(Photo: Wikipedia)

Twitter now has a broadly worded patent on its own service, but the company pinkie swears it won't go patent trolling. [The Verge]

Yahoo's reportedly in negotiations to buy a big stake in the video site Dailymotion. Does someone have a little GOOG envy, hmm? [Wall Street Journal]

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, who was thought to be in the running for Adobe CEO, was named Apple's VP of technology. Given the animosity between the two companies, we're going to guess he won't be invited back for employee happy hours. [AllThingsD]

But is he any good? Or is he a "bozo"? [Daring Fireball]

Google is expanding Fiber to the suburb of Olathe, Kansas. And here we thought cities owned the 21st Century. [Kansas City Star]

"Android has outgrown Andy and honestly, I don't think he knows where to take it next." [The Verge]

It's not easy being a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. Even with slides, buffets, and any other number of ridiculous amenities, the tech business can be a stressful and even physically painful endeavor (you try typing for twenty hours straight). But for many of America’s best coders, the remedy to stress is manifesting in a way bosses would probably rather not know about: they gettin hiiiiiiiigh, brah! San Jose, which is home to over 100 medical marijuana dispensaries, is seeing a noticeable uptick in the number of customers who work in tech, according to a report from Businessweek.

Nearly 40 percent of customers at Palliative Health, a medical marijuana distributor, work in the tech industry, and although most tech companies do not allow marijuana usage or possession on their campuses, some employees are skirting this rule. They use products like MedMar Healing Center's "Veda Chews", a marijuana infused chocolate toffee which delivers the pain relief effects of marijuana without the psychoactive effects. MedMar says that at least 15 percent of its clients work in the tech industry.

It only takes a “recommendation” from a doctor for a patient to obtain medical marijuana, and it can be used for arthritis, migraines or "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief,” according to the initial 1996 California medical marijuana law. Apparently arthritis and migraines are pretty common maladies among programmers.

While it is commonly used by many employees in the Valley, tech companies are apparently pretty hesitant to start employing mandatory drug testing, for fear of losing too many employees. “The Silicon Valley data support recent news reports citing some employers who say they are having a hard time finding candidates that can pass the preemployment drug test,”  Barry Sample, director of science and technology for Quest Diagnostics Employer Solutions, told Businessweek.

Maybe all Marissa Meyer needs is to let her employees light a little chronic to increase productivity.

Another precautionary measure: Seven months after raising $6.5 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures, Behance has been acquired by Adobe Systems. Behance said that it would remain in New York in a blog post discussing the deal. [Behance]

Zynga confirmed that it's shutting down its Japanese operation at the end of next month. If we get there. [TechCrunch]

Three Google executives were cleared by an Italian appeals court, which reversed a lower court's findings that the execs violated a child's privacy by failing to remove a bullying video. [Reuters]

NASA is going to keep blogging that the world isn't really ending until the sidewalk opens up and swallows its communication team whole. [NASA]

The Tipping Point Partners office. (Photo: Tipping Point)

Like cushy sign-on bonuses or drool-worthy stock options, perks are a potent recruiting tool for startups, dangled before potential hires like a treat before a ravenous animal. Expensive, Steve Jobs-approved gear and kitchens overflowing with every snack imaginable are treated like they’re the equivalent of platinum health insurance.

We get it--having a thriving, enjoyable work culture is integral to fostering a healthy work/life balance and not becoming consumed with resentment every time your shitty desk chair breaks. But is it possible that some of these perks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be?

Unlimited Vacation Days

One of the most frequently touted startup perks is the unlimited vacation day policy, under which, instead of receiving a finite amount of vacation days, employees are allowed to take however much vacation they want ... as long as they work super hard the rest of the year. It seems too good to be true: having the option to take three weeks off at a time to jet around Europe? Fabulous. And all sizes of company offer this perk: Adobe, Gilt Groupe and Tumblr are just a few that come to mind.

But some reports have shown that when people have unlimited vacation days, they actually end up taking less time off. Without a finite amount of days to use--think "Oh, it's December, better use my extra vacay days!"--employees are often unsure of what's the appropriate amount of time to take off.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote last year:

Some employers promote this as liberating, saying their workplaces are so flexible that old-fashioned constraints such as assigned time off aren't needed. But others say the lack of guidelines fuels a tendency to work all the time ... Americans have trouble taking time off even when they are assigned a specific number of days. Only 38% of U.S. employees use all their allotted vacation time, says a 2010 survey of 9,000 people by travel-booking company Expedia.com; the average worker took only 14 of 18 days permitted.

