Canada earning mobile cred
Posted by Editor in applications, mobile
Not to mention Vancouver, Montreal and a lot of other great mobile development happening across the country, but it’s great to see Toronto (and Canada) earning some international recognition.
White boards abound, as groups of 20-somethings huddle around computers tweaking software that delivers CNN Money, Time and other tier-one news feeds to the BlackBerry and iPhone.
Only, Polar Mobile isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in Toronto. Conservative, cold, conventional Toronto — which is home to one of the world’s biggest clusters of mobile-application companies this side of Silicon Valley.
“It’s very much a hotbed,” said Michele Perras, director of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre, a non-profit mobile-apps research and consulting organization. Perras estimates there are 200 mobile-apps-development companies in the greater Toronto Area, while another 750 GTA companies now have mobile-content offerings.
Proximity to several schools with world class computer-science and design programs, such as the University of Waterloo and the Ontario College of Art & Design, is one reason for Toronto’s emergence as a mobile-apps hub. Availability of public and private-sector funding is another, as is access to entrepreneurs and engineers who cut their teeth working at or with Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd.(RIMM), whose headquarters are just one hour west of Toronto in Waterloo, Ont.
just a few years ago, would you have expected such a headline?
LINK: Toronto Becoming A Hub For Mobile-Apps Companies [WSJ]
Non-paywall version: here
Posted by Editor in applications, iphone
Contributor Tim Tang from MaRS has been digging around the apple iTunes store data looking for tips to pass on to aspiring app developers. Tim writes to Wirelessnorth:
The Apple App Store. What should developers know about it? How competitive is the landscape? How should developers price their app? Conversion rate from free app to paid app?
In the past 8 months, I have crawled iTunes, Mobclix, 148Apps, comScore, Techcrunch, and many developer sites. The average price across the store is USD $2.47. The conversion rate from fee app to paid app is typically 0.25%-2%, and one should not consider quitting their day job unless their app is at least in the 99.9 percentile.
Along the way, I have come across many interesting trends. For instance, app pricings are dropping and accelerating due to the downward market pressure from the supply of free apps. Or, despite downward pricing pressure, the expected value of the App Store has increased more than 60% in 3 months since March. However, it’s important to separate the merely interesting from the truly important.
What is truly important, and the more difficult question to answer, is how to improve monetisation and increase revenue per app. In my research, I found two actionable recommendations for App Store developers. Both recommendations resonate with bigger issues in Canada and around the world today: how to become more competitive in the knowledge economy and how to commercialise digital media assets? The answer, as Jacek Utko has eloquently put it on TED, is design.
Major App Store findings and a few pointers from Apple can be found in my report, A Guide to the Apple App Store, which I am sharing with the community. The iPhone and the App Store are sold in more than 80 countries. Yet, limited market intelligence is available for developers to make informed decisions. The purpose of my report is to gather and interpolate data in order to help developers establish both achievable milestones and expectations.
The first recommendation for developers is to design for social, outgoing, inter-connected consumers. iTunes data show this customer base not only has a bigger budget for mobile software, but also they are more willing to try new apps from a range of categories. The second recommendation for developers is to think long term about renewal revenue from the get-go and design apps as delivery platforms for new content on a fixed release schedule.
iPhone OS 3.0 and In-App Purchase will enable on-demand-subscription revenue model that put Freemium business models in the spotlight. For more information, click here for the report and here for the iTunes data I compiled.
LINK: Download the full dataset here
We know a few readers of WirelessNorth.ca have put together an iPhone app or two. Any tips to pass on?
UPDATE: Link fixed
UPDATE2: see also this excellent series by cannuck iPhone developers ENDLOOP: How to start, build, launch and market your first iPhone App in 28 days
Posted by Editor in applications, events
If you are an iPhone dev, you’ve already heard the news. Apple has dropped the (@#$!) NDA terms on iphone apps. This means you, we can actually talk to each other about iPhone development. There’s only one thing to do, hold an iPhone dev’s meetup and pub event to celebrate.
