March 28, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: Disney Releases Marvel App

Disney will release a book app featuring Spider-Man.Disney will release a book app featuring Spider-Man.

When reading books, some children like to turn the page, others like to swipe the screen.

Seeking an opportunity to reach digitally curious children, on Monday the publishing arm of the Walt Disney Company will release its first app based on a Marvel Comics character, a children’s book app featuring Spider-Man.

Disney, the largest publisher of children’s books in the world, sells 700 million items a year in 85 countries, said Russell Hampton Jr., the president of Disney Publishing Worldwide. When the company bought Marvel Entertainment two years ago, “we saw an opportunity to build a complementary business with children’s books,” Mr. Hampton said. The company began overseeing Marvel’s printed books for children, but it was Apple’s iPad that gave Disney a way to translate the books digitally.

“In kids’ books, art plays a bigger role in telling the story than the text does,” Mr. Hampton said. However, “many of the devices were not capable of showcasing the art.”
Disney is using the popularity of tablets to sell more children’s books. Through the App Store and Android Market, Disney has published 30 book apps, which have been downloaded more than four million times, Mr. Hampton said.

The Spider-Man app will be released for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch for $6.99. Geared toward children ages 4 to 10, it includes interactive features, distinguishing it from e-books, Mr. Hampton said.

“E-books tend to be pretty strict translations of the print products,” he said. “Book apps tend to be almost new products that didn’t exist before. They have embedded video, music, games and activities.”

One of those extra features is the ability to have the story read for you. And who better to tuck your children into bed with a story about Spider-Man than his co-creator, Stan Lee? Mr. Lee narrates the app, telling the tale of how the web-slinger gained his powers.

“This is a whole new type of entertainment,” Mr. Lee said of the app. “They can offer things comic books cannot offer, all those extra features. That’s the brilliance of these things. They don’t detract from the story; they embellish.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f31a836b01dce1d960c2e16525f6938f

Bits Blog: At Long Last, Facebook Releases an iPad App

DESCRIPTIONFacebook The Facebook iPad application takes advantage of the iPad’s multitouch technology.

It has been the equivalent of waiting for Bigfoot. Bloggers had seen it. Developers said they had worked on it. Facebook denied its existence. Everyone else just wanted to know if it was real.

It’s the Facebook application for the iPad, which is finally out in the wild for everyone to prod, pinch and interact with.

After months of speculation and false alarms, Facebook said Monday that its official iPad application was available as a free download from the Apple App Store.

The app will likely benefit Apple and Facebook. Although the iPad is the biggest-selling tablet on the market, some consumers are not convinced they need it and opt for less expensive tablets. Seeing a slick Facebook app could convince people to choose an iPad over competitors, as there is no Facebook app specifically tailored for tablets running Google’s Android software.

For Facebook, a complete iPad application will keep people even more immersed in its service and add to the amount of time people spend on it. According to Nielsen Research, Americans spend eight hours a month, or 16 percent of their total time online, using Facebook’s Web site and mobile applications.

Leon Dubinsky, a software engineer at Facebook, wrote in a blog post on the company’s Web site that the app had been designed to create an immersive and “fun” experience on the tablet.

Mr. Dubinsky highlighted the use of multitouch gestures within the app, a feature that is not available on the Facebook Web site. “Use your fingertips to scroll through your News Feed. Give the screen a swipe to page through albums. Pinch a picture to zoom in,” he wrote.

Facebook highlighted other key features in the announcement: Photos and videos are given prominence in the app and can be viewed full-screen. Users can also capture photos and videos with the iPad and put them directly into the Facebook news feed. Gaming and Facebook Chat are also major components of the app.

DESCRIPTIONPhotos are a prominent feature in the Facebook iPad application.

So what took so long? Apple and Facebook have been in talks for months trying to resolve issues that came up last year when the companies disagreed about Facebook’s integration with Ping, Apple’s music-focused social network. Since then they have been caught in a stalemate over disagreements on coming projects.

Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said in a phone interview that the app was delayed because it “just wasn’t ready yet.”

“We felt that the Facebook Web site on the iPad was a really good experience,” Mr. Taylor said, noting that the company wanted to make sure it was taking advantage of the possibilities of an iPad app before announcing a new product. “We really feel that we have built an app that takes full advantage of touch, photos and chat.”

Features from the Facebook iPad application have also been integrated into the company’s iPhone application, Mr. Taylor said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=86df276beba7c1935c75e9927e07bc4a

Bucks: For Consumers, Little to Cheer in New Cap on Debit Fees

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday issued its long-awaited rule on the cap on “swipe” fees that banks charge retailers for processing debit card purchases. And it appears that all the banks’ complaints about the proposed cap paid off.

The Fed had originally proposed limiting the fees to 12 cents a transaction, a steep drop from the current average swipe fee of about 44 cents. But the Fed said Wednesday that it would set the base cap at 21 cents. Plus, banks can add extra cents, based on the amount of the transaction, to cover fraud costs.

David French, senior vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation, said the rule was “a lot closer to what the banks would have received if they’d written the rules themselves.” He predicted that “consumers will benefit, but not as much as Congress intended.”

