Tag: mobile content Page 6 of 12

Carnival of the Mobilists #192

On 21/09/2009

The 192nd iteration of the Carnival of the Mobilists is under way. This week’s edition is hosted by C Enrique Ortiz on his About Mobility blog and features an overview of Opera Mini 5, a background story on app stores (juicy: written by a Qualcomm exec), some stuff on mobile learning and, last but not least, my own “little” contribution on mobile’s role in the transformation of the music business (which also received a “favourite of the week” note; thanks C Enrique!).

Check it out, it is well worth a read! You’ll find it here.

Judi Dench Movie Launches on Mobile First!

By Volker

On 12/09/2009

In 1

On today’s is a stunningly beautiful Indian summer morning in England’s North-West and I have been indulging in the Guardian‘s weekend supplement. One of the features was an interview with Dame Judi Dench, the iconic actress of Shakespearean as well as James Bondian fame. It is well worth a read but the little bit that caught my attention for the sake of this blog was to be found at the very end: Dench’s upcoming movie (Jude Law and a few others star, too), “Rage”, a project with arthouse director Sally Potter, will see its world premiere not in some swish viewing room or cinema in SoHo but on mobile phones. The prosaic announcement read:

Rage premieres on mobile phones on 21 September and in cinemas on 24 September. For details, go to ragemovie.com.

And that was that.

I find it noteworthy not only that it would happen at all but also that it appears to be somewhat normal, so that no one would actually bother to point it out specifically. Sometimes, progress moves in indiscernible little steps that can happen on stunningly beautiful mornings. This is one of them.

Is Spotify finding the Business on the Move?

By Volker

On 09/09/2009

In 1

Spotify was a breath of fresh air when it hit the markets. Finally, there was someone who combined the ease of iTunes with unsurpassed breadth in catalogue. Lots of songs. Always available. And even the ads weren’t all that bad (which is why few people upgraded to the ad-free premium version [more on this below], much to the dismay of label executives who – rightly – fail to see the greater good of dependable revenue streams from those few ads; although they are getting more, mind you).

Then, back in July, Spotify submitted its iPhone app to Apple. And the big wait began. After lots of back and forth and speculation if it would or would not, Apple finally approved the app. So now it’s live, and not only on the app store (where it ranked #1 on the UK store when I checked tonight) but also on Android Market. A Symbian version is in the works.

All reviews I have read are raving: from “very impressed” (and that’s the Daily Telegraph no less) to having “to pry it out of my cold, dead iPhone” (Wired), everyone waxes lyrical about the thing. It comes with a load of stuff, too: streaming all your favourites from over 6m tracks on the go sounds promising, and one can also sync up to 3,333 (what a number!) songs for offline use in the networks’ broadband doldrums.

The trouble (!?) is: you can only use it as a premium subscriber, which means forking out £10 per month. Which brings me conveniently to the key point, which is the business underlying model.

The labels are fairly happy, it seems. Because they got shares in Spotify itself. Some more equal than others though: the majors are said to have received a disproportionately high stake). The same report claims though that ad income is only £82,000 and, in the UK, only 17,000 users had signed up for the premium version. However, shareholders and all that, Spotify still has to pay the labels a fee per streamed track, irrespective of the user paying or not. Tricky model, that. Note though that this might be different in other countries: according to reports, the world’s largest major, Universal Music is making more money from Spotify in Sweden than from iTunes!

Anyhow, all this was before the mobile app, and mobile may well be the game-changer for them… The launch of the iPhone app, glorified niche audience or not, seems to have gone fairly well (#1 position on fhe app store within days of launch). Spotify reckons that mobile is where its future lies. And this had been echoed (and well ahead of the actual launch!!!) by others in the industry, and perhaps rightly so: if users are used to (and in love with) a service they are more likely to pay for it if that means they can also have it whilst on the road. For the marriage of music with the world’s leading MP3 player come mobile phone, the iPhone, this seems to be made in heaven: I can have the smallest model and still carry 6m+ tracks around with me? Wow! Here’s value-add!

The much-discussed freemium model it is then: get them hooked on the free desktop app and convert them to paying users on mobile. It has long been known that users are more likely to pay if stuff is portable (I can still recall the disbelief of music executives when they realized that people would pay more for a monophonic ringtone than for a full-blown music track). And whilst now the link between (free) basic service on the desktop and (premium) mobile service is new, the principle is old and proven: and it is simply added value (plus the little things like being used to paying on mobile and having convenient existing billing models in place). If the user perception is that they are getting value for money, they are willing to pay. And if it is for such a fairly special thing such as music (don’t we all love and nurture our very own musical mix tastes?), the step is even easier to make.

Spotify fully expects this to fly: they are upgrading their servers already. Labels are said to be still a little jumpy but I reckon their experiences over the last decade or so have shown that their is a need to re-think incumbent models…

Warner Brothers push into mobile!

