Questions of decanting, aging and the necessity of visiting the place where the wine is made Matt Kramer http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/42838
Posted: June 1, 2010
Whether it’s a function of time or just a personal inclination, I’ve always been fascinated with what might be called “truths.” These are the elements that transcend fashion, that eclipse even time itself. They both enlighten and endure, because they are, well, truths.
Wine admits such possibilities. A good chunk of the first book I wrote, Making Sense of Wine, explored just such enduring aspects of wine. For example, I examined how complexity as a standard of judging a wine’s goodness is not as fashion-driven and arbitrary as you might imagine. Neurologically, we relish greater complexity. We crave the stimuli. No matter what the wine—from retsina to Richebourg—we will, over time, prefer the more complex version of it.
Not every truth about wine is quite so substantive. Some might seem lighthearted, even frivolous, but that doesn’t make them any less true. A great French fry is no less perfect than a great soufflé, even if the latter is unquestionably a greater culinary achievement. All truths are equally valid. For example:
Nearly all wines are better if decanted. Now, this is a truth that I have tested innumerable times over the decades with just about every wine type you can think of.
So why the qualifier “nearly”? Because I have yet to test it with sparkling wines. I’m no great fancier of bubbly, and therefore prefer to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get to “real” wine. (Yes, yes, I know what that makes me. You should hear my wife, a great Champagne lover, on the subject.) I do know Champagne fanciers who assert that decanting does, indeed, serve the cause of sparkling wine.
That caveat aside, I’m prepared to say that one of the truths of wine is that pretty much all wines, red or white, young or old, are better if decanted. Mind you, I’m not talking here about how long the wine should remain exposed to air in a decanter; that seems pretentious and overly prescriptive. Just pour the wine into the decanter, exposing it to some air in the process, and serve it when you like. I’ve yet to see a wine suffer for this, and I’ve seen an awful lot of wines be the better for it. Really, you can’t lose.
Most fine wines are at their best with 10 years of age. Like all truths, this is not an exactitude so much as it is reliably true for most wines most of the time. (When Voltaire famously said, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," it was for just this sort of thing. You can’t let a demand for absolute perfection be the enemy of what’s generally good and true.)
You will almost never go wrong serving any wine with 10 years of age on it. This of course assumes that the wine has been well stored in a cool place. Without that, all bets are off. But if well cellared, I’m hard-pressed to think of a fine wine that isn’t either showing its best or at least approaching its best after a decade of aging from the date of the vintage.
Among white wines, I include in this such types as Muscadet (which is conventionally thought to be best drunk very young); just about any Riesling from dry to sweet; Chardonnay, Champagne; even Moscato. I would have thought that Piedmont’s great Moscato d’Asti, which is always drunk as soon as possible after the harvest, would be an exception to this truth, but the great Moscato specialist Paolo Saracco once hauled out a decade-old Moscato for me in order to prove that even this gorgeous-when-young wine could show unsuspected qualities with age.
Among fine red wines, I can’t think of any that aren’t pretty swell after 10 years of aging. Even wines that are rightly recognized as utterly delicious when young, such as Beaujolais and Dolcetto, are surprisingly resonant with a decade’s age. (I do not include Beaujolais Nouveau in this because, bluntly put, it’s not a fine wine.)
Does this mean that you shouldn’t drink any fine wine until it has hit the 10-year mark? Of course not. Rather, this truth suggests that never more than today, when so many wines are well made, there’s no hurry. And that after 10 years of age in a cool spot, nearly all fine wines can give you the best of both worlds: a still-youthful fruitiness and the greater dimensionality of flavor that only age can offer.
You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. I mentioned this recently in a column about wines from Argentina. But it bears repeating, and expanding upon, if only because this particular truth has taken me a long time to recognize and accept.
No one disputes that it’s always a nice idea to visit where a wine comes from. But when I first became involved with wine I recoiled from the premise that I had to see the place in order to truly understand it. I felt, not unreasonably, that with enough tasting and reading and imagination, I could apprehend all that was worth knowing about, say, Volnay. I was wrong.
