Presently, online versions of magazines lose "the coherence and majesty of the [printed] medium," said Anderson. Tablets, on the other hand, offer impressive functionality, such as 360-degree views and iPhone-like screen sliding, plus collapsing and layering -- all of which make the user experience vastly more compelling than the Web,

Also revolutionary from an editorial and design perspective is that magazine staffers -- now editing for print and the Web in separate work flows -- will be able to edit for print and tablets simultaneously.

tablet renderings of traditional magazines will draw consumers who weren't magazine readers before.

it is not the technique by which they communicate their brand, but the communication itself that connects the brand to the psyche of a consumer. As long as there is a need for an idea, there is a demand for what we do. In other words, we will always be in business as long as we create new ways to communicate brand stories.

Just because you have a venue for a conversation, such as social media, doesn't mean the consumer will have a conversation. We are the conversation makers. We are the ones that think of what to talk about.

Ideas become big when they are in the right place at the right time.

Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.

To improve the quality of their rendering capabilities, the researchers plan to integrate their computing system with a social game that will permit competing teams to add images where they are most needed to improve the quality of the visual models. The PhotoCity game is already being played by teams of students at the University of Washington and Cornell, and the researchers plan to open it to the public in an effort to collect three-dimensional renderings in cities like New York and San Francisco. Contestants will be able to use either an iPhone application that uses the phone’s camera, or upload collections of digital images.

“The obvious thing to do is to try to mobilize a lot of people and get them to go out and take snapshots that contribute to this 3-D reconstruction,” he said. “But maybe if enough people are involved someone will come up with a better idea of how to go about doing this.”

If Apple cut the price of each TV episode in half — to 99 cents, from $1.99 — would sales on iTunes increase enough to offset the price drop?

Separately, Apple has proposed to some networks that the store sell a subscription package of popular TV shows. At a price some reports have set at $30 a month, the subscription service would be a direct threat to entrenched cable and satellite providers.

Pricing is coming up now in part because Apple is keen — some TV executives privately say desperate — to line up content for the iPad, the tablet computer to be available in March.

By mid-2010, there will be 6.8 billion humans on this planet. According to United Nations estimates, there also will be five billion cellphone subscriptions.

With the release of the iPad, companies with dedicate Apps Powered by PixelMags will be able to offer full-sized, digital versions of their publications, complete with interactive components like video and streaming media, at a fraction of the cost of the hard copy paper versions of their magazines and newspapers. The Apps will be compatible with the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry.

A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market.

I suspect the first group to really embrace this will be educators who have created course material that includes audio and video, along with standard text. Authors of how-to books may also embrace video to enhance the learning process. Better yet, authors can take advantage of Apple's distribution power by making each book an app that can be sold through the iBookstore. By doing this, authors bypass publishers altogether.

Newspapers and magazines are reportedly in talks with Apple about repurposing their content onto a “new device,” presumably the rumored touchscreen tablet Apple will deliver in early 2010. Numerous reports suggest an Apple tablet would have a strong focus on redefining print media. Enabling in-app commerce through free apps was a crucial move to help make this goal a reality.

But the more book publishers, more magazine publishers, more newspapers, the more video game creators, and textbook companies Apple can pull on board, the more attractive the iPad will become as a one-stop shop for media.

There’s more to a gadget than just good hardware. An elegantly designed user interface can put a gadget head and shoulders above its peers. That’s where most e-readers have fallen short. E-reader manufacturers’ focus on hardware design means their user interfaces often feel like an afterthought.

Another way to enhance the experience may be through opening up e-readers to third-party apps, as Amazon has done with the Kindle. That could bring additional features to the devices and maybe even alternate readers with more elegant interfaces.

Jamy Ian Swiss calls himself an «honest liar», because as a magician, he promises to deceive his audience, and then promptly does. User interface designers are somewhat similar, though probably a bit less honest. We constantly lie to our users about what they actually see. A button on a screen isn’t really a button, it’s a bunch of colored dots. The better we lie to users, to more easily we can convince them that it actually is a button.