You’re probably reading this because you’ve been Googling and have a problem getting your Zinio mags and aren’t finding any help. The simple answer is if you’re reading this in early March 2011 then it’s because Zinio has a massive outage.

I started these blog posts and tweets because Zinio wasn’t communicating with their customers. A 48hr outage then a few days uptime then another 48+hr outage meant very little communication coming from Zinio. This is not designed to be anti-Zinio and Zinio do understand that, but it’s born out of frustration both from myself and many other thousands of Zinio customers not receiving any information about the service they have invested in.

Here’s a quick summary…

What’s gone wrong?
Zinio have a major outage and are working to restore the service. Zinio will publish information on what went wrong after the event and what they will do to resolve this I am told.

Why is it taking so long?
It’s a complicated issue, it’s not just a hard drive crash in a RAID array as I understand it. They are also working on reinstalling the platform to restore service more quickly.

How can I trust Zinio again?
Zinio have a good 10 yrs of service in this area and are not a new startup. Typically most companies have a good run then hit into problems at some stage. Zinio are now in this phase and I am told they will do their best to ensure that this and other problems don’t happen again once they have restored service.

Why haven’t they updated their home page? It says will be back shortly…
Their maintenance message was really only designed for planned maintenance. This is very unplanned and they are locked out of modifying the page unfortunately. They have setup a blog at http://zinio.wordpress.com.

Why weren’t we told as customers what was going on?
Zinio were undoubtedly trying to reduce the PR nightmare as many companies would in this situation by trying to restore service quickly and trying to reduce bad PR and that ultimately meant not communicating with customers admitting the problems. This isn’t new, most companies on their first major outage fall into this. The key is to communicate with customers, it’s not good PR to tell people that service is down because media outlets get hold of this and make a mountain out of a molehill, however communicating with paying customers to keep them on side, to not lose the business that has been built up is key. Zinio understand this now and are communicating much more on their blog which is what I was trying to achieve from these updates.

When will service be restored?
Zinio are hoping for Saturday 5th March in the morning EDT (East Coast US time). With the nature of the problem anything could affect this window, but Zinio are hoping to restore service around this time. If complications set in then it may take longer.

Will I be compensated?
Zinio do understand that their customers are key, it’s what has built their business and that without you as a customer their business wouldn’t be what it is today. Although I can’t say what level of compensation will be provided, yes I have been told by Zinio that they will be trying to put it right with customers affected by the service outage. What that will be I don’t know, that will be down to Zinio to decide. Whether it means extensions to your existing subscriptions, additional complimentary subscriptions of your choice or refunds will be down to Zinio. I think due to the level of outage that maybe it should be a combination of all three, but that’s based on a feeling as a customer.

Was Zinio hacked, have they gone under?
No, that has been the unfortunate perception by some because of the lack of communication. Zinio have also put an answer to this on their blog. They did also have an unfortunate outage on their phones but these are back operational.

I want to read the magazines I have, what should I not do?
Okay, don’t uninstall the Zinio app or delete your magazines, otherwise you won’t be able to access them throughout the outage. Also try not to restart your iPad or iPhone because this will also log you out of Zinio to authenticate you. Hold tight and hopefully you can still read what offline magazines you have on your device and you will receive all your magazines once Zinio is restored. Any issues that should have been sent out to you through this outage you will still receive when service comes back.

What happens when service is restored?
The first thing is that you might see the service restored then it goes back offline again. This can happen when trying to restore any kind of service, it might be that it comes back online but configs or service packs or other items need to be applied to servers to ensure stability. So if you do notice it goes down soon after for a little while longer, please understand this. This isn’t something Zinio have mentioned to me but it’s something through my experience of managing servers can and will most likely happen.

More information is available at their blog but I will keep you updated here in the event that information does dry up whilst trying to restore service.

Although the situation is no doubt complicated with regards to any kind of technical outage, they’re trying to bring back and restore the service as quickly as possible. This obviously can bring further complications when it comes to technology but Zinio are hoping to restore service early on Saturday morning US time. Obviously with any kind of technical outage like this it’s not possible to guarantee or pinpoint a day/time, however Zinio are hopeful Saturday AM will be an achievable target if everything goes smoothly.

