alexandernl

A couple of months ago I started Project E Ink, a little venture that began with displaying daily print newspapers on a huge 32" e-ink screen. It transforms your wall into a dynamic canvas. Many of you loved it and I can't thank you enough for your overwhelming response!

I'm excited to share the newest feature we've been working on: integrating Hacker News into Project E Ink! Every four hours we'll grab the top story from Hacker News and turn it into AI art, optimized for E Ink. Examples are in the link.

We built our own CMS, so no need for a subscription

Most newspapers publish a PDF of their most recent front page. We make it easy to find those in the companion app.

I apologize for the acute mistake.

I apologize for the grave mistake.

I'm a news junkie, and the power and allure of a newspaper's front page have always fascinated me. When I stumbled upon an article written by a Google engineer who had built an e ink device with the front page of his favorite daily newspaper prominently displayed on his wall, I was a bit jealous. So, I worked with a e-ink company called Visionect in Slovenia to build a version that comes shipped ready to put on your wall. The screen isn't cheap ($2500) because it's a huge 32" e-ink display. The beautiful glass screen is connected to wifi and we made it easy to choose your favorite newspaper frontpages to put on display. It's a bit like an ever changing artwork.

Thanks so much.

We're currently doing experiments integrating with publishers paywalls on their own sites. More here: www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/18/blendles-secret-weapon-its-toolkit-22/

On Blendle, the participating publishers have all kind of models: metered paywalls, hard paywalls, no paywalls. Publishers that also put content on the web without a paywall most often charge very little for their content (less than 10ct) in return for a human curated, ad free experience. It's like the business class for journalism :).

Blendle founder here. Really interested to hear you guys' thoughts: alexander@blendle.com

Yes.

Founder here. Yeah, we used to send everybody the same recommendations, which makes it all pretty general interest. But we recently started personalizing the recommendations. It should get much better in the next couple of weeks :)

We don't do bitcoin topups right now, you think we should add that?

Thanks fixing that.

Blendle founder here. It's exactly what we're working on (making articles for free on Blendle if you already have a subscription), and are already doing ("blendle links") :)

Blendle's founder here. Pricing is something that we're going to experiment with. Nobody knows what the willingness to pay for journalism, yet. So we're going to figure that out.

I think it'll always be a mix between micropayments and subscriptions: micropayments if you only read a little, subscriptions if you read a lot from a specific title.

I'm Blendle's founder, and I'm sorry that happened. I made sure it was removed as soon as I saw it. I enjoy using HN just as much as you guys and only wat to add good things to it :). Very much appreciate your feedback :).

Right now, about 20% of users that register start topping up.

Doing my best to balance my inherent tech optimism and pessimism on Dutch TV, while trying to make it interesting enough to have it be on TV at all, all the while trying to take not too many short cuts to make people like yourself not too angry -- I'm still learning how to do that :).

We're at 650.000 users in NL and DE, out of which 1/5 actually pay with real money. It's not everyone, but it's a start :).

That's practically what we do by using a wallet -- it's basically batching of payments (with less risk for us, asking for an upfront payment after a user has spent the $2,50 he gets for free when he signs up).

We don't want to force users to consume premium journalism on our platform, that's why we're working on a button that publishers (or any author, really) can put on their own site too http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/18/blendles-secret-weapon-...

We thought about credits. It might work, I'm doubting about this one because if feels a bit user-unfriendly to make it less transparant. What do you think?

Blendle co-founder here. I must admit that micropayments sounds exhausting when you think about the model. But we really tried to make the UX very pleasant, and I think we succeeded (and about 1/5 of the users who register take out their credit card and top up, so apparently they agree :)). But, at the same time, prices should be fair. We're always looking at refund percentages to make sure that they stay fair.

Blendle co-founder here. A flat fee is definitely something we're thinking about. But, the publishers have to be comfortable with it (and for newspapers, most of the time they are charging >$15 per month for a digital sub). Also, as an option, we'd always like to offer pay-as-you-go for users who don't want a subscription (a problem we set out to fix in the first place).

At Blendle we try to solve this with micropayments. NYT, WSJ and The Economist (and many others) are already working with us in The Netherlands en Germany https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

Thanks for the nice words and comments! Working on that!

Publishers decide.

True. Some really long articles can cost up to €0,79

Articles cost between €0,10 and €0,30 for newspaper articles. Between €0,20 and €0,40 for magazine articles.