These are my notes from the webinar that took place this morning.
Major update to platform. Best selling product. Customers want more tablet features. Update delivered this morning. Apps, full featured email client, Flash and new interactive content.
Claudia Romanini, Director of Developer Relations: invited 3rd party developers to contribute. Launched 6 months ago and now have over 5,000 developers signed up. Not trying to build largest app offering. Conde Nast and Chronicle Books participating, also National Ge0graphic, Lonely Planet. More than 125 apps at launch. Competitive business model for developers. Want even more reading-centric applications. Email: full screen virtual keyboard. Air is pre-installed. Imroved browser with enhanced pinch and zoom.
Wendy Bronfin, Direction, Product Management, Nook Kids: best in class kid’s reading experience. Adding new read and play titles. Designed activities akin to the way a parent would read to a kid. More than 350 digital picture books. Enhanced content for adult readers. More than 225 multimedia titles. Video and audio content and work in portrait and landscape. For magazines have enhanced navigation. Added location slider and end of article marker. Over 150 full color magazines and newspapers. Exceeded 1 million periodacl subscription orders and individual downloads. For books: added page turn animation.
Nook Friends beta: can see which books friends have and can send request to a friend to borrow a book. Can see recommendations from friends and see what friends are reading and discussing.
Have Nook counter in every one of their stores. Launching a major marketing campaign. Worked with a new agency on the campaign. “Best tablet value out there at $249.”
Answers to questions: Very easy for developers to develop for Nook color. Can easily deploy existing android apps. Revenue split 70% for developer and 30% for B&N. “Best selling product” means best selling over the entire B&N enterprise. Sold millions of devices. Email support IMAP and POP and will work with any wmail client. Will get notified of incoming email. Launched at a “readers’ tablet”. Goal with apps is email and web browsing because that’s what consumers asked for. Additionally asked for games, exploring and learning. I built for readers. For Flash: will work with any Flash site and see any Flash content on the web. Made it easy to choose between mobile or desktop mode for browsing. Nook Friends: if in library you can see your lendable books. In the Nook Friends application can see that books that your friends have that are lendable and can request to borrow that book. Can see a history of what your friends have done in their reading activity. Uses Flash 10.1 and should work well with all sites.
