Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts

Thursday, 24 January 2013

MomoLondon: Demo Night 2013

Another fun demo night from Mobile Monday London. Some new ideas and some old — you never know which ones are going to stick!

My bets are on Vyclone and Critical Arc…

Blue Badge Style

Fiona Jarvis & Kishan Gupta @bluebadgestyle

  • a guide for the discerning less able
  • app available for iOS: Blue Badge Style
  • graduated from the Mobile Monday & UCL Mobile Academy
    • (it’s really great! sign up now! :-))
  • social media advisor suggested:
    • video of app to attract people to download
    • RSS feed in app
  • added TTS (but not voiceover?)
  • got 1000 downloads in Nov (PR & press) + 300/month afterwards

Boss Level - Scavengers

Nick Brown @boss_level

http://playscavengers.com

  • game based solely in HTML5
  • aimed at PC, mobiles, tablets & smart TVs
  • want same control system across everything
    • up down left right & select - lowest common denominator
    • fixed 720x720 resolution at the moment (will need to change for different devices)
  • closed alpha at the moment
  • aiming for Kickstarter to raise profile
  • cross between xcom & worms
  • freemium business model with in-game purchases
  • also thinking about a store for game assets
    • there’s a game editor that allows you to completely customise levels and characters
  • would rather not have in-game adverts, but depends on the eyeballs
  • currently two developers

Connecthings

http://www.connecthings.com/

  • NFC tags for street furniture
  • 1500 tags displayed in Strasbourg
  • real-time transport info
  • integrated with cycle info too
  • also has event & POI database
  • POI tags show POI info first, transport tags show transport info first
  • tags have QR codes too
  • license the platform to municipalities
    • though not sure how well it would go down with councils that already have their own portals….

Critical Arc

http://www.criticalarc.com/

  • previous company led security & surveillance for Olympics
  • security & safety in large open spaces
    • e.g. universities
  • define SafeZones where there is a response team available
  • security team have an app to see a situational view of the campus
  • free app to call for help & get notified
  • have created a platform for sharing location and situational information
  • universities are first market
  • no tracking in the background for general public
  • security officers are tracked in the background
  • Wi-Fi positioning covers off GPS issues
  • can report on security staff location — heatmaps etc, can be used to actively plan response

Decibel Analytics

http://www.decibeltechnology.com/analytics/ @decibelanalytic

  • actionable analytics
  • object maps, which integrate with elements on page, to show which are actually being clicked
  • attention maps — shows which areas of page are actually viewed
    • i.e. where is the fold for all your customers…?
  • which content is contributing most to goals & revenue generation
  • can filter by device and by incoming source
  • adding A/B testing soon

Men’s Fitness UK iPad app

Paul Cooper, Design Director, Dennis Publishing @dmfcoops

iPad app: Men’s Fitness UK

  • COPE — create once, publish everywhere
  • Drupal CMS with responsive design & native elements
  • started with The Week (iPhone & iPad)
    • takes one person one day to lay out
    • less than 100Mb an issue
  • now done a monthly magazine — more content
  • Drupal 7 & responsive is a complex thing
  • Adobe DPS takes over a week to lay out an issue of EVO
  • content producers (photogs etc) struggled a little with responsive design, but get training
  • can preview the issue before generating the app
  • looking at licensing the system to other parties
  • developing a system like InDesign that outputs responsive HTML

GO!Enterprise

Globo plc - Enterprise Mobility in a BYOD world

http://goenterpriseserver.com

  • deploy access to back office systems in a secure manner
  • no need for mobile device managment
  • client app available from standard app stores
  • three products:
    • office — point and go
    • mobilizer — development for custom enterprise apps (cross-platform)
    • reach — make apps for customers