By Volker

On 01/06/2009

In 1

They’re coming… The big entertainment players are increasingly gearing up to take charge of their mobile destinies. Whereas previously a lot of the big movie studios would simply license out the rights to mobile applications and games to independent game companies (Gameloft and Glu having been particularly active), they seem to increasingly embrace the medium themselves. Sony, Disney, Paramount – they have all recently been self-publishing on the – erm – iPhone. Other mobile platforms? The 98% non-iPhone handsets? Erm, maybe later…

Going a little further, Warner Brothers digital arm plans to release no fewer than 40 iPhone apps in 2009. And besides Warner properties like “Terminator Salvation”, it looks to doing on this platform what it has proven to be quite capable of in others, namely production and distribution. It therefore plans not only to publish Warner-related apps but wants to assert itself as a leading distributor of mobile apps full stop.

It banks on its might and star power claiming that developers would struggle to find Apple’s ear. And there is certainly truth in this as a major studio (with all the marketing muscle that comes with it, may well be of more appeal to Apple when it comes to accentuate the wild growth of its 30,000+ apps on the app store. The return of the old publishing model then?!

But, well, they all do it not on just any mobile but on the iPhone only (I hear you sigh…). So why only the iPhone? 1.x% market share and all? Well, it’s simple and it’s powerful: Warner mentioned that “it doesn’t cost a lot to launch an app”. And that is probably true for the iPhone (at least when you are used to movie budgets). However, it could not be less inaccurate for “classic” mobile: one needs all the carrier distribution agreements, battle handset fragmentation and ends up with a product that is inferior (apps and games on J2ME devices will often fail on the “smallest-common-denominator” rule and lack polish when compared to the iPhone) and much more expensive to produce. Hey, carriers and OEM: another call to simplify and unify your platforms!

Are you Smarter…?

By Volker

On 26/05/2009

In 1

The sales power of the Apple App Store is legendary with its 1bn+ downloads in record time. I have repeatedly held though that the other end of this ecosystem, i.e. the entry door to the app store (and related SDK and all) – and its relative ease of use – was an equally imporant contributor to Apple’s success. And now we have a beautiful example on how cool this really is: in Chicago, an 11-year old and his 9-year-old brother designed and programmed an application called “MathTime” that has just gone live on the app store. It provides random addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems and their solutions.

The creators, Owen and Finn Voorhees, worked on it for 9 months and it is now live on the app store, which means available for sale in every country the iPhone is currently available – on deck so to speak! Try this with a J2ME app…

Now, I do not want to belittle Owen’s efforts (it is spectacularly awesome for any 11-year-old!) but this would arguably not have been possible on any other (mobile) software platform. Even if some smart kid might be able to write such a programme. To get it into live distribution on official on-device app stores (or operator portals) would be just utterly unthinkable. Try close those deals with all them operators. Good luck.

I have not seen the MathTime in action but since Apple approved it to go live, it must have passed at least certain thresholds. The whole ecosystem on any of the “classic” carrier channels would have thwarted any attempt to do the same. Would it have worked on Android Market? On the Blackberry App World? Nokia Ovi? I don’t know but it does not really matter since they are basically only further iterations of the model that Apple came out with first: a cr0ss-carrier, multi-territory, single-SKU deployment channel with a fairly regulated development environment. Fragmentation? Hah! Multi-channel distribution? What?

It is here where we should sing Apple’s praise: to make it possible that 5th graders can not only write but publish an application is truly stunning! That their dad needs to front it as the seller for being the only adult involved in the process is then only a touching and even more pronounced little detail, isn’t it?

123 Play at Metro

By Volker

On 18/04/2009

123 Metro could be the name of the latest Major League Soccer franchise but it signifies a neat deal that 123Play, a service that wraps mobile games with ads free to end users, has just struck with the newspaper mavericks from Metro (they’re the guys with the free newspapers; see here for UK and here for the [seeming] inventors of the concept).

I like this deal a lot as it is so natural: Metro is a very successful advertising-driven medium and it ties in extremely well with 123Play’s model. Seamless, simple, very neat: anecdotally, a lot of people play games on their mobile when they have time to kill. Likewise, a lot of people read Metro when they have time to kill, namely when they commute on public transport. One challenge will of course be that there is no mobile reception in the London tube (or most other undergrounds for that matter) but the overall concept should work.

Disclosure: my company works with 123play.com (although I don’t think this post will bring me front-page coverage on Metro…).

iPhone all-time top 20 apps, countdown to 1bn downloads

By Volker

On 13/04/2009

In Apple, OEM

I’ve been raving about it many a time and I still won’t stop but then: Apple does neither. When, waaaay back in January, I looked last, the App Store had raced through 500 million downloads and I calculated this to equate 4,000 per minute. Well, that’s history: We’re now through a 948 million total (count taken on 13 April, 11.23pm UK time from Apple’s site [check the little clock]) and look at 6,000 downloads per minute (or 100 every second of every minute of every hour of every day!) or so some learned friends have summed it up to.

Apple also revealed a list of the top 20 all-time top downloads, both paid and free, which (courtesy of MoCoNews) is this:

So here’s the good stuff for my gaming friends: 14 out of the top 20 paid apps are games! Yes, baby! 6 out of the top 20 free ones are, too. Way to go! I haven’t looked at the pricing for the above paid apps but MoCoNews did: ¢99 is the prevailing price-point at the moment but $4.99 seems to be the price point of choice for “premium” games.