Here’s the punchline – loyalty really positively impacts in app purchases!
Here’s the data, from Localytics:
According to LocalLytics, “Of all users in Localytics’ study who made an in-app purchase, 44% did not do so until they had interacted with the app at least ten times. On average, a user who makes an in-app purchase will do so 12 days after first launching the app.”
There is a well crafted piece on Business Insider on the new iPhone 4S announcement and how it actually may make a lot of sense that Apple did not release an iPhone 5.
The thinking is that perhaps this phone is not aimed at current owners of the iPhone 4, since they are still bound by their existing 2 year mobile contracts. Instead, it says:
So the 4S isn’t aimed at these folks. It’s aimed at the other three categories of iPhone 4S buyers:
- Pre-iPhone 4 iPhone users (~70 million of them)
- Non-smartphone users (1+ billion, who can now get a 3GS for free, if price is an issue)
- Non-iPhone smartphone users (Blackberry, Android, Nokia)
The release of the forthcoming iPhone 5, meanwhile, which presumably will be a more radical upgrade from the iPhone 4, will likely be timed to appeal directly to the ~70 million iPhone 4 owners who will just then be starting to come off their two-year contracts. The iPhone 4 was released in the early summer of 2010. So the two-year window for these contracts will begin to roll off in the summer of 2012 (next June).
Hmm. Well, maybe that is a possible strategy… Anyways, it makes some sense. Who knows though!
Do we finally have a real competitor to the iPad? Is Amazon going to do it!?!? I’m getting pretty excited here.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad (actually it’s my company’s, but hey). However, the world needs at least one legitimate competitor to the iPad to keep Apple honest and to push the industry to continue to innovate.
Preliminary sales numbers for Amazon’s Fire are supposedly very impressive. Mashable is reporting:
More than 250,000 Kindle Fires have been pre-ordered since Amazon announced the new tablet computer last Wednesday, according to a report from Cult of Android.
The blog says a “verified source” within Amazon provided screenshots of the company’s internal inventory system. The screenshots show the Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 units per day.
That’s legit if it’s true! Note that I couldn’t link to the original source, Cult of Android, because their blog seems to be down. This is big news… Ah, wait, it’s working for me now:
These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day… Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales. The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability. In the first month, iPad sales amounted to over a million units. By the time the iPad 2 came around in March of this year, Apple managed to rack up an estimated 2.5 million units in first month of sales.
What does this mean, beyond the fact that there may be another real player in the tablet space? I think that it shows that PRICE really matters in the tablet space. $199 is a sweet spot, perhaps. And remember that HP’s tablet flew off the shelves when the price was really reduced… it looks like there is a market for lower priced tablets. Of course, this follows along with the Google Android strategy of having a LOT of low end phones running on the software.
What will it mean for app developers? 1) Get in the Amazon Android marketplace. 2) Get ready for another form factor + potentially highly modified Android OS. 3) Get your hands on one of these devices ASAP so you can get a feel for how your applications will run on it.
Healy Jones | 
Cloud computing, Customer behavior, Innovation, Market research, mobile | 
08 24th, 2011| 
No Comments »Tablet growth is going gangbusters! Bizrate Insights has a new report that shows tablet growth at a 51% CAGR for the next few years (I can’t find the piece, just a write up on online marketing trends here.) A slightly more dated chart shows how fast tablets are taking off:
Online Marketing Tends reports that:
“According to a new report by Forrester Research, in partnership with Bizrate Insights, the number of Americans owning tablet devices is forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 51% between 2010 and 2015, while tablet commerce is expected to grow rapidly over the same period. 9% of surveyed online shoppers say they own a tablet device; among them, 78% own a smartphone as well, while 22% of tablet owners (2% of online shoppers) own a tablet only.”
