Fast-food, eating out, are in the DNA of this country.  Food is everywhere, 24/7, accessible, inexpensive. And now also at your fingertips.

Not a day passes without a new “food” app making the headlines. Gluttony meets GadgetsMania. It’s fun. It’s as fast as it can get,  thanks to store locators and in-app ordering. It’s convenient, even more convenient thanks to special discounts and coupons. Soon, apps will also allow you to pay for your fast-food fix within the app!

-Make it Fun: The PizzaHut case

Craving a pizza? PizzaHut is designed for the mischievous 10 years-old in you. It lets users indulge devilishly in the creation of their dream pizza, and smile at their own excesses, as the Iphone screen displays flying toppings and sauces.  A 20% discount makes you feel even better about your little sin.

Numbers speak for themselves: $1million sales in 3 months.

-Not just the IPhone: the OpenTable case

Online restaurant reservation site, OpenTable, has happily seated 1million diners via its mobile apps. Based on an estimated $50 average check per diner, that’s $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

The OpenTable app allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries. Unlike others, OpenTable is not just for the Iphone: key to its success is a mobile strategy that sees the app seeded throughout the various mobile platform. You can use their mobile site, or download the app on the Android,  BlackBerry, PalmPre, and obviously the Iphone.

-Make them pay through the phone: the Starbucks case.

Still no numbers have been disclosed, but Starbucks is certainly the one to look at closely, since it is paving the way for the fast-food mobile revolution with its recently launched myStarbucks application. The app has a slew of nice designed features to remember your friend’s favorite drinks and locate nearby Starbucks stores.  But what’s interesting is that, if you’re in a few select West Coast areas, you can turn your Iphone in a  a Starbucks card, and pay for coffee using a bar code on a phone’s screen.

-Make it Social: the DunkinDonuts case

The DunkinRun app is the Office dream: the app lets you email or text your friends to tell them when you’re leaving, and give them the option of ordering stuff from Dunkin Donuts. It had never been easier to get a coffee fix. Social meets mobile and mobile meets revenues!

Another App Store Day is on us. With lots of numbers to dive into.

According to Apple’s official press release, 2 billion apps have been downloaded in just over a year. Itunes took 6 years to sell 8.5 billion songs.
But….
-$0.99 is not $0.00.
-Buying a song is a conscious act- you really want it, you want to listen to it over time, you want it on your Ipod. Apps are an impulse driven “purchase”.
-Many apps come with the price tag $0, which makes the impulse of downloading even more irresistible.

But one more set of data has made the news today. This time it comes from Flurry, a mobile analytics and monetization tools start-up in San Francisco, and it’s a study on the behavior of users who download apps and their churn rate.
For the purpose of the report, Flurry used a sample of 2,000 apps and 200 million user sessions on the IPhone and iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry, and J2ME platforms.
Apps were grouped into 19 categories and their use was monitored within 30, 60 and 90 days.

The Good:

1) The apps in the News and Reference category, Quadrant I, which are used more than once a day, at a rate of 11 times per week.

2) A little less good, but still not bad, the apps from the Productivity, Social Networking and Utilities categories, in Quadrant IV, which have  a less intense usage over time, but still a loyal customer base.

The Bad:

The apps in Quadrant III, the IQ Test and Ringtones of the case, which gets abandoned right after the download. No surprise here.

The Quitters:

Apps from the categories Games and Books  in Quadrant II, which generate the most downloads across the different stores and are used very often, but over a very limited and finite timeframe. In other words, a very “disposable” user experience, which might only account for a one-off fee business model, as opposed to subscription or ad-supported models for the categories in Quadrant I and IV.

No one will be surprised by this data. But if you’re planning to build an app, getting noticed among almost 80,000 other apps is not going to be your only challenge.

With 75,000 apps in the App Store, how do you convince a user to buy your paid app? The magic word seems to be Freemium.

Who says so?

First it was Admob in its July mobile metrics report. The mobile ad network run a survey on about 1,200 users of the Apple App Store and Android Market and found that the top reason for purchasing an app was that users had liked the free version.

What conversions are we talking about?

According to a recent Mobclix’s study:

-Apps with a lite version will sell 2 or 3 times more.

-Supposedly from 50% to 60% of the lite version users upgrade to the paid version!

Here’s the full video of the event.

It would be interesting to know what categories are experiencing the most success with this model. If it’s just games or if it applies across the board.

Another point worth noting from the Mobclix presentation, is that even if you add the lite version later, you’re still going to experience the same bump in sales.

So, watch the video, think about your strategy and next steps. But watch out from the freemium buzz virus!  Building a freemium model is about re-inventing a business which offers real value to the end-user (additional levels of the game would do it), charging for what is scarce, not a mere giving away stuff for free.

It’s the Year of the App Stores. Brands, bands and unknown developers are all busy working on the Next App.

But for how big and hip the Apple world can be, developing only for the IPhone is like making a website compatible only for one version of a browser, say Safari 4, and having a blank page for all the others. Wouldn’t it sound like a poor strategy?

That is why the IAB has decided to weigh in with a set of recommendations. And the gist of it is: stay focused on your goals, but look further than the IPhone.

So let’s look further. What do we see? Here are a few facts and numbers, collected via Distimo (a start-up active in the mobile app analytics space) and Wikipedia. Download the Distimo Report here.

STORES DNA

1) Device-Centric with two sub-categories

• Smartphones Manufacturers: Blackberry App World, Palm App Catalog, Windows MarketPlace Mobile (which will be launching in October).
• Handset  Manufacturers: Nokia Ovi Store, Samsung, SonyEricsson PlayNow, LG.

2) Carriers-Centric

• New app stores: Vodafone (by the end of 2009), China Mobile Market.
• Old-style stores- Verizon Get It Now, Sprint Software, T-Mobile web2go

3) Open Marketplace with open-source standards and an open review policy: Google Android supported by the Open Handset Alliance.

4) Closed Marketplace with propietary standards and an arbitrary review policy: Apple.

5) Independent Third-Parties Uber-Stores: GetJar, Handango, Handmark, Mobango.

COUNTRIES & REACH

World-wide: all the top third-parties stores, GetJar, Mobango, Handango. The reach is not disclosed, but the numbers from GetJar are impressive. Only last week it generated 12million total downloads (as a benchmark think that the Nokia Ovi Store has generated 10million downloads in about 3 months)!

International:

-Vodafone with a customer base of almost 300 million users in 40 countries, set to go live by the end of the year.

-Nokia Ovi Store: 109 Countries with an install base of about 100 million supported phones (but the overall potential reach is much higher, with Nokia still at a 40%+ market share worldwide).

-Apple App Store: 77 Countries with 50 million IPhone and IPod Touchs according to latest sales data

-Android Market:  26 Countries for free apps (8 for paid ones) and a 1 million customer base so far with one device.

-BlackBerry: 13 Countries and 8 million devices.

-SonyEricsson PlayNow: 13 Countries and 25 million devices.

-LG: 2 countries (not the US).

One-Country Stores: all the others.

Worth noting that China is getting into the game and the China Mobile Store went live in July, reaching a potential customer base of almost 500 million users.

POPULARITY

Apple obviously dominates with a declared 1,800,000,000 yes 1.8 billion downloads spread across its 75,000 published apps.  But here’s the rub: as Pinch Media revealed in its study a few months ago, the engagement curve is pretty low and the accelerated death of the app is an almost sure destine.

More studies have circulated since, but there’s little reason to beleive that the life cycle and exposure have gotten any better.

Developing across different platforms is not an easy challenge, inter-operability has always been The issue within the mobile industry. But following the hype (let’s get the app for the iPhone first, then we’ll see), might not be as rewarding as you might think.

Apps discovery is one of a hot area right now. Always more startups are jumping into the space with the hope to make money out of it. And there are plenty of reasons to agree with them: if you can become the gateway for the discovery of mobile apps, you can bank on the data (mobile user behavior) and advertising that come with it. Think of Google + DoubleClick. Brands are moving fast into the space and so are their budgets.

I’ve already  talked about the promising first steps of AppsFire, a bootstrapped startup, whose iPhone app acts like a meta-app, reading your library of downloaded apps and recommending new ones based on various filters.

Two new entrants made the news this week: Appolicious and Uquery.

SOCIAL DISCOVERY WITH A BIT OF AFFINITY

Appolicious is the latest effort of well-known serial entrepreneur Warms (who sold BuzzTracker to Yahoo in 2007).

How does Appolicious work? As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your apps and can “follow” other people whose apps you like.  Once you sign-up, you can use the App Library Builder to import the list of apps from your ITunes or you can manually type in their names. As a member, you can also rate and review your apps.

Next step: create your social network. Here you have only two options for now: importing your Gmail/Yahoo contacts or adding users with similar tastes. No need to say that this part needs the be expanded by means of Facebook Connect and other social graphs tie-ins, as Twitter or FriendFeed.

