Touramblings

Another Prediction: What Happens to RIM?

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:07:00 -0800

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 cash-rich company wanting to expand their mobile and tablet device business.

Now if you’ve used a Blackberry lately, you are probably asking why? RIM, like the others, is sitting on a chest of patents. Some people speculate that these patents could be worth more than their core business.

So now for the hard part. Who’s the right buyer? Well, naturally, any of the major handset manufactures are potential acquirers, Samsung, HTC, etc. Any of these players may want to distance themselves from Google/Android/Motorola and be interested in the operating system and corporate market share. Then there are the usual suspects, such as Cisco, Microsoft and maybe even HP. And don’t forget about Amazon. They could benefit from the hardware manufacturing expertise that RIM brings to the table, while picking up a few patents along the way.

Any other suggestions? I’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter @SayKnight or @touramobile.

2 Years, already?

cmalexander27 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:06:59 -0800

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 the company it was as a consultant to the museum space. I worked 20 hours a month, although it ended up being a lot more since I was enjoying it so much.

My first big experience with the company was flying to Vancouver with the CEO Aaron Radin and future Creative Director, Eric Yang. The mission of the trip - to make the dream of a cross-mobile-platform, app producing CMS a reality. The objective was to talk with a group of developers who were making an impact in the world of cross-platform apps to see how we could work together.

That trip resulted in the planning and development of Mobile App Producer (MAP) 1.0. The groundwork was set and every week there were meetings to discuss the iterations that were taking place - constantly adding, subtracting and refining. We were making cool software and it was fun! The end result was “a quick, cost effective way to create cross-platform mobile applications” - that was the 5 second elevator pitch.

I don’t recall the first client that we gave access to. Possibly Art Institute of Chicago, Pace Gallery? - so much has happened, it’s hard to remember. I do remember however the first iPhone apps to launch - Pace Gallery and the Hirshhorn. I remember the thrill of being able to officially say that Toura had apps in the App Store. That was in May of 2010 only about 5-6 months after the initial development began.

A month prior to those apps launching, the iPad was officially released. The result? - a full on shift in focus with the company. Clients, left and right, were asking if we were going to support the iPad. Since the iPhone and iPad shared the same operating system, making a compatible version from MAP was not a huge challenge and we were fortunate enough to have our first iPad, iPhone AND Android app simultaneous launch with the Art Institute of Chicago’s French Impressionism app in September of the same year.

We had by this point brought all of our software development in-house. Our customer base was starting to grow and many requests were starting to pour in for enhancements to Mobile App Producer. We realized that the 1.0 iteration of the system was proving to have some limitations so we undertook the enormous task of rebuilding the whole system from scratch and making if more flexible and better optimized. The result was MAP 2.0. The version came with many requested enhancements, including layouts, bulk uploading, an asset repository, and much more.

Since then, business has started to grow and Toura has branched out from the museum space, signing on publishers, newspapers, and legal firms. We’ve also started creating affiliate relationships with companies selling our services to their clients. Most exciting of all is the open-sourcing of the underlying code of MAP which has been called Mulberry. The company is actively engaging the developer community through meet-ups, hack-a-thons and conferences.

Over the course of all this, I’ve been able to forge some amazing relationships with clients all over America and beyond to the UK and Australia. The start-up experience is definitely exciting and entirely unpredictable. It’s a mobile experience in more than one way - while the company is obviously mobile-centric, the job has me working from home, traveling, looking for WiFi constantly while I’m out and about, uploading, downloading - you name it.

(Uploading in an SF Parking Gararge) ———————>

Most of all, it’s rewarding working with the truly inspiring, smart, creative team that CEO Aaron Radin and CMO Sayoko Teitelbaum have assembled. Seeing the dedication and problem solving that goes on everyday leaves me awestruck.

Happy New Year from the Toura Team

aaronradin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:42:06 -0800

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 source HTML5 framework and Mobile App Producer, our publisher solution now being used by major news organizations, magazine publishers and cultural institutions around the world.

Later on the evening, we properly celebrated the occasion with our New Year’s Party. Not following tradition, we postponed our holiday party and opted to do it in January while the majority of the team was in town. We certainly missed our colleagues who couldn’t make it, including Isobel Lyons, Robin Radin and Kathleen Schnoor.

