Category Archives: mobile

#MobileIHateYou — A love/hate letter to my mobile phone.

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The following is a guest post from Ted Youngs. Storyteller, designer, entrepreneur & CMO at Seconds, the mobile payment system working to make technology so simple that it disappears. @bobhodge

#MobileIHateYou — When you turn me into an addict.

Everything else be damned! Sunlight streaming through the window, my child’s hand tugging at my shirt sleeve, the oncoming traffic passing at 120 miles an hour. All I want is to be away from here, lost with you in the pixel wash of your retinal display.

#MobileIHateYou — When you don’t give me my fix.

Your ringtone goes “ding dong”. You vibrate in my pocket. Except it’s that guy’s ringtone over there. You lie inert. That vibration? Just a phantom. The conversation I was having without you was good. It’s just that I so wanted to believe that you were calling me to a better one.

#MobileIHateYou — When I’ve just bought you and you’re the most precious thing in the room.

Remember that party we went to? (It was our first day together.) Everyone knew your name. No one knew mine. Compliments on your sophistication and grace were directed to me but were meant only for you.

#MobileIHateYou — When six months later you are obsolete.

Until I had you, I never knew I could be so self-conscious, so vain. How did you age so quickly? Why do I feel shame when I expose you in public? I thought we had something that would last. The whole world seemed to flow through you to me. I didn’t understand: you were just a fashion to be discarded with the next season.

#MobileIHateYou — When I look up from you and find that the day is gone.

What where you showing me? A mushroom cloud over Beijing, promotional offers for websites I haven’t visited since 2008. It’s all a little hazy. How could so much of my life be consumed by staring into your a 2” x 4” screen? Is being with you making my life better or are you the one who keeps me from living?

Watch Out! Downloading iOS 5 Could Automatically Erased All Your Apps

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Apple seems to be having some difficulty with this new iOS release.  Planning on purchasing the 4S later this weekend, I wanted to test out the new iOS 5 with my 3GS.  Well, I connected my phone and started the download process.  The result – an entire system restore with ALL my purchased apps GONE!  You can see in the image below, there were a lot more apps yesterday.

WTF?!

Anyone looking to upgrade their iOS on their Apple device should either take extra precaution or wait a few more days until things get straigtened out.

Anyone else have this problem?  Please share in comments.

Good Lord, All I Need Is Another Darn App In My Life…

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I think I am like most other people.  I use a few apps daily… like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the weather app, email, maps, texting, and some various other ones I can’t remember their names but I do remember what they look like and where they sit on my phone.

I flip through 6 or so “screens” of apps each day just to find the one I need. This is too much in my opinion.  It feels as if we are drowning in a sea of apps.

So do we really need more apps in our life?  And should you rest your company’s future on thinking people will want to download another one to their device?

Here are some stats:

  • The most used Android apps in the US are Google Maps, Gmail and Facebook, according to research from Nielsen.
  • More than 500,000 apps have been approved in the Apple App store.
  • Total App Store revenue before the break-down is almost $3.6 billion in aggregate.

There’s half a billion apps are available for me to download… and how many will actually end up on my device?  Very little.  And once some have made it to  my iPhone, will I even use it after the first time?  I fear not…

The message here is :

1) if you are a mobile phone user, you have to dig through so much clutter to find useful apps today.  This is inconvenient and it sucks, so we will remain with our “tried and true” apps and not venture to download many more.

2) if you are a business, maybe the app store approach is not such a good idea.  Fighting for shelf space is getting more difficult as they days go by because I think most people think similar to me.  Why put such barriers to everyday usage for your web service?  My opinion is if you are  solely depending on a app store positioning, the odds are you will get lost in the clutter.

Does anyone else have this problem?

I Hear the Future

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And it’s a Daily Deal Nearby!

Loopt has partnered with Groupon to push their users notifications about nearby daily deals.  Currently, I am not sure how I feel about my phone buzzing every minute as I walk down the street to notify me about deals, regardless if I am interested or not.  This might change, but that is how I feel right now.  What do you think?

Mobile Commerce Will Be HUGE

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Mobile commerce is starting to show its legs.  Groupon just announced it will be seeing half of revenue coming from mobile devices sometime in the next two years.  This coincides with what Mary Meeker has been saying for so many years – the mobile web will be HUGE.  Look at the chart below, you can see it is predicted global mobile users will overtake desktop users within the next 5 years.  Think about that for a second.

According to Mary Meeker:

“the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

This shift has major implications for consumers as well a businesses.  Shopkick, a mobile app initially created for in-store shopping experiences, now allows users to create a custom area for their favorite retailers.  Remember how you throw away most of the advertisements and mailers you receive each day.  This is the opposite.  It’s all the best deals right in front of your face.

If you are a local business, your customers are theoretically always connected to you and your products or services.  Think: how can you add value to them on a daily basis.  If you are a consumer, odds are you carry a device in which pretty much anything (or anyone) in the world is just a few taps away.  Think: what new place/thing can I discover in my city today.

As a consumer, in what ways do you use your mobile to interact with your local community?  And what do you wish you could do?  In today’s world, you might just get what you ask for…