Ebook spike

In ebooks, one publisher, Hachette UK, saw 86 percent more global ebooks sales this Christmas Day and Boxing Day than in 2011.

The publisher’s digital head George Walkley tells The Bookseller higher ereader and tablet sales, price promotion and greater digital availability lifted the market, including the long tail: “This is not just a frontlist phenomenon as over 6,500 of our titles saw digital sales in the last two days.”

The growth coincides with new Pew Internet data showing the proportion of Americans who read ebooks to increased 23 percent in 2012, from 16 percent a year ago.

Some independent authors using Kindle Direct Publishing reported far more modest upticks to their already small-scale sales. Their titles are relatively unknown and don’t benefit from bigger-hitting marketing campaigns of the kind that catch new ereader owners’ attention.

Publishers had awaited Christmas with different expectations. Random House COO Madeleine McIntosh told The New York Times: “In the first years (of ebooks), people were getting just e-readers. This year they will be getting multi-functional tablets. You can put a lot of other media besides ebooks on these, and that may somewhat diminish the ultimate focus on ebooks.”

iOS wins?

When it comes to those multi-function devices, Apple’s appear to have won this season. A cursory examination of first tweets sent on Christmas Eve showed the iPad with a 7x greater prevalence than the nearest rival, Amazon’s Kindle Fire…

Game spike

What were people using their new devices for? Some apps have seen Christmas uplifts, too. Temple Run, a game that was previously ranked No. 20 on App Store, leaped to lead the store’s free and top-grossing charts, BGR reports.

Mobile data outfit Flurry reports a threefold hike in numbers of new tablets and smartphones activated on Christmas Day, which this year also smashed previous seasonal activation records.

App downloads grew by more than double compared with previous Christmases, Flurry found.

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Digital revenues surpassed 50% of total recorded music sales in the US last year, but almost reached that point in 2010, level pegging physical sales on 49% at year end (performing rights made up the rest according the IFPI).  By comparison full year digital revenues in the UK in 2011 made up 35.4% of total trade revenues according to the BPI’s (invaluable) 2012 Yearbook.

The BPI’s announcement today refers to 1^st quarter data alone.  In Q1 2012 digital accounted for 55% of income at £86.5 million, up from £70 million in Q1 2011 when it accounted for 46.1% of income.  The eagle eyed of you will have noticed that even in 2011 digital’s Q1 share was markedly above the annual total of 35.4%.  Underlying this disparity is the emergence of a new wave of seasonal purchase behaviour, what I call the Post-Holiday Surge.

Christmas / holiday period sales have always been by far the most important for record labels (highlighting why it is so important that someone somewhere gets digital gifting fixed – and iTunes vouchers are not the answer).  The advent of digital has created a second wave of festive spending: after the Christmas / holiday period we now see a surge in digital sales as people fill up their brand new MP3 players, tablets and smartphones with new music.  Although because Apple accounts for c.75% of digital download sales it is probably more accurate to restate that as ‘we now see a surge in digital sales as Apple customers fill up their brand new iPods, iPads and iPhones with new music from the iTunes Music Store’. (Other digital channels such as Spotify of course play a major role in digital revenue, but less so in the post-holiday boom).

This is why Q1 increasingly over reports for digital sales.  That is not to take anything away from the numbers reported by the BPI (it is a key milestone worthy of celebration) but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the UK remains somewhere between 1.5 and 2 years behind the US in terms of the shift to digital.  If trends continue at their current rate the end of year digital revenue share in the UK should hit somewhere in the region of 46% to 48% i.e. pretty much where the US was in 2010.

Digital sales are growing, but still not quickly enough across the entire year.  Full year 2011 UK trade data shows that physical income declined by £84.2 million while digital grew by £55.8 million (a net loss of £28.4 million).  In Q1 2012 a very different picture appears: year-on-year digital increased by £16.5 million while physical declined by £12.3 million, a net gain of £4.2 million.

The Post-Holiday Surge phenomenon illustrates where digital needs to be performing at now and for the whole year, namely growing more quickly than CD sales contract across 12 months of sales. In the UK, Q1 is digital’s quarter, now it needs to take ownership of the entire year just like it did in the US.

