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Eric is the CTO and co-founder of Forecast. He is a lifelong hacker, licensed mathematician, and lean startup fanboy. Warning: only ask him about lean startups if you have a couple of hours to spare. You can follow him on twitter @geometrid and on facebook.
Tell us a little about forecast:
Forecast is the best way to meetup with your friends! Checkout all the cool places your friends are going, or create your own forecast to share where you’ll be later today. Queue up multiple forecasts and then check-in with one touch when you arrive. Whether you’re going out for coffee or a wild night on the town Forecast helps you meetup with your real friends out in the real world. It’s social networking that’s actually social.
Where did the idea come from?
A check-in tells your friends where you are now. A forecast tells friends where you will be later. This simple change from present tense to future tense changes everything. It's the difference between a serendipitous...
When Caroline came to London a month ago we were saved from drowning (yes it rains heavily ever now and then in London) by a fantastic taxi application called Hailo Cab.
If you haven't heard of them the following blog post will tell you more about this dream story of 3 taxi drivers who dreamed up an app!
Here at WIP, we partner with many mobile conferences taking place all over the world. As a result, we are able to secure discounted registration for the WIP Community for most and sometimes even a FREE pass or two. The next few weeks are jam-packed with events before the usual summer slow down. Check out the events below and many more on our Mobile Community Calendar:
AnDevCon, May 15 – 17, San Francisco, USA. Still time to register for this technical conference geared towards software developers building or selling Android apps. Exhibit Hall is Free to attend. Conference discount for WIP Community.
APPNATION, May 15 & 16, New York, USA. This is where the app and connected device ecosystems meet, combined with social TV apps. It is the first conference to focus entirely on the business of apps and their transformative impact on consumers and enterprise technology, devices, commerce, media and social interaction. Discount for WIP Community.
In-app purchases are blowing up, and now account for more than 70% of the revenues in the iTunes App Store, and account for a huge and growing chunk of revenues on other platforms as well. Business models with in-app purchasing (such as freemium, virtual goods and more) work a bit differently than paid downloads, and require you to design your app differently to get the best conversion rate and accrue the most revenues. There's a premium on lifecycle planning and management so you can keep your revenue streams alive and continually offer new value to your users in exchange for continued purchases.
Our friends at App-Promo recently did a survey gauging how mobile developers found success with their applications in the last year. Some interesting data was found, as you can see from the infographic below:
The results of the survey definitely re-emphasize something that we've been preaching for a while - that it is important to start thinking about marketing from day 1 and as much as possible, your development and marketing cycles should sync. When 68% of developers in the survey have earned less than $5000 (guess they weren't developing for the BlackBerry), it should be eyeopening for all those about to release an app.
Apigee recently released a webcast titled Mobile Apps 101: Key Patterns You Need to Know. In there, Ed Anuff, Gregory Brail, and Tim Anglade go through some trends in some of the most successful apps to date, such as social graph, push notifications, location as context, and more. If you're just starting out in the ideation phase or are looking to enhance your existing app's feature list, listen in on this webinar:
James Coops kicks things off for us with the 'Best Mobile App Developer Directory' by mobyaffiliates. It's still a growing list, but includes iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 developers. The apps are grouped by geographical region, and they are taking suggestions, so if you are a developer or work for a studio, go ahead and email them and tell them why you're the best!
Natasha Hutchinson of adfonic shared this post about why advertisers should be shifting their media budgets to mobile. The most interesting stat the shift in consumer behaviour: "a recent study by Flurry showed that we now spend one third more of our time on mobile apps than desktop web That’s a significant contrast to 18 months ago when the reverse was true".
MotoDev has recently released a best practices guide for Enterprise Android development. It's free to download with registration. It's a fairly comprehensive guide, especially if you're new to mobile enterprise. It covers everything from the planning stage to deployment of your app. The white paper also covers security considerations and systems integration. It's definitely worth a look!
Late last week, RIM released their Q4 2012 revenue reports, and the results were extremely disappointing, to say the least. Multiple senior-level executives parted ways, along with one with the original faces of the BlackBerry brand itself - Jim Balsillie. As the news of RIM's apparentpendingdoom spread throughout the blogosphere, I couldn't help but wonder if this was really the beginning (or middle, depending on your level of cynicism) of the end for the Canadian tech giant. While most critics have focused on BlackBerry's revenue numbers and the downward consumer trends, there has barely been any news on what developers think of BlackBerry.
To start, both BlackBerry DevCon Europe and all the sessions at BlackBerry's ADC at Mobile World Congress were completely sold out, but was this simply due to the schwag being given away at the front door?
Surprisingly, the answer was no.
While talking to attendees at DevCon Europe, we noticed an unusual (in a good way) amount of...
In early March, we had the chance to meet up with Gary Yentin, CEO of App-Promo at WIPJam. App-Promo assists developers and app owners to succeed with their apps through providing services to increase discovery, maximize app revenue and mitigate the risk associated with new product development. We talked with Gary about how the biggest marketing issues developers face everyday and how to overcome them:
Tell us a little about your expertise and background on mobile marketing.
Our team has over 15 years of combined mobile marketing experience. We started in mobile when personalization was the big trend and everyone wanted a ringtone and wallpaper for their phone. Both Tom and I have continued to work in every facet of the industry as it has grown, becoming experts in mobile media, mobile marketing, mobile advertising and product strategy and development along the way. We leverage our years of experience and knowledge to help our clients of various sizes and vertical succeed...
In early March, we had the chance to meet up with