I ended up spending the Memorial Day holiday weekend in Las Vegas, a city in which I do not set foot particularly often. When I wasn't partaking in my preferred activity of lounging by the hotel pool with a good book and a pina colada (yes, that's right, I don't gamble), I decided to test-drive a new iPhone app. Namely, it's the free app from lifestyle e-newsletter UrbanDaddy, which hit the iTunes App Store earlier this week.
UrbanDaddy--which operates city-specific newsletters for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles, as well as a "national" edition and a weekly travel guide--targets the young, louche, and well-moneyed, or at least those who want to be. Its newsletters frequently cover high-end restaurant and bar openings, as well as exotic vacation destinations. For its iPhone app, the company opted to build an automated "concierge" that will suggest activities for you if you fill in what you're looking for.
The interface and concept are very, very cool. It's like playing a Mad-Libs game to find out what you can do that day or night: the app will fill in your time and location, and then you specify what you're looking for (dinner, drinks, dancing, etc.) and who you're with (parents, friends, boss, ex) and then a few options for the situation. When I was looking for a Sunday brunch in Vegas, for example, the options included "and we want great bacon," "and we want champagne," or "and we're hung over." Like I said, very cool setup.
The results, however, were lacking. UrbanDaddy CEO Lance Broumand told me that the directory has been curated to only include establishments that fit the tastes of the newsletter's discerning target audience, which meant that my "and we want great bacon" brunch selection would not be bringing up the local Denny's. That said, the app only brings up very basic contact information for the restaurant or bar it's chosen for you--no hints at prices, no reviews from users, no tips like "the drink menu is really girly," "crowd is full of d-bags on Friday nights," or "vegetarians need not apply."
I realize that both the serendipity factor and the "money's not an issue" overtones are part of UrbanDaddy's carefully constructed image (complete with a Lexus sponsorship), but it certainly puts a damper on how helpful it can be when you're in an unfamiliar city.
These things, obviously, can come in version 2.0. But for now--especially in Vegas, where things can be alternately rock-bottom-cheap or unexpectedly expensive--it was too much of a gamble (ha, ha) for my tastes. After an unsuccessful quest to find great bacon, I went right back to the lounge chair by the pool.
This post was updated at 3:50 p.m. PT to correct the list of cities for which UrbanDaddy publishes newsletters.
Women's e-newsletter start-up DailyCandy seems like a better fit for Conde Nast than Comcast, but Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that the cable company has acquired it for $125 million. The blog wrote that Viacom had been in the running, too; a Viacom spokesman told CNET News.com on Tuesday evening that while the media conglomerate had been interested, it had never made a bid for DailyCandy and had dropped out in early June.
DailyCandy's demographic of trendy urban women is a niche that advertisers love, but it's still a higher price tag than many observers expected.
The company had already been acquired once, by former AOL exec Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm. That was for about $3 million five years ago; DailyCandy now employs about 60 people and has published two books. It's the second e-newsletter that the Pilot Group has flipped this year, having sold the much younger "eco" publication Ideal Bite to Disney for around $15 million; the firm still owns a majority stake in slacker-dude list Thrillist.
Comcast has recently acquired Movies.com and contacts management company Plaxo.
This post was updated at 6:16 p.m. PT with comment from Viacom and 7:39 p.m. to clarify wording on the company's interest in DailyCandy.
Glam Media has always insisted that it's not just an ad network, and an announcement the women's-focused media firm made Monday underscored that.
Glam has launched "Glam Today," a daily newsletter featuring a selection of content from the more than 500 sites in its network of independently run blogs that serve the company's ads.
"Glam Today surfaces and highlights some of the best content created daily by the professional publishers across the Glam network," Ryan Roslansky, Glam Media's vice president of products, said in a release Monday. "Glam Media's focus on packaging display advertising with relevant content extends is core to everything we do and extends to our premium e-mail products like Glam Today designed for publishers."
It's a five-day-a-week affair: Monday's newsletter will focus on fashion and shopping, Tuesday's on beauty, Wednesday's on "living," Thursday's on entertainment, and Friday's on health.
It's a bit surprising that Glam hasn't launched something like this before: for the parent company, it's another outlet for ads, and for sites in the Glam network, it's more exposure, as well as, perhaps, the cozy feeling that they're part of something more than a plain old ad network.
There are plenty of e-mail newsletters focusing on the women's market, though. DailyCandy has been around for years and is extremely popular, though it should be said that its newsletters focus primarily on women in select U.S. cities, and Sugar has a newsletter called (wait for it...) DailySugar.
Other popular online newsletters have primarily female readerships, like Vital Juice Daily and Ideal Bite (just acquired by Disney).
LetterPop makes nice-looking family newsletters.
(Credit: CNET Networks)LetterPop is a new service that makes it easy to create attractive personal newsletters. It's an interesting option for creating personal pages that are not a river of text like a blog, and yet are better at telling a story than an online photo album. There are currently 14 LetterPop templates, and most are well suited for telling family stories, showing family photos, and sending recipes.The templates are a bit less suitable, however, if you want a newsletter for your small business.
The service has a simple mailing list manager you use to send your newsletters out to friends and family. Unfortunately, recipients don't actually get the newsletter, only a link to the LetterPop site where the newsletter is stored. It'd be much better if the actual newsletter was sent through by e-mail. Recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings if they like, though. That's a nice touch.
I like what this product does, and I admire its very clean and simple interface. The service doesn't layer on a bunch of extraneous options and features that would make it hard to use. However, it's a young product and perhaps it needs a bit more refinement before I'd recommend it to my mother-in-law. For example, when you place a photo into a layout, the system puts an attractive border around it that cuts into the image. In my tests, the border cut off the heads of people in a group shot.
And while I'm at it, here's another gripe: LetterPop is yet another service you have to upload photos to. For services such as this to be truly easy to get into, we need an integrated online storage system--such as the ones Sharpcast and OmniDrive are working on--they let you manage all your images in one place. Or these services also could work with photo-sharing sites such as Flickr or Webshots (CNET's photo-sharing service). I don't mind uploading images once, but after that I find it a real drag to use other photo sites.
The service is free during the beta period but imposes limits on the number of newsletters and photos you can work with; there may be paid options later with more storage and other features.
See also: Tabblo [our blog post] makes photo posters and links directly to Picasa.
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