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This is just a taste of what we’ve recently rolled out to make AppMakr apps, and our users’ app-making experience, better than ever. To see the full list, head to our release notes. Or better yet, head to AppMakr and start building to see these features in action!

Because things aren’t always as they appear.

Confession: we’ve been known to go into nagging-mom-mode on a handful of AppMakrs over the years. Except instead of saying things like “put on a sweater” or “stop feeding the dog your brussels sprouts”, we find ourselves dishing out, “Make sure to test out your app first” on a semi-regular basis. At least enough times to inspire a blog post.

We get it! There’s a simulator right there, staring at you, as you’re crafting your lovely apps. If it’s not there to show you what your app will turn out like, then what’s the point of it?

The simulator is a more-or-less accurate prediction of what your app will look and act like. So you can get a feel for your app while you’re creating it—choose the right colors, pick which tabs to use, and build your app just as you want it, for your adoring audience to enjoy. But while you’re admiring your fine work, keep in mind that it’s a simulator. As in, a hypothetical version of your app. To see the real version, you have to test it on a native device.

This is because any simulator comes with certain limitations. Would you get in a plane with a pilot that had only taken lessons on a flight simulator? Probably not. A simulator is great for practice but doesn’t cut it in the real world. Which is why we make sure you’ve tested your app before it goes off to market. This is important for two reasons:

•  So you can make sure your users are getting the high quality app they deserve.

•  So you can suss out any discrepancies between how you thought your app would behave and how it actually does once it’s on a native device—and see if it’s displaying any issues so you can file a bug report before making your app public.

It’s best to take the time to test your app, each and every time you rebuild. Those extra few minutes could end up saving you a bunch of frustrated users if your  app doesn’t turn out as advertised. Or keep you from having to resubmit your app to the marketplace (and spare you the heartbreak of a rejection/deletion notice). But above all, you want your app to know exactly how your app looks and behaves when you release it into the wild. Then all you have to so is sit back and watch your downloads go up.

So here it is, one last time:

Put on a sweater.
Eat your vegetables.
And test your app. 

Happy AppMaking!

]]> http://blog.appmakr.com/why-testing-your-app-is-a-step-worth-taking/feed/ 6 http://blog.appmakr.com/publishing-your-iphone-app-not-simple-made-simple/ http://blog.appmakr.com/publishing-your-iphone-app-not-simple-made-simple/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:17:21 +0000 ad min http://blog.appmakr.com/?p=924 Tweet

That is, if you get a whole week off.

Listen up, iPhone devs: if you haven’t already been notified by Apple, please note that iTunes Connect will be shut down from December 22nd to December 29th for the holiday season.

That means:

• Access to iTunes Connect will be disabled.
• Any apps or app updates will not be delivered.
• Releases scheduled to appear in the App Store for the first time during this period will be delayed.
• Pricing changes made through the interval pricing system and scheduled to take effect during this period will not be reflected in the App Store—and the app itself will become unavailable for purchase.

It’s strongly recommended that you do not schedule your apps to go live during the shutdown, as their release will be delayed until after December 29th. It’s best that you schedule your apps to go live for the first week of December—at the latest. That way your app won’t get lost in the shuffle and risk being delayed anyway. Apple hasn’t released the announcement on their site yet, but you can see a copy of the email here.

Bottom line—don’t make, schedule, or count on anything to happen in regards to your iPhone apps for that week. And expect the time periods before and after to be pretty crazy as well. T’is the season for holiday chaos!

Just think of it as a sign that you should go ahead and book that week in Jamaica.

It’s official! We’ve changed our company name to Socialize, Inc. (from PointAbout, Inc.) to reflect our targeted focus. As a company, we’ve always focused on communications engines. First there was AppMakr, an easy, do-it-yourself platform for building mobile apps. Next, we launched Socialize, a turn-key social layer for mobile apps made with AppMakr. These products are here to stay. Now, we’re homing in on (mobile) communication and dedicating ourselves to making Socialize the revolutionary mobile component we think it is.

We’re excited about our new direction, and we’re working around the clock to constantly evolve Socialize. We want to make Socialize accessible to all developers so that together we can socialize the mobile experience.

Below is the official press release about our name change and our sale of PointAbout (our consulting side) to Three Pillar Global:

 

Three Pillar Global Acquires Professional Services Division of PointAbout, Inc.

PointAbout to deepen key niche in mobile app development for Three Pillar Global.

Fairfax, VA and San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 18, 2011

Three Pillar Global of Fairfax, VA, a trusted, high-growth software product development innovator providing solutions for today’s expanding mobile environment, and PointAbout, Inc., a developer of mobile applications for some of the world’s leading organizations, today announced that Three Pillar Global will acquire the professional services business of PointAbout, Inc.

In making the announcement, Three Pillar Global CEO David DeWolf said, “We are all excited about integrating such a preeminent team of mobile developers and consulting expertise into our family. We’re a professional and geographic fit, providing even deeper capability to our global customers.”

As part of the transaction, Three Pillar Global obtained all rights to the PointAbout brand and the professional services mobile development team based in Washington, D.C. Pete Johnson, previously president of professional services at PointAbout, will lead the mobile team at Three Pillar Global.

“Our talented team has already expressed enthusiasm in recognizing the synergy of joint operations,” Johnson said. “Both companies have built success on delivering innovation to large brand customers who are rapidly adopting new mobile strategies. This combination will only accelerate our success.”

PointAbout, Inc.— now Socialize, Inc.—will focus on mobile product development from its San Francisco, CA headquarters, leveraging its leading do-it-yourself mobile app development platform, AppMakr as a product division. Socialize recently announced a mobile services layer through its Socialize SDK which can be implemented by any developer and unleashes the community of users that have been hiding in mobile apps. Details at http://www.GetSocialize.com.

“The sale of our professional services division to Three Pillar Global positions us perfectly to capitalize on our product-based expertise under the Socialize brand,” said Daniel R. Odio, CEO of Socialize, Inc. “We were careful to select a buyer for PointAbout that can complement the expertise the PointAbout team has developed as a leader in custom mobile development and continue to foster thought leadership in the mobile space.”

About Three Pillar Global
Founded in 2006, Three Pillar Global is a trusted, high-growth software product development company providing solutions for today’s expanding mobile environment. Today, with rampant growth in mobile-based applications, organizations can no longer afford to develop product without a deep understanding of rapid data access and portability issues that can block scalability. Offering solutions expertise in the areas of mobile, SaaS enablement and product, Three Pillar Global offers a unique and flexible approach for clients through its innovative Virtual Development Centers that deliver transformative levels of productivity. The company has respected and leading customers in media, healthcare, education and financial services. Headquartered in Fairfax, VA, Three Pillar Global has been recognized for its rapid growth by Inc. magazine (#44) and Virginia Business (#6).http://www.threepillarglobal.com.

