Both apps and mobile websites have become increasingly important ways for companies – particularly retailers – to connect with people. However, while there have been good arguments put forward for the benefits of both sides – there has been little cold hard data to really compare how many people are engaging across each channel, nor has there been much analysis of user behaviour within them. So how do mobile apps compare to the mobile web?

New research published by Nielsen is hopefully the beginning of an increase in insight into both apps and the mobile web. The data focuses on the 2011 holiday season in the US and saw that, combined, both apps and mobile websites reached nearly 60% of smartphone users – around 58m people (judging by Edison’s most recent count of the number US people with these devices).

However, looking at apps and mobile websites separately, there is a considerable difference between the penetration of each. During December, mobile websites reached 51% of smartphone users (nearly 50m people) compared to apps which topped out at 28% (around 27m people). This shows mobile websites taking quite a big lead with US shoppers buying Christmas presents, reaching almost twice as many consumers.

Judging by mobile user behaviour in the US, there is clearly more value to be attributed to focusing on mobile web rather than developing an app. After all, a well-designed website that is compatible for web can potentially reach the entire connected smartphone audience, while certain apps are developed with certain devices – such as iPhone or Android – in mind.

For developers such as ourselves, there are a growing array of tools and frameworks helping us design websites for increasingly mobile-orientated web users. Bootstrap is an open source project engineered by Twitter which has evolved to accommodate major browsers across PC, tablets and smartphones. Additionally, Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help us rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17" laptop screen or an iPhone.

For businesses who are looking at campaigns which have to include one or the other, the latest word from Nielsen looks to favour developing a decent mobile website instead of an app. However, further analysis into the data reveals some interesting behavioural trends which we shouldn’t ignore, including that US men are slightly more likely to try mobile apps than women – and those who do use mobile apps spend more time browsing than those using mobile websites. Surely, the battle is not over yet, and if it’s engagement with your brand you really want to push then perhaps a fully-fledged app is still the way to go. But for reach alone, a mobile website is likely to be seen by many more potential consumers.

We have just rolled out an update to Stubmatic. Although on the surface stubmatic looks the same we have made some major changes to the underlying logic in preparation for some future enhancements that we are working on.

For now one of the biggest changes you will notice is we have updated the way events are published. We have changed the terminology from "published" to "listed" and events can now be listed and delisted from your box office at any time. For example, previously when an event was cancelled or sold out it remained on your box office, you can now optionally de-list these.

In addition to this we have made several fixes and tweaks to the system, including:

  1. Sold out events now correctly show as available if more tickets are added
  2. Layout tweaks to assist navigation.
  3. For new events created from today: Have made it clearer and simplified which email address PayPal payments are being sent to.

We are centralising product blogs back to our main blog so all updates to Stubmatic will be posted here from now on.

As mobile and smartphone camera technology continues to become more powerful, there has been increased speculation into the usefulness of camera phones for driving consumers of offline marketing towards digital content via scannable tags, codes and images.

Mobile tagging adoption

From crowd-sourcing reviews and comments of physical products via barcode scanning, to embedding URLs in QR codes, there is certainly a lot of scope for methods of delivering relevant information to mobile users more efficiently than depending on them to type in a web address or make a Google search.

Yet, despite success in Asia (particularly Japan, where QR codes were created by Denso) since 2003, adoption in the West has been relatively subdued. According to research conducted by Toluna Quick, just 19% of UK consumers have scanned in a QR code (11% have done so in the US, say Simpson Carpenter) and 31% know what they are (36% in the US).

Problems?

