Archive for Mobile Applications
by Ewan Spence
July 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Mobile Applications, Apple, Long Tail, Design, Development, SDK
Ah yes, the much vaunted Apple Store, chick full of applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, providing the user with a simple one click access to everything on offer. Is this the long sought for nirvana of mobile app distribution? Perhaps it is for Apple, but not for the developer community.
There’s no simple way of putting this, but the screen of the Apple iPhone will only show a fixed number of applications in the store. There is going to need to be some sort of filtering in place, to provide the top picks, the recommended applications, and those that get a burst of activity. Yes, simply having an application in the store will generate some sales (anecdotal evidence shows the mere act of registering a podcast for iTunes generates around 400 subscribers without actually doing anything), but that’s not going to be enough. These digital paths are paved with gold, remember?
Developers will still have to get people’s attention; they will still need to fight online to get their ‘Super Clock’ application noticed more than ‘Wonder Clock’ and ‘Time Flight.’ They’ll still need a website, they’ll still need to capture eyeballs, and that’s not something that Apple will have clear guidelines on – I’m sure we’ll have rotating weekly picks of apps (much as we do with podcasts) but the process of how these are chosen is going to be murky at best.
How long until we hear developer ‘A’ claim that Apple is favouring developer ‘B’ and giving them help, promoting them in the ratings, just because ‘A’ is in the Valley and ‘B’ is in Poland? Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s going to take very careful management of expectations and customer handling to navigate choppy waters – and the price drop on the iPhone rises up like the rocks of a Siren as to what can happen when it goes awry.
The more Apple become a services company with day to ay contact with the paranoid world, the less they become a distant faraway godlike visionary hardware company. This is going to be a very interesting period for the Cupertino company, and it’s interesting to me that they’re holding onto as much of the delivery chain as possible.
Developers write the app, submit the app, and then relaise that their influence becomes much more limited. They need to spend their marketing effort pushing Apple’s Store as well as their product – smart move on Apple’s part, having every developer shill their Store to their users (for which they’ll only take a small percentage of any software purchase fee).
What it does do is leave Apple as the sole distributor of pretty much every application that’s going to be written for the iPhone. Unlike Windows Mobile, where a .cab file can be hosted anywhere and downloaded from any URL to the phone; unlike a .sisx file in Symbian OS which again can be downloaded from anywhere; unlike .jar and .jad packages that are pretty much universal. Competition is a good thing, and having options at every part of the delivery chain is key. If Walmart doesn’t like a trucking company, they get another one.
Yet Apple has control of the last mile – from their server to the hardware. They’ve bypassed the network carriers. They’ve bypassed the traditional third party application stores like Handango. To a certain extent they’ve neutered the free (as in choice) route to market that developers have traditionally had to reach their customers.
The bottom line is Apple’s bottom line. They’re not giving up an inch more than they have to. So yes, the Apple App Store may look like a silver lined cloud, but the cloud may rain on some people’s perceptions of the company.
by Darla Mack
February 5, 2008 at 10:31 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Usage + Usability, News, Mobile Applications, Nokia
MTV Citizen Journalists will be covering Super Tuesday today across the states using mobile technology and the web to keep people updated. Street Team 08 will be armed with Nokia N95’s and Flixwagon software to cover 23 states during the primarys.
This is a very unique use of mobile multimedia. As quoted by Bill Plummer of Nokia and Christina Norman of MTV:
“Nokia is proud and excited to see our flagship Nokia N95 multimedia devices being used so creatively to support and promote the electoral process,” commented Bill Plummer, Vice President, Sales, Nokia Americas. “Nokia Nseries devices are at the forefront of mobile technology, in this case delivering real-time high-quality Internet- ready audio and video reporting from the polls — the very way that first-time and future voters have come to expect their news.”
“Young people are taking hold of the political process like never before, and are clamoring to share and react to the stories as they unfold on the campaign trail in real-time,” said Christina Norman, President of MTV. “The Street Team’s Super Tuesday coverage will be hyper-focused on the issues and stories that matter most to our audience, empowering them to experience the day’s historic events in a whole new way.”
