I spent the whole day at the WIP Jam, speaking on an "un" panel, and managed to get the last word in (!). I then co-chaired the testing round table with Paul from Mob4Hire and generally hung out and had a number of interesting conversations.
You can check out the Twitter chatter from the event here #wipjam
Here is a photo of the wrap up at the end of the day:
The general theme of the panel was fragmentation, technology choices, distribution and of course how to make money.
In terms of summarising my contribution, I'll start with my closing comments / rant.
One of the panelists said Operators need to reduce their revenue shares on premium sms to give the developers a break.
The developer community has a clear message /requirement - show me how to make money. To achieve this all parties in the value chain / ecosystem (insert buzzword here) need to be incentivized to invest.
This is the only way we can turn this into a sustainable business.
The panel included handset manufacturers, VC's, Operators, and software sitting in front of a room full of developers. Everyone in the room needs money. How then does a race to the bottom, cutting value out of a nascent industry, help any of us?
Marketing is not about giving stuff away for free. If you make a product people value they will pay you money for it. It's worked for thousands of years, so do we assume mobile app's won't work like that? What's special about this space? Am I missing something?
It's all about setting expectation.
If you position something as worthless today, it's so much harder to go back and then justify imposing charges later on. I've heard stories this week of developers giving away app's they believe have a value purley to drive visibility in the growing mess that is the Apple app store. "I have to because I need to stay in the top 5 so people can find me"
That's a crazy model right, and how does that answer the question show me how to make money?
I made the point a couple of times today that the mass market does not know what apps are. It's a small community of developers and early adopters (mostly iPhone owners we are led to believe, may be GetJar would disagree, they seem to be doing ok!!) that are creating all the buzz at the moment.
If we discount all the value out of the market today then you have set expectation for mass market adoption when it comes, if it comes. Again, how does that help you make money?
In a side conversation I likened it to Henry Ford giving away Ford Model T's free of charge before anyone had a driving license. Sure there was a risk that no one would trade in their horse for a car, and some one had to build roads, but stick in there, be clear on the value proposition and if people understand and recognise the value they will change their behaviour and pay you at the same time.
Kind of irrelevant if operators share 100%, 70%, 50%, 30% of revenue, if the price point is zero.
This leads me to the second theme I tried to explain. How many developers research their ideas and trial their products with real end users / customers, or is the model throw something against the wall and see if it sticks?
There seemed to be no real preference in the room, with many trying both. Surely in the current climate developers can not afford to speculate on what customers may want when they could learning what customers do want. Back to Henry, if you get this right, then you can charge a premium because there is an inherent value in what you are doing.
As the guy said at the last Mobile Mobile in London, "all of this is great, but tell me how I make money from Widgets and don't say advertising"
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