12 Months old and 7.5 Million downloads

EyeMags was relaunched under a new spin off company 12 months ago and in that time we've seen 7.5 Million downloads.

EyeMags is a top 50 publisher on Ovistore

As we reached 1 million downloads on Ovistore last week, the top 50 publishers on Ovistore have been announced and we are in the list.

Comments using Disqus

Today we've released a new capability. All magazines can now be commented on from iPhone, iPad, Android and S60 Touch phones, plus the PC interface. Please start commenting on what you think of the magazines.

We're using Disqus to enable this.

1 Million downloads on Ovistore

Today we've just crossed the 1 Million downloads barrier on Ovistore from our EyeMags apps. The top downloaded app is Optical Illusions which itself has done 500K downloads.

5 Billion connected phones world wide

According to our sister site phonecount.com, 5 billion people now have mobile phones. The billion barrier was broken this week. 5 billion people is 73% penetration. Penetration is the number of phones divided by the number of people, because large number of people have more than 1 phone it is possible to have more than 100% penetration; for example Italy has a penetration rate of 151% penetration.

Currently every second there are 25 new phones and 4 new people on this planet.

EyeMags reaches 6M downloads

After only 11 months EyeMags has reached 6M downloads worldwide. These downloads have been from EyeMags itself but also from operator and manufacturer sites. One major download site has been OviStore where downloads are now close to 1M downloads.

EyeMags now supports Bada Wave platform

Following our successful launch of Android support we now offer the same support for Bada Wave devices using webapps. Now thousands of EyeMags are available as interactive webapps.

CEO Robin Jewsbury said "Bada is a great platform, but Samsung do not allow delivery of apps to their wave phones outside their own SamsungApps download platform. So instead of deliverying native apps we now deliver the same functionality as a webapp from EyeMags. Separately we can package up any eyemags and deliver them via SamsungApps, so we get the best of both worlds."

Any publisher can now experiment creating their apps for any phone using EyeMags technology and then if they want that app downloaded from a native app platform such as iTunes, Ovistore or SamsungApps they can contact us and pay a small fee to have the app made available for download as a native app.

For more information please contact info@eyemags.net

EyeMags now supports Android

EyeMags now properly supports Android 2.1 and 2.2.

We've been waiting for the Android browser to get better and finally we can support Android as a webapp.

My Blog on widgets

Whilst working with mobile widgets, I've come to the conclusion that there is no single place where anyone can get useful independent information on widgets. So I've create a blog called http://themobilewidget.com/ where you will be able to find out everything you need to know about mobile widgets.

3 Million downloads in 8 months

Since relaunching the EyeMags site in Oct 2009 we seen 3 Million downloads of EyeMag apps and this is volume is growing strongly. In the last month we doubled the number of unique users coming to the mobile site.

Version 2 iPad Magazines

Today, we've just released our V2.0 offering for iPad magazines.

This version works much better with the iPad than V1.0 released at the end of March.













New features include:

• a fixed menu bar at the bottom of the screen.
  
• Content List can now be view
• Easier left/right swiping between pages
• Pictures can now be full screen
• It is now possible to sell the magazines to the public using PayPal.
  

The final payment option is in closed beta with a limited number of publishers. But we see this as a significant step forward into incentivising publishers onto the eyemags platform and make money from their content.


At the same time iPhone EyeMags 2.0 is also released with the same new features.

For both the iPhone and iPad EyeMags use the HTML5 features which allow offline webapps to be created. EyeMags makes it easy for publishers of great content to make it available as apps on thousands of different mobile devices.

A Mutualised Media Offering - describing eyemags.com

Great video of Alan Rusbridger (editor of the UK's Guardian newspaper) talking about the revolution of Mutualised offering of media content.

In the video, he is talking about the Guardian doing these offerings, but here at eyemags.com we see his words as fitting perfectly with what we are doing with eyemags

Eyemags enables anyone to create content application in a perect open environment and here at eyemags we collaborate with the new breed of publishers to enable them to distribute and sell their content to users throughout the world.

Selling of content is new from us and there will be more information on this in the coming weeks

iPad is nearly here

Our iPadMags.com site is getting very popular as the excitement builds to Saturday's release of the iPad. We're ready with eyemags.com to fully support the iPad alongside the thousands of other phones we already support. Now anyone can create magazine content all the way from the 9.7 inch screen of the iPad down to the sub 2 inch screen of many phones.

Announcing support for iPad

Today we're announcing support for the iPad. Now any magazine created will work on the iPad, the iPhone and still work on 1,000s of other phones too. So if you have a magazine, a company brochure, information leaflet on a new festival or conference information and want it on the iPad and just about any phone now, try us.

To mark this new features we've created a special site just for the iPad at iPadMags.com.

And what's more because we do not use iTunes appstore to install the magazine web application there's still time to get your magazine live on the iPad before April 3rd - the US launch date for the iPad.

Go to iPadMags.com and watch the 2 video adverts showing our magazines running on the iPad

Win €100K! Can good content make a better app than rich functionality

Vodafone is running an Application developer competition with prizes totalling €1M and top prize for an individual being €100K. Competition ends on 31st March so hurry.

