iPad Version of Wall Street Journal Will Cost $17.99 A Month

Gizmodo quotes an article from the official WSJ blog:

“WSJ has reported on itself by saying that “according to a person familiar with the matter,” their monthly iPad subscription will cost $17.99 a month.”

Furthermore, on advertising:

“The WSJ article also addresses advertising on the iPad—apparently Time magazine will debut its iPad version with adverts from Unilever, Toyota, Fidelity Investments and three other companies, with each ad said to be setting them back $200,000 for the full first eight issues. Meanwhile, Wired magazine will offer a little extra something for advertisers who buy eight pages of ads for each issue—with video and “extra features” promised.”

While $18 for a monthly subscription sounds a little bit high to me, at least it’s a start.

Spreads for iPad: A new Way to Be Informed

We all know that the iPad is gonna change the way we consume media, though we still don’t know how exactly. Sure the first step will be iBooks, with newspapers and magazines to follow with iPad specific apps and subscription services. But back to where we are now, what about RSS feeds? Yeah, those things you’re likely to use with Google Reader which should have been died 2 years ago but they’re still here. I honestly don’t see RSS completely die anytime soon, I’m more orientated towards an evolution and change and maybe - I don’t know much about it at this time -  Spreads for iPad will contribute to this change.

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iBooks Pricing Leaked, Matches Amazon’s Kindle

AppAdvice has just posted what it seems a real screenshot of the iBookstore, the place where we’ll be able to purchase our iBooks as soon as the iPad goes out. Well, it turns out that despite Apple taking its usual 30% of revenue from each download, the prices will be similar to Amazon’s Kindle ones - and this could be a real game changer for Apple.

Bad news for Amazon.

Five Factors Contributing to Google’s “Demise”

Link

The second one is worth a mention here:

“Google is having trouble making money from anything but search, which is why, he says, hardly a week goes by without word of another Google innovation. “Last week it was Google broadband. This week it’s Google TV. It’s all a big joke. Even Android is a joke.”

Advertisers Plan to Exploit iPad Size

Macnn reports:

“As the iPad is incapable of Flash, and blocks cross-domain cookies, more interest is said to lay with in-app advertising. AdMarvel CEO Mahi de Silva notes that the iPhone 3.2 SDK allows for interstitial ads, click-to-connect commands and even video, none of which can be found in present iPhone campaigns. Most iPhone apps rely on small banners or links, which can moreover take people away from whatever content they happened to be looking at.”

Looking forward to Google’s take on this.

The iPad and Horror Vacui Application Design

I was reading Marco’s latest post about Instapaper for iPad last night, and as I saw the screenshots of the new version I realized something: developers seem to see the bigger screen of the new device only as a way to put more information on screen, rather than a way to lay out information in a different way.

Don’t get me wrong, of course with a bigger screen you’d like to insert more interface elements and stuff - the point is, you don’t necessarily have to. Instead of focusing on how to fill that space with elements that would be located in a different window otherwise, why not thinking about how to explore new ways to present information?

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