Morten Hjerde's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

So, 2009’s new mobile phones, other devices or mobile software have to displace an existing digital activity. In fact, they have to compete with multiple digital options as well as books, newspapers and the ubiquitous freesheets.

A product with no differentiation and rabid price competition equals no profit.

"...my phone is not authoritative for my contact information. The phone has a local cache of information that it gets from Outlook. But Outlook's not authoritative for my contact information, neither is Gmail, neither is my Vonage, neither is Grand Central, neither is the six or eight other things that I have in my life that think they are.

"What none of them do is the simple thing of, 'tell me the URL for your contact service.' Additionally, it has to be a service, not a repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries...

"So when I think about the authoritative data source, it should be in the cloud. And it's a service, not a repository, so I can deal with the complexities of the real world where there are many potential data sources. However, I have to get every piece of software that's involved to do the right thing—to delegate responsibility—rather than acting like they're independent owners and whatever they have in their local state is good enough."

The typical operator product development process is usually: an opportunity is identified, market research is performed, a project is created once budget can be found, the new product development process runs its course, and then a service is launched typically 12-18 months after the initial market research.

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that is often attached to the world of objects

One of the most fascinating components of the UI is that when you're zoomed out to cards, the data is still active in the previews.

This may sound rough on the product managers, but given the fact stats show that about 3% of people have downloaded a game, while 25% have played a game preloaded (source: M:Metrics), you know there is a gap in terms of how you manage the store.

Mike’s preference was always: write apps for the 95% market, not the 5% market. That’s what we did with Delicious Library; it’s an app for your mom and my mom.

Oh, and if I priced at $9.99? There would be virtually zero sales.

Not only do they want a kick-back from the data traffic generated by the phone, but they also keep all revenue from the iPhone-generated sales of Apple's own applications and music. Is it not fair to say that Apple is actually in the process of positioning the mobile operator as a dumb bit pipe that is spending subsidies on reducing the price of Apple's hardware, while at the same time letting Apple keep all the premium revenue streams generated by the product after the customer has purchased it?

Due to the direct relationship between an app’s chart ranking and the numbers of copies sold each day, developers on the store have given up the notion of a price as a marker of valuation, and now simply use the price as a means of competition and marketing, rather than as a cost relative to the value of their application.

The interesting thing about the paid apps charts is that sales increase almost exponentially with each jump in the top ten, and apps that make it in there tend to hunker down and stabilize for a while.

The Apps Store and the iPhone 3rd Party Platform as a whole is barely 22 weeks old.

Well, Apple doesn’t allow developers to track sales from link to purchase. Until there is a way to track and optimize marketing dollars, it's incredibly hard for me to warrant going in the hole on an advertising spree or dropping my prices to $0.99 hoping that it will pay off once an app hits the top 50.

we’re hoping for is a way to rise above the competition when we do our job well, not just when we have the lowest price.

So instead of trying to solve Java's fragmentation, AT&T will try to standardize on as few operating systems as possible, and preferably open platforms, he said. That will give third-party developers more opportunity to reach AT&T subscribers with mobile applications

By offering much more selection — aiming to be the world’s biggest catalogue — Amazon makes it much more likely that transactions will occur.

Developers are getting more vocal about the restrictions too, especially Google’s often closed lines of communication on software problems or changes. Consumers may not worry about that, but they will get restive if they find that their new phones are as controlling of their web choices and experience as the old operator walled gardens.

The problem here is that developers become focused on making money now, instead of nurturing and building up a loyal customer base over the long term.

People are willing to pay more for superior products. Unfortunately, with the App Store developers haven’t given them the opportunity to do so

The common answer to that is to monetize through advertising. Awesome. That’s a very engineer friendly answer to the problem. It’s true, most problems can be solved by adding an additional layer of abstraction.

If you weren’t able to make money selling to users why should other advertisers be able to?

Today, a little over two months since the store's launch, the App Store already rings up $1 million in purchases a day, indicating potential annual sales of $365 million.

Most applications in the store now sell for 99 cents, compared with $9.99 in July, according to Rubicon Consulting, which researches tech trends. "You are not going to get the next Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) built on 99 cents a copy," says Rubicon analyst Michael Mace.