games are a perfect example of this. For a publisher whose product is words and pictures, it is unclear what additional functionality an app can provide that a well-designed Web page cannot. Sure, it’s always possible to slap some artificial stuff on an app (and The Daily is a great example of things that can be done on a publisher app), but the question is whether those things are done because it’s possible to do them, or because they are actually useful.

I’d argue that the most useful mobile reading experience is on Instapaper, which is a clean presentation of the text with proper typography — attributes that are all perfectly achievable in a well-designed mobile website. The only two exceptions here might be: a) video and b) offline reading. The gap on both is closing with HTML5, and soon even these “app excuses” won’t be a valid reason for justifying development of proprietary mobile apps.

You can’t link — or, at least, link easily — to apps

When deciding to publish content in an app rather than a mobile website, it’s important to understand that the value of links, as we know them on the Web, is greatly diminished. Because an app is a standalone program, not a part of the open Web, linking to other pages is clunky at best. You cannot link to content on other apps. And links to websites, while possible, require switching the user to another application (AKA a mobile browser) and disrupting the user experience between articles.

You’re being held hostage on someone else’s platform

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, is the ownership of the platform on which you publish. No one owns the Web, and therefore no company can impose new rules, pricing, censorship or other surprises along the way (FCC regulation aside, of course).

When developing a mobile app, a publisher technically becomes a node within someone else’s platform — namely Apple or Google — and is bound by their rules and whims. Apple’s decision to impose a 30 percent tax on all publisher subscriptions done within apps is just one example of this. The Financial Times created a lot of buzz with their decision to fully withdraw from the App Store and go all-in with their mobile Web app. Developing an app for someone else’s platform might give the illusion of a new marketing channel, but in reality it means becoming a node in someone else’s business model.

All that said, a mobile app can be a decent marketing channel, and there is value for publishers in having a presence inside the various app stores. But if you peel away all the other layers of what an app can be and focus on it exclusively as a marketing channel, then the conclusion is that an app for publishers is basically a bookmark on people’s phone screens. That’s it — a reminder to consume the publisher’s content, and a quick link to do so.

I urge (and predict!) that publishers stick to these principles after the “we need to have an iPhone/iPad/Android/WebOS/Win7/etc. app” hype passes:

• Use limited dev resources to build a single, great mobile Web version of their website.
• Submit a bookmark version to all the app stores of an app that launches the Web browser with their mobile Web site.
•  Use services specific to mobile, which provide readers a superior browsing experience, tailored for the mobile Web.
•  Alter monetization strategies for the mobile environment, opting for revenue generators that are perfected for mobile consumption.

Mobile is putting pressure on publishers to quickly adapt and successfully deliver. In a “sink or swim” environment, the hype of apps is ultimately going to weigh publishers down. There is no real reason for publishers to spread their dev resources thin, supporting multiple proprietary apps that break links and really serve someone else’s strategy more than their own.

Yaron Galai is the CEO and co-founder of Outbrain, a web-based recommendation engine. 

We’ll discuss the app economy, its rise and possible fall, and the opportunities presented by HTML5 at our annual Mobilize event in San Francisco, September 26 and 27th.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sean MacEntee.

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Gamification is growing up. First it’s got its own conference, a new certification program and now consolidation. BigDoor, a gamified loyalty platform, is announcing that it’s buying up web check-in rewards provider OneTrueFan.

The purchase price was not disclosed but BigDoor CEO and co-founder Keith Smith believes it’s the first big acquisition in the gamification space and shows that there’s growing momentum behind companies looking to add game mechanics. Or it could mean that the opportunity is not just big enough yet to support a host of players. Time will tell.

Seattle-based BigDoor got started in 2009 and has been one of the leaders in the gamification space along with Badgeville and Bunchball. It has several hundred clients who are using a free product to add badges, levels, leaderboards and loyalty programs to promote engagement. By scooping up San Francisco-based OneTrueFan, it can reach thousands of more websites that have installed OneTrueFan’s web check-in tools. It also gets a big social component from OneTrueFan, which rewards visitors with points and badges for sharing content on social networks.

Smith said BigDoor is poised to release a new product called Engagement Economy next month that will incorporate technology from OneTrueFan, which will also continue on its current form for now. Engagement Economy will reward visitors for participation with virtual currency from publishers, which can be redeemed, and BigDoor will take a cut of that. The company will also implement quests sponsored by advertisers, who will pay to have consumers complete certain tasks on a site.

Smith said while some detractors still roll their eyes at the term “gamification,” it is actually paying off for companies that employ it. He said publishers who participated in a private beta of Engagement Economy found that participants are 300 percent more likely to return to the site than those who don’t use a loyalty program, and their overall engagement increases on site by 30 percent. And he said there’s a 200 percent increase in sharing by users of BigDoor’s reward programs.

“There’s an incredible need by publishers and the web community for increased engagement on site and to give people reasons to come back,” Smith said. “We’ve been shocked at how positive the response has been from the marketpace for our product offering. It’s a sign that gamification and our program is in massive demand.”

BigDoor not only picks up a potential competitor but also acquires a solid team of entrepreneurs. OneTrueFan is founded by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, who co-founded social network MyBlogLog before selling it to Yahoo. Marcoullier also co-founded gaming site IGN.com in 1996 and social data provider Gnip in 2008. Sampson also co-founded Cloudspace in 1996. OneTrueFan has previously raised .2 million from Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, First Round Capital, David Cohen and Bob Pasker. BigDoor last year raised million from Foundry Group, bringing its total to .7 million.

I’ve pointed out some of the pitfalls of gamification when implemented haphazardly, but I think it’s more than just hype. These days it’s all about engagement, whether on websites or in apps, and the fact is a certain amount of people respond to game mechanics. It might be manipulative or shallow at times, but when done well, with hopefully tangible rewards, it can really motivate people. We’ll have to see if BigDoor can take its acquisition of OneTrueFan and make good on this opportunity.

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YouTube rolled out automatic captioning for Japanese videos, utilizing the same kind of speech recognition technology that’s also used to auto-caption videos in English. The video sharing site announced the launch of the feature late last week on its Japanese blog, and a YouTube spokesperson confirmed Tuesday via email that this is the first time automatic captioning is available in a language other than English. “We look forward to continuing to expand this feature to additional languages over time,” he added.

Users can now select automatic captioning for Japanese videos by clicking on the CC button and then selecting Transcribe audio:

YouTube rolled out auto-captioning for English-language videos in late 2009. The site expanded the feature to all of its English-language videos in March 2010.

Captions for online video recently came into the spotlight when disability advocates sued Netflix and CNN for failing to provide subtitles for each and every video the companies are serving up online. YouTube’s effort to bring auto-captioning to Japan has been hailed by the country’s Federation of the Deaf, but Google Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black cautioned on Monday that publishers should merely understand the auto-captioning provided by the site as a starting point. On Google+, she explained:

As someone who posts content to YouTube, I wouldn’t rely on auto-captions without review, but it’s a great starting place for making accurate captions, since the video owner can download and edit the captions. And as a viewer, if the video owner hasn’t provided any captions, it does give you some insight into what the video is about.

There’s also another big benefit for publishers and Google alike in expanding automatic captioning: Captions make videos searchable, expanding the discoverability of videos both on YouTube itself as well as via Google. This could help to add more views and improve monetization of video assets.

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