This is a classic weekend story conundrum…

• In the early hours of Sunday morning, AppleInsider reported an anonymous source as saying Apple has offered €87.3 million ($112 million) for Kronach-based Loewe, which makes sleek TV sets and speakers.
• By Sunday morning, a Loewe spokesperson quoted by German press (Heise Online) said there was “absolutely nothing to it”.

But the apparent rebuttal didn’t gain as much pick-up as the excited speculation about the sexy products Apple might be buying.

Net effect: When German markets opened on Monday morning, shares in publicly-traded Loewe rocketed by around 25 percent.

That pushed Loewe’s market cap to over €77 million ($99 million) by mid-morning – up from what had been €59.1 million before the rumours, and not far off Apple’s rumoured offer price.

And the price kept rising even after traders had a chance to read the apparent denial over their morning coffee.

What we do know is…

• Loewe in 2011 made a €10.5 million loss on €274 million revenue.
• Its largest shareholder is Sharp, with almost 30 percent.
• Sharp has formed a joint venture with Apple’s assembly contractor Foxconn.

Ahead of the weekend, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou was reported as confirming production of the forthcoming set…

China Daily: “Gou said Foxconn is making preparations for iTV … although development or manufacturing has yet to begin.

“iTV reportedly features an aluminum construction, Siri, and FaceTime video calling

“Foxconn’s recent 50-50 joint venture factory with Sharp in Japan is one of the preparations made for the new device, Gou added.”

Update: Foxconn, backtracking, makes a denial on behalf of its CEO (via The Next Web):

“In remarks at a media briefing during the groundbreaking of Foxconn’s new China headquarters in Shanghai on May 10, Terry Gou, Foxconn’s Chief Executive Officer, made it very clear that he would neither confirm nor speculate about Foxconn’s involvement in the production of any product for any customer because Foxconn’s policy is not to comment on any customers or their products.

“At no time did he confirm that Foxconn was in development or manufacturing stages for any product for any of its customers.  He did say that  Foxconn is always prepared to meet the manufacturing needs of customers should they determine that they wish to work with Foxconn in the production of any of their products.   Any reports that Foxconn confirmed that it is preparing to produce a specific product for any customer are not accurate.”

AppleInsider had reported Loewe would decide on a deal or otherwise by May 18.

Future flooded iTunes Newsstand with 65 titles in October and, by January, had clocked up 430,000 individual sales from 10 million free magazine downloads. “We can claim to be to be leading publisher on iPad, worldwide,” Wood tells paidContent.

Now Wood’s group plans to make more of those editions interactive, and to start selling to rivals the very tools it is using to make them.

#1. What are the latest numbers for your tablet magazines?

“We’ve moved on (since January). In March, we were at over 12 million container app downloads, had five million people signed up for marketing messages, which is a lot, and way past half a million sales.

“We saw a big spike when iPad 3 was launched – the more devices that are launched, the more we will see people prepared to pay for content.”

Future reached a milestone in Q4 2011 when digital revenue gains made up for print declines for the first time. Next stop, digital revenue fully overtaking print? “We’re heading that way, yes,” Wood reckons, though it is some way off.

#2. Some observers say sceptically that early tablet magazine sales were just novelty spikes. Is iPad a gift that can keep on giving?

“If you take our T3 magazine, sales of its editions have carried on climbing. It is still the top-selling magazine on Newsstand; we’re not seeing any change in that pattern.

“Overall, it demonstrates people are prepared to pay for content.”

“The more magazines which go on Newsstand, the harder it gets to find stuff. iTunes introduced simple navigation but the navigation is getting clogged. Apple is aware of that and is looking to improve it.

“T3′s are big numbers, our others are not so big but are significant and enough to make profits, especially as sales of tablets grow. We are looking at numbers that project there will be close to a billion tablets by 2015.”

#3. Why did you develop your own tablet publishing software, and why are you trying to license it to rivals?

Of its interactive editions, Future launched T3 magazine to iPad, pre-Newsstand, using the Woodwing production software,  and followed it up with Guitarist magazine built using Adobe Digital Production Suite – amongst the many packages catering to publishers’ migration ambitions, including Mag+, PixelMags and one from Siemens.

But, unusually for publishers who often buy in the service, it then turned its in-house app developers toward building Future’s own iPad magazine production software, Folio, which it has since used to roll out Tap!, Cycling News and Total Film. More are in the pipeline.

“It’s very flexible,” Wood says. “There aren’t many other software technologies out there with the range it’s got.

“Our Future Music magazine has always produced covermount discs with audio – now we’re embedding that in the magazine.”

“One thing we tried to achieve was to have a system which enabled us to produce multimedia editions with the least possible additional work, because a video-rich edition like T3 can add three people to your headcount if you’re not careful.”

So how many of the 65 page-turner replicas, out of Future’s 70 Newsstand titles, will be converted to interactive using Folio?

“We are aiming to get almost all the portfolio to be interactive to one degree or another,” Wood says.

“Consumers are becoming more demanding – they want exciting editions. We will certainly convert all the ones we think will sell well. We will go through a winnowing process at some stage.”

Next up, Future hopes to license Folio to rival magazine publishers to produce their own interactive editions – something which will see the publisher go head-to-head with vendors like Adobe and Mag+.

#4. What place does the long tail play in magazines? It seems like the book sector, which is going episodic, and the magazine industry, which is publishing more timeless editions, are each converging at the same middle point from opposite ends.

“I agree, that’s a good way of looking at it.

“We are looking at how we can repackage our existing material from back issues, things that run along in themes.

“The back content is still of interest. We’ve learned on ipad that back issues carry on selling for quite a long time – you just don’t take them off.

“With one of our Photoshop guides, a repackaged product at £11.99 – we’ve sold between 1,000 and 2,000 – that will stay up there for a long time. We’re looking now at what else we can do.”

#5. What are Future’s international plans?

As part of an effort to turn around its U.S. business, where newsstand print circulations are declining faster than in Europe, Future last year stated its ambition to turn its efforts there more digital, more quickly than previously planned.

The group launched its TechRadar web portal in the States in April. “First feedback is good,” Wood says. “We will do the same with BikeRadar next month because we want to build our U.S. cycling presence very quickly. We want to make it a very American product.”

Wood hinted Future is also looking to new markets beyond the U.S., too. “Every time we go in with a new English-language product, it’s very large margins.”

“Completely out of the blue, Amazon have told us they have decided to stop publishing any new newspapers on the Kindle indefinitely, worldwide,” says Gannett’s Herald & Times Group of Scotland, which was awaiting approval for its Kindle edition.

The Herald & Times says Amazon has suspended its approval of black-and-white editions submitted by publishers while it works through a backlog of submitted titles and reprioritises resources – a closure that is supposedly not permanent but which may be long-term.

But Amazon tells paidContent: “That’s not true — we are accepting newspapers on Kindle.

“However, we are not always able to immediately launch every publisher who contacts us using our more heavyweight integration method. For publishers that want to add their newspaper onto Kindle in self-service fashion, they can also do so via the Amazon Appstore for Android.”

Herald & Times Group, which publishes the Glasgow Herald, Sunday Herald, Evening Times and integrated HeraldScotland.com, submitted its edition two months ago and had since progressively tweaked it to Amazon’s requests. It is frustrated that, despite this back-and-forth, it received notice the edition will now not go live.

The Newspapers section of the Kindle Store currently carries nearly 200 newspapers.

Many publishers have come to operate a strategy of availability on multiple devices. Across those devices, Kindle is low in publishers’ priority list compared with iPad, but important compared with other platforms.

Somewhere between Herald & Times Group’s claim and Amazon’s statement may lay the truth. It sounds as though Amazon is facing some issues managing an influx of Kindle newspaper and magazines that include both content feeds and digital replicas. And publishers who want their papers to be available for sale immediately may have to publish them as colour Kindle Fire tablet editions for now.

Publishers have also become well used to dealing with Apple’s back-and-forth app approval process.

This lofty, urgent and not-ironic lyrical manifesto riffs for the salvation of an entire medium, in one of the few places connected tablets don’t always function… the cloud.

It was made for Ink Global, a firm that produces printed in-flight magazines for 32 airlines.

Ink Global, however, also produces digital-edition tablet magazines and even campaigns in the kinds of social media our linear-media lyricist-hero derides in the video.

On a panel at the MPA Digital: Swipe conference Tuesday morning, Upbin said that reader engagement with Forbes through Flipboard is “off the charts,” with over twenty “flips,” or page views, per average reading session.

Reading sessions on Flipboard are “eight to ten times” longer than those on the web, said Flipboard editorial director Josh Quittner.

So far Forbes has only run house ads on Flipboard and they convert “okay,” Upbin said, adding that the company will have ads on Google Currents sooner because Google has already developed an ad platform and analytics. The only analytics that Flipboard offers now are the number of subscribers, number of users, number of page flips and whether users are using the iPad or iPhone app.

“We don’t sell on CPM and we encourage our publishers not to sell on CPM but to sell based on their rate base,” Quittner said. “At this preliminary juncture that seems to be working pretty well.” He said anecdotal evidence points to publishers finding success selling referrals to their native apps; USA Today, for instance, took out a full-page ad referring Flipboard users to download its app. He said in the first few months publishers typically see “a 30 to 40 percent increase in downloads of those apps,” though Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) doesn’t tell them where the users are coming from.

At IP&TV World Forum in London, I tried several of the software and hardware technologies pitched by dozens of jostling vendors to new internet TV operators. My conclusion – the four-directional paradigm of the conventional TV remote control, used by most new-wave connected TVs, is no longer suitable for the exploding new set of use cases for the humble telly box.

The remote control must die; but what’s next? One company at the apex of that question is Philips, which, unbeknownst to many onlookers, already makes remote controls for an array of TV makers, set-top box vendors and pay-TV operators like BSkyB.

Philips now offers its own Wiimote-like gesture stick to screen makers like HP; (NYSE: HPQ) a motion-sensitive, qwerty-equipped uWand; candybars with integrated laptop trackpads and, yes, plain ‘ol candybars for internet TV operators who still want them.

After speaking with Philips’ Ans Tambuyzer, I’m convinced that there is no consistent position amongst the kind of service operators to which Philips is catering. That’s why Philips is making such a varied range of devices. Many new devices are suitably different enough from peers to justifiably demand entirely different input mechanisms from the madding crowd. Take Xbox’s voice and gesture Kinect controls as testament to that.

All of this means the TV input segment is about to embark upon the same kind of innovative period of disruption and competing standards that the TV space is now wrestling with and which the internet itself before it first unleashed.

The catch-up TV service on Tuesday became the latest TV app to launch in the Xbox Dashboard’s app initiative, for free with no subscription requirement (announcement).

Although the BBC has become reluctant to custom-build iPlayer apps for the burgeoning number of new devices, Xbox Kinect’s TV interface represents a sufficiently interesting new opportunity.

Users can swipe through iPlayer’s menus as well as navigate programming by voice control.

iPlayer had been available on Wii and Playstation 3 as an app and through the web browser for some time now. They made up five percent of iPlayer requests in September.

The BBC’s Xbox delay were the Xbox’s lack of web browser and, paidContent understands, that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) had initially wanted to give access only to paid-up Xbox Live Gold members – something which would have run contrary to the stipulation that the BBC must provide its services free at the point of use to UK license fee payers.

But Microsoft’s stance thawed late in 2011 when it announced several TV partners would bring in Xbox apps that could be outside as well as inside its Gold subscription.

I would expect Xbox to become one of the platforms on which iPlayer is most used.

Even better: This report includes the term “bull-twinkie.”

Some tidbits from Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s survey of over 1,100 “U.S. Internet consumers” (so just imagine “Citi says” in front of all these bullets):

–Twenty-three percent of survey respondents own a Kindle e-reader — just a Kindle, not a Kindle or some other type of e-reader. A July 2011 Pew report estimated U.S. adults’ e-reader ownership at 12 percent, hence Citi’s assertion that “Kindle ownership has increased about 100% over the past 7 months”). Six percent of respondents own a Kindle Fire.

–”We see Amazon’s eReader revenue contribution as actually materially greater than its Tablet revenue contribution for the foreseeable future.”

–”E-reader owners purchase about 2.4 books per month….this survey finding is higher than our prior assumption of about 1.5 books purchased per month by Kindle owners.” Also, 24 percent of respondents said they’d purchased five or more e-books in the past 30 days.

–Kindle Fire owners are most likely to use their device to read e-books (35 percent), browse the Internet (18 percent), and play games (18 percent).

–Eighty-one percent of Kindle Fire owners have purchased digital products, 10 percent have purchased physical products and 8 percent have purchased nothing.