The key word, of course, is “understand.” It’s true that you can become expert, in the literal sense of that term, about a wine without ever having set foot on its originating site. At such a moment you are technically proficient, much like mastering a foreign language without ever actually going to its native land. It can be done.
Yet as anyone who has studied a foreign language can tell you, there’s no substitute for chatting up the locals. There’s nothing like hearing how it’s used, catching the subtle cadences and, above all, seeing how the language is inseparable from the culture.
So it is with wine. This struck me forcefully during my time in Argentina. Frankly, I already knew this particular truth about understanding wine. It’s why I’ve lived in France, Italy, California and Australia, the better to grasp and understand the wines. And why I’ve traveled to many other locations, for briefer but certainly illuminating sojourns, to at least begin to understand the likes of South African wines, Hungarian Tokaji, New Zealand’s many offerings and so on.
Yet despite all that, I was, while in Argentina, struck forcefully yet again that there’s no true understanding without your “presence in the midst of it,” to borrow a line from the poet W.S. Merwin.
I foolishly imagined prior to moving to Argentina that I had a pretty good grasp of its wines. After all, I had already tasted a lot of them. But I had no clue about why the wines taste the way they do, which is to say no real “knowing” of the culture that creates them and how that culture itself is changing. And how, in turn, that cultural evolution might transform the wines yet again.
This is why you can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. It’s why you can’t truly understand someone until you’ve met their family and visited where they were raised. It’s no different with wine—fine wine, anyway.
What are some of the wine truths you've discovered over time?
Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com
Monday, June 7, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Stock vesting: Why is four the magic number?
(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)
http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/stock-vesting-why-is-four-the-magic-number/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter-publisher-main&utm_campaign=twitter
There’s a historical anomaly in start-up compensation that I’m struggling with. Although I know this risks being an unpopular post with entrepreneurs, I confess that I no longer get why we have four year vesting schedules for stock option grants at start-ups.
Let me explain.
Vesting is known as the time period during which you unconditionally own the stock options that are issued to you by your company. Until you vest the stock options, you forfeit them if you were to leave the company. Typically, that time period is four years.
There is also generally a one year “cliff”, which means that you don’t vest for a year and then “catch up” by vesting 25 percent of the stock options on the one year anniversary. Subsequent vesting happens monthly or quarterly, depending on the stock option plan your company has put in place.
I was explaining to a friend the typical vesting at venture capital firms is 8-10 years. That is, if you leave a fund before 8-10 years from the start of the fund, you risk forfeiting some of your unvested profit interest in the fund, or carry. I explained to my friend that this vesting schedule made sense given venture capital funds take 8-10 years from managing initial investments through to exits.
Then I realized that vesting at start-ups should also logically match the time it takes from inception to exit. In looking at the data, it appears that the average time to exit in start-ups during the 1990s was 4-5 years, so the traditional 4 year vesting period made sense.
But since then, the average time to exit has crept up meaningfully from 4-5 years to 6-8 years. So shouldn’t vesting schedules reflect this reality? Shouldn’t the vesting schedule for stock options be 6 years?
Boards are finding that they have to reissue options every 3-4 years because once an employee is fully vested, they naturally come back to the table with their hand outstretched asking for more incentive options to stick around.
In fact, why can’t vesting schedules be flexible and simply a part of the overall compensation negotiation? A CEO would benefit from having the tools at their disposal to adjust vesting dates alongside share amounts and other compensation levers.
For example, in the very early days, you might have six year vesting on stock options – but after a few years, that date might be reduced to four or five, depending on the situation. Some form of accelerated vesting upon change of control (i.e., a sale) is often a part of the package for senior executives, so if a quick exit were navigated, there wouldn’t be a meaningful penalty.
So maybe you can explain it to me, but I just don’t get why our industry clings to a historical magic figure of four years. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
KB's Notes- I'd also love to hear about your experience-successes / failures with vesting programs. Good, bad, indifferent. Do you have a better program-have you used a vesting program or something similar that worked. There are many tightly held private companies that aren't interested in full stock plans for key people but can offer other types of incentive programs that give something similar to ownership in a buyout etc. What have you seen-I am VERY interested!
Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com
The Elevator Speech Wow Factor
http://ow.ly/1TIRT
INC Mag
By Marla Tabaka
Jun 2, 2010
Do you make the best out of every elevator speech opportunity? You’ve heard the rule of thumb; we have 15-20 seconds to get someone’s attention, no more than 30 seconds for them to decide if it’s time to find the buffet table or give you another few minutes of their time. Furthermore, since our attention span drifts in and out every 7 seconds, time is ticking.
An elevator speech is not about you; it’s about your prospect’s needs and the emotion behind them. If you fall into the common trap of telling someone about how you got into this business, why you care so much, blah, blah, blah, you will lose them. While you’re telling your story or (goodness forbid) educating them about what a virtual assistant, coach, SEO expert or physical therapist is, they will be thinking, “I wonder if this guy makes any real money,” or “I really don’t feel like a lecture right now, I just want a drink.” Take the ego out of it by making this time about them, not you, and drive your message home.
Here are some tips to help bring the wow-factor to your 30-second opportunity. If you wow them you’re more likely to create a connection with someone who may become a great resource, new client, mentor or friend.
Your 30-second message is not about educating, explaining, or boring your acquaintance; it’s about sparking enough interest to prompt them to do something; ask for your card, introduce you to someone you should know, or even make an appointment to learn more. If you give them a reason to want to know more, they will act on their instinct.
Here are some steps and examples.
Put action in your speech – Instead of “I am” use phrases like “I teach, create, develop.” People who do are just seen as doers; people who inspire, teach and create are seen as experts. Who’s the expert here?
Before: I am a virtual assistant who takes on technical tasks for my clients.
After: I teach business owners how to save time and aggravation so they are free to do what they love and increase their profits.
Use the step-process approach – Programs, Methods, and Processes sell. If your work can be marketed as a 5-step process (no less than 3 steps, no more than 10) to a powerful end result, people will pay attention. Look at the difference here:
Before: I help business owners organize their office space so they can be more productive.
After: I teach busy entrepreneurs my proven 5-step process to create an organized work environment and streamline their workflow. My clients have less stress and more profit.
Hit home – People buy with emotion; nearly all purchases are based on a need or desire that strikes an emotional chord. Find the emotion in your target market. What is their deepest problem, concern or desire? People are almost always looking for more money, improved relationships, better health, weight loss or to somehow make life easier, happier and less stressful. Find the need and desire and speak about them directly, don’t beat around the bush. In the example below, working parents will naturally worry about qualifications and safety when looking for someone to care for their children. Which would you feel most comfortable with?
Before: My Company helps busy parents find the right nanny to care for their children.
After: Nannies For You is a licensed, bonded service whose family advocate matches loving parents with highly qualified, experienced Nannies. Our pre-screened candidates go through rigid background checks and provide care, guidance and fun for children so parents can go to work worry and guilt free.
Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com
INC Mag
By Marla Tabaka
Jun 2, 2010
Do you make the best out of every elevator speech opportunity? You’ve heard the rule of thumb; we have 15-20 seconds to get someone’s attention, no more than 30 seconds for them to decide if it’s time to find the buffet table or give you another few minutes of their time. Furthermore, since our attention span drifts in and out every 7 seconds, time is ticking.
An elevator speech is not about you; it’s about your prospect’s needs and the emotion behind them. If you fall into the common trap of telling someone about how you got into this business, why you care so much, blah, blah, blah, you will lose them. While you’re telling your story or (goodness forbid) educating them about what a virtual assistant, coach, SEO expert or physical therapist is, they will be thinking, “I wonder if this guy makes any real money,” or “I really don’t feel like a lecture right now, I just want a drink.” Take the ego out of it by making this time about them, not you, and drive your message home.
Here are some tips to help bring the wow-factor to your 30-second opportunity. If you wow them you’re more likely to create a connection with someone who may become a great resource, new client, mentor or friend.
Your 30-second message is not about educating, explaining, or boring your acquaintance; it’s about sparking enough interest to prompt them to do something; ask for your card, introduce you to someone you should know, or even make an appointment to learn more. If you give them a reason to want to know more, they will act on their instinct.
Here are some steps and examples.
