February Going's On...

Firstly thanks for stopping by. I've finally got a round to setting up a personal blog to try and aggragrate stuff I'm guest writing on other sites, and to provide a home to various personal ramblings and nuggets I pick up along the way.

For those of you that don't know me I'm the creative force behind O2 Litmus and as such I have spent the last 18 months talking to, and working with, some great people. Now we have the thing built and launched, 2009 is going to be busy spreading the word and helping the developer community make some money, good news huh? :-)

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona dominates the month, and O2 Litmus will have a visible presence down there, below is my upcoming schedule so it would be great to meet and chat...

February 2009:

2nd: Mobile Monday, London

16th - 19th: Mobile World Congress, O2 Litmus on Telefonica stand (Hall 8 stand 8B185)
16th: O2 Litmus sponsors Mobile Monday Peer Awards
17th: Speaking at the The Business of Mobile 2.0 Conference (14:40)
18th: Speaking at an Oracle Breakfast Briefing, RSVP by e-mail to anders.lundell@oracle.com
19th: O2 Litmus sponsors WIP Jam

26th: Oracle Webinar (details tbc)

March 2009:

5th: NavTeq Webinar

More soon...

And the winner of the most important API of 2009 is...

Orginally published at http://www.wipjam.com/ on 30th January 2009

We’ve asked our discussion leaders for WIPJam session to share their insight of the mobile developer world. This post was penned by James Parton, Head of O2 Litmus, the mobile developer programme with a twist and a sponsor of the WIP Jam Session at Mobile World Congress 2009 (#MWC09).

Open source, crowd sourcing, app stores, open networks, Web 2.0, Mobile 2.0, co-creation, user generated content. It’s clear that the future of application development is a hot industry topic.

Tip your hat to Apple. They have quickly transformed a cottage industry, struggling to find a poster child, into a serious business in a very short space of time. Through great end-to-end user experience – often overlooked by many in the area - we now have people buying apps on a regular basis. If you had asked those same people 6 months ago what kind of app they were interested in, they would have struggled to even define what an app was, let alone have a clear view on what was missing from their app life.

This wave has also beached in corporate boardrooms with many companies now launching or planning to launch app stores in reaction to the success of the Apple App Store. This leads us to ask where will the industry be in 6 months time?

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer for a second. They switch on their PCs and are be offered applications by their internet service provider. They then go to their favourite portal and may be offered applications, next they will see sponsored links for applications from their search engine.

Next they then pull their mobile phone out of their pocket and see an application store from their handset manufacturer, and sitting next that is the icon for their mobile network’s app store. Confused? Just imagine what the customer is thinking.

On the surface this explosion of app stores is a good thing for developers – more places to sell your apps means more people buying those apps, right?

However, this could be misleading. Many of these app stores are using aggregators to fill them up. This may lead to the vast majority of stores containing identical catalogues.

I can see parallels between the growing app market and digital music. Research has shown that over 90% of digital music catalogues are never downloaded. It’s an extreme example of Prato’s law. Are App stores already following the same path?

If these stores are filled by aggregators, and managed by marketers believing it’s all about catalogue, how do you as a developer get noticed? You want your app to be Smells Like Teen Spirit, and avoid being the obscure Cat Stevens B side from 1967 that no one wants!

So how do you solve this problem?

Customers. They are out there. They have an opinion. They are potential consumers of your products. You should get to know them, and love them. If you want to be successful, you have to prioritise customer relationship and service. Don’t just focus on the next feature you can build into your software.

Going back to my digital music analogy, we are going to see a huge attrition rate for apps. Thousands will never be downloaded or make profit. Can you afford to burn time and money speculating on what customers might want? Why not ask them before you commitment your engineering resource.

How do you find and reach these customers?

You should be seeking out partners that provide the most important API going forward. The winner of the most important API of 2009? It’s the Customer API.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if a large organisation was willing to step out of the way and let you interact directly with its customers? You would be able to demonstrate, co-develop and refine your product directly with end users?

This has to be a win – win approach. You save time and effort by refining your ideas before commercially launching, the end user feels empowered by helping to improve the products they and their friends will end up using, plus they get to experience these apps before anyone else – very different to a traditional retail environment where you buy and either love or hate the app you get.

Come and check us out here and upload your apps: http://www.o2litmus.co.uk/ or you can contact me directly via Twitter: www.twitter.com/jamesparton

Have you registered for WIPJAM yet. Rumour has it there are 2 tickets to give-away to the O2-Telefoncia party on Tues nite…

Mobile 2.0 San Francisco

Orginally published at www.bima.co.uk on 8th November 2008

This week I was fortunate enough to have been able to attend the annual Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, on behalf of O2 Litmus. The one-day event took place on 3rd November at the Hyatt and was a sell-out, with over 300 people in packed into the venue. What was interesting to see was not only the international outlook on the mobile 2.0 scene, but that the mobile application developer ecosystem is rapidly building in size and credibility.

Venture capitalists, start up’s, operators and established application developers sat closely alongside one another in San Francisco. I was one of a relatively small number of Europeans at the event, and it was clear to see the benefits of such a closely knit community both in terms ofcollaboration and ideas.

The topic talked about the most at Mobile 2.0 was what gives mobile applications the ‘X Factor’.

Many of the questions from the floor insinuated that many developers were still working hard to find sustainable business models for mobile. Many were looking at ad funded as the potential solution to their problem.

However the view from the VC panel was as clear as it was stark. Mobile applications which solely rely on advertising revenue are consistently failing to attract any interest from the Bay Area VC community. This is due to high levels of cynicism that mobile will be able to generate the CPM rates & volumes required to sustain a VC investable business.

“VC investable” is the key term here. All on the panel were at pains to state that many app developers will be able to create a business in Mobile via Ad funded, with the potential to scale to single figure millions of dollars per year. However, of course, the VC community are looking for exits of substantially more than that, and you got the sense everyone is still searching for the Mobile poster child company to emerge.

Secondly there was a detectable frustration with a lack of innovation coming through. Too many ideas being presented to the VC community were seen as line extensions, simply taking an existing concept and adding one or two new features - not breaking fresh ground or coming up with differentiated & unique propositions. This view was backed up by Sarah Lacey in her talk entitled “Secrets from Silicon Valley” held in London on 7th November.

An great tip for anyone going in front of these guys was be prepared for the “why now?” question. In these increasingly tough times the entrepreneur must be ready to convince the VC that they can’t afford to just sit back and let some other guy take the risk on their idea.

The theme of negativity on ad funded models was articulated by Tim Chang from Norwest Venture Partners, citing companies like GetJar who are building a sustainable business in Mobile. In anticipation of this focus on monitisable transactions, Tim was particularly supportive of micropayments and companies in the payments space.

I’m not an application developer though, so although the sweet spot for hot applications right now was compelling to see, what I found more insightful was the appetite for the industry to collaborate to create better things in the mobile 2.0 era.

I can see too that it will be important for Mobile operators like us to help bring customers and application developers together and step out of their way to let both parties get the most out of one another.

Consumers want cutting edge apps and developers want to reach an audience more easily. I see no reason why this won’t be the future model, and we will all be able to learn a lot from the journey.