Top left: Evan Hensleigh, Daniel Kim, Rebecca Murphey, Aaron Radin, Dan Imal
Bottom left: Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum, Ashley Williams, Chris Alexander, Matt Henry, Matt Rogish

We hope all of you have had an exciting start to 2012 as we have at Toura. To all of our customers, partners, vendors, friends and family, we wish you all a very wonderful new year with many good things to come.

Shaping the Future of Local Media & Mobile

aaronradin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:20:00 -0800

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 Cathy Hughes in 1979, when she bought an AM radio station, and is now run by her son, CEO, Alfred Liggins. They have an extraordinary management team, with President Barry Mayo running the stations and GM Dan Shelley running their digital business that regularly outperforms their competition.

African-Americans over index in their use of smartphones and consumption of content on mobile devices, so Radio One is keenly focused on making sure that both they and their advertisers can efficiently distribute their content on mobile.

Both my co-founder and I have a background in the local media space and think that there are enormous opportunities for local media companies to embrace and exploit the rapid content consumption that is occurring on mobile devices. Scale is always, and will continue to be, the greatest challenge for distribution and sales at a local level, but local media companies already have the infrastructure in place to enhance their relationships with their audience and advertisers through mobile. They just need to be able to do so in an efficient and cost-effective manner. This is where we are confident that Toura is providing an elegant solution to help our partners capture increased audience and revenue through the mobile distribution channel.

We expect that our relationship with Radio One will provide an early blueprint for the ways that mobile can be exploited at the local level by enabling the ability to deliver unique local content from their stations and their advertisers to their loyal local listeners. Perhaps the strongest asset that any local media company has is its sales team and their relationships with local businesses. These businesses have come to rely on and trust their local media partners to guide them through an ever-increasingly complex world of media distribution and promotion. By embracing the opportunity to help guide their clients in the mobile space, Radio One is wisely enhancing its role of a trusted partner and advisor to its clients. A perfect example is in the first app that they have helped enabled for their client, the CIAA, which is the oldest African-American athletic conference in the country. They have worked with Radio One to design an app, which profiles its historically black college and university members, promote its conference tournament and highlight the businesses that help to sponsor their continued success.

We look forward to enhancing the mobile presence of many more of Radio One’s clients in the coming days, as well as to help share their content with their loyal audience. We expect that we will have some new ways soon to share that Radio One, alongside other local media entities, are helping to shape the future of local and mobile.

Redefining What We Do

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:40:40 -0800

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 feedback she’s been hearing about Mulberry, as I embark on a challenging project to communicate what Toura does as a company, across our solutions, to our different audiences.

While Toura originated with this premise that we could help virtualize tours for physical locations, such as museums, attractions, universities, etc., we then evolved to providing a platform to the publishing industry (which includes attractions) to push their content across a variety of different handsets and devices.

Now, with the launch of Mulberry, we’re more than just a publishing platform. We’re really a framework that provides various tools to our different customer types. For developers, we’re able to provide a very easy way to develop apps using Mulberry. For publishers and content owners, we’re able to provide a very easy way to develop apps using Mobile App Producer. Now you’re starting to see a pattern develop here…

It’s now obvious to me, after having spent time with Rebecca and having spent endless hours with my co-founder and partner, Aaron Radin, that the message is indeed the same, regardless of our audience. It’s simply a different process or a different set of tools to get there, but ultimately, either way, we’ll get to the same result. Easier, better apps.

Mulberry: News from the Alpha

rmurphey — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:00:05 -0700

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 developers to get their feedback ahead of an official release.

That developer feedback has been fascinating. We’ve talked to developers who are using Mulberry as a shortcut to get their own startup off the ground, and developers who have caught on quickly to the potential to easily create a host of similar apps using Mulberry as the foundation. We’ve had developers identify and fix bugs we never knew we had, and we’ve even had developers make serious strides toward getting Mulberry — which was developed entirely on MacOS X — running on Windows.

The most interesting thing, though, has been seeing how developers are using Mulberry in ways we never imagined. Mulberry was originally written to create a certain kind of app: a rich, absorbing experience, but one that’s mostly built using static content. Our alpha testers are crafty folks, though, and they didn’t hesitate to ask us how to get Mulberry to do things it wasn’t built to do. They were seeking dynamic, data-driven experiences that were a far cry from traditional Mulberry apps.

