Mr. Baptiste (jasonlbaptiste.com)

The first sound we heard upon ringing the doorbell at the Onswipe offices just off of Union Square was the pitter-pattering of puppy footsteps. "Is that a dog?" we asked aloud to the well-dressed man who was also waiting to be let into the office. Sure enough, an Onswipe employee opened the door and a scruffy white dog excitedly greeted us.

Once we were in the loft-like offices, out came TechStars alum Jason Baptiste, Onswipe's colorful founder, who after introducing himself made the dog (named Johnny) sit and shake. Johnny refused to do a spin though. "He'll do anything if you have food," acknowledged Mr. Baptiste, wearing a dapper grey suit and pink tie.

We were at Onswipe to discuss the company's recent growth, which has been on an impressively upward swing since February. Onswipe's staff has quadrupled to 25 in the last year, with plans to grow to 48 employees by year's end. The company also recently added two new executive level positions: former VP of AOL Video Richard Bloom as its first COO, and former VP of sales at Jumptap Jared Hand as its first CRO.

Onswipe is a platform for publishers to transform their presence on iPad, iPhone and Kindle Fire--and soon other devices--into beautiful experiences. By serving up both the content and the ads, Onswipe can anonymously collect data about the browsing habits of users, and use that information to better target ads based on interests. The number of page-views Onswipe's platform powers has increased by 344 percent since January, Mr. Baptiste told us.

"The mission of Onswipe is still the same," said Mr. Baptiste, once we'd settled into a conference room. "Apps are bullshit. A lot of companies love to pivot and change ever so slightly to something vastly different. Our mission from day one is to be the platform to power the way the world experiences the web on touch devices, reimagining it for devices that aren't built for onclick but for onswipe."

On an iPad, Onswipe renders web pages beautifully. They take on the appearance of glossy magazines--swiping through articles becomes a luxury. But Onswipe also serves ads in between articles, which have taken on a more print-like feel, boosting the bar for ads on the web. "Most ads on the web, they're not about emotion--they're about algorithm. They don't give you the storytelling that a print ad gives you. We think that's finally going to change," said Mr. Baptiste.

"I hate bad ads. Our altruistic mission is to fix ads on the Internet," he added. "In print they get ads that are so beautiful people rip them out and put them up on their wall. Why can't we do that with online ads?"

Toward the end of the meeting, Mr. Baptiste pulled up his own website so Betabeat could get a good look at Onswipe. A quote from Joan Didion's essay "Good-bye to All That," written in chalk on a patch of asphalt in Washington Square Park, dominated the screen.

"I love New York," said Mr. Baptiste. "That's why we've succeeded. There's just a certain energy. We hire people that are raw talent, hungry; they have a Silicon Valley-esque energy and hacker talent mixed with New York's own secret sauce. Onswipe takes the best of what New York does: emotion."

We wonder what Ms. Didion would have to say about that.

The Big Six publishers--Random, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Macmillan--were still the center of gravity, their booths the most crowded. They had advance copies everyone wanted and they had the snazzy tote bags. Hachette even brought beer and cake.

Given the slowly stabilizing state of digital publishing, we were intrigued to check out the demos staged yesterday by the researchers at the Book Industry Study Group. The guest list was largely potential buyers -- publishers with managerial titles and the occasional librarian. The seventeen demos were a mixed bag, ranging from the most wonky of enterprise solutions to the downright consumer facing, but we did notice that book tech doesn't seem to have escaped the cloud fad.

NY is en fuego for the Fire

There was a reason Jeff Bezos came all the way to New York to unveil Amazon's new suite of Kindle e-readers and tablet devices. Like the iPad the Kindle is first and foremost a device for consuming media, with the new Kindles going beyond the book to offer music, television and movies as well. And the Big Apple's high end publishers are thrilled to have a second dance partner for the party beyond Apple.

As the NY Times reports, Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet will come with a digital newsstand front-and-center where users can buy magazines and newspapers. To glossy publishers, this sounds like a haven from a digital world dominated by Angry Birds.

“When you’re lost in the middle of 100,000 apps, you only have people who find you when they’re looking for you,” Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast, told the paper. “This helps with getting consumers in. They pick what they want, and we sell them more of what interests them. And everybody is happy.”

Apple has been hoping to introduce its own newsstand for some time, and is expected to announce one within the next month. But Cupertino has struggled to come to terms with magazine publishers over their cut of subscription revenue. And sales of subscriptions on non-iPad devices, like Barnes and Noble's Nook, have already surpassed iPad sales for publishers like Hearst.

This new line of devices are all priced below $200, meaning they are most likely a loss leader to help Amazon establish themselves in the tablet market. So far it seems to be working, with the Kindle Fire and various flavors of Kindle sitting claiming the entire top ten for best selling gadgets on Amazon. Come Christmas time, the tablet market is going to look very different than it does today.

Tony Haile - Internet Explorer - outside betaworks

When a huge surge of traffic suddenly starts washing over a website, publishers have to act fast to capture the most value from these visitors. Yesterday, for example, Betabeat popped our cherry on a pickup by John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog, which turned on a fire hose of new readers who had never previously been to our site.

I knew there was a high percentage of first time visitors because I was using Newsbeat, a more powerful version of the real time analytic engine Chartbeat, which breaks down the percentage of new versus returning visitors. I was able to throw some additional links into the story taking these reader back to some of our best coverage on the mobile space.

As the story spread around the web, Newsbeat also gave me a look at the volume of tweets surrounding the story and let me find some of the influencers who propagated the piece across different networks. It captured a lot of info that my Tweetdeck @ mentions column missed, allowing me to reach out to those users and give a follow up link or a thanks.

With Newsbeat I can also get a sense of a stories momentum. For the first time it doesn't just show me how many people are currently reading an article, but which direction a story is trending in term of new eyeballs. This means I can focus on a story when its on the way up, but stop wasting time trying to tend to it after it has peaked. Or, viewed another way, I can know when the momentum is shifting, and change the placement or promotion of a story to get it traffic building again.

"We are predicting the path of every story and showing you how much you should be getting from direct traffic, inbound links and social media," says Chartbeat general manager and betaworks chief troublemaker Tony Haile, running a hand through his lush, golden locks. "Now we can show you where a story is headed, a measure of momentum, not mass."

One big change in Newsbeat is the way it measures direct traffic versus social. "Direct has been this bullshit black hole. People may type in betabeat.com, but no one is typing in betabeat.com/article/news-breaking/2011-5-13. A lot of what we used to record as direct traffic is actually coming from email, IM and apps, especially Twitter client, so now we break that out into its own section."

Newsbeat is the first specialized extension of Chartbeat, but Haile says versions for e-tailers and gaming companies are both in the works. "We don't want to build a better Omniture, we want to stay very real time. Hopefully we can work closely with a lot of these publisher to help build the newsroom of the future."