Antonella Stellacci's Blog

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?

empty board

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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800px-Banana_republic.svg (1)

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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Two Possible Augmented Realities Coming To You

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Is AR going to set the foundations for a world full of possibilites or is it an ambiguous technology that is going to feed the next Big Brother?

Take a look….

-Facebook and Augmented Reality: Heaven or Hell? by Mikiane.

Mobile Mixed Reality by the Nokia Research Center- via IntoMobile. Research paper available in PDF.

This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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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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A $5billion dollars Twitter?

Posted on 31. Aug, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Is Twitter worth $5,000,0000,000? That is what Scoble suggested yesterday in his post Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars.

The arguments that back-up his assertion are essentially four:

-Twitter is primarily a public communication platform that businesses can and will use to their benefit.

-Twitter will hit critical mass sooner and more profoundly than any other “social network”, because it offers an easy way for the public personas to broadcast themselves. (And who is in the entertainment industry, knows that Scoble has a point here).

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The Book Industry And The Music Industry. A Deja’vu?

Posted on 29. Aug, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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Ancient civilizations believed that time was not linear but circular and postulated the theory of the Eternal Return.

Fast forward to the 21st century: the era of time as progress. Still, sometimes, it feels like ancient philosophers might have been up to something.

Take the history of the Music Industry in last 10 years and compare it against the “evolution” of the Book Industry in most recent months. You look at the facts and then tell me if I am the only one disoriented in time and space. The phenomenon of this displacement is what we today call deja’vu.

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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.

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

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You’re Not a Sci-Fi Nerd Anymore…

Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

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There’s a fascinating new trend in the mobile application space: Augmented Reality.

The technology, which superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, is not new, but the newest generation of smartphones are about to make it mainstream.

So what is Augmented Reality and what’s the big deal? AR is a graphics-oriented technology that blends sounds, haptics, and even smell to the natural world. So for example picture yourself using your cell phone to view the real world through its camera lens and while doing so, being able to interact with it. How? You could get twitts of the people all around you or the playlists and music streams of your neighborhood or see who built that statue that you’re staring at…