Put action in your speech – Instead of “I am” use phrases like “I teach, create, develop.” People who do are just seen as doers; people who inspire, teach and create are seen as experts. Who’s the expert here?
Before: I am a virtual assistant who takes on technical tasks for my clients.
After: I teach business owners how to save time and aggravation so they are free to do what they love and increase their profits.
Use the step-process approach – Programs, Methods, and Processes sell. If your work can be marketed as a 5-step process (no less than 3 steps, no more than 10) to a powerful end result, people will pay attention. Look at the difference here:
Before: I help business owners organize their office space so they can be more productive.
After: I teach busy entrepreneurs my proven 5-step process to create an organized work environment and streamline their workflow. My clients have less stress and more profit.
Hit home – People buy with emotion; nearly all purchases are based on a need or desire that strikes an emotional chord. Find the emotion in your target market. What is their deepest problem, concern or desire? People are almost always looking for more money, improved relationships, better health, weight loss or to somehow make life easier, happier and less stressful. Find the need and desire and speak about them directly, don’t beat around the bush. In the example below, working parents will naturally worry about qualifications and safety when looking for someone to care for their children. Which would you feel most comfortable with?
Before: My Company helps busy parents find the right nanny to care for their children.
After: Nannies For You is a licensed, bonded service whose family advocate matches loving parents with highly qualified, experienced Nannies. Our pre-screened candidates go through rigid background checks and provide care, guidance and fun for children so parents can go to work worry and guilt free.
Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Re-Hootsuite Post below
I have this ap and traded in tweetdeck for it. I really like the ability to see multiple accounts with a simple click of the mouse and to be able to view 'mentions', 'direct mentions' 'pending tweets' etc on a single screen. With a busy schedule and often being on the road it gives me the opportunity to schedule tweets for later that day and on Fridays I often schedule weekend tweets! Using both the iphone ap AND online it really ties the whole twitter process together for me!
Give it a whirl! A VERY VALUABLE Ap in my book! I am looking at getting an Ipad shortly and Hootsuite will be a big part of it!
Give it a whirl! A VERY VALUABLE Ap in my book! I am looking at getting an Ipad shortly and Hootsuite will be a big part of it!
HootSuite's Updated iPhone App
Posted by Nadine Heintz at 11:20 AM
Hootsuite, the Twitter management tool, has added some handy new features to its iPhone app recently. Here are some of the highlights: In a single click, you can now translate foreign messages in more than 50 languages to English to keep track of international customers and competitors. You also can comment on Facebook news feeds and post messages on Facebook pages and profiles from your HootSuite account. Multi-taskers will enjoy a placeholder feature that remembers where you left off in a stream if you get distracted. You also have the option to save a draft of a message and finish it later. Cost: A free Lite version of the iPhone app is available in the iTunes App store; the full version is $2.99. Plus: Find out how entrepreneur Lori Highby uses HootSuite to manage her Web design firm’s tweets in “How to Use HootSuite for Business,” which appeared in the February issue of Inc. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/how-to-use-hootsuite-for-business.html
Hootsuite, the Twitter management tool, has added some handy new features to its iPhone app recently. Here are some of the highlights: In a single click, you can now translate foreign messages in more than 50 languages to English to keep track of international customers and competitors. You also can comment on Facebook news feeds and post messages on Facebook pages and profiles from your HootSuite account. Multi-taskers will enjoy a placeholder feature that remembers where you left off in a stream if you get distracted. You also have the option to save a draft of a message and finish it later. Cost: A free Lite version of the iPhone app is available in the iTunes App store; the full version is $2.99. Plus: Find out how entrepreneur Lori Highby uses HootSuite to manage her Web design firm’s tweets in “How to Use HootSuite for Business,” which appeared in the February issue of Inc. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/how-to-use-hootsuite-for-business.html
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Stuck on Ramen-the funding process
http://epaley.posterous.com/stuck-on-ramen
Eric Paley is a Managing Partner at Founder Collective,
"I thought getting funded would be as simple as pitching my idea to a smart VC and getting a check based on the magnitude of the idea."
