Mobile App Developer Resources by Jon Byous

Thanks TechCrunch.com & Richard Wong:

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.

Yesterday’s post from SmashingMagazine.com was about marketing tactics for boosting mobile app sales. Today’s featured article from TechCrunch.com takes one big step back to consider your actual platform strategy.

• http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/04/mobile-fragmentation-forever/
• By guest author Richard Wong
• TechCrunch.com
• 3.5.2010

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/03/how-to-market-your-mobile-app/
• By Michael Flarup [nice work, Michael]
• Smashing Magazine
• March 3rd, 2010

Android Developers

Too much data?

AppAware.org has some entertaining real-time specs on Android app installs and removals. They say:

“…become aware (App-Aware) of what other users are installing on their Android phones right now!”

You can see the recent number of user Installations, Removals, and Updates by application, and even though most users are “Anonymous,” you can see their handset type, as well as other apps they’ve installed or removed in the last few days. All free.

Look for things like this:

• Good: Air Control – 27 Removals/279 Installations
• Not so Good: Advanced Task Killer Free – 39 Removals/58 Installations
• What apps are users dumping quickly, or retaining, in your app category?
• Is there a common cluster of non-competitive apps that your users tend to prefer?

It looks like a good initial tool for uncovering some intelligence on the real-time success or failure of competitors. And it could be a good start on finding popular apps to ally with for co-marketing to similar audiences.

If you’d like me to do some digging for you, check into my Contact page. Thanks.

Here’s ten minutes of inspiration video for mobile app developers and marketers: Anonymized census-level user data reporting.

This light, upbeat video from comScore gives us a glimpse at the awesome customer data we’ll soon be able to access. It’s a big step in finding your most profitable customers.

GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM): Next Generation Media Measurement for Mobile

Hey Gang,

I’ve been an advertising guy for the high tech industry since 1979, and I’ve got to say: Nothing like the last few months of tech announcements has ever happened before. The landscape of “who owns what” has changed significantly in the last few months, weeks, and even days. Consider the five-year impact of these moves just on mobile developers:

Android phones could/will outnumber iPhones. Google has the fastest PC web browser, Chrome. It’s developing a (presumably game-changing) operating system, also called Chrome. Google and Apple are at war on brands, platforms, operating systems, browsers, phones, mobile application stores, mobile advertising, development communities and employees.

Now, let Google drop a 4G Gpad on the table, maybe one with an Android/Chrome combo OS.

Gpad or iPad, when the sleek, high-speed mid-size screen comes to mobile computing, you will never again find an empty seat at a sidewalk coffee shop.

Oh yes, as you may have heard last week, for some, Google will offer the fastest desktop PC fiber connection to the home – many, many times faster than our current snail-pace home speeds. You won’t be able to resist it for the PC. And, while Google’s there with fiber and boxes and stuff, why not wire up the TV and a wicked-awesome droid desk phone? One service, one bill, one company. One pissed off Comcast.

Or maybe Google is just trying to spur the others along to run faster.

Either way, it’s a big deal, opening the opportunity for much more sophisticated data-packed desktop, TV and desk phone apps with mobile components.

SoMo – Social Mobile

Oh yeah, and have you seen the brand new Google Buzz? I love Twitter, I love Buzz more. And I know I’m not the only one. They will coexist as fierce competitors for both features and app developers.

What else? One observer noticed that Microsoft has called off its war with Apple, finally upgrading Microsoft Office for Mac to full capabilities. Does this look like a Survivor’s alliance with Microsoft and Apple make-nice to join forces against Google? I see Microsoft attacking Google with Bing/Yahoo search, a mobile OS upgrade, and now augmented reality mapping. By upgrading Mac Office with an improved Excel (finally), Microsoft was pulling Apple closer and protecting its Mac Office base from defecting to Google Apps. Big tag-team fights, on a scale we’ve never seen, are on the way.

Then, let’s add the whole mobile movement, more people accessing the Internet on phones than PCs. This feels like a volcano. The World Mobile Congress was held this week in Barcelona. You just wouldn’t believe the major alliances and communities happening from this, right now. And the magnitude of mobile traffic growth is off the page. Again, mobile app developers are the coveted resource.

The desktop web-only business world is going to get left out, big time, very soon. Caught unaware and late to join, they are going to have to scramble to acquire mobile marketing intelligence and a sense of “who is where” in mobile audiences. Ads are being turned into mobile applications. And mobile applications are delivering ads from within. Google bought a mobile ad company, Apple bought a mobile ad company, Microsoft already has one. And new, advanced mobile analytics are a money-making machine just waiting to be turned on.

