iPhone 4 > A Cappuccino Warrior Comes of Age

>>  The iPhone 4 has been around since June 2010 but it is the hand-held device I have been waiting 9 years for. 

For years I have been lugging around laptops to coffee shops, service stations, hotel lounges, trade events and onto aeroplane flights. It’s always been very important to be able to work remotely but in 2001 I began to see the possibilities for a less cumbersome way to work; a way to work remotely without a laptop.

Apart from my first Apple Mac computer (A Macintosh Plus) a desktop that I brought in 1996, it’s been laptops all the way; starting with an Apple PowerBook 100. Being a freelancer with no fixed office abode, I preferred the freedom that came with picking up and putting down your machine to suit. In the early days I would usually be the only person sitting in the coffee shop with my laptop doing my work. Soon after, other laptops would appear around me. Laptop, mobile phone and constant cappuccino was all we remote workers required to be productive. For a long time, of those with laptops, I was usually the only person with an Apple Mac. Windows users would frequently sneer and bark out their well worn mantra of Macs being only of any use for those in creative industries. I used to try and educate but you know what it’s like, some people are just set in their ways and don’t want to admit that there might be another way.

In those early days (2001) there came along a company called Palm and with their pocket device, the Palm Handspring Visor Neo.  It made no major technological breakthroughs but it showed me that one day there might be a future beyond laptops. By now the laptop’s weight was actually giving me minor back problems, especially after a days back-to-back meetings around London. It’s so long ago that I can hardly remember why I loved that little Palm device. I had to use a silly little stylus to write and navigate the device (not always a smooth experience). The web browsing experience was slow, clumsy and frustrating (no data packages then, just hoping around looking for WiFi hotspots) but worth the trouble if you needed a telephone number in a hurry.  Composing an email or entering text into a Word document was done via a stylus pen. All very slow and not very accurate but then I discovered that I could use a bluetooth keyboard with my Palm device. This was so cool. With just a small light shoulder bag I could now carry my mobile, Palm Neo and bluetooth keyboard and although the browsing experience was slow, I could now write emails or compile documents quite quickly with the aid of my fold-out bluetooth keyboard. However, beyond writing emails, the experience was still a very limited one and I knew that a leap in technology and a wait of several years would be necessary before I carry my working tools in a small shoulder bag (even in pockets) without having to also budget for occasional physiotherapy for shoulder pains.

Fast forward 9 years and the iPhone 4 with its ability to compose / edit emails and text documents, full webpage viewing experience and countless other beautiful features. The iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard though is not up to the task of facilitating a day’s work in a coffee shop. It’s fine for short tasks but my stumpy short fat fingers tend to wain after time. The iPhone 4 however was the first iPhone device to allow bluetooth connection to external devices. So now I get to use a laptop sized keyboard along with the excellent web experience and full application functionality of the iPhone 4.

Of course the iPad affects a quantum leap in the mobile working experience but I can’t put it in my pocket and it’s a tad too big to fit in my mini shoulder bag. One day soon I expect to buy an iPad but for now, even nearly one year since its launch, my iPhone 4 still thrills me. Time for another cappuccino me thinks!

App Store Revenue Strategies (Wolfram Alpha & Other Apps)

Anyone visiting recently will have noticed a lack of content since the last article but September’s article seems to have dropped off my blog and I don’t know why. Anyway, I have recovered a poor early draft of the post “Summer Shoots” which can now be seen underneath this article.

There’s a lot of focus on the Apple app store at the moment. Having become a revenue channel / revenue stream in itself, the tech industry as of late has been able to review and assess its progress since the opening of the app store’s doors from July 2008. Wiki states there are currently around 85,000 third party apps within the store, with over 2bn total downloads to date.

One of the issues a company faces, when trying decide where their iPhone app sits within a product revenue strategy, is to try and chart the financial returns and decide what revenue to model to employ. Whether to give away the app to encourage increased contact points, brand awareness or a value-add benefit for the brand, or to just do a straight unit fee charge. This week has started with postings on this topic with a mini debate on a welcome addition to the app store family from Wolfram Alpha.  This is a fantastic application that I am not sure I really know how to use fully but have a sneaking suspicion  that this is going to be an incredibly useful tool for me once I learn how to use it (Note to self, “see if there’s anything on YouTube perhaps?”). Wiki calls it an ‘answer engine‘ but its kind of a data crunching tool that does searches using the parameters that you feed it and comes back with data answers. However, the headline issues relating to their iPhone app launch all centre around the pricing of the application as it hits the app store. I’m sure I saw it last night on my iPhone at £29 (TechCrunch have it as $50. Is that the same as £29?). TechCrunch are not convinced with the current price tag, as anyone who uses the service will know, the app store is not a place for venders to realize full price on their software. It’s the place to go and see what free stuff you can find that might be worth pulling onto your iPhone. Next come the apps that you don’t mind paying a little bit more for. For me, the £1.79 I paid for my little Chirp bird spotting app was bargain of the year. However, as I look though my iPhone apps, aside from the freebees and fun stuff, the only “must have” app on my phone is 1Password. This comes in at £2.99 for the standard version or the big boy app at £4.99. I’m currently debating whether or not to ‘splash out’ by bring over a favourite mind mapping tool of mine that I use on the laptop called MindManager (made by MindJet and weighing in at a hefty $349). The scaled back, stripped back iPhone app version of the product is on my UK iPhone at £4.99.

