Tag Archive for ‘Appstore’ at WIP Jam Sessions

Tag Archive for 'Appstore'

WIPJam @ MWC App Planet - Agenda is up!

Published

on January 11, 2010

in Barcelona, Mobile Jam Session, Uncategorized, WIPjam, app store, developer and mobile world congress

. 2 Comments

Mobile World Congress is coming up VERY soon! Yikes. It’s time to go through the checklist:
- airfare booked - check
- room booked - check
- signed up for WIPJam - check!

Wait a minute…. are you telling me you you haven’t done any of these yet :-0

Well - you are in luck! Because WIP is a Mobile World Congress App Planet Partner, it’s not too late to get yourself signed up and even get some good deals.

FIRST the travel

Hotel deals: MWC has identified several hotels in Barcelona that do not require a minimum stay. This is perfect for developers and guests that will only be attending a specific App Developer Conference or a limited portion of the Congress.

Airfare deals: Save up to 30% on domestic and up to 20% on international travel to Barcelona between 10 February 2010 and 23 February 2010 with Spanair and the Star Alliance Network.

To take advantage go to: http://www.appplanethotel.beinbeyond.com/
UserName: WIP
Password: Developer

There are also lots of great apartments around to share. We know a few folks who are looking for some roomies - let us know if you’d like to connect.

NOW for WIPJam and FREE Passes to MWC!

WIP has 200 Guest/Exhibit passes for entry to MWC2010, to give to eligible developers to attend(that’s a 599 Euro value). What’s an eligible developer you ask? We will favor small companies, you must attend WIPJam, and you have to write something creative on the WIPJam registration page!

Why attend WIPJam?

Well - you wouldn’t ask that if you were a Jam veteran! It’s a great place to learn about mobile development, participate in discussions to find out information really relevant to YOU, and to meet and connect with LOTS of people in the mobile developer ecosystem that can start making a difference in your business right way.

Check out the Agenda! Featuring:

1 WIP Buzz Session
2   UnPanels - #1 Sticky and Spready Redux, #2 App Store Placement Optimization
8   Discussion Groups: Cross Platform Development, Merchandising your Application, Opportunities in Open Source, Mobile Web Development, Emerging Markets, Augmented Reality, Features and Enhancements for Addictive Apps and Getting Cool Content from the Cloud
1   Lunch
10+   Demos
200+   Jammers

Great sponsors like:

Qualcomm, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Enough Software, MoSync, O2 Litmus, Perfecto Mobile, GetJar and Oracle.

And here are just some of the speakers:
Sean Galligan, Flurry
Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic
Francisco Kattan , Alcatel Lucent
Simon Davies, Snaptu
Patrick Mork, Getjar
Deep Shah, Buzzd
Katie Lips, Kisky Netmedia
Robert Virkus, Enough Software
Eran Yaniv, Perfecto Mobile
Charles McLeod, MetaFlow
Matts Bergrund, Swirly Space
Tony Hartley, MoSync
Ofir Leitner, Mobile Monday Televiv
James Parton, O2 Litmus
Emmanuel Ekuwem, ATCON (Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria)
Lester Madden, Augmented Planet
David Caabeiro, Sequence Point
Patrik Nordstrom, idevio
Scott Jensen, LegiTime
Raj Singh, Skyfire
Stephen Cull, Oracle

and of course Caroline Lewko (me) and Thibaut Rouffineau of WIP facilitating, ringing bike bells, cutting off any visible ties and making sure the developer voice is heard loud and clear!

More details to come as we wrap up sponsors and speakers! See you soon.

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32 appstores on the WIP appstore wiki at the end of 2009!

Published

thibaut

on January 3, 2010

in app store and developer

. 0 Comments

32 mobile appstores!

That’s what we finished 2009 with (see January report on wipconnector)! And luckily we do not list yet the various appstore announcements on the verge of the mobile sphere like the Ford SYNC enabled appstore or Sun Java Store otherwise our wiki would be on fire.

So 2009 was the year of the appstore glut maybe… however it was also a year that saw new forms / concepts of appstores rather than un-differentiated ones, addressing specific issues such as discovery and recommendation or specific markets which can only be favorable for developers and consumers. Have a look at the newcomers for December and judge by yourself.

If we are to judge future smartphone platform success by the number of appstores distributing their apps, Android has a slight lead with 53% of appstores distributing Android apps, followed by Windows Mobile with 50% (mostly for historical reason one could claim), Blackberry with 40% and Symbian with 37.5% are forming a second group of established players, followed by iPhone and Palm with 19% closing the ranks.

