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.

Book group iPad app that supports Kindle

A bunch of my girlfriends and I are about to start a virtual book club to read Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. We’ll be reading it on our respective devices and then talking about it together on a private message board.

Most of us will be buying the Kindle version of the book, and I wish there were an iPad app that let us open the Kindle file within it and then create our own private conversation around the book — highlights, notes and so on. There are already plenty of social reading iPad apps — Readmill, Subtext, Copia — but they either don’t support Kindle books and/or don’t let users create a private discussion.

If you’re wondering why it has to be Kindle, by the way: It’s the device/format that all of my friends already use. That’s going to be true for a lot of book groups, and so it seems as if any book club app is going to have to support books bought on Kindle.

Interim solution: We’ll be reading the book on respective devices or in print, and then we’ll talk about it together on a private message board.

E-ink mode for iPad

I like to read ebooks on my iPad before I go to bed, but I worry that the back-lit screen messes with my eyes and sleep patterns. I wish there were an e-ink mode or a filter app that changed the type of light coming from the iPad screen — not just a dimmer but something that actually made it look more similar to an e-ink screen, with no glare. Apple actually has a patent on this type of hybrid display, so it might be a feature we see on an iPad one day.

Interim solution: The app F.lux changes a screen’s brightness and tint based on the time of day.

A Web-based Calibre

Calibre is free ebook management software: You can use it to store your ebook collection, convert ebooks to other formats, send ebooks to e-readers, download content from news sites and turn it into an ebook, and so on. There are also a number of third-party plugins that add new features to the service. For example, there are Calibre plugins that break the DRM on an ebook. That means that, for example, you can buy an ebook from Barnes & Noble, break the DRM on it, convert it to a *.mobi file and read it on your Kindle. (That isn’t what publishers or retailers want you to do, but with Calibre third-party plugins it’s possible.)

Calibre is downloadable software, but I’d love to see a web version that lets readers store all their ebooks in the cloud, convert them directly within a web browser and then email them straight to a device. That way, users could access their files from anywhere.

Interim solution: With a couple hacks, you can sync Calibre with Dropbox. That’ll let you access all your ebooks where you have Dropbox installed, but you won’t be able to convert them to other formats. Also, be warned that it looks as if Dropbox has cracked down on this in at least a few cases.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk 

Discoverability is a problem for publishers, maybe not so much for readers

This post on why online book discovery is broken and how to fix it got the most comments of any post I’ve ever written, and a couple commenters complained that the solutions I offered in that post were aimed at publishers, not readers. That might be because discovery is more of a problem for publishers than readers: It is in publishers’ best interest to help readers find a not-so-well-known book, but it is not necessarily in readers’ best interest to read that book. It’s also unclear whether the average reader is really having all that much trouble finding the next book he or she wants to read.

A Book^Camp session led by Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky of BookRiot focused on the “average” reader, a person who reads at most a few books per year. (Recent Pew data shows that of the 75 percent of Americans who read at least one book in 2012, the median number of books read was six.) This session was, not surprisingly, filled with bookish people who read at least a book a week, so I suggested that we think about areas of media consumption in which we, ourselves, are average.

For me that’s music and movies. I’m an avid reader — I spend a lot of time thinking about what I will read next and searching for books and talking to people about books — but I don’t put that level of effort into finding which songs to listen to next or which movie to watch. Instead, I kind of wait for things to rise to the surface. When something finally breaks through to the point where I’ve heard about it enough, through various internet and non-internet sources, I consume it.

This is why I saw Argo three months after it was released and will maybe get around to watching Zero Dark Thirty some time in 2014. It’s why I mostly listen to the radio on Spotify. I’m not really proud of this, but I’m not that embarrassed by it either. If I put as much effort into consuming movies and music as I do into reading books, I would have way less time to read. I’d rather read, so something’s gotta give.

There are a lot of people like me — big readers who spend a lot of time thinking about what they are going to read next. Book publishers do not have to worry about these people. At the same time, getting average readers to be interested in book discovery — getting average readers to visit Bookish, for instance — is going to be difficult, because you are also going to have to require these people to make big shifts in their behavior and in their media consumption patterns.

Are these people really not reading more because they don’t know what they should read? Maybe. But it’s more likely that they have plenty of things they’d like to read, and just don’t have time, or, like me, there are other forms of media that they care about more than books, and if they were to shift into reading more books, they would have to give up things they really like instead.