There are numerous possible reasons for the relatively lacklustre uptake of mobile tagging to date, such as:

  • Lack of standard code. The numerous different types of 2D barcodes available may be confusing and/or off-putting to potential users. For instance, in the US Data Matrix codes are also popular while in the UK, QR codes dominate. Most mobile users need to download either paid or free apps before they can attempt to scan the tag they see (although some handsets, such as Android, come equipped with QR/image recognition tool Google Goggles). There have also been a number of other niche codes released, such as Microsoft Tags.
  • Not quick enough. Despite the supposed simplicity and efficiency of using a camera phone to read a tag (QR stands for ‘Quick Response’), scanning can be tricky. If tags aren’t clear enough (particularly when there is little light) it can take a few attempts for scans to work – and certain phones are equipped with better cameras than others.
  • Content not worth the effort. It might also be argued that content that is most often beyond the code or tag is rarely of any more interest to the consumer than what can be found at the website anyway. There have even been reported examples of tags leading to websites which aren’t optimised for mobile.

Already beyond codes?

Mobile tagging technology is undoubtedly moving quickly, and it may even be argued that we are moving into a post-QR era, even before they really took hold. Recently launched, Blippar is an app which uses the camera on smartphones or mobile devices to unlock digital content simply by recognising the imagery – be it an ad in a newspaper or even a product itself.

By eliminating the need for a code or tag at all, services such as Blippar (other Augmented Reality tools, such as the Layar browser, exist too) have overcome the hurdle of the lack of a standard barcode. And although it remains to be seen whether ‘blippable’ content imposes any restriction on what can be included in the image, it is likely that many designers will be keen to see an alternative to the ugly black and white pixel boxes of QR codes.

Real opportunity?

There is also increased versatility with non-code mobile tagging, giving advertisers and marketers the scope to develop impressive augmented reality animations and games as well as links to URLs and more compelling content such as discount vouchers.

With more opportunity for developing inventive examples of augmented reality, Blipper and others look likely to become quite significant, particularly for multichannel and mobile commerce campaigns by larger organisations and businesses which can afford to develop such ads. If this happens, then mobile tagging will certainly reach a larger audience, and QR codes may continue to have a place too – with their remaining sole USP as the mobile tag which anyone can generate.

One of the biggest stories in the world of the iPad last month centred on the success of the app released for The New Yorker.  By turning their back on interactive features and the ‘Bells & Whistles’ approach to digital versions of offline media, The New Yorker’s developers essentially put all of their efforts into making the app clean and readable.  Simple, huh?

Impressively so.  With over 100,000 readers (and 20,000 paying in excess of $50 for subscriptions) these numbers are dwarfing those being reported for others in the magazine app category and are signalling to developers that app consumers – for all our keenness to adopt emerging technologies and try new things – are still creatures of simple tastes.

So, is simplicity the key to a hit app?  And if so, why?

These are intriguing questions.  After all, in this era of ‘the long tail’ do we really care about hits anymore?  Surely, there are as many folk buying a variety of the numerous niche and complex magazine apps available as there are buying The New Yorker for iPad.  With no limitations of shelf-space in an increasingly niche-orientated world, developers, in theory, could invest the same amount of time and money into a variety of non-simple magazine apps to similar success as they might putting the same efforts into one very simple hit app.

I needed to do a little more research so I reached for my iPhone 4, clicked through to the App Store and went in search for the hit app of the moment.  Although I wasn’t expecting something overly complicated, I was perhaps expecting something kind of new – or at least something with more than one function.  But lo and behold, at the time of writing this, the top free app (and second to top paid-app) on the iPhone is none other than... Snake ‘97 – not only a very simple app (it doesn’t even have a menu screen), but a version of perhaps one of the simplest games that remains popular to this day (at least 30 year since its original release).

Unsurprisingly, the trend is similar across paid and free apps on different devices and I believe if we were to take all the applications produced to date and plotted them on a graph, the left side (head) of the curve would be home to more of the simpler apps, while the tail would be where we’d see the non-simple apps.

So, is the reason for this simply because the majority of app buyers are keen on simple things – in the same way that the straightforward pop of Justin Bieber appeals to more people than the latest prog-funk album by Destroyer?

Maybe.  Yet additionally, I think the fact that apps are still a new media to most people means that when we start searching around the market (where we are, of course, initially presented with ‘the hits’) we’re keen to test it out with things we can understand quickly.  What might be a surprise to developers, is that this young market may need to go through a period of hit making with ultra-simple apps – especially when looking at emerging app categories like magazines – before ‘the tail’ is long enough to really invest in ‘non-simple’ niche apps.