Two different first time entrepreneurs in their early twenties both made some version of this comment to me in the last month. I like and respect both entrepreneurs and they were confiding in me that the fundraising process has been very disappointing and were seeking advice on how to close on some capital.
The fact is that raising money is really hard unless you've built a successful business before. Of course, that actually makes some sense given that building a company is really hard and most venture-backed companies don't return capital to investors. The likelihood that an investor will fund a first time entrepreneur simply based on an interesting idea is exceptionally small. Consider that the entrepreneur has an tremendous amount of conviction about the concept. However, the investor has never heard the concept before and is likely hearing it (or at least this version of a theme) for the first time and is quite unlikely to share the depth of conviction that the entrepreneur holds. In fact, a typical investor is regularly hearing credible ideas and cannot possibly fund them all. Even if the investor is enthusiastic about the concept, she is likely meeting the entrepreneur for the first time and hasn't yet established the trust and confidence needed to believe the entrepreneur has what it takes to execute the idea and be one of the few to succeed.
So what can a first time entrepreneur do to overcome the odds and get funding? Here are a few tricks that I’ve seen work well:
Figure out who in the world you know that can afford to put some money into the company and believes in you without caring much about the idea. Even if it is a small amount of money, this can be used to create more evidence that you're building a fundable business. The value of such trust networks is actually way more effective for raising money than the idea itself. If the people you know that have the means to bet on you aren't willing to fund you, why should you expect someone that you don't know to fund you?
Find experts related to your business, preferably ones who have built a successful company in the same space, and sell them on your idea. The more you can sell that person, and the more credible that person is, the better. If that person signs up as an advisor, that's helpful, but a director is better; signing up as an investor is much better and taking a leadership position on the team is the best.
The most important thing an entrepreneur can do prior to raising money is to keep building the business regardless of the funding situation. Continue to validate the market opportunity and try to prove out that the founder’s convictions are right. Build the team with people who will work for sweat equity. Create some early product and show market traction. It is very hard to know when you will have enough evidence to convince investors, but an entrepreneur that can continuously show progress has a good shot of convincing investors that he is scrappy and capable. When an investor is trying to figure out if an entrepreneur has what it takes, that ability to keep building the business is great evidence. Certainly the entrepreneur should not sit around and wait for a check in order to really start building the business. At some point if the company is showing meaningful signs of living up to the founder’s beliefs, it becomes very hard for investors to ignore.
At what point does an entrepreneur hit the wall and cannot live on ramen noodles alone? This is a very personal decision and the reason that most successful entrepreneurs have inspiring stories of perseverance. It's a question of objectively assessing the depth of the entrepreneur's conviction, how much struggle he can endure, and how much progress he can make without capital. First time entrepreneurs rarely get a benefit of the doubt from investors and getting funded is rarely easy.
Eric Paley is a Managing Partner at Founder Collective,
"I thought getting funded would be as simple as pitching my idea to a smart VC and getting a check based on the magnitude of the idea."
Two different first time entrepreneurs in their early twenties both made some version of this comment to me in the last month. I like and respect both entrepreneurs and they were confiding in me that the fundraising process has been very disappointing and were seeking advice on how to close on some capital.
The fact is that raising money is really hard unless you've built a successful business before. Of course, that actually makes some sense given that building a company is really hard and most venture-backed companies don't return capital to investors. The likelihood that an investor will fund a first time entrepreneur simply based on an interesting idea is exceptionally small. Consider that the entrepreneur has an tremendous amount of conviction about the concept. However, the investor has never heard the concept before and is likely hearing it (or at least this version of a theme) for the first time and is quite unlikely to share the depth of conviction that the entrepreneur holds. In fact, a typical investor is regularly hearing credible ideas and cannot possibly fund them all. Even if the investor is enthusiastic about the concept, she is likely meeting the entrepreneur for the first time and hasn't yet established the trust and confidence needed to believe the entrepreneur has what it takes to execute the idea and be one of the few to succeed.
So what can a first time entrepreneur do to overcome the odds and get funding? Here are a few tricks that I’ve seen work well:
Figure out who in the world you know that can afford to put some money into the company and believes in you without caring much about the idea. Even if it is a small amount of money, this can be used to create more evidence that you're building a fundable business. The value of such trust networks is actually way more effective for raising money than the idea itself. If the people you know that have the means to bet on you aren't willing to fund you, why should you expect someone that you don't know to fund you?