» For 11 years, Mark Mulligan was a vice president and research director at Jupiter Research (later acquired by Forrester Research). He now blogs at The Music Industry Blog, where this piece was originally published. Mark also contributes to GigaOM Pro.

This article originally appeared in Music Industry Blog.

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A big reason for that is editing — or, really, a lack thereof. Video can be a great way to convey things, but even the most exciting event can be boring if the video has not been edited properly. Even though devices that shoot high-definition video are cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever, amateur videos themselves have not gotten any better to watch.

That’s where a new iPhone app called Magisto comes in. Magisto, which debuted its web app in September 2011 and just launched its first iPhone app this week, turns any plain video into a fully edited movie in a matter of minutes. Essentially, it does for movies what Instagram does for photos: It makes even the most mundane media appear more compelling.

Screenshot of Magisto for iPhone

The greatest thing about Magisto is how dead simple it is to use. You log in with either your Facebook credentials or email address, upload one or several short videos from your iPhone (Magisto prefers to start with videos that are at least 45 seconds long,) select some music (you can upload your own song or choose from Magisto’s library, which is sorted into categories such as “Hip Hop,” “Birthday,” “Travel” and “Christmas”) and then that’s it — you wait for the app to do its magic.

The final product is edited to contain your videos’ most “interesting” bits, with music and a few visual effects thrown in to keep viewers entertained. I’ve submitted several videos that are a minute or so long, and Magisto typically took about 10 minutes to turn each one around. You can also use Magisto on your regular computer through its website.

Now, Magisto is not for everyone or everything. Since users have very little control over the final product — how long the edited video will be, and what parts it will definitely contain, are completely up to the app — Magisto is only realistic for casual videos of things like vacations and birthday parties. And people who already know their way around iMovie or Final Cut Pro may find Magisto to be frustratingly short on features. But for most consumers who just want to make fun, short videos their friends might want to actually watch, it’s perfect. And the fact that it’s available now on the iPhone is pretty major, since people are increasingly doing everything from their mobile devices.

Magisto is run by an Israel-based startup called SightEra, which raised $5.5 million in Series B funding round this past fall led by Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures.

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Turns out, those concerns were pretty well justified. New data out of Skylines, a Dutch real-time photo search startup that analyzes the Twitter feed, indicates that most third-party photo sharing services are seeing major shrinkage in terms of market share.

Skylines December 2011 Twitter photo analysis (click to enlarge)

Twitter now powers nearly half of all the photos shared on the micro-blogging site, according to Skylines’ analysis. And over the course of December alone, the company increased its market share by 18 percent, growing from 38 percent of all photos shared in early December to 45 percent in late December.

Meanwhile, the biggest loser of market share in December was Twitpic, which fell from 23 percent to 16 percent market share over the course of the month. That may be because Twitter’s brand new user interface, which began rolling out in early December, has its own service set as the default photo sharing app — a designation that formerly belonged to Twitpic.

But there is one third-party Twitter photo app that is growing right now: Instagram. The hip iPhone photo-sharing app now is responsible for 16 percent of the photos shared on Twitter, up from 13 percent in early December. And at the moment, Instagram’s growth is not showing any signs of slowing down. As Om Malik reported Thursday, Instagram saw a big “bump” in users over Christmas, after being named Apple’s iPhone app of the year and newly gifted iPhones were being activated.

It bears mention, though, that Instagram is not as closely tied to Twitter as these other services are — as of this past summer, only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter. Instagram is built as a mobile social hub in itself, which is something that’s surely contributing to its current strength. It’s a good reminder that building an app with standalone independence in mind from day one is always a good thing to do.

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The numbers are starting to roll in, and it’s becoming clear that Apple had a pretty good holiday weekend. Waiting for the iOS maker under the Christmas tree on Sunday was a gigantic pile of new customers, who promptly starting buying apps, playing games and shopping, according to a bunch of stats released Tuesday.