Time and again, it was a matter of just a few lines of code to show them how Mulberry could meet their needs, and this proved one of our key hypotheses: Mulberry gives developers patterns and tools that they can adapt to meet a wide variety of needs, without ever worrying about the underlying plumbing that’s required to create a complex JavaScript application that will work across devices. This means that developers can focus their efforts on the parts of an application that are truly unique, and that could have a big impact on the time — and skills — required to get an app to market.

Exciting things will be happening in the coming days, weeks, and months. To kick things off, Mulberry version 0.1 will make a quiet, public appearance on GitHub any day now — you’ll want to sign up for the mailing list at mulberry.toura.com and follow @touradev on Twitter to be among the first to know. Once the code is in the wild, we’ll be hard at work figuring out how to continue to help developers make the most of it. We’re looking forward to it!

The Fate of webOS

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:04:00 -0700

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 to stop producing hardware for their smartphone and tablet operating system, webOS. As of now, it looks like she will not overturn this decision, perhaps two in one day would be a bit much. Or perhaps she agrees with the decision that HP can’t compete in this highly competitive market. Or perhaps she has other plans for the operating system, webOS. I am hopeful that Whitman is going for the latter.

We’re currently in a two horse race, with Apple and Google as the only ponies in play. While Android has been positioned as the open source operating system, it’s hard to predict the fate of Android, in the light of Goggle’s acquisition of Motorola. Could Android one day be exclusive to Motorola? Will other manufacturers want another alternative?

I think yes. And here’s where I think webOS can come into play. Since webOS uses WebKit functionality for its browsing capabilities, it’s a natural platform for developers to build web technology driven apps, such as HTML5. webOS should join the open source movement and become free and open to any and all hardware manufacturers. It should focus on marketing it’s own app store and signing up developers to participate in its ecosystem. It should continue to develop the operating system and be the OS of choice for HTML5 developers.

Maybe they have a shot to disrupt this two horse race we’re currently watching? Either way, I’ll be watching from the sidelines.

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."

aaronradin — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 05:45:00 -0700

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, he likely would have utilized the new media forms in ways that we have not yet conceived of and had miles, not inches, written about it.

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA to share the story of Warhol’s life and his art in a terrific new application, “Warhol: the art.” Available on iPhone, iPad and Android, this application is a comprehensive review of Warhol’s career and has been expertly curated by the museum’s staff. You can see a brief video about the app here http://bit.ly/pbr8p8 and even better you can download the app http://a.toura.com/47 which will be a great reference to Warhol’s career in your pocket.

Death of a Salesman

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:09:00 -0700

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 various news sites, blogs, etc. I watched and read Walt Mossberg’s thoughts. I watched slideshows on NY Times on how Steve impacted ordinary people’s lives. I went to Apple’s site and pondered if I send an email to rememberingsteve@apple.com. Instead, I thought I’d use this blogpost to share how Steve Jobs affected my life.

More than two years ago, my dear friend and former colleague came to me with an idea to start a business as a mobile app development platform. The premise was that we would develop tools, a solution, and a framework around organizing content and publishing that content to various mobile platforms. And I was hesitant. I was worried that the market was not ready for a solution like this.

Now, two years later, we have a company with an amazing product, brilliant team, and many customers using the platform to build apps, some of which have even been named iPad App of the Week. We’ve partnered with world-class brands to distribute their content across mobile and tablet devices. We work hard day in and day out to continue to innovate and provide the best products we can to our growing customer base.

Indirectly, Steve Jobs was certainly influential to me and to our business. Without his inventions, his drive, his success, we would not have a premise for Toura. He has shown us that if you build great products, people will want them. As part of his legacy, we will continue to do our part and distribute high quality products and content in the ecosystem he created. Thank you, Steve Jobs. RIP.

Pacific Standard Time and Toura

cmalexander27 — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:26:00 -0700

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 coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. Beginning October 2011, over 60 cultural institutions will make their contributions to this region-wide initiative encompassing every major L.A. art movement from 1945 to 1980.”

Toura is pleased that three of the participating institutions have used Toura’s Mobile App Producer to create their apps. New Toura clients The Getty and LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) along with previous client the HAMMER have all release apps which are either focused solely on the initiative or have a section of their app devoted to it.