About PointAbout Professional Services
PointAbout is a consulting and software development company headquartered in Washington, D.C. that specializes in the rapidly expanding world of mobile. The company works with recognized clients such as Intelsat, Marvin Windows, ARINC, Cars.com, Newsweek, OnStar, Disney, Kohl’s, The Washington Post and the Huffington Post to develop native apps for smartphones and tablets. PointAbout also develops mobile websites for clients looking to create a multi-platform browsing experience. http://www.pointabout.com

About Socialize, Inc.
Socialize, Inc. is the creator of the leading do-it-yourself app creation platform, AppMakr.com. The Socialize social layer offers the first cloud-based service enabling turn-key access of social features in any mobile app. It is available now on iPhone apps made with AppMakr.com. Visit http://www.GetSocialize.com for more information.

Socialize has partnered with SimpleGeo for its upcoming round of location-based functionalities. SimpleGeo will help carry the burden of location data so that Socialize can continue to upgrade with nifty new features. Location is the next frontier for mobile, and we’re excited to jump into the fray.

Check out the official press release from PRWeb below:

Socialize, Inc. Partners With SimpleGeo to Add Location Functionality for Mobile App Communities

SimpleGeo’s infrastructure to enhance upcoming features in Socialize’s arsenal

Here’s a transcript of the video:

---

Some Big Thinking About Small Phones

By Daniel R. Odio

Hi, it’s Daniel Odio, I am the CEO of PointAbout Inc. and I’m here today to share with you some big thinking about small phones—or you could also call this, “Why Mobile is Way Bigger Than You Realize.”

The way that I am going to do that is share seven things that, I believe, are just going to fundamentally change the way we interact with technology because of the mobile device. I wont go through these here but this is what I’ll be going over in this talk today.

I would argue that mobile looks a lot more like this than it does like this. This is today, but within five years, I believe that the majority of the things that I’m putting forward in this talk are going to have happened and I believe that it’s going to fundamentally change us as a species. As a human race we are going to be interacting with each other and with technology and information and knowledge in fundamentally different ways. That might sound a little philosophical, but I really believe it’s true and if you’re laughing — if you don’t believe that— then this is a perfect presentation for you to watch, and I would point to you some other people who didn’t believe the power of what was in front of them and made a mistake because of it, so, hopefully at the end, you’ll be convinced and you might think differently about mobile because of what’s in here.

First of all, let me share with you who’s talking to you today. My name is Daniel Odio and just a quick video here so you can put a face to a voice, alright? I’ve been featured in a bunch of publications for applying technology to various industries, including real estate and media, and now mobile, but the thoughts that are in this pitch today aren’t just mine— a lot of the credit goes to my co-founders, Sean and Isaac who are just amazing. This was a real photo taken in our DC office…this is Sean down here, he’s our Chief Strategy Officer and Isaac is our Chief Technology Officer and yeah, I really am jumping above them there— that’s a lot of trust.

Real quickly about us: AppMakr is a brand and it’s a platform that was created by PointAbout. Let me tell you about PointAbout first: PointAbout is a mobile development shop based in Washington DC. We do custom mobile projects for large enterprises, so we’re talking about large brands, typically the Fortune 1000 with big budgets for mobile. It’s just professional services across all the platforms but also we as founders are product guys and we we really wanted to democratize app creation, so in January 2010, we launched a platform called AppMakr that lets anybody make an app. If you don’t have a budget or you are not sure about how to apply mobile technology to your business, AppMakr is a really great way to create an iPhone, and now Android and Windows Phone app. Right now AppMakr is free, so you could do it without spending a penny and you can get this really intimate connection with your current and potential customers through AppMakr.

So, having these two perspectives, both the professional services high-end consulting companies like Disney, Northrop Grumman, Cars.com and others, as well as this platform which is a product play, gives us a unique view into mobile and where it’s headed and I am going to share as much of that knowledge as I can with you today.

I think I would start about telling you what’s happened recently in mobile. A great analogy is that it’s a lot like the beginning of flight: mobile had a really bad rap before 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, just like flight did before the Wright brothers figured out to get an aircraft into the air for extended periods of time and I’d also say that where we are in mobile today is a lot like where we were in the beginning of flight! We’re just starting to figure things out. It’s really this sea-change that we’re seeing, especially with smart phones specifically. I think the most amazing thing about this photo is that if you had been standing on this sand dune in Kitty Hawk watching this plane take off, I’d be willing to bet that it would have been hard for you to envision that less than 100 years later we’d see planes that look like this, with hundreds of people and much different technology. Going from this photo here to this photo here is just an amazing rate of change and it’s made our world smaller and changed our lives in a lot of ways.

The difference with mobile is that it’s, a) much bigger, and b) it’s happening much much more quickly. So, instead of 70 years I’m saying that a lot of this is happening within 10 years. From 2007 to 2015— less than 10 years.

Let’s talk a little bit about how quickly it’s already been happening just to get us started. Marry Meeker was an analyst with Morgan Stanley who has now moved on to a venture capital firm but she’s probably the most bullish analyst on the future potential of mobile. To show you some of her slides, the green line here was the growth of mobile. You can see that, normalized by quarters we can just see that we have much faster growth in mobile than even, desktop Internet. Also, by 2014 she’s saying that mobile users will surpass desktop Internet users. That’s a really big deal because that means that more people will be accessing the Internet from their mobile devices than from their desktop.

There’s also a great graphic here from Mashable— it’s an info graphic. Let me just pull it up real fast to show it to you. They talk also about this change in 2014— probably pulled that from Mary Meeker’s slides. They also show that smart phones are 27% of all phones. That’s up from 16% just about a year or maybe two years ago. So, very fast growth in the smart phone space and very fast absolute growth. One really interesting stat here is that 91% of mobile Internet access is used to socialize. We’re going to talk today about the power of social in mobile among some other things but that’s a really powerful stat.

If you want to find this, you can just Google “Mashable mobile by the numbers” and you’ll be able to find it.

Really quickly—blast from the past here— just 10 years ago, let’s look at how the iPhone 4 compares to the 2000 iMac. Just to show you how quickly the hardware has been progressing and improving. The iPhone 4 has a faster processor than the iMac did, it has faster data transfer speeds, it’s got more storage, but it only weighs 4.8oz compared to over 34 lbs for the 2000 iMac. To me, this is just very indicative of how the hardware platform is enabling a lot of this innovation.

It’s also very a “back to the future” type of scenario. If you remember, if you were around or if you’ve seen this back in the 1950’s and 1960’s — I wasn’t around but there was a client mainframe model where dumb terminals were accessing the computing power of these large mainframes. We’re seeing that again, but the difference now is that it’s a phone in Cloud model where the phone is the dumb terminal and the Cloud is the mainframe, so data is living up in the Cloud and the phone doesn’t even need to be that smart. We call these things “smart phones” but they don’t need to be that smart, they just need to be able to just need to be able to access the Cloud effectively and efficiently and even more importantly, they need to be able to provide a great user experience to the user because the mobile use case is different from the desktop computer use case. My co-founder Sean makes a great point: computers haven’t changed very much in the last 30 years. There’s still a keyboard and still a monitor, but the phone is changing really rapidly. Literally in 60-month cycles, we get new types of phones, new models, new experiences like tablets. The phone is changing very quickly and the use case is different where, on a phone, you typically just want to get something done. On a computer you want to browse, but on a phone you want to take action; you want to find a restaurant, or get to an appointment, or whatever it might be. It’s a different use case and we’re just starting to transition and understand what those differences really are.

Because of these things, I would definitely pause it that the age of the mobile super computer is upon us but by “mobile super computer,” again, I don’t even mean that the phone itself has to be a super computer, it has access to the Cloud, which does the super-computing for us!

What’s coming next in this massive disruption?

Let’s start going through these points: First of all, data mash-ups are a kin to magic. What do I mean by that? Well, we are analogue beings, we don’t have the ability to reach out and grab the digital information that’s swirling all around us. I joke that the iPhone is like a firefly catching net, that it allows us / gives us this vehicle through which we can access all of humanities knowledge, also known as the Internet, or the Cloud, the data that’s in the Cloud. And so, maybe the next version of the Apple ad should look a little bit like this! But, the reason this is so significant is because of some really big changes in the way that data is accessed and shared. In the old world we had legacy data systems. These were data bases were of proprietary format that did not talk to each other, it was not easy to extract data from these systems. Now we are in a world where we are starting to see a large adoption of API’s, Web Service Layers, Service Oriented Architecture. It’s a lot like the Star Trek universal communicator where companies / brands are agreeing to provide access in controlled and limited ways to their data so that it can be mashed up. What happens when that data gets mashed up is something that we’re really going to dig into because that’s the part that starts to feel like magic.

Here are some of the brands—you know there are thousands of software platforms, web platforms that have API’s and are making them available. In the mobile world also, there are SDK’s, which are, you can think of it as a little bundle of code that can be dropped into your mobile application. Yelp is a great example: Yelp is enabling real people to provide honest and scathing or positive reviews of their experiences! That means that data is becoming less “lossy.” We experience things and produce data in our daily lives and most of that is lost. It’s not captured, but it’s starting to be. And not only is it starting to be captured, but it’s starting to be put together so that it can be shared though these API’s. Yelp has an API, meaning I can get access to these reviews and mash them up with something else that I am working on— a different project.

Even Google is providing API’s for a number of it’s products. This just shows you how very large companies can be forward thinking in providing access to their data. The important thing here when we talk about API’s is that we’re talking about controlled access. Google holds the keys to the ways that this data is accessed. Google Maps, for example, will give anybody an API to be able to access Google Maps but if you start hitting that API, if you start pinging it for requests, for Map information beyond a certain volume they start charging for that. So that’s a model where Google is monetizing their map API access.

But it’s not just software platforms that are starting to produce API’s. We’re also seeing hardware, which is really software embedded in hardware, which, for all intensive purposes let’s just say that we’re starting to see hardware has API’s. For example, OnStar is embedded into mini vehicles and here’s an article in Gadget Article about how OnStar is exploring API’s for their cars, meaning, as an developer you would have the ability to create applications that can access the API the OnStar service and you can do things, you can make the car act in certain ways because of this API access.

Here’s another example: Ford is opening up it’s API for some developers. And I’d like you to think beyond just these early examples because they’re just that, they’re very early examples. What if your house had an API for a home automation system? What could people dream up then? What if your washer and dryer had an API that could communicate how often you wash your clothes? How many loads do you do? How much water do you consume? What temperature do you wash at? What if your neighbor uses different settings that are more effective? What if somebody could make a “what’s the best way to wash your clothes?” application and use real data from consumers to help aggregate best practices among washing clothes. What if there was an API for your wall? It’s kind of funny think about that because there’s no embedded software in walls today but that doesn’t mean that paint couldn’t have some type of embedded software in it through circuitry that was baked into the paint! So that when you walk in with your smart phone you can swipe your experience off the small screen on your phone and on to the wall. There’s a lot of real estate that’s not being used today on walls. If you just walk around and think of walls as potential displays you’d be astounded by how much display real estate there is! Well what if you could access that? What if your shoes had API’s? You know it sounds funny, and you might be laughing, but there’s a lot of data that’s captured by your shoes, especially when they’re on your feet! Things like, where you go, how often you go there, what route you typically take, who takes that same route with you? Other things too like, how much you sweat? What kind of shape you’re in, how much do you weigh today? There’s all sorts of information that can be gotten from your shoes.

Those are just a couple examples. So, really start thinking about if API’s could be embedded or if API’s could gain access to data that is gleaned from all of these different things that we interact with in our daily life, than what would be possible with this mobile device that you’re carrying could make use of all of that data? The problem is that “data” means nothing if it’s not information.
This is another great quote from Sean where he says, “Think of the number 1776. What does it mean to you?” And you might make some assumptions about what it means but it could be obviously a very significant year in American history, but it’s also the street number for a house: 1776 Main St. Data doesn’t mean anything unless it’s turned into information. When you start being able to mash data up with other sets of data, you start created context and relevance, and that means that meaningless data turns into very valuable information. Even just 10 years ago, this was what data bases looked like when you tried to mash them up. I spent the early part of my career at GE, in fact in the business of GE is called GE Information Services and we did EDI- Electronic Data Interchange and we would help banks communicate with each other. The mapping that we had to do, we literally had to map fields in database tables because one bank might have one field called First Name and the other bank might have a field called Name_First and we had to tell these two disparate data sources that they contained they same information. We had to create a mapping translation layer!

Well, you don’t have to do that anymore. With API’s you are defining a common set of criteria upon which people can extract your information and you get to control the way that it’s used and you can monetize it. So this is a really big deal; it’s the foundational building block upon which all of the mobile innovation is built. On the professional services side under the PointAbout brand, we often have large enterprises come to us and say that they want us to do a mobile project for them. Maybe it’s an iPad app, and we typically find that the first thing we have to do go in and clean the data up. Mobile has an uncanny ability to uncover data issues within an organization because the CEO wants an iPad app but that iPad requires the CRM system to talk to the ECommerce system to talk to the various other systems that have never had to interact in this way before. So when we go in to do mobile projects, a large part of the project isn’t the mobile development but it’s actually getting the data layer fixed first.

This is happening now, today, in ways that in just a couple of years, data will be much more accessible and mobile is really driving that change and mobile is going to be a large beneficiary of that change. We’re going to start living in a world where data is mashed up.

