Interesting Snippets

Apps have also been important for streaming TV and film services such as Netflix and Hulu, as well as for the BBC’s iPlayer and BSkyB’s Sky Go – the latter now attracts 1.5 million unique users a month.

The top five free iPad apps are for TV catchup services.

3 months ago, Flipboard was doing 250 million pageviews. While that number is huge, Flipboard is now seeing 550 million views per month, having been downloaded over 3.5 million times.

With that in mind, McCue was asked when people were consuming all of this information. Unsurprisingly, he says that people primiarly use Flipboard between 8pm and 11pm, as well as on weekends. Beyond that, it’s used heavily in the morning hours as people are having breakfast and drinking their coffee

Conde Nast reports users are spending more than two hours on average with its Vanity Fair and GQ apps — that’s double the average hour spent with print magazines. Interaction times are also growing with subsequent issues. Vanity Fair’s interaction times jumped more than an hour from June to July; GQ’s jump was much more modest at only few minutes

before launching Flipboard, he made his engineers hook up double the amount of servers they thought would be necessary. After the launch, Flipboard maxed out that server capacity in a shocking 20 minutes… “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We thought it would take a while for people to understand the concept and get used to it and download it. I didn’t realize that it would be explosive – that within seconds people would be downloading it by the thousands. The other thing I didn’t anticipate was the way that people used the product. They use it far more intensely than I thought they would. When people started downloading it they were flipping back to 2009 on their Facebook pages. It was crazy! They just sat there just flipping

Gilt Groupe, an online high-end fashion brand whose hook is exclusive 36-hour sales that begin every day at noon, launched its iPad app at the same time as the device and has seen that come true. The number of user visits increased; the times of the day they visit have diversified; and Gilt has tracked a 25%-plus increase in revenue per user connected directly to its iPad app.

An upscale Sydney restaurant, Mundo Global Tapas, is replacing their paper menus with the interactive tablet. Customers use the restaurant-provided iPads to not only browse menu selections and order food, but access photos of every dish and even notify chefs of how they want their steaks cooked. The digital medium offers several advantages over the paper medium – these include easy revisions for fluctuations in price and keeping track with inventory so customers don’t order items out of stock. The restaurant envisions the iPad menu to eventually revolutionize the dynamics of food ordering by utilizing local weather and customer moods to recommend meals.

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.