In 2011, Evernote--a startup based in San Francisco--began literally paying its employees to go on vacation. As soon as the company switched to an unlimited vacation day policy, "The first thing we noticed when we did it was that some people started taking less vacation," chief executive Phil Libin told Businessweek last year. In order to correct this, Evernote began giving employees $1,000 every time they took a weeklong vacation.

For many startups, encouraging employees to take the vacation they deserve often starts at the top. "It's all about creating a culture of flexibility so people feel O.K. taking advantage of it," said Kara Rota, director of editorial and partnerships at Cookstr, which boasts Tipping Point Partners as an institutional cofounder. "I think it’s the responsibility of people in executive and management positions to role model it and be very vocal about the things they have going on outside of work."

Unlimited Snacks

On a recent trip to the Vimeo offices in the soaring IAC building, Betabeat was asked upon arrival whether we'd like to indulge in some delicious snacks. The kitchen, situated right where you get off the elevator, was stocked with every kind of treat you could imagine: candy, cookies and other sweet things were tucked into one side of the island, while chips, crackers and salty items invaded the other side. It was a snacker's delight.

But there are downsides to all this food: for one, it can keep you from ever having to leave your desk for a lunch break. Even big corporations like Bloomberg LLP employ this strategy. As a Vanity Fair profile of Bloomberg pointed out, staffers there were "taken care of," but, as one employee put it, "The free junk food was great but it was there to keep us from going out for coffee."

There's also an important health aspect. Even if your startup stocks healthier snacks like fresh fruit and unsalted nuts, there's a chance that you'll eat more than you want to just because food is around.

"Your proximity to food has a huge impact on whether or not you're thinking about food," said Richard Talens, the cofounder of Fitocracy, a fitness social network. "This in turn impacts your desire to eat. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs have a scarcity mentality when it comes to food, especially free food. If they see that there's free calories lying around, they will likely prefer to go for that rather than paying for a lunch."

Mr. Talens said that in order to eradicate mindless snacking, the Fitocracy office doesn't stock snacks.

"There are no snacks per se at Fitocracy," he told Betabeat by email. "As a company, we're not big snackers, to be honest ... quite the opposite. Most people at Fitocracy try to remain within a caloric range on most days and we have the same philosophy: we'd much rather eat a few larger meals than snack constantly throughout the day."

If you can't convince your company to get rid of the M&Ms, Mr. Talens also advised how to hit the gym on the cheap. "Try to bargain with your local fitness club to see if you can get an employee discount for everyone," he suggested.

Food can be an important way to bring people together, though. "We provide a breakfast spread every Monday," Ms. Rota said. "It’s a good opportunity for people to check in at the beginning of the week and to have a good boost socially. It's important culturally and has an opportunity to let people sort of connect with each other in another way."

Working From Home

Allowing employees to work from home is a common perk, but frequently--if the office culture doesn't encourage it--it's one that can easily fall by the wayside.

"People used to do it, but then at some point it just became standard to work from the office, and now you can't really work from home unless you really need to (cable guy, doctor's appointment, whatever)," said one person employed at a well-known New York startup, who asked not to be named.

Different people work in different ways, whether it be collaborative--through activities like pair programming--or solitary. Different tasks also require various work methods. At the Cookstr offices, Ms. Rota said that there are couches and conference rooms set up for group work, while other employees prefer to work from their own private desks. She also argues that removing the emphasis from hours spent working at your desk can help employees flourish.

"A culture that is focused with how many hours you’re sitting at your desk puts the focus on the wrong place," she added. "It’s an artificial definition of what work looks like."

In the end, fostering a culture where employees feel comfortable to take advantage of the perks so many recruiters promote is key to maintaining a happy and productive office environment.

"It really is about setting a precedent to make people feel comfortable with alternative work styles," she advised. "If you’re an intern, or new, or if you’re not an executive leader, you’re not going to feel comfortable being the one person taking advantage of the work from home policy. But if there’s a real culture of that, and you trust in your coworkers that they're doing the things that they need to be doing, then there's really no concern about it."

Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media (flickr.com/leweb3)

AllThingsD is reporting that social marketing company Buddy Media is in talks to be acquired by Salesforce for $800 million. We had been hearing similar rumors ourselves, and reached out to Buddy Media last week, but the company refused to confirm, saying only, "We've been hearing this kind of chatter since the day we started the company, and it has always turned out to be false."

An acquisition for Buddy makes sense--Facebook's bungled IPO (its stock dropped another 10 percent today) left little room for companies with offerings reliant upon Facebook to go public themselves. And judging from Buddy's hiring of an "IPO-ready CFO" last August, an IPO was its preferred route.

There's also the fact that social marketing's current manifestation is inherently unsustainable. Sooner or later, big brands are going to figure out how to manage their own Facebook pages in-house, and refuse to pay the high premiums offered by companies like Buddy. Plus, startups like One Public offer similar services, but for free.

"We had been hearing about Buddy Media's acquisition by Salesforce last year as well, but I think their primary objective must have been to go Public," Fahad Khan, CEO of One Public, Inc., told us via email from the D Conference. "However, post-Facebook IPO, many IPO dreams have been shattered. Buddy's sale is one of those shattered dreams."

Mr. Khan added that Buddy's possible acquisition by Salesforce "is nothing but good news for smaller players like us as it will level the playing field. Two other big players (Context Optional and Vitrue) have been acquired already....these players will be busy integrating their products with acquirers while smaller players can focus on serving the ever moving target of satisfying global brands and their agencies."

Sources told AllThingsD that "the two companies have agreed to terms that will value Buddy Media at more than $800 million, but that the transaction hasn’t closed yet. People familiar with the deal say Buddy Media chose Salesforce’s offer over a competitive bid from Google."

The acquisition would make Buddy one of the last big social marketing companies to be acquired, and the largest one to date. This reporter's former employer, Context Optional, was picked up by Efficient Frontier last fall, and Efficient Frontier was nabbed by Adobe earlier this year; Oracle bought Facebook marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million just last week.

Salesforce itself bought social media monitoring tool Radian6 last year, so an acquisition of Buddy--a much more robust social marketing platform--is a smart move by Salesforce to, as AllThingsD reports, "extend its core customer relationship management offering."

"The acquisition is all about data," confided one industry insider. "That's why companies like Adobe and Oracle and Salesforce are gobbling up social media marketing companies--there's data out there to be integrated into the larger story."

Of the potential Radian6 and Buddy Media pairing, our source added, "That marriage will probably be pretty interesting."

Buddy Media declined to comment "on rumors and speculation."

via Aviary

Aviary has done pretty darn well for itself in the four months since launching its mobile SDK. In a blog post announcing a new version of its embeddable photo editing software for web and mobile, the puppy-obsessed startup shared some noteworthy stats. Aviary is now editing more than 10 million photos were month on mobile alone and picked up 300 partners through its API. Both in terms of unique users and edits, the company is growing at 50 percent a month.

The Aviary blog features a number of luxe screenshots of what the updated user interface, which includes enhanced speed, sleek dials, overhaul of its cropping tools, and more effects, will look like. But Betabeat spoke to Alex Taub, head of business development and partnerships, to get the full story about the upgrade, which also includes some attempts at monetization. In the meantime, if you want to start playing around with it, Pic Stitch will be the first partner to implement and go live with V2.

For those that aren't familiar, Mr. Taub offered a handy summary of how the company evolved from a destination site to an API for web and mobile. Aviary began with funding from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman to back a founding team that wanted to build Abobe Photoshop, but in the cloud. "While that was going well," he said. "It was built in Flash and we didn’t have a solution for mobile."

"We saw a lot of people use Photoshop, but it is an advanced skill to have," said Mr. Taub. "So we took sort of the good stuff out of it. We said, we want to be around in five years, so we need shift gears. We’re focusing on professional consumers and advanced suite and we need to focus on consumers, developers, and mobile." Rather than limiting Aviary's tools to its own site, "We said, why don’t we take out the best things in our advanced suite, which was effects, and cropping, and rotating, and brightness and stickers—why don’t we take that out and make it into a lightweight editor and put it on third-party sites."

The web API came in Thanksgiving 2010 and the mobile API in 2011. After that pivot, he said, "We went from a good business to a better business."

