If the future of publishing is an ipad friendly Wordpress theme the industry is in more trouble than I could conceive. This kind of absurd hyperbole makes it hard to take small but interesting ideas seriously.
So one thing I notice on HN a lot (here and in the Qwiki thread) is that people have a tendency to belittle projects without enough information. "That's just X, and X isn't very hard" or whatever.
It's sickening, and the people that do this are vigorously indicating they have at best shallow reasoning facilities.
Some really great companies have much lower profiles than you might expect. Try not to draw conclusions on limited data, or at least understand the quality of said conclusions.
Basically, everyone wants to make their own branded apps, but few people are actually going to bother to buy them. The publishers are the victims, not the guys at the top of the pyramid, it's the app makers who're going to profit.
It might be a scam, but for it to be a Ponzi scheme, the developers would need to use the money they get from the first publishers to, say, buy the apps they've developed to show it gets great returns to get new publishers to pay... (or something like that)
The article is a little breathless in its style... hard to see how there is any sort of barrier to entry being raised for another competitor to do the same thing.
http://www.ridesurfboard.com was posted on here the other day in an ask hn. Seems like this "niche" is starting to already get crowded by a bunch of people scrambling to get a piece of the Flipboard pie.
Looks neat but not revolutionary at all. I don't think each content provider needs their own app but what's the problem with using a mobile friendly format and letting RSS readers do the extra work?
I should really really clarify: the demo shown in the video is of PadPressed, the precursor to OnSwipe. Think of padpressed as the equivalent of our "university research project". OnSwipe is a much much larger evolution from that and encompasses a lot more.
Many many publishers use Wordpress, especially their VIP program. Wordpress powers 10% of the web (Tony Conrad, partner at true ventures tweeted this, will post as reference).
We're working with more than WP as a CMS, but it's a huge install base.