There’s a great blog from Greylock Partners about why they invested in Groupon. I encourage you to read it. They basically say that Groupon’s public-facing business— the daily deals and couponing business isn’t the thing that’s all that interesting to them. What’s interesting the data that Groupon is collecting about the consumer, where the consumer is shopping, about the retailers, about the merchants, local information. There’s a lot of data that Groupon is getting and they are going to be able to do a lot with it and that was why Greylock invested in Groupon. You can just Google “Zero to A Billion” and “Greylock” and you’ll be able to find this blog.

Another trend here is that the location layer is going to grow up. What I mean by that is that location today is often referred to LBS—location based services— is a lot like a car without a road. The car is a great technology but without a road, it’s not that useful. Today, you might use a service like Foursquare and you might check in, and you know, that’s fine, it’s fun, Foursquare is doing a bit of “gamification,” which we’ll talk about later, where you can compete against your friends to check in more often and get more points and be on a leader board. But it’s not all that useful. It’s very useful to Foursquare because they’re getting a lot of great data, and again, Foursquare is another example, like Groupon, where they’re going to be able to do a lot with that data but from the actual user’s perspective, it’s just OK. That’s changing as this data becomes more accessible and starts to be mashed up and becomes more available through API’s. Imagine scenarios where you check in on Foursquare and a separate data source, which is apartments for rent, is mashed up with the fact that you just checked in at 1234 Main St. and that apartment that you’ve been looking for — and by the way the phone knows you’ve been looking for an apartment— because you’ve been using the phone to do your apartment hunting, the phone tells you the exact apartment that you’ve been looking for just came on the market and the phone knows that you’re there because you just checked in to a cafe next door. This is much more meaningful and significant than just checking in for fun. Or what if you were a member of Match.com? You’re looking for a partner and the fact that you checked in at a cafe, somebody else checked in at that same cafe that has the exact profile that you’re looking for or a very close match, and you find somebody because of that check-in. It turns what used to be just fun and games into very significant life moments for the human psyche. We’re talking about mass law’s hierarchy of needs here! You know, shelter, and things that are very basic and fundamental to human needs. Finding a partner in life, the mobile device is starting to be able to help you live a better life and a more meaningful life.

Another example, though not quite as deep, is that perhaps you like to collect Star Wars action figures, they have to be in their original boxes and you check in somewhere and the fact that you collect these is known by your phone and there’s one that’s for sale right around the corner and you get to pick that up. So just a few examples…hopefully you can start thinking about more examples of how this gets to be really powerful.

Next, peripherals get connected and smart; what does this mean? Well, if you’ve ever watched the TED conferences, there’s a great TED video about something called “Sixth Sense.” It’s by Pranav Mistry. He at least was a student at the MIT media lab…I don’t know if he still is— he might have graduated— this is an example of him dialing a phone number on his hand and the way that he’s doing that is because he has a camera and a projector on a lanyard around his neck. The camera knows that’s his hand, the projector projects a phone number on his hand and the camera knows where’s he’s dialing because of that.

So we’re starting to talk about dumb peripherals, appliances, even things like kitchen appliances just dumb items starting to get smart and starting to be connected, and that’s important because, just like your shoes, dumb items capture a lot of data but it gets lost, it’s “lossy,” but they could be capturing it. And so, here is an example I believe this might be Pranav here with the lanyard around his neck— you can see it right there— and it’s projecting onto this student things about this student. The camera here is doing a facial recognition scan and then it’s projecting that this person is a student at the media lab so Pranav is getting information. Obviously it’s a very geeky example but this is how these things start. Another geeky example—and you can see this is just a homemade EKG monitor—that’s being plugged into the headphone jack of an iPhone. Again, there’s not a lot of infrastructure and defined product around these things yet, these are just home-brewed. But that’s where a lot of this opportunity lives. Also things like your refrigerator or your washer and dryer and other items being connected and you being able to warm the house up before you get home, or do a load a laundry while you’re away. Very simple and basic examples but hopefully you get the gist of what I am saying.

Another great technology that’s coming to the iPhone 5 is called “Near Field Communications.” It allows for mobile payments. Again, this is the phone starting to be able to communicate with things that it couldn’t communicate with before so, for example you could buy a soda by swiping your phone in front of the soda machine, or you could pay here with the swipe-to-pay type technology.

One interesting thing is that the iPad 2 has a camera and this is an example Fast Company says, “what if augmented reality is the iPad 2 sacred killer app?” One thing here that I’d just like to point out is, this is iPad 2 is taking a photo or just has the camera open of this picture. This picture is acting as a marker. You can see there’s a little play button here, this person can play a video because the app that’s running this camera recognizes this picture means something. It means there’s a video attached to this so there’s no QR code, the actual photo itself is the marker and is telling the app to allow the user to play a video when the iPad sees that photo. That’s a very significant thing. The actual real-life item is the marker.

Software Rules the Cutting Edge. There’s a big debate raging right now about HTML vs. apps and I’d like to put this debate into context. A lot of people are saying that mobile devices will use the browser and by browser I just mean Safari or whatever type of web browser is running on the phone. The browser will allow and replace a lot of the functionality that we have in apps today. Today the term “app” means compiled software, an app is something you download onto your phone like the Facebook app, whereas you go to Facebook.com in the browser. Those are the differences. I actually think that the browser is a lot like Lewis and Clark exploring the western part of the U.S., where, before, back in the day on the desktop we used to browse a lot. We used to explore a lot, and go to twenty different web pages and you know, when Lewis and Clark were exploring it was literally the wild west! That’s what we would do on our computers. We would browse. But the use case on a phone is different. On a phone you don’t want to be browsing you want to be doing specific things. So, just like today, we have a highway system with roads. I would propose that apps are the equivalent of roads, where, you just want to get something done! You want to find a restaurant review, you want to get to your destination, you don’t need to stop and look at the creek when you’re on your way from point A to point B when you’re in the car, and just like that, you don’t want to be browsing on the phone, you want to be using an app that gets you where you want to go. One thing by the way that I think gets lost in this debate is that people think that browsers are catching up to where apps are and that’s true, absolutely true! The browser is catching up! The most recent version of HTML, HTML 5, can pull a latitude and longitude from the phone. It can do local storage. But what I feel gets lost is, when people say that in two years the browser is going to get caught up to apps, they’re not thinking, “where are apps going to be in two years?” This hardware is changing so quickly that if you want to be able to do things you need to be using software, because only software can dig deep down into the actual hardware of the phone and extract the full value and capabilities of that phone. Things likes sensors, proximity sensors, the accelerometer, the camera, all sorts of things that exist today, but more importantly will exist tomorrow in this hardware. The browser is not going to be able to keep up with the rapid pace of hardware innovation that we’re seeing.