Here’s what we know so far about how Apple did this past weekend:

• People like shopping on their shiny new iPads. An IBM Coremetrics study tracking Christmas Day e-commerce found overall online shopping on Sunday was up more than 16 percent from last Christmas Day, and the dollar amount spent just from purchases made on a mobile device jumped 173 percent. But most interesting is that 7 percent of all purchases made on Sunday from a mobile device were from an iPad, the highest percentage among the mobile devices used to shop.  The IBM study tracked spending on 500 websites (excluding online retail king Amazon.com).

• Dec. 25 was the best Christmas ever for iOS and Android activations combined. For the first three weeks of December, between 1.3 to 1.8 million devices powered by iOS or Android were activated each day, according to Flurry Analytics. But Christmas Day saw 6.8 million activations, a 353-percent jump compared the rest of the month. It was also a huge leap over the 2.8 million Android and iOS devices activated last Christmas.

• New iPad and iPhone owners got down to using their devices right away. On Christmas Day, playing games and using iOS apps was up 12.5 times compared to the previous weekend.

It’s looking like Apple is on track for that record-breaking quarter top company executives predicted back in October, though we won’t find out definitively for a few more weeks.

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• Czechoslovakian politician and poet Vaclav Havel passed away earlier this month. The Paris Review has published outtakes from an interview with the man who shepherded his country’s transition from communism to today’s Europe.
• I am glad that venture capitalist (and a patron of crazy-awesome shirts) Brad Feld argues that life (and the Internet) is not about having the most friends, but its about having the best friends. With 45 summers behind me, I now have the wisdom to whole heartedly agree with him.
• What does it mean to be best? Is being best the way to compete or think about your business? Joan Magretta in Harvard Business Review raises some good questions and offers her responses to obsession with the best.
• Why we all need childlike curiosity. Shawn Parr sums up the reasons why we don’t need to grow up. As you look into 2012 make this core to your thinking.
• In Living by Default, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker points out that the shame that came with potential business/corporate failure aka bankruptcy lacks the shame and stigma that it used to carry in the past. “When it comes to debt, then, the corporate attitude is do as I say, not as I do.”
• The pen is mightier than the phone. Kevin Purdy writes about importance of pen and paper. I couldn’t agree more. My Montblanc goes with me everywhere.
• Decoding “I cracked it.” Jeremy Toeman takes a gander at what Apple TV might look like and is pretty close to cracking it.

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Thick and burly — but short

Apple’s own dock connector-to-USB charging cable is pretty thin, as far as USB cables go. That definitely helps when you’re rolling it up and stuffing it in a pocket, but it doesn’t necessarily do anything for durability. The Innergie Magic Cable is much thicker — about twice the diameter, I’d say — and definitely feels more solid. It seems to me like an animal’s tooth or errant blade would have to do a lot more damage to cause a fatal breach.

The feeling of durability extends to the point of connection between the cable itself and its USB tips, too. This is a notoriously weak point on Apple’s own charging cables, but Innergie seems to have gone out of its way to buttress and reinforce that weak point, which should do wonders for the cable’s longevity.

The only downside of the physical design of the Magic Cable vs. Apple’s own is in terms of length. The Innergie cable is just 31 inches (79 cm) long, while the Apple dock-to-USB cable is 38 inches (96.5 cm). If you find the official version short, you’ll be very disappointed in the Innergie, in other words.

Switching head

The key appeal of the Magic Cable Duo is its sliding, in-line interchangeable dock connector head, which fits over the cable’s micro USB male component. I’m happy to report that this part of the cable impresses; repeatedly pulling the dock connector part on and off of the micro USB head showed no signs of stressing or breaking the plastic that holds it in place. I was also intentionally being a little rough with it, so with standard use (i.e. switching out the heads once every day or so) it should more than meet expectations.

Charging capacity

The Magic Duo seems more than able to charge your iOS devices at a normal rate. I tested it with my iPad 2 and the standard iPad 10W charging adapter, and found that the Innergie cable charged the iPad just as much as the Apple cable during a 15-minute period. Plus, the Magic Cable Duo also worked with the iPhone 4S, the Samsung Galaxy S II, and the BlackBerry Curve 9300, although the BlackBerry did required use of a BB-designated charging adapter.