Zinio have provided an updated status page at http://zinio.wordpress.com and have asked me to pass this along to anyone reading this. Zinio understand their customers frustration and will try to provide more updates to customers. This is the first major outage for Zinio in their 10 years of service. Zinio will continue to update the status page link above and try to engage with customers over Twitter and Facebook to provide regular status updates.

Our sincerest thanks from Zinio
We realize that this is not the level of service that you expect from Zinio. We are working tirelessly to return the quality of service you have come to expect from Zinio over the past 10 years. Please bear with us during this time.

The first outage was caused by a power failure according to Zinio

To have two outages in less than 3 days isn’t uncommon, but to have 2 major outages, the first lasting just under 48 hrs and the second lasting 34+ hrs and rising is very unusual.  To have a second power outage is extremely unlikely and it seems that Zinio are being plagued by faulty hardware or corrupted databases.  Any power utility company would have restored power within a matter of hours.

The only message thousands of loyal customers are receiving from Zinio is

With no proper communication from Zinio or their Marketing team, this is turning into a PR nightmare for Zinio. Many customers have subscribed to several hundreds of pounds / dollars of magazines, personally I have spent over £1000 with Zinio.

As a once loyal Zinio customer I have now had to pay additional money to Apple to get my magazine subscriptions through Apple due to Zinio not being able to provide my PAID subscriptions.  I’m sure Zinio will not be refunding me for these purchases, and to be honest I don’t care now.  I just want access to my magazines and as Zinio have proved they cannot provide that and cannot provide a reason for the down time or an estimate on when the service will return, there’s only one thing most of us are thinking.  Have Zinio gone under and not able to pay their bills?

I’d just like to take this chance to apologise to anyone that has subscribed to Zinio on my recommendations (from emails I’m receiving I know that’s a lot of people). I feel your pain too with the amount I have invested in Zinio and am truly sorry that we are all suffering from the lack of service and communication coming out of Zinio.

If Zinio ever recover from this they will have lost a very large percentage of their customers.  Customers are voting with their feet and 38% of Zinio customers have now rated the iPad app as 1 star.  If Zinio don’t want to lose their customers they need to turn this around and be honest with their customers and tell them what’s going on.

Unfortunately last weekend Zinio had just under a 48 hour outage and 3 days later they’re into another 12+ hour outage of service.

The service outages means that customers who have paid for their magazines cannot access the Zinio service to download the paid content.

The email from Zinio in the first outage to customers…

I wanted to reach out to you personally to thank you for your patience this past weekend and check to make sure your Zinio access was working properly. As you noticed, Zinio experienced some systems problems that impacted your ability to shop and read your magazines. These have now been fully resolved. On behalf of the entire Zinio team, I wanted to apologize for any inconvenience this unfortunate outage caused.

Zinio was able to restore service on the first outage approx 48 hrs later. However, Zinio’s down again 3 days later and has not been able to provide it’s service for over 12 hours.  It seems like there’s no out of hours coverage at Zinio for it’s service due to the downtime over the weekend and overnight all being outside of core business hours which doesn’t bode well for Zinio. Zinio has been around for a number of years (since 2001) but there are more companies coming onto the scene to compete with Zinio. Apple more recently started selling Magazine subscriptions for the iPad through iBooks and a number of magazine companies have already started offering their magazines through iBooks or through their own apps on the iPad.

I’m an avid Zinio supporter and have spent well over £1000 on magazine subscriptions with Zinio so hopefully that shows my level of commitment to Zinio! However, Zinio being down twice in 4 days for a serious amount of time has now put me off making two further magazine subscriptions with Zinio and I’ve just given Apple the money for these. After the first 48hr outage I purchased some additional magazine subscriptions and I haven’t been able to download these new magazines because Zinio’s service has gone down a second time. Zinio also offered me some complimentary free magazine subscriptions on top of this due to the last outage, but again they weren’t showing in my account just prior to the second service outage.

It’s one thing being bad for Zinio’s customers seriously making them look elsewhere for magazine subscriptions but it’s more serious for the magazine companies that partner with Zinio because new customers can’t purchase magazine subscriptions resulting in loss of sales.

I really sincerely hope Zinio can rectify these outages and improve the level of service to it’s customers and magazine partners and pull through this.