What is even more interesting is to look at the fact that about 2/3 of these appstores were launched in the last 6 months… looking at the platforms targeted by these appstores the results are in line with the previous numbers. If we look at “new appstores” only… those created in the past 6 months… unsurprisingly a lot more fragmentation kicks in as the number of new appstores players concentrating on a specific platform counterbalances the large OEM / Operators coming in this space. So newer players but… the same trend can be seen with 40% for Android and Windows mobile, 27% for Symbian and 18% for Blacbkerry, 13% for iPhone, and 5% by Palm and Limo (for widget only).

One can only be surprised looking at these figures by the similarities between a long established (struggling?) player in the mobile platform space Microsoft and the new kid on the block Google’s Android. Both of them encouraging or generating fortuitously the creation of somewhat fragmented appstores ecosystem around the platform . Sign of success or sign of failure?

New appstores in December:

Zanox : Simple concept of appstore including mobile, web code snippet, SAAS, looking to connect developers to brands and publishers. A B2B exchange place aimed at increasing on-line purchases by encouraging developers to produce interactive and addictive applications using Zanox affiliate APIs.

In a sense this appstore concept brings something rather new and interesting to developers : access to B2B marketing and advertising money without the need to build personal commercial relationships with brands and agencies… With the obvious drawback of getting a much higher share of risk and exposing themselves to copy.

Overall this is a good example of a web appstore and will be a good touchstone to see how revenue making can be associated with the mobile web.

MobileIron: Another good example of an appstore turning towards B2B to bring new revenue streams for developers. In this case by getting IS department within enterprises to select / pay for / deploy applications for their entire workforce. This kind of solution could sounds like an obvious merge between traditional device management solutions and appstores. But in an era where the enterprise mobile IT agenda tends to follow consumer mobile technology solutions, this could be a good way for enterprises to do a substantial leapfrog in their mobile IS policies.

It is also quite interesting to see how new appstores position themselves around recommendation(see very good post from Visionmobile on the subject), generating revenue from affiliation (as per our previous post on ideal appstore). 2 examples there :

Mplayit an appstore entirely built as a facebook application

and positioned around facebook friend recommendation.

Specialised in iPhone, Blackberry, Java applications, and

recently Android .
AppstoreHQ.com an appstore specialized

in social media / twitter / blogger recommendation for iPhone applications.

That’s it for 2009!

Now tell us! What will you remember of 2009 when it comes to appstores ?

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Interview with Victor Shaburov CEO of Handster

Published

thibaut

on November 27, 2009

in Interview and app store

. 2 Comments

Victor To accompany the launch of the WIPwiki appstore WIP’s been going around interviewing mobile Appstore providers of the kind you generally do not hear about. In this first interview we talked to Victor Shaburov, CEO of Handster. Handster provide a mobile appstore but more importantly specialize in white label appstores for OEM and Operators.

WIP: We love the name of your company does it stand for “Napster of the handheld device world”?

VS : Yes, the name originally had some hints to this, because we were doing SDK with direct payment and peer-to-peer sharing (with possibility to make a few dollars on sharing apps). Sharing was later dropped, but the name remained.

[Neat idea to get users to swap app directly with built-in billing and an affiliate scheme, this one score high in the ideal appstore (see on the left hand corner) discussion]

Handster launched pretty recently in a world where appstores are getting more numerous by the day. Why did you decide to start a new appstore then? What makes you different?

Project was actually started in 2004, so it is not that recent.
Right now we are focusing on providing more qualitative content:

we are adding screenshots to app descriptions.

we support 10 languages and translated lot of program descriptions

we started making video reviews of applications with professional voice artists. Video reviews explain the software and make it easier for customers to make purchase decision.

we are working on worldwide SMS payment integration, to make purchase simple for everyone.

And we have highly flexible white label AppStore platform for carriers, handset manufacturers and other distributors.

Video review of MiniTranscanada as found on Handster (don’t ask why we chose this one )

Unfortunately, though we have seen a lot of appstore launched lately, none of them seems to be getting the level of success that Apple and iPhone developers have. Do you think we’ll see such a success coming to other platforms?

Android already shows a similar success. Apple AppStore generates up to 9USD per user/month, Andoid around 8 USD as recent reviews show - so that is close.
We believe that other platforms will catch up with them after some time.

As you support multiple platforms on Handster, do you have any insights in terms of where should developers concentrate their efforts?

We are neutral and welcome success of any platform.

You say you work with HP and LG to give them content for their stores, how does it work? If more people get on the way doesn’t it mean less money for developers?

Apple has a special situation, where they own hardware, OS and are able to push their conditions to mobile operators.
But in general, you should make everyone happy - and mobile operators and handset manufacturers should participate in the success of AppStores.
We see potential for us in this area and offer white label AppStore platform for mobile operators and handset manufacturers.
That, of course, makes a developer’s share smaller, but what matters in the end is the paycheck that they receive.
We offer software developers stronger discoverability and promotion of their applications on AppStores of our partners - this is an additional revenue channel for them.

