Amazon.com announced the latest version of their Kindle for iPhone application. The updated application is now available for download from the iTunes App Store. Kindle for iPhone 1.1 includes landscape support, tap to turn a page, alternate background and text color selections to improve reading comfort in low light conditions, and image zoom capability. The Amazon Kindle for iPhone app allows customers access to more than 280,000 Kindle books wirelessly on their iPhones, the ability to access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers, and adjust the text size of books. http://amazon.com, http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Category: Publishing & media (Page 29 of 53)
Vjoon announced that media companies, publishing houses, and corporate publishers now have the option to rent vjoon‘s K4 Publishing System. According to their individual situation, publishers can hire as many K4 workstations, K4 Web Editor licenses, and other system components such as K4 Overview or K4 XML Exporter as their projects, order position, and workload demand.This new rental offering benefits both new and existing customers. New customers can test the system, existing customers can add additional K4 seats to their current system as needed. The costs for Adobe InDesign CS4 Server and the database are included in the rental fee. This enables Adobe InDesign and InCopy users to test the system and experience the time and cost savings brought on by K4 under actual production conditions. http://www.vjoon.com/
Content Data Solutions, developers of publishing software, systems integration and pre-press solutions, announced the release of their Web Publishing Solution (WPS) as Software as a Service (SaaS). WPS, developed for the needs of news, journal and book publishers, is a comprehensive application for the creation, enrichment, management and delivery of content to the Web as well as other publishing channels such as print, CD-Rom or E-Reader. WPS’ standard editing controls are similar to Microsoft Word. WPS SaaS’s built in automated publishing process allows companies to publish information quickly with features such as future scheduling and expiration capabilities. WPS’ browser based solution has a built in workflow feature allowing Authors, Editors and Content Managers the ability to revise, approve and release documents in a collaborative environment. Content DSI’s WPS SaaS is priced starting at $500 per month for up to 3 users, 10GB of storage and up to 10MB of monthly internet usage. http://www.contentdsi.com/
SDL and Language Weaver announced a strategic partnership to deliver Language Weaver’s translation software tightly integrated into SDL’s GIM platform and as part of SDL Knowledge-based Translation System (SDL KbTS). Language Weaver automated translation solutions have been deployed for the enterprise and large web properties to deliver translations of digital content. This partnership will give SDL customers the opportunity to deliver effective communication to customers across many more languages. The companies announced that the agreement encompasses a number of different applications of automated translation, including: Translation of content that is otherwise too expensive or time consuming to translate, such as online support content that re-directs customers from expensive call centers to more cost-effective self-service on the web; Integrating automated translation into the translation process for high-quality technical documentation; Providing ubiquitous access to automated translation, through integration into desktop translation technology, SDL Trados, and integration into the translation website http://www.freetranslation.com. Integration with SDL Trados and the addition of new language support within SDL Knowledge-based Translation System are planned for the second half of 2009. http://www.sdl.com/lwsdl
Amazon and Lexcycle announce that Amazon has aquired Ebook Firm Lexcycle, Inc., developers of the iphone eBook reader. Both companies said there are no plans to change the development of Stanza. According to Lexcycle’s founder Marc Prud’hommeau, “We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers. We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in ebooks. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for ebooks and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time”. http://www.lexcycle.com/lexcycle_acquired_by_amazon
Vasont Systems announced the release of the next major version of their content management system, Vasont 12, that enables users to store multilingual content once for maximum reuse and delivery to multiple channels. Vasont 12 includes: Collaborative Review package provides effective virtual collaboration with colleagues. Internal and external reviewers markup content with changes and comments while seeing other reviewers’ feedback simultaneously. Accepted changes automatically update in Vasont, minimizing manual updates; Project Management tracks projects to meet publishing deadlines. The Project Management window provides overall statuses of workflow projects across multiple departments and highlights overdue projects. When needed, users can inquire for specific status information. Gantt charts provide a graphical view of project timelines; Translation package consolidates translation project information in one window. Vasont’s Translation Projects window provides tracking and status for each multi-language translation project. Translation coordinators submit projects to multiple vendors for quote or translation. Integrations with translation vendors automate content delivery and status information to/from Vasont; Preview feature provides a styled view of XML content. Vasont’s Preview displays content in a styled view to speed up editorial time by making content easy to read; Content Ownership increases content security. Specific pieces of content within a collection are restricted to alterations by its Content Owners while other users can only view it. Associate Administrators role provides flexibility to coordinate administrative responsibilities across multiple groups, and more. This release is available on May 1, 2009 for both the client/server and hosted (SaaS) models. http://www.vasont.com
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The 10th annual Buying and Selling eContent conference took place under sunny skies in Scottsdale, AZ, this week. The event brings together buyers and sellers of business information that drives decision-making within enterprises and supports research within institutions. There’s no doubt that the economic climate is putting pressure on the industry. But although budget cuts are certainly shaping 2009 packaging tactics, the industry faces far bigger challenges that will still exist when the economic pendulum swings back the other way. We spent much of the conference wondering when – and if – participants will make the commitment to innovation, roll up their sleeves, and begin the difficult work of transforming their businesses.
Anthea Stratigos, co-founder and CEO of Outsell, gave a stirring yet practical opening keynote. She used Outsell’s highly-regarded and well-researched annual outlook to explain why the industry isn’t simply experiencing a blip. She strongly reinforced the fact that things will be different on the other side. This isn’t news to industry watchers and participants. The need for fundamental change in the way the information industry works has long been acknowledged. We experienced the same buyer/seller tension at the NFAIS conference in February, where the “them versus us” attitude was right out there in the conference theme: “Barbarians at the Gate? The Global Impact of Digital Natives and Emerging Technologies on the Future of Information Services.” Gilbane’s own study on Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends and Best Practices (May 2008) looks at some of the important issues in those markets. The current worldwide economic situation simply brings the need for revamping the industry into even clearer focus. Sellers want the buyers to acknowledge the value of the content they provide and be fairly compensated for it. Buyers want the sellers to provide that value – and more – for a lot less money. And everyone wrings his or her hands over new entrants into the workforce who expect to have access to quality content for little or no money, with tools that are easy to use and freely available.
At the same time, there exists a wealth of technologies that can be brought to bear to address these problems and enable industry transformation. The BSeC program provided good exposure to some of these, including dynamic publishing capabilities, structured content creation, software-as-a-service platforms that enable low-cost experimentation, social computing tools, and cloud computing services. Although there was lots of twittering going on (see #bsec09), the gulf between the buyers and sellers in the audience and the technologies and services being discussed on the speaker platform felt quite wide at times. As analysts trying to fulfill our market education mission, we found ourselves wondering how to narrow that gap.
One answer lies in the willingness to experiment and then report on successes and failures. Marty Kahn from ProQuest described insights emerging from Project Information Literacy, the goals of which are to “understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and ‘everyday use’ and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.” Kahn showed the current working version of Summons, a Google-style interface for library data. It’s meant to aid students who perceive a higher value of information offered by a library, but are stymied as to how to get at those resources with quick, easy discovery. See a video on YouTube. John Girard from Clickability highlighted successful experiements by some of the company’s customers in paid-content markets, enabled by Clickability’s SaaS WCM solution.
Another answer lies in leveraging experience in other domains. While experiments get started and begin to show early results, the information industry can look outside itself to other content practice areas and seek experience from which it can learn. One such domain is technical documentation. One of the break-out topics for informal discussion was flexible content and how it can play a role in the transformation of the industry. It seemed like an early learning conversation for a number of the participants. The technologies and practices for creating, managing and publishing flexible content have been delivering value to technical documentation organizations throughout the world for some time. The information industry can leverage this deep expertise.
The tools to innovate are readily available. The know-how exists in other industries and content-centric business practices. The necessity to transform the industry is apparent. We’ll be watching to see who steps up to embrace the change and experiment with the business models that can drive a transformed industry.
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