MEI hopes Yards Brewery iPad app is a prototype for publishers

Fri., Jan. 14, 12:09 p.m.: Corrected detail about Reader’s Digest app. It is not being created by MEI as originally published.
After making a surprising appearance in Wired in November, it’s maybe less of a surprise that a local brewery is tapping its techie customers.
Late last month, Yards Brewing Company launched a free iPad app, which allows customers to hear the brewing backstory, watch a video with Yards founder Tom Kehoe and explore particulars of the brewery’s selection of beers.
But, let’s be frank—good beer is not a hard sell.
It’s perhaps the production of the app that is more representative of technology’s impact, as a local company with deep roots in the publishing industry is keeping up with the times by shifting its business.

Headquartered in Jenkintown, MEI—founded as Managing Editor Inc., more than two decades ago (and not to be confused with West Chester’s MEI, an electronic payment system company)—is finding ways to bring its customer base of 2,400 publications to Apple’s tablet computer.
“There’s this whole new type of media and no one knows how to get on it,” says Marketing and Creative Director Will Steuber, who has his graduate degree in graphic design from the University of Missouri. “That’s how MEI got looped into this; a lot of publishers wanted to go to the iPad.”
From its announcement in early 2010, the iPad has been hailed as a platform that could give publishers another chance at finding revenue in digital distribution. And for vendors like MEI, which provides magazines with editorial, layout and advertising solutions, that means new business opportunities. MEI’s products are often industry standard. Wired utilizes its K4 workflow editor and so do hosts of others, like the New York Times, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Though Wired beat MEI to the table in packaging its own iPad app, MEI is offering a new service that it hopes can integrate its workflow solutions into the production of digital magazines.
So it is with Yards, the company’s first prototype iPad application. With it, MEI tested its own service offering. The digital magazine was designed in Adobe InDesign, a standard publishing layout package, using the software’s interactive overlay tool. The magazine was then bundled and sent to Adobe, which created the actual app, which was then submitted by MEI to Apple.
Since launch on December 23, the Yards app has seen under 1,000 downloads, the company says. But that may be because customers aren’t expecting to find it the App Store. And it isn’t the focus for MEI, Steuber says. The goal was to build something that takes advantage of all of the DPS offering, like video, slideshows, and pinch, zoom and slide navigation.
“The main focus for us is to show some of our clients some of the things we can do with it,” Steuber says.