As Brett Sandusky points out, “Most people who read books read for pleasure. They will have gaps in their reading before they pick up something else. Yet somehow, we’ve decided, implicitly, that the normative reading behavior, which discoverability facilitates, is shotgun style where readers are reading book after book after book after book.”

It’s hard to change people’s behavior patterns — that’s a challenge for any industry, not just for book publishing. Book publishers have to continue to focus on getting their books into new readers’ hands, but it is unclear whether algorithmic solutions like Bookish are going to be of interest to anyone but the people who are the most avid readers already. Since publishers can’t physically enter people’s living rooms, turn off their TVs and shove books into their hands, they may instead have to focus on retail and, as Guy LeCharles Gonzales writes, work on their direct relationships with readers.

Walled gardens are permeable

At Tools of Change on Wednesday, Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler presented the results of a survey of 1,500 U.S. Goodreads users. (His full presentation is here.) This is, of course, a survey of those avid readers I mentioned above — not only are they on Goodreads but they are willing to actually sit down and take a survey about their ebook reading behavior. Nevertheless, check out this slide:

Goodreads / “What’s Going on with Readers Today” http://www.slideshare.net/GoodreadsPresentations/whats-going-on-with-readers-today-16508449

There are way more questions than answers here, but the results appear to suggest that readers don’t see platform lock-in as an insurmountable problem — or in fact as something that’s actually locking them in. Instead, they’re reading across different retail platforms.

These results “made us scratch our head,” Chandler said. The company didn’t delve further into which devices readers are using to read ebooks across platforms, and so it’s unclear how exactly this experimentation is taking place. For example: Are people confusing “iBooks” with iPad — so that someone reading ebooks on a Kindle is also reading them on an iPad Kindle app, but somehow counts that as reading on iBooks? Or are readers using multiple retailers’ tablet apps, and also buying ebooks from multiple retailers? Or are they actually breaking DRM so that they can buy a Nook book and read it on a Kindle? It seems possible that tablets actually break down walled gardens because readers can have multiple ebook vendors’ apps on a single device.

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Ventures.

I got a demo of Bookish at the company’s trendy, book-filled offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last week, and had a chance to use the site further on Monday when it was prematurely available online for several hours as it was being tested. Overall, I think the long-delayed Bookish is off to a promising start.

Bookish has the opportunity to shape book discovery and offers publishers a chance to directly engage with readers. It also allows them to tiptoe into direct sales. I’m less intrigued by the original editorial content: I’m not sure it differentiates itself enough from other book-related content on the web to draw users to the site for the first time. Once those users make their way to the site, though, they’ll find a clean, easy-to-use design, and an algorithm that may well find them their next book — even though it’s limited to less than a quarter of the books on the site for now. Here’s my overview of the site.

 The basics: Books and authors

While only three of the big-six publishers are financially backing the site, the other three — Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan — are making their books available through it, along with 10 other publishers including Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. In total, that’s 1.2 million unique titles spanning 18 genres (fiction and literature, children’s, cookbooks, and so on), and 400,000 authors have profile pages. The book pages include basic information, a preview of the first chapter, related news and videos, and a roundup of any “must-read” lists that the book has appeared on (for more on those lists, see below). Each book page also includes purchase links (more on that below, too).

Algorithm-generated book recommendations

Online book discovery is a huge problem for publishers, and Bookish tackles it with a recommendation algorithm that lets users input up to four titles to find what to read next. “We’re very much a technology company,” Karen Sun, an MIT grad (and book blogger) who is heading the company’s recommendation engine, told me. “This is probably the largest venture in the book space, in terms of data.” Sun explained that while Amazon and Goodreads primarily deliver book recommendations based on “collaborative filtering” — namely, a user’s purchasing or rating and reviewing history as well as those of other users — Bookish doesn’t have that user or purchase data yet. Instead, it relies on “deep, introspective” data: “Recommendations are based on the books and understanding of the books.” The recommendation looks at features like the authors, editors and illustrators who contributed to a book, the awards a book has won, and genre and publication date, then layers on a machine-learning component that parses user and professional reviews to try to distill themes, concepts and sentiments. Insights from the editorial team are included, too.

A user who liked The Help, for instance, receives recommendations for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — another women’s fiction title that features race relations — and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book that, like The Help, includes an aspiring female author. Type in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the engine pulled up four similar “big ideas” books, but also two Spanish-language titles that were out of place even if the subject matter was similar (and you’ll see a Spanish-language edition of The Room in the recommendations for The Help above).

For now, Bookish’s recommendation engine works with only about 250,000 of the 1.2 million books on the site. Sun says the engine will improve over time, and will eventually integrate reader reviews and user actions — other books users have looked at and rated on the site.

