The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘abc’

Earlier this week, ABC News launched a new iPad application that adds a twist to the way most apps present the news: a third dimension. Fire up the app and you’re immediately faced with a nifty-looking globe that’s covered in headlines and photographs depicting the day’s top stories; tap one and you’ll be linked to the relevant video clip or news article. It’s quite snazzy, at least from a looks perspective (more on that later), and it’s quickly risen to become the #1 free application on the App Store.

To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application.

Stephanopoulos says that he was quickly enamored of the application’s globe, which is a running theme in the interviews (though he said that he hadn’t had a chance to play around with it too much at the time of the interview). On a related note, when guaging his affinity for gadgets on a scale of 1-10, he gives himself a 4.5 (he does own an iPad, but his family has issues getting the cable box to behave properly).

Andrew Morse, Executive Producer of Integration and Innovation at ABC News Digital, says that the globe is meant to be a “meandering experience”. He explains that on traditional sites, people complain that you only get what you’re looking for, and that there isn’t the discovery factor you get from a newspaper.

Isaac Josephson, VP Product Development for ABC News Digital, says that the team has been working on the app for a solid three months, and that it stirred up more excitement among traditional broadcasters than any previous product they’d developed.

My take on the app? Looks aren’t everything — if you want to catch up on the day’s top headlines at a glance, this might not be what you’re looking for. The globe may be fun, but in my experience it also has a habit of obscuring most of the app’s available content (only two or three stories are legible at once). You can flick the globe around a few times and be pretty confident that you’ve seen everything, but it’s hard to kick the nagging feeling that you may have inadvertently skipped over the day’s top story.

That said, the ABC team may be right: if you’re just looking to kill some time discovering random highlights from the day’s news, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. And if you just want the headlines, you can venture over to the ABC News HTML5 site, which is integrated into the app.

Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.

Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“

As Vogels points out, the best reviews are highlighted on reviews-only page. The most helpful positive review reads: “So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” Meanwhile, the most helpful negative review reads:

A recent report by the local ABC affiliate in the Bay Area uncovered some startling information: Apple Stores weren’t accepting cash for iPads. That’s right, you had to pay with credit or no iPad for you.

Following the 7 On Your Side report, there was “outcry all across the country,” ABC 7 reports. Not anymore. Apple has responded. Thank God.

Apple has changed its store policy to now accept cash and credit cards when customers want to pay for an iPad. “We want to make sure it’s as fair as possible for people to get iPads,” said Apple Sr. Vice President Ron Johnson tells ABC 7.

Effective immediately across the country, if you want to use cash to buy your iPads, you can now do so (provided you register for an Apple account, which you’ll need for the iPad anyway).

And that’s not all. Apple was so moved by the story of one woman feature in the investigation, that they decided to drive to her home and deliver her an iPad for free. Her key quote for the investigation? “Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break.”

A break, she got.

“What I would like to say to Steve is thank you,” the woman now tells ABC.

In all (okay, somewhat) seriousness, this part is somewhat interesting:

Johnson tells 7 On Your Side that grey market sales were never the issue, as many assumed. He says the policy was instituted to make sure the tablets were fairly distributed during a time of high demand. Now, he says, he hopes it will be even more fair by reaching customers who want to buy with cash.

So the policy was in place for a stated reason, that reason hasn’t gone away, and yet Apple just decided to change its policy? It sounds like some of Apple’s critics need to take a lesson from ABC 7 and this woman.

This is great news for anyone with with $500 to $1,000 in cash burning a hole in their pocket. Well, unless they actually want to buy an iPad. Those are still sold out across most of the country.

UrbanSpoon plans to continue its assault on OpenTable, and its weapon of choice is going to be the iPad. I am not talking about UrbanSpoon’s slick iPad app which is already out and is aimed at consumers. I am talking about the RezBook, which is part of UrbanSpoon Rez and is aimed at restaurant owners.

When it comes out in June, RezBook will be a full reservation system. Instead of writing down reservations in a paper book, restaurant owners will be able to enter them directly into the iPad, see bookings by time and by table. With a $500 iPad and RezBook, any restaurant will be able to afford a computerized reservation system. It won’t be free. RezBook will charge $1 per reservation, plus a low monthly fee. It will be much cheaper than a dedicated reservation system, and slightly cheaper than OpenTable, which is the company UrbanSpoon is really going after.

RezBook works hand-in-hand with UrbanSpoon Rez, an iPhone application that launched last Fall. UrbanSpoon Rez helps restaurants promote open tables and add a Rez button to their Websites, their page on Citysearch, mobile apps like UrbanSpoon, or to other sites and apps through CityGrid. RezBook takes those incoming reservations and manages them on the backend, and creates a customer database in the process.

The combination of Rez button promotions and the iPad’s off-the-shelf affordability should allow UrbanSpoon to target a wider swath of restaurants than the kind you currently find on OpenTable. At least that is the plan. I place RezBook in the same category as Square’s iPad app, which turns the tablet into a mobile cash register. Both of these apps leverage the iPad to bring sophisticated business software to small merchants with the promise of bringing them into the digital age.

When is OpenTable going to come out with its iPad app?

Software testing marketplace uTest today announced the results of its so-called “TV Networks Bug Battle” competition. More than 500 software professionals from 30 countries around the world participated in the quarterly competition, reporting a total of 908 technical, functional and GUI bugs in the web and mobile apps of NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC.

Testers were challenged to search the sites for bugs – performing a combination of exploratory, functional and usability testing. At its conclusion, participants filled out a detailed survey in which they ranked each site based on video quality, ease of use, community features and actual TV content/shows. After carefully reviewing each bug and survey response, uTest awarded roughly $4,000 in prize money based on the quality of bugs and feedback.

Top findings:

- Nearly 50% of survey respondents chose video quality as the attribute most important to them when evaluating an online TV network. NBC.com scored highest in video quality.
- Ease of use was deemed most important by 33% of the participants, followed by TV content & shows (12%) and community features (5%). CBS.com scored highest in ease of use.
- 70% of respondents watch at least one show online each week, with more than one quarter watching four or more. 7% watch seven or more programs.
- More than 10% of the total reported bugs were found on mobile devices.
- None of the TV network support mobile video watching as they rely on Flash (tested on Blackberry, iPhone, Android and other mobile platforms).
- Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities of varying degrees of severity were reported on three out of the four sites.

TV Network comparison (top-two box score of testers who rated each site as “excellent” or “good”):

Here’s the full report:

Total advertising expenditures fell 12.3% last year to $125.3 billion as compared to 2008, according to data released today by Kantar Media. However, Q4 2009 ad spending was off 6% against the year ago period, with nearly all media improving upon their January-September performance.

Zooming in on the digital part of equation, Kantar Media says Internet display ad expenditures actually increased 7.3 percent in 2009, aided by higher spending from the telecom, factory auto and travel categories.

Print media were unsurprisingly hit hard, with measured ad spending in the Newspaper sector plunging by 19.7% in 2009.

You can find more figures and insights in the press release.