Where you browse on the computer, or maybe you browsed in the past, today you take roads and so you might have a series of apps, let’s call it Yelp for restaurants, Facebook for friends, Maps for figuring out where you’re going, Camera for taking photos, Run Keeper for staying in shape, Mail for checking your mail and I left the rest blank. You can fill in the other dozen or however many apps you use on a regular basis. But, imagine a world where most of what you need to get done happens through an app and you only browse when you go outside of that kind of, habitual comfortable world that you live in every day. In fact, I think that the definition of “app” is changing to not just be a technical term that means compiled software but actually, the definition of app is turning into “functionality that just works.” So, it’s possible that there may be, or, in fact, we’re already seeing browser-based technologies look and feel and function more like apps where they’re imitating what compiled software does today. You might be actually using technology in the browser but it’s telling you that it’s an app, it’s just a little piece of functionality that just works. But I do really believe that software is going to rule the cutting edge. One great example of that is this app, RunKeeper. When you go for a run, you start the app and it tracks where you’ve run, tells you what pace you’re running at, every five minutes it announces by voice—so if you’re listening to music, what your pace is and how far you’ve gone. It lets you upload to Twitter and Facebook information about how long of a run you have taken, it shows you altitude and speed, it shows you were you’ve gone and imagine what the possibilities here are! You can map out a course and you could “gamify” this! By “gamify” I mean you could turn it into a competition. So, I just ran this course in however many minutes. I did it in 42 minutes, let’s see who can do it more quickly than I can and the next person to go out is using the RunKeeper app and the app tells them to take a left at the next street, go one mile, take a left, etc, etc, to help them run the same course that you ran. There’s just a lot of potential with the gamification of the world, of the real physical world, through this cutting-edge software.

Another great example is called iHealth, which is a blood pressure monitor but it’s an app. It just works. It has a very simple “start” button, you take your blood pressure. But what gets interesting is, what if you could start mashing up data? Let’s build on the things that I’m saying here. What if you could mash up this data and you could take your blood pressure, and your blood pressure was then communicated to your doctor, but it’s also tracked over time, so you can see how your blood pressure has been over the past two years. Since you have high blood pressure today, let’s say it just took your blood pressure today and it was high, when you go to the grocery store your phone might tell you not to buy a certain item because it’s high in sodium! It might know that because you’re scanning bar codes to check out. So that’s the data set from the grocery store being mashed up with the data set from your health and body. That’s where this magic starts happening. That’s where your phone is telling you, “hey don’t buy that today or ever because you have high blood pressure!” So, it’s changing that you live your life.

Now, building on these first four points, I think we get to the (?), as it were, of the way we interact with information, which is that information goes from “pull” to “push.” Let me give you an example to tell you what I mean: Let’s say that you’re driving in the car and having a conversation with a friend and you realize that your gas light is on. You think, how long has my gas light been on, um, do I need to take the next exit? Can I make it to my destination? What range do I have left? Well, today you would probably pull information. You would open Google maps, you’d look for an Exon and you’d still have to decide whether or not to take the next exit. So there’s a lot of stress that comes to the human psyche from this uncertainty. That’s today— you’re pulling information.

But let’s look at what this same scenario might look like tomorrow, “tomorrow” being within five years. First of all the phone is starting to be used as the hub which is interesting because the car manufactures always considered the car to be the hub and the phone to be the peripheral and they’re just starting to wake up and realize that the phone is the hub and the car is the peripheral! By the way, that’s a very hard thing for the car manufactures to accept because they make a lot of profit margin off of their multi-media display systems. But I believe it’s inevitable, it’s going to happen. This [photo] is a production concept from Chrysler. I don’t think it ever went to production; it’s called the “peapod,” where the phone was the actual brain of the car. In this new world where we’ve talked about API’s and OnStar offering the phone an API to it’s system, so the phone knows what the gas level is and your phone is your GPS and it’s also your calendar so it tells you, “Hey Daniel, stop at the next gas station on the way to your destination,” and it knows you have time to stop at the next gas station because it knows what time your appointment is. It also knows your preferences because you have, in some other app, told it that you want to get gas when the tank is half full, not a quarter full, so, even before the gas light goes on the phone tells you to stop at a gas station and it tells you to stop at an Exon and not a BP because it knows that you don’t want to buy gas from BP because of the oil spill, because of some other app that you’re running.

This idea that it feels like magic, I hope you see what I mean! You’re just on your way to a destination with your friend and your phone is telling you to stop for gas. It really feels like magic. It’s this very egocentric, very intimate with information that we’re going to start seeing because of the mobile device. Today we’re dealing with a lot of information-overload but one of the most important characteristics the mobile device will be performing is filtering based on you— based on your preferences and your patterns, and filtering out what is and isn’t important to you because it understands that. That’s another example and reason why this starts to feel like magic.

Let’s move on to some trends, one of which is very significant— significant enough for me to put as a separate point— is the rise of Android and the significance of commoditized hardware, and specifically, tablets. Android and tablets are just on a tear! You can see here that Android is starting to out-sell iPhone in terms of units sold. Just a very fast growth— I do these state-of-mobile panels with about 300 people in a room— two years ago there were maybe 10 hands that were raised when we asked, “who was using Android today?” We just did one about a month ago, and literally half of the room raised their hand. It’s just unbelievable growth. We often say— and we have been saying this for a few years now— that we think it’s going to be like the difference between PC vs. Mac back in the 80’s and 90’s where the experience is arguably better on a Mac but there are more PCs in the world. That’s how the Android/iPhone Debate could be classified. We do see this trend continuing with massive growth in the Android platform because Android is an open-source operating system. Hardware handset manufacturers don’t have to pay anything to use the Android operating system on their phones.

I’m sorry I don’t have any legends for this. This next one is units of iPad shipments—or I believe it’s actually tablet shipments— in millions. We’re starting right here and these are analysts such as Gartner and others saying that tablet growth is just going to explode. I do believe we’re seeing that play out. It’s very significant because, whereas before—especially in the b2b space or in the enterprise space— large enterprises had to buy very specialized and expensive hardware. Symbolism manufacturer, for example, of devices, when you see your UPS or FedEx rep, they’re carrying a specialized purpose-built device but now we’re starting to see that commotitized sub $500 hardware can be used for accessing information in very rich ways on the go when you’re not in front of a computer. We have one client, for example, that is a tool rental company that wants to create an app so that their field reps can go to construction sites and show how “oh, you’re using that front loader? Look at this one, this one could be better for you!” Another example is that Hyundai is making the iPad the owners manual for one of their new vehicles, so we’re going to see a lot more adoption of commotitized hardware and a large significant role that it will be playing in the way that mobile will transform the way business is conducted and the way we live our lives.

