April blizzard: iOS app, video search, machine to machine bitcoin, open source, Ubuntu for Windows

So much interesting stuff is happening at PageKicker this month that I want to reach out and share my excitement; there will be more about each of these items in future emails.

The long-delayed iOS app is in the final stages of testing. There will be a free tier with a handful of especially popular books accompanied by an all-you-can-eat subscription tier available for a modest fee via an in-app purchase. Price will be more than competitive with Kindle Unlimited or Scribd and coverage of nonfiction topics will be more comprehensive due to PageKicker’s “build it when you need it” approach to creating books. Never any gaps on your bookshelf!

We’re testing video search and assembly as a first step towards making PageKicker’s content “containers” multimedia: wave of the future.

We’re going to add a couple of apps to 21.co’s machine-to-machine bitcoin-powered API marketplace.

And most importantly, perhaps, we’re going to begin open-sourcing some of PageKicker’s core components. Algorithmic creation of books is a very hard problem and it’s time to get lots of brains involved in overcoming some of the key challenges. In a nutshell, we’ve got a good framework, and now we need to focus on making the “nside of the book” better.The github site is https://github.com/fredzannarbor/pagekicker-community and we will gradually begin adding code to the repository over the course of the next couple of months.

Finally, a lagniappe: Microsoft’s recent stunning announcement of Ubuntu for Windows means you’ll be able to run the open source (or enterprise) versions of command-line PageKicker on Windows PCs with minimal modifications. This means that you’ll be able to “push a button, build a book” on your own permissioned content on your own PC or local network.

What you can do: join us! If you’ve got a hard problem that algorithmic book creation might help you solve, let me know. We are looking for challenging pilot projects to prove the worth of our current and new technologies.