We wonder whether a developer has to be the winner. If you have great content and you used EyeMags to create the app, could that app be better than something a real developer has produced? I think it is possible. Do you?

Why don't you accept the challenge and show that "Content IS King" and create an outstanding app which could win you €100K.

You have to live in UK, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal or Spain you can enter and each country has access to the €100K prize then go to this url

Note after publishing your app in EyeMags at the bottom of the screen look for the Vodafone logo and then click more details. Then download the widget that has been created and submit it to Vodafone. Please note we have no relationship with Vodafone. We are not promoting their competition -we do not guarantee anything about the W3C widget which is created; it is created as is; but if you win please remember we enabled you to do it for free so please donate 10% of your winnings to us. :-)

The future of Magazines

I've just watched a programme I now watch weekly called "The bottom line". It's available in the UK as a video but in the rest of the world it's a podcast only but well worth listening too. It's very clever in that every week they have 3 business leaders from different industries but with a balance and mixture helps complete the true story that Evan Davis the presenter is trying to convey. This week they talked about outsourcing and the magazine industry and they had the Head of O2 UK (Ronan Dunne), the CEO of Future Publishing (Stevie Spring) and the CEO of First Source an Indian outsource company (Ananda Mukerji).

I was fascinated by what this mixture of people would say about the magazine industry and in particular Evan's question to Stevie on how she thought the magazine industry would look in 10 years time.

So the answer from Stevie was surprisingly honest: she did not know but they would try lots of business models, but she still thought that physical magazines would exist on the shelves and said that magazines needed to be "keepable", "portable" and have "serendipity". The answer from Ronan was he thought there was a great compliment between online and physical magazines. For me, Ananda's answer was even more interesting; he said that in India people were not using the fixed Internet with only 12M users but there were 450M users using their phones and that the interest in magazines was becoming more of a microcosm; more granular.

I loved these answers because for me they answered it perfectly but did not quite come to the conclusion I would make. For me it's obvious what will happen and they nearly got to it but did not quite get there. Increasingly, over the next 10 years, people will be using mobile devices to read magazines - in the west this will be devices such as Internet tablets and high end smartphones but in places like India it will be all models of mobile phone.

Of course, in 10 years, in India, the smartphone will be the low end device for magazine consumption anyway. These magazines will be "keepable", "portable" and have "serendity" because they will be delivered by tiny apps (hopefully using our own EyeMags technology); they will be physically on the phone and they will in many case be purchased using micro payments systems such as premium SMS or appstores. This is not the online website technique they thought they were talking about. Online websites will continue to exist as complimentary multimedia to the "keepable" and "portable" magazines which themselves will be delivered content applications delivered to the mobile device.

And it will be eyemags.com which will be one of those delivering this technology to all models of phones in all parts of the world as it is already doing so today.

A great programme well worth listening too.

Great review of EyeMags by Technorati

Technorati business section writers Bizcats voted EyeMags as "best small business pick" and wrote a great review/video of how to use it.

Professional Publisher features added to EyeMags

EyeMags (eyemags.com), the mobile content app generator for all mobile phones and devices, announces “EyeMags Pro” today. “EyeMags Pro” is designed for the professional publisher. It enables the professional publisher to brand their apps within the builder user interface.

EyeMags allows publishers to create apps on the EyeMags website, which can then be downloaded onto mobile phones. Thousands of free apps are available for downloading. EyeMags have previously targeted the home user, but is now focusing its attention on the professional user. The CEO, Robin Jewsbury, said "Within the EyeMags app builder professional users can now define their own “theme” which totally defines all the branding elements within the application. These themes can be applied to multiple magazines so specific branding can be quickly applied to groups of magazines. Magazines can now have a separate graphical cover, product name and a defined icon. They can also fully define the “about” text and urls in the app. EyeMags is unique in that it currently supports virtually all phones including Java capable phones, iPhone, most smartphones, as well as lower end phones. What’s more we intend to support the iPad by the time it is released in March. This means that EyeMags Pro magazines will be available for the majority of phones and other mobile devices. We believe we’re the only company that is able to do this”.

To start using the professional capability, publishers must join the “Pro Club” for $999 and then can purchase licenses for $49 per app. This is a great deal cheaper than what similar companies are charging.

All this is in addition to the previous announcements in December when EyeMags announced a complete whitelabel capability for companies wishing to re-brand the whole of EyeMags. For an example of it being implemented at mobilemags.360fashion.net. Also in December e-commerce links were released and these are available in pro magazines within all the published stories. E-commerce links enable click to call, click to sms, click to feedback, click to map, and click to video capabilities.

Also released today are 2 videos explaining how the new capabilities are used. The first is an overview and the second is more detailed. Within the second video there are details of a promotion code which enables users to produce a pro-magazine for free (for non commercial use), so they can try before they buy.

The overview video is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM19eYBFvsQ

The detailed video of how to create the graphics elements is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE1Lt2Yw5_I