What if Apple turned the iPad into an easy-to-use front end for real-time financial data?
Image: world-wallpaper.com
News Corp. (NWS), a ship that leaks from the top, reports through AllThingsD that Apple (AAPL) has scheduled "an important — but not large-scale" New York City event in late January headlined by Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for Internet software and services.
I'm having a hard time getting as excited about this as Kara Swisher seems to be, given that Cue's last public appearance in the city was for the February 2011 launch of Rupert Murdoch's The Daily, the iPad-only publication that has failed every benchmark for success Murdoch laid down that day. (See here and here.)
According to TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis, the January event will involve no hardware announcements but will focus instead on the publishing industry -- perhaps with an overhaul of Apple's largely unpopulated Newsstand or a tweak of iBookstore, which nearly two years after launch still doesn't offer anywhere near as many titles as Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle bookstore.
But Brian S Hall has an idea that could spice up an otherwise lackluster press conference: Some kind of joint venture with Bloomberg's financial publishing empire. "Consider the possibilities," he writes, "of an Apple - Bloomberg tie-up."
Apple can instantly and probably significantly grow their iPad business. Those Wall Street guys and rich Hong Kong expats and other Bloomberg customers will absolutely want to show their real-time Bloomberg data on their iPad.
And they can begin placing financial data on Macs with those sweet big screens instead of Bloomberg terminals. Even now, banks and other financial institutions can afford the Apple margins. Fact is, Bloomberg's 'closed' terminal model probably won't last forever. Placing 'locked' Bloomberg data on the tightly controlled Apple system may be the perfect answer. Plus, on an Apple device, odds are that in a short period, the many functions of a Bloomberg terminal that are locked away because no one understands how to fully leverage them, will be liberated by Apple UI magicians, making the data and views even more important....
Bloomberg has captured billions of dollars for a high-margin premium content market. Numbers, video, analysis, real-time. He and his company have aggregated data, sliced it, reviewed it, analyzed it, filmed it, recorded it, packaged it. They are a model for how all content can be created, combined, cut and sold. This belongs on a similarly high-margin, best-of-breed device. Combining the two will take Apple into the enterprise, all over the world, and will usher in the Bloomberg model for all premium content. Plus, Apple can make all that Bloomberg offers truly mobile and potentially universally available.
How cool would that be?
The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper ran a couple of very odd stories this week
Murdoch launched The Daily on Apple's iPad in February. Photo: PED
There's not much doubt, Rupert Murdoch declared on his Fox News cable network last year, that Steve Jobs is the best chief executive in the U.S.
"He's got such incredible focus," he told an interviewer. "He's got such power inspiring the people around him who work for him. MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 23, 2011 8:50 AM ET
The TV networks that invested big to create the online video service don't seem to like what it's maturing into.
Image via Wikipedia
FORTUNE -- It must be immensely frustrating to either own or manage Hulu. The viewing public is moving away from cable and satellite toward Internet viewing, but so slowly and uncertainly that programmers can't simply port all their shows online and be done with it. They have to MORE
Dan Mitchell, contributor - Jun 23, 2011 4:26 PM ET
It has to really be news, it is right there in the name of the company!
News (NWS) Corp's AllThingsD today broke the story that News Corp.'s tablet daily newspaper, called the Daily, would be hitting Google's (GOOG) Android tablets this Spring.
Before you Android fans go out dancing in the streets however, keep in mind that the Daily missed its internal mark (also reported by News Corp) on the iPad by a MORE
Seth Weintraub - Feb 23, 2011 10:09 PM ET
The subscription model Apple announced today is unlikely to please anyone
Image: News Corp.
There was a rumor in the Time Life building last week that Apple (AAPL) -- which had been in a stand-off with the publishing industry for nearly a year -- had "blinked" and was about to cut a deal favorable to the publishers.
It was not to be. When Apple announced its new App Store subscription service MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 15, 2011 10:28 AM ET
It's not the end of the struggle to translate print media to a digital platform -- it's just the beginning.
Image via Wikipedia
Among the media elite, obits are already being written for The Daily. The content is unimaginative, they say. The tech is buggy. The numbers don't add up. And it's mostly true, but maybe they're missing the point.
Once again, Rupert Murdoch has launched a large and flashy innovation lab MORE
Jessi Hempel, writer - Feb 3, 2011 2:16 PM ET
With an iPad-only product and a burn rate of $500,000 a week, it could be a tough slog
The Daily. Image: News Corp.
Let's do the math.
The Daily, the first news product designed for Apple's (AAPL) iPad, launched on Wednesday having already burned through $30 million just to get started.
That, says News Corp.'s (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch, has been "totally written off."
OK, fine. But now the fun begins.
Producing the thing, according MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 2, 2011 5:15 PM ET
All eyes on Rupert Murdoch and Apple for the launch of the first iPad daily
The TOC for The Daily's "news" section
After a 45-minute presentation, The Daily was set to go live on the Apple App Store at 12:00 p.m. EST. Here's the link. There's a video tour here. The press were treated with pre-loaded (loaner) iPads in the lobby. A quick hands on:
Paging through The Daily took about 10 MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 2, 2011 10:48 AM ET
The aging press baron makes one last bid to capture the eyeballs of the Internet generation
The Guggenheim Museum. Source: Wikicommons
[UPDATE: The free (for two weeks) app is available here. There's a video tour here. Click here for our live coverage of the event and first impressions of the product.]
At 11 a.m. EST, a museum-full of reporters and analysts will gather amid the Post-Impressionists at the Guggenheim to watch News MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 2, 2011 7:14 AM ET
Rupert Murdoch's new project goes live tomorrow. Here's who he hired to produce it.
Source: Poynter.org
Poynter.org's Damon Kiesow has taken some of the surprise out of the invitation-only launch of News Corp.'s (NWS) The Daily at the Guggenheim Museum Wednesday.
We still don't know exactly what the first daily newspaper created specially for Apple's (AAPL) iPad will look or read like, but thanks to Kiesow, we know who Rupert Murdoch has MORE
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