Trademob - mobile click fraud protection

Adrienne Gauldie @adriennegauldie (ag@trademob.com)

http://www.trademob.com/

  • did a study in june (6m clicks)
    • 22% accidental (< 0.1%)
    • 10% botnet & hijacked clients
    • 8% server-side fraud
  • can see it from data…
    • e.g. in-app clicks from non-mobile user agents
  • don’t get fraudulent clicks from publishers with real customers
  • building a blacklist of dodgy publishers
  • 100 people in company

Vyclone

http://vyclone.com/ @vyclone

Download the app for iPhone

  • wouldn’t it be amazing if we could make a single video from all the angles at a rock concert…?
  • combine multiple vids in one
    • had 200 people filming a Jason Mraz concert
    • 150 people at Ed Sheeran in Hammersmith Apollo
  • business model:
    • lots of interest from music industry
    • want to get footage and release it to fans for behind the scenes
  • copyright: music industry recognise that this is already happening
    • now they get access to video, so a win-win
    • customers can choose to keep video private, or share with everyone
  • app is winning lots of awards!

AudioSnaps

Marc Sallent, We Choose Fun

http://audiosnaps.com

  • record 5 secs of ambient sound while taking a picture
  • JPEG + MP3 = JPEG! (plus extensions)
    • all devices can still show it
    • web site can play audio with just one line of javascript
  • why not just take a short video?
    • want to capture a moment, not tell a story

Chirp

Geraint, Animal Systems

http://chirp.io

Download the app for iPhone

  • send small amounts of data using sound
  • want to release an API for third parties
  • have an arduino that can chirp
  • teach the machines to sing!

Catch-up with last year’s demos

Two of last year’s Demo Night presenters returned to give us an update. See my notes from last year.

Ko-Su

http://ko-su.com @kosumobile

mobile learning for everyone

  • demoed last year, one month pre-release
  • been accepted into BBC Worldwide Labs
  • material created in lots of countries around the world
  • now “officially out of pre-revenue” (?)

Six-Three

https://six3.tv/

Simon Frost, CTO @spli

  • started out as a private closed network — a messaging thing
  • sports stars started using it to keep in touch with their public, but also to communicate with their private street marketing teams
  • made it onto WAYRA Telefonica business incubator

Monday, 2 April 2012

MomoLondon: Demo Night 2012

Demo Night is one of the most popular events in the Mobile Monday London calendar. Lots of new ideas all at once!

LangAR

Peter O’Shaunessy (@poshaunessy)) & Rene Bastijans (@renebastijans)

  • Work for Pearson Future Technologies team
  • developed with BBC Active & DK + wikitude
  • AR tourist guide with audio phrases
  • available on Google Play and the App Store
  • uses wikitude’s beta AR engine
    • chose it because you get to write the app using web technologies (so two apps for free)
  • would envisage the real app having embedded data

LocalSocial

Sean O’Sullivan @sos100

http://mylocalsocial.com

  • “offers, points and more that only unlock in-store”
  • proximity nerds (bluetooth, zigbee, NFC, etc)
  • actions: near, tap, scan
  • reactions
  • shopkick pioneered the format
  • collect points just for going in the venue
  • provide retailers with a beacon
  • “we like NFC for all the things that aren’t payment”

Go my Life

Michael Mulquin, IS Communications

Try it out on http://www.gomylife.eu

  • online social networking platform tailor made for the over-60s
  • older people more concerned about privacy
    • cautious about posting as they’re not sure who will see it
  • like things to be step by step
  • “facebook without the confusion”
    • but can post to facebook
  • come out of a European project: http://gomylife-project.eu
    • have a group of people in UK and Poland trying it out

six3 video messenger

Simon Frost @spli, @six3

http://angel.co/six3 http://six3.tv

  • asynchronous video messaging
  • either need the app or use it on the web
  • can send a message to someone’s email address
  • at the moment, it streams video but they plan to cache locally in the future
  • all messages are private

ko-su

http://ko-su.com

  • lesson/activity creator
  • creates mobile-friendly content from a clean HTML interface
    • quizzes, videos
  • can share content to people via an iOS app, mobile web, or mobile emulator on the website
  • subscription model with a transaction fee