That’s a lot to live up to! Let’s see how well The Daily has done in living up to it’s claim.

So how good is it?

Well, the first thing I need to tell you is that it’s only available in the United States of America. Anyone outside of the US of A will not be in much luck. You can get around Apple’s bureaucracy and create a US iTunes store account, login and then download but that’s a lot of hassle for the regular person.

I gave The Daily a try to see what all the hype was about and you can see in the screenshots below what it looks like.

Opening The Daily you’ll see the following for the first time

So far so good until you now start to try and actually do what they want you to do and that’s read the newspaper…

Unfortunately as you can see from the above screenshots you most of the images don’t load for each article, and you might as well be reading The Daily in plain text in a text editor. In-fact you would be much better and have a much richer content by just opening up Safari and going to the web to read an article on a news website.

Getting past the “We’re only going to provide it to US customers” which is a big hurdle to overcome, I can really on say so far that trying to read the articles is troublesome at best. The navigation (carousal) that you can spin to get to the next news article is slow, the animation is very jerky and makes you long just to have an index page where you can just tap a photo that doesn’t try to over do the animation.

That said, if I could get past the above problems, there’s then the other problem of the news content is only updated on a daily basis (like a newspaper). I’m sorry but that’s not good enough. If I want to read a newspaper then I would go out and buy one. When it comes down to news you want to get the up to the minute news, so for me Twitter, blog sites and news websites are still going to be my main focal point in getting the latest news.

All in all with not being able to read The Daily as you’re supposed to, I’m glad News Corp have provided The Daily free as a trial. I really can’t see many people signing up for the subscription model unless they sort out these problems.  People crave news now, they want it when they want it.  This is why there is a decline year on year for newspaper sales, and I think it shows that News Corp just don’t understand this theory and why they’re publication circulations are down year on year.

One thing the iPad has done is give me 0 second startup time. I simply press the power button and it turns on. There’s no hard disk to spin up, there’s no time to boot the operating system, it’s there. All solid state as opposed to a hard disk. It’s also larger than my netbook in terms of screen size, but it’s thinner and more lightweight. Okay, granted it doesn’t have a keyboard but the on-screen keyboard works pretty well for me. The biggest part is that I always had to leave the netbook powered on because even bringing it out of hibernation was slow. That ate up electricity, not a lot on a daily basis but when you consider you’re running a device 24/7 for 365 days a year, that adds up to a lot of electricity. With the iPad I only charge it when it gets low, e.g. over night if I want it topped up to 100%, or sometimes I go for several days without charging it.

On the iPad I have my Exchange email, I have BeeJiveIM for my Instant Messaging chats, I have Docs2Go to open up and read any attachments people send me, I also have a variety of other office based apps that allow for online storage of docs, to read PDF’s and PowerPoints as well as my creature comfort personal apps.

Steve Jobs said that the iPad was revolutionary and magic. For some maybe it’s not, but when I look back on how my evenings have changed and how much more I use the iPad than a regular computer, I guess I would call it revolutionary. I’m not sure I’d class it as magic, but it’s not far of it.

The iPad is still selling strong, but in people I talk to it’s had a lesser take up than I would have imagined. I think this comes down to more the price point and that people already have computers available and see no need for the iPad. Some said that the iPad would be a niche market, and it is. However the more people that have iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s, the more that like their devices and want a larger ‘living room’ computer will probably adopt to an iPad more than going to buy a new laptop, mini-laptop or netbook.

This is where the 7″ Android tablets might come in to still the thunder a little from the iPad. Android has got to the stage in it’s life where it has matured enough to be a serious contender for Apple both in the mobile phone platform but also in the tablet platform. A 7″ tablet would be nice and I have to agree that if I had one I’d probably take it with me more than I do the iPad because it’s smaller, but then comes the smaller screen, less battery power and suddenly you start to realise that all you have really is a device that for the best part is double the size of a regular mobile phone. Will that cut it for you? For me probably not, that’s where the iPad screen size if 9.7″ really comes handy. Will Apple do a 7″ to compete with the new Samsung Galaxy Tab? Possibly, time will tell, but for the best part I think Apple will probably sit back but have something to go just in case they feel they need to. The one thing that Apple don’t want to do is create a drop in iPad sales and create fragmentation around the iPad and ultimately bring in less money because people will start buying the 7″ more than the 9.7″ iPad.

