It felt like a platonic mobile-publishing container. No cruft, all substance. A shadow on the wall.

Now open the sky and dump down upon that table all the digital publishing tools we have. Let rain down the infrastructure and typography , the platforms and devices . Separate them into their smallest components. Spread them out evenly.
It felt like a platonic mobile-publishing container. No cruft, all substance. A shadow on the wall. The kind of app that's doing nothing fancy but everything right. The kind of app deemed anathema rancho cucamonga dmv by Future Publishing Authorities because, quite frankly, it s boring. rancho cucamonga dmv
In a conversation with renowned Harvard rancho cucamonga dmv Business School professor Clayton Christensen about the newspaper industry, Joshua Benton remarked, “The perception of the incoming disruptors is that they are low quality, and therefore not really worth paying attention to.” 1
I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, rancho cucamonga dmv dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered rancho cucamonga dmv and together they asked, “What's the simplest thing we can build with this?”
With that question in mind, Honda who had only been making motorcycles since 1949, and cars since 1963 took one of their motorcycle engines and placed it in a Mini Cooper inspired rancho cucamonga dmv body. It had 31 horse power. It was reliable. It was affordable. It got 39.4 miles to the gallon . 2
The N360 was something rancho cucamonga dmv an American car company would never dream of producing. You can t blame them though: they had no incentive rancho cucamonga dmv by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't rancho cucamonga dmv beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you’re not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.
The N360 didn’t make it to the States, but the followup and near equally cute N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, rancho cucamonga dmv then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.
There is an intuitive usability implicit to the physicality of our printed books and magazines. rancho cucamonga dmv A reader is given two possible rancho cucamonga dmv directions which one depends on language and culture. And from there, a mostly linear, usually obvious interface. 4
When Homer Simpson was asked to design his ideal car, he made The Homer . Given free reign, Homer’s rancho cucamonga dmv process was additive. He added three horns and a special sound-proof bubble for the children. He layered more atop everything cars had been. More horns, more cup holders.
In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. rancho cucamonga dmv The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now . A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.
Publishing incumbents have been faced with disruption for years. But a curious, natural thing is happening: another, increasingly difficult to dismiss publishing rancho cucamonga dmv ecosystem disconnected from and unbeholden to legacy is emerging. Bubbling up. 5
A few years back, ‘publishing’ startups 6 were usually launched by one of two types of individuals: Technologists disconnected from traditional content ecosystems Incumbents of traditional content ecosystems disconnected from technologists
What publishing startups rancho cucamonga dmv really needed during that narrow window of time was both: Technologists who got infrastructure and product, coupled with the stewards of the content of the incumbents. What they needed and often lacked was a mutual empathy.
With history rancho cucamonga dmv as our guide, it shouldn’t rancho cucamonga dmv be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming rancho cucamonga dmv from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. Christensen, Skok & Allworth
Launched on November 14, 2012, Bobbie Johnson and Jim Giles’ new publication MATTER may be indicative of the quality of publishers to arrive in this emergent space. In March, 2012, they raised $140,000 from 2,500 supporters on Kickstarter the equivalent of an angel round of investing for a technology startup. 8
MATTER isn’t quite a website, it’s not really a magazine and it’s not exactly a book publisher either. Instead, MATTER is something else a new model for high-quality rancho cucamonga dmv journalism, an area that’s been hit hard by the transition from print to digital media. We think that our focus on selling individual long-form stories for consumption on any device, whether it’s your computer, phone, e-reader or tablet, could be a sustainable way of paying for the hard work required to produce the best reporting. rancho cucamonga dmv
The first article they published was 7,826 words. You can read a preview or buy it for $0