Skip to main content

What's Bigger than Amazon, Google, Microsoft & Apple?

The web.

Duh. But with Apple's anticipated Tablet [Update: iPad!], Google's Nexus One phone and any number of other shiny objects to distract us, it's easy to forget that even the most massively successful of these platforms—the iPhone—has maybe 60 million users, whereas the web has about 1 billion.

Maybe this is why the Nexus One's tagline is "web meets phone," and why even though few really know what capabilities Apple's long-rumored tablet will have, it's a safe bet it will feature a great web browser just like the iPhone does.

The simple reason is that the web is simply too big for even the biggest device makers to ignore.

Which is very good news for those of us looking for the best ways to reach large audiences with digital content. The fact that all these great companies are coming out with more great devices just means more ways for users to access the content we serve.

As long as open web standards prevail, those of us who stick with them don't really have a horse in this race. In fact, just the fact that there is a race means we win.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2018 Tizra User Summit: What We Learned by Meeting Our Customers Where We Are

They say you should "meet your customers where they are." Well, for Tizra 's 4th annual user conference we decided to take a chance and do the opposite. Instead of going to Chicago or DC, where Tizra customers are concentrated, we bet on hosting in our home town of Providence, RI. It's not that we don't love Chicago and DC, but we really felt we could do something special with the home field advantage. As it turns out, we were right. The Tizra user community is a silo-busting mix of creatives, technologists, content strategists and executives, who share the goal of building, engaging and generating value from audiences with digital content. For this crowd, we didn't want a sterile conference facility. We felt that by giving them a place they could really connect with, we'd help them connect with each other. Providence, with its vibrant tech and design scene, walkable downtown, and non-traditional venues, provided just the funky catalyst we were loo...

What Einstein Taught Us About Searching Inside Publications

When the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein went live on Tizra a few years ago, it was a huge step forward. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could search and access the output of one of the 20th Century’s great minds…from love letters to breakthrough articles that changed how we think about the nature of time and space. But the project also showed the limits of traditional tools for searching within large, complex publications. These limits sparked a collaboration with Princeton University Press and Einstein Papers Project editors, which this year resulted in a dynamic new search interface, which we’ll be demonstrating in a  Webcast Friday, December 15 at 1pm ET . The interface not only makes it easier for Einstein researchers to home in on relevant content on both mobile devices and desktops, it points the way toward faster, better searching within a wide range of publication types, from reference books to periodicals, technical documentation and standards to textbooks. Click T...

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra!  Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at  Scribe  did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...