Tag Archives: iPhone

The Independent’s new iPhone news app

The Independent has launched a new app for the iPhone, it announced on its own site.

“Once launched the App automatically downloads all the articles and images for offline reading, talking around a minute on a Wi-Fi connection and a few minutes on a standard mobile connection, making it possible to read the latest Independent news even when without mobile reception. Articles can be read while the download continues.”

The app includes 12 categories of articles, among them: World and UK news, Sport, Business, Football, Opinion, People, Politics, Technology, Arts and Entertainment and Environment.

Full announcement at this link…

App at this link.

The Independent launched its mobile site in early July.

PDA: Journalists and developers join forces for Guardian Hack Day 2

Nice round-up from Kevin Anderson on the projects created at the Guardian’s second Hack Day – an event to see ‘what journalists and developers could come up with in just a day’.

Projects included:

  • a visualisation of swine flu news – showing the number of news stories compared with outbreak areas that had received less coverage
  • creating Google gadgets for individual Guardian sections
  • an iPhone app alerting users to Guardian events and helping them find their way their with Google maps

Idea-inspiring stuff.

Full post at this link…

BreakingNewsOn launches iPhone ‘push’ alerts

BreakingNewsOn (BNO), the breaking news service based around Twitter, has just announced that it will soon be using Apple’s ‘push notification’ to send breaking news to iPhone users.

The launch is the latest development for the service: founder Michael van Poppel told Journalism.co.uk in February of plans to establish a website for BNO.

It is expected to launch in the week of the August 3. BNO reports many stories a day and does not intend to ‘push’ all of the headlines to their users, it said in a release. The service has decided that editors will be selective and only send alerts ‘when important headlines break’.

But users will also be able to get updates from a second stream intended for ‘news junkies’ or journalists. Subscribers to this channel will receive more notifications.

Users of the app will be given the option to choose what volume/what major news stories they receive alerts via a ‘push’ and can also use the service to find other stories that they were not alerted about.

The application will cost $1.99 to download and then $0.99 per month after that. BNO said it is also considering expanding the service to other platforms such as the BlackBerry.

ReadWriteWeb: How a baseball iPhone app could create a new media model

RWW looks at MLB.com’s iPhone app, which has just added a feature to stream live video.

At $10, fans of the sport are downloading the app to gain access to stats and data – a new revenue stream for other media?

“The emphasis on statistics, the extensive reporting infrastructure that baseball already has built out and the ‘wow factor’ of the iPhone’s interface are all things that other established media outlets have an opportunity to emulate,” writes Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Full story at this link…

Audio reporting tool Audioboo experiments with paid-for account for ITV

Since its launch in March, Audioboo, the service which allows users to record and upload short audio recordings, has notched up 30,000 registered users and been taken up by both hyperlocal and international news media.

This Saturday ITV.com is planning to use the tool as part of its FA Cup Final coverage: fans using the Audioboo iPhone app will be able to submit their audio reactions to the site.

Significantly this seems to be the first foray into running a paid-for version of an Audioboo account.

As CEO Mark Rock explains in this blog post, there will always be a free version of the tool, but the firm is developing a range of paid-for options intended for media organisations.

Audioboo Pro will be the version used by ITV tomorrow, ‘which will contain a series of web tools which make it easy for companies, particularly media companies, to manage content coming from their audiences’.

Key to these tools are ‘magic tags’ – a private tag that the account use can apply to any Audioboo content creating a specific feed for use in a player on their site. ITV are using this system to help moderate the ‘boos’ left by fans.

The use of Audioboo by ITV marks a focus by the broadcaster on capturing the online buzz about the match alongside the roar of the crowd within Wembley Stadium. As such, the site will use Twitter aggregator Twitterfall to stream relevant updates to the microblogging site.

In addition, using a tool developed by thruSITES:

“The players’ names and faces will appear alongside bars which will move up and down to reflect the buzz around players during the game. The tool will be available after the match so that fans can scrub along a timeline to see which players caused a buzz at crucial moments.”

TEAMtalk goes all a Twitter for football finale

It’s a bank holiday weekend here in the UK and the end of the season for the Premier League football clubs and promotion play offs in League One and League Two – so why not have some tweets with your footy?

BSkyB owned football website TEAMtalk is going to be using Twitter (@TEAM_talk) to covering breaking news from the games – but aims to be more than just an automated updates feed. The site’s journalists will offer more info and analysis via the service.

Access to Sky’s live football feeds makes the reporting possible, Jon Holmes, mobile editor, sport, of TeamTalk, told Journalism.co.uk.

According to a report on Revolution, ITV is also getting in on the social media act, embedding Twitter updates relating to certain players onto pages on ITV.com.

“The tool provides images of each player and ranks them based on the number of mentions they get on microblog Twitter. ITV is also giveing the chance to comment on the game through AudioBoo, the audio comment service available for iPhone users,” reports Revolution.

Another development from the Telegraph’s use of Twitterfall to aggregate tweets around key Premiership terms on its live match pages.

Second dose of Stephen Fry: transcript from Digital Britain – ‘I don’t need to be re-skilled into anything’

Another dose of Fry this morning, in an earlier post we reproduced yesterday’s comments to the BBC about journalists and expenses.

Courtesy of Malcolm Coles, here is the full transcript [below video] of Stephen Fry’s presentation at Digital Britain on April 17. Fry’s appearance caused a little stir that day, not least for the way he was introduced onto the stage by the BBC’s Nick Higham:

“Stephen is, one of the organisers told me beforehand, the representative at this conference of the ordinary person, frankly: if that’s what someone thinks the ordinary person is like, then someone needs to take them aside and fill them in…”

Some of Fry’s comments relate to technology more broadly, but some interesting points on media, and keeping the web ‘organic’:

“You talk about the BBC doing a digital switchover, as if that’s the same thing as the world-wide web.”

“We’re moving from a world, in which no-one knew or saw the point of, online world, into something [where] everybody has reserved to themselves some special insight into how it’s to affect us.”

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Advancing The Story: Why Missouri J-School is asking students to have iPhones

While iPhones could be a tool for students to experiment with mobile journalism, the journalism school at the University of Missouri is making the device a requirement for new students for another reason entirely: the institute is going to make its lectures available for free on iTunes.

Is this requirement necessary, asks Deborah Potter, especially if students can access them through iTunes.

But a good free resource for non-Missouri students too.

Full post at this link…