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Tag: "Conde Nast"

Wired Producing Short Films for Its iPad App

By | August 2, 2010 | No comment yet
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Over the last 4 weeks, Condé Nast has been very active releasing updates for the Wired Magazine app.

In early July, Wired started offering its magazine app as a free download. But, keep in mind you still have to buy the full issue of the magazine, which you can update with the in-app purchase feature.

Then, Condé Nast made another move by dropping the price of the July issue to $3.99. We don’t know if this will be the official price going forward, but the August issue is available once again at $3.99.

So far, Wired has brought a magazine app with tons of multimedia, including audio, videos, and interactive graphics. With the August issue, the company is adding more multimedia content to their collection. They are now including original short films that are available exclusively on your iPad.

The latest app update features five short films with comic Will Ferrell. Watch Will Ferrell spoof once-anticipated inventions for the 21st century in a series of films that are tied to the August issue titled, “The Future That Never Happened”.

It’s hard to say if the new added features will convince more people to download the magazine app. However, we cannot ignore some facts. Wired has already experienced thousands of downloads for their magazine since it came out over 2 months ago. And, publisher Condé Nast seems to be planning to push lots of video content to you via their iPad app.

Wired for iPad – New Features and New Price

By | July 1, 2010 | No comment yet
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After more than 90,000 copies sold since going on sale, Wired Magazine has returned with the July issue and plenty of updates. Without further ado, let’s get into the details.

The Wired app is now free to download. But, keep in mind you still have to buy the full issue of the magazine, which you can update with the new in-app purchase feature. You will be able to get both future and past issues from the same app. So, if you purchased the June issue, you’ll still have full access to that issue.

Another move by Condé Nast was to drop the price of the current issue compared to last month. The July issue is a dollar cheaper, which means you can purchase the issue for $3.99. We don’t know if this will be the official price going forward, or if the price will be reduced even more. Magazine representatives have mentioned the recent price cut is associated with their investigation of different business models.

If anything, the price drop at least shows the company is trying to figure out ways to make their content available more efficiently and at a cheaper price. I’m not one that will keep every single issue on my iPad. I’ll need that space for other things eventually. But, I like the fact the new Wired app gives me some flexibility to download old issues, or skip an issue and download it later as a back issue.

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Gourmet Magazine Returns as iPad App

By | June 23, 2010 | 1 comment
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Condé Nast has announced that its Gourmet magazine will relaunch as an iPad app titled Gourmet Live. The app promises to be an entirely new digital content product.

Based on what we’ve seen, Gourmet Live is an immersive and interactive content experience built on an ever-expanding collection of articles, menus, photos, videos and more.

As expected from such a fancy magazine, the app will bring together branded high-quality content, social and location-based technology, as well as monetization structures new to Condé Nast, like virtual currency, that are typical in digital economies like gaming.

When we look at Gourmet’s app, it certainly displays visual elegance and flashy animations. The app captures the essence of your iPad by simply taking advantage of your tablet’s fancy features.
Check out more and a Gourmet demo video after the break>>

Wired Magazine for iPad Available Now!

By | May 26, 2010 | 4 comments
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Condé Nast has finally delivered its Wired magazine application for the iPad.

Several weeks ago Wired was still insisting that its magazine app for tablets would still reach the iPad despite being built using Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone tool. At that time, publisher Condé Nast said, they were working with Adobe to develop the reader, but was adamant that it would still pass Apple’s iPhone 4.0 guidelines.

Many of us were still speculating, whether Wired had actually discovered a workaround for Apple’s guidelines, or was simply hoping that it will be given an exception.

Well, it seems that Wired had to rebuild the Wired app from the ground up using Objective C, and now it is available to Wired fans on the App Store.

We have not tried the app yet, but it seems it comes with lots of bells and whistles. If you are a Wired fan and like the traditional paper magazine experience, you will probably like the digital magazine experience on your iPad. It will enlighten you with great visual tools, images and short films.

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Conde Nast Clarifies GQ App Downloads

By | May 18, 2010 | No comment yet
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Looks like GQ’s apps sales might be higher than first reported.  Conde Nast contacted PadGadget to provide some clarification to a story we ran earlier this morning on GQ’s iPad apps sales.

According to Conde Nast, there have been 57,000 downloads of their GQ app for the iPhone and iPad since last December.  According to GQ spokeswoman Peri Dorset, they have no way of knowing how many iPad downloads there have been, as GQ does not sell an iPad only version of their app.

Obviously it’s hard to say what impact the iPad has had on GQ app sales but according to Dorset, they saw a traffic spike during the initial iPad launch on April 3 and then again on when the 3G iPad launched.

Initial GQ iPad App Downloads Disappoint

By | May 18, 2010 | 3 comments
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The iPad was heralded as the digital savior for many newspaper and magazine publishers but it seems iPad magazine sales have not been as brisk as many editors had hoped.  Gentlemen’s Quarterly publisher Pete Hunsinger told min that there have only been 365 downloads of GQ’s December 2009 Man of the Year iPad edition.  This equates to a whopping $1,091.35 for Conde Nast before Apple takes their 30% cut.

The low numbers don’t seem to phase Hunsinger. “This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage,” says Hunsinger. “Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”

Although sales numbers are low, the iPad version does bring in extra advertising revenue. According to Hunsinger, “The iPad is bringing added value to advertisers, too.”

The low sales numbers come as a bit of a surprise as GQ’s iPad edition is well put together and the pricing is competitive. Normal newsstand prices for GQ run $4.99 while the iPad edition is $2.99 with back issues also priced at the discounted $2.99 price. Although the single iPad issue is discounted off of the newsstand price, the iPad version doesn’t look nearly as attractive when you compare it to a 12 month printed subscription.  You can pickup a year”s subscription of the printed edition for only $12, or a savings of nearly 70% off the iPad version.

It is still early for publisher’s experimenting with the iPad.  We fully expect more publishers to release iPad editions of their magazines and they’ll continue to play with pricing until they find the sweet spot.

Update: Conde Nast contacted us with some clarifications to our original story.  You can find the follow-up article here.

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