The Getty

The Getty has four exhibitions featured in their app, all of which are part of Pacific Standard Time. The app features images, audio and didactic text for dozens of works of art in the exhibitions.

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970 charts the rise of the L.A. Art scene from Post-WWll where artists started developing their own forms of modernism. The exhibition continues into the 60’s with variations on Pop-Art and then into the 70’s where artists started experimenting with new techniques, subjects and approaches.

Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950–1980 focuses on the way these artist disseminated their work to the public. Art schools became “innovative forums for artists”, while other artists exploited mass media to reach their audience. The exhibition features photos, ephemera and art from the period.

From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column features a large scale sculpture by artist De Wain Valentine who became recognized for his innovative use of polyester resin in the 70’s. This sculpture will be on display for the first time and the exhibition tells the story of how this work was made through images, video and studies.

In Focus: Los Angeles 1945–1980 has 25 photographs - some that are iconic and others that are relatively unknown - by artists whose careers are defined by their association with the city of Los Angeles.

Download the Getty iPhone, iPad or Android app for Pacific Standard Time at: http://a.toura.com/3179

LACMA

LACMA presents the first major exhibition on modernist design in midcentury California, California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way”. Spanning all areas of art and design from ceramic to furniture to fashion and textiles, the exhibition “aims to elucidate the 1951 quote from émigré Greta Magnusson Grossman that … California design “is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions…It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way.”“

The app created for the exhibition contains over a hundred high resolution images and over a dozen never before seen video interviews with highly recognized California designers. Learn about design history in California with an interactive map highlighting artist studios, schools, past exhibitions and more.

Download the LACMA iPhone, iPad or Android app for Pacific Standard Time at: http://a.toura.com/3194

HAMMER

Existing Toura client, the HAMMER Museum, has updated their app to include new features along with a new section devoted to their Pacific Standard Time offering. The exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980“chronicles the vital legacy of the city’s African American artists.” With subject matter drawing to an extent from the civil rights and Black Power movements, artist such as Betye Saar, David Hammons, and Noah Purifoy became largely influenced by Southern California movements like assemblage, “finish fetish”, and California Pop. The exhibition features 140 works of art.

The HAMMER app contains many images from the exhibition along with audio recordings of the exhibition curators discussing the work and exhibition in detail.

Download the HAMMER app for iPhone and Android at: http://a.toura.com/11

Toura wants to thank our Pacific Standard Time clients for choosing Mobile App Producer and hope that their exhibitions and their apps are are great success!

Cost of Distribution vs. Return on Investment

aaronradin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:35:00 -0700

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 and opportunities of mobile content distribution.

I am not going to run through the specific statistics here of how fast mobile content consumption is growing, but it is clear that that the speed of growth has dramatically altered the way that publishers must think about how they distribute their content. Many of the publishers I have spoken with recently expect that up to half of their traffic to come from a mobile device next year.

There are, of course, two primary distribution channels for mobile: web and apps. I believe that a publisher has no choice but to focus on both. The latest research suggests that more content is being consumed through mobile apps, yet most publishers have created just one or a small handful of apps, generally for their marquee content titles, leaving vast amounts of content still inaccessible from a mobile device. This has, to some extent, been driven by economics. In most cases, publishers have spent considerable amount of time, money and resources to develop their first apps on iOS. A lot of them repeat the effort to then launch, if at all, on Android even though it represents about double the incremental audience. Given the effort and resources, the ROI on these applications may be neutral at best.

This is the quandary facing publishers today: a rapidly growing audience on mobile devices that they must reach with their content, but scale the distribution in a way that has incremental positive financial value to their business. Dennis Publishing has set out a blueprint of how they plan to deal with this challenge. It will be very interesting to see how other publishers manage it.

Onsite Marketing at the Art Institute of Chicago

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:34:00 -0700

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 Institute of Chicago. They happened to be one of our first clients and launched a comprehensive guide to their French Impressionism collection.

It’s amazing for me, almost 2 years later, to see this promotion taking place on the screens in the lobby of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is certainly a testament to this client’s commitment on promoting the app and making it an integral part of their overall communication strategy to their visitors. They have millions of people walking through their doors each year, and it’s important for them, as a Chicago landmark, to educate their visitors that their content is available on smartphones and tablets.

As for their results, they enjoy a steady number of downloads every day, so they must be doing something right. Now, on to their next app…

Introducing Toura Mulberry

rmurphey — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:51:18 -0700

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 technologies.

