On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.

“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.

While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the web vs. app debate – standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores. (We’ll be digging into the web vs. app debate with three influential publishers at paidContent Live later this month.)

The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.

“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.

He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.

“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”

For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.

The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.

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For skeptics, apps amount to a temporary — and increasingly unnecessary — technology. But this is hardly the only view. Many in the publishing
community still thinks apps will deliver on their initial potential to provide deep reader engagement and handsome ad revenues. Now, with the arrival of more tablets and smartphones than ever, the debate over apps becomes more acute: should publishers turn away and rely solely on HTML5 or instead double down on these new app opportunities?

These are some of the questions we’ll explore during “Are Apps or the Web the Future of Mobile Content?” one of many discussions that will take place during paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City. Our guests include Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, whose widely read 2012 essay made him a leading voice in the counter-revolution against app idealism. He will be joined by ESPN’s Ryan Spoon and Nick Alt of Vimeo – two mobile experts who offer other alternative app narratives.

Here are more of the topics we’lll be exploring during the panel (feel free to propose more in the comments below):

• Is the payoff worth the cost?: Apps are nice in theory but they cost a pretty penny to build and maintain – especially as the number of platforms grows. Is the return worth it? Or should publishers plow that money into other parts of their editorial operation?

• Platform proliferation: The initial promise of apps appeared brightest on Apple’s iPad. But now dozens of tablets, from the Galaxy to the Kindle Fire, are emerging – and consumers are finally picking them up. Do all these new screens present a new opportunity? Or another reason to escape apps once and for all?

• Nice app, where do I find it? Those who want to wash their hands of apps are faced with a powerful counter-argument: You need to be where your readers are. As the mobile market grows, are the app skeptics confident their readers will find them on the mobile web?

• Does sub-compact change the app game? The arrival of so-called sub-compact publishing offers a way to create light-weight and relatively inexpensive apps. Examples like Marco Arment’s The Magazine and The Awl also show how these new species of apps can deliver both a beautiful reading experience and an ongoing stream of subscription revenue. Do these offer an opportunity that the mobile web cannot?

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Current Chrome for Android users can actually enable the test feature now, provided they know how to use tools found in Google’s Android SDK. This one line command turns the function on: adb shell ‘echo “chrome –enable-spdy-proxy-auth” > /data/local/tmp/content-shell-command-line’ although for it to work, Google’s proxy servers supporting Chrome for Android need to be in place and running. There’s no indication if they are at this point.

According to Beaufort, code related to the effort suggests Google will use SPDY proxy authentication. SPDY is considered to be a next generation web protocol to lower page load times and latency; Google’s testing of SPDY has shown up to 64% reductions in page load times. Google created SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) in 2009 as an experiment and support is now included in the Chrome, Amazon Silk, Opera and Firefox browsers.

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Project Orca, the Romney campaign’s mobile strategy to equip an army of loyal volunteers with tools to help measure voter turnout, generated more stress than it did votes for the Republican candidate. As detailed by Romney volunteer and web developer John Ekdahl on his blog and further explained by other reports, Project Orca was untested technology foisted upon volunteers at the last minute with very little practical training.

The idea was a good one: campaigns have for years monitored voting in cities and towns across the country to see whether or not people expected to turn out for an election actually vote. Campaign volunteers watch polling places to see which registered voters show up, with the intention of encouraging the ones who had yet to vote to get down to the polls through a phone call. It’s usually a pen-and-paper affair, but Romney’s campaign wanted to automatically collect that data from its volunteers to get a better sense of where to direct its get-out-the-vote team.

It didn’t work. Some of the problems:

• Many volunteers didn’t realize that they were being asked to use a mobile website, not an app.
• Those who did realize it was a website didn’t necessarily understand that they needed to use “https:” for secure browsing on the site, and got a blank webpage because the campaign didn’t forward the regular unsecure URL “http:” to the secure site.
• PINs issued to volunteers simply didn’t work in Colorado.
• The campaign’s data center was poorly designed and collapsed under the weight of all the attempts to connect to the Orca system.

There are plenty of lessons here for future campaigns. For starters, it’s still an app-focused world: one can understand the campaign’s desire to build a system that could work on any smartphone, but its volunteers still expected that they were going to be using a mobile app. If you’re not directing people to an app, you need to make it very clear, and you need to figure out a way to let your volunteers test it beforehand.

It’s also clear that Election Day is probably not the best day to roll something like this out at a grand scale. With dozens of primaries leading up to a typical election, there was plenty of time for the Romney campaign to test this out on a smaller scale before the big day.

Still, mobile strategies such as Project Orca are definitely the future of campaigning. Had this system worked, the Romney campaign could have had a real-time picture of how and where its supporters were voting. That could produce some fascinating data for the next wave of political data scientists to crunch.

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“The companies that are really struggling are the ones for whom the mobile monetization is a nuisance for the user,” said CEO Spencer Rascoff at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. “But with real estate, the mobile ad unit actually enhances the user experience.”

Rascoff pointed out that unlike social media sites or areas where mobile ads are just distracting for users, real estate sites are areas where they’re looking to purchase something and find information, so the advertising is a good fit rather than an annoyance. The company, which went public in July 2011, has optimized its product for mobile, rolling out 14 different apps for phones and tablets.

“That wasn’t easy, it took a lot of brute force to get a 100-plus person company to get away from desktop to mobile,” Rascoff said, noting that it meant changing the company’s name and working on prioritizing the mobile web throughout the company. “It took a year or two to find our footing from a design experience,” he said. “But it was easier for us to get into mobile because of our category.”

