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Read It Later Now Goes Beyond Paywalls, Supports Tweet Attribution

Today is a good day for online services aimed at letting users read content from the web. After the big news that Readability is launching a subscription service and it’s teaming up with Instapaper, Read It Later has just announced the release of an updated version of its official iOS app for iPhone and iPad, which reaches version 2.4.

The path towards the much anticipated Read It Later 3.0 starts with the possibility to access websites behind a pay wall. The problem with apps like Instapaper and Read It Later, in fact, is that subscription-based websites like the Wall Street Journal and ESPN Insider don’t support these tools out of the box, nor do they easily accept the fact that an online application is used to access their content in an uncluttered, ad-free layout. So it’s been a problem for developers to find a way to let users keep using their favorite reading tools, whilst keeping the access to the pay wall active. The solution implemented in Read It Later 2.4 is simple and genius: there’s an account manager to create, save and organize all your logins to subscription-based sources. Read more

Official Basecamp Mobile Web App Launches

37Signals has announced the exciting launch of Basecamp Mobile, an official web app that works universally across Webkit browsers on mobile smartphones. With experience in designing mobile applications, 37Signals’ goal was to release a strong, universal HTML5 app that didn’t require in-house iPhone & Android developers. The end result? Basecamp works across WebOS and Blackberry devices too!

A big part of this initial release was nailing the basics that mattered the most. We had to make a bunch of hard calls about what was important enough to make version 1. That meant leaving some things out and not bringing full functionality to other things. For example, you can view Milestones but you can’t add new ones. But you can view, add, change, and assign to-dos. We plan on rounding out the functionality as time goes on.

Jason Fried notes that this version will launch without every editing feature under the sun, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have the ability to view Writeboards, reply to messages, or browse attached PDFs. At MacStories, we’re very excited that there’s finally an official mobile solution for one of our favorite products, and we can’t wait to see where the company takes us. If you breath the 37Signals mantra, read up on the launch notes via the Signal vs. Noise blog before catching the “Works Without Apps!” seal of approval on the mobile landing page. Read more

First Details of The Daily: Six Sections, Sudoku, Interactive Articles

The Daily, News Corp.’s much anticipated iPad-only newspaper, will be announced tomorrow with a media event at New York’s Guggenheim museum. The publication is the result of months of collaboration between Murdoch’s News Corp. and Apple, which will send  VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue to join Murdoch on stage for the presentation. The Daily, in fact, will be based on a new subscription system created by Apple that will allow users to receive fresh content every morning through an iTunes’ push feature. Read more

iOS Devices Accounted for 2% of Worldwide Browsing in January

A new report by NetMarketShare has revealed that the iOS ecosystem of devices has broken 2% of all browsing on the web. The January figures published by the analyst revealed the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reached 2.06% of global browsing, accelerated by the holiday period.

Singapore had the highest percentage of iOS devices at virtually 10% and Australia was one of the highest countries at 5.6%. The UK was also close at 5.1% and the US had 3.4% in January.

See above for a graphic of world browsing by iOS devices and head over to NetMarketShare for a full breakdown of each country’s percentage of iOS device usage.

[Via 9to5Mac]

The New Readability Has Ambitious Future

Readability, the Javascript library that stripped websites of unnecessary graphics and elements to provide the user with a simple, easier to read page, has today revealed the next step in it’s future. The ambition plan includes fundamental new advancements including; usage on mobile devices, saving Readability-enhanced pages, social features, a subscription service that supports writers and a partnership with Marco Arment’s Instapaper.

One of the biggest new features of the new Readability is it’s subscription service which is a new model that aims to give back to the writers and publishers that you read from. The subscription starts from $5 but can be as high as you want to pay, and 70% go back to writers and publishers, so obviously the more you pay the more goes back to the content creators. There will still be the basic Readability which does not require a subscription.

Jump the break for full details.

Read more

Report Says 26% of Mobile Apps Are Only Run Once

Analyst firm Localytics decided to investigate how many apps are downloaded and then used only once, never to be touched again. What they discovered was that a surprisingly high percentage of 26% of all apps downloaded were only ever used once.

The research Localytics did involved thousands of apps from every major mobile platform and over a period of a year. In fact interestingly throughout 2010 the number of apps that were only run once increased from 22% in the first quarter to 28% by the fourth quarter.

Read more

Apple Possibly Tightening the iOS Walled Garden

Apple seems to be tightening its control over the App Store ecosystem after telling some developers including Sony that the selling of e-books within their app must go through Apple. The move is somewhat contradictory of recent movements by Apple to open up the App Store and gestures of collaboration with publishers.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division told the New York Times that Apple rejected Sony’s e-book reader iPhone application on the basis that the app would have let users buy e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store, bypassing Apple and that any purchases made from within an app must go through Apple from now on.  Mr. Haber said; “We always wanted to bring the content to as many devices as possible, not one device to one store.”.

[Updated and points clarified in light of responses to the NYT article]

Read more

iPad ‘Real Positive’ for USA Today’s Future

The Telegraph reported yesterday that Gannett, publisher of USA Today has been enthused by the iPad’s impact on their business, despite having to initiate cost-cutting measures in other aspects of their business. Their free iPad App, available worldwide, has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times since launching April last year.

Gannett, like many other Newspaper organizations had to cut 130 jobs in August at USA Today and lost 6% advertising revenue worth $722m in the last quarter. Yet Gannett’s chief operating officer, Gracia Martore said that “The iPad has been a real positive for USA Today, we expect this will translate into much more significant improvement.”

At this stage USA Today remains free and it’s revenue comes from generating ad revenue from within the app. Gannett’s Chief Executive however couldn’t rule out charging users in the future, saying “We’re looking across the board at this.” Gannett and other newspaper publishers will no doubt be watching closely at tomorrow’s announcement of News Corp’s The Daily and this month’s pay-wall that the New York Times is implementing.

[Via The Telegraph]

Apple Job Posting Suggests LTE for iOS Devices

As noted by 9to5mac, a new job listing on Apple’s website suggests support for LTE is being considered at Cupertino as a “specific duty” for iOS cellular protocol engineers. While LTE-related job listings have surfaced before, this is the first time LTE is mentioned among the “specific duties” for an applicant.

Specific Duties

- Implementation, Integration, customization, enhancement and maintenance of L1-3 Protocols for one or more of the following air interface: GSM/UMTS, CDMA (1x/EVDO), LTE etc.
- Carrier specific features implementation

Job listings shouldn’t be considered as the ultimate proof of a new feature Apple is working on, but they provide good indication of things to come sometime in the future, or that are at least being tested. LTE 4G connectivity seems pretty obvious at this point, considering that carriers in the US are updating their networks to support it and several European carriers have confirmed LTE will be launched during 2012 and 2013.

It is unclear whether the next-generation iPhone will feature LTE or not, but the rumors have been intensifying lately with China Mobile making the bold statement that “Apple will support LTE” and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saying “LTE will come”.