By Amy Gahran and Barb Iverson
News is going mobile in the U.S. In fact, the number of people getting news via cellphone doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009, according to comScore. Improvements in the iPhone OS have the potential to make or break news delivery.
The iPhone is due for a major operating system update, and on Tuesday Apple revealed what the iPhone OS 3.0 software (to be distributed summer 2009) will allow users and developers to do.
In a nutshell: Plenty.
The biggest splash: iPhone 3.0 will support copy and paste. Seems like a no-brainer, but so far iPhone users have not been able to employ this basic user interface tool which has been available since long before Apple even started making computers. The iPhone’s lack of copy and paste has led to user frustration and some work-arounds involving javascript bookmarklets for mobile Safari. We’ve heard several people say they’d get an iPhone if only it did copy and paste. So it’s possible that this key bit of usability catch-up could broaden the iPhone market base.
New APIs offer exciting opportunities. The real genius of Apple’s iPhone strategy has always been the application store. The app store is what we like to think of as an entrepreneurial engine: good business not just for Apple, but for any people or organizations that think entrepreneurially.
Since micro-payments don’t pay, lots of news organizations have suggested using an iTunes model. As Jason Snell, liveblogging for Macworld said, “a newspaper could sell a premium subscription via their iPhone app. (Might this help save the newspapers from destruction?)”
iPhone apps can be sold outright to users for a direct revenue stream. However, even free iPhone apps can help build online businesses (including for news publishers, advertisers, or news-related services) by growing audience, increasing user engagement, or enabling additional features or services.
The latest iPhone software developer kit offers over 1,000 new iPhone application programming interfaces (APIs). (Tidbits contributor Will Sullivan recently explained why news orgs should use APIs.) Many news organizations, including The New York Times, already offer their own iPhone applications. But the new APIs just announced by Apple will allow whole new types of interaction with the iPhone and with iPhone applications. For instance, Apple notes:
- In-Application Purchase: “Users can purchase content or services from your application using the Store Kit framework.” Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe observed, “The biggest feature in Apple’s iPhone 3.0 is a cash register.”
- Maps in your Apps: “You can now embed maps within your applications using the new Map Kit framework.” Imagine a mobile map interface to your local news.
- Push Notification: “Alert your users of new information, even when your application isn’t running.” This could include breaking news headlines, relevant classified ads, event announcements, and more. And what if you coupled this with the embedded maps API? Maybe alerts could change based on the iPhone user’s location.
- Peer to Peer Connectivity: “Allows any application to communicate between devices [i.e., several people’s iPhones] using Bluetooth — no pairing required.” This could prove useful for enabling mobile coverage collaboration between professional or citizen journalists.
Someone on the tech side of every news organization should download the iPhone 3.0 beta SDK (enterprise developer program: $299) and start exploring the possibilities now. If you don’t already offer an iPhone app, this is a good time to start developing one — and you might even get it into the app store in time for the summer distribution of iPhone OS 3.0.
And if you don’t think that the number of iPhone users is significant enough to warrant this effort, bear in mind that iPhone users tend to be power users of online and social media. Getting their attention through a well-planned app might yield surprising benefits to your news business and brand.
