Common Paradox Tech Blog

Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing was asked what his favorite iPhone Apps were, and here’s what he said:

Shazam [Free - iTunes link] “There’s just something so amazing about being anywhere, and some music starts playing and you just hold up your phone and can find out what it is,” Mr. Schiller said. “You never [...]

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Apple SVP Phil Schiller’s Favorite iPhone Apps

The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.

Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time.

If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We’ve seen it time and time again recently.

Earlier this week, we wrote about how news organizations are already using Twitter Lists. Today, they’re getting their first major test, by way of a tragic breaking news event – a deadly shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.

Details are still coming in about the event, but Lists being created by major news brands are providing some of the best coverage, as they offer a real-time view of what multiple sources – both local and national – are reporting. Here’s a look at what a few news organizations are doing:

The New York Times: Their Fort Hood Shootings list has updates from news organizations throughout Texas, the US Army, as well as what look to be several citizen journalists on the ground.

The Today Show: Similarly, The Today Show has found local news organizations and people in the area for their Fort Hood list. They are also included feeds from several NBC properties like MSNBC and the local NBC affiliates.

Dallas Morning News: Reporter Scott Goldstein has taken it upon himself to setup a list of news sources.

The Huffington Post: The popular news blog is putting its real-time curation to the test with a three column display of Twitter lists on its site – Fort Hood Locals, Breaking News, and Central TX News.

CNN: The cable news network has created its own Fort Hood list with local and national sources. It’s the first list the network has created on its breaking news (@cnnbrk) account, which has more than 2.8 million followers.

The Austin American-Statesman: Although not using Lists, the @fthoodshootings account they setup immediately following news of the Fort Hood incident has been a valuable resource (though oddly it was briefly suspended by Twitter yesterday afternoon).

What’s really interesting here from a media perspective is that we’re seeing news organizations that compete vigorously for breaking news turning to real-time curation to help tell the story. And the result is certainly a win for media consumers – rather than searching far and wide for local news from Fort Hood, it’s all being aggregated for us by news organizations we trust. It certainly might be a glimpse of what’s to come from the Twitter Lists feature.

Meanwhile, if you’ve seen some useful Fort Hood lists that we’ve missed, please share them in the comments and we’ll keep our post updated with the latest.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: fort hood, twitter, Twitter Lists

CNN is coming out with an iPhone application Tuesday that has a feature few other news apps have tried: a price tag. There’s been a lot of talk this year about finally charging readers for news, especially on mobile devices, where media executives see a chance to condition consumers to handing over a few dollars for a constant stream of updates to their pocket.

I tend to reflexively dismiss single-source news apps, since they’re usually not much more than a repackaged mobile site. CNN’s Mobile, with push, VOD and live newscasts, is much, much more—but don’t expect to get it for free.

Once you’ve gotten over the fact that no, CNN somehow didn’t already have an iPhone app, consider the feature list: CNN.com’s text content is formatted into swipeable panels, organized by category. You can save stories for offline reading, and select subjects to create personalized news feeds from CNN’s stories. (In blogland, we call these “tags,” but hey!) If you’re particularly reportorial, there’s also a panel for iReport submissions—3GS users can upload video, and everyone can upload stories and photos.

The newsreading and reporting functions look fine, but he app doesn’t really start to shine until it starts to stream: Video is available in both VOD and live flavors, the first of which is organized in a catalog, and the second of which jumps in and out of service at the whim of CNN. Here’s the theory: Users sit tight with their text content and old clips of Anderson Cooper interviewing panda cubs, or whatever he does, until NEWS BREAKS: Anderson has been mauled by mother panda. This is huge. You get a push notification that says, “Hey, CNN’s live right now,” which means that the station’s content is streamed over Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE. And, you watch.

CNN says this’ll kick in fairly frequently, mostly to correspond with big news events— you know, the kind of things you might rush to a TV to find out more about. It might not sound like much, but conceptually, cable news streaming over the air to the iPhone is, well, a pretty big deal. Sadly, CNN seems to have realized this, so they aren’t giving this one out for free: the app will run two dollars when it goes live later this morning. [CNN]