The MindJet approach above illustrates the typical approach adopted by companies who usually discount (or give away free) a reduced feature set of their product on the app store. Possibly to help introduce their product to a new audience or to consolidate their brand in the market place but either way, the thing about the app store, aside from taking a punt on various frivolous games or utilities, its not the place where you go to get more the more serious and weighty software apps. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be but at the moment that is not how it is generally used. Sales of this particular app will be keenly watched over the next 12 months. Apple have always maintained that they don’t really make much out of the app store, like its a loss-leader but maybe they are starting to look at taking their app store to the next level. Good luck Wolfram, let’s see what you can do.

As a little aside, how about this article which says that Apple are soon to allow free apps to themselves offer ‘In-app purchases.’ That means you can download an app that itself can bill customers.  Might the likes of Ebay, Skype and PayPal be the first to lead the way here with iPhone billing.

Whilst here talking around iPhone apps and the app store, I was quite excited to learn of a new developers kit that can be downloaded to help you make your own iPhone apps. It comes from a company called Tap Lynx and here’s an article on the product/company.

Anyone there like to comment on their iPhone app ‘buying’ or downloading strategy, are you a freebees only type of person? What are the apps that you don’t mind paying £5 or over for? Has anyone had to configure an app pricing strategy? I’d be interested to hear any thoughts or comments on any of this.

GruvMe – New Kid On The Media Block

I’ve just picked up on something that could be very big news for the delivery of multimedia on mobile platforms. A free application download called GruvMe enables you to pull down HD quality movies, videos, music and games on your mobile – most platforms are supported. This of course could have huge implications for Apple’s iPhone and iTunes. It’s only in public beta at the moment but this has definitely got to be one to watch.

A related article is here.

M3X Media’s website is here.

iPhone App Revenues

Although there are some great developer success stories, it’s not all glory for mobile app developers. Streaming Colour (the makers of an iPhone game widget) explain their revenues from a $4.99 iPhone game they have made called Dapple. This article is quite interesting because the metrics of costs and royalties are broken down. He has incurred a heavy front-end development cost of $32,000, which gives his break-even of around selling 9,150 units but has sold around 151 copies, despite great reviews. His next step is to bring the price point down by producing a ‘lite’ version with the hope of bringing in more volume.

The full article can be seen here.

Social Networking in Asia – Watch Out for Hi5

In terms of European / American social networking websites, it’s pretty much all Facebook and MySpace. Over in Asia, there are different players that dominate, sites such as Hi5 and Friendster. When online to anyone from Asia, if they wanted to share more of their information with you, you would always be pointed towards a Hi5 or Friendster page (long before the buzz of MySpace or FaceBook had taken hold over here). Asians seem to connect more deeply with things virtual, projecting themselves into their own customized worlds. It was from Asia that I first saw people experimenting with personal avatars. Also, Asian social network audiences tend to be younger (although if anyone has any data references, do send them over) and because of this they will glitz up their profiles with all manner of sparkling, flashing, eye catching widgets (see my naff Hi5 profile here as an example – excuse the hash of the music file I have made. I keep meaning to sort it out).

Anyway, the reason for all this preamble is as a precursor to news on big moves for both Hi5 and Friendster. Hi5 are looking to take on Facebook and other players in the Asian space. A recent development late last year was to incorporate virtual currency with the virtual gifting of Hi5 coins but more are underway to make Hi5 an  “immersive social environment” that includes virtual goods, avatars, games, instant messaging and a 3-D world. See more here. It gets my vote, trying to bring in revenue without advertising revenue reliance. Also, a big thumbs-up article for Hi5 from Venture Beat can be found here.

Friendster although being US based are huge in Asia and have now made the timely move to consolidate their Asian market by opening up new offices in Sydney and Singapore, flooding them with new Executives. Be aware also that many Asian countries have social networking sites that many of us will never have heard of: Xiaonel (China), Xanga (Hong Kong), CyWorld (South Korea), Yahoo 360 (Vietnam) and Mixi (Japan). See more detail on how here on how Facebook fights its corner in Asia.

