During the presentation I increasingly get the feeling that relative newcomer Bol.com is already under fire and can barely keep up with developments. You can already buy CDs and films via iTunes, there is an app store for games. As soon as a Dutch iBook store opens (or Amazon opens its Kindle platform to Dutch publishers) things could take off for the currently lucrative book division of Bol.com. Bol is diversifying with a wider range of electronics and physical products, but will they win the battle against global giants such as Amazon and Ebay? The presentation of Bol.com sounds good, but between the lines of the story there is a company that is fighting with gigantic global competitors. Will bol.com survive the mobile future? Time will tell, but I see the necessary challenges.
Herman Kienhuis of Sanoma talks extensively about the user profiles of iPad users in the Netherlands. It is no surprise that the majority consists of men between 22 and 45, but it is new to me that no less than 94% of the users surveyed by Sanoma use the iPad several times a day. The peak is clearly in the evening hours, while the smartphone is used from the moment you get up and has a peak again at the end of the day, for example (quickly going through your apps before going to bed). The use of media on the iPad is also different: less chat and messaging but more consumption of media, such as magazines. The latter in particular is interesting for Sanoma. They have now tried out portugal phone number list what works with many apps and magazines.
Sanoma believes in a future of magazines on the iPad, but also thinks that the definitive form has not yet been found. That is why they continue to experiment. Challenges in this are to make things simple, to use recommendations and other social functions and to learn even better to market magazine editions in apps. In order to learn from the development of apps, Sanoma consciously builds analytics into its apps. Learning from the development of apps is an important pillar at Sanoma and the past year has brought many lessons. For example, there appear to be a number of legal issues. Sanoma has learned to always claim ownership of the code, in order to be able to reuse code in future apps. Legal issues can also arise around content. For example, the rights to the classic Margriet cookbook did not belong to the magazine, but to an external publisher. Something that was only discovered during the development of the app.