In talking about the race for mobile, Rascoff said he thinks some companies have actually moved too fast in trying to adapt for advertising, when they don’t yet have a total grasp on how it will fit with their business.

“I think the most common mistake would be overzealous monetization from mobile,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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In his first public post-IPO appearance on Thursday at San Francisco’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Zuckerberg called the company’s early decision to focus the bulk of its efforts on HTML5 over iOS a mistake for the company. Facebook’s iOS app was notoriously slow and difficult to use, and August’s iOS update was heralded as a much-needed makeover to the popular app.

As Zuckerberg noted Tuesday, users are now consuming twice as much information from the newsfeed after the update, and Facebook officials said the app’s popularity has almost doubled in the App Store, going from about 2 stars to 4 stars since the update.

But at a round-table discussion for journalists at Facebook headquarters Thursday, the company’s developers emphasized that HTML5 and the technology behind the mobile web version of Facebook isn’t going away — in fact, it’s playing a huge role in keeping Facebook in people’s lives around the world.

“We focused on scale and we got to scale,” said product manager Mick Johnson, pointing out that users access the site from more than 7,000 different types of mobile devices, and that using HTML5 allowed Facebook to push out updates to the site more quickly over time. He said the mobile web is still an incredibly valuable platform, and Zuckerberg’s comments do not “in any way shape or form, change that.”

And with Zuckerberg wanting Facebook to reach “everyone in the world,” the company said it’s not going to be native iOS apps or a speedy, HTML5 web app — it will have to be both.

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In the past, it hasn’t made much of a difference in how advertisers interested in your mobile behavior used that information to target ads at you.  But George Bell, CEO of mobile ad network Jumptap believes advertisers need to be smarter about separating so-called “impulse” behavior from “intent” behavior, and said his company has a new way to help them do it.

By partnering with thousands of publishers, third-party data providers like Datalogix and Acxiom, as well as data companies that focus on vertical-specific offline data (such as Polk for automotive data), Bell said the company is linking consumer behavior on mobile and the web with offline data to give advertisers a more global picture of their activity.

Distinguishing impulse from intent behavior

“Because of the nature of the device –- it’s always on and always on your person –- people use [mobile devices] to express impulse… people tend to fantasy shop,” he said, adding that other impulse actions include clicking on ads or content by mistake or out of curiosity. “If you don’t have a way to see consumer behavior across screens you’re not going to get a full enough picture of the consumer’s intent.”

From its publisher partners, he said, Jumptap is given hashed (or anonymized) profile information about mobile users–including email addresses–which is then forwarded to the third-party data providers. Those companies query their databases to match mobile information about users to information they might have about their online or offline behavior. The vertically-focused data companies supply additional information to further flesh out consumer profiles.

That’s a lot of consumer data to piece together, especially for privacy-minded smartphone and Web users who may not want their personal information shared with outside companies. But Jumptap said it doesn’t handle user information until it’s anonymized and that it gives mobile consumers tools to learn about the process and opt out.  Last month, the company announced that it has partnered with Evidon, the ad tech firm powering the AdChoices icons that lead to privacy notifications, to bring those icons to mobile web and app ads.

Tracking consumers across multiple devices

Historically, mobile ad targeting has used indicators related to the devices themselves (including the device type, usage, data plan and zip code) and consumer interaction with content and advertising on the device.  Bell said Jumptap’s new “consumer-level” approach to targeting gives advertisers the ability to distinguish between a consumer searching for a Rolex who is actually a luxury shopper and a consumer who is really a student with little income, who happens to be in an affluent zip code, clicking on ads (maybe even by mistake) for high-end goods.

But the company isn’t the only one coming up with ways of tracking and targeting consumers across multiple devices to get more complete pictures of their behavior.  Through device recognition (or “device fingerprinting”), which involves the collection of potentially hundreds of data points flowing off of a mobile or desktop device to identify it, advertisers could start to link behavior across iPhones, tablets and laptops.

As my colleague Ryan Kim has reported, a team of ex-AdMob and Google scientists launched Drawbridge to target advertising across platforms using consumer behavior data from online and mobile ad requests.

Jumptap said it doesn’t yet have data showing the effectiveness of its approach but said a handful of advertising clients are currently using it in beta. As the company looks ahead to an IPO within a year, the ability to target mobile consumers with more granularity will help keep it competitive in an increasingly active marketplace.

For more on mobile monetization, check out GigaOM’s upcoming Moblize conference in San Francisco.

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Data compression isn’t exactly new: Both Research In Motion and the Opera browser teams have long used it as a differentiator. The idea is to cut down on the amount of data on smartphones and tablets by compressing the content before it gets to a user. And as unlimited data plans continue to be an endangered species, solutions such as these could have greater appeal and help prevent data overages. According to Snappli, its users are saving $37 annually with data reductions up to 85 percent on Instagram and 72 percent on YouTube, for example.

But Snappli is quick to note that savings are just part of what it offers: Fewer bits of content being passed from a mobile broadband network to a device can result in a speed boost as well. Snappli says that its users experience the mobile web twice as fast as a result.

The new app is supported on devices running iOS 4 and up, which means the iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, in addition to iPod touches and iPads. You won’t see any speed boost on Wi-Fi devices, nor Android phones, at least not yet. Once the app is installed, you can customize the compression level in order to sacrifice a little video or image quality for some data savings and speed, for example. And the software offers up information showing how much data you’ve saved over time and even on a per-app basis.

Here at GigaOM, we were so impressed with Snappli that we chose it as one of our top 10 Launchpad finalists for our upcoming Mobilize 2012 event. The company will join nine others on stage to impress the judges and become the best of the best on Sept. 20, so join us to hear more about Snappli.

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