I’d say that the guy in this Flipboard video is boringly serious or seriously boring but I like the way he talks! It’s the second video in past few weeks that I see him in, both about geeky products. The first one was about Square mobile payment system that I mentioned earlier.
And yes, the Flipboard. It’s a crossover between social media and a digital magazine. Just checked the application on my iPad and I too, like many others, liked it very much. Flipboard taking online social media out of its mould into mobile social media, we would see this kind of apps becoming a norm soon. This is something that I highlighted in detail a while ago under ‘Future of Web Design’.
It is interesting to see how quickly technology and our needs are converging into new products and concepts – refining or redefining our habits and experiences. I’ve been quite happily reading digital magazines such as Bak, FF3300, Destructed and Proteus on my computer monitor for quite some time now. Issue took online publishing to another level by providing a platform to deliver exceptional reading experiences. All of this is enough to indicate where things are heading in near future.
Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Reader, and Fujitsu’s FLEPia have already added new dimension to this. Earlier this year Amzon brought Kindle to mobile platform, extending its reach but at the same time pushing competition into a new direction … I’m not talking about business here rather prospects of combining advance interaction, normally seen on advance mobile phone devices such as iPhone, HTC HD2, Palm Pre, Else Intuition etc with conventional reading experience. In other words, refining and redefining reading experience on handheld digital devices.
Bonnier and BERG collaborated to illustrate such a concept in Mag+, aiming to capture the essence of magazine reading, they compiled a video demo of a digital magazine on a touch tablet. The video demos how magazines like Bonnier’s Popular Science can be adopted for a handheld multi-touch screen device with gesture based browsing and non-obtrusive interface that you only see when you actually want to.
With publishers collaborating and preparing for digital future and technology advancements, any such product is not a dream anymore. I can hope to see it alive within a year or two.
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