Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

“Mark Zuckerberg was dead wrong, and it was shameful for him to throw HTML5 under the bus because Facebook had an outdated and poorly written hybrid app,” Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire wrote in an open letter to tech and media leaders that calls for an end to the “religious wars” on mobile platforms.

Allaire’s gripe is that companies like Facebook and Apple are abandoning support for hybrid apps which are built with much of the same code used to display a website in mobile browsers. With the hybrid approach, publishers can rely on universal HTML5 code to get their apps out quickly on multiple platforms and devices while also using some native code for features that count.

Facebook recently eschewed the hybrid approach, claiming it offers a sub-par user experience. Allaire suggests that this is a smokescreen, and that Facebook and Apple have undercut the viability of HTML5 in order to develop their own private eco-systems.

Some might accuse Allaire of sour grapes since a turn to proprietary platforms threatens Brightcove’s App Cloud service which relies heavily on HTML5. But that doesn’t make his point his less valid.

The larger issue here is about standardization. Recall that for much of the 19th century, there were no standards for everyday items like screws or lightbulb threading. Imagine if a carpenter needed a special, proprietary screwdriver for every job site? Allaire makes the same point for the app economy:

Since 1994, our industry has created millions of jobs in the web development industry.  Proprietary native platforms are limiting the available labor in the app economy, hurting our productivity. [...] Every institution on the planet wants to invest in reaching users through apps on consumer devices, but we have a deep deep labor shortage because of these religious wars.

Allaire concludes by calling for an “ecumenical” approach to end the current sectarian approach to development. His letter also points to a Brightcove blog post that sets out a longer version of his thoughts.

Update: In response to a reader request below, here is the full text of the letter:

Subject: Ending the Religious Wars over Mobile Platforms – an open industry letter

Date: November 15, 2012 3:47:48 AM PST

To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Hi-

All of us are blessed to be participants in this marvelous and dynamic internet tech and app economy.  But we’re also cursed with internal strife and religious wars over mobile platform technology that are hurting our economy.  Since 1994, our industry has created millions of jobs in the web development industry.  Proprietary native platforms are limiting the available labor in the app economy, hurting our productivity.

Mark Zuckerberg was dead wrong, and it was shameful for him to throw HTML5 under the bus because Facebook had an outdated and poorly written hybrid app.

Hybrid apps as a bi-partisan solution to the religious mobile platform wars are too important to our economy.  Every institution on the planet wants to invest in reaching users through apps on consumer devices, but we have a deep deep labor shortage because of these religious wars.

Steve Jobs, god bless his soul, was also wrong — well, perhaps, just deceptive — with his Thoughts on Flash and public flogging of Adobe.  Killing support for Flash on iOS was not a benevolent move to save consumers from slow and crash-prone software, nor a resounding vote for open, HTML5 based content apps.   No, it was merely a flanking maneuver to protect Apple’s proprietary native app development model.  While Apple has gone on to deeply enhance the iOS native APIs, they’ve barely moved the needle on support for HTML5 inside of native apps.

Again, hybrid apps are essential to getting the technical economy highly productive, and that’s essential to getting the global economy more productive.

Adobe smartly acquired PhoneGap — a hybrid app development platform — to answer this corporate and industry need, but since then the technology has gone stagnant, with little innovation.

The industry needs better hybrid app platforms, and that’s what we’re doing.

On my blog, I have a lot more to say about all of this, how we got here, and what the industry and Brightcove is doing about it.  Take a look, it’s a quick read.

http://blog.brightcove.com/en/2012/11/bipartisan-solutions-ending-religious-wars-over-mobile-platforms

The industry needs all of us to make this happen.

Thanks,
Jeremy Allaire
Founder and CEO, Brightcove

(Image by WilleeCole via Shutterstock)

MediaEverywhere provides publishers with an SDK based on HTML5 that allows them to create custom mobile websites in a short period of time but also re-use the work for native apps for smartphones and tablets. The SDK  allows publishers to control the look of their content while easily distributing it to multiple devices in a cost-effective way.

HTML5 has been hyped as a tool to help developers build once and reach mobile browsers and apps. But the technology hasn’t developed as fast as proponents would have liked, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who admitted that the company’s reliance on HTML5 was its biggest mistake. So why does it make sense for MediaEverywhere?

CEO Kunal Gupta told me Polar Mobile did a lot of optimization to its SDK to improve performance including a lot of caching on the device and a single-page architecture. And he said he created the tool specifically for publishers to help them present articles, blogs, photo galleries and multimedia content. Polar Mobile has also integrated support for third-party ads and also handles Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture for analytics.

He said publishers are finding that the revenue they’re currently making on mobile doesn’t justify the heavy price tag of dedicated native apps, which also take a long time to develop. And he said mobile consumption is increasingly moving to the web browser. Pew reported earlier this month that 60 perecnt of tablet news users rely on their browser to get news on their tablet, compared to 23 percent that mostly use apps. With a tool like MediaEverywhere that’s optimized for media publishers, Gupta believes brands have a way to be on all devices quickly without paying a heavy price.

“The mobile economy isn’t working today. Publishers are spending too much to pay for audiences and advertisers haven’t kept up with the audience,” said Gupta.

Gupta said more publishers will be coming on board soon including some of Polar Mobile’s more than 400 existing media clients. If that happens, that should validate Polar Media’s bet on MediaEverywhere. The company raised $6 million in January to build out the product.

The app allows users to consume content in a number of ways, including a trending section that lets people see what’s popular on Twitter from the past hour. There’s also an option to access TimesWire, a firehose feed of all the content on NYTimes.com in reverse chronological order. Users can also view today’s stories by topic headings or see across all of the sections of the Times.

The limited nature of the web app suggests it is just a way for the Times to test the waters of HTML5 as it continues to develop its native apps. But it is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. By launching a web app, the Times can avoid paying Apple’s required 30 percent cut for in-app purchases on subscriptions. It also helps the Times improve on its “NYT Everywhere” initiative, which aims to make NYT content available on third-party platforms. And it also makes sense in light of  new Pew data that suggests news consumers are using the web over mobile apps.

The move follows similar steps by the Financial Times, which abandoned its native iOS apps last year to focus on HTML5. There was speculation that other publications would follow the FT’s lead, though that hasn’t really happened in a big way. The Boston Globe last year launched BostonGlobe.com last year as a paid HTML5-based web app. The Times was quick to point out that it’s not looking to skirt Apple’s rules on subscriptions.

“We wanted to test the web app among an engaged audience of NYT subscribers, which made the iPad a natural choice. This is the first step, but the HTML5 format does allow us to explore the idea of launching Web-based apps other platforms in the future,” a Times spokesperson told the Verge.

The web app doesn’t have the performance of the Times’ native app, but it gives the Times more options as it considers how it wants to distribute its content and how consumers want to consume it.

Once Hiptype’s plugin is added to an ebook, it provides insights like reader demographics, reading behavior (where people start or stop reading; what they skip), conversion patterns (who buys an ebook after reading a free sample); and sharing and highlighting behavior (which passages readers highlight or take notes on). Publishers then log into their Hiptype accounts to see a dashboard with visualizations of the data. Hiptype also helps publishers run Facebook campaigns and target readers with personalized recommendations.

Hiptype launches in beta this week and is working with a limited number of publishers, whom 26-year-old founder and CEO James Levy (cofounder is 19-year-old Sohail Prasad) would not name — though a sample book profile for 50 Shades of Grey suggests Random House might be one early client. Other publishers — as well as self-published authors — can request access on Hiptype’s website and will be invited to join in waves. The first book is free. After that, Hiptype will charge $19 per month per book for a basic package (including data from up to 1,000 readers and basic insights and trends) or $99 per month per book for a pro package (including data from up to 500,000 readers, detailed insights and trends, ad management and personalized backlist recommendations for readers).

One possible concern is privacy. “We don’t want to discourage the conversation about privacy,” Levy said, noting that while all of the data Hiptype collects is anonymous, users can opt out completely. The company is also looking for ways it can improve its service for readers. In beta, end users have requested that Hiptype make its data available to them. For example, Levy said, a teacher could track how students are interacting with the books they’ve been assigned to read.

It doesn’t work everywhere yet

Hiptype’s largest limitation is that it doesn’t work on every platform. The plugin only works on platforms that support HTML5 and allow Javascript to be embedded within a book. Apple, which supports EPUB3 and HTML5, is in. But e-ink devices, like Kindle and Nook e-readers, web-based readers like Kindle Cloud, and desktop e-reading platforms are out.

Apple is estimated to have about 10 percent of the ebook market, with Kindle at 55 to 60 percent and Nook around 25 percent. In the case of Kindle and Nook, we don’t know how much of their usage comes from devices versus mobile apps, but for now Hiptype is missing a large portion of the ebook market.

Levy says Hiptype works on most iOS and Android e-reading apps, but wouldn’t clarify what those are beyond “some of the most popular e-reader apps on the most popular operating systems.” He says Hiptype is in discussions with ebook retailers and it’s “paramount to our success that we have an open line of communication.”