The Web Analytics World comparisons for 2007 are here but unfortunately, apart from India, there is no Asian representation. It does however show how popular the site Orkut (Google operated) is in India in.

And finally, two other sources. the first is heavy going but there are some nuggets of gold in this report for those who might find comparisons between the social networking sites of the US and Korea. The report from J P Shim, Mississippi State Uni can be found here. Secondly, a SlideShare presentation comparing the leading SNS’s of Asia here.

Reality Digital: Evolved Social Networking For Brands

I met with Rob Proctor from Reality Digital yesterday. The industry speak to describe what they do would be something like; ‘enterprise-scale, white label, SaaS, social media platform for brands to engage with their audience in a more meaningful way, building brand recognition, increasing reach and revenue.’ Essentially, it is a SaaS offering to brands looking to take their online community to the next level; beyond just forums and blogging.

The company is based in San Francisco and is represented in Europe with an office just off Oxford Street. Founded originally by three individuals: Cynthia Francis, Randy St Jean and Ed Klein, it names clients as MTV, NFL, The Travel Channel and Lonely Planet. Here in the newly open UK base, ITV and Nokia have come on-board.

Other products in the same space would be Pluck and KickApps but Rob believes the comparisons are not that direct. From the Crunchbase entry it says, “In addition to video uploading, the platform can handle audio blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forums – pretty much anything that you’d see on MySpace or YouTube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns.”

Funding rounds for the company have been $2m in 2005 and $6.3m in 2008 (Open View Venture Partners).

E-Consultancy take a look at several players in this field here.

TweetDeck – New Funding

Iain Dodsworth’s London based TweetDeck has raised funding (led by seed funding house Betaworks) that could amount to up to  $500,000. TweetDeck is a free product that rides of the back of the micro-blogging social networking service Twitter.

TweetDeck organizes Twitter feeds into categorizes via the Twitter API and was until recently an Adobe Air desktop application in beta.

Just as with Twitter, we are all waiting to see which path to revenue this burgeoning area of social networking development takes. I’d love to see more than just the standard reliance on advertising revenues. Might there be room for virtual currency, brand partnerships or fee led enterprise level product development (which I gather is Dodsworth’s preferred route)? I wonder how an add-on app such as this as it starts out, gauges the viability of committing funds and resources to development, in the hope that the product that it follows will not decide to develop something of a similar nature. Is there something in the API agreement to give 3rd party developers reassurance? I used to wonder the same thing with all the Apple add-on products. Apple didn’t seem to buy-out many of  the companies that developed off their OS but somehow the ideas and products soon seemed to get incorporated.

A new RSS reader for iPhone – Mippin

I love my RSS reader on my iPhone. I use Newsgator’s, NetNewsWire across 2 Mac laptops and an iPhone but here comes another. It’s called Mippin and in 2 months has reached 20,000 downloads. Supposedly, iPhone and G1 users stay using their RSS phone readers for the greatest length of time – probably due to screen size and usability, or as it says in techCrunch “ the mobile web rocks on these devices compared to any other handset.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

This article covers all my favourite issues: an iPhone product, web 2.0 monitisation, VC take-up. One to watch possibly?

Newsgator’s RSS can be found here.

TechCrunch article on Mippin can be seen here.

Mippin can be found here.

Open-Source Twitter

Just seen a rather interesting article on an open-source version of Twitter. Ewan Spence of Mobile Messaging 2.0 writes, “It means corporations could run a private ‘Twitter like’ service behind a firewall for just their employees. This points to a growth in micro-blogging as a standard, that will be free of a single site and becomes something that people will build into tolls and services for many years to come.”

The full article can be seen here.

You can trial the product here.

The Library House – Sold

I think it’s a shame the way TechCrunch have splashed the word ‘FAIL’ over the Library House logo on their post. The article is a good analysis of the information market in that space but do we really need to tag entrepreneurs that way? Can’t entrepreneurs occasionally  sometimes do some not-so-good deals. They explored a market and felt there was some space to expand in it. I don’t think they were expecting phenomenal growth in the way a web2.0 business might. I sure it was more about embedding themselves in the wider investment space and having the ability to know where the future investment possibilities were, not only for their clients but for themselves also.

“Cambridge-based technology VC deals tracker Library House, which went into administration last month, has had its database of deals sold to Dow Jones. The Library House database and customers will now go into Dow Jones’s VentureSource, a larger, similar service.”

Anyway, they sold the business. This wasn’t akin to the crumbling business that was Woolworths. Dow Jones make a big song and dance about this acquisition, which for me highlights that even in a downturn, the assets and business of the LH were of good enough value for the DJ to buy it. Does anyone know how the Library House fared in the sale?

Full article here.