Let me let you in on one of mobile’s dirty little secrets. This is also one of the main ones that our company is working to solve, which is that right now, engagement drops off over time. This is specifically in regards to apps, so mobile applications. You can see that 21 days after install, only 5% of a user base on average for free applications and its the same line for paid applications though it’s a little bit higher but it’s the same drop-off. Only 5% is engaging with the app after three weeks. We think that is because there is no social aspect in mobile today. Which just blows my mind because mobile is a social medium. Making phone calls is by definition, social. We believe that integrating social into mobile is a killer combination and very significant.

Let me play for you a video, this was a Goldman Sachs Conference that I attended with Max Levchin and Bill Gurley and the audio is really low but I’m just going to play a minute of it here. Let me see if i can get this to play and I’ll also re-cap because I don’t really think you’re going to be able to hear this but let’s give it a try. This is Bill Gurley talking from Benchmark, which is a venture capital firm, and Max and Bill are talking here about Facebook and the social graph and how Facebook created the social graph but he was just saying that Reed Hastings from Netflix tried implementing a “liking” system based on your social graph and it didn’t work that well.

Ok so, what Bill is saying— and by the way, you can just go to my blog at danielodio.com or just Google “Goldman Sachs, Bill Gurley & Max Levchin” and it will probably come up. If you want to watch this you’ll probably be able to hear the audio a bit better. But what Bill is saying is that the social graph, which is taking your offline friends and representing them online through Facebook, for example, which pioneered this, the social graph isn’t great for recommendations. You hang out with people who have many different tastes from you so just because a friend “likes” something doesn’t mean you’re going to like it. What he’s talking about is the nirvana, is the interest graph. That’s a big bet that our company is making. I could not agree with Bill more. We believe that the interest graph is in some ways, more powerful than the social graph. So what Bill was saying was, if you’re into road biking, how do you connect to fifteen road bikers that live near you? The interesting thing about the interest graph is that, we believe, you don’t need to know these people in the real world. So where the social graph takes your takes your offline friends and brings them online, the interest graph just means that you care about the same things that other people do, regardless of whether or not you know them in the real world. You would want to connect with them online or specifically through mobile because you share an interest.

Let’s talk a little bit more about this. We really believe in the interest graph and the power of the interest graph in making the interest graph available through mobile applications. Here’s the problem with the interest graph: Interest-based communities have typically been very nichey and hard to scale. Things like Elk’s Lodge or the BMW Club or any sort of interest-based group. But what we realized— and we think this very significant— what we realized was that apps solve this problem for us! So just reflect on this for a minute. It’s really hard to figure out how these interest graph networks work and look with interest-based communities but apps define the interest groups. If you download the Green Bay Packers app, you are self-selecting and saying that you care about the Green Bay Packers. Everybody else who downloads that app is saying the same thing. The problem, though, is that all of the people that downloaded the Green Bay Packers app can’t talk to each other. Today in mobile, if 100,000 people download an app, nobody knows about any of the other people who have downloaded that app! It’s like everybody is in a room but the lights are off! And it’s amazing that nobody has solved this problem yet. What we’re doing with a technology called Socialize, is we’re turning the the lights on in the room so that this community that shares an interest that defines the interest graph can start socializing! So we’ve created a social layer that we are building into every app made by AppMakr. If you go to www.appmakr.com and you build an app, by default, it will have Socialize built in to it. And you can learn more about Socialize and how it works because I am not going to go into detail about that here, but we believe that, by creating a social layer that can be put into every app made by AppMakr, we can help solve the problem with the interest graph. Not only that but Socialize that something that could be put into every app, not just AppMakr apps. So stay tuned to see what happens there.

For now, you can make an app with AppMakr and it will have a built-in social layer / community baked into the app. A couple screenshots of Socialize just to help you get an idea of what it does. In the app, you’re able to see an activity stream not only of who is doing what, but where they’re doing that. So you can start connecting with other users in the app. People who are liking or commenting or sharing content from the app. There’s also a challenges component that we’re building in. This gets to the gamification of the real world piece. For example, if the PGA Tour were to make an app using AppMakr, they could create a challenge and that challenge could be to take your photo on 18 golf courses across the U.S and the first person to do that gets a set of Big Bertha golf clubs. It’s the Socialize layer, the Challenges framework layer that’s being used to veto or verify that that’s actually being done through things like GPS or other sensors that the phone has. So again, we’re building on a lot of these early points but the important thing here is that it’s changing the way that people engage with apps. In fact, we’re just starting to build Socialize into apps made with AppMakr and this is an app I made for Hacker News and you can see that before we put Socialize in, we were getting about 15 sessions a day. The moment we put Socialize in that number jumped up to over 150 sessions a day. So this shows the amazing power of this social layer and this interest graph. So again, Bill Gurley I could not agree with you more on that social graph or the importance of that interest graph. Specifically, what we think this does to this engagement metric is it turns the graph the other way. Instead of engagement dropping over time, engagement goes up over time because the community is forming around the core content of the app. We believe this is amazingly powerful, it’s one of the biggest problems in mobile today and we solved this problem first that allows us to solve other problems like the discoverability and recommendations. You can go to www.getsocialize.com to learn more Socialize.

So that’s it! I hope I’ve convinced you and shown you about the power of mobile and specifically, the power of data and data accessibility through API’s changing the way we are going to be living our lives even within the next couple of years. I’d love to hear from you, this is my contact information, please reach out to me, leave a comment on the blog where I am going to post this video, and just engage me in conversation.

Thanks.

Here’s a transcript of the video:

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Socialize Is Here: Unleash the Community Within Your App
Daniel Odio

Hi it’s Daniel with AppMakr!

I’m going to show you some really revolutionary new functionality that we’re just about to launch. It’s called Socialize, and it’s a social layer that we’re putting into every app that’s made by AppMakr.

Let me show you what I mean:

The way I’m going to show this is off is through an app that we’ve made called the “Unofficial SXSW Guide.” We made this app using AppMakr and, like any app that uses AppMakr it has various pieces of functionality. This is an HTML tab here, there’s also RSS for example, but here’s what’s really special about AppMakr now that it has Socialize in it.

You’ll see that some bits of information peak on every piece of content, well that’s Socialize.

Let me show you what I mean: at the bottom we overlay some information; How many views this story has had, the ability to like, the ability to make a comment on this story, so I’ll say, for example, I’ll say “nice story.” I miss-spelled it but you get the idea. And also, you’re able to share, for example share on Twitter or share on Facebook or share in e-mail.

Now, that’s all well and good and it’s a great thing that most apps don’t have. To be able to get the social layer started and also if someone else comments on this article, I can see everybody’s comments here.

But here’s what’s really really special about Socialize: If I swipe up, I go from a comment-centric view to a community-centric view. So now I have an activities stream showing all of the comments and all of the activity happening in this app. This does not exist today. The idea of swiping up on the tabs so that you go from the content to the community is really revolutionary and this is how we are solving the problem of the interest graph. What I mean by that is, there are a lot of people that share an interest in, let’s say, SXSW in this case. Now, they can start socializing together.

