Author: Robert Andrews

The Times joined the Financial Times as the only national UK newspaper with a news app for iPad’s international launch Friday morning.

Yes, it’s pay-for, but there’s an entirely different pricepoint from the new websites, which will soon charge £1 a day, £2 a week or free with print…

It’s £9.99 every 28 days. But (and here’s where it may fall down) – these payments don’t link up with website payments. That means anyone who is paying to access the website must also pay the extra tenner a month for the same content on iPad, and vice versa.

Now, this may well be a result of an inability to link Apple’s iTunes Store billing systems with News Corp.‘s own. But the Financial Times, which uses its own payment technology rather than Apple’s, has a platform-agnostic, pay-once strategy across its outlets.

“It is a shame and I feel it is somewhat of a scam,” wrote one early iTunes Store reviewer. “I like the look and feel of the app but will definitely not purchase again unless this is changed.”

A Times spokesperson tells us: “The Times iPad edition is a separate product to the new website, which is why it is priced differently. It is an edition of the paper edited and developed specifically for the iPad, which can be downloaded and read offline, for example.”

Of course, if an iPad reader is not the same customer as a web reader, then this isn’t a problem – something everyone’s yet to find out as the device beds down.

The Times’ iPad announcement today is accompanied by a story on how the iPad “may rewrite the future of newspapers”.

Its iPad app comes with “editions” for updates; a screengrab shows its “11pm edition”. Just as with the new websites, the iPad editions retain a strong Times newspaper brand identity, without resorting to a lazy, page-turner replica. Users rate it 3.5/5. The paper has now taken its existing iPhone news apps off the store.

Other UK newspapers have not embraced iPad’s international day one…

—The Guardian, though its has a photojournalism app, says it has no iPad news app, despite Apple’s main advertising campaigns heavily featuring the Guardian.co.uk website.

—There’s no evident Daily Express app, despite that paper’s early promise to release one.

—The Metro freesheet is due to release an app.

—Telegraph.co.uk was saying nothing either way yesterday, perhaps suggesting an upcoming release.

—At least the Cheshire-based Congleton Chronicle is in full force, rolled out on the iPad version of Exact Editions’ existing iPhone app.

Elsewhere in News Corp (NYSE: NWS). BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) has updated its Sky Mobile TV iPhone app for iPad, with a hefty price premium…

Whilst the iPhone app costs just £6-a-month to non-Sky TV customers, for live Sky Sports channels, Sky Sports News and Sky News, the iPad app asks non-TV customers £35 a month and for TV customers to pay an extra £6.

This strategy is clearly designed to drive subscriptions to the satellite pay-TV service as a whole, rather than to consider the iPad in isolation. The app also uses in-house billing technology rather than iPhone OS’ auto-renewals.

But Sky Mobile TV at least ventures a multi-platform charging mechanism that The Times has not managed to deploy. The equivalent, for The Times, would have been to charge £10 a month, or even more, to non-subscribed readers, but to drop or reduce the charge for website subscribers. Still, News International is being pretty upfront that models may change as it learns over the course of time.

It’s high time we had another UK get-together, and what better opportunity than to mark our founder Rafat’s leaving us.

Join us at MSN’s HQ at 80 Victoria Street, London, SW1E 5JL for nibbles, drinks and a natter on Wednesday, June 2, from 6 pm.

Thank-you to MSN UK’s executive producer Peter Bale, who is generously supporting us by providing the space.

We will use the opportunity to think positively, after a difficult year, about what opportunities may lay ahead in digital media.

During a Q&A session, we will ask Rafat and Peter to focus on why the future’s bright, and will ask Rafat to share his thoughts on the last eight years at the ContentNext helm.

See you there.

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So, CEOs will be wandering around, toting iPads with critical business info on, right? Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) think so…

I chatted with the consumer publishing division’s SVP Alisa Bowen, who said it’s “the perfect platform to engage with C-level executives” and who outlined the opportunity tablets present for business news and data publishers…

So far, Thomson Reuters has two main iPad apps – NewsPro, with news and basic market data, has clocked over 75,000 downloads and is showing triple the user session time of Reuters.com, while MarketBoard, which gives pay-per-download earnings and fuller stock data, is “an interesting experiment” in marrying pay-for news in a no-cost wrapper.

Both apps are free – part of the agency’s ongoing grand expansion from B2B wholesale content provision in to direct-to-consumer, ad-supported publishing. “It provides us with a consumer touchpoint for those who are business-to-business customers of ours,” said Bowen of Apple’s device. “That’s an important brand extension.”