E-commerce: Essential, but…

Each book on the site can be purchased in print or digital formats directly through Bookish or from another retailer — there are affiliate links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple and Kobo.

Distributor Baker & Taylor is handling all of Bookish’s direct sales. For now, ebooks purchased through Bookish are only available in EPUB and PDF formats, for reading on iPad, Android, Nook and desktop — no Kindle.

Bookish seems to want to stress that it’s not cutting into other retailers’ sales, even though a serious direct-sales outlet is something that book publishers desperately need.

“We want to be able to say you can buy [a book] here and it’s reasonably priced. We’re not trying to steal sales away from other places,” CEO Khazaei told me. Publishers probably don’t care about taking sales from Amazon, but they may not want to sour relationships with retailers like Barnes & Noble and the independent bookstores represented by IndieBound.

Bookish’s print and ebook prices appeared to match those offered by Amazon, though I wasn’t able to test many titles. Khazaei told me that “I don’t know how the pricing decisions are made, really,” Khazaei said. “I assume [Baker & Taylor] is tracking [prices on other sites] but we just leave it in their hands.” While the site seems like an obvious place for publishers to run special sales on both print and digital books, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for now. Update: Khazaei stressed to me that his lack of involvement with pricing is required by the Department of Justice in order to be compliant with antitrust regulations. (The DOJ sued Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, along with Macmillan and HarperCollins, last year for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices; Hachette, Penguin and S&S all settled.)

Original editorial content along with the algorithm

Bookish has seven full-time editors who each manage different genres and update those sections daily with original book coverage. The site is also soliciting pieces from well-known authors and other public figures. In one ongoing feature, for instance, editors from The Onion review books. Other editorial features at launch include a column by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and an interview between bestselling thriller authors Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya. In addition to that content, the site’s editors are curating columns and lists of books like “The Biggest BFF Breakups in YA Books” and “Big Ideas.”

Advertising, revenue and partnerships

Bookish is collaborating with USA Today’s books website. Its original editorial content will be syndicated on USA Today’s website, and the technology that Bookish uses to let readers view the first chapter of a book and to offer book recommendations will also be included on USA Today’s site. In exchange, Bookish will feature USA Today’s book bestseller lists on bookish.com.

In addition to book sales, Bookish will get revenue from advertising. For now the site’s ad slots are taken up with books from the three launch partners, but eventually the company will expand advertising to other publishers and to companies from outside the book business. Prior to its launch two years ago, Bookish had announced an advertising and content syndication deal with AOL Huffington Post, but that’s off the drawing board for now. A company spokeswoman told me Bookish is “in discussions about continuing to work with AOL in the future.”

Not a focus: Social, self-publishing

Other publishers can sign an agreement with Bookish to add their titles to the site. (Khazaei told me Bookish doesn’t charge publishers anything to join, but they presumably have to fulfill a number of requirements to be included.) However, self-published authors can’t add their books. “The focus right now is on traditionally published titles,” Khazaei said.

Also at launch, the social features that are a key part of Goodreads’ mission are absent from Bookish. Users can’t friend or follow each other — the focus is on a reader’s individual interests. I found that refreshing: Just because you’re Facebook friends with someone doesn’t mean that he or she shares your book preferences, and I prefer the algorithm-driven approach.

Wenner Media describes the launch as a “planned progression” that began in May 2010 with Rolling Stone‘s Beatles guide app and continued with a music news iPhone app and the launch of Us Weekly on iPad last May. A digital replica edition of Rolling Stone is already available for Kindle Fire, Nook and Zinio, but the iPad edition is optimized for the tablet and “all of the album and song reviews and music-related articles will include a link to listen to music samples and purchase tracks from iTunes.” (Those are the red buttons in the image at left.) In his AdAge interview two years ago, one of Wenner’s arguments against releasing magazines on iPad was that it was too expensive and didn’t provide enough revenue; the iTunes affiliate partnership helps with that.

The iPad edition of Rolling Stone will not be bundled with the print issue. iPad subscriptions are $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, while a single issue is $4.99 — the same as the print magazine on the newsstand.

Inkling says the launch of its “Content Discovery Platform” is a way for publishers to make their ebooks “more discoverable and profitable.” The company also wants to reduce readers’ reliance on Amazon as a tool for book discovery. “Amazon has way too much market power,” Inkling founder Matt MacInnis told me. “They control the discoverability of consumer content. They end up making or breaking a project for a publisher.”