Find experts related to your business, preferably ones who have built a successful company in the same space, and sell them on your idea. The more you can sell that person, and the more credible that person is, the better. If that person signs up as an advisor, that's helpful, but a director is better; signing up as an investor is much better and taking a leadership position on the team is the best.
The most important thing an entrepreneur can do prior to raising money is to keep building the business regardless of the funding situation. Continue to validate the market opportunity and try to prove out that the founder’s convictions are right. Build the team with people who will work for sweat equity. Create some early product and show market traction. It is very hard to know when you will have enough evidence to convince investors, but an entrepreneur that can continuously show progress has a good shot of convincing investors that he is scrappy and capable. When an investor is trying to figure out if an entrepreneur has what it takes, that ability to keep building the business is great evidence. Certainly the entrepreneur should not sit around and wait for a check in order to really start building the business. At some point if the company is showing meaningful signs of living up to the founder’s beliefs, it becomes very hard for investors to ignore.
At what point does an entrepreneur hit the wall and cannot live on ramen noodles alone? This is a very personal decision and the reason that most successful entrepreneurs have inspiring stories of perseverance. It's a question of objectively assessing the depth of the entrepreneur's conviction, how much struggle he can endure, and how much progress he can make without capital. First time entrepreneurs rarely get a benefit of the doubt from investors and getting funded is rarely easy.
Could this be the future of magazines? Text Books?
http://m.gizmodo.com/5552315/
The Great iPad Magazine isn't here yet—but it's getting closer all the time. Popular Mechanics' app, set to launch next month, already looks like the new best magazine on the iPad.
If you've used Wired's Adobe-developed app, you'll notice Popular Mechanics' app looks and feels more like it than any other magazine app so far, even though it was developed in-house at Hearst. It's interesting, not only because Pop Mech is 1/10 the size of Wired, weighing just around 60MB, but it means we've already established a set of conventions for magazines on the iPad, if you take them, and other apps, like PopSci+, and Time, in aggregate.
Namely, they mostly reject pinch-to-zoom—what you see is what you get, true to form. (GQ and Vanity Fair are the exception, but given that Wired is effectively prototyping for Conde Nast, I don't expect it to be that way forever.) Which is interesting, in that Apple has taught everybody pinch-to-zoom as the predominant multitouch gesture, so it's what most people automatically do to anything. The idea, clearly, is fidelity to this idea of the magazine as curated object, unlike something purely digital and flighty, like a web page.
Second, there is a common navigational scheme emerging across magazines, although Pop Mech breaks it slightly. Articles are read vertically—that is, you scroll up and down—and you move to the next article or section by swiping left or right. Popular Mechanics, on the other hand, goes for page-for-page fidelity, in that you swipe to left to turn every single page. (Except for the handful of pages you don't, which is kind of confusing.) Swiping for every page, I suspect, will grow tedious, quickly.
They have a nice implementation of a sidebar, though it might also be slightly confusing if you've never used it before—essentially the top half of a page will be its own scrolling section that can go ad infinitum, showing all the steps of a DIY process, or other sequential steps magazines love to shove in sidebars. Galleries work like Wired—when you're presented with one, you tap various areas on the page to progress to the next shot in the sequence. Fine, but somewhat pointless.
Pop Mech does do a few things better than anybody else, though, besides coming in a more economical package. For one, fully embedded, seamless video—videos play on the page, so they feel like they're part of the magazine, and you're not interrupted by the iPad's movie player springing to life on top of the app. This is great. And it feels more future-y. (Apologies for the video looking a little wavy—I was hand-holding a DSLR, and the shaking was pretty bad, so iMovie's motion stabilization seemed preferable.)