How amalgamating social media might be able to help you get more from your feeds and highlight those networks which aren’t delivering on value

There has been much written recently (this post and this one at Econsultancy are good examples) about the difficulties businesses, marketers and individuals have in being able to quantify and analyse the actual value of social media as a marketing or promotional tool.  In simple terms it is still very hard to see whether 100 ‘likes’ on Facebook leads to a worthwhile number of conversions on your site, and even if you do have 1000+ followers on Twitter does the ROI come anywhere close to that of more traditional (but less sexier) online marketing methods such as email and search?

It is unlikely that any ‘social media expert’ will admit that the benefits of email, search and most other online marketing is a darn sight easier to see than social.  He/she will also not be likely to highlight the experimental and largely trial-and-error nature of social media marketing – and without being aware of this nugget of truth from the outset, anybody with a fledgling online presence can easily end up with a confusing mess of distracting feeds, fruitless cyber-buddies and half-maintained profiles scattered across the web.  So is social media amalgamation a viable route back towards order, and value?

Introducing social media amalgamation – making things more manageable

When thinking about making our social feeds more manageable, tools which offer us an overview of the activities of those across our networks are the ones that usually spring to mind.  Friendfeed, launched in 2007, was something of a pioneer of this.  It gives users a real time overview of Facebook updates from friends, tweets, posts from blogs they have subscribed to and countless others, as well as a simple front page in which you can interact with everything without having to open numerous tabs and logging into separate channels.  The growth of Twitter during 2008 saw the emergence of more microblogging orientated amalgamation tools both in-the-browser (such as Hootsuite) and as standalone programs (such as Tweetdeck).

Getting around distraction

Getting all your most important feeds in one place is a great way to save time that might be spent flitting between profiles.  The tendency to be distracted by social media, however, can still be a problem – and new services are striving to address this.  Launched in 2010, Rockmelt is an entire browser dedicated to getting the most from your social media networks.  By allowing the user to amalgamate feeds direct into the architecture of the browser, they do not even need to navigate away from pages in order to network.  In addition, the service also provides a customizable quiet mode to minimize distraction at the user’s request.

Amalgamating on your site, to help your site

Social media value can also be improved by how we amalgamate our networks on our websites.  Including your feeds such as Twitter and Facebook directly on to your homepage can not only increase the likelihood that visitors will want to connect, but it also helps deliver the freshest content to your site – a positive thing in the eyes of Google and other search engines.  The evolution of this comes with services such as Flavors.me which seamlessly integrates the social networks of its users as a basis for a simple and useful website.

More valuable?

Like all that is social, precisely how valuable amalgamation can be to your overall campaign is difficult to quantify exactly.  Yet, being able to see all your networks side by side is a great way to gather insight into where the most worthwhile conversations are happening and via which channels followers and fans are being most receptive.  In addition, working to cut out as much of the distractive elements of social media is no doubt a step toward value.  And by ensuring as much of your network action is assisting the relevancy of your website in both the eyes of your visitors and search engines is certainly a positive thing.  With decent amalgamation, users are likely to be in a far better position to tweak, amend and refine their social media activities.

As social networking continues to become a key strategy for businesses and start-ups to promote themselves online, photo sharing is an activity which seems second nature to some but almost entirely ignored by others.  So – from a business point of view – is it worth downloading the latest photo app, snapping away at every opportunity, then posting the results to Facebook or Flickr?

Photo sharing to ‘blend in’

It’s a question which has garnered considerable discussion online recently, not least on the newly launched service Quora.  The most popular answer came from VC Simon Olson who argues that photo sharing can form the ‘base activity of the “social” pyramid’ and that ‘it is one of the most popular activities that users engage in on social networks.’  With this in mind, it then seems logical for anyone eager to establish themselves on any social network to spend some time doing what everyone else is doing, not least to align yourself with the audience you are hoping to communicate with, as well as to highlight that you know what social media is all about, i.e. sharing, not promotion.