How about a Toronto meetup downtown, tentatively Thursday Oct 9 6:30pm-ish, details/venue to follow. Drop a note in the comments if you’d like to be there. Bring your ideas, your apps (just the, er, released ones, honest). Drop a note if you’d like to organize one elsewhere too.
photo by shapeshift
Posted by Editor in applications
# Montreal’s OZ communications sells to Nokia. The scoop: “What OZ does is enables branded (think Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MySpace, etc.) email, instant messaging and social networking on handsets. Their focus has been consumers and they had typically worked with feature phones. They have recently moved up-market with an enterprise-like “Smart Mail” offering aimed at professionals, small business owners and frequent email users.”
# Fonolo’s mobile app wins Judge’s prize at mobilize We’ve written about fonolo before, and should have mentioned this story earlier. Great voice 2.0 applications here, and now on mobile. Fonolo is like a voice-bot that navigates call centre trees for you… or any other applications you can think of, they just released an api.
# Got your own recent mobile success story? send it in :)
By the way, in the back of our collective brain here at WirelessNorth.ca, we’re working on a new presentation deck “The State of the Wireless Industry in Canada is… Awesome”. You may recognize this as a counterpoint an earlier, alternate, thesis.
Posted by Editor in applications
Ok, so Gmail may actually be one of the most popular applications for the blackberry or iPhone etc. However, we’d just like to say, for the record, that there is something incredibly awesome about being able to easily search years of email archives from anywhere at any time. What a lifesaver. Ideal for scrounging forgotten phone numbers out of email signatures (tip: search for “name 416″ or whichever area code), or for any other vital tidbits of information anyone might ever have emailed you or vice versa. Almost as lifesaving as crackberry gchat stuck when in a useless meeting or long street car ride (viigo comes in handy here too) or that magical psuedo-gps cell-tower mapping trick. Very handy.
Your indispensibe, most life-saving mobile app? discuss. iPhone flashlight FTW?
Posted by Editor in applications, deals
OZ and Wellington Financial announced today that they closed a 10M venture financing round for the mobile company. OZ is a 5 year old mobile “consumer messaging” company headquartered in Montreal
OZ builds cross-device client applications for mobiles that allow operators and device makers to package up popular messaging and social services (like IM, flickr, myspace) through a slick app that runs natively on the a variety of devices.
That OZ were able to raise 10M in debt financing speaks to traction the company has been earning with their industry partners and to the confidence of Wellington in their future revenue streams. That 10M and the fact the fact that are able to create such value as essentialy a middle-ware services also speaks to the capital intensive nature and ongoing challenge of translating any kind of online experience across the heavily fragmented world of devices.
It seems to us that a number Canadian successful stories in mobile, like OZ, are often are not widely recognized. Canadian mobile entrepreneurs have a tendency to be B2B stories, quietly making money selling through or to the traditional carrier value chain. Not many Canadian mobile consumer brands come to mind. Even RIM who everybody knows does sell only through carrier partners.
Very recently however, the possibility of a real Canadian mobile content market is starting to emerge with new entrants, more open smart(er) phones and data rates beginning to approach sanity. WirelessNorth.ca is interested to see if the balance in strategy shifts. Will the likes of OZ, or Viigo, and/or the next wave of mobile entrepreneurs continue to focus on making or powering the carrier deck. Or will they step in to the limelight in their own right?
Posted by Editor in applications
The great debate in mobile content has long been browsers vs apps with a clear set of tradeoffs between the two. Browsers is absolutely where the desktop computing is going but browsers on the mobile are inconsistent, underfeatured and messy. Apps on the mobile can be a lot more rich but here the hardware and OS fragmentation makes this strategy just as painful.
Toronto’s Viigo software used to be known for one simple app, the Viigo reader (get it here) one of the best rss news readers for the blackberry (and windows mobile). This week they’ve (pre)announced their second generation “tango” platform. Tango is a third way to deliver mobile services.