Finally you’re ready for some recommendations which are served by Appolicious itself, by your personal friends or by the people like you whom you are now following.

It’s too soon to seriously evaluate Appolocious; but Warm is definetely up to something and he knows it. He is working with developers to extract new metrics not available from the App Stores and plans to be there, when brands will want a trusted partner for their apps.

A few thoughts:

-Why isn’t Appolicious an app?

-Widgets. From your apps “personal” stream to the live feed of your network to the  Appolicious’s App pages which aggregate content from various sources and are usually very rich of information. Being able to package those info into widgets and embed them in your other social networks/blogs would be a further incentive to use the service.

-Lifestyle Profiles & Engagement. I like the idea of profiling users this way, but why not letting them set-up alerts when new apps reach a certain threshold of downloads? Say I am a TechJunkie App User, I’d like to be able to follow the Tech Junkie Recommender and be alerted if something new is worth a download. Also why not letting users who are very engaged (reviews/downloads/ratings) become like the gurus of those channels? Show-off seems to be quite an integral part of the app experience.

-Developer and Brands Pages. Anything here in the pipeline?

—–

DISCOVERY VIA SEARCH

Uquery wants to be the search engine for apps. It is pretty fast and offers various filters which allow for better queries: by category, price, publication date.  It also features a Twitter button to allow users to tweet about an app.  But don’t be misled: uquery is not a social search as much as a shopping engine.

Unfortunately though, unlike Appolicious, the app pages have very little information besides the descriptions pulled from iTunes. And no review or rating is incorporated to help the user make an informed decision on whether or not to download an app.

Open questions:

-Is an app in the roadmap? or…to say it straightforwardly, would it have any chance to be approved??

-How does the ranking work? Or in the Google lingo, what is the equivalent of PageRank here?

-How does the advertising work? Is it going to be based on keywords or will it be more of a category display ad? Not much is disclosed on the uquery site for now.

Overall uquery feels a little underwhelming for now, but again it might be too soon to tell.

Remember when people used to compare their phones by the tech specs? Pixels for the camera, MP3 player, etc? Luckily that’s not the case anymore: today no one cares of the hardware (sure the hard-core geeks will always do…), what makes the difference is the software: the services and the content. Alas in 2009 lingo: the APPS.

The numbers are impressive: 65,000 apps on the App Store in less than a year. Still something is wrong with the user experience: the discovery process. Once you download an app, it sits there and you might as well forget why you downloaded it. The App Store experience is autistic and often times apps are used for as much as one time…

So welcome to Appsfire, a über-app with one mission: helping you share your apps and discover new ones. To be clear, you do not really share the apps themselves, but the names of the ones you select. Your friends will see your list and have one-click access to download them, from the App Store.

In order for the app to work, you have to install it on your machine first, so that it can scan and index your iTunes backup file. And then you’re ready for sharing. The reason of this extra-step is explained by AppsFire on their blog: Basically Apple does not let you read what’s on your iPhone. Each app has its own sandbox and except maybe the contact book, no app can communicate with another app making the listing of your own apps impossible from the iPhone.

Peace&Love to Apple and its limitations…

So here’s how the app works.

1) Download AppsFire on your machine

2- (optional) Select the apps you want to share and choose your favorite network: Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, widget, link. (In my case Facebook didn’t work …but the app is still in beta so a few kinks are still being ironed out. Other technical limitations as the indexing are well known also - not all the apps, even some famous ones, are yet recognized by the AppsFire engine). [Update: please make sure you download the latest Appsfire version, which should be able to view all your apps].

3) Download the App on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app will let you share your apps via email in a rather smooth way. Or you can discover new ones. The options are Top Downloaded Apps, Top Apps in Your Area and Apps from a few Internet celebs: Loic Le Meur, Corvida, Louis Gray, etc.

Overall kudos to AppsFire for their job.  A few thoughts:

-Reviews: being able to review the app a friend recommends,before being kicked out of Appsfire into the AppStore, should be a priority.

-Sharing- It would be nice to have Facebook Connect  in order to make the sharing a smoother user experience.

-Multiple Bundles & Alerts- Why not allowing various bundles for each user so that the sharing could be more targeted? like My Idiot Apps, My Useless/Useful Apps, My MustHaves etc. Additionaly, I’d like to see an option to send a simple alert to my friends if I add an app to one of the bundles that has already being shared.

-Friends Feedback – Why not letting your friends acknowledge that they liked the apps you shared with some sort of feedback mechanism (Apps Downloaded by XX friends or App Liked/Hated by XX friends).