So just how big is photo sharing online?

Photo sharing has certainly seen fantastic growth over the last few years.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook has been the key player, increasing its lead as top photo sharing site (ahead of Photobucket, Picasa and Flickr) at the end of 2008 with users now uploading more than 3 billion pictures each month.  Yet, as Facebook’s dominance may have been seen to be making life difficult for other photo hosting sites such as Flickr, whose traffic started to decline by early last year, the site now boasts five billion photos and has increased steadily at 25% over the last 12 months.

The impact of apps and technology

Of course, photo-orientated smartphone apps and the increasing number of camera phones is having a positive effect on photo sharing – and making it easier for all of us to take better looking pictures and upload them quicker than ever before.  Instagram, Hipstamatic and PhotoShop Express all allow photos to be tinted etc. without the need to upload to your desktop or laptop beforehand.  Following this, it makes even more sense that Facebook is winning the photo sharing race with more than two hundred million users accessing the site via mobile – it figures that we want to put our pictures on this network first straight from our phones.

The case for...

For some, photo sharing is a great way to naturally instigate communications on social networks (especially at the start of a SM campaign), and it is becoming an increasingly quick and easy way to do this.  But is photo sharing worthwhile for any business or start-up with a fledgling web presence?  From an online content point of view, I would add two additional reasons why it may well be: fresh content and transparency.  In simple terms, fresh content is good for keeping both your audience and Google interested in your presence.  If you are active, even with only one piece of content a day – then a photo can be a quick way to achieve that daily goal to remind everyone that you’re still there.

The latter reason, transparency, relates to the earlier point of ‘aligning yourself with the audience you are hoping to communicate with.’  One of the ways businesses and start-ups really succeed with social media is by highlighting the human side of the organization behind the corporate persona which is often presented on the website.  Simply put, evidence of staff events and non-work activities showing that your organization is a diverse bunch of real people is much easier to see in photos rather than text-based blog posts, status updates or tweets.

Or, how a non-developer can make sense of the terminology we sometimes spout... It all starts from a simple question:

Is .NET a programming language?

No, .NET isn't a programming language, it's a framework.

Framework! Like Ruby on Rails!

Yes like Ruby on Rails. A framework is a load of bits of code that someone has packaged up to help developers create applications. Ruby on Rails, .NET, Django and Cake PHP are all examples of frameworks.

So frameworks are libraries?

Not really. A library tends to be focused on a particular piece of functionality - for example you might have a libraries that lets your code talk to Twitter.. In the world of Ruby, libraries are often packaged up into gems - little bundles of functionality which you can add to your app. In fact that's a good way of looking at a library - just a bolt-on of focused functionality.

Right. So what was a programming language again?

The programming language is where it all starts. A programming language, like C#, Ruby, PHP or Python, is used to write libraries and frameworks. The language, the libraries and the frameworks combine to allow you to write an application.

You need a lot of stuff to get started then...

Well really the programming language is the bare minimum - you could write an application using just those bare essentials. But bolt on a framework like Ruby on Rails and you get things like easier ways to access the database or do localisation, and add a library to speak to Facebook and Foursquare. This enables your application to get up and running much more quickly because you don't have to write all of that code again. You're standing on the shoulders of giants; you're not reinventing the wheel.

But what about security? How do you know all of these frameworks and libraries are safe to use?

Two reasons. Firstly, many libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and the vast majority of Ruby gems are open source. This means you can look at the code yourself and check that it's not malicious. Additionally, hundreds of other eyes are looking at that same code - in the case on Ruby on Rails some of the world's best coders will have had a hand in developing the framework. Secondly, in the case of frameworks such as .NET, a multi-billion dollar organisation will have developed a rigorous Q&A process with automated testing and security auditing to make sure it lives up to its billing. If Microsoft can rely on .NET to run its business, chances are you can too. And recently even Microsoft has begun open-sourcing its code, so you can review it by eye if you want - all 1 bajillion lines of it.