Similar to rss itself (and a first glace similar to Yahoo’s mobile strategy as well) Viigo will be offering an xml-driven cross-device content platform to anyone who wants to be on their “deck”. Viigo provides a cross platform client (basically a browser alternative built like a rss reader on steroids). Without much extra work, content providers can push straight rss content to the client wich Viigo bundles with sponsorship (they have a current deal to distribute the National Post on mobile this way) or, with Tango, the content provider can implement stuff thats a little more interactive like restaurant recommendations and travel bookings.
Take your own look at some example tango apps here.
Another interesting wrinkle is the revenue model. Viigo will split advertising and other revenues with the content providers – but with out a dime going to the mobile carriers.
Will Viigo have as much or more luck than the Yahoo’s, googles and apples (mozillas, operas, BREW etc.) of this world in creating the [holy grail of] a standard platform for the mobile world? Something tells me this is more of an interim play, more of an AOL than the Tim Berners Lee of the mobile internet. That said, if they can keep building on their loyal client base, Viigo may be just the thing a lot of publishers are looking for – a viable way to monetize in-demand content over mobile. At least until that distant day when the mobile web finally does get its standardized $h*t together.
Viigo’s Tango platform is scheduled to launch this June.
Corrected:Mark Ruddock of Viigo tells us that they definately are building carrier partnerships which would include revenue share.
Posted by Editor in applications
Congrats to the boys and girls at RIM for another monster quarter. Canada’s favorite smartphone contines to shift shed-loads of pearls and curves to new markets across the world. The iPhone has completely changed how people use data and webservices on their phone. Smartphones have been all the rage lately with expensive little slivers of glass and plastic from RIM, Apple, Nokia, HTC etc. galvanising geek-lust and hoarding media attention. Does anyone want to be seen with a RASR any more?
Though they sometimes get less attention, your “regular” phones are getting better too especially with browers like Opera mini starting to appear. A friend of mine showed me the other day a fine looking SonyEricsson you can get today in Canada that features a full HTML brower and Ajax. Even by 2012, smartphones are predicted to still occupy less than half the market.
As fast as the PC world is moving away from desktop apps to cloud and browser computing, the mobile world is getting just as excited about open OS’s and application platforms. Is the mobile world just behind, or are they getting it backwards.
How s-m-r-t does your phone need to be? do we need apps any more? Surely, a sufficiently decent set of browsers (once they exsist) stands a better chance of uniting the painfully fragmented world of handset plaforms, both “smart” and “unsmart”.
Is the future ultimately in mobile apps or mobile browsers?
If you have thoughts, put them in the comments
Posted by Editor in Carriers, applications, competition
In the news today, Torontoist calls foul on Roger’s new “unlimited” data plan. Go read. excellent rant. Why is it important?
Among the plan’s many “unlimited” caveats, is this gem:
3rd party applications are applications like Yahoo! Go or Google Maps. These are non-Rogers applications which can be downloaded to the device and incur data charges at a rate of 5¢/KB – Rogers “Unlimited” browsing plan
In Roger’s case, this isn’t an offer, this is declaring preemptive war on off-deck content. 5cents a kilobyte is $50 a megabyte 3 years, or a prohibitive cost and fear denial-of-audience attack against any non-rogers owned or licensed off-deck applications.
Now all mobile application developers, whether you are Google, an art student or designer experimenting with new modes of interaction, or a kid in the garage with the Next Great Software Idea, you all now have to do a corporate deal with Rogers to have any hope of distribution and mobile usage on the Rogers network.
Where are Bell and Telus in all this? If I were them , there’s tremendous opportunity here to call out the emperors nakedness on data and play the white knight of the industry. There’s a whole internet and mobile ecosystem out there exploding with new (3rd party) mobile services and applications – which your competitor is shutting out. Sounds like a competitive advantage to me.