Flurry PercentMobile Bango

Businesses are already jittery about what they’re missing by avoiding the topic of “Social Media.” They have no idea of what they will be missing in “Mobile Web Browsing” by the end of 2010.

Yeah, things are changing quickly, things that will have  an enormous impact on our world as techies and tech consumers.

One more thing. Toss all that into the very beginning of an economic recovery cycle. Mobile app developers, your time has come.

A lot of people are struggling to understand the answer to, “Why Twitter?”

Here are three simple ways I use Twitter:

Editor's Hammer

As a blogger – advertise my content: I have friends on Twitter, and I use it to let them know, “Hey, here’s a new post on mobile madness….” It’s like a quick billboard, bus card, or taxi board moving across their PC or mobile screens. All biz, no waste.

As a researcher – advertise other people’s content: Almost every day I find a relevant, credible info source in my field. It may not merit a blog post, but it’s more important than a bookmark. So I Tweet it with a contextual comment for my friends to see. You can scroll through my Tweets in the blue window, top right. See something interesting? Click and go.

As a researcher – to find content: On a good day, I’ll explore 160 web pages. One day last week was 279. How do I find them? I use Twitter as a search engine. At Twitter, you can search topics by putting a “#” (called a “hashtag”) in front of the search term, in the right-hand column search bar – try #mobile developers, or whatever. Zoom. You get a long list of real human search results, most of them pointing to a fascinating web page – on topic. [Beware: hypnotic time suck.]

I follow a bunch of specific people and companies in my interest areas. It’s easy to segment them by “Lists.” My Lists: mobile apps, mobile analytics, web analytics, social media. You can see ‘em at jonbyous on Twitter. It’s mobile-friendly.

Here are two good graphics showing the current desktop and mobile market size. Scroll down in each story to catch the graphic:

Mashable: The State of the Internet in One Giant Infographic

GIGAOM: Updated: The Apple App Store Economy

And for the analytically curious, here’s a sidenote: one of my first articles on analytics delivered through software.

It’s for the good folks at java.sun.com. (I wrote 114 articles for them.)

Play Ball! (Scroll down and click to enlarge the graphics for a glimpse inside baseball 2004.)

Much of my Java technology writing (1997-2005) is still available on java.sun.com, thanks to Oracle for preserving the site.

Vanno.com is back for big-company reputation updates, newly relaunched.

The quick glimpse is here: Hit the 1-2-3-4 vanno.com/tour/home.

The new Vanno is: “…a corporate reputation tracking service that follows the most talked about companies on the Web, and analyzes online stories and commentary to rank the top 250 companies based on how they treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general.” – Vanno Blog

I use Vanno to track my large-client competitive environment for sentiment and reputation, kind of a pulse beat: Cisco, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, HP, SalesForce. But note, Vanno tracks only the top 250 companies.

The service engine evaluates news stories and blog posts for each company I follow, and it shows me the day’s good, bad, and ugly with thumbs up/down icons. (Cisco, my largest client, consistently tracks near the top in reputation.)

It’s an easy way to see emerging reputation problems at the root – for $9.95/month.

These folks have a nice take on their past experiences realizing that “crowdsourcing” was often “mobsourcing.” They revised their data approach in a nice adaptation. All of my reading tells me that the “soft facts” of today’s analytics, such as sentiment and reputation analysis, are extremely difficult to nail, but it can be done. Vanno is on it.

More: The Vanno blog illustrates some thought-provoking uses of its data. More on Vanno as I give it time.

A related book for the analytically curious: How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business, by Douglas W. Hubbard. At Amazon

Now for SocialMention.com – another good service. You can go there and plug in a name or site for free, and you see a new level of information revealed – strength, sentiment, passion, reach, keywords, and sources.

LauraRoeder.com provides a good two-minute video describing the use and value of SocialMention. It’s called How To Track Your Online Reputation with SocialMention.com.

Take a shortcut and go to this video. Meanwhile, here is her Microblogs Mentions page on SocialMention for reference in the video. (This is just the microblog mentions.)

Also, watch her similar short video about backtweets.com called Find Links to Your Website on Twitter with BackTweets.com.

But really, take a look around Laura Roeder’s site. And visit her on Twitter.

She could be a valuable consultant to consider for social media strategy. She speaks like someone who has passionate direct experience with everything she’s talking about and was born with it. She’s at a high level of insight. I explore maybe 20 resources like this a day, and this one stands out: LauraRoeder.com.

Next stop: Vanno.com