Creating for Mobile – Day 2 and round-up of SIME

For day two of SIME, and as a round-up of the whole conference from a mobile perspective, I thought I’d focus on creating in the mobile arena, and bring up some of the interesting tid-bits from our day.

The first presenter that really grabbed everyone’s attention during the day was 12-year old Puck Meerburg, founder of Puckipedia. He’s a young, very curious kid who has single-handeldly created and released 2 apps to the Apple AppStore, learning English in the process to be able to understand the programming language. Interesting is that an American kid, Thomas Suarez, also 12, just circulated the web for having done exactly the same thing, and speaking at TEDx like a pro. This is just incredible, and says a lot about how easy it is to get into digital creation today if you’re curious enough and don’t see limitations. I also think it says everything about the mobile field. It’s so accessible and tangible, you feel apps are more of an object than software, which makes the concept less abstract to young people. And mobile is simple, it’s about doing small things in a delightful way, which is very easy to get in to. Have there been other young kids creating their own apps for desktop computers before? Definitely. But most probably not as many, and definitely not reaching out to as many people as these kids are today.

The day’s other big mobile evangelists were Maks Giordano, a digital guru now running a mobile agency, and Leif Eliasson, mobile expert at TradeDoubler. Leif is a numbers guy, once again showing the stats on why mobile is on track to outgrow desktop computing within the not too distant future. Maks is a Creative, and presented some great examples of interesting things that are being done on mobile that I’ll present you with below. What both of these people mentioned though, and also Zennström, Hjalmar, and a lot of other speakers at this years event, is that today, right now more than ever, all the bits are in place for truly great services and marketing to be created on mobile. We have the right hardware at a mass consumer price point, we have the software distribution ecosystem, we have the payment solutions, we have the networks and the bandwith, and most of all we now have the users.

But, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to think hard when you start creating for the mobile space. On the contrary, it’s important to really have mobile mindset when creating, and remember that it’s all about context. And also, something isn’t “fun” just because it’s in a mobile space, but contrarily we are more inclined to get tired your campaign or service if you’re not making it easy enough.

Here are some companies that have gotten it right:

• Heineken Star Player, an app that taps into people’s multitasking behavior when watching football (ie soccer) games, and for doing it right they’ve gained the opportunity to have a whole 90 minutes of brand interaction with it’s users.
• Nike+, a mobile app that helps you get your running going. The app, apart from being great in and by itself is probably the best example out there of how to leverage mobile and social networks to add value to your brand.
• Chase QuickDeposit, an app from the bank Chase, that has enabled it’s customers to cash their checks (US company, obviously) from anywhere just by photographing them with the app. It’s also worth noting that Swedish banks have enabled paying bills using their apps and the phone’s camera, but the user experience is unfortunately very bad, which is inhibiting adoption.
• Target, the US retailer has made great apps for iPhone and iPad that are shopping companions that help make shopping at Target more pleasant experience. Here the execution is of greater importance more than the concept, and Target got it right, giving them high App Store ratings which is unusual for a marketing app.
• Jamie Oliver has a set of apps that align perfectly with his brand, making cooking a pleasant experience, and recommending his favorite restaurants.
• Northface in China launched a location based game where you could claim land, which is totally in line with the explorer mentality of the brand, and the winner had placed over 4000 flags over all of China.
• Google Wallet, Google’s initiative to let you make your phone your wallet. This is happening, it’s just a matter of who will rule, and Google is a good canditate to say the least, going down the NFC path for money transactions.
• Tesco in Korea, launched Homeplus Subway Virtual Store where they put up virtual stores in subway stations where you can shop using your phone, scanning QR-codes on life-size grocery shelves while waiting for your train, and having the groceries delivered to your home when getting back from work. Genius, and the only really good use of QR-codes to date.
• There are several price comparison apps, like Prisjakt, where you can scan the barcode of a product anywhere and quickly receive a list of where you can get the item at the lowest price. Retailers – be worried.
• Mobile makes the perfect companion for house/apartment shopping, where Zillow and Trulia on the US market are among the most prominent, telling you what’s for sale around you, letting you peek in before you go in, and telling you if the price is reasonable, all on the go.
• Rabble, a Swedish app that provides digital redeemable coupons based on you location. Providing cheap marketing opportunities for local businesses.

Some other examples Maks mentions, it think fail in the fact that they’re gimmicks, and don’t deliver any real value to the end users in the long run. These apps will be removed very quickly from the users phones after the novelty has worn off and waste the potential you have of making truly meaningful long running relationships with your users or customers.