With the big web companies taking a keen interest and rival startups all competing, there’s plenty of jostling amongst mobile social location sharing hopefuls.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has bought Koprol, Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Twitter are all planning their own location add-ons and rival Foursquare is growing in popularity.

Gowalla seems to want to keep its cards in the game by being as open as possible until things shake out. So is there really a differentiator, and what is it… ?

At the Open Mobile Summit in London, CEO Josh Williams told me: “The Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world… location’s going to become a platform that is ubquitous across the web and mobile web. We want to provide a valuable service that sits on top of that – so, ultimately, we’re agnostic about where you choose to share your location.

“Hopefully, we can play friendly with everybody.” Williams told a summit panel session: “We dont care if you want to take (your location) to Gowalla and share it with your friends there or take it out to your Twitter friends.”

Williams says the location sharing space will mature in the next six months by the cluster of counterparts differentiating. He wants Gowalla to add media, not just location, sharing.

Ultimately, one wonders whether there’s a window of opportunity before the big guns switch on to the phenomenon – and that could mean either acquisition, as in Koprol’s case, or sticking to a start-up’s guns.

So is there a standalone business model? Gowalla’s trying “two or three different angles”, including promoting brands’ locations, Williams said. Is Gowalla an acquisition target? “It’s too early to say,” Williams added, noting he’s “very happy to be swimming in that (Austin start-up) pond”.

Back when Twitter announced its own Promoted Tweets plan, COO Dick Costolo hinted it would “prohibit” third-party alternatives. Now it’s making good on the promise…

In the second recent threat to Twitter’s developer-friendly reputation, Costolo announces in a blog post that: “Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

Costolo’s wordy, big-picture argument about “enduring value” says “third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created” and “the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization”.

This boils down to: Twitter thinks it’s got a better way of advertising than those who use its infrastructure, it wants to safeguard users’ experience on that infrastructure and, if it can push Promoted Tweets instead of other methods, there’s a massive pay-day at the end of some future rainbow.

Several third parties had beaten Twitter to making a nascent ad platform out of the micromessaging service – among them, Magpie, Ad.ly and Tweetup, which Bill Gross started recently having raised £2.44 (£2.44 ()) million VC for the effort.

The question now – will the third parties (assuming they’re not totally pissed off with Twitter) get to transfer their ad system to Promoted Tweets? That could be a win-win for both sides.

Sawhorse Media’s founder Greg Galant, whose company made MuckRack, says: “We’re not concerned about it. It highlights the need for creatively working companies into the social media conversation, over easy fixes.”

But it’s not that Twitter isn’t expecting some discontent. “We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money,” Costolo writes.

—iPad’s hot: I kept mine in the shade, but others who soaked up the UK’s glorious sunshine this weekend found their iPad didn’t appreciate the near-30 degree temperatures, warning: “iPad needs to cool down before you can use it.” Via GadgetVenue.

—Bambuser: Norway’s NRK, which already inked a deal with the Swedish live mobile video streamer, is giving Bambuser-enabled handsets to entrants in this weekend’s upcoming Eurovision Song Contest.

—Evening Standard: The papaer has a new, free app for iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Android, made by Handmark.

Ewan MacLeod’s Mobile Industry Review is amongst the trade’s better respected sources for insider mobile news and analysis.

But when founder MacLeod tried taking the ad-supported site paid last year, he was surprised to get an entirely negative response from readers in the industry.

The site was bought, in a fashion, last year by what MacLeod, speaking at an event at journalists’ Frontline club on Wednesday, called merely an “acquiring party”. The unnamed company effectively bought the rights to all its output as its own private news source, but it let MacLeod sell the same subs to readers for £1,000 a year.

“(It was) £200,000 I paid for everyone to read my site over the last couple of years,” a jovial MacLeod told the event. “I’m expecting the vast majority of the readers to understand. I know £1,000’s a lot of money for a person, but for a company it’s nothing…”

So how many takers did he get? MacLeod drew a big fat hollow circle. “Absolutely zero, not one,” he said. “There was a Facebook movement. A guy called Mike said ‘let’s campaign for a tenner a month’ – (just) 12 people joined the group.”

But the site is still going strong after four years, now with a mixed model. “The acquiring company said, ‘Okay, we don’t need your dotcom, we actually want a subscription service, so you carry on with what you’re doing (for free), it’s still there.”

