Mobile Users Prefer Browsers Over Apps. According to research conducted by Keynote, US mobile phone users prefer browsing their way to favorite websites rather than downloading an app version of the site that’s been optimized for the mobile-phone experience. The only categories where mobile users prefer apps over the standard browser experience are social media (namely Facebook and Twitter), games and music services. The findings bring me back to 1999, when websites were obsessed with building-client app or browser-extension versions of themselves, only to realize that web users mostly opted to skip the download-and-install process in favor of browsing, bookmarking or searching for content by way of an upstart called Google.
As eMarketer suggests, this data will disappoint sites that were hoping to use apps to snatch up permanent real-estate in a smartphone land grab: “These preferences may surprise mobile experts who consider apps to offer the best content and shopping experiences. iPhone-Applications-Privacy-Issues. Show Me The Beta! How Fast-Growing Companies Like Chartbeat Are Born. In our new series about product innovation, we're exploring how cutting edge Internet products are created. Yesterday we wrote about the design philosophy of John Borthwick, the CEO and co-founder of Betaworks. His company operates some of the leading real-time web products: Bit.ly (link shortener), TweetDeck (desktop Twitter client), SocialFlow (a social messaging service) and Chartbeat (real-time analytics service). In part 2 of the Borthwick interview, we look closely at the evolution of one of Betaworks' products: Chartbeat.
And you don't necessarily need to be an entrepreneur to read this. Anyone who is interested in understanding - and utilizing - social media trends will glean a lot from John Borthwick's insights below. Chartbeat is an analytics service for publishers, focused on showing real-time traffic. It's similar to Woopra, which is the product we use at ReadWriteWeb for the same purpose. Inception Phase So firef.ly was shuttered by Betaworks. Iteration Phase Scale Phase. The Truth about Mobile Application Stores. At the recent Mobile World Congress 2010, Dutch app store analytics firm Distimo presented their findings on the six largest mobile application stores in existence today: the iTunes App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. In their presentation, they analyzed everything including store size, store growth, the most popular applications and where you can find the best deal.
They recently shared some of the highlights from that presentation by way of a slideshow embedded on their blog. For mobile industry insiders, some of the findings won't be all that shocking, just common knowledge paired with statistics. However, there were a few surprises that caught us off guard, maybe they will you too. Distimo collects public application data from app stores and also offers developers an analytics tool which is used to monitor their apps and those belonging to their competitors. Free Vs. Games, Games, Games. News | August 2010 | Is Context-Aware Computing Ready for the Limelight? By George Lawton Context-aware computing — which leverages information about users and their environments to improve the interactions among them — has been around for almost two decades. However, it has been implemented commercially only in limited applications, such as those using location information to find nearby friends or stores.
This has occurred mainly because of a lack of relevant standards, few devices with the capabilities necessary to perform context-aware computing, and limited sources of context-related information to draw on. Now though, context-aware computing is ready to take off, due to significant improvements in social networking, mobile technology, smart phones, and sensor networks, said University of Colorado associate professor Rick Han. In addition, researchers have become better at combining location-based, presence, social-network-profile, and other data to determine a user's context, said William Clark, research director at market research firm Gartner Inc.
Carriers missing opportunity with app stores. Duane Edwards is senior vice president of product development at Globys By Duane Edwards Wireless carriers are missing their opportunity to take a leading position in app stores by not leveraging their assets to provide developers the two most compelling advantages: monetization and marketing. By turning their rich data into actionable context, a carrier can provide developers with a more powerful set of services than their competition.
There is much buzz in the market today around the proliferation of mobile applications and the continued disintermediation of carriers as consumers look towards Apple, Google and elsewhere to discover new applications. Carriers see the strategic value in actively participating in the application ecosystem and many are launching their own app stores. Per The Economist newspaper, 56 percent of carriers surveyed say app stores will be an important source of revenue for them in the next five years.
But carriers are faced with a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma.