Google have extended their content offering by launching a much-rumoured Flipboard competitor, Google Currents. It’s a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones, that lets you explore online magazines, blogs and news sites through a clean, touch-friendly interface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOcUkm8m9w

Google have worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, The Guardian, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Popular Science and more. Content has been optimised specifically for smartphones and tablets, allowing users to navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline. more…

At last week’s STM Innovations Seminar, thought leaders from a range of disciplines converged to discuss the latest developments in publishing.

The opening keynote speaker was Richard Padley, MD of Semantico, who announced to a surprised audience that the Semantic Web was in fact dead. Next up was Herbert Van de Sompel, who unveiled his work on recreating the web-based scholarly record as it was at a certain point in time; a plug-in called Memento. This allows the user to see resources as they existed in the past (including citations that point to archived copies of papers, if available). Anita de Waard, Disruptive Technologies Director for Elsevier, shared a number of recent projects that aim to accelerate the revolution in executable research. Of particular interest was the Claim-Evidence Network in Medicine, which will aggregate data to automatically update clinical decision support systems (CDS) using linked data. more…

There’s a notable scene in the film Minority Report, where a man reads a newspaper that updates in real time with breaking news. Whilst we are not quite at that stage yet, Augmented Reality (AR) is making use of computer visions algorithms in order to superimpose virtual information (2D or 3D, textual or pictorial) onto real world scenes in real time.

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QR codes are becoming more and more prevalent in our daily lives. Now commonly used for digital boarding passes, interactive shop windows and advertisements in newspapers, magazines and billboards, they are appealing to our inherent desire to access further information as quickly as possible.

Notably, rather than remaining the domain of entertainment and retail marketing strategies, QR codes are increasingly used as a serious means of information recall in professional and scholarly circles. more…

My blog about the iPad last month generated some interest, and this update outlines some of the feedback we’ve had to date. The move to make the app free to BMA members has generated some very positive reviews on the iTunes app store. We’d already had some nice comments about the app’s technical functionality, but the pricing issue led to a fair number of 1* ratings. more…

A chunk of our working week is now devoted to preparing the latest BMJ iPad edition so its appearance in the iTunes app store coincides with the thud of the print issue as it lands on subscribers’ mats. I thought I’d use this blog to explain how our processes have changed to accommodate our new product, and to gauge interest in seeing the BMJ on other e-reader/mobile devices.

But first, some history. The BMJ iPad app launched in early 2011. We are the first general medical journal on Apple’s tablet computer, and our focus was to respond to a wish from some international subscribers to get a sense of what the print issue looks like each week.We’ve been delighted with the feedback to date, particularly with the interest shown by BMA members. When we developed the app we assumed (wrongly, as it turned out), that interest from UK doctors would be limited. After all, most get the BMJ print and online as a BMA membership benefit. So our focus was getting the app live, rather than investigating ways of offering it free to members. The BMA is now offering it for free. You can find out more by reading these FAQs.

I’ve talked a lot about print, but our focus throughout was to make the app genuinely interactive, and it is this which takes up our time each week.

The print issue goes to press on Tuesdays, but many of the pages (research, practice, etc) are ready by Monday. So we meet to discuss what archive links to add to the iPad pages. These are the kind of connections we tend to make:

• If an article is already online it may have attracted some commments, so we often find an interesting one to link to,
• Other articles by the same author,
• Previous articles in a series,
• A relevant blog, podcast, or video,
• A discussion on doc2doc, BMJ Group’s global clinical community

On Wednesdays, after the print issue has gone to press, we select images for the iPad and ensure they are the right format and size for the device. We then insert all the links we identified on Monday via a content management system, and quality assure the finished product on a test server before getting the issue live by Friday. This usually entails ensuring that links work that images look OK. News, blogs, podcasts, and videos are updated via a live feed, so they bypass the above process, but an end users always sees the latest each time they log in via a web or wifi connection.

The whole process now runs pretty seamlessly, so I imagine we will very soon consider if we want the BMJ on other mobile/e-reader devices. The iPad project means we had to stall our discussions on iPhone apps, or ones for othe mobile platforms. How might we cut the content cake for a phone app? We could, for instance, launch separate ones for news, education, research, and comment. Or we could be more creative and combine content from across BMJ Group products, adopting a similar approach as we have for specialty portals (see my previous blog). Amazon’s Kindle often gets talked about. Perhaps that’s a logical next step for us. It would be great to get your feedback.

David Payne is editor, bmj.com