Apple:
Apple today announced it signed an agreement to acquire Texture, the digital magazine subscription service by Next Issue Media LLC, which gives users unlimited access to their favorite titles for one monthly subscription fee.
Texture brings over 200 of the world’s best magazines to life, providing an easy way for users to read high-quality stories and entire issues of their favorite titles. With Texture, users enjoy the magazines they know and love, while discovering new content that fits their passions and interests.
I used Texture back when it originally started up (it was called Next then) and liked the service’s potential, even if I didn’t use it after a few months. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with this going forward.
i would like to see them do similar ‘deep searching’ like they are trying to do with tv channel apps. only hopefully a lot better since many channels still don’t support it. add a ‘google alerts’ style feature for keyword alerts and you can see when there’s a magazine article about X. if you aren’t subscribed perhaps it still alerts you and offers to let you subscribe or just buy access to that issue. maybe even allow this feature for magazines that aren’t part of the ‘texture’ family and either send you to their app or create a common user interface for the magazines to use if they want to join the fold even if not part of the monthly thing (if that makes sense)
heck perhaps they could even add something similar to TV. including a way to not have to flip apps to watch something. Since they talk about wanting TV to be THE way folks watch stuff it would make sense. And NEWS would be THE way folks get all news. perhaps even from social media like Facebook pages (something Flipboard was trying to do at one point and might have actually developed after I stopped using it)
Anything Apple can do to improve Apple News – already excellent for me – would be highly valuable.