Now other than following the web (God forbid we should sit in front of our laptops or pc’s for a whole day), users can text the word STREET to 44686 on their mobiles or visit m.street08.com from their mobile browsers.
by Russell Shaw
October 27, 2007 at 3:52 pm · Filed under Mobile Applications
I’ve been reading through a just-released IDC white paper entitled “Mobile Instant Messaging: The Next Major Mobile Opportunity.
(I’d give you a link but the white paper is firewalled)
Addressed to mobile operators, the 12-page white paper make the persuasive case that operators and carriers should view their Mobile Instant Messaging strategies from the needs of their mobile user customers.
I know that’s kind of a “well, duh,” but since at least one carrier I’d rather not name approaches these strategies from the point of view of advertisers than the end-user, this white paper should be required reading.
The four key goals, IDC advocates, are integration and flexibility, media sharing, presence information, and support of communities.
Since IDC mentioned integration and flexibility first, let us zoom in on their recommendations:
Mobile users want MIM that is fully integrated into their device contact lists and with other applications such as social networking sites and mobile browsers. In addition, they want MIM that has the flexibility to meet their evolving communications needs such as the ability to instantly share a picture or a media file with contacts who are participating in a MIM
session.
Well that sounds simple enough.
by Ewan Spence
September 21, 2007 at 7:26 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, SMS, Software, Events + Conferences, Podcasts, Mobile Applications, GSM, Mobile Email, Carriers, mobile social networking, Nokia, Ovi, Instant Messaging, Communication
As mentioned in our previous post from Tech Crunch 40, Debi and I sat down to talk about the five companies who won through to present on stage - namely Cubic Telecom (www.cubictelecom.com), Yap (www.yapinc.com), Trutap (www.trutap.com), Ceedo (www.ceedo.com) and Loudtalks (www.loudtalks.com).
There’s a lot to discuss, from business model, geographical challenges (both in distribution and acceptance), the might of the carriers and the handset manufacturers, and all the issues that a start-up in the mobile are going to have to deal with.
MM20 at Tech Crunch 40, pt 2:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
by Debi Jones
August 30, 2007 at 9:25 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Events + Conferences, Mobile Applications, iPhone, Carriers, Apple, Nokia, Mobile Music, NGage, DRM, Ovi, Microsoft
Nokia needs to find someone other than their executives to put on stage for these launch events. Showmanship isn’t a Finnish strength. The devices and new direction of Nokia could have been an exciting event, and they’re talking about entertainment to the press. However, the execs struggled with the English language causing stutters and stammers, and they make Al Gore seem animated.
Ever watch someone totally uncool try to be cool? That’s the same awkward and uncomfortable experience of hearing a Nokia executive say that a phone made him think of “Funky, and ah, ah, and fresh.” These guys do a great job of running the market leading mobile device company, but when it comes to charisma, they are more Erkle than P. Diddy.
I had planned to continue live blogging through the Music and Game panels, but couldn’t hear the Music panel, because the first five minutes of the presentation contained repeated US industry bashing mostly from Rob Wells of Universal. The cliff notes version of the moderated discussion:
- Music Industry struggling
- US bad, UK/Europe good
- Digital only 10% of the market
- US bad, UK/Europe good
- Mobile is the answer
- DRM, DRM, DRM
- Not everyone wants only Britney Spears
- US bad, UK/Europe good
- iTunes no DRM solution?
- US bad, UK good
You’ll recall that Universal was the one music producer, and the world’s largest, who balked at Apple’s no DRM offering and single pricing model. Many people speculated about where Universal would go for digital distribution, and now we have that answer. The US bashing shut down my hearing and I couldn’t live blog the discussion. Sorry. Of course, there wasn’t any new territory discovered from the discussion or the Q&A, so the cliff notes version goes like this:
-
DRM, no DRM?
- Why Windows DRM?
- Stealing bad
- DRM good
- Compete with Apple
- DRM interoperability?
- DRM device independence?
Got it? That pretty much characterizes any discussion of digital music with music industry executives.