Our tools draw heavily on open-source technologies — Rails, Dojo, and PhoneGap, to name just a few — and today we’re happy to announce that we’ll be making our own entry into the world of open-source by releasing our content publishing system, which we’ve code-named Mulberry.

With Mulberry, developers can scaffold, configure, customize, test, and deploy mobile apps using the web technologies they already know. Developers can use CSS3 to apply unique styles to a solid base; they can use a simple JavaScript API to create and integrate custom components; and they can take advantage of built-in systems for enabling features like over-the-air updates, social integration, and more.

Why open source? Aside from the fact that we’ve benefited from it so heavily in our efforts, we also look to success stories like WordPress. By making it easy for developers to use, extend, and improve the platform, an enormous community emerged, and with it came an unrivaled ecosystem of plugins and themes — something no single company ever could have achieved with closed technology. Over the years, WordPress became the de facto server-side software for creating content sites, and these days it is known and respected far beyond the developer community where it got its start.

An ecosystem and community like that benefits us, and it benefits our users. Toura gains valuable learning, as it sees how developers use the system, where it excels and where it falls short. Our users get access to the expertise of not just a company, but a community — something money can’t buy. They also get access to the ecosystem of components, themes, and more that will emerge.

We’re in the midst of a closed alpha of the Mulberry platform with a few select developers, dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, but you can look for the code to appear on GitHub in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can learn more about Mulberry and sign up to participate in the alpha.

Considering App Reviews

cmalexander27 — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:53:51 -0700

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 will always be good reviews, you will undoubtedly receive some bad ones along the way. Reviews, in and of themselves are good. You can find out what people like and/or dislike about your application allowing you to make adjustments. However, when you receive a review, especially a bad one, the app markets make it surprisingly difficult to deal with. If your first review is a negative one it can immediately impact sales.

It would be great, in a perfect world, to reply directly to the reviewer through the store. In many cases a quick and easy explanation would be all that is needed. However, both the Apple App Store and the Android Market do not allow for two-way communication. If there is a negative review, the app creator is at the mercy of the reviewers. You could login in as yourself with your personal account and give a reply as a review, but you are limited to one review per app.

So, what can you do?

Well, the Android Market does not offer much recourse, but Apple does have some services and policies you can employ.

First, you should consider the review and what the reviewer meant. Perhaps the reasons they are stating are valid and you should look at your app and make adjustments based on the review. It’s never wise though to let one person sway you in one direction so look for common similarities between multiple reviews to help inform your decisions to make changes.

If the the review is clearly out of touch with the application - let’s say someone states “Not what I was expecting. Only a handful of images.” - Apple offers a “Report a Concern” link. Selecting this link allows you to send a note to Apple to express your disagreement with the comment. You may write something like, “User did not read the description thoroughly. The app contains over 100 images. This review gives a false impression of our app”. While this note goes into the mysterious void known as Apple, it has worked on numerous occasions with a successful removal of the comment. Android, unfortunately does not offer a similar feature.

Additionally, Apple offers another feature along with “Report a Concern” - the “Was this review helpful” option. This gives you the choice of “Yes” or “No”. The more “Yes” selections the review receives the higher in the list of reviews it appears being the first ones seen by interested purchasers. The more “No” replies will push the review toward the bottom of the list. Again, the Android Market does not offer a similar functionality.

If you want your app to have a clean slate of reviews you can alway resubmit a new and improved version to the Apple App Store. This basically gives you a fresh start since reviews are tied to versions. Android keeps all the reviews for all versions not allowing you to distinguish one from another.

So what can you do about Android? There are a few things.

On both app markets you can quickly and easily change the application description. You can utilize this to broadcast messages about the app and to clarify certain misunderstandings about it. Since both stores utilize plain text in their descriptions you may need to broadcast the message in special ways:

YOU CAN DO IT IN ALL CAPS.

***Or, you can do it with asterisks.***

——-Additionally you can use hyphens——

Both app markets also have the ability to link to a support site of some kind or another and include a link to send an email to you for help. You can create a page on your website that offers troubleshooting tips and suggestions then point the support link to that page.