For instance, this user “Delicious Orange” liked this story and so if I like the things Delicious Orange likes, I am able to get more information in detail on what they’re liking and what they’re commenting on. I can also get more information on this user by clicking on their photo. I can see all of their activity specifically right here.

So, this ability to go not just from a content-based view but to a community-based view is a really really powerful thing. Additionally I have the ability to see everything that I have liked, so this is like a favorites bucket. And I can also see my profile, I can edit my profile, I can see more details/ all the activity that I’ve had.

That’s Socialize.

Now let me show you a little bit more about the capabilities of AppMakr because, AppMakr has really been maturing quickly as a platform.

Not only does it do RSS, it does full HTML with support for PhoneGap, so we can see, for example, that this is an HTML tab, this is an RSS tab here with Socialize peaking through. But also, there’s things like [GeoTweets,] this is a really great HTML tab that we made called GeoTweet. You can see who’s tweeting within a half-mile radius of where you are. And the ability to use the camera to take photos, so if I want to take a picture this is just a PhoneGap implementation. I can take a photo, (I’m not actually going to take it I’ll just hit “cancel” and I’ll show you where all the photos show up, which is in this thread right here.) These are previous photos that I’ve taken.

So the ability to do these types of things with an AppMakr- literally making an app within a couple of hours or in as little as 15 minutes is a very very powerful thing, and now with Socialize in the app, you have not just the content but we’re starting to unleash the community that’s been hiding within every app.

The crazy thing here is, if 100,000 people have downloaded an app, it’s like we’ve been in a room but the lights have been off because we haven’t been able to socialize together. Now that we have Socialize in the app, it’s like we’re turning the lights on; we’re unleashing this community and giving them the ability to interact with not just the content, but start interacting with each other.

Hope you like that demo of Socialize, we’d love to have you build an app using AppMakr and give it a try yourself.

Here are some screenshots of the app:

Here are some screenshots of the app:

Here’s a transcript of the video:

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Using AppMakr’s AppDrop with QR Codes
Daniel Odio

Hey guys it’s Daniel, and I have in front of me here a QR code that I am going to scan using a program that just scans QR codes and then it gives me a URL, and this is actually a way to install an App.

I’m going to go ahead and click on the URL. It’s going to take me to a page called “AppDrop.” AppDrop is an AppMakr-only piece of functionality for Adhawk test apps to be installed without having to synchronize with the computer, so it’s over-the-air installation of test applications.

I’ll go ahead and click “install test app” and it says AppMakr would like to install “AngelList,” and I’ll say go ahead and install- then it takes me right over and starts installing the app. Let’s just watch it load for a minute here.

The AppDrop technology is especially useful if you want to try making an app through AppMakr and then send it off to a bunch of people to see what they think about it and then you can get feedback from people before you submit it to iTunes.

In order to do this, you do need to have the UDID’s of the people who are going to be installing the app through this Adhawk installation process. You can actually get that UDID through an app that we have in iTunes called AppUDID.

So you can see here that this application has now installed and I can take a look at it. It’s actually the first time I’m looking at it. By the way, if you’ve never heard of AngelList it’s great!

Here’s push notifications that we enable through AppMakr so it looks like that’s working. That’s awesome. Let’s just take a look at the different pieces of functionality…

There’s a “Join AngelList” piece- that looks good…

There is a Twitter feed…so it’s going to probably pull in the AngelList or the VentureHack’s Twitter handle and…while it’s loading I’m going to take a look at the other stuff…

We have a news section– oh nice, Quora Reviews– they’ve got Twitter for VentureHack specifically, so pretty cool!

Here’s the news feed- I think it’s actually just Google News. This is just a Google News RSS feed that we pulled. Let me go back to the Twitter feed and take a look– so here’s the Twitter feed for AngelList…very nice.

The Join Page again…so as you can tell this is still in testing mode so all activity which I think is going to end up being the AngelList funding activity- this is an HTML implementation but this is not working yet. This is a great example of using the QR code in AppDrop to be able to test functionality in an app. Now I can let the app maker/ app creator know that this tab isn’t working. So, very nice! This is a test app and it looks good.

Let’s just take a look at one more thing- Quora Reviews. I don’t know, let’s see if this has been implemented yet or not…it doesn’t look like it. So, again, another thing that we can ask the app creator to work on.

That’s an example of using a QR code and taking a picture of the QR code with the phone and then installing the app using AppDrop.

Ciao.

Here’s a transcript of the video:

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We are here at the CES Panel and we are going to be having a discussion about app development, App Marketing, the way that Apps are kind of changing the hardware’s that we are seeing being developed here at…. CES and what to expect in the near future. I think it will probably be easiest for our Panels to introduce themselves, where they work and give a little of background about their experience in the industry.

Ali: I’m with Mateo. Good Morning everyone. Mateo is actually an autentive reality software company located in Munich. Excuse my Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. That is actually where it is coming from?… ha-ha and San Francisco California. We are developing a software stack to develop ………. reality apps?

Germano: Good Morning everyone, is everyone excited?? Whew (crowd screams) …Alright get jazzed, okay now that I got that out my system. My name is Mike Germano. I’m with Agency called Car creative? We are in Brooklyn NY. New York. District. And we build costume apps for Really large brands and we are wondering what the Fuck they entire App Market is all about. And they pay us a lot of money….

Belmont (Host): Oh yeah it is that kind of Panel today…

Germano: Yes, we have to make sure all of you are wide awake and so luckily for us we have a, we are kind of a hybrid of half agency and half start up so we are a bunch of start up people who kind of sold out to build really cool things. So that’s us!

Isaac Masquera: Hi, how is it going? My name is Isaac Masquesra, I am a CTO CO founder of PointAbout Inc. We make custom consulting apps. We recently spun of a product called Appmakr, which has been moved to San Francisco. So my background in one end you got everything you need from app making and on the other side you got a ……….?? Product is online and you create your own apps with in a few minutes.

Belmont (Host): Great! So just to get kind of a feel for the room, how many people work in App development or App Marketing here today?

Crowd…

Belmont: Great, Fantastic. So my first question to the panelist and feel free to jump in and answer for what ever you feel like talking about
There seems to be a huge incentive these days for developers to really focus on IOS Apps. What can kind of lead people to work in other development environments? Developing for Android, developing for blackberry?

Isaac: I think there is a huge incentive right because of IOS Lead the way. Then you got IPad, Iphone and the Iphone. And Iphone is what we think should be released for Verizon here soon so that showed increase of sale and distribution forms the Iphone standpoint. But when you look at the raw numbers, Android is over taking the Iphone or has over take the Iphone in terms of distributing and Windows is getting in the Game. Although they are just now starting, they have a lot of capital and they are used to starting of a little bit behind the race but they have enough resources to make it happen. So as you see these distributions of those other platforms happen, you will see more and more people start creating newer platforms. Some gaining developers that have decided for the first couple of years just to focus on IOS but you just cant be so single focused when there is a whole other platform that is available. Initially you see that Android is taking much more around the world the distribution is much more “will be focused” platform.