Several money quotes from the presentations.
1) From the Q&A in response to a question on the similarities of the new UI and iPhone’s UI
We don’t know what is copied, but if something is out there that is good, we will copy it with pride and if we are the inventor, then we have the inventor’s pride.
Long ago, when asked about Apple’s use of Xerox Parc’s GUI invention in the Macintosh, Steve jobs quoted Picaso: “Artists copy, but great artists steal.”
2) The goal [of Xpress Music] is stated as providing a superior service to Stop Stealing.
While I understand that the phrase “stop stealing” is music to Universal’s ear, this is a false narrative. The size of losses from digital copying of music is dwarfed by the physical CD counterfeiting losses that have plagued the music industry for years.
3) Push back from operator customers and how have operators done with their own services of this same type?
Different operators have different strategies, we are definitely trying to help operators in their strategies. Phones, devices are not enough anymore - often service is needed including ease of use. The way we have cooperated with operators in the past we will cooperate with them with the experience. This has not happened in stealth mode. This is complimentary.
Apparently, Orange doesn’t agree. Most tier one operators have their own music stores, navigation and maps applications, and even gaming catalogue. The new Nokia - the software and services company - expects operators to abandon their own deals with content providers and buy devices that are preloaded with competing services? Really? Unless I’m reading this wrong, Nokia is taking a huge risk that operators are happy to become the carriers of Nokia services.
As Apple and Microsoft continue moving into the mobile industry from a PC base and Nokia moves into the PC space from a mobile base, a comparison of the strengths of their strategies and positions makes sense as a next step.
Ewan Spence a contributor to MM2 attended the event and caught up with Rob Sears, Chief Architect, Multimedia Experiences at Nokia USA, and has an excellent podcast interview with Sears on the implications of the new Nokia.
by Ewan Spence
August 15, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Software, ARPU, Mobile Applications, Carriers
One of the most interesting challenges that the mobile application industry has is how to get their third party applications on to the phone – with only one or two third party apps shipped in the firmwares of high end devices, many rely on a shareware style demo in the box CD, but that still requires a fair bit of searching by the user. There is also the unrelated problem of the carriers wanting to somehow make more money from their subscriber base.
So if companies are already paying for the privellege, I’ve had a wild thought using game-theory. Why not throw the two together and make a market?
A market for space on the top of the deck.
For those of you not aware of the deck, the term is a holdover from the days when Wap was the mobile internet, but essentially it is the catalogue of games and applications (although it’s mostly games) that a network portal offers to their customers. Out of all the tiles that are available via search, the majority of purchases are from those which are listed in the small umber of slots (let’s say there are five) which are initially presented to the end-user. If a publisher can get their application into that batch of five, then sales are pretty much guaranteed.
With a finite resource such as this, the allocation of this space at the whim of the network is a black and muddy art. So why not lift that veil, and make some money at the same time? Every application that passes a network testing regime receives a number of credits. Now split the day up into, say 5 minute slots, and allow people to bid with these credits on each slot during the day and night. Naturally you can buy more credits from the operator, over and above the credits you might possibly earn each time your app gets purchased.
But why stop there? Let’s take it further than that, and allow people to not only trade credits between them (vital if you have twenty applications, allowing you to pull everything for your wicked version of something that’s almost, but not quite, Bejewelled), but to trade on the open market the slot times that you have earned, for the aforementioned credits.
All you need to finish this off is the facility to revert credits back to cold hard cash (go on, a fluctuating currency market) and you’ve got an entire eco system designed to make sure that the best, strongest applications rise to the top of the deck (in the handset sense and the metaphysical sense), and a completely open system that takes the hidden murkiness away from the operators.
Now… discuss!
by Debi Jones
August 6, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Podcasts, Mobile Applications, Twitter, JuiceCaster, MOKO
Mobile Social Networking is a hot topic for 2007. Perhaps, it is the hot topic for 2007. Witnessing the success of MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo on the web along with increasingly robust handsets has inspired the whole of the mobile ecosystem to get social. Operators like US MVNO Helio have place social networking at the very center of their entire service through an exclusive arrangement with MySpace. Nokia has announced a soon to be released handset based social networking tool, and of course, Twitter has made news through rapid adoption, inspiring competitors Jaiku and Pownce and receipt of their first VC round.
