Author: Bill Trippe (Page 7 of 23)

Quark’s Acquisition of In.vision Research

August 10, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

I missed this, and I shouldn’t have, but that is what a few weeks out of the office will do for you. It’s significant for Quark’s new DPS offering, and also bolsters their traditional QPS line, which has been re-architected to better support open development standards and XML. (I wrote an article about QPS for the Seybold Report, but it is behind their firewall.)

There are plenty of Quark skeptics out there (and I have been one of them), and it’s clear that Quark has challenges. But they are also still a sizable company, and they have a talented management team that understands the enterprise publishing market. And while Adobe is formidable, Adobe also does not seem to want to put together integrated server offerings or to take on the services side of a service-intensive business. Meanwhile Quark does, with both QPS and DPS, and a growing list of service partnerships. Since we’re convinced that enterprise publishing is an important market, the message here seems to be to not count Quark out yet.

Could the iPhone be a Kindle Killer?

August 10, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Charlie Sorrel has some thoughts over at Wired’s blogs.

Here’s a project I would love to do if I had the time–a face-off between Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, an eBook Technologies ETI-1, and a few other devices. Take a few book types–novel, textbook, graphical book, business document to begin with–and create a feature matrix and evaluation criteria. Also evaluate the e-commerce experience, the experience with public domain and other free content, and the experience of adding your own content. Write it all up, and keep it up to date.

Mygazines.com

August 6, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Why didn’t I think of this? Of course, among other things, I don’t have the stomach to deal with the legal challenges.

Cuil

July 29, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Have you tried it yet? News here. My first search here. I guess there were technical difficulties yesterday.
Oh, it’s pronounced “cool,” but, old geezer that I am, I would have never guessed that on my own.

From the Department of Inscrutable Data Points

July 24, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Time magazines’s Josh Quittner offers some insight into Kindle sales:

According to a source at Amazon, “on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”

Amazon’s quarterly results didn’t spell things out more, though the inventory of eBook titles continues to grow:

The number of titles available for the Kindle are now up to 140,000 compared to 90,000 at launch, and the company did not break out any other Kindle figures except to say sales of e-books represent a low double digit percentage of the 140,000 titles available in both e-books and print formats.

Should I Click It?

July 18, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 2 Comments

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I am tempted…

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Don’t Forget Today’s Webinar

June 5, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Mary Laplante will be moderating a webinar at noon eastern time today, Web Experience Management: Essentials for Engaging Customers and Winning Loyalty. The sponsor is Fatwire, and the speakers will be Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Sovan Shatpathy, Manager of Web Infrastructure at Linksys; and Erik Kulvinskas, Web Coordinator for the Colorado Department of Transportation. We are seeing a lot of activity in Web Experience Management, and Mary offers the following definition:
Web experience management is a business practice that formalizes an organization’s approach to relating to its audiences through web-based channels. WEM is based on the premise that engagement that delivers high value to all participants does not happen by accident, but rather, by design. Only when experience is deliberately managed does it become repeatable, predictable, and capable of being improved and optimized. WEM, as a business practice, is enabled by a range of technologies, including web content management, personalization, dynamic content delivery, analytics and optimization, and emerging tools for social computing. As such, WEM calls for integrated marketing and IT processes.
Registration for the webinar is still open.

Acrobat.com…

June 3, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

… was announced yesterday, and is available now as a public beta. By all means, check it out. I have been playing with Buzzword, and like it. I did manage to break it trying an Export to Word 2003 XML, but it is a Beta after all.
I do wonder about the export choices, which, apart from Acrobat, zipped XML, and plain text, are all Microsoft–Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2003 XML. This makes perfect sense if Adobe sees Buzzword as the Web interface in a Microsoft-centric document workflow. But I can see other use cases, especially ones where the content is destined for a Web CMS (or is already in a Web CMS and is being updated. In these cases, the Web CMS would likely not want the overhead of the complex Microsoft file structures.
I think we are getting a briefing on Acrobat.com shortly. I will see what Adobe has in mind.