Bigstock, Ning, Imager, FriendCaster for Facebook, RockMelt, Fashism, and Halftone are all current Aviary partners. Companies that use the Aviary API, he explained, don't need to be photo-centric, rather any platform that allows users to upload photos. "If you’re a dating site, maybe you want to do red eye removal, brightness, cropping, rotating. If you’re a blogging platform, maybe you want stickers, effects, and drawing," said Mr. Taub. "It really takes a full company working on it to build the tools right." With the new version, the Aviary branding is less prominent so that users to have a more seamless experience.

As we spoke, Mr. Taub demonstrated the incredibly easy-to-use dials to adjust brightness. "This is me adding effects in real-time. It’s sick." The brightness dial in particular, he noted, is "ten million times cooler for mobile" and vibrates as you move right and left. "Honestly, we put this in the partners hand and they smile." The best, however, may be how well it works with crappy photos. "Auto-enhancing, night-enhancing, backlight balance, it’s all one-click magic."

Meanwhile, he pointed out, competitors like Picnik, which was purchased by Google, have yet to release a mobile version. Although Aviary sees its biggest competitor as the actual tools in your smartphone, although iOS 5 cropping tools, for example, are still without an interface for developers.

As far as potential new revenue stream, the tool will still be given away for free to developers, but Aviary will start offering premium content like virtual goods on top of its editor to help partners monetize their users. That includes effects packs, sticker packs, and branded sticker packs. That includes "grungy" and "nostaglia" effects, themed stickers for particular holidays and, potentially, partnerships with big brands like the NBA or MLB. Another potential monetization strategy is printing, but right now the focus is on premium content.

"When you’re doing 10 million photos a month, if you can start converting a certain amount of users into buying stuff, it gets really, really interesting," said Mr. Taub, who pointed out that Zynga only converts 1 to 5 percent of their users. In an email to Betabeat, CEO Avi Muchnick said, "I'm most looking forward to seeing our in-app purchasing capability beginning to roll out across our entire developer network."

The Muellers’ similarities are more than superficial. The twins, who are 27 and stand 5'5", share the same bank account. They share the same calendar. They share the same curriculum vitae. The same sexual orientation (gay), brownstone (Prospect Heights) and taste in boyfriends (“over 30”). They share the same profession, and the same specialty (interactive design). They even, in a manner of speaking, share an identity. Email the Brothers Mueller at their shared account, and the only way to tell which Mueller is responding is by whose name shows up first in the signature: Nate & Kirk versus Kirk & Nate.

“We have this little notation,” said Kirk.

“Some people figured it out,” chimed in Nate, who, along with his brother, seems unburdened by matters of selfhood.

One stutters trying to figure out how to address them. “The Brothers, the Brothers Mueller, or ‘the twins,’ or ‘the boys,’” Kirk said.

In the year and a half since the Brothers got their master degrees from RISD—sharing the podium as commencement speakers in 2010—and moved to New York, they have created iPad apps for Martha Stewart and e-books for Vanity Fair and Bon Appetit. Coming soon are a political website for The New Yorker and an iPad app for Newsweek. Whereas most graphic and user-interface designers tend to hand off the technical work, the brothers do it all, relying on Nate’s speed in programming and Kirk’s facility with design.

Their first media world collaboration, a one-off iPad app for Martha Stewart called Boundless Beauty, won the Society of Publication Designers “Tablet App of the Year” award. Shortly after, Time magazine called it the cover of the year for featuring an interactive time-lapse video of one of Martha’s prize peonies, a 10-hour shoot compressed into 10 seconds. The SPD Award dinner was on a Friday. (“We have these crushed velvet pumps,” said Nate. “Loafers,” Kirk corrected. “And it’s the only time you could wear something like that,” Nate finished.) The following Monday, they got a call from Scott Dadich, Condé Nast’s vice president of digital magazine development, about revamping the company’s e-book operation.

“At this point in media, they have a bit of a lore, like, ‘Oh, the Mueller Brothers are coming!” said Melissa Lafsky, the launch editor for Newsweek’s updated iPad edition, which is slated to debut on Jan. 23, with the Brothers’ help. “When they come into the office, people love it because they’re so striking to look at. Everyone does a double-take because they’re so handsome and well-dressed and there are two of them. They’re a presence. They’re sort of the modern Jewish mother’s dream.”