Second, and key to keeping the app feeling alive and relevant, it pulls in new info, so the app doesn't become a fossil once you're done with the issue. The mini-app-within-an-app—a living infographic, if you will—that they demoed for me charted seismological data in the US, not only historically, but also using the most recent 7 days of earthquake data from the USGS. Which is really savvy—the mag retains value after you're done reading the issue. Oh, there's a built in reader that pulls in the latest articles from the Popular Mechanics website, but I figure you'll just go to the website anyway. Oh, and you can actually share articles, which you can't yet with the Wired app.
The upshot of Popular Mechanics releasing what could be the best magazine app yet on the iPad a month after the app we just deemed to be the best is that while the Great iPad Magazine hasn't arrived yet—to be clear, I don't think Popular Mechanics is quite it, either, for many of the same reasons John critiqued Wired—it may very well be on the way sooner than we think. Everybody's still just figuring this thing out, so people are mostly sticking to incrementally reformatting the magazine, instead of reinventing it, which is what we're waiting for. I suspect the HTML5 Sports Illustrated demoed at Google IO might be a peek in a different way, in that it's truly cross platform and could live on the web.
I love magazines, and this idea they could be something more than they are, given a totally blank slate to recreate themselves with. But just give it some time. [Popular Mechanics]
The Great iPad Magazine isn't here yet—but it's getting closer all the time. Popular Mechanics' app, set to launch next month, already looks like the new best magazine on the iPad.
Namely, they mostly reject pinch-to-zoom—what you see is what you get, true to form. (GQ and Vanity Fair are the exception, but given that Wired is effectively prototyping for Conde Nast, I don't expect it to be that way forever.) Which is interesting, in that Apple has taught everybody pinch-to-zoom as the predominant multitouch gesture, so it's what most people automatically do to anything. The idea, clearly, is fidelity to this idea of the magazine as curated object, unlike something purely digital and flighty, like a web page.
Second, there is a common navigational scheme emerging across magazines, although Pop Mech breaks it slightly. Articles are read vertically—that is, you scroll up and down—and you move to the next article or section by swiping left or right. Popular Mechanics, on the other hand, goes for page-for-page fidelity, in that you swipe to left to turn every single page. (Except for the handful of pages you don't, which is kind of confusing.) Swiping for every page, I suspect, will grow tedious, quickly.
They have a nice implementation of a sidebar, though it might also be slightly confusing if you've never used it before—essentially the top half of a page will be its own scrolling section that can go ad infinitum, showing all the steps of a DIY process, or other sequential steps magazines love to shove in sidebars. Galleries work like Wired—when you're presented with one, you tap various areas on the page to progress to the next shot in the sequence. Fine, but somewhat pointless.
Pop Mech does do a few things better than anybody else, though, besides coming in a more economical package. For one, fully embedded, seamless video—videos play on the page, so they feel like they're part of the magazine, and you're not interrupted by the iPad's movie player springing to life on top of the app. This is great. And it feels more future-y. (Apologies for the video looking a little wavy—I was hand-holding a DSLR, and the shaking was pretty bad, so iMovie's motion stabilization seemed preferable.)
Second, and key to keeping the app feeling alive and relevant, it pulls in new info, so the app doesn't become a fossil once you're done with the issue. The mini-app-within-an-app—a living infographic, if you will—that they demoed for me charted seismological data in the US, not only historically, but also using the most recent 7 days of earthquake data from the USGS. Which is really savvy—the mag retains value after you're done reading the issue. Oh, there's a built in reader that pulls in the latest articles from the Popular Mechanics website, but I figure you'll just go to the website anyway. Oh, and you can actually share articles, which you can't yet with the Wired app.
The upshot of Popular Mechanics releasing what could be the best magazine app yet on the iPad a month after the app we just deemed to be the best is that while the Great iPad Magazine hasn't arrived yet—to be clear, I don't think Popular Mechanics is quite it, either, for many of the same reasons John critiqued Wired—it may very well be on the way sooner than we think. Everybody's still just figuring this thing out, so people are mostly sticking to incrementally reformatting the magazine, instead of reinventing it, which is what we're waiting for. I suspect the HTML5 Sports Illustrated demoed at Google IO might be a peek in a different way, in that it's truly cross platform and could live on the web.
I love magazines, and this idea they could be something more than they are, given a totally blank slate to recreate themselves with. But just give it some time. [Popular Mechanics]
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