Mark Sigal
Mark Sigal is the Chief Product Officer at Unicorn Labs, a builder of iOS Games, eBooks and Educational Apps. He is an eight-time entrepreneur, whose ventures span mobile, digital media, social networking and platform development. Sigal maintains a personal blog called The Network Garden.
Mobile native publishing: The rise of dynamic content services
Why our concept of content must evolve in the post-PC era.
One reason that industry disruptions prove so vexing to market leaders is that disruptive waves simultaneously barrel through assumptions about customer needs, industry economics and operational best practices.
Consider the case of the motion picture business, an industry that was disrupted when the “talkie” — once derided as a costly gimmick — subsumed the silent picture in the 1920s.
The takeaway from the film industry’s transition is instructive. The talkie not only changed how movies were made and the economics of the business itself, but critically, it changed our concept of what a movie could be. Read more…
Anatomy of an ebook app
Lessons learned while building a top 20 ebook for the iPad.
"Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" was featured by Apple (leading to a 3-5X bost in paid downloads) and for a time became one of the top grossing App Store ebooks. Mark Sigal discusses the lessons he learned while developing and marketing the title.
Rebooting the Book (One iPad at a Time)
The book business is under assault. Book sales have been stagnating for some time, Amazon is the industry's boogeyman, and more terrifying, book publishers have no idea how to market books in a world (largely) devoid of bookstores. Moreover, in the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people even still read anymore? Just as it re-envisioned the Media Player, the Mobile Phone and Mobile Computing, Apple is well positioned to reboot the Book with its forthcoming iPad Tablet.
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been "hollowed out," reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition. Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages? Remember record stores? Whither Blockbuster? When analog media collides with digital media, "creative destruction" occurs with brutal efficiency — unless you can truly differentiate your offering, a tall task, but not an insurmountable one.