“When Martha met them, her first question was whether they would appear on The Martha Stewart Show,” seconded Gael Towey, longtime chief creative and editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Not everything about the duo is as identical as it first appears, however. After the first half hour, it comes into focus that Nate’s face is more of an oval. The bridge of Kirk’s nose is more narrow, his physique more slight. Nate’s voice is deeper and a few decibels more nasal—a blessed discovery you don’t make until the next day. “It’ll be hard to transcribe,” they warned, eyeing The Observer’s digital recorder.

“Our collective identity is what matters,” said Kirk.

“We don’t get offended if people can’t tell us apart,” added Nate.

“Gilbert and George, the art duo, they call themselves ‘living sculptures.’ We like the idea of instead of being ‘living decorative objects,’” explained Kirk, gamely.

Before speaking, the twins tend to turn, birdlike, to face each other, often hesitating until they’ve reached some sort of wordless consensus before offering a response.

For all their attention-getting ensembles, the brothers retain a Midwestern equanimity from a youth spent in the suburbs of Akron. “Because we were originally raised Catholic, we have this running joke that for these twin gay boys in Akron, Ohio, our outlet to ornamentation and beautiful things was going to Mass,” said Kirk, recalling that as altar boys they fought over who got to wear the gold sash.

As budding young artists, they read up on the Aesthetics Movement and admired Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp.

They came out at different times—Nate first, Kirk years later, but never officially to each other. “I guess we always assumed that the other one was going through the same things,” they wrote in an email. “We would have been more surprised to find out the other one was straight.”

Even among unflappable New Yorkers, the Brothers Mueller tend to draw stares. In the subway or the elevator at 4 Times Square, “we get stopped once a week by people who say, ‘Have you been interviewed for a magazine or newspaper?’ and we just go, ‘Nooo,’” Kirk said, demurely shaking his head.

“That’s what’s fun. They see you maybe as objects? So we get people touching us,” said Nate, miming a hand on his arm, “saying, ‘Do you know that you’re twins?!’ It’s great.”

Indeed, the brothers are just as affable fielding questions about their interactive wallpaper, which was on exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum and featured stylized versions of a viral molecule, appearing and disappearing between delicate rows of damask ("They're STD viruses!" explained Kirk), as they are entertaining questions about fetish play.

Identical twins tend to receive unsolicited queries of a sexual nature, and in 2010, when Bel Ami, the gay porn production company, introduced the world to the Peters twins, muscle-bound teenage Czechs who begat the word “twincest,” such interrogations took a turn for the lurid.

“It used to upset us a little at first,” Kirk said. “But now we’re very playful with it.”

“My favorite is using ambiguous language,” Nate added.

“They’ll ask questions about us, like do we date the same guy or do you sleep with the same guy,” explained Kirk. “So we’ll purposefully answer, like, ‘Not usually,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time. Nate will say, ‘Not really,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’ll explode their head.”

“And then we walk away,” finished Nate.

Later, they offered a less ambiguous answer by email: “We don’t think there is a need to experiment with something like that when there’s a whole city full of beautiful people.”

As for whether they would date the same man simultaneously, however, they added dryly, “I think it’s the German in us that seeks out efficiency, so what would be more efficient than the both of us dating one person?”

As is befitting a proper wunderkind, sorry wunderkinder, the outside world’s discovery of the Brothers was a matter of happenstance. Martha Stewart was working to develop its first digital issue as part of the early development group for Adobe's new InDesign for the iPad software,  and Ms. Towey contacted RISD president John Maeda.

“The director of the program calls us and says you should probably come down here since they’re looking for iPad people and you’re probably the best iPad people here,” Kirk recalled. The Muellers went to lunch with Ms. Towey and her husband, a fellow designer named Stephen Doyle. “We had a great time and then we looked them up and we were so glad that we didn’t know exactly how big of design powerhouses they are because we would have been nervous wrecks,” Nate said.

“When the brothers walked into the room, I was immediately smitten,” Ms. Towey remembered. “They handed me one résumé, and that did it for me—one résumé. They were clearly smart at marketing themselves. I thought of the Starn twins, and figured that these guys were on their way to stardom.”

Not only did the brothers prove adept at the technical side—finding bugs in the software before developers at Adobe even knew they were there, Ms. Towey said—they made a number of critical design suggestions. Along with other team members, they insisted the peony should be shuffled to the front of the issue.

“They were going to put it in one of the stories and we said, It should go on the cover,” whispered Nate.

“We should be the first to have an animated cover,” concurred Kirk, adding, “The tools were still being developed. The cover almost didn’t go out the door because of some technical difficulties. But we finally got it out.”

After the success of Boundless Beauty, Condé tapped the brothers to make their e-book process more efficient and keep the branding more in line with their individual titles. “They always try and get us full-time,” said Kirk, who also mentioned helping Mr. Dadich with the beta version of Adobe's software. The Brothers, however, prefer working under the Studio Mercury umbrella, where they also dabble in work for the Guggenheim and the industrial design magazine Core 77.

After setting up e-book production workflows at Conde, “once a title wanted to launch a book, instead of taking a matter of weeks, it took a matter of a week,” said Kirk.

With the New Yorker political website, which is slated to launch this week, the Brothers are employing a Studio Mercury specialty called a “liquid layout,” which easily adjusts from “very large monitors all the way down to the iPad, so it scales seamlessly,” as Nate put it.

It’s easy to see how duo’s cooperative spirit is embraced by publishing design teams, but the world isn’t really built for two separate bodies who want to perceived as one unit. “Our accountant hates us,” Nate admitted.

“If we could, we would get one tax ID number,” Kirk added, wistfully. “And one Social Security number.”

Then he volunteered a mid-century cautionary tale of parents who bucked the standard practice of separating twins to foster individual growth. “The story was that because these twins weren’t separated, they didn’t develop separate identities so they became murderers … and gay,” Kirk said. “Society was saying if you don’t have separate identities—”

“—all this bad stuff can happen,” said Nate.

Although the Brothers have shared a wardrobe since high school, they didn’t start dressing alike until grad school, when, they explained, “we merged our working identity under one name.” That meant a combined Facebook profile and Twitter account, in addition to the email. In their old apartment in Park Slope, they had to institute a morning check-in about what they’d be wearing, to avoid showing up in the exact same ensemble instead of slight variations. The problem was solved with a shared “dressing area” in their Prospect Heights brownstone.

“We often wonder if throughout the majority of the day we think the exact same thoughts,” said Kirk. Or maybe it was Nate.

ntiku@observer.com

Mr. Subtraction himself.

For this week's cover story about Condé Nast's struggle developing for the iPad, Betabeat had the opportunity to talk to Khoi Vinh, former Design Director for NYTimes.com. On his widely-read design blog, Subtraction, Mr. Vinh has repeatedly expressed his skepticism toward publishers like Condé Nast and Hearst and software companies like Adobe for thinking that what iPad readers want is a magazine replica app that takes a print-centric approach to tablet design. But we didn't get the chance to include some really interesting predictions Mr. Vinh made about the direction he thinks consuming content on the iPad is heading (in short: back to the browser) and what readers really want.

Mr. Vinh, who recently released a book on web design, seem to have contracted that start-up fever making its way around the city and is currently working in stealth mode on an app of his own. He compared the bells-and-whistles of the current magazine app rush to the CD-ROM bubble and advised publishers to think more like Netflix.

Do you still believe Condé and Adobe are leading the industry in the wrong direction?

I do believe that in general, though I found that I’ve been using The New Yorker app a lot. I’m a lifetime subscriber to the print edition, so I get access to the app for free. I still find it frustrating, but I think its okay in that sometimes I’m traveling and can’t get my hands on the print edition, so it's nice to have that. It’s what I’d call a nice reader. I don’t think it taps into the potential of what you can do with that brand online. I have constant problems with it crashing.

Because of problems with the size?

I wouldn’t speculate as to a specific cause. My general guess would be they just tried to get too fancy. What I like about it is that it's just the text from the magazines presented very simply. I ignore all the other extras. I don’t think the stuff I care about is what's causing it to crash, which is just the text.

Do you think the replica approach is going to make it hard for publishers to get iPad subscribers?

To me the question is not what’s going to get them to subscribe but rather what’s going to get them to engage. I think trying to get readers to subscribe is a very difficult proposition that I think very few brands are going to be able to succeed at. Engagement is something else. I think there’s all kinds of great stuff on NewYorker.com [Ed note: Agreed!] blogs and extras and stuff. It’s bizarre to me that the app hasn’t tapped into that stuff. I guess it’s frustrating to me that so many of these Condé Nast apps address a problem that’s already been solved.