Surely there's no way to be sure unless I've written it myself though?

Possibly, but chances are you're more likely to fall into the same holes as other developers - for example creating a web framework which falls prey to XSS vulnerabilities or other such security issues. A peer-reviewed third party framework will have been there and done that, with thousands of developers and users checking it for security problems every single day. Like I said - standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ok. I'm getting it. Language > Library/Framework > Application. So what's a platform?

Oh God. Well a platform is at the top end of the scale. You build applications on a platform, but a platform itself will likely have been built using a framework. Sometimes platforms are applications as well - applications which provide developer APIs for example. A good example is Facebook - technically it's a vast application, but it also provides lots of ways for developers to build on top of it and interact with the Facebook application and its users.

Excellent. So this new language we're writing with Facebook on top of the C# library - when will that be ready?

You mus- Ahem. Well now you know so much, you can write it yourself. Get back to me when it's done, there's a good manager.

...And emerging ways to pay online and on mobile

Using the internet to sell products and services is the ultimate goal of many websites we come across each day.  Yet, as an increasing number of businesses and companies move online, emerging technologies are also bringing fresh ways to pay and receive money as well as completely new ways to monetise mobile and web-based content.  While 2010 was dominated by trends such as freemium as used by services like Spotify and Evernote, as we move into 2011 new types of digital currency and payment technologies are appearing and diversifying.  This post aims to define some oft-used but sometimes confusing terms in the new world of money online.

Facebook Credits

At the end of January, social networking supergiant Facebook announced that they will be requiring all social game developers to process payments via their own in-site payment system: Facebook Credits.  The virtual currency, which has been in the works since 2009, allows users to purchase credits (currently costing $1 for 10) which can then be spent on items in Facebook games and other apps.  Advertised as being a safer and easier method of payment, it’s hard to see how the idea won’t increasingly appeal to users – and in order to get developers on board, Facebook are offering a host of cool incentives for app makers.

In-game purchases

Monetising mobile apps is often a matter of tough choices as to whether you offer free versions and advanced (often ad-free) versions, or simply charge for one version from the outset.  For mobile games, in-game purchases are increasing in popularity because they offer a portion of what is paid for, i.e. the first few levels of a game, and give users the opportunity to pay for later levels or other unlockable content.  This also ensures that such games have more chance of being discovered by potential gamers – an important factor for developers as the market becomes increasingly crowded.

Mobile payments, e-wallets and Square

Mobile payments are likely to be a big deal in 2011.  The idea is quite simple, why not leave our credit cards at home and use our 3G enabled smartphones to transfer payments for us?  After all, we all have online bank accounts?  Now, a number of companies are planning on making our wallets redundant.  For paying for items, Visa have announced that they will be rolling out their PayWave system by the end of the year.  On the flipside, Square (part founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey) is a smartphone service which allows others to pay you via your mobile.  Less than 18 months after launch, Square are already processing $1m payments a day.  They have also recently made the potentially groundbreaking move to stop charging $0.15 per transaction for merchants, making the new technology (a simple dongle and downloadable app) even more appealing to small businesses, freelancers and workers on the go.

Micro-donations

Micropayments has been a popular term online in reference to simple small payment transactions for a few years now.  Today, however, micro-donations are offering a new way for bloggers and start-ups to monetise content without requesting an outright payment or subscription fee, and by avoiding the sometimes off-putting ‘donate’ method.  New service, Flattr, is a good example which gives web-content providers (i.e. bloggers, journalists, developers) a button for the posts they create (similar to Facebook ‘Like’ buttons), Flattr users who view the site decide how much money to put into their account monthly – and this amount is then shared between the sites that have been ‘liked’ or ‘flattr’d’ at the end of each month.

It is certainly an exciting time for developers to approach charging for web and mobile content, and we are sure to see some intriguing changes over the coming year.  Social media is certainly having a big effect, as well as emerging mobile technologies.  We, here at GoTripod, are curious to see what takes off.

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