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Men's health tech creates shame-free ways to get treatment
About 50 percent of men have erectile dysfunction. That's not to say that half of all men around you at any given time have ED. The statistic is aggregated across age groups, with the condition being more prevalent in older men -- 30 percent of men in their thirties, 40 percent in their forties and so on. But despite all the men it affects (not to mention their partners), ED isn't something people talk about much. It remains a taboo subject -- so much so that men even have trouble broaching it with doctors.
Men's Health magazine comes to the iPad
Men's Health, the world's largest men's magazine with editions in 40 countries across the globe, has released the Men's Health iPad Edition. With each issue you get everything you'd get in the pages of the regular magazine, but the iPad edition gives you extra benefits including an "Enhanced View" interface that overlays icons on any given page to highlight a page's multimedia features including video of exercises, real-time Snap Polls, bookmarking, and Twitter and Facebook integration. In addition to a Table of Contents pop-up, there's also a Scrub pane feature that allows readers to quickly flip through the entire issue via a film-strip view. Interestingly enough, Men's Health say they will start making enhanced back issues available on the iPad. The iPad is creating a new market for digital magazines and publishers are going to go through a trial-and-error period for a few months to find out what readers want. Right now Men's Health is not offering a bundled print magazine and iPad edition. They do note that the iPad edition will be identical to the print edition, with the exception of adding the interactive features discussed above. If you are a current subscriber to the Men's Health print edition, you will need to purchase the iPad edition separately. What about a subscription for the iPad edition? Men's Health says for now you'll need to purchase each issue à la carte, but they hope to make digital subscriptions to the iPad edition available soon. Men's Health Magazine for iPad is a free app that gives you a 10-page preview of the April issue. Additional issues can be purchased for $4.99.
WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?
The Wall Street Journal is running a piece that focuses on ad sales for the iPad. Pretty boring stuff except for a few nuggets related to the actual content we crave. Rupert Murdoch already confirmed that his monument to main stream media was coming to the iPad. Hell, they've even been treated to a rare, in-house device to assist with the development of the iPad version of the Wall Street Journal. Now it's quoting "a person familiar with the matter" (wink) who says that The Journal plans to charge subscribers $17.99 per month for iPad subscriptions -- for comparison, the print version of the WSJ costs $349 for 52 weeks or about $29 per month. Not bad, but you can't roll up an iPad to swat the dog. Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst's Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase "somewhere in Mississippi," oddly enough) to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men's Health with match the glossy's $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.
iPad in the family: What it'll take
When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, I thought it was neat, but I didn't see how it would really fit into my life. What could it do for me that my iPhone or MacBook Pro couldn't? It seemed like that gap Steve Jobs said the iPad filled was targeted at a group of people I didn't belong to. So I asked the TUAW readers if you'd be getting one. Then I began talking to my family about the iPad and discovered some surprising things: the very people I thought would never buy one plan to, and the people I thought would jump at it are holding off. So here's a rundown of four very different people in my family and if/why they will be getting an iPad: Person: My mother. 62. Queen of the Luddites. Computer proficiency: Absolutely none. Will she be getting the iPad? Yep. The 16GB 3G model. Why? My mom has never owned a computer. She doesn't have an internet connection. She couldn't explain to you what Facebook is. And she refers to my iPhone as "that information device."