The website is a perfectly good delivery mechanism for the content and takes better advantage of the medium. These apps tend to set aside those benefits that users have already said that they want for this illusory benefit of being able to control the typography and the layout and being able to make things look more print-like.

So if you were in charge, you'd focus on optimizing the mobile web experience?

If it were up to me, I would focus on new technologies like HTML 5 that let a website cache inside of a browser more readily, so people can have better offline access to it. But there’s a finite amount of resources that any organization can spend on these projects and I would rather double down on the website because in my view in a couple of years most content delivery is going to go back to the browser anyway. I mean I love apps and I feel like there’s a real use for apps. But I feel like it’s mostly for things that require the horsepower of the device and take advantage of the specific capabilities that Apple built into the operating system. You don’t need that to deliver content, you just don’t.

Do you think it's possible to monetize a mobile website on the iPad?

I’m not privy to the numbers, but I would imagine there’s better long-term potential in a huge audience through a browser than a limited audience through an app. They could be making good money off the app, but my guess is they’re not. My guess is it's mostly people like me who are subscribing through print, right?

When does an tablet app make sense?

If I were to build an app, it would be because I found some piece of the functionality that made sense with the brand. Whether it's some video or multimedia or some utilitarian reason like a calculator or a productivity app or something--some feature set that really made a compelling case for building a new audience and was a complement to the brand. And if I found that feature set then I would build it with native tools, meaning on the iPad using Apple’s development environment, Xcode and so forth.

Are you skeptical about the future of the iPad adoption?

I’m bullish on the device in general. Apple sold 15 million last year, the projections are 55 million this year. I think that might be a conservative estimate. It's conceivable that we’ll have a 100 million of these devices by the middle of next year, which is a huge number, a tremendous adoption rate. I think within five years they are going to be an accepted norm for most computing tasks. So I think it’s a fantastic device to the point where I’ve started a new venture that is focused on an iPad app. I’m building an app that takes advantage of properties that are unique to the iPad. It's not that I’m a skeptic about the device, I’m a skeptical about the use of the device to deliver content that’s just as well delivered in a browser.

Do you think publishers need to use interactive designers to really get at the potential of the iPad?

Absolutely. Even in so far as all the extras that they put it, it’s not just that they’re centered around delivery of text from the print edition. It’s like things that they think are going to be interesting to people are very much in the mold of what somebody thinks is going to be interesting if they come from a print world. "Oh, we’ll have some video extras and be able to rotate the photo, you’ll be able to get extra audio clips." That stuff is fine. But it takes such tremendous amount of incremental labor and expense that there’s no upside to it. People want the core content. They’re not going to say no to the extras, but most of the time they’re not going to use them and most of the time they’re not going to care about them. Netflix is a company that totally gives you just the core content. They decided to do this after a decade of all this value-add in DVDs thinking that’s what sells stuff. Then Netflix demonstrates, people just don’t care about the extras. That to me is part of the print-centric approach.

There’s a clear precedent in the CD-ROM bubble from 20 years ago where they tried to deliver content in this very fancy value-add way and people just didn’t buy it. If you just at look at what it takes to put these magazines together, you come to grips with the fact that you’re not shipping content, you're shipping software and it costs you $10,000/month to produce an iPad edition. Let’s just say it only takes one incremental staffer to build an iPad app, they cost $120,000 to $150,000. Why would you spend that amount of money just getting the content out there? Why wouldn’t you invest that money in building better software around what users want? If you spend that much money to deliver the content, you’re not improving the content. To me it just doesn’t make sense.

When does it make sense to build an app?

I would build an app that has utility. I would build social features and sharing that really resonate with people and have longer shelf-life than just a month’s worth of content.

Eric Litman

"Adobe is embedded in the creative community," says Medialet's CEO Eric Litman. "But there is a bunch of work to be done. Flash isn't going to go away anytime soon and iOS isn't going to open up to Flash."

The solution? Adobe is bringing on Medialets to power its rich media ads. "It's a deep integration, right into the workflow for InDesign and other publishing tools."

Adobe's future as the center of publishing is still unclear. Apple's near complete control of the tablet market means they may have enough leverage to force a shift in strategy away from Flash completely.

But in terms of selling these same firms on their own branded advertising Apple is clearly having trouble. They just cut the price of an iAd campaign in half. And as Betabeat reported earlier, Medialets is winning customers even among Apple faithful like News Corp's The Daily.