When your app launches It is always a good idea to get the message out to all of your colleagues and friends. Let’s face it, your friends and family are going to be much kinder to you than people you don’t know. It’s also a great opportunity to have them write a favorable review of the application to help with the star ratings average. Additionally, you can solicit reviews via Facebook and Twitter Channels. These followers believe in you and what you are offering. They will certainly let you know what you are doing right.

As app creators let’s hope that one day the tools will be there to allow us to immediately respond to reviewers of the apps. Ebay and Yelp have allowed this functionality to give a voice to sellers and business owners. Until that time comes we’ll just have to keep building great apps!

Uncool HTML5

mrdanimal — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:09:02 -0700

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 technologies such as CSS3.) Some of these smaller improvements, while not nearly as cool as <video> or <canvas>, can have more effect on the day-to-day problems of web developers than those more popular Flash-killing tags.

Placeholder text

One of the original purposes of HTML5 was to improve HTML forms. HTML5 introduces a large number of additional input types and attributes, many of which have uneven implementations in browsers in the wild. But the lowly placeholder attribute has nearly universal support in modern browsers.

It implements a common UI pattern in which the text field contains some hint text to let the user know what to enter there. Once the input gains focus, the text disappears. Here’s what it looks like in Chrome, along with the code:

<input type="text" placeholder="Type something">

While this is pretty simple to handle with JavaScript, you’d still have to make sure you handle edge cases correctly. E.g. if the user clicks “Submit” without entering anything in the field, you’d have to make sure you don’t submit the placeholder text as the data for that field. But one simple HTML attribute eliminates all that messy JavaScript, and it works in all modern browsers, without affecting older browsers.

text-overflow: ellipsis

This is another little gem that would normally require some JavaScript to duplicate. Say you have a long block of text content, but your design only has space for a single line -such as a title bar or a pull quote.

Once again, you could write some JavaScript to handle this, but why not let CSS handle it instead?

A typical Javascript implementation would involve estimating how many characters can fit within the space available, then truncating the string to that length. But with a variable width font, and words of varying lengths, this is always going to be a rough estimate at best. There are going to be edge cases in which you trim too much or too little, and then things will get ugly.

So, you have a choice: Forget about the edge cases and just accept that your graphic design will be ugly in those cases, or spend a bunch of time writing the perfect algorithm to truncate sentences correctly.

Or use text-overflow: ellipsis and let the browser do the work.

<style>
#long-text {
    background-color: #c9c;
    padding: 10px;
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
</style>

<div id="long-text">
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam a nisl ut justo cursus luctus eu at enim. Praesent et nunc nec enim porttitor eleifend. 
</div>

Neither of these little features are going to make or break an application, and you could ultimately accomplish something similar in JavaScript. But by keeping this kind of presentational logic out of your JavaScript you can keep your application code focused on business logic, with less work and less code.

Mobile Apps: A Once-in-a-Decade Opportunity

rmarkus — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:10:00 -0700

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 the growth of mobile media. Researcher In-Stat projects 48 billion app downloads by 2015, generating more than $29 billion in app revenue. When one considers this market did not exist a few years ago, mobile apps clearly deliver a rare and exceptional opportunity for content publishers.

Due to the engaging nature of mobile apps as a content delivery vehicle, an intriguing opportunity has opened up for content publishers of all sizes and styles. And we’re not talking PDF versions of magazines for iPad in this case.

Topical and re-purposed content in the form of mobile apps for the smartphone and tablet audience can deliver consumer engagement and revenue. A publisher need not create an app for its entire magazine, book, or library of content.

Savvy publishers see a real opportunity in publishing topical, focused or niche apps. For example, a publisher of cooking and lifestyle content may publish a line of “how-to” and “tricks and tips” apps around shopping for, buying and using products related to seasonal entertaining at home.

Revenue opportunities are abundant on the back-end via sponsorship and advertising, and the front-end via app store sales (apps enjoy a merchant layer that remains elusive to web content).

Preventing publishers from taking advantage of this opportunity to-date has been the high cost and pain of bespoke app development. Such a strategy is simply not scalable in cost, workflow or distribution.

We created the Toura platform to solve for those very issues. and publishers from SMB to Enterprise, who’ve experienced the challenges of bespoke app development, are taking notice.

It’s an exciting time …a once-in-a-decade time… and we’re thrilled to be an innovative player in the mobile app arena.