movellas

http://movellas.com

  • free self-publishing platform for readers and writers
  • mainly for younger people
  • social story-telling
  • had 280,000 comments since launch
    • very engaged audience
  • featured as New & Noteworthy in the app store
  • app can send comments
  • website can create content
  • “we aren’t monetising at the moment”…

android enigma simulator

Franklin Heath Ltd @heathcr

  • very pretty enigma simulator
  • looks especially good on an Android Tablet
  • also collecting donations for Bletchley Park
  • spent a lot of time getting to work on all Android devices & versions
  • can send messages to friends via Android sharing intent

one man MVNO

impossible telecom @danlane

  • early adopters wanted: http://alpha.impossible-tele.com
  • a new kind of MVNO focussing on:
    • innovation
    • customer service
    • transparency
  • sharing bundles of texts, minutes, data between devices
  • 3rd party APIs for core of network
  • divorcing devices and numbers
    • one number on multiple devices
    • multiple numbers on single device
  • static IP addresses for M2M SIMs

Dtouch mobile

Shakir Ali, IntelliDzine

Horizon Institute, University of Nottingham

Tone push

  • “your ringtone on someone else’s phone”
  • web and app based
  • currently Android-only, but would work on iOS too
  • if the other person has the app, then this app/website will set the other person’s custom ringtone for you

sooqini

http://sooqini.com

Raj Singh, raj@sooqini.com

  • “Your trusted mobile marketplace”
  • reverse market place: buyer does the posting, not the seller
  • initially focussed on students and housewives — 2,500 sellers in system already
    • created a “Campus CEO” system to drive adoption
  • iOS first: “people who have iPhones think they’re cool and want other people to do things for them”
    • going for Android later
  • have PayPal payment at the moment; planning to add bank account connection later

qrpedia

  • demo’ed at last year’s Mobile Monday London
  • more and more museums and galleries signing up

Monday, 20 June 2011

MomoLondon: Web vs Apps

I couldn’t make tonight’s Mobile Monday on location, so I thought I’d post my delayed notes from last time’s debate on Web vs Apps.

It was a lively session with both sides arguing strongly, though (unfortunately?) sometimes for the other side! The team members started by taking turns in giving short presentations — notably all of team web had slides (including beautiful ones from Bryan as usual) whereas all of team apps had decided just to talk.

Team web ended up with the audience vote (just!), but personally I thought team apps had the better argument. Yes, there are billions more mobile devices out there that can access web sites rather than have apps, but as we’ve seen (and as even Tomi Ahonen has been repeatedly caught out by) slick user experience drives mobile devices more than anything else. Web sites are great for finding stuff — but people don’t keep coming back to the same web site like they do to a favourite, well-designed app. And the skew in stats that we’ve seen since the iPhone came out (iPhones and similar devices punch way above their weight in usage compared to number of devices) applies even more for apps vs web sites. In his 5 minute presentation, Mauricio put up some Flirtomatic stats saying that they made about three times as much revenue from mobile web as from apps, but then revealed that their iPhone app provided 11% of revenue from 0.8% of sessions!

Anyway, enough ranting… Here’s my usual semi-structured notes:

Panel

Chaired by Leila Makki

Team Apps

Team Web

5 min presentations

Each team member made their own presentation, but my notes have all the points mixed together. Viji Pathy has posted a pretty comprehensive report of the session on the Mobile Monday blog that gives a bit more detail on the presentations side.

