Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

People are now spending more time using mobile apps than they spend surfing the web! According to a report by Flurry released yesterday, a serious platform shift is happening in how people interact with data.

The report says:

…for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption. This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.

This is pretty big news. Check out the chart from the post:

Time spent using the internet is only growing at 16% year over year, but mobile app usage minutes is growing over 90% year over year. So it looks like mobile has got a lot more legs to grow on!

Flurry also reports that social networking and games account for almost 80% of the time spent on mobile apps. This stat doesn’t surprise me too much, as mobile gaming is really taking off. I am a little surprised about the social networking thing – what are they using, Facebook’s app? Or LinkedIn? Maybe Twitter, actually. I wonder how this fits with Facebooks HTML5 strategy?

This data fits with how OfficeDrop is seeing growth. Our Android app has really taken off and is now a huge percentage of our recent growth, and I’m excited for our other upcoming mobile offerings. I think this survey should help clear up any thoughts on the importance of mobile apps and consumer preferences.

Rob Go, seed investor with NextView Ventures (I wrote about NextView last month), has yet another good post, this time on Product Development – Librarians and Poets. He talks about how product management and development needs bot vision and execution/organization, and contrasts several well known startups, internet companies and founder and talks about how they played to their strengths. Good piece, check it out!

I’ll be speaking at a very cool event next week in Cambridge on the 5th in the evening. The event is called “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” Come out and hear some pretty interesting folks talk about startup marketing. The main speaker will be Bob Dorf, and the event is moderated by Simeon Simeonov. Other speakers include:

• David Cancel, serial entrepreneur and founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery and Performable.
• Andy Moss, founder and CEO of ESMZone.
• Andy Greenawalt, founder and CEO of Perimeter eSecurity and Continuity.net.
• Healy Jones, founder of Startable and VP Marketing at OfficeDrop.
• Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify.

The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here. The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA. Everyone should come!!

The conference is organized by General Catalyst Partners and FastIgnite. Bob Dorf will provide an exclusive peek “under the covers” at some of the many new rules and advancements that Steve Blank, Bob and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years. The event will feature a keynote by Bob, guest appearances by entrepreneurs and executives who have successfully applied customer development in their businesses and a discussion led by General Catalyst Executive in Residence and FastIgnite CEO Simeon Simeonov.

Along the lines of my recent series on what makes a good platform (part one, part two) Shaival Shah has a post on how Hunch uses its API to drive growth.

Nielsen has a great blog post on smartphones, Droid and mobile applications. Some of the most interesting points they make are:

• Over the next several months at least six new smartphone devices (like Droid) will be released – these devices are going to have large screens, keyboards and a wide array of applications.
• More smart phones are accessing web pages vs. “dumb” phones as of Q3 2009.
• 24% of cell phone sales in Q3 2009 were smartphones; Nielson expects this to jump to 40% in Q4.
• In 2011 50% of all phone sales will be smartphones
• In 2011 120 million mobile users will be on the internet, and 90 million will be watching video on their phone.

It is clear that we are finally reaching that critical tipping point in terms of mobile internet usage. (I guess we were already there, but now even a slow person like me can see it clearly.) But I believe that phones ARE the internet/computer for many people these days, and that there continues to be opportunity developing services, apps and sites specifically designed for these users. The evidence I’ve seen recently speaks to this point; in particular several of the Techstars mobile companies have really had amazing adoption.

Is Droid, for that matter any of these other new smartphones, going to really take on the iPhone and emerge as a real alternative smartphone platform? I understand that iPhone has a real lead in apps, but I don’t think the market is won yet (although I am a pretty happy iPhone user.) Blackberry shouldn’t be forgotten about either, since their market share is surprisingly large and I think grew to 19% of smartphones recently due to their new phones positive receptions. My gut is that at least BB and iPhone are going to continue to gain share real market share. I have no idea how Droid will do, but if it got 10+% market share over the next year or so I wouldn’t be shocked. And I think it might be good for the overall market if 3 competing smartphone platforms all had real volume.

I was at a private luncheon 10 days ago with Scott Cook, the founder and Chairman of Intuit. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially withdrew MS Money from the market on the same day – a huge achievement for Scott Cook and Intuit. When asked how he managed to stem off competition from Microsoft, this is what he had to say:

Solve Customer Pain Point(s)

Most companies are founded with an objective to solve a pain point but only few firms continue to focus on the customer after they have achieved success. What Intuit has done in the last 25 years and is relentlessly focussed on what the customer pain points are and then go about solving them. They engage the customer before, during and after each release cycle to ensure what they build is what the customer wants.

Delight the customer

Solving the customer pain point is not just enough but doing it in a manner that the customer loves it is what counts. The customer interact with a company and its products in various ways and various times. The post-sale customer experience is even more important than the pre-sale experience. How the product satisfies the needs, how accessible the company is (customer service) and how involved the user community is play a major role in enriching the customer experience.

These according to Scott, will create a loyal customer base for life and continue to generate word of mouth. When Scott asked Bill Gates what the main reason to acquire Intuit (in the mid 90s) is, Bill responded by saying that they could replicate everything that Intuit did but not the word of mouth. No wonder, Microsoft pulled out of personal money management market.