Inkling is fighting back not by trying to “build a storefront overnight that is another Amazon.com” (though the company does sell its titles online) but by making all of its ebooks completely searchable through Google. When a user clicks on an Inkling Google search result, the relevant part of the book opens in Inkling’s web-based reader. The user can then preview the ebook’s content (up to five clicks are free), buy it in chunks or buy the whole book. The company is bullish on selling ebooks by the piece because it primarily works with publishers of practical nonfiction — cookbooks, travel guides and how-to books, along with textbooks — that can be chunked easily. In a version to be rolled out in a few weeks, users will be able to tweet the content and share it on Facebook.

You probably recall that Google has tried to harness the power of book search before — and, in MacInnis’s phrasing, “got its face sued off” because it tried to do so without the permission of publishers and authors. (Check out my colleague Jeff John Roberts’ ebook on the Google books lawsuit and settlement.) But Inkling has secured all of the rights it needs to make books indexable on Google. Client publishers include O’Reilly, Wiley, Workman and Pearson. HarperCollins will soon make some of its titles available on the platform, and MacInnis said that Inkling is either in negotiations or has signed contracts with the remaining big-six publishers. In addition to the 400 titles available on the platform now, the company says it will add about a thousand more over the next year.

MacInnis described Amazon as a “black box” that doesn’t give publishers data on how their books are being discovered. He also claims that Inkling’s Google initiative will bring publishers new readers. “We’re going to bring people in before they ever get to Amazon,” he said, claiming that “the vast majority of people who buy content on Amazon are just disgruntled Google users” who couldn’t find the book content they needed from a search engine. Amazon is also working to improve its own search, of course, and a search performed on Amazon.com will also scan the contents of books for which publishers have enabled the “Look Inside the Book” feature. But Inkling is structuring its content for Google search, which it says will provide better and more useful search results.

Of course, for Inkling to draw any users away from Amazon, it has to make sure its content is rising to the top of Google search results. MacInnis said that will happen because Inkling’s content is high-quality and ad-free, delivering “higher search happiness” that users will reward with clicks. But “we have to do a lot of work over time to establish domain relevance for Inkling.com,” he said, “and establish rank for key titles and key components of titles that we think will drive sales.”

Inkling has raised over $30 million in funding from backers including Sequoia Capital.

It’s easy to forget now, but when The Daily was first launched a little less than two years ago in February of 2011, there was a tremendous amount of attention paid to it. Apple’s iPad was still relatively new, and many publishers were hoping it would become a kind of magic carpet that would whisk them all out of the doldrums and into the promised land of revenue-generating digital content — and Murdoch was seen by some as leading the way. Obviously, the tablet newspaper failed to do anything of the sort, and in that sense its failure is just part of a gradual process of publishers waking up from their dream about apps.

Are tablet-only publications an impossible dream?

Reuters writer Felix Salmon, in fact, argues in a post on The Daily’s death that it proves tablet-only publications may actually be impossible:

“I think that The Daily has taught us all an important lesson — which is that tablets in general, and the iPad in particular, are actually much less powerful and revolutionary than many of us had hoped… the tablet is basically just one of many ways to see material which exists on the internet; it’s not a place to put stuff which can’t be found anywhere else.”

The @daily bet traditional business/editorial assumptions would work in a new medium that resists them. Is that innovation?

—
John McQuaid (@johnmcquaid) December 03, 2012

In many ways, the seeds of The Daily’s demise were (or perhaps should have been) fairly clear from the start: in my initial review of the app, I mentioned that the two most obvious things about it were that it ignored the web almost completely — showing anyone who came to the website via a shared link what amounted to a photograph of the relevant page from its app — and the content seemed rather disappointingly dull, in a traditional newspaper sort of way. Both of these criticisms have also been echoed by many of those who responded to its death notice on Monday.

Why did it have to be daily?

In addition to criticizing The Daily for choosing to go with a paywall for product that was unknown to most of the market it was trying to reach, journalism professor and author Jeff Jarvis says the iPad venture also took a flawed approach to news:

“Finally, there was the absolutely befuddling decision to make The Daily daily. News was only ever daily because it was forced into that limitation by the means of production and distribution of print. The internet freed us from those shackles of time. Why put them on again? Nostalgia?”

