Aloft, Element and Four Points Introduce 'Digital Newsstands'
Whoa. Sweet. Just when we thought Amazon Kindles topped the list of awesome tech offerings for word nerds and news junkies, we hear about this: Starwood announced this week that they've entered into a partnership with Zinio (a company that digitally publishes print magazine titles) to offer a "Digital Newsstand" for free to guests in Aloft, Element, and Four Points by Sheraton hotel properties.
According to a press release:
The digital newsstand, which will be accessible in Starwood's guest rooms and lobby kiosks, will offer participating titles including: Caribbean Travel & Life, Destination Weddings & Honeymoons, Field & Stream, Golf Fitness Magazine, Kiteboarding, Macworld, mental_floss, Outside, Outside's GO, PC World, Saveur, Ski Magazine, Skiing, Spa Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Wakeboarding and Working Mother. Also, Starwood will be the first hotel company to offer VIVmag, the first interactive digital women's luxury-lifestyle magazine, conceived and designed exclusively to be read digitally.
To access the digital newsstand during your stay, you click through from the internet portal page (on your laptop in your room or on a lobby kiosk) "to the private-label newsstand where free single issues will be featured," pick the magazine you want to read, register for Zinio, and read mags to your heart's content.
We signed up for a Zinio account to check out the whole concept this morning, and we thumbed (er, clicked?) through that luxury women's mag VIVmag, shown above. We've gotta admit: it was kind of awesome; the graphics were even animated on a couple of the pages (which was, surprisingly, more cool than distracting or annoying). The text was easy to read and navigating through the pages was a piece of cake. Also, account registration took us less than five seconds: all we had to do was enter an email address and set a password, then we were good to go.
Expect to see the digital newsstands in Element hotels by the end of May; you'll start finding them at Aloft and Four Points by Sheraton properties later this year.
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