Yahoo’s relaunched its flagship purchase, Summly, for iPhone and iPod touch devices this morning. The app uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing algorithms to deliver short summaries beneath story headlines. The new features are prominently on display in the “Visual” mode, wherein headlines and summaries are overlaid atop blown-up thumbnail backgrounds. You can now also specify your section and topic preferences, making your Yahoo news experience more personalized. Yahoo also gave the app a major upgrade to its video and image searches. This is another big app release for Yahoo, who also released Weather and Mail apps last week, and demonstrates their continued effort to penetrate the mobile app market.
Tag: iPod Touch
iPad, IAD, and Me
The iPad is here — and with it, apps. And games. And ads. The iPad arrived on April 3. Rumor is, on April 7 Apple will reveal what it’s done with Quattro and showcase the future of the ad platform for its mobile operating system. This announcement could, in a very real way, mobilize (pun intended) casual gaming ad opportunities.
Did you know there are more iPhones and iPod Touches out there than Wiis? Or that Apple is eating away at the handheld gaming market revenues, despite the games on its platform being a fraction of the price that others charge?
A solid advertising platform from Apple will represent a unified offering for iPhone OS games. Based on where Apple’s interest lies for its iPhone platform, the ad platform should be very publisher-friendly, and potentially able to generate revenue for publishers better than current ad networks. If that’s the case, many publishers will flock to the common standard for their apps (or not). Continue reading “iPad, IAD, and Me”
iPad: Game changer or iPod Touch for Boomers?
The IPG Media Lab team weighs in on Apple’s release of the much anticipated iPad device.
Is the iPad a game changer?
Scott Susskind, IPG Lab CTO: I don’t know if I would consider it a “game changer.” However, I do think it raises the bar. We saw several tablet devices this year at CES that leveraged the Google Android platform that have some similarities to the iPad.  However, the iPad will quickly leapfrog the competition due to the maturity of the iPhone OS and breadth of the existing application ecosystem. The heavy lifting was already done. It allowed Apple to focus their efforts on smoothing out the user experience for this form-factor as well as developing special ports of business apps that make it an attractive device for the workplace.
That said, I think it will be a short-lived lead. As the Android App ecosystem matures, the marketplace will swell with a variety of Android-based devices Devices that will either compete directly with the iPad, or fill smaller, niche markets that would be too costly for Apple to support through multiple hardware versions.  And since the content (and app) distribution model will likely be based on an open ecosystem, I would wager that the lion’s share of the market will be non-Apple inside of a few years. Continue reading “iPad: Game changer or iPod Touch for Boomers?”
Your creative deptartment’s new BFF
Adobe recently went from near irrelevant in mobile marketing to king-of-the-hill. While Flash has taken online rich media by storm, a few months ago it was barely supported on any mobile handsets, and for the few which did claim Flash support, it was an incarnation that was bordering on painful. How quickly things can change in today’s mobile market.
The big news has been the addition of iPhone and iPod Touch-compatible file export from Flash Professional CS5. Flash developers can take existing or new Flash assets and use those to create iPhone apps with minimal optimization, and no knowledge of Objective C (which is what iPhone apps are written in). For creative agencies (and the media agencies trying to get those creative agencies to support an iPhone app) this is great news. Continue reading “Your creative deptartment’s new BFF”