Smart and sturdy

In the end, the Magic Cable Duo is a smart, inexpensive ($19.99) upgrade that makes plenty of sense for gadget addicts with lots of devices that need charging. It’s also much less likely to get lost than Apple’s own diminutive iPhone Micro USB Adapter, which has a tendency to get lost. Plus, Innergie includes a fixed velcro cable wrap to make sure it’s easy to pack. So long as you don’t mind the trade-off in cable length, it’s a great way to spend some of that Christmas money.

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But this one uses the power of Twitter.

Frstee is the latest experiment from some friends of mine in London known collectively as the Really Interesting Group. They’ve come up with a way to inject a bit of the web into Christmas by producing an individually-manufactured bauble whose dimensions are determined by online data… in this case, details about your Twitter usage.

So, when you order your very own Frstee, the system takes a look at a Twitter account of your choosing (perhaps yours, perhaps a friend’s, perhaps Lady Gaga). And the more followers you have, the bigger the snowman’s head. Conversely, somebody with a small Twitter following will have an undersized noggin:

In addition, the number of buttons on the snowman’s front correspond to the number of years you’ve been using Twitter.

So you end up with something like this:

It is intended, say the gang with tongue firmly in cheek, to cause “a uniquely Social Media frisson around your festive tree.”

He’s been on sale for a couple of weeks already, but this isn’t Frstee’s first time at the snowdeo. Really Interesting Group has got form on this stuff: a couple of years ago they produced a series of data-based objects (“datadecs”) which included not only a Twitter snowman, but also baubles cut to represent your online listening patterns, travel patterns and photo uploads. This time they’re making the idea available to the public.

If you want a Frstee in time for Christmas you’d better hurry. Manufacturing and delivery take 21 days because each one is 3D printed individually and shipped off to you. And while these one-offs aren’t exactly cheap — mine cost £19.50 ($31) — they are a lot of fun.

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Image courtesy of Flickr user SolYoung

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A word of caution: Some of the e-card solutions utilize a server-side service to send the cards. I’ve noticed some of these solutions ended up in recipients’ spam folders, so if you’re not sure whether the message will get through, use the solutions that let you do the sending.
For the Truly Lazy Among Us
What you’re looking for is the quickest and easiest way to let your friends and family know that you’re ready for the holiday season this year. If this is what you want, then ISBX’s Build-a-Card Holiday Edition for $0.99 is just the app for you. Simply snap a photo, choose one of the design patterns, add some props, and tweet the results to all of your followers. From app store to instant online gratification in less than five minutes.

For the Slightly More Creative

Perhaps you’ve been more than a little busy this year, and you’re still looking to add the personal touch to a holiday card. But you still want to get it out to everyone before the holidays are over. Then I’d recommend Vivid Apps Christmas Lifecards for $0.99. The workflow is very closely related to that of Build-a-Card, but you have a much greater degree of control as the templates are much more involved. Where the goal of Build-a-Card is quick and easy, Lifecards provides a much deeper and more customizable result.

The sharing options are a lot more involved, too, including the ability to email a PDF version of your Lifecard. You can also save your results in high or low resolution, post to Facebook, and even upload to Flickr or Twitpic.  With more than fifty customizable templates to choose from, you should be able to get exactly what you wanted out of this holiday card app.

For the Kid at Heart

There are several holiday entertainment apps for kids that will let you email an image of the artwork they create.  But sticking to the theme of holiday card photo apps, Oceanhouse Media’s Dr. Seuss Camera – The Grinch Edition on sale for $0.99 is a great outlet for the kid in each of us. While not quite as extensible as the other two apps (you cannot modify the text), and your only sharing options are to save the resulting image into your photo library, email it, or copy it to the clipboard, this app does have style.  It’s just as well put together as are the other Dr. Seuss apps that Oceanhouse has created.

So don’t bother ordering a set of those new fancy letterpress cards that were made available in the recently released iPhoto ’11. And forget about printing out address labels this year.  From quick and easy, to deeply creative, to childishly entertaining, these three holiday photo card apps will suite almost anyone’s holiday needs.

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