WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Do you remember the story of JVC’s VHS versus Sony’s BETAMAX?

Yes, Sony’s format was better with more reproduction quality, but…

JVC’s  had more movies available and at the end of the day, content prevailed over technology.

Well, now you can understand why Brian Marshall says that “for Apple, content is the focus of the tablet.”

Look at the Google Phone, the Super Phone, the “iPhone Killer”…

The Nexus One could be better as a product (it’s not) but the iPhone has these 100.000 applications, so the game is over.

The same is going to happen with the new upcoming tablets.

The key for the success of the Apple one  will be not the hardware but the software.

And just channeling these 100.000 applications to the new tablet will be enough to win the war.

The Apple tablet will have, I am sure, brilliant hardware.

Superb design.

Great usability.

Magnificent navigation tools…

But, again, it’s the software, stupid!

It’s the wine, not the bottle.

Or as the British used to say when the first computers were presented as “the” solution to have better education in the scholols:

“Garbage IN, Garbage Out”

So, good news for media companies and other content-driven providers.

The Apple tablet loves your content.

Apple wants your content.

Apple needs your content.

Music content made the difference for the iTunes and iPod.

So Multimedia content will make the difference for the Apple iTablet.

Are you ready?

Well, if your newspaper still dosen’t have an iPhone application, I don’t believe you.

You are NOT ready.

And shame to you and to your IT people!

UPDATE:

INNOVATION’s Javier Zarracina writes from Boston, and he is absolutely right, that Visual Content will be a key-issue in the success of these tablet.

Done not just by decorators, but by Visual Journalists.

They must be also counting the days until they can play and work with this fantastic device.

Thanks, Javier!

This is a fascinating and candid talk.

Intended as an”off the record” talk, it was leaked, and you can read and watch it here at the Nieman JournalismLab website.

For me the most striking impression is this:

The editor of The New York Times talks like as if his newsroom was going to be integrated.

Well, this is an old, old story.

Too old to be news today.

And it’s amazing to me that these basic goals still have not be preached by the New York Times that is, according Bill Keller, “the most innovative online publisher in the business.”

Oh, boy, that too much!

Just read these quotes from the speech:

• Prioritizing the web is “our Manhattan Project.”

• The single best advice we’ve gotten, I think, is to spend some time living without print. And we’ve both been trying to do that, trying to experience The New York Times and our competition mostly on screens — iPhone, laptop, Kindle, Times Reader –- trying to better understand the joys and frustrations of our journalism delivered online.

• I think everyone agrees that over the past four-plus years, we’ve come a long way in breaking down the psychological, cultural, and organizational barriers that isolated print from digital. But the gospel still needs preaching

• We understand that The New York Times is, and has to be, a technology company as well as a journalism company.

• As long as we’re doing journalism on separate publishing systems, we will not be an integrated newsroom.

• We need to figure out the right journalistic product to deliver to mobile platforms and devices.

Well, you better go faster or you will be late, very late.

And you will not make it!

FT is now on the iPhone.

The question is why it took so many months to do it?

This late arrival shows an endemic problem is many of our leading newspaper companies.

In-house developers work very slow or perhaps publishers and editors don’t react as quickly as needed in the new media landscape.

From AP:

In central London, excited shoppers flooded Apple’s largest store for the gadget’s 6 p.m. launch. The first buyer out of the store was 20-year-old architecture student Tom Jasinski, who said he had been waiting outside for 26 hours.

“It was worth the wait,” Jasinski said.

Yes Tom, it is great!