UC Berkeley >Play Conference

This past Saturday was the >Play Conference at UC Berkeley, which is an impressive all-student-run conference that happens annually. The line-up of speakers included Wired's Chris Anderson talking about the iPad, and a wide variety of panel discussions stocked with luminaries from Silicon Valley and the digital media community in the Bay Area.

Anderson is big on the iPad as a way to find a Third Way beyond web and print for magazines such as Wired. Wired was one of the early entrants in doing a custom-built iPad app, and has rightly been lauded for the quality of it. However it does have its downsides, as Anderson spelled out - the file sizes are tremendously large (hundreds of megabytes) due to limitations of the current publishing platform and how it ports over from traditional media. To get the look and feel, with custom fonts, and work in both landscape as well as portrait modes requires a lot of work and a lot of data. He called for a questioning of the traditional attributes of magazines, finding which ones are still valuable/viable in a tablet, and which new attributes can be layered on top to take advantage of the iPad's capabilities and form factor.

The good news from the print industry standpoint is that early data for iPad apps for Conde Naste's various publications (of which Wired is one) is that duration of engagement is currently even longer than for print. They average 60 minutes of readership time for physical print, a few minutes for their web sites, and 100 minutes on the iPad. Anderson doesn't expect that number to hold (neither do I), but even if it drops to an hour, they have largely solved the economic conundrum. That's the theory, anyway. In answer to an audience question, Anderson didn't want to get into the details of the fees model with Apple... 

I had the opportunity to be on a panel titled "Splinternet", which looked at how the web is getting embedded more into apps and mobile devices (of which the iPad is one), shifting away from desktop browsers as the primary means of getting web content. (In some ways it related to the talk I gave at the Next Web conference earlier this year.) It was a lively discussion and good Q&A from the audience. My other panelists were really stellar: Ivy Ross (EVP of Marketing at The Gap), Jason Krikorian (venture capitalist and co-founder of Sling Media), Sung Hu Kim (former Android evangelist at Google, and now a product manager at Twitter), Daniel Heaf of the BBC, and ably moderated by Andy Kiang, a product manager at Yahoo.

AVP of Marketing Strategy Adam Richardson is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage. His book is the manual for leaders looking for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses. You can follow Adam on Twitter @richardsona.