• Beck, the beer brand, has an app that helps you get home safe from a night out. It automatically calls a cab for you to get home if you don’t pass the in-app sobriety test.
• Axe Auto Romeo, an app that helps you stay on good foot with all your girl acquaintances, gained of course because of the “Axe effect”, by sending the girls your not with texts while you’re on dates.
• IKEA Interactive Catalogue, which lets you test placing IKEA furniture in pictures of your home using augmented reality. See the video at the bottom of the linked page to get an idea of how it works.
• Ebay launched an app that tries to deflect the biggest problem with buying glasses online; you don’t know how they will look on. Using augmented reality technology, you can try their glasses on live using you mobile phone. (Interesting to note is that Favoptic launched this concept long before Ebay on our advice, but their execution was just not up to par)

These are all interesting examples of what can be done with the technology that exists today in mobile. Only your imagination sets the boundaries. But I would really like to stress the importance of thinking about the bigger perspective when working in mobile, and make something truly engaging, that adds real value in the lives to your target group. It’s always possible, and if not taken advantage of you waste a big opportunity in working with mobile, or even the digital space at large. It might require a bigger budget in the short run, but will keep on giving long after your usual “campaign period”.

To send you off, I would like to bring up, a very relevant question was posed at the M-Commerce workshop that I feel didn’t get a good answer. Why, when mobile is showing such large numbers in adoption, is it still such a small part of the digital commerce? I think it’s quite obvious why. A minute part of businesses have yet to adapt to mobile. When we’re talking about companies and services that have been rethought for mobile, we’re talking about very small percentages. How much business do you think a retail store would make if it had locked doors or a 1 m ceiling height, next to a normal one? We have to get to work adapting if we want to get that business.

And lastly, a BIG thanks to SIME and everyone behind it for inviting us to cover our passion, and for being such great hosts for the bloggers this year. Really hope we get the opportunity again. Now back to creating great useful and valued mobile experiences. And keep in touch if you want to hear more.

Day one at SIME, a mobile perspective

© Image by Petter Karlsson

This week, MobileApps and me, Christoffer, have been selected to watch the mobile space at SIME Stockholm, the largest conference in IT and media in Scandinavia. We are very excited about it, and since we’re watching the mobile space closely anyway, we thought it would be a really good opportunity to share our thoughts here on our blog.

The first day at SIME Stockholm has delivered some great shows and presentations, and a lot of it touching on, or being directly about the mobile field. We thought we’d summarize it all with the one all-encompassing key take-away:

We’re going mobile, and there is no turning back

First of all, it’s evident already today, that if you’re mindset isn’t in mobile, you’re doing it wrong. How do we know this? Just look at the two biggest actors in the digital field today: Google and Facebook. Google, shifted their main focus on to mobile last year. Now everything they do is mobile first. Facebook, they have already today just under 50% of their 800 million users accessing Facebook on their mobile phones. The shift to mobile has already started to happen in a huge way.

We also heard a lot of other interesting stats, spottings, and predictions from the speakers, supporting the mobile trend:

• Mobile searches have increased 4-5 time under the last year alone
• 30% of all restaurant searches are done on mobile phones (a big stat considering how many non-mobile optimized, or even Flash(!) restaurant sites that are out there. Here’s a great exception by the way)
• 79% of Smartphone users use a smartphone to help with shopping and 70 percent use phone in store.
• Youtube has 200 million playbacks from phones per day (up from 100M a year ago)
• 550.000 new Android Smartphones are activated per day (and Apple is adding another 200.000 iPhones to that)
• Two of this years biggest conference stars iZettle and Wrapp, are businesses completely focused around mobile
• All TV discussions are surrounding the interaction between TV and the mobile devices taking up more and more of the watchers attention
• The biggest websites in Sweden are all seeing exponential growth in mobile visitors, with Aftonbladet, Sweden’s most visited website, predicting mobile surpassing desktop in 1-2 years

The big disparity here is that with all this mobile web usage, very few websites are actually optimized for mobile use. Of advertisers, less than 25% have a mobile optimized site, even sometimes linking to it through campaigns geared towards mobile users. This is why Google has launched a mobile initiative, GO MO, helping businesses go mobile. The initiative is great and we of course love the push from Google telling people to go mobile. When you’ve visited the site and seen what you should do, contact an experienced developer like us to help you get sorted out.

MobisleApps view, that’s supported by what we heard at SIME today, is that mobile is indeed where all digital communication is headed, and we think it’s quite evident. The era where we had to sit down in front of a desk, screen and a keyboard to do everyday interactions was just a phase, forced by the limitations of technology. While we might want to do certain high concentration tasks in a controlled desktop environment, we think the barrier for what these are is being erased, and everything else is just very unnatural to do on a PC on a desktop. Period.

Want to hear more from MobisleApps? Follow us on Twitter.

MobisleNotes hit 200 000+ active installs on Android

We are happy to announce that we as of last week reached over 200 000 active installs of MobisleNotes for Android. Only <3% of these are on Android 1.6 witch is very handy.

This is very exciting as we are currently in the finishing phases of taking MobisleNotes to a completely new level (I know we have said this for some time now but we rather do it right than fast). Anyone wanna join the Beta can kindly send us a and e-mail at beta@mobisleapps.com

Thanks!