The experience has made MacLeod sceptical that anyone, even trade specialists can successfully charge for their content. At Wedneday’s event, he told The Times’ digital director Gurtej Sandhu, about the paper’s paid plans: “I love the concept – I just don’t necessarily think it’s going to deliver.”

Fresh from making a short-lived surge to the top of iTunes Store’s app chart, browser maker Opera is now buying Australian webmail service FastMail.fm to bolster its own email effort across multiple devices.

The Opera desktop web browser, which claims 50 million users, has offered a built-in email client for 10 years now. But mobile has fast become Opera’s bigger business, with 55 million users.

FastMail.fm offers its service to desktop web users but also to mobile users via WAP. It ranges from free up to $39.95 a year.

Oslo-based Opera says the acquisition will “deliver cross-platform messaging to a wide range of devices, including computers, mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles”.

Chief strategy officer Rolf Assev: “This will enhance the value Opera provides to consumers, while assisting our operator partners in reducing customer churn.” Opera Mini, the mobile client, compresses web pages for phones by routing them through Opera’s own web servers and striping out certain elements.

No acquisition terms were revealed.

Five months after buying the web-based music service, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is now shutting Lala, in what is likely preparation for a web- or subscription-centric upgrade to its own iTunes Store.

The site has stopped accepting new sign-ups and will shut to existing users on May 31, says a message on Lala.

Since launching in 2003, iTunes Store, to the labels, has been a welcome bulwark against what would have otherwise been even more chronic decline. It now contributes over a quarter of U.S. music sales. But, in a North American music market that’s now shrinking faster than anywhere in the world, digital income has now basically flatlined, growing just 1.1 percent in 2009, says the industry’s IFPI.

Web-based streamers and new subscription models, offering unlimited music access, offer the industry promise of another shot in the arm. Spun-off Rhapsody now looks in shape to arrest the decline that’s brought it to 675,000 subscribers, Spotify’s excellent client has 320,000 premium subscribers out of seven million users but still has not launched in the U.S.

Against both the web and subscription rise, iTunes’ a la carte reliance looks archaic and one-dimensional, tooled for a market that’s plateaued.

But Apple has already moved closer to a web-based iTunes by displaying iTunes Store listings on a series of iTunes Preview pages. Reports, at the time of the acquisition, that Apple fancied Lala’s “payment and fulfillment systems”, suggest it’s also interested in subscriptions. It’s not clear whether it will launch a web-based service, a subscription offering or a combination of both, though a few industry sources I’ve spoken with speculate it will launch an underwhelming “locker”-type service, to house already-bought tracks in the cloud, before going all-out on subscriptions proper.

iTunes’ flatlining has created an opportunity for new services to race to a legal music gold rush, in a space partly created by a growing number of anti-piracy moves by international governments. The labels can’t wait. “The subscription models that we are promoting will create much more value over time than the per-play or per-purchase models,” Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr said in February. “The number of potential subscribers dwarves the number of people purchasing music on iTunes.”

Maybe so. But, depending on what Apple does with Lala, rivals should be very concerned. Rhapsody and Spotify may be looming, Mog.com may have an attractively-priced service and Rdio.com is on the horizon. But none has iTunes Store’s existing heft and leverage…

The store has over 125 million user accounts with credit card numbers – convincing just some of its music lovers to subscription will be very easy, and flipping them from occasional, one-off payments to recurring debits of, say, $9.99 a month, could create yet another massive new income stream for Apple, which has already introduced recurring subscriptions to its mobile apps. Whatever it does will likely have more impact than Lala, which has never launched outside the U.S..

“There is a short window of opportunity for Rhapsody and others to lock in some of that growth for themselves before Spotify launches Stateside or Apple launches its own version, thus changing the competitive environment,” wrote Forrester analyst Sonal Ghandi this week.

Orange UK revenue grew 2.3 percent this Q1 to €1.82 billion, though, following confirmation of its merger with T-Mobile UK, parent France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) is now disregarding it in its business reporting.

Too bad. The parent saw less income in every region except Rest Of World, as it reported 5.5 percent lower EBITDA of €3.76 billion on 2.7 percent smaller income of €10.9 billion.

The group says European regulatory measures forcing telcos to reduce call termination fees wiped €270 million of its quarterly income, and will hit it by “about €1 billion” over the whole year.

Data revenue in its native France jumped 24.1 percent from the previous year, nearly a third of network income. And Orange TV customers there jumped 34 percent to 2.9 million – France is a world leader for IPTV take-up, and Orange is ahead of the pack in France. Orange TV clocked up 2.7 million pay-per-view buys during the quarter – that’s 53 percent up from Q1 2009.