@carr2n @mathewi @Penenberg Innovate? No, it tried to shoehorn an old business & product model into a new device built on pay wall zealotry

—
Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) December 03, 2012

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic notes that The Daily failed in part because it was aimed at a “general news reader” instead of a niche, but also says it ignored the fact that media outlets no longer control the distribution of their content, regardless of whether they have an app-only approach. By divorcing the product from what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” The Daily doomed itself, he says:

“There’s not much anyone on your Internet’s favorite websites can do aside from stick a story on the homepage, tweet/Facebook/tumble/Reddit/LinkedIn it and then pray. We do not control the distribution of our work. Period. It’s horrible and bizarre and it is also the way that the media world works now. You can’t push; the content has to pull.”

Peter Ha, an early employee at The Daily who now writes for Gizmodo, echoes this point in a post he wrote about his experience with the iPad paper. Great content, he says “doesn’t do much good if there’s no good way to share it… The Daily had every chance of flourishing and succeeding, but operating independently of the Internet as a whole was clearly a huge mistake.” And another former employee, Trevor Butterworth, summed up his view of the venture’s cause of death in a posting on his Facebook page:

“You can’t create an entirely new brand and take it behind a paywall after 4 weeks, while limiting its footprint on the Internet, and then expect people to buy it. Where was the marketing? Second, it simply added more average-reader content to a market saturated with free average-reader content.”

If you are tablet-only and paywalled, it better be good

The Daily was never an "experiment," it was an expensive, stupid, business decision.

—
  (@dansinker) December 03, 2012

John Abell of Reuters also says that regardless of whether you believe an iPad-only app like The Daily could have survived, it was doomed in part because the content was so underwhelming. He writes that he “grew increasingly annoyed at the extent to which I was reading wire service copy… In other words, I couldn’t find any reason to turn to The Daily as a news brand, and that has to be the absolute baseline requirement for a publication.” Peter Kafka at All Things Digital made the same point:

“The Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one. While the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers. You can’t make that work no matter what kind of platform you use.”

For his part, Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab says that despite the issues with content and the paywall and ignoring the web, he believes that the biggest issue was the structure of The Daily — in other words, its sheer size and its daily-newspaper style approach to a digital business:

“The Daily had over 100,000 paying subscribers. That ain’t nothing! With most subscribers paying $39.99 a year (others paid 99 cents a week), minus Apple’s cut, that’s around $3 million in annual revenue — and that’s before you add in advertising revenue… You can absolutely build a real online news organization on that kind of revenue. You just can’t build one that has 200 staffers. Or 150 staffers. Or 100 staffers.”

Any analysis of The @Daily's fall that doesn't begin and end with it having a staff of more than 100 is useless on arrival.

—
Michael Roston (@michaelroston) December 03, 2012

A bold experiment, yes — but still doomed

A number of observers, including Benton, say that despite all of its flaws, Murdoch and News Corp. should be given some credit for at least experimenting with something like The Daily at a time when many newspaper companies are content to just cut costs by laying off staff. Benton said that News Corp. “made a pretty big bet on an idea. It didn’t work out. But at least they tried.” David Carr, media writer for the New York Times (which has just announced a new round of layoffs — its fourth round in five years — had a more visceral response on Twitter:

@mathewi @Penenberg Y'all kill me. You say dinosaurs need to innovate. News Corps tries something really new that flops, you grave dance.

—
david carr (@carr2n) December 03, 2012

In a sense then — to answer the question posed in the headline of this post — The Daily was both a bold experiment and doomed from the start. It was bold from the point of view of a major media empire with little or no understanding of the web or mobile, and a lot of other media companies without Rupert Murdoch’s deep pockets were watching it closely to see whether they should jump, and if so how to proceed. But then many of the lessons that could be learned should have been obvious even before The Daily launched: don’t ignore the web, don’t make your content platform-specific (unless it is unique), and don’t put a paywall around something no one has ever seen before.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Stephen Brace

Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it’s an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser – you can’t enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content.

However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top – click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a ‘Silicon Valley’ tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like ‘Moore’s Law’. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery.

What’s more – and here it really differs from StumbleUpon, in my experience – you never see the same content twice.

“It’s a new way to consume content,” co-founder Marko Anderson said. “We want the interface to be as simple and fluid as possible. Based on my usage of the service, I get very different things coming to me. If I choose ‘Silicon Valley’ and somebody else does too, the content might be different.”

I’ve not yet had a chance to play with the beta extensively, and of course it would take significant usage before it’s possible to evaluate how successful the algorithms are, but – if it works – Futureful could be a great way to kill time and learn new things. If you’re an iPad user, of course.