We’re just in the infancy of the app store “revolution”. So it’s nice to see some innovation popping up. Once AppsFire will be ready for prime time, there will be infinite ways to make it a money maker. From the usual suspect (affiliate links) to analytics, the most valuable one: what are people most shared apps by geo-location or demo (via Facebook), what are the most frequent bundles, super- sharing options for business accounts (e.g upload of email lists, etc).

For now, go get yourself some (Apps)fire!

AdMob is out with its latest Mobile Metrics Report, which is based on the usage behavior found on various applications and web sites across its ad network. For the month of July,  AdMob decided to spice up its network data with survey results from 1,117 users of iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices.

The key findings of the survey have had the blogosphere go ah and oh about the potential App Store business.  What are those key findings?

In AdMob words:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month
• More than 90 percent of Android and iPhone OS users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer
• Upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when users were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app
• iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users.
• Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month

From there, the math seems easy: as GigaOm points out, there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year.

Why I don’t buy it?

-Users surveied are a skewed sample who had to have downloaded at least one free app.

-Distribution of free vs paid apps: is there a report showing what’s the breakdown for the AppStore and Android? Without it, it’s hard to tell if Android users are really less inclined to buying premium apps than the AppStore customers.

-Payment Method: it’s a no-brainer for an AppStore user to go through the payment process, all you have to do is login into your iTunes account. For Android users on the other hand the purchase is much more “conscious” .

-Does this sound like a reliable claim? “Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month”. Every month? Maybe users who participated to the survey and/or who download AdMob apps are more engaged/addicted than the average user. Others have questioned the reliability of this claim.

-What type of applications were selected for the survey? Surely some categories will have more rabid fans than others: game users might download a new game every few days. But if you’re after utility apps or business ones, why would you download a replica of what you have, every few weeks?

-The “Freemium” model or “cheap is here to stay” claim. Respondents said that their number one reason for purchasing an application was because they tried and liked a free version. This might back up developers’ cries for a demo capability on the App Store. Or it might be again a consequence of the skewed sample of users: those most likely to answer a survey, maybe are also the ones more inclined to use free apps first.

Last week, TRVSDJAM, the combined force of Travis Barker and DJ-AM, released their newest mixtape via Twitter, offering a free download of their newest mixtape in exchange for a tweet.

By tweeting “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape ‘Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09′ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com/”, tweeters receive a free download via an application built by Culture Jam Labs.

As you can see in the pre-populated tweet, a special hashtag – #trvsdjam – is included in the twit, with the goal of making it a top trending topic on Twitter.

A brilliant and innovative use of Twitter as a Marketing Platform.

How did the campaign go?

Travis Barker and DJ AM have a combined 230k+ followers on Twitter.

By looking at TweetMeme it appears that so far 12,350 have retweeted the message. That translates into a 5% conversion rate.

The Twist chart shows the trends over the last few days. Clearly there was a peak as soon as the twit was broadcast, then the buzz quickly dried out.

So how do you measure the success of such a campaign?

-Buzz: the story definitely picked the interest of the music community and the social media one. The coverage includes big names as Hypebot,  MusicAlly, ProHipHop, TechCrunch, Mashable, and the list could go on…just try googling it.

-TwitterBuzz: the initial twit reached an audience of 230,000, the combined followers of Travis and DJ AM. It was re-twitted roughly 12,500 times. Assuming the average number of followers is still 70 as stated in a January poll,that translates into a reach of close to 900k users! Not trivial for an operation that probably costed the two musicians less than $5k (the development of the app).  According to Twitterholic, a Twitter tool that keeps tracks of your followers, both Travis and DJ AM kept growing their “followership” but at a rate that is pretty much in their average for the last few weeks. So this doesn’t seem to be a secondary byproduct of the initiative, but probably it wasn’t in the plans either.

-Conversions/Sales: as stated before, conversions could be measured against the total number of followers at a 5% rate or against the total reach, at a about 1.5%. How many of those downloaders were already followers? How many non-followers? How many were real fans? How many of those downloads will translate into new fans that attend live performance and buy the artist’s music? Will they be able to keep messaging to those users? Send them a follow-up?

These seem to be legitimate questions, and it’s up to each musician to gauge the success of his own initiative based on his goals.

Early Twitter conversations were tagged as life-casting and mind-casting, because early adopters were mainly geeks. But always more and more musicians are jumping on board, embracing the potential of Twitter as a marketing tool and new medium, what I would rather call a “FanCasting” because it is not really about sharing your personal life neither your knowledge. It is more about building and nurturing the Tribe of your True Fans, as brillinatly explained by Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin.