Handster_main_page
What’s your view on application testing and certification? How long is Handster certification process?

We test applications of new software developers, and once we are sure about their quality, we basically allow to publish updates and new apps live anytime.
Depending on a partner (carrier, handset manufacturer), we sometimes do re-testing for a particular handset and offer only compatible software.

Where do you think appstores in general have to improve?

More payment options, better discoverability of applications, quality content.

And finally, what is going to be your challenge in the coming months?

We are actively looking for more partners among mobile operators and handset manufacturers from one side, to offer them a white label AppStore platform and aggregated content.
And we are looking for more software developers, to distribute their apps through our channels. Developers can register with Handster using this link: http://www.handster.com/developers.php

Thank you Victor!

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No ppt but loads of ties and panels at ITU

Published

thibaut

on October 23, 2009

in ITU, Open innovation, developer, open source, wip and wireless

. 0 Comments

Launch of the App STore Wiki at ITU and CTIA

Came back from Geneva where I was 2 weeks ago for ITU Telecom World! And haven’t had found to finish this blog… but here it is now! In a self admitted mixed bag of thoughts and things seen.

For those of you who cannot remember ITU Telecom World, it used to be the craziest / biggest / unmissable event in the telecom space! Well of course it was in 1999, we were all going to be wheeling in our personal optical cable behind us to get our necessary 100M/s dose of “bits”… Now we know better and have realized that carrying a mobile phone is much better than carrying a cable wheel… So the show had to rethink about itself… So the ITU Telecom World now concentrates a lot more on mobile than it has done before moving away from its fixed roots (can one have mobile roots ).

So it’s all mobile.. It’s all about cybersecurity… It’s all about about governance and standards… it’s all about ICT being a key driver for overall economic development especially in times of recession… It’s all about the next 1 Billion users and the deployment of mobile in developing countries… And… a lot of suits, lots of ties and lots of government representatives. (I even had to put a tie on to participate to a videoed Telecom TV debate on the subject on “Show me the Money” available here)

A different crowd then different discussions for sure but still mobile application and services development was at the center of many discussions, as the mobile phone becomes a quasi universal information, communication and computing device. So a lot of attention and demand for application and content providers which was also reflected in the official theme of the conference “open innovation” or more exactly “Open networks, connected minds”. Developers and content providers were praised by all as being the future of the telecom industry and critical to further economic development either through eHealth, sensors, mobile banking. Unfortunately examples of activities, exchanges, lessons learned in the field of open innovation were rather spurious.

WIP on the invitation of NGMN organized a panel to bring in those very practical examples: our objective being to cover the various aspects of “open innovation” with the developer community and how to deliver on this innovation in a sustainable way (scoring high at the ITU buzzword bingo here). Or in more down to earth terms “how can operators, OEMs and all platform providers work more collaboratively with developers rewarding risk taking more appropriately and facilitating decision making for developreneurs”. A great panel then covering a wide range of subjects from open source, to appstore, to end-user analytics sharing, to the importance of mobile to redefine customer relationships, to the increased importance of making mobile data available on the cloud. The panel available for NGMN members here , thanks a lot to the panelists : NGMNpanel

Joe Barrett, Qualcomm
Emiliano Ceraldi, Telecom Italia
Jérôme Lepeu, Mobile Distillery
Dr Toshitaka Tsuda, Fujitsu Laboratories
Mike Yonker, Nielsen Mobile

And for those of you interested in the geeky stuff on the show floor, they were sparse but here are a few cool things spotted:

The Docomo booth was rather impressive with 2 prominent demos of Augmented reality both given on HTC Android phones. (not so surprising when you see popularity of Layar in Japan)..With a couple of Blackberry’s added to their product lineups this made for a not so usual Docomo booth.
Augmented reality was hot among developers with a few more companies demonstrating their solutions. One that caught my eye was a demo by KDDI, because .. it was running on a mid-tier Brew device, basically stating that embarking the correct hardware on mid-tier phone could open a much wider market for Augmented Reality.
The OPhone and Mobile Market were massive on China Mobile’s booth. I could finally make a mental and real pictures of the OPhone OS and Developer Network as well as the whole collection of OPhones from 5 different manufacturers showing the impetus behind the platform. So mental picture is:

OPhone OS = a variant of Android, -2 hardware buttons, + China Mobile APIs and improved navigation + JIL widgets + Chinese character hand writing

Looking forward for your views on the mental pictures… In the mean time here are the physical pictures: