Mobiletribe » mobile apps

One way to get location right on mobile – Neer

pfhagermark — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:20:29 +0000

Mashable published their top 5 shortlist for best location based services. The list is fair I think and there is a very interesting entry there – Neer. Here is a video on how it works.

So why do I find Neer interesting?

They have made smart and simple use of location. On top of that privacy and safety is very well played here. The user is in total control and no actual address is published to others. They go beyond only setting who can see your whereabouts, but also what days of the week and at what times. The locations you set up are then named by you, but without the address.

User interface is very simple and looks good.

Downside? Only Android at the moment, but for Neer that should be ok since it is the platform that’s really growing at the moment and it should be large enough to make it interesting. However no networked service can really flourish if it is not truly cross-platform.

And then of course – show me the money. I would love to hear their thoughts on how to make a business out of this. Sale of apps? Deal with carriers to bundle it in family plans? There are a few options, but they need to get to critical mass of installed apps as well which makes it tempting for them to just give away their stuff.

Why mobile gambling is the next big thing

pfhagermark — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 07:41:27 +0000

Most of us have seen all the reports and articles on 2010 being the year of the mobile internet. The quote below adds to that.

“Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.”

–The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

So, what about specific niches then? I have looked into the mobile gambling arena for a while. (Disclosure: My company Acemob offers a mobile poker product). As I see it the logic is easy: Gaming as entertainment in short bursts is huge in the mobile. Gambling is huge online. Merging entertainment and gambling into your portable entertainment central is bound to happen. If you do it right and can handle the jump to mobile from desktop.

Remember we are talking gambling here. Gambling requires legislation so yes, that is also on the list. But before that the number one thing to make mobile gambling the next big thing is mindset - Online gambling companies need to broaden their mind and views of the world.

Mobile is accepted for sports betting and some simple casino style games. What I hear from people in the know is that mobile betting is really taking off. Some of the bigger European online gambling companies have as much as 15% of the betting revenue from mobile.

For connected real time gambling the view is different. Many have seen online poker in the mobile as impossible. Too poor interface, unreliable and not big enough screen to sit in at 6 tables at the same time to wait for the right cards etc. Well, positioned as a kill time 3 minute game with the extra spice of a few bucks in the game with the potential of winning a total of maybe 10-20 bucks is a different proposition. It speaks to another target group as well who never will be big stakes rollers online. If the online gambling industry could handle this new customers there’s a chance for a second period of growth.

There are two big hurdles to overcome though:

1. Legislation – going from grey to black and white regulation in Europe and from illegal to regulation in the US
2. User interface – both a technical limitation and a trust issue.Therefore mobile gambling proposition needs to be positioned differently than desktop gambling.
When these hurdles are overcome growth will be explosive. Plenty of knowledge and skills out there to deliver.

Market outlook: In Europe mobile gambling is starting to grow spearheaded by betting. Pokerstars purchased Cecure gaming to position themselves. Passing new legislation in the US on gambling will open the flood gates.

One area that is not explored much at all is to use mobile as digital give aways and customer acquisition vehicles. I think that will feed both existing online business and help grow the mobile channel. The Trojan Horse you have inherently in a client-server solution means that you can give a way a play-for-fun app and later offer upgrade to a gambling version when the time is right for that.

Mobile phone networks fight back on apps | Business | The Guardian

pfhagermark — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:35:27 +0000

The BBC iPlayer website viewed on an iPhone. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features

London is to become the centre of a fightback by the world’s biggest mobile phone networks, which together serve more than four billion customers, against the growing power of Apple and Google.

The capital will be the location for the headquarters of a new business that will create a single global market for downloadable mobile phone applications, allowing the mobile phone companies to cash in on the growing craze for “apps”.

By the end of the year, the mobile phone companies could be in a position to present application developers with a single standard that will operate across everything from BlackBerry devices to mass market Samsung and LG handsets.

Mobile phone apps have proved a huge hit with consumers, with more than 3bn downloaded by iPhone users in just 18 months. But while they are creating a dramatic increase in traffic for mobile phone networks, they are not bringing any significant increase in revenues.

Apple splits revenues from paid-for apps with the programme’s developer, not the network. The situation is likely to get worse as Apple updates the iPhone in the summer so that more than one app can run at a time, further increasing its appetite for network capacity.

While the iPhone is likely to remain an expensive gadget aimed at high-end users, making it a niche product – albeit a very lucrative one for Apple – there is the potentially much larger threat from the growing adoption of Google’s Android platform. Later this year handsets from the likes of HTC and ZTE, which use the Google software and are aimed at the mass market, will start appearing. Already in the UK, according to recent research, almost one in every five smartphones now sold uses Android and some carriers reckon there will be more Android devices than iPhones within a year.

Google has made it plain it wants to co-operate with the networks on Android but while it is understood to be sharing a portion of mobile advertising revenues generated through the phones with mobile operators, Google does not share revenue generated by apps.

The mobile phone companies were galvanised into action by the appearance of Google’s own-branded mobile phone, the Nexus One, at the start of the year. It is the first in what the search engine giant hopes will be a portfolio of mobile phones over which it has complete control.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February a group of more than a dozen mobile phone companies including O2, Vodafone and Orange announced their intention to form the Wholesale Applications Community, which would work on a single platform for downloadable apps that would work across all their networks and across a wide range of phones.

Since then, WAC has attracted 40 members and this week the operators will announce that it is to be based in London, where it will merge with another industry body called the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP). Backed by nine operators including AT&T, Orange and Telecom Italia, Nokia and Ericsson, OMTP developed the nascent Bondi open apps standard, which is used in the recently announced Samsung Wave handset.A chairman is currently being sought for WAC, whose interim chief executive is head of the OMTP Tim Raby, and the first board meeting of the new organisation is expected in July.

Its first task will be to pick a technology platform from the numerous competing open standards, including Bondi. It is understood to have chosen to use the open platform currently under construction by the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) partnership between Vodafone, Verizon Wireless of the US, Softbank in Japan and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone network.

It is also supported by LG, Samsung, Sharp and most crucially Research In Motion, maker of the Blackberry email device and bitter rival of both Apple and Android. Also involved in the process is the LiMo Foundation, which has been creating an open source mobile phone operating system based on Linux with the backing of partners including Motorola, NEC and NTT DoCoMo. Its software is inside Samsung’s H1 and M1 handsets which Vodafone has used as the flagship devices for its 360 suite of social networking services. There is speculation that Vodafone 360 could be rolled into the wider WAC effort.

via guardian.co.uk

Unity at last. But will it last and what are the terms for the developers? The entire reason for WAC is to get a slice of the pie that Apple has locked the MNOs our from in its model with the AppStore. All I can say is: “I want 70%!”. If WAC leaves that share to the developer community they might have a chance. And that is of course if they can deliver a develop-once-deploy-everywhere solution on this side of Christmas.

Posted via web from pfhagermark’s posterous

Real money with mobile as a real channel

pfhagermark — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:26:22 +0000

Here is a fantastic story about a company in the bricks and mortar word making real money with a mobileapp. Pizza Hut opening up a new store. In an iPhone near you. Well, if you are in the US that is.

The claim is that they have sold pizzas for 1 million USD in that app. That is pretty neat facts. The mobile as a retail outlet for core business that has nothing to do with mobile or social media. This should hopefully wet the appetite for others to follow. Hopefully in more channels than the app store. There are more phones out there.

Why mobile cloud computing is not hype

pfhagermark — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:15:40 +0000

Mobile cloud computing. Another hype term? Well, lately I have realised I use more services in the Cloud even from my phone. Mail is obvious, but lately also access to all my workfiles in the Cloud. I had a rela life/hard experience of this last Firday when my hard drive on my MacBookPro crashed while installing the Snow Leopard upgrade (interesting coincidence don’t you think? Nice business to sell new harddrives to all who purchase Snow Leopard. I am more then a bit ticked off by this. #applefail in my books). Anyway, thanks to mail and files in the cloud I was pretty ok. I could mail from a laptop in the showroom while waiting for technician to deliver the verdict at local Mac store. Later that day I could read a contract on my iPhone while on a call.

Besides these features there are other compelling reasons for mobile cloud computing. We know it is a stated fact from Google that they are betting on the mobile web. Example of that here. Read Write Web also recently had a good summary of a research paper made by ABI Research on this subject. The authors even dare to saymobile cloud computing will soon be a disruptive force. This is based on a factor that you know your humble blogger supports, the mass market for mobile is not in the smartphone segment. There are 4bn mobile subscriptions in the world. Smartphones have a very small market share of that. So for the masses there is huge potential in a browser based service in the cloud where processing power and data storage is handed over to the server side. The mobile phone takes the role of a thin client. Most most phones today can fill the shoes of that role.

Another interesting point made in the report is that there are far more web developers who are capable of churning out great services than there are experts in mobile apps. With browserbased services, access is also better. You just need a mobile internet connection, not a specific carrier reltionship to reach the specific app store for a specific smartphone. With HTML5 around the corner the prerequisites for mobile cloud computing becoming a distuptive force are improving as well with the caching features covering for glitches in the network service quality.

The coming 24 months will be interesting times for mobile cloud computing. Will we see companies like Netbiscuits compete with Amazon Web Services in this area soon? Will Nokia, a company that looks sadly lost today, regain its stronghold through leadership in mobile cloud computing? Was it all just hype?

Time will tell. I am looking forward to the ride!

Layar – Another app that takes the BS out of LBS

pfhagermark — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:54:16 +0000

The Dutch company Sprx Mobile has launched its new app Layar. Read about it here. They call it an augmented reality browser. Sounds fancy. What it does in layman terms though is that it pulls in relevant data depending on your geolocation and what you are pointing your camera phone to. Yes that us pretty powerful. Looking for a house? Walking around in a neighbourhood you fancy to move to? Just start Layar and sweep over the landscape with your camera phone and pull up information on the houses that are for sale.

So by being aware of your phone’s geolocation and knowing where it is pointing to (Layar requires a built in compass to work) it can provide you data about what is just around you.

Challenges:

- The need for a built in compass. Total universe now is Android phones and iPhone 3GS.

- In addition the business model requires scale. This is yet another app that is fully relying on a very powerful network effect. I.e. that you get many users fast. With small user base there will be few companies and content providers knocking on the door.

It should be possible to charge end-users directly for some information. Travel guides etc. This might be the most viable route to take in the short to mid-term. On the iPhone the in-app purchases should be a powerful vehicle for this.

If you are in Holland (launched) or Germany where they launch soon you have the chance to see a bit of the imminent future.

Good work Sprxmobile!

Apple time!

pfhagermark — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:02:14 +0000

Will there be any dramatic mobile news from San Francisco today? You can follow live video stream from TechCrunch here.

Will we succeed to take the BS out of LBS this time around?

pfhagermark — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:06:00 +0000

LBS has been one of the long lasting hyped functionalities in mobile services. One of the classic cases is the location aware advertising model. I am walking down a street, approach a Starbucks and voila I get an MMS with a voucher for a half-price latte. Only thing is, I need to be signed up to or have downloaded an app that tracks me in realtime. But the big challenge is the targeting. Just because I am approaching a Starbucks does not mean I am in the mood for coffee. I might be on my way to the health clinic next door to Starbucks for an appointment with a cognitive therapy expert to kick my caffeine addiction.

But location awareness has a strong value added in many cases. Lately I have spent much time thinking about LBS in the context of dating and matching. The reason being the recent launch of Souldate (that I am a shareholder of, to be clear and transparent).

In the dating scenario locaion awareness makes a lot of sense. Even without precise realtime location a la GPS. Just a quick positioning at sign-in of the service that is then used to rank all matches in order of geographic proximity without revelaing the location of any member adds value. As a user you know that the people at the top of the list match your criteria and vice versa, they are also the ones nearest to you. Since dating services are all about getting people to meet in real life, I know that the top results are the ones that most likley are easiest and quickest to meet up with.

Makes sense? Let me know what you think. Take the poll!

Vodafone opening the holy grail?

pfhagermark — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:01:21 +0000

In yesterday’s announcement from Vodafone we can get a hint of the future. Operator opening up access to their unique assets for content and service providers to create and deploy their services to the masses in a more efficient way than before.

It is not an app store. Remember Vodafone gives access to bill their customers worldwide. This cover all types of handsets in several markets. Build once and deploy everywhere gets one step closer to reality.

However discoverability still will be a challenge. Rightly so the main responsibility for the marketing will fall on the content provider. If the billing payouts from the operator is more in line with the 5% a credit card transaction costs it is a fair deal. I am still waiting for details on this.

So far we have seen the mobile operators abusing their monopoly to bill to a mobile phone. The quantum leap needed here is that we get the billing cost down to single digit percentage poit of the retail price. That would be the catalyst the mobile content and value added services business needs.

More on App Stores

pfhagermark — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:59:55 +0000

A follow-on to my last post. Just read the extract for a new study from Strand Consult, the wireless industry consultants. Their study is funnily enough called App Stores, do they have a future?.

They have a somewhat blunt but still useful analogy. If the mobile VAS/content market was the bookmarket, the problem is not a lack of bookstores. The vast majority of the public is illiterate. We need to educate the users and offer stuff they actually can be bothered with. Hear hear!

They also claim that App Stores are nothing new. The only difference is that Apple executed far better on design and user experience on theirs. handango, Nokia and many other have had their platform/handset specific app stores running for many year. Success has escaped these efforts though.

Finally, I love the way they can put things in perspective. The mobile content market in Norway is bigger than Apple’s App Store. So sure 1 bn apps, sounds great. But it is not the greatest if you measure in real dollars.

On that short note I end this working week and hope you’ll have a great weekend!