And then their are those who been pushing white label solutions for brands and platforms for mobile operators.
The program features 3 MoSoSo experts who employ different mobile technologies including SMS, Java clients, WAP and even web assisted social networking to enable connections and sharing among mobile subscribers. Is text enough? Can a mobile only solution be successful? Listen to and learn from the thoughts and experience of Nick Desai, CEO of JuiceWireless, Biz Stone, co-founder and creative director, Twitter, Inc., and Paul Gruber, head of business development and marketing at Loop Mobile.
Nick Desai is the co-founder and chairman of the board of Juice Wireless. He co-invented Juice’s flagship, award-winning mobile social media product — JuiceCaster. Prior to Juice Wireless, Nick co-founded a market leader in IP based cellular infrastructure solutions. Prior to Lemko, in 1998, Nick was Founder and CEO of Zkey.com – a multi-award winning market leader and early trailblazer in consumer mobile applications. Zkey was the first mobile address book and email WAP site available in the US, launching in 1999.
Biz Stone is the co-founder and creative director at Twitter, Inc. Biz also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. Biz sometimes writes books about what people are doing on the Internet.
Paul Gruber is the head of business development and marketing at Loop Mobile, Ltd. Paul is responsible for the global expansion of Loop’s mobile social network, MOKO, and Loop’s mobile social networking partnerships with global brands which include Big Brother, Australian Idol and ITV. Previous to Loop, Paul was Head of Social Media for 3 mobile.
The podcast is a bit longer than I’d hoped, but with 3 dynamic speakers it’s easy to use time. Leave a comment if you’d like to receive the podcast in as a two part episode, and given enough requests, I’ll split it into two files for you.
by Ewan Spence
July 30, 2007 at 6:18 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, SMS, User Interface, Platforms, Software, Usage + Usability, Mobile Applications
I’ve always joked that the best user interface for me and my mobile – given I’m a complete control freak for my computing devices, would look something like this…
But interfaces have moved on since those days, with icons, gui’s sliding fingers, predictive keyboards and so on. Or have they? Gina Trapani has pointed out over on Lifehacker the number of services that are using SMS messages to send commands directly to the system – in many cases returning the information to the handset in the same format.
And it strikes me that this is the perfect example of the evolving nature of connected applications. We’re now at the “Windows 95†level – where we have got the job of getting our smartphones online pretty much sorted (remember the headaches of Windows 3.1 and the TCP/IP stacks? Exactly). We’re starting to see services online start to use the Web Browser, or putting together their own client, but there is still a huge (sometimes undocumented) range of SMS commands you can send directly.
And then there’s Twitter.
And while I think mobile applications are nowhere near Windows XP/Vista/OS X levels, I don’t think we’ll ever ‘downgrade’ the use of SMS as a command line to the world. Not only is it just convenient, but it’s very human centric. By this I mean it’s not scary (like calling up .bash shell scary) to the regular user. And those regular users are people who are used to texting friends and asking “where the restaurant is†– a perfect scenario for texting Google Maps or Yellow Pages.
What we need now is some natural language parsing, so that regular sentences can be sent to our Web 2.0 apps. Rather than “D Here Restaurant†“I need to get from where I am now to Valvona and Corolla.â€
by Darla Mack
July 30, 2007 at 3:25 am · Filed under Mobile Applications
I was recently notified by a reader that support for the Yahoo! Go Mobile version 1.0 is ending.
Some users are being alerted via text message to update to the latest version 2.0. Now what I could never understand is why didn’t they make the new version more user friendly such as the 1st version. What made 1.0 so popular was the fact that it had the cool messenger app built right in. I think this was replaced by the addition of Flickr in the new version.
Support for 1.0 will end on August 27th. To download Yahoo! Go Mobile 2.0 visit here.
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