That’s pretty quick. I’m starting to believe that the future will be dominated by tablets, at least as far as small business usage goes. And looks like Prasad Thammenini, my intrepid sometimes co-blogger, agrees. Here he is with a nifty new iPad2 keyboard that he just purchased:
Healy Jones | Customer behavior, Entrepreneur tips, Marketing strategies, mobile, online marketing | 08 23rd, 2011| No Comments »Came across a study by a company called Comparz and found the following quote interesting:
Only 20% or less of SMBs found vendor websites and conversation useful. So what are SMB’s looking for? Over 90% of business users said that user reviews and user ratings and rankings would be the strongest help in making vendor decisions. In addition, 84% indicated that decision guides outlining what to consider when purchasing a solution and would be useful. They also seek a community where they can chat online with similar buyers.
This goes along with my mobile app marketing strategy of getting existing power users to step up and review new versions of apps in app stores.
Pew internet research has more data on recent smartphone usage; you can find the full report here.
Looks like almost everyone has a smartphone there days… and people use them, with 87% of smartphone users saying they go online and or email with their phone.
For 25% the smartphone IS the primary way to get online. That’s a big deal!
And another interesting fact from the report: “Those under the age of 45 – 58% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 now own a smartphone as do 49% of those ages 18-24 and 44% of those ages 35-44. Even among those with a household income of $30,000 or less, smartphone ownership rates for those ages 18-29 are equal to the national average.” That compares with 35% of all age groups, so it’s clear that younger people are getting into these things. Smartphones are the future of computing…
Android is growing like crazy but it sill lacks that… je ne sais quoi that the iPhone has.
Oh, wait, I know what it lacks. People who download and use mobile apps, a stable and non-fragmented OS and consistent user experience.
Android Eclair - is this robot holding a piece of poop? Nope, it's just another dessert named OS by Android
Anand Rajaram, an OfficeDrop co-founder and our chief product officer, just wrote a piece for Techrepublic called “10 Things I Hate About Android.” Of course, not to be totally negative on Android, the subtitle is “and some work arounds that help.”
OfficeDrop has now released a series of mobile apps on different platforms – our iPhone PDF app, iPad App, Android Scanner App, and the PaperPort Anywhere iOS and Android apps. Anand has led the charge on all of these mobile applications. It was a lot of work! And he also has gotten a pretty deep view into the development and marketing side of these different mobile platforms.
And let me tell you… Android has some problems brewing. If the platform is going to be a serious contender from a mobile app developer perspective then it’s got a lot of stuff that has to get fixed. Anand goes into his top 10 in this article. This includes things that are nightmares for developers and QA people, like the software and hardware fragmentation, security issues, and the problem of getting found in Google Android marketplace.
Let’s hope that Google is able to address and reduce some of the problems. I think they, as a company, are taking this whole mobile thing quite seriously and I’d expect they make significant headway in improving a lot of these things in the coming year.
Anyway, click on the link above to see what Anand has to say about OfficeDrop’s experience developing on the Android platform. It’s a good read.
Healy Jones | Cloud computing, Marketing strategies, mobile, New England Innovation, officedrop, saas | 08 5th, 2011| No Comments »I’m pretty excited about a new partnership my company has that just launched. OfficeDrop is working with Nuance’s PaperPort desktop filing system to bring the newest version of PaperPort, PaperPort 14, to the cloud.
The team here at OfficeDrop was able to connect our APIs to PaperPort 14′s desktop client, making it simple to right click any folder from within PaperPort 14 and automatically sync all files to the cloud. If you include the mobile apps we developed this means you can right click a folder and the text search, browse and share the folder and it’s contents from your phone. It’s pretty cool and the tech press seems to be getting it. You can buy PaperPort 14 at paperport.com, where you can also sign up for a free PaperPort Anywhere account. And the mobile apps are here:
Obviously preparing for this was a ton of work, which is why I’ve been totally silent on the blogging front. Hopefully now that we are launched I”ll have time to get back to posting more frequently!
Below is the press release by Nuance talking about PaperPort Anywhere.
Nuance Launches PaperPort Anywhere Cloud Service
BURLINGTON, Mass., August 2, 2011 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today introduced PaperPort® Anywhere, a new cloud-based service that makes it easy to organize, access and share documents from nearly any PC and mobile device. PaperPort Anywhere lets users manage and access their documents in the cloud using web browsers, as well as using free apps from Nuance for Apple® and Google® Android® mobile devices.
The service uses the market-leading Nuance OmniPage® OCR (optical character recognition) engine to automatically create searchable documents from scanned and camera-captured documents, as well as faxes, making paper content as easy to search and find as digital documents. As a result, users can organize, access and share all of their document content on PaperPort Anywhere.
“There is a reason that recent surveys show over 51% of people still use paper files – it is in large part because current cloud services treat paper content as an afterthought,” said Robert Weideman, vice president and general manager for the Nuance Document Imaging Division. “PaperPort Anywhere goes further than other services by closing the content gap between paper and digital documents – making it easy to scan to the cloud, improving the way users manage both their scanned and digital documents, and by making cloud access easy and convenient.”
PaperPort Anywhere also integrates with the new release of Nuance PaperPort 14 for Windows®, the world’s most popular scanning and document management application for the PC, which was also announced today. PaperPort 14 provides automatic synchronization of Windows folders and files with PaperPort Anywhere. It also adds conversion of scanned and PDF documents into fully formatted word and spreadsheet files that can be edited on Windows, the Macintosh and through cloud services such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. PaperPort 14 provides robust PDF capabilities, including the ability to create PDF from practically any application, and includes PDF-MRC, which creates scanned files that are up to eight times smaller than scanned PDF files without compression.
PaperPort Anywhere is valuable to anyone that works with documents, including the over 20 million registered users of Nuance desktop applications, and users of the more than five million seats of PaperPort that are deployed each year. PaperPort Anywhere includes free apps for Apple iPhone, iPad and Google Android devices, and is free for up to one gigabyte of searchable storage space. PaperPort Anywhere subscription plans include $9.99 per month for 10 gigabytes and $24.99 per month for 50 gigabytes of storage space.
PaperPort Anywhere makes it easy to organize, access, and share any document – both paper and digital – anywhere and anytime. Key features and benefits include:
Pricing and Availability
PaperPort Anywhere with up to one gigabyte of searchable storage is free. PaperPort Anywhere Premium with up to 10 gigabytes of storage is $9.99 per month and $24.99 a month for 50 gigabytes of storage. For additional information on PaperPort Anywhere visit www.PaperPort.com.
About PaperPort Anywhere
PaperPort Anywhere is a new, innovative cloud service from Nuance that makes it easy to scan, organize and share documents – anytime, from anywhere. PaperPort Anywhere is powered by OfficeDrop. It delivers enhanced search-indexing capabilities using Nuance OmniPage OCR.
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.
Trademark reference: Nuance, the Nuance logo, and OmniPage and PaperPort are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the property of their respective owners.
# # #
Media and Industry Analyst Contact:
Jennifer Shelgren
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Tel: (781) 565-4758
Email: jennifer.shelgren@nuance.com
Ok, to be a little less histronic, internet map access from fixed computers (i.e. ‘landlines” if you will) shrank, while mobile map app access grew a lot. In fact, according to Comscore, it looks like internet map usage is up almost 9%, but this is totally because mobile map usage is up 39% (ie access from a mobile device and not a computer).
Are we seeing the innovation around mobile maps? Or is this space totally dominated by Google Maps? It’s hard to think of a more valuable piece of mobile real estate, although to be honest I don’t know if Google is really monetizing it all that well. I tend not to be hit by ads when I look up addresses or directions on my phone’s map app.
I tweeted this the other day and got some good retweets, so I figured it was interesting to other people too!
35% is a lot, but it is also clear that there is still room to grow. (see the report here.) I don’t think we’ve yet hit the point where growth in mobile advertising will slow down (the pundits are saying mobile advertising will be $1.1 or $1.2 billion in 2011), and the itunes of the world that I continue to say is the major distribution engine for today’s most interesting startups is just revving up.
So, basically, if you are an internet startupper, it is in your best interest to have the latest and greatest smart phone. Looks like I”ll have to be in line for the next iPhone I guess!