When publishers do see the data on their books, “it can be a little bit depressing,” Levy said. Publishers testing Hiptype in beta, for instance, were surprised by “how low conversion rates are” — early data suggests that only three to four percent of people who download a free ebook sample go on to buy the book — and how few people who do buy a book finish reading it. “It can be a bit of a bummer,” Levy said. “But as soon as you start measuring, you can do tests and see what moves the needle. We’re already doing research on the data we’re collecting. As data hackers, we think there are underlying patterns here even if they’re not apparent at first.”

Users opening the new m.people.com will see a change in content as well as design — instead of a curated news and photo feed created for snacking, the new mobile People offers the complete desktop content. For instance, mobile users will be able to read People.com’s celebrity blogs. And they will see a new ad format for Time Inc., a “snap banner” that sits at the bottom of the page but scrolls down the screen with the user and “snaps” into place when they stop.

The shift in content strategy comes from user behavior as more sophisticated devices emerged, Liz White, general manager of People Digital and Tony Brancato, senior product director, told paidContent in an interview as the site was relaunching. “Call what we had before version 1.5,” said White. “The initial version was us operating on the assumption that people were coming to the mobile phone to snack.” But when 25 percent of mobile users spend 5 minutes or more on the site, they’re coming for more than a quick snack. They also may be visiting from a variety of screens throughout the day.

White says People‘s mobile site has more than 4.5 million monthly uniques, according to Nielsen Mobile, and White says mobile accounts for about 10 percent of all People.com pageviews. People.com claims 13 million unique users a month and more than 1 billion pageviews. The majority come from iOS but Android is gaining. Kindle Fire is “a blip but it we see it growing; market share is picking up,” said Brancato. They’re also keeping an eye on Google’s Nexus 7.

The costs of a redesign make the switch to responsive a little more expensive on the front end, Brancato said, but People will save probably five times the cost in the long run in terms of upkeep and the editors’ ability to manage the site. For White, “The driving force is the unity of the user experience. As responsive design takes hold consumer benefits are huge, as are the brand benefits from making sure the consumer experience is viable on all devices.” Responsive design means the site should be able to adapt to new devices as they emerge.

The new m.people.com is also being edited specifically for mobile with “dayparting” in mind — changing the kinds of content that are highlighted to match or encourage certain kinds of user behavior at different times of day. For instance, Monday morning visitors will be offered a “what you missed” wrap up for the weekend, while evening users will get companion content for primetime shows like The Bacholorette finale. “We know people have more time to linger during lunch, after dinner,” said White. The slide below shows how people are using m.people.com throughout the day.

People has hired an editor for mobile — a first for the magazine and another first for Time Inc., recognition that offering the same content across platform doesn’t equal shoveling the same content. “Like most sites when we first launched, it was basically a feed taken from the desktop site built of a flawed assumption that people want the same kind of content,” White aid. That may sound a little contradictory given that part of this redesign is about making desktop content available. The difference is programming with mobile in mind and a mix of mobile-exclusive content.

White sees it as a way to make use of “found” time — the time opened up by a device that’s in reach and in use most of the day. “The mantra here was not just programming for the device but programming for the moment,” she added, whether it’s a quick check between meetings or during TV.

The redesign also includes some enhanced ways of sharing content. In addition to the now-routine Twitter and Facebook sharing, m.people.com users can share via SMS text message if they want to send a link to a sister or friend. White was shocked to realize how few sites offer that option.

Imagine how many texts might been sent the day People.com broke the news that Katie Holmes wanted a divorce from Tom Cruise.

People already has a mobile sales director embedded with the sales team. Motorola is the first sponsor using the new “Snap Banner”. While White didn’t provide actual costs of advertising on the mobile site, she said the new ad unit has a premium of 25-to-30 percent over People‘s usual mobile ads.

“The other major initiative as part of this is to build a very robust advertising experience,” White said. In addition to selling advertising, the site also is a marketing tool for subscriptions so users will see “touts” offering subscriptions.

People also will offer standard units and full-page interstitials within the context of how various ads come across on different devices. “When you have a screen size of three inches, you have to be really mindful of the difference,” she said; that does away with “the idea that we can just take the standrad banner and slap it on the page.”

The snap banner is their way of pushing the envelope by claiming attention for a advertiser on a long-scrolling page.

In addition, publishers using Habitat, Inkling’s e-book publishing platform, can make their books available for the Web simultaneously.

Books automatically sync between the Web and iPad. Inkling for Web is initially only available on Google Chrome and Safari.

