What’s a HooClix?

One of the most fun aspects of having this blog is the ability to scoop ourselves. So right here, right now, we’d like to tell you about HooClix Enhanced Tracking.

Advertisers love the NXTbook format because the publisher of the magazine can tell them exactly how many people clicked on their advertisement. But anyone in marketing or sales can tell you that when it comes to leads, quality is the name of the game.

HooClix Enhanced Tracking answers that very question by capturing the domain-level information of the person who clicked on a given ad and placing it in a database, which is then sent to each advertiser in a custom report once per month. Now, advertisers will be able to know that someone from microsoft.com or google.com clicked on their ad.

Here’s a quote from our president, Mr. Ewald: “As a hybrid product, it’s imperative that digital publishers don’t just embrace the best magazine practices, but also that we utilize what technology companies are doing for other mediums. HooClix Enhanced Tracking is the latest example of that.”

All together, now: HooClix!

The State of the Custom Publishing Industry

The custom publishing industry is looking at a sunny future, according to this white paper, which was jointly sponsored by Penton, B2B Marketing Trends, and us. The paper says that companies believe custom publishing will have the greatest impact on buyers over the next five years than other marketing vehicles.

If you’d like to see a great way to make your white paper sizzle, click here to view a cool flash graph and some embedded audio.

Great Day in McLean

Yesterday we had the great opportunity to meet two of our favorite bloggers in person as both Scott Karp and Rex Hammock were on hand for the Folio: Roadshow, of which we were a sponsor.

I think a great time was had by all, and Scott and Rex (along with the other speakers) did an excellent job of presenting to a group with varying experiences in technology.

If you missed DC, be sure to check out the same program next month in Atlanta.

On Blogging

Do you blog? If not – but you’ve thought about – be sure to view The 15 Minute Case for B2B Blogging.

Very Cool Use of Adobe Flex…

At NXTbook, we’re always on the lookout for great Flash applications, and here’s one of the slickest I’ve seen. If you haven’t yet, you’ll need to download the newest Flash player, but this is a a great way to share content. Very nice!

Check Out a Nxtbook Video Example

Our sister company, Reprint Management Services, is consistently named one of the Best Places to Work in Central Pennsylvania. How do they do it? Well, aside from being a cool place to work (we share office space with those crazy folks), they do a great job of promoting what makes them special.

To learn more, and to see a great use of video within a Nxtbook, click here.

Crystal Ball Talk

A futurologist has warned the magazine industry that it needs to personalize content, embrace technology and tackle competition from non-traditional publishers to survive in the digital world.

You can read the whole article here, but for our money, this was the winning section:

Pearson said these kinds of technology advances would mean magazine production becomes more of a two-way system, of personalized interaction between the reader and the magazine beyond the traditional means of communication, the letters page.

"You can make a much clearer link between you and the customer because of the artificial intelligence which knows who I am, where I am and what information I need right now," Pearson said.

As we’ve mentioned before, our newest feature is tied directly to this concept: magazine publishers must make it easier for people to take specific content, make it relevant to themselves and share it among others with similar interests.

It’s Time to Be More Social

Since the announcement a few weeks ago that Nxtbook content can be easily uploaded to popular link aggregators Digg and del.icio.us, we’ve received many requests from traditional publishers asking us to explain what these two websites do and how they can best use them to increase the reach and effectiveness of their presentations.

To view the Nxtbook Media Guide to the Social Internet, click here.

Somewhere in All of This Lies The Truth…

Over at Folio, Matt said "While online revenue is still dwarfed by print revenue for most publishers, many are starting to see real revenue growth online exceed the real revenue loss in print on a quarterly basis."

Meanwhile, a report out of Great Britain said,"Cannabalism of the revenue of traditional publications by digital publishing is a myth."

The good news is that whichever side of this fence you take, a digital edition with Nxtbook Media makes sense. By using your print publication as the springboard, publishers have the ability to present both the paper versions and online versions of content to their audience (and advertisers). It’s a great way to hedge your bet on the future.

Looking Into the Rear View Mirror

What were people saying about digital publishing 10 years ago and how right were they?

Adobe’s Bill McCoy takes a look at Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality, published in 1995 and points out where the authors nailed the future as well as some interests moments where they didn’t:

Scanning of magazines impractical. Their numbers of 22MB per page after compression were based on a compression estimate of "25 percent of the original size" – they call this an "optimistic" figure but with the rise of JPEG2000, JBG2 and other more aggressive compression technologies of course this was really a very conservative figure. And, we are now poised to have terabyte+ storage on desktop PCs, and outrageous numbers like "168 gigabytes per year" are now measured in tens or hundreds of dollars. In fact their example of the New Yorker magazine to illustrate the impracticality of digital replicas of magazines is ironic given that in fact that 80 years of the New Yorker is available to consumers as 8 data DVDs for $63. 

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