The Retail Industry Leaders Association quickly criticized the new rule as an “about face” from the Fed’s earlier proposal. “The announcement today from the Federal Reserve is a disappointment to merchants and consumers who face unfair and excessive fees imposed by big banks and credit card companies,” Sandy Kennedy, the association’s president, said in a prepared statement.

The real question, as we here at Bucks have said before, is whether consumers will actually see any savings from lower swipe fees. Consumers have been skeptical that they’ll benefit at the cash register. Perhaps the best that shoppers can hope for is that retailers’ costs won’t go up as quickly as they might have without the cap — although it may be impossible to truly know if that occurs.

Banks have until Oct. 1 to comply with the new rules.

Do you think the base cap of 21 cents goes far enough?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0d61447aa3715b73103525092e9c10ce

Economix: Banks Have Powerful New Opponent

Today's Economist

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”

As a lobbying group, the largest American banks have been dominant throughout the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle – capturing the hearts and minds of the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the support of most elected representatives on Capitol Hill.

Big banks are lobbying Congress to delay a limit on fees they charge for debit-card transactions, and retailers are countering with an advertising campaign.Elaine Thompson/Associated Press Big banks are lobbying Congress to delay a limit on fees they charge for debit-card transactions, and retailers are countering with an advertising campaign.

Their reign, however, is being seriously challenged – finally – by an alliance of retailers, big and small, on whose behalf a variety of ads are now running, including on television (such as this one, by Americans for Job Security), the Web (such as this, by American Family Voices) and a powerful radio spot directly attacking the too-big–to-fail banks.

The immediate issue is the so-called Durbin amendment –- a requirement in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation that would lower what are known as the interchange fees that banks collect when anyone buys anything with a debit card. Retailers pay the fees, but these are then reflected in the prices faced by consumers.

The United States has very high debit-card fees, colloquially known as swipe fees –- 44 cents on average (that amounts to 1.14 percent of the average purchase price of $39) and up to 98 cents for some kinds of cards. These fees are per transaction and although the formula is complex, the payment is a significant percentage of many purchases and poses a particular problem for smaller merchants. These fees are estimated to amount to $16 billion to $17 billion annually.

Other countries, including Australia and members of the European Union, have acted to reduce interchange fees – because the actual cost of such transactions is quite low. Think about it: the interchange fee for checks, which also draw directly on bank deposits, is zero.

The United States severely lags behind comparable countries in terms of how consumers are treated by banks in this regard.

The intent behind the amendment offered by Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was quite clear: Fees should be lowered – to a level commensurate with the costs of that particular transaction. The amendment attracted bipartisan support (the vote was 64-33 in the Senate, with 17 Republicans among the supporters).

The Federal Reserve was mandated with determining reasonable fees through a regulatory rule-making process, and, after some foot-dragging, the proposal is that interchange fees be capped at 12 cents.

Unsurprisingly, the big banks’ lobbying machinery sprang into action, arguing that the fee cap would hurt small banks and credit unions. Senators Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, and Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, are offering legislation –- as is Representative Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia –- that would postpone implementation of the fee reduction for up to two years, pending further study.

In Washington, the best way to kill something is to study it further.

This is an issue that cuts across party line –- witness the eclectic Dick Morris weighing in for the amendment – but supporters of the big banks sit on both sides of the aisle. Tea Party-inclined Congressional conservatives are arguing that the Fed should not get involved with the market. And the Financial Services Roundtable asserts that the amendment is wrong from top to bottom.

But this is a badly broken market, as James C. Miller III, the budget director under President Reagan, has argued. Too-big-to-fail banks are not a market – they are a government subsidy scheme, because they are backed by implicit government bailout support (to be provided at below market cost whenever needed).

These subsidies enable megabanks to borrow more cheaply and grab market share relative to smaller banks (those with less than $10 billion of assets.) On top of this, and working closely with the biggest banks, Visa and MasterCard have around 90 percent of the market for debit cards – hardly conducive to reasonable competitive outcomes.

At the same time, some on the political left are confused (or captured) by the assertion that lower interchange fees will hurt small banks and credit unions. This is a pure smokescreen – banks with less than $10 billion in total assets are specifically exempt from the provisions of the Durbin amendment.

This exemption was a smart political move, and it also makes economic sense, given the disproportionate size and power of our largest banks. Adam Levitin, writing on the Credit Slips blog, makes a strong case that small banks will actually win under the proposed cap, as this can level the playing field with larger banks to some degree:

If they end up with higher interchange revenue than big banks as a result of Durbin, that is a step toward undoing the troubling consolidation of financial services around too-big-to-fail institutions.

See also Mr. Levitin’s paper on credit unions, showing that they may also benefit – again as most have less than $10 billion in total assets.

Of course, the big banks are threatening to punish customers in other ways if debit fees are capped — for example, by ending free checking. But this makes no sense, given that these banks have to compete with smaller institutions for retail business that will not be affected by the caps on debit fees.

The dispute between big banks and the nonfinancial sector has started to get interesting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0d1ab41e7948d70896db3b976b3d1f38