The carrier announced the details of a new initiative that will allow mobile app developers to write HTML5 apps that can access some features of the phone that are unique to AT&T’s network, such as picture text-messaging and location services. AT&T will then distribute those apps on an app store that will be accessible to iPhone and Android users and will let those users pay for apps or in-app purchases by putting the charge on their monthly wireless bill.

“The two things that are the biggest challenges for HTML5 to reach its full potential are distribution and monetization,” said AT&T’s David Christopher, chief marketing officer, at AT&T’s Developer Summit, according to IDG News Service. We’ve been over the inherent promises and challenges of HTML5 mobile development: apps that can truly work across platforms are extremely intriguing, but only when they work well.

By giving access to device-level features and an established billing network, AT&T might be able to entice a few mobile developers to list their apps with the carrier, which hasn’t been top-of-mind for developers in a world dominated by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.

Software developers packed themselves into The Westin in downtown San Francisco Tuesday for HTML5 Dev Con, which one of the speakers, Peter Lubbers of Kaazing, said was thrown together in a few weeks. Yet it was among the more crowded conferences I’ve ever seen, with developers sitting Indian-style in the aisles of the ballrooms straining to hear more about what many in the mobile industry consider to be the holy grail of mobile software development.

The idea is pretty simple: the mobile renaissance of the past several years has been created largely on the back of native software development, or apps created specifically for iOS and Android. Native applications can interact directly with a phone’s hardware and enable all kinds of nifty tricks, but they force developers to keep up with platform changes and either yoke themselves to Apple’s tight-fisted control of iOS or burden themselves with the fragmentation problems of Android.

The mobile web, on the other hand, promises to be the latest incarnation of the “write once, run anywhere” dragon that the tech industry has been chasing since the mid-1990s and the advent of Java. With all major mobile browsers moving to embrace HTML5 technologies under development by the W3C, the hope is that mobile devices can soon enjoy the same types of web applications that have taken the PC by storm in the Web 2.0 era.

“The third player is maybe the web,” said Michael Abbott, vice president of engineering for Twitter, at the GigaOm Mobilize conference Tuesday morning, in response to a question from GigaOm founder Om Malik about which technology will emerge as the third mobile platform behind iOS and Android. “If you look at what we’re doing with HTML5, and the experiences you can build, we’re really excited about that.”

Mobile publishers at our paidContent Advertising conference earlier this month said they were starting to embrace the mobile web more and more as tablets become popular, in that the larger screen size present on tablets allows developers to create web experiences that are equally as compelling to both users and advertisers.

But just like the hype surrounding mobile payments, it’s pretty clear this embrace of the web is not going to happen in a big way for quite some time.

Lubbers told a packed ballroom Tuesday that “as much promise as HTML5 has, it’s not completely done.” Browser makers are implementing some of the technologies under discussion by the W3C, but until a standard is fully baked the danger of fragmentation lurks in the wings.

And while the mobile Web might be an everyman technology, some developers aspire to more. “If you’re looking for the high end, you really have to go native,” said Santiago Becerra, co-founder and CEO of Mellmo, during Mobilize. Fellow panelist Adam Blum of Rhomobile, a company dedicated to giving developers a way to target multiple platforms with a single effort, agreed: “I don’t think HTML5 will ever offer as much as native platforms.”

Perhaps the most damning criticism of the mobile Web in recent weeks came from the blog of Joe Hewitt, the former Facebook iOS developer who has recently chronicled his frustration with mobile Web development on his Twitter feed. In a blog post last week, Hewitt articulated his frustration:

Let’s face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform. There will forever be other important platforms competing for users’ time. To thrive, HTML and company need what those other platforms have: a single source repository and a good owner to drive it. A standards body is not suited to perform this role. Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido.

Yet even Hewitt acknowledged in a later post that there is some inherent value in what is being proposed by backers of the mobile Web. The problem is the “potential” albatross, a word thrown around so often with good intentions that only serves to illustrate how futile progress has been to date whatever has been described as having potential.

HTML5 and mobile Web technologies have an easy-to-understand appeal: “They make it simpler to do things you were already probably trying to do,” Lubbers told developers Tuesday.

But the mobile Web seems at least a few years away from reaching its true potential among mainstream developers, despite the efforts of companies like Sony and The Boston Globe to raise the bar.

“HTML5 is early, but we’re full believers that it’s a standard,” said Sean Whiteley, a senior vice president at Salesforce.com, at Mobilize. That gives mobile strategists two choices: get out ahead of the crowd now in hopes of establishing a foothold, or save your bullets until we all have a better idea how this notion of mobile development will evolve.