WIP Jam Sessions - Connecting Developers

Sticky or Spready?

Sticky or Spready? Which would you choose? That was the premise for our hot UnPanel on mobile analytics at the WIPJam session at CTIA in San Diego on October 8, 2009.

The winner? Sticky, which measures the user engagement and satisfaction with a mobile application, was chosen by all three UnPanelists - Sean Galligan of Flurry, Jeff Wender of Nielsen and Mark Donovan of ComScore. My co-facilitator Seamus McAteer of Majestic Research agreed. The reason being you want an application to stick, for someone to want it, use it, and more importantly – pay for it!

Now that’s not to say that being spready (hey, it was a Jam session) or viral isn’t important. And a viral campaign is certainly needed to spread the word in a mobile marketplace that is getting increasingly noisy. But app developers need to first develop an application to meet a market demand (not a new story, but one worth repeating!)

The next question then was – how do you measure the sticky or spready success of your application? The UnPanelists and Jammers offered a number of market level and ‘in-app’ metrics as follows:

Market Level Metrics which tend to be more costly to track down include:

• Audience size
• Types of phones
• Demographics
• Preferences

In-App Metrics to track include:

• Revenue tracking
• Comparative value
• Volume
• Technology
• Customer features such as page views, event tracking and navigation.
• Usage metrics such as:User
  Sessions
  Session length
  Frequency
  Retention
  Geography

What did we miss? - add your comments.There was also some discussion from some of the big companies about providing some info to WIP to share with developers…..  Apply some pressure so it happens - keep asking them for it!

Cross media analytics are when both market level and in-app metrics are used together.

Flurry is becoming a key player in this space offering the first free, cross-platform service to provide developers with detailed analytics about how, when, where and by whom their mobile applications are being used. Their customers are getting great insight into how customers are using their applications – often in ways never expected. Flurry recently announced a partnership with T-Mobile USA who is offering the Flurry analytics tool to their developers (another WIPJam introduction!)

Darius Gandhi and colleague from HipVoice winner of the ATT Award with Caroline Lewko of WIP

In other exciting news from CTIA – congratulations to HipVoice, with their push-to-talk software solution, who were winners of the AT&T Fast Pitch Platinum Awards in the Enterprise category.  Check out the great video of the awards here. When we met Darius Gandhi of HipVoice (see photo) at our WIPJam session at CTIA in Las Vegas earlier this year, we knew he and his company were winners so we did what we had to do. We introduced HipVoice to Ed Schmidt from AT&T Dev Central and also got Darius to lead a Discussion Session at WIPJam!

The last interesting tidbit from WIPJam came during our opening UnPanel on Going Global, with a comment by Tim Chang of Norwest Ventures partners who let us know that VCs aren’t interested in companies whose sole revenue model is based on mobile advertising, the reach just isn’t there yet.

To all our UnPanelists, Discussion Leaders and YOU our attendees - thanks for Jam’n with WIP.

And thanks to our great sponsors:  Qualcomm, Sony Ericsson, BlackBerry, AT&T Dev Central, Eclipse-Pulsar, Mobile Socery and Forum Nokia.

Here are a few more photos:

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