Enter The 2016 Innovation By Design Awards now through May 5! At F8, Facebook's massive annual developer conference, the big news is bots—specifically bots on Messenger, Facebook's messaging app. Messenger now boasts 900 million users per month, which presents a tantalizing user base for companies eager to get their wares in front of customers. That's where the bots come in. Facebook is turning Messenger into an open platform, and any company can now build a chatbot that users can talk with. If you're an airline, you can build a chatbot to book tickets; if you're OpenTable you can build a chatbot to take reservations. "To me it's about bringing back all the best parts of the interaction between people and businesses," David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, says in an interview. "What we're trying to build with bots are rich conversational experiences. That's what we believe will be the future of interactions and services." The chatbots are designed to guide you through a lightweight user flow that doesn't leave you guessing about what to do next. All Roads Lead to Messenger Chatbots seem like a new fad in software design: Microsoft just announced its own suite of bot-building tools; Kik, the messaging platform massively popular among teens, announced one as well. But there are deep reasons why chatbots make sense. The app model has stalled out: People don't use a ton of apps, and they don't download many either. The reason is simple:... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2016-04-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Magnify, a video distribution and curation startup, has raised $1 million from a group of investors that includes TED conference producer Chris Anderson and Chris Kelly, Facebook's former chief privacy officer. Magnify, which has previously raised $4.2 million over five years, helps publishers... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2013-06-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook Inc. FB -3.51% is aiming to become a newspaper for mobile devices. The social network has been quietly working on a service, internally called Reader, that displays content from Facebook users and publishers in a new visual format tail ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2013-06-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook, which has never shied away from copying its rivals' features, is now working on a mobile service that would display news content in a visually appealing, magazine style, similar to what startup Flipboard already does. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2013-06-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Esquire, Hearst's monthly men's magazine, has revamped its website, in the first step of the brand's digital strategy overhaul. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2013-06-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As publishers migrate beyond the first phase of the ebook revolution, the IDPF's Digital Book Conference on Wednesday will address ebooks on the web, tablets, phones and more. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-05-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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This year's US Innovations Seminar of the International Association of STM Publishers focused on the impact of data mining, MOOCs and new author/researcher tools. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-05-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A price war earlier this month between two of China’s biggest online booksellers has... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-04-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Only newspapers have been given up for dead more often than magazines. But though their print cousins continue to lose advertising at a brisk clip, some magazine publishers are trumpeting a turnaround few could have foreseen in the dark days of 2008 and 2009, when nearly 1,000 titles shut... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2013-04-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Barnes & Noble's PubIt! self-publishing conduit has been active for well over two years, but you'd be forgiven for overlooking it with that somewhat forgettable (if very emphatic) name. The company might just know what you're thinking, as it's giving the service a considerably more memorable... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-04-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Barnes &Noble has reportedly been ordering fewer Simon & Schuster titles than it normally does as the book retailer and the publisher wrangle over cost issues. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2013-03-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Andrés Rodríguez, the publisher and founder of SpainMedia, has much at stake in the debut this month of a Spanish-language edition of Forbes, the American business magazine. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2013-03-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Last year at the end of this annual bestseller article, we made the obvious prediction that unit sales for hardcover bestsellers would be even lower for 2012 books and that the “ebook explosion could be the culprit.” Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-03-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, are fighting Amazon's bid to own new global domain names including .book, .author, and .read. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In the UK a new ebook platform Boosh will allow readers to share an ebook with a fellow Facebook user to read for free after its read and deleted from their own account. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-03-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The stores charge that secret agreements made between the publishers and Amazon give Amazon the advantage in selling ebooks, but some industry observers find flaws in their logic. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2013-02-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Outside of photos and status updates, Facebook's original shareable content was game activity. So-and-so just planted a new crop, etc. Next Facebook rolled out the Like button, and news articles became popular. Then Facebook debuted its Open Graph in fall 2011 so that someone could listen to a... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2013-02-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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By incorporating trillions of calculations, Bookish.com, the new online bookstore financed by Hachette, Penguin and S&S, promises to apply Big Data to book discovery. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-02-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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You want an idea to survive hundreds or thousands of years? Step one: Don’t write it on paper. Alexander Konta believed this deeply. Paper yellows and withers and crumbles; it is the printed form of Alzheimer’s. “Why not make [text] imperishable by photographing the written word after it has... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The value of the children’s physical books market last year was marginally up on 2011,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Parsing through the top 10 bestsellers of 2012 in a number of major publishing categories reads like a usual suspects list, as a small number of authors filled a large number of spots. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-01-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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