iPad demands attention at Orlando’s mediaXchange

Screaming distance from Sea World, a brief space in time from the Epcot Center and, yes, a sip out of Cocoa too, the NAA’s mediaXchange event opens in Orlando, Florida tomorrow (Monday). But be sure to take the i-Ride Trolley ‘tram’ and the interstate I-4: It’s going to be a i-everywhere show! Virtually all the systems and e-reader vendors have apps – or will have, or want to say how well their existing systems will work with (or whatever!) – Apple’s iPad tablet, launched in the US last week. Just mention the i-word. This second mediaXchange marks the evolution from the heavy-metal rich (but visitor poor) Nexpo to an event aimed focused primarily on systems for online, multimedia, mobile. Oh, and print publishing. Thankfully, print is still big, even though – as I was reminded at another conference a couple of weeks back – US newspaper sales are at much the same level they were a decade-and-a-half ago. The press and postpress vendors who were still, albeit a little unhappily, at Nexpo in Washington in 2008 and took a gamble in Las Vegas last year, are mostly migrating to a dedicated newspaper feature within the Graph Expo print trade show in Chicago at the end of October. Meanwhile, mediaXchange 2010 is at the Hilton hotel, next door to the Orange County convention centre, which would likely have been too big for it. After all, who needs a big booth when you can show most of your wares on a 25-cm touch-screen LED panel? Some 300,000 iPads were reported to have been sold and a million iPad apps downloaded in the first day of sales. The ‘New York Times’ was in at the birth with an app show by Steve Jobs at the tablet’s launch. Since then, ‘USA Today’, the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and others have custom-branded apps. In Australia, News Limited is expected to have an app for ‘The Australian’ in time for the launch there at the end of this month… always assuming they will have any stock left after the runaway success of the US. No date has yet been announced, and there have been industry concerns that the launch will be rescheduled again. When it happens, GXpress understands the ‘Australian’ app will be ready, initially making use of “probably 40 per cent” of the iPad’s full functionality to create a highly-attractive reading experience. News has had the benefit of experience (and the limited iPad access) gained earlier by its US stablemate the ‘Wall Street Journal’. The iPad excitement has seen some announcements already from companies not at the Orlando show. Pressmart Media – which now has offices in California as well as its home base in India – has its first customer, ‘The Caribbean Camera’ – a Canadian newspaper for expats – live. UK-based PageSuite is also in on the act and has iPad webinars planned for this week. Australian e-reader developer Realview has a new browser-based iPad viewer which switches automatically when a publication is accessed and will maintain branding. WoodWing USA is at mediaXchange with plenty to talk about, having worked with New York digital design agency The Wonderfactory to get a good-looking app for ‘Time Magazine’ ready for the US launch following its roadshow sessions in the city. The Dutch developer, which announced a white-label iPhone app service at Ifra Expo last October, is already well advanced with iPad work. Saxotech is showing the extended content distribution capabilities of its Mediaware Center with an online module to distribute content to multiple digital channels and devices (including the iPad) as well as web and print. And Atex has a team on iPad development but says its Atex Content already provides tools to streamline content publishing to it. News of online editions specially-tailored for mobile devices is growing, with Eidos showing its work with French-speaking Swiss daily ‘Le Temps’, produced using the Méthode Portal Server web CMS it added this year. Mobile editions are automatically adapted to the display characteristics of each mobile device, optimising layout to the screen type and dimension of the individual model. As well as a constantly updated homepage linked to main news stories, the mobile edition also features an expanding menu giving access to selected sections of the paper, editorials, financial data, TV and entertainment listings and personalised weather forecasts. Also at the show is Spanish developer Handmark, which is producing a mobile application for the ‘London Evening Standard’, owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev (who is also to buy the UK ‘Independent’). The application is refreshed automatically and allows offline reading. But if you were thinking of the iPad in terms of its e-reader potential alone, it’s time to lose the blinkers. Video and interactive experiences – within a publisher’s page or not – are among the rich opportunities offered by the device. That’s why Tuesday evening’s ‘fun night’ at mediaXchange looks especially promising: Washington-based video services facility TreeHouse Media is behind a project to showcase with the launch of three ‘channels’ or regularly-scheduled progammes in September. One for “lazy, cheap environmentalists” sounds promising, as does a small business channel… and we’ll leave ‘The Guy Channel’ – “guides to looking good, living well and getting the girl” – to your imagination. If that doesn’t get you round to their stand (booth 919), perhaps the prospect of entering their draw before Tuesday night might: There’s an iPad to be won!