It’s now committing 12 percent of its income to capital expenditure, notably fitting out France with a fibre optic network.

Release | Slides | Webcast

Spotify spent most of its first year saying it would refrain from adding “social” features and concentrate on just serving music. But the ice in Stockholm has thawed lately and today the music service added just that, amongst its first significant product updates since launching in late 2008.

—New profiles: Users can friend each other by Spotify username or via Facebook graph and send tracks to each other with a new Inbox. New activity appears in a “feed”. Users can share a web link to their in-app profile and add profile details to their blogs.

—Library changes: Spotify’s no longer just a cloud player – now users can play local files, like iTunes. Tracks and albums can be “starred”, popping them in a favourites folder. Spotify will also wirelessly sync music files to mobile without USB sideloading.

Spotify SVP Paul Brown tells paidContent:UK:-

“Today’s upgrade is all about driving discovery and enabling users to build their playlist libraries. To then access these libraries across multiple platforms, we feel will be a major attraction for people looking to sign up as a premium customer.

“We have shown, since rolling out premium mobile access to our users, that the ability to access your music in a very simple, exciting and absorbing way, across multiple platforms, is a big reason to subscribe and today’s features only increase the stickiness of Spotify as a music platform. There is a lot more to come but this is a significant step in Spotify’s evolution as music access and management platform.”

The features are available to both free and paying users. Spotify has over seven million users and 320,000 of the latter. Little of this seems to affect that dragging issue of entering the U.S. market. But, assuming Spotify’s economics are scaleable, these additions will likely yield higher dwell time and attract more users, because they’re all about propagating extra engagement.

Twelve months ago, Brown told us about social prospects: “I don’t think that’s the path that a company like Spotify will take. It’s about a core experience – others may do interesting things off the platform, that’s where the social features thing will come, I think.” But Spotify has come a long way since then, and these features had been requested by users.

Spotify has long let users “scrobble” song listens to Last.fm profiles. That feature remains, but now Spotify is taking more ownership of the social music experience at a time when Last.fm is stopping playing full on-demand tracks to concentrate mainly on the social experience.  Likewise, this could be a challenge to Mog.com, the social music site that’s looking to bring its music subscription service to the UK at a price undercutting Spotify.

But Spotify isn’t just flexing social muscles here. The local files feature means users who had been using Spotify for cloud streaming but retaining iTunes or Windows Media Player for their existing library, can finally ween themselves off those clients. The Spotify app is a slicker, slimmer homage to iTunes itself, and the files even sync to Spotify’s smartphone app.

For those of you in countries that can’t yet access the new or old Spotify, here’s a video and our slideshow…

The differences are clear – Apple’s selling phones and associated content faster than Nokia.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) smartphone shipments grew by 50 percent in the year’s first three months, compared to 131 percent more iPhones reported this week.

But Nokia isn’t juicing the uses for these smartphones – sales from services (ie. Nokia’s Ovi suite) are 12 percent down from last year at €148 million.

Nokia still shifts more phones than Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) – it sold 21.5 million “converged mobile devices” in the quarter, compared with 8.75 million iPhones.

But the first phone powered by Symbian^3 – the upgrade that’s critical to improving an OS that’s now seen as relatively clunky – is now forecast to ship in Q3, delayed from Q2. CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told analysts this is “close to our milestone date” – but shares took a dive.

“It’s a painful thing to delay something a bit,” Kallasvuo said. “But meeting the quality requirements is the right thing to do. It will be more intuitive, more fun and faster.” Analysts piled in with unflattering questions, like: “Can Nokia be fast and big, or just big?”

It must be both, Kallasvuo said. “We are not going for the high end with Symbian only, but also going for the even higher end with Maemo,” he added, somewhat optimistically, referring to the Linux-based smartphone OS.

Operating profit bounced back 787 percent to €488 million on three percent higher net sales of €9.5 billion.

For its coming Q2, Nokia expects 10 percent higher mobile volume across the industry, but expects no higher market share for itself compared with last year.

One thing’s going okay – sales from the Navteq mapping subsidiary are up 41 percent, and Nokia has got 10 million downloads for the free GPS navigation service since introducing in January.

North America continues to be Nokia’s slimmest market – devices and services sales down 27 percent over the year to just €219 million, and its share of the market down 21 percent to just 2.7 percent. But sales grew fastest in Latin America (42 percent) and Middle East/Africa (30 percent).