Mobile | Snowcrashing

The Ifashion Revolution

Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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The fashion industry is under-going radical changes. For better or for worse, it’s a matter of personal opinions. It used to be an elitist world, accessible only through glossy magazines acting as influential gatekeepers. The impact of the digital economy couldn’t be more disruptive. Instant access to fashion shows means a flat democratic ecosystem is being built, where everybody can watch a runaway event on its PC; online shopping aggregators and blogging have made consumers savvier and in charge of their own style; lower costs of distribution have made designers less dependent on the runaways laws. You can buy online collections exclusively designed for eBay, shop smarter for high-end fashion brands on Gilt, watch the fashion week in real-time.

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What Location Service Are You?

Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Why would you want to share your location? There are many answers to this question and mostly it depends on the situation and the personality.

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1) The Socialite. If what you’re looking for is a twist in your social life, Loopt offers a few options: you can meet up with your Facebook and Twitter friends, find new Yelp hot spots, or go for a blind date with someone who matches your profile (Loopt Mix). The location service, which was once featured by Apple in its Iphone TV commercials, is not the only one in the category. Whrrl, with a recently revamped 2.0 version repurposed around your social “stories”, and BrightKite are close competitors. But what makes Loopt different is that it is now the only Iphone app that can run in the background. Which means that it will notify you if anything noteworthy is going on, without your checking in. Loopt’s other advantage is that it supports many platforms and has a deep integration with a few carriers.

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A Freemium Mobile World?

Posted on 13. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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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.

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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.

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App Buzz: Enjoy The Bad News With Puma Index!

Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Earlier this week, Chetan Sharma blogged on GigaOM about the limits of the current mobile advertising ecosystem.Sharma is right: mobile advertising is stuck to banner ads with “Click here to download” call-to-actions. Tracking technologies are still behind.

In this caveman scenario, mobile apps have been a game-changer. Context-aware, personalized apps are opening up a whole new world of possibilities for advertisers to engage with consumers in effective new ways.

202412 Brands who had been turned down by the device and industry limitations, are rushing to develop their own apps. We’re still at the very early stages of the phenomenon, with most apps looking just about the same. But there are exceptions and one of them is generating a lot of buzz, the Puma Index.

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Beyond The Apple Hype-The App Stores Ecosystem

Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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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?

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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.

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SEO And Freedom of Speech – Random Stories From the Republic of Bananas

Posted on 09. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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August 28- ITALIAN REGULATORS INVESTIGATE GOOGLE

The Plot: Italian Publishers filed a complaint to the equivalent of the Italian FTC claiming that Google is abusing its dominant position on the Internet to deny them a fair share of online advertising revenue.

And how do they back-up their assumption? By saying that, if you as a publisher opt-out of Google News, Google will penalize you with a poor ranking…

That’s not because they are clueless about SEO, right? Let’s see: besides showing that they ignore even the basics, they now pretend that it is in their right to know and master Google editorial policy, so that they can get more money. Cough… Cough…

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Have You Seen This Cool New App?

Posted on 05. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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“hey, have you seen this cool new app?”

Apps discovery is one of the hottest area right now. If you can become the gateway for all apps, you will dominate the world of mobile consumer behavior and be able to create a layer of monetization through trafficking and data.

Take Apple: it just doesn’t seem that interested in adding social filters for now. The iPhone App Store has Top 10 lists for various categories of apps, but it doesn’t let customers see which apps their friends, family and coworkers like or don’t.

I’ve 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 in the scene made the news this week: Appolicious and Uquery.

Appolicious. http://www.appolicious.com/, founded by serial entrepreneur Warms http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090901/serial-entrepreneur-al-warms-debuts-appolicious-hoping-iphone-apps-fans-will-find-it-delicious/–who banked his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, by selling them to Yahoo in 2007.

Warms is also an angel investor in Stocktwits, Trada, AdGooRoo, Directory of Schools, DOS Partners, and Moving Station as well as Wallstrip, which was bought by CBS.

As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your apps. Also like other social bookmarking services, you can “follow” other people whose apps you like. The”my network” feature will highlight people like you who save and share items that fit your interests.

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.

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Are We There Yet?

Posted on 03. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Mobile services without location are similar to a car without the engine. You end-up with web-like clones: dating, games, news, etc. No offense to any of the players in the space. But it just tastes as a surrogate. Not surprisingly eMarketer labels m-commerce as a business in its infancy.

Unlocking the potential of location-based services means cracking the nut of mobile as a revenue machine. Like AdSense, it’s a mixing of what’s potentially useful for a consumer with a way to make money for advertisers.

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The Hottest Apps…Are Now On (Apps)Fire

Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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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…

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The Iphone & Android App Business according to AdMob

Posted on 28. Aug, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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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.