Let’s not forget the iPad is an all-round device, it’s good for gaming, there’s tons of games from card games to fully fledge 30fps shoot’em-up games and driving games available for the iPad, most games are under £10 too.

Also the iPad just isn’t a gaming device, it also allows you to catch up on your ebook reading, store hundreds of thousands of electronic books on the device, so you have your entire reading library on the device when you take it with you.

If you have apps installed like Amazon’s Kindle app, then you can also synchronise where you left off reading on your iPhone or iPod Touch and pick up at the same location on the iPad.

There’s also lots of magazines, newspapers and periodicals you can also purchase or subscribe to and have delivered to the iPad on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Unfortunately on iOS4 when you launch Zinio you can’t get past the app splash screen as it just seems to freeze and not crash back to the springboard. I tried to uninstall, reinstall from appstore, power cycle iPhone but still won’t load.

Hopefully Zinio can provide a fix soon as this is a must have app for me!

I thought this would be a highly tech orientated magazine for the iPad but it turns out it’s more of a lifestyle magazine featuring iPads which includes looking at how to grill food on the BBQ, looking at the world cup, running and fitness for the iPad and showcasing a few apps to purchase along with some basic tutorial videos on how to use the iPad.

This is all okay, but one thing I did find is that even after purchasing the magazine that there’s a number of articles in the magazine that don’t work because they’re scheduled for release on a future date in the month (see image of greyed out articles above). I really don’t get this or like this attitude. If you are providing a magazine for sale, then everything should be there. This would be like going to the newsagents, purchasing a paper magazine and finding on the pages where an article should be it says, “sorry this article isn’t ready, send us your address and we will mail it to you when ready”. That kinda sucks seeing that i have paid £2.99 and can’t yet get the entire magazine, especially for a magazine first and I’m sure will hurt Sideways. I can see a possible reason why they’re doing this, to try and get you to come back to the magazine later in the month in the hope you’ll say, okay I’ll buy next months magazine that is due out soon, or simply because they aren’t fully ready with the magazine.

Overall the magazine look and feel is very nice, its not like a traditional swipe magazine, you navigate by picking articles off the left hand menu, so the closest you could say this comes to is a website but designed in a very clean way.

Now that I have seen the first issue and experienced the content and the missing articles in the magazine, I don’t think I will be buying the second monthly installment of the magazine but do like what they are trying to do with Sideways all the best and hope it takes off for them. I think they would get a lot more monthly subscribers if they have all of the articles ready in-app and made it a lot more tech orientated.

Now Zinio have released an iPad version of their app and I am very impressed, impressed to the point that i have now uninstalled Zinio on my PC because, simply i don’t need it now that I have it on my iPad.

Zinio provide some free magazines so you can check out their interface. The great thing about Zinio is it you can screenshot a page, crop it in your favorite cropping too, or Zinio have an option to copy the text out of the page, just in case you want to report on it.

Here’s what Zinio looks like when you go to read a magazine, you can use your cursors to navigate to turn a page, you can also zoom in to read a particular article or column.

Features include

• Review the HTC HD2
• the BlackBerry Storm2
• Motorola DEXT
• HTC Tattoo
• Samsung Galaxy
• Garmin 1690
• Navigon 8410 and more

The company announced that effective immediately, several comics from Marvel Comics will be available for purchase via in-app purchase from the free Comics app.

The Marvel comics available initially from Comixology are Joss Whedon’s 24-issue run on Astonishing X-Men, Robert Kirkman’s five-issue Marvel Zombies miniseries, Ed Brubaker’s first 30 issues of Captain America, and two other X-Men-related books, X-23 and X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, each six issues long.

Each individual issue will be priced at $2.

In addition to Marvel, Comixology’s Comics app features comics from more than a dozen other publishers, including Kirkman’s excellent superhero book Invincible and his black-and-white Zombie-apocalypse drama, The Walking Dead.

This isn’t Marvel’s only foray into the world of the iPhone. The company recently launched two “motion comics” sold directly via iTunes: Spider-Woman and an adaptation of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.

Source: MacWorld

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