  • Discoverability
    • App store pre-installed
    • Browse, search, one-click install
    • Web is about information — apps are about utility
  • Building a mobile web app is not just about knowing HTML and CSS with a bit of Javascript
    • Easy to get very bad results on mobile
  • Numbers: 77% of 6.8 billion people have access to a mobile device (5.3 billion)
    • only 100 million iPhones (only 2.015%)
    • for 1/3 of population internet access is only via mobile
    • the other devices are mostly “feature phones”
    • but this is not an argument for web vs native… since many of the feature phones either have limited mobile web, or else support native apps!
  • Linkability — if you don’t have the app installed, sending someone direct content doesn’t work so well
    • this is Tim Berners-Lee’s fear, but apps can integrate with a web-based backend (e.g. instagram) and app stores themselves can be web-enabled
  • Non-technical people actually don’t understand what a website is…
    • Big successful web sites are understandable on a human level: eBay/Amazon are shops; Facebook is the pub
    • Similarly, apps are a more human thing — you get a nice shiny icon
    • The blank browser scares many people
  • AW: When you get the iPad, it’s totally useless until you put apps on it
  • From content perspective: Google prioritises quantity of content, whereas apps can highlight small limited quality
    • For example, instagram has many less features than flickr but has grown to 5 million users very rapidly
  • Flirtomatic — iPhone native has 11% revenue from 0.8% sessions…
    • and Mauricio is on Team Web…?
  • At Tesco, have seen that mobile web used for research but not for re-use and habitual long-term usage
    • app use encouraged by push notifications and widgets
  • 1 in 4 mobile searches in the US are on Google Voice search
  • Mobile web seems to be doing well for mail order & delivery shopping sites — searchable content with larger payments
  • Tesco made money back from iPhone app in less than a week
  • Targeting mobile devices: build it and see who comes, then target appropriately

Summing up — pro apps

  • Tangibility
  • Ownership & engagement
  • Native apps are faster
  • Using hardware
  • Lots of web browsers available, but are they ever going to be your customers?

Summing up — pro web

  • Don’t just target the rich west — reach beyond
  • Discoverability for apps can be one of the biggest problems

Q & A

  • What about using web apps on a long flight?
    • Not really
    • but this is possible now
  • Hard stuff: two-way voice with echo cancellation etc?
    • Not in a web app
  • Fragmentation of web browsers?
    • Design your site appropriately: it depends on who you want to target, but it’s still a larger number than just iPhone apps
    • e.g. target a touch-enabled mobile site and get both iPhone and Android at once
  • Mobile social
    • Good example of having both a mobile web and native strategy
    • e.g. Facebook native users add photos more; web users add quick status updates
  • Mobile ads — is there a problem keeping competition away from apps?
    • Tesco doesn’t have external ads in their apps
    • The end-user wants the curated experience…
  • Testing across multiple devices?
    • AW: It’s a problem for mobile computers — they don’t work some of the time…
    • AW: Apps are a reliable experience
    • The mobile web is no better and sometimes harder
  • Apps are good for some things and webapps are good for others… It’s like asking a carpenter which is the better tool: a hammer or a saw?
  • Monetisation?
    • Not for web games… yet
    • Flirtomatic has in-app purchases of virtual currency, but it’s a whole range of transaction
  • How do costs compare for native vs web?
    • It depends… You can spend more or less on each
    • Tesco: cost seems quite similar — especially since mobile dev has to be optimised for various devices
  • App-store owners take a cut; will it be the same for web?
    • probably — billing partners will always take a cut…
  • Will it be a digital divide between those who have apps and those that don’t?
    • Some people just don’t want apps on their phone — e.g. mother has a binatone phone with big buttons and doesn’t even use a mouse
    • There’s just a time lag to the rest of the world
  • What about lock-ins?
    • By choosing HTML, your development environment is free from manufacturer tie-ins
    • However, by choosing HTML, you play into the hands of Google making things free, operator content filtering etc.
  • Mobile web currently over-promises and under-delivers, but we’re all hedging our bets as mobile web catches up…?
    • Panel: yes!
    • BR: mobile web is catching up very fast, and depending on your business may already be a better bet
  • How do you find where your customers are?
    • Analyse the web browsers of your mailshot emails

Notices