Part II of Lynn’s Day in NY: “Are Apps the Past?” and Other Burning Questions

At our Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo on Sept. 13, Paul Shouvik, VP of Business Development at MAZ, is going to be a panelist for a session asking the question “Are Apps the Past?” At lunch on Thursday with Paul Canetti, Founder and CEO of MAZ, creator of the “MagAppZine,” we addressed this very question. These days, it seems sometimes as if the debate comes down to Apps vs. HTML5, and our panel will be exploring that at the conference. Needless to say, Canetti is a believer in Apps. He likes Apps because he thinks they are vibrant and active in their linkability and access to anything that exists in the internet universe. Says Canetti: “Smart digital content takes advantage of the fact that it’s interactive.” He’s also, of course, a fan of his own platform, which makes app development affordable by providing users with an easy self-service template. Canetti started as a graphic designer, raised by a graphic-designer father who, while schooling his soon in traditional methodology, was also savvy enough to purchase software as it came along. So while Canetti the elder taught his son the old ways of doing things, Canetti the younger figured out how to use the software and taught dad a thing or two. Early employment included Condé Nast and freelance work with various publishers and ad agencies, until he “landed at Apple” in 2006. At first he did video editing, audio engineering, and worked on music videos (Canetti is also a musician and sings in a band). He then became involved in internal design around creating and reinforcing Apple’s corporate identity. He moved to user experience at Apple in 2008, working on unification of experience in both retail and telephone environments. After Apple, Canetti was an iPhone app developer for a year, with some big clients such as Ford. In May of 2010, his world changed with the introduction of the iPad. He began getting calls from publishers to help create affordable apps, and in July of 2010 he and Simon Baumer of Web agency Soapbxx founded MAZ. They were joined by CTO Shikha Arora, who was lead at Adobe on InDesign. Since app development could be so expensive, their goal was to create an affordable platform to create custom digital content, so as to “democratize the process” and allow for an end product that feels hand-coded. Today they work with hundreds of publishers in over 40 countries. Scholastic: What's the Storia? After this invigorating conversation, I head to Soho to the oh-so-cool offices of Scholastic. I have spent many hours in the Scholastic store at 557 Broadway tagging behind my children as they carefully examine every bit of Captain Underpants and Harry Potter merch, but I have never before visited their offices. After receiving my Clifford nametag (he’s celebrating his 50th birthday!) and riding up the escalator to the receptionist on the 2nd floor, I find her surrounded by a café for employees and an airy library-type space that seemed to be used for meetings and special events. Hanging behind her and along the walls into the offices is beautiful framed art by winners of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. These awards for grades 7 through 12 in the visual and literary arts launched in 1923 and have been won over the years by artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon and Robert Redford. At Scholastic I meet with Ghalia Bhatty, General Manager, eBooks, Scholastic Book Clubs and eCommerce, who will be a panelist at the virtual conference session on “Ebooks: An Analytics Gold Mine.” Poised as she is at the intersection of eCommerce, ebooks and book clubs, Bhatty is indeed sitting on a veritable gold mine of information. “Publishing today is not a traditional business anymore,” she says. “You’re competing with technology companies. You need to serve content quickly.” I also chatted with Kyle Good, SVP of Corporate Communications, about some new Scholastic publications. Speaking of apps, Scholastic this year launched Storia, its new eReading app containing a curated and growing selection of ebooks. Parents can choose age-appropriate books from pre-K to grades 7 and up and they can stay involved and monitor their child’s progress and learning as they progress through a book. Books are enhanced with dictionaries, games, story interactions and animation. Good explains: “Storia is an app that’s an entire system, built in a way that allows us to develop an array of ebooks through it.” Vook: Escaping Pain, Embracing the Cloud A quick stop at Dean & Deluca, conveniently and dangerously located right across the street from Scholastic, another ride on the N/R/Q line, and I exit at Madison Square Park, 23 skidoo my way past the Flatiron building, stroll down 23rd St. searching in vain for my favorite Krispy Kreme shop, and head over to see Matthew Cavnar, VP of Business Development at Vook, a cloud-based eBook publishing platform. Matt’s going to be joining us at the virtual conference along with Ghalia Bhatty to talk about Analytics. Cavnar is a founding employee of Vook, along with CEO and founder Brad Inman. Cavnar’s background includes lots of filmmaking and production, including work for photo and video-producer Turnhere and for public radio. Right now he’s pretty excited because on July 26 they just launched the complete Vook which, he tells me, is “the only HTML5 ereader that plays video.” He continues to laud Vook’s features: Every author gets their own Web page. Once the book is created through their simple process, it’s browser-ready. “It’s a one-stop shop,” he says, “a publishing house in a box.” The Vook process began several years ago when they began to make enhanced books. Working with a number of big six publishers and authors including Anne Rice and Seth Godin, they built 800 enhanced ebooks. In the process, they built their own technology tools. The process, he says, was “terribly painful.” But because of this painful process, they realized that instead of building the books, they could sell the tools. “We weaponized all our pain and suffering,” he adds wryly. Now Vook offers authors the opportunity to pay $99, create a cloud-based ebook, and “create once, distribute everywhere.” Attendance is free at our Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo on Sept. 13. Sign up now! A Correction On Friday I mentioned a book that our speaker and friend Brian O’Leary was reading. I erred in saying it was by Stewart Brand. Called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture," it is about Stewart Brand, and was written by Fred Turner. As O’Leary explains: “It's loosely a Brand biography, though only around the arc that the title conveys.” O’Leary also sent me this link, a clarification of and brief expansion on Brand’s oft-quoted line that “Information wants to be free.”http://www.magellanmediapartners.com/index.php/mmcp/article/75_words/ To read Lynn's earlier dispatch from NYC, click here.

Emerging Technologies

Part II of Lynn’s Day in NY: “Are Apps the Past?” and Other Burning Questions

Lynn Rosen

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Lynn Rosen