February 2012
1 post
Another Prediction: What Happens to RIM?
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
Perhaps prediction is the wrong word, but at least I should point out my “suggestion” a few blog posts back about HP making webOS open source. I think @MegWhitman has been reading my blog posts!
Now this time I’m addressing RIM, as they are likely headed down the similar path as Palm. But reality is, RIM is a perfect acquisition target for a...
January 2012
2 posts
2 Years, already?
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years since I started working full-time for Toura. Man, have we come a long way in a short period of time. It seems like 10 years smashed into the space of two, but what a fun and incredible experience it has been. I’ve always wanted to work for a start-up and I’m finally living that dream.
When I first started working for...
Happy New Year from the Toura Team
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
Today at Toura, we kicked off the new year by having an all day strategy session. We covered various topics and set our objectives for 2012. I think everyone on the team agreed it was a productive session with a lot of exciting things going on across the company. Most notably, we spent a significant amount of time covering our product roadmap for Mulberry, our open...
December 2011
1 post
Shaping the Future of Local Media & Mobile
By Aaron Radin
Earlier today we announced that we are partnering with Radio One to help them distribute their content and increase the reach of their advertisers on mobile devices. Radio One is one of the largest radio station groups in the country, with 54 stations in 16 markets, specifically targeting the African-American community. The company has a fascinating history, having been started by...
November 2011
1 post
Redefining What We Do
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
I got a chance to spend the better part of the morning yesterday with one of our lead javascript developers, Rebecca Murphey. It’s exciting to hear about what Rebecca’s been working on with the rest of our dev team, an open source project you may have heard about called Mulberry.
It was a perfect time for me to sit down and learn more about what initial...
October 2011
5 posts
Mulberry: News from the Alpha
It’s been about six weeks since we announced our plans to release Mulberry, a set of application development tools we’ve been working on for more than a year. A lot has happened in those six weeks: we transformed tens of thousands of lines of code into something we were ready for the world to see, arrived at a very permissive license for the code, and started sharing Mulberry with a handful of...
The Fate of webOS
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
This morning I read an article in today’s FT about Meg Whitman’s move to overturn her predecessor’s decision to spin off HP’s PC arm. Apparently, it’s been well received by the board as it received unanimous vote.
I was interested to read about the fate of webOS and see if Whitman was also going to overturn Léo Apotheker’s decision...
"Don't pay any attention to what they write about...
The title of this post is a quote attributed to Andy Warhol. It would be very interesting to see what Andy Warhol would think of our star-obsessed, reality television culture of the present and perhaps even more interesting to think of the role he might have played in it. Would he have had his own reality channel on Bravo giving “stars” their 15 minutes of fame? Given the arc of his career,...
Death of a Salesman
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
I woke up this morning in London to my alarm going off on my iPhone. I then proceeded to do what I usually do every morning and check my iPhone for emails. Usually, I check out my news apps, the NY Times or FT. This morning I went to Tweetdeck and that’s where I learned about the death of Steve Jobs.
I proceeded to spend the rest of my morning perusing through...
Pacific Standard Time and Toura
By Chris Alexander
If you live in California or are part of the museum world, you’ve no doubt heard of the large scale art initiative called Pacific Standard Time happening in Southern California. Led by the Getty, the initiative is a region-wide collaborative of museums and galleries, described as:
“an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California...
September 2011
3 posts
Cost of Distribution vs. Return on Investment
By Aaron Radin
Late last week, we announced a deal with Dennis Publishing to provide the Toura platform for the production of at least 20 applications to be launched across devices running iOS and Android. The first of these, Auto Express, was published last week.
The strategy of Dennis to publish many apps, and that of publishers in general moving forward, points to the numerous challenges...
Onsite Marketing at the Art Institute of Chicago
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
At Toura, we have many clients in the arts and culture space, namely museums. This is one of the first verticals we ever entered, in part because it was ripe for change, but also because of our personal passion for the arts.
My co-founder, Aaron Radin, was recently on a trip to Chicago and snapped this picture of the promotion taking place onsite at the Art...
Introducing Toura Mulberry
At Toura, we’ve been working for nearly two years on what it means to create content-rich mobile applications. Over the course of that time, we’ve developed two powerful tools: a web-based system for arranging content, media, and data into a compelling experience; and a content publishing system that turns the output of that system into a responsive, native mobile application using HTML5...
August 2011
3 posts
Considering App Reviews
You’ve spent a great amount of time building an app, thinking through what will make it good and useful. It’s finally time to release it. It gets submitted, goes through the review process (in the case of Apple), and finally goes live. You may think that your work is over, but it doesn’t end there.
Invariably, your app is going to receive user reviews. While the hope is they...
Uncool HTML5
While most of the hype surrounding HTML5 has been around new tags like <video> and <canvas>, there are a lot of less dramatic enhancements available in the latest browsers that can help developers solve common problems more simply and elegantly than had been previously possible. (I’m using the term HTML5 in its buzzword sense — not the literal sense — so this includes other web...
Mobile Apps: A Once-in-a-Decade Opportunity
It’s predicted that >50% of digital content will be consumed over mobile devices by 2012. That’s incredible growth, reminiscent of the early days of the Internet and personal computing. And that’s the kind of new channel opportunity that comes around maybe once in a decade, even in this age of lightning-fast technology advances. Mobile applications represent an integral part of...
July 2011
3 posts
Improved Pinch & Zoom in Toura Apps
When we overhauled the system that we use to deliver content on devices, one decision we made was to favor HTML5 and CSS3 over “native” components wherever possible. Native components have their benefits — they tend to have better performance than an HTML5 counterpart — but there’s an enormous tradeoff for that performance: a component that works on iOS absolutely will not work on Android or...
Apple Price Increase in the UK
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
This past week, Apple announced a price increase to the various pricing tiers in the app store. As you can only imagine, consumers in affected countries are not happy about this change. Think about this for a second: You are an iTunes customer registered in the UK, and were hit with over a 15% increase on apps. Would you, as a consumer, understand the various pricing...
Introducing Our Blog
By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum
Here at Toura, we’ve been talking a long time about writing a blog. I’m proud to say we’ve finally gotten around to it and I’m happy to be the first entry. A little bit of background about the blog: This is not just about Toura, but really more of an insight into the people behind Toura. We want to use this forum to share what we’re thinking about, which at times can...