Write us at info@toura.com or contact me directly for more information: Rich Markus | VP Business Development | rmarkus@toura.com | B 415.794.9644

Improved Pinch & Zoom in Toura Apps

rmurphey — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:06:35 -0700

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 another operating system. Going native means duplication of effort, both in development and maintenance. It also means that expanding to any new platform requires developing a new native component.

One example of where we opted for an HTML5/CSS3 solution was with our image gallery. The original version of our content delivery system used a native component; in the new system, we use the iScroll library to create swipe-able image galleries. When you click on one of the images in a gallery, you get a full-screen view of the image, where you can “pinch” the image to zoom in or out if your device has multi-touch support.

The iScroll library provides a lot of power, but one thing we were never happy with was the image quality when you zoomed in on an image, because iScroll didn’t do anything to redraw the image when it zoomed. That meant that if you zoomed in to 3x on an image that was initially displayed at 320 x 200 pixels, the image ended up looking grainy — each pixel was being displayed at three times its normal size:

More often than not, though, we had more pixel data available to us than we were using to initially display the image — we’d display an image at 320 x 200 pixels to fit the whole image into the space available on a phone screen, but the image stored on the device was actually much larger. It was clear that a better experience should be possible.

Last week, we decided to see if we could improve the zooming situation a bit — one of our clients was working on an app that featured a lot of images with text in them, so there was new urgency to the issue. After a bit of thinking, we realized that the answer was to get the image to redraw at a new size when a user finished zooming, much like Google Maps draws a new set of map tiles at an appropriate scale when you zoom in or out.

Once we had a strategy in mind, the path was pretty clear: we asked iScroll to tell us when the user was done zooming, and then used information about the just-completed pinch gesture to calculate a new image size in JavaScript. A nasty bug in Mobile Safari means we use CSS backgrounds to display most of the images in the app, and that approach made this task easy: we just needed to resize the container the image was in, and -webkit-background-size: contain would take care of the rest. In the end, a lot of thought and a few lines of code solved a nagging problem:

var scale = scroller.scale,
    oldWidth = dojo.style(imageContainer, 'width'),
    oldHeight = dojo.style(imageContainer, 'height'),
    newWidth = oldWidth * scale,
    newHeight = oldHeight * scale,
    ratio = oldWidth / oldHeight;

dojo.style(imageContainer, 'width', newWidth + 'px');
dojo.style(imageContainer, 'height', newHeight + 'px');
scroller.zoom(scroller.x, scroller.y, 1, 0);

Now that this code is in production, new apps are doing this little bit of math whenever you zoom in on an image in an image gallery, and the change in quality is hard to miss:

We hope you like it :)

Apple Price Increase in the UK

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:04:58 -0700

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 tiers and how Apple assigns marketing prices based on relative exchange rates? My guess is no.

My fellow countrymen in the United States are not affected by this price increase. That’s because Apple chose to keep the US$0.99 price as the foundation for how all other countries were affected. On the flip side, the Japanese, Australians and Swiss are all happy about this. That’s because their currencies have flourished against the dollar and their local market pricing has come down.

One might think that £0.10 is not a big deal. One also might think that the British should be used it to it. They certainly pay more for Apple hardware. They pay higher income tax and higher sales tax. So what’s another 15% on apps, right? Well, I think they are wrong. It will be interesting to see how the UK consumer responds. And how the Android marketshare is affected.

Introducing Our Blog

teitelco-deactivated20121210 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:35:00 -0700

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 be very focused on our products and solutions, but also about our vision or understanding about what’s going on in the mobile and technology space today.

I had a client recently ask me about my thoughts on the direction of the new Financial Times web app and what I think it means in regards to the future of mobile applications. The honest truth is that I don’t really know what it means. However, I certainly applaud the FT in taking the risk and controlling their distribution, while protecting their subscription revenues. I believe that people will always demand quality content and it’s important that the distributors do not underestimate the power of the brand. FT is a powerful brand with a very loyal customer base. My guess is that this customer base is going to find them wherever they exist – in the app store or through a browser.

I’m still a believer that content creators should continue to distribute their content to as many places as possible, wherever their customer wants to consume it. Whether it’s online or on mobile, either as apps, web apps or mobile web, it’s important for content owners to be discoverable. This is a tough task, but I’m excited to be part of the team at Toura dedicated to making this easier and efficient for our clients.