There are plenty of examples of musicians who use Twitter to connect with their fans and engage them, offer free music,  twitt a live show.  And many examples of companies supporting and educating artists in this new effort: TopSpin, ArtistsHouse and Plugola are just the first who come to mind.

To conclude heres An inspirational video from a few months back: Steve Lawson interviewed by Andrew Dubber

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

The annual San Francisco Music Tech Summit collects experts and entrepreneurs dealing with the ways technology is transforming the music industry.

A few highlights from this year’s edition gathered throughout the blogo/twittershepere:

-A RIVER OF (SMARTER) DATA

Digital music is still in its infancy. There’s definitely more than playlists, music in the cloud and artist pages. And a few innovative companies promise to have the answer.

-Say good-bye to editorial picks and dummy collaborative filtering. The future is a gigantic “music brain” that is fed by the massive river of unstructured information that is the Internet in a continuous learning process.

At the Music Recommendation panel, the Boston-based EchoNest demoed its product which spiders millions of blog posts, playlists and forums and draws from both the sonic analysis and text mentions to create smarter recommendations. The much-hyped Spotify will be soon deploying the EchoNest engine through its Expand Playlist feature.  Paul Lamere blog post is a recommended read for a better understanding of the engine’s ins and outs.

A different way to tackle the issue of discovery comes from theSixtyone with its Digg-style platform.

-BandMetrics

What are people talking about and what are they saying? Can the stream of data be analyzed to help bands improve their online presence and be used a prediction engine?

BandMetrics is trying to crack the nut. It is still a beta but the promise is alluring: using semantic, it aims to provide the tools to track the dissemination of, and sentiments towards, your music online. It demo’ed its product to the attendees of the summit and announced the release of a new music data exchange format.

-A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE: CONNECTING BANDS WITH FANS. IPHONE AND MOBILE

There has never been more opportunity for musicians to take control of their careers. Recording and career promoting technologies are now in the hands of the artist. At the same time, there is lots of competition out there among artists.

ILike brand new syndication platform, demoed at the conference, is meant as a tool to help artists’ marketing and distribution efforts. It allows them to update tour dates or band photos on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo, Hi5, etc., from a single dashboard. iLike also allows artists to create and submit iPhone Apps for their band using a template powered by iLike.

Mobile was obivously a hot topic. Pandora’s CEO boasted some amazing metrics from its mobile experience: 5 million users through the Iphone and counting 18/20k new ones every day.

The bottom line  perfectly summatized by Boothism in his blog post

• Social networking can be an effective tool, but it’s not the Holy Grail. You should have a plan before going in and be active with your network-respond to fans, answer questions, interact and be fun! On the flipside, more and more bands and brands are hiring “community managers” to manage their online presence.

• Bands cant depend on the technology, the labels or anyone to control their careers, they have to take control themselves.  It’s a scary prospect for a lot of creative folks, but with the industry the way it is, not knowing your audience and your business model=yes, the soupline.

• By taking control of their careers many more musicians will be able to eat and live comfortably off their music, but we’ll likely see a decline in super mega ultra obnoxiously rich rock stars.

-BUSINESS MODELS?

TopSpin Ian Rogers claims that given a reason to buy, fans want to and will pay for premium content and services. Initial data, gathered in the beta phase ,prove that the average transaction value goes all the way up to a  $22 and in one recent case, 84% of the paying users opted for the premium tier price over the lower one.

But why wait for customers to come to you and chose whether they want to pay and for what. Griffin’s Choruss project pushes for a forced subscription model where college students are “volontueering” a monthly fee for p2p activity. The legal aspects of the project are still obscure, as well as how the indie and unsigned bands could participate to it

A BLANK CD

Producer Danger Mouse and rocker Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse have decided to go against EMI legal threats and release their new CD, Dark Night of the Souls, as a blank CD  reading, “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” The CD comes with a book of photos provided by film-maker David Lynch.

The album, which has been one of the most hotly anticipated albums of 2009, features Iggy Pop, Black Francis (of the Pixies), the Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle, James Mercer (of the Shins), and Julian Casablancas (of the Strokes) and others all contributing original material.

It is available for free streaming on NPR

WILCO

Wilco on Wednesday began streaming its new album, “Wilco (The Album),” in its entirety from its Web site.

The band believes that hardcore fans will pre-order the new album
regardless, or attend its live show later this
year. Wilco also asked users who have downloaded the record illegally to
donate to Chicago-area charity the Inspiration Corporation as penance.