As Anderson pointed out, “mobile devices aren’t great for typing”. Add to that the need for enough space to show the tag row, and it makes sense that Futureful is launching as a tablet app.

“We started with web development, but the tablet is the ultimate consumption device, where the information finds you,” Anderson told me. “We haven’t ruled out a web version, but the smoothness in terms of the cleanness of the UI has just been better on the tablet.”

And Android? “We have no plans yet, but we have had some of the biggest players in the mobile industry ask us to build for them.” Same goes for the iPhone – maybe in the future, but first things first.

Also, there’s no business model yet. That said, if Futureful takes off I’d imagine there would be many options for making money off it.

Here’s a video:

Created by Scotty Iseri (who longtime web video fans ought to remember as Scotty of Scotty Got An Office Job), The Digits features Pavi (Sara Castilleja) and a cast of puppets using music to make math rock. And despite being online only a few months, the project has already received an IAWTV nomination for Best Educational Web Series.

Iseri first began developing Digits two years ago, after winning a fellowship from the Center for Asian American Media, and initially tried to pitch the project to various children’s entertainment entities. After many passed on the project, though, Iseri decided to take a different approach: “I started looking at it as a start-up, as opposed to a media property.”

He thus went out in search of investment, raising money from a wide variety of sources, including friends, family and the Oregon Governor’s Office of Film and Television — making Digits the first new media property to receive state incentives.

The difficulty in pitching, Iseri found, was the fact that Digits was “a thing that doesn’t really exist yet” — in app form, Digits blends video content with number games, encouraging viewer/players to engage directly with the content. (Pavi gets prety stern with you if you don’t play along.)

“I was inspired by watching my nieces and nephews play with their devices, apps like Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. They expect their stories to play back with them,” he said. “Gamified narrative is how I’d describe it.”

Launched last September for Android and last week for iOS devices, the Digits app comes with the first installment of the series available for free; subsequent “appisodes” cost $2.99 each.

The reason for launching first on Android, Iseri said, was due to the differences in approval processes. “Android allows us to iterate very quickly — we were able to look at reviews and problems and address them quickly,” he said.

In addition, the official Digits YouTube channel is regularly updated with new video content — both new math-related adventures, as well as response videos to viewer questions.

Traffic so far is low, with the channel almost at 6,000 total views, but a recent episode featured a cameo by Huffington Post science correspondent Cara Santa Maria, and plans are in the works for more guest appearances, including Dr. Hannah Critchlow of the BBC’s Naked Scientists.

“I’m trying to find science and math-positive people. I also wanted to find women, because we want to show that it doesn’t matter if you’re an alien or a robot — there’s something really awesome about being smart,” Iseri said.

And it’s at a key time in a child’s life that Digits is trying to spread that message. “There are a lot of apps and educational shows out there for young kids, but not a lot out there for 4th, 5th graders,” Iseri said. “And we’re targeting that age group because that’s when math gets hard — it’s also developmentally when kids decide who they are and what they like. It’s important to me to show that age group that math can be fun and beautiful.”

We anticipate that over the course of an hour or so Cook and a variety of other Apple executives will introduce us to the rest of the company’s holiday product lineup. The star of the show, of course, is expected to be a smaller iPad. But that’s not all: the Mac is also set to play a role in the events as well.

Om Malik and I will be bringing you live updates and photos of the event as it unfolds. We’ll kick things off a bit before the event started at 10 a.m. PT, so please join us below.

In a rare move, Apple will also be live-streaming the event from San Jose: as long as you own an Apple product. Owners of iOS devices running version 4.2 or later or Mac OS X 10.6 users running Safari 4 will be able to watch the event, as well as some Apple TV users, according to a webpage released by Apple early Tuesday morning.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the event.

Here’s what has been announced so far:

• A new version of iBooks. It has continuous scrolling, and works better with iCloud.
• A 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Retina display, which Apple introduced earlier this year in a 15-inch version. It’s thinner and lighter than the current 13-inch MacBook Pro, and costs $1,699. It’s available today.
• A new iMac. It has a much thinner display than the current iMac version, and will come in 21-inch and 27-inch versions for $1,299 and $1,799, respectively. They’ll be available in December.
• A fourth-generation iPad. It has a faster processor and will work on Sprint’s 4G LTE network. It’s the same size as the original iPad, and costs $499, just like the current-generation models.
• The iPad mini. We’re a little surprised they chose that name, but hey. It has a 7.9-inch screen and a 1024 by 768 pixel display. It’s a Wi-Fi only device, starting at $329 for a 16GB version, and cellular-network versions will also be available.