–About 20 percent of Amazon shoppers in the survey were also Prime subscribers — most through a paid annual membership (58 percent). Also, Citi agrees with me that this Bloomberg report on Prime subscribers is stupid: “12 percent of Amazon shoppers in our survey are paying Prime subs. Although a relatively low %, this would seem to suggest that the recent report that Amazon has only 2-3MM Prime Subs was a bunch of bull-twinkie.”

–”Prime subs shop more frequently (22x per year vs. 9x purchases per year done by non-Prime subs) and spend more dollars ($458 vs. $310, or about 48% more than non-Prime subs.”

–Finally, for those who just really like analysts’ estimates of devices sold: Citi estimates that 30 million Kindle e-readers will be sold in 2012, compared to 12 million Kindle Fires. And Citi estimates Amazon’s e-book sales at $6.2 billion this year, up 176 percent from 2011.

Barnes & Noble is reportedly partnering with UK bookstore chain Waterstones to sell the Nook, though the company hasn’t confirmed it.

Apps are Barnes & Noble’s fastest-growing content area and the company wants more of them — hence the developers workshop taking place today as part of a Mobile Monday London panel. I am following the news from the workshop via Twitter. Attendees appear (understandably) frustrated by the fact that Barnes & Noble is not answering questions about international expansion even as the company invites them to create apps for the platform.

Everyone waiting for one piece of info – when is it out here? #momolo #nook

— Charles Catton (@crgc) March 19, 2012

Drumroll please… They’re not available in the UK. Why. Are. You. Here? #momolo #nook

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) March 19, 2012

We need to get some alcohol into these BN folks, this lack of information on UK availability is bullshit #momolo

— Andrew Rhomberg (@arhomberg) March 19, 2012

Also of interest:

My god. UK Nook developers have to endure a short 5 minute interview with the US tax authorities to submit an app. #momolo

— Tom Hume (@twhume) March 19, 2012

That’s not to dismiss the value, rather to put it in perspective in a way that may be hard to see when you spend a lot of time immersed in various forms of social media. Nine percent of the respondents in the latest PEJ annual survey “very often” follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter via computer, mobile or tablet — a growing number, up 57 percent from 2009.

But most digital news readers are still “very likely” using search (29 percent), web or app news aggregators (27 percent) or direct visit (38 percent). When you get granular, Facebook users are more likely to follow recommendations than those on Twitter; 27 percent follow Facebook if you combine “very likely” and “somewhat likely” for tablet and smartphone users, compared with 9 percent for Twitter.

The likelihood that you’ll use Twitter and Facebook as conduits to news — that is, actually follow links and recs — increases if you use both a smartphone and a tablet. That makes a certain kind of sense: more digitally inclined plus more mobile = more comfortable with social media. Instead of using apps or sites to aggregate, they use certain social networks as aggregators. (According to PEJ, about a quarter of those device users are using curation/aggregation sites or apps like Topix or Flipboard to follow news.)

Those who rely primarily on laptops or desktops rarely follow Twitter for news — in fact, 85 percent say they never do; that number drops to 53 percent for Facebook. At the same time, those who use Twitter to follow news are the most likely to own a smartphone and also to own a tablet.

They’re also more likely to follow links from news outlets than Facebook users and to follow news recs from non-news sources. Again, that makes sense to me despite the emphasis some news orgs are placing on Facebook. Twitter is a constant flow of news and information; when news is breaking, people are likely to follow the flow. Facebook is still more about the personal.

Another thing that makes sense: Twitter users are more likely not to know where a news recommendation comes from. My guess is a fair amount of that relies on the way they’re accessing Twitter.

Who are they? I was intrigued by some of the demographics, particularly the differences between Facebook and Twitter users. Twitter users surveyed for Pew tended to be “less white” than Facebook users or the general population, also more male and more educated. Facebook users are more likely to have children in the house. Both tend to be younger: more than one-third are 18 to 29.

Here’s the full section from the study on how some people use Twitter and Facebook for news — and who doesn’t.

A little on the methodology: Pew’s traditional survey partner Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 3,016 adults in the continental U.S. during the second half of January. The phone interviews were mixed between landline (1,809) and cellphone (1,207). Of the latter, 605 only have cell phones, not landlines. That mix suggests a fairly good chance at getting a relevant blend of users. The margin of error is 2.2 percent. Those margins change as the larger group gets broken into subsets when researchers pursue certain topics. That said, it’s still a survey — it offers insights into behavior based on a sample.