We entered Travelhack 2011

So this weekend we entered the competition Travelhack 2011 that was held in Gothenburg, Sweden. The goal was to come up with a digital service, an app in our case, witch where to aid travelers and help them travel more sustainable.

“TravelHack is launched as a service innovation competition with a special focus to improve how people travel in a sustainable manner.” 

Our idea named “go’ tid” (translates into “in good time”) was to make both public transport and car travel more reliable and there for an easier choice. If there where to be a traffic congestion the app would offer an alternativ travel route by public transport instead. To the right you can see a screen of the app.

Although we did not win the competition we are very happy with the result an proud of what we where able to accomplish in only 24 ours. All of the guys made a remarkable achievement and performance. Good work team MobisleApps – Martin, David, Per, Dean and Christoffer

Unfortunately the product at this time is only made for the Swedish market but we will be looking in to expanding markets outside of Sweden.

Go check it out on Facebook. (Only Swedish information unfortunately)

Problem with backups

Hello,

There have been a few comments and questions regarding problems with the backup. We are aware of the problem but we have no good solution in sight. Here is an explanation from our dev team:

Unfortunately there is a bug in the Android OS that is caused by certain SD-cards. Android mistakenly assumes that the database is corrupt. Older versions of Android responds to this by crashing, while never versions instead deletes all data and gives the app an empty database. Currently there are no efficient way to import the notes into MobisleNotes. However it is still possible to recover the notes to your computer if they are important. Also we are currently working on a workaround to this problem, and with the next release this issue will be solved.

One way to retrieve your notes is if you connect your phone to your computer you can mount the sd-card, so it can be accessed from the computer. Your backups are in the folder “MobisleNotes”. If you want you can mail the database to us, and we will extract them for you and send them back. This would be done automatically and no one would read your notes.

To manually extract your notes you will need a database-manager. If you are using firefox as your browser, one of the simplest way is to use an add-on called “SQLite Manager”. This program will be able to open the database-file. After you have installed the add-on, in firefox click “Tools” and choose “SQLite Manager”. First open the database. Your notes can be extracted like this: In the menu to the left, select the backup file. Click “Tables”, then “notes” and choose “Export”. Here you can configure the settings of the export, but just click “ok” to export your notes as a csv-file. Some redundant data will also be in the file, but your notes should be fully readable.

Update 120117: There is no solution in sight for this problem and as we are introducing a free web-sync in the upcoming version we are phasing out the automatic backup within a few versions. Anyone that have experienced this problem will be rewarded with 1 year premium subscription of the new service. More on this when we have launched the new version. 

Update 111201: This bug only occurs on HTC phones and we have ongoing  support from HTC to solve it. If you experiencing this issue on an other manufacturer, please let us know.   

//Fredrik

What is the main reason for buying (or considering buying) our Pro version?

Please swing by Facebook and leave your answer:

http://www.facebook.com/MobisleApps

What we have been doing

Hi everyone,

We have been busy this summer. Allot of work has been done improving and developing MobisleNotes, both for Android and iOS. The long awaited update will among other features have a folder option and a brand new web-sync with our own web-interface. We have worked hard on the stability and performance of the iOS version witch we know isn’t the greatest right now.

The app has been completely re-built with major improvements as a result.  With the new web-sync users with an Android phone and for example an iPad will be able to seamlessly edit their notes on both devices.  Stay tuned for the beta release invite release.

We have made a few apps for our costumers as well. One of them was an App for the popular nightclub “Port du Soleil” in Gothenburg. We are very happy with the result and the feature to incorporate the Facebook “check in” as a VIP-card (VAPP) we managed to create a viral social loop.

If you would like to check it out:

iPhone

Android

(Unfortunately only descriptions in Swedish)

Review of Mobisle Notes by All things Android

All things Android UK has reviewed our MobisleNotes app for Android. Go check it out:

http://allthingsandroiduk.blogspot.com/2011/03/great-little-simple-notepad-app.html

Minor updates for Notes Pro for Android

We have just released a minor update for Notes Pro for Android. It includes the following:

We are currently very busy but are working hard to get a few bigger updates in there. Such as folders and a unified web sync with our own site and cross platform (iPad etc). Here is a preview of the upcoming tablet design:

Thank you for your patience!

Here’s the link to the app:

MobisleNotes Android Market

MobisleNotes on iOS

MobisleNotes is now finaly avialible for the iOS!

The app will work great on iPhone, iPhone 4, iPod Touch and on the iPad. We have a completly new self developed web sync for this app that will store your notes safely online and are working on a web app as well. We have added the most used feature from Android and will continue to improve both this new iPhone app as well as the Android version.

Features:
- Switch between plain text or checklist on the fly
- Web backup
- Set note reminders
- Password protect notes
and more…

We hope you’ll like it!

Any feature requests for the iOS version can be posted on our feedback forum.