Ali: The IOS and Android is actually a global focus. (3:38)….. Is still a very strong platform? Specially developing countries. Which are countries, Countries that consist of 50% of the market future …. in ……..

Germano: From our standpoint, last year …. Companies had every 10 requests we had to build a custom application 9 of them prefer the IOS. Now that means one was for either Blackberry or one was for Android. In the last two months we have started seeing a dramatic shift. However it will always so far keeps with IOS but now its we want all three or we want the whole sweet…? Before it’s either the Iphone or the Iphone and everything. and that is what we are kind of getting as a request. I like to just think and take that back like okay so they are asking for why? Because it’s a shiny Toy? right? Or it’s the best shiny Toy?
Lets take the technology side and just say its about the audience as well and the fact that everyone likes to and you always see all those things people put “ the Iphone sucks..” and “ you shouldn’t have ..Android”. But if you look at the ….. And that one says, “ Oh people by the Iphone, they don’t know what they are taking about and they don’t think it’s a great Phone… “. Well then that’s great! That is the exact market I want to advertise too. People who really don’t care, who wants shiny things, and willing to download my app for .99 cents. And I question it like where may be maybe Android market is more concerned about “I want this Free and I know the best way to do it.” I want the people who don’t know the best way to do it, who have disposable income, who don’t want to research too much, who want the shiny thing because I will sell it to them for .99 cents. So you know from our end it’s the Technology its clearly coming with all the other platforms for us it has always been much easier to develop for the Iphone and the Ipad. Its bee so much easier for us, our developers love it, we like most projects come in??… But in reality we just know that that audience we are making things for is there with the Iphone and not yet with the other devices.

Belmont: You guys feel like you get a fair share from Apple in terms of getting your products out there and what kind of profits you are getting from the App store?

Ali: I mean in the Mateo way and the way we see it most of the Apps are free. So it doesn’t matter. In the marketing ……………..??……

Germano: UMM.. You know I guess my background in the past is politics. So you know I guess I believe in like you know I always consider myself a democrat. I like when one person takes full control and we have this kind of … one brilliant leader and … jobs and in reality you cant really …

Nice to join… would you like to introduce yourself?

Belmont: Oh no I will give him a chance .. You can continue..

Germano: Already.. I feel like okay.. No it’s totally fine..
What ends up happening is I think in terms of cost where are you going to argue? Where are you going to go? They built the audience! You know honestly when people complain about the prices they are getting, you know if I ….. taken a 15% they are going to do it and you are not going to do anything about it. The App developers are still going to do it. So right now yes I’ll have more percentage and all the competitors will come in and give developers you know higher percentage of what they charge but the reality is Apple is going to be able to do what they want right now.

Germano: So this … true Salton?

??? : Hi, I’m …. ??? .. The roads and the Moderns??>>> Are slow today my apologies.

Germano: Yes everything, the roads and the Moderns, you cant win in getting to CES this year.
So I guess we can move on to the next question. What do you guys think about IS? Now that we keep talking about IOS a little bit. How has that been working out for you guys in Apps? Have you integrated that yet in to your Applications?

Mosquera: So, Actually IS is kind of a funny thing because what happens is my background, a lot of Apps we have created are publisher base Apps or content based apps. And what happens with IS is that a lot of people are just focused on implementing their existing advertising systems. So they want to sell their own inventory. So really IS has not been that big of a demand on our side. We don’t actually see much demand for it. Although there are nicer Apps when you see them, they are nicer, but that comes with the cost. Not everybody wants to pay that cost. It goes back to control back to the publisher having control of their own inventory and being able to sell the inventory.

??? : From my perspective, I love the idea of anything that is kind of standardized and stabilized. It is really hard to get agencies to create something for a platform until it has massive scale. So you end up with a really chicken egg problem. We saw this with online videos. Where there were a few really interesting ……….8:23…….

Germano: I know a lot of you have done the official applications for a lot of major corporations and Businesses. How is that compared to starting from scratch? Has the Brand recognition really help held that App to success or does it kind of held it back a little bit?

Ali: ,,,,,

Germano: I think that brings a very interesting topic. Its brands of Powers that people perceive that brand makes an app that is going to be Great? 9:18. Unfortunately the brands also think you know “ we are a large corporation, If we build an App everybody is going to want it” in reality, that is not the case. What is even worse is there is really four buckets you are putting an App in. Its either going to be offering sometime of funding of Entertainment or I can usually sometimes the charge for it, Its offering Account service in Bank of America App or Wachovia app or you know these are actually the directions of utilities services. Then you kind of have one of those promotional App. Click here to download this and you get something, you know, that is actually trying to cut the market down. The 4th one is really services. Something unique and are acting as Brands of Powers. A brand can be Sherman, you know like where the Bathrooms are. Things like, Little things in society that we need but no App maker really want to do it but then a brand can promote for it, I would say every brand expects their App to go well and for instance we have one. 10:16 Problem.

the Onion came to us and hey Build an app. We were like so stoned, it’s the IPhone. It’s going to be like this App it’s just their headlines, the funny headlines that they have. We said lets make fun of the Iphone like it’s a micro fish. So you start with Micro fish and it makes noise and you flip through, Oh man I thought it was the FUCKING coolest thing ever. Right? Well we charged for it. .99 cents was the first App that came out. People hated it because we charged for it. They were like “ I expected a whole Onion, what is this crap??!? Its just the headlines!!” And we wrote the description “Just the Headlines” you be kind of cute and show something and people just went ballistic! The hated it, they gave it such a low rating and we didn’t get the contract until the next app. The next App was just for a simple New App. Sponsored by brands. Brands are getting hesitant because they expect something have one something that is popular, but imagine how they plan on grouping it. That was entertainment app that people weren’t expected to be you knowing as much Entertainment as it was services for all the news they was trying to get. So branding spends a crazy amount of money for Downloads and I think that’s where everyone hears that a Developer has a huge opportunity. Brands are expecting their apps to be big. Instead Brands should be doing is they should be buying up developers Apps that are already out there. I think that is Hands down, as a developer we do for ABC, but if I was the same corporate person, I will be solving little tiny problems and have a nitch market that have 3 major brands and service that market some way and call all three of them up and ask “ which one of you want this?” Because they are paying like $5 to download, paying like $250 you know thousands of dollars to get an app built mean while you can just sell it to them for a quarter million dollars if you just make something good at least a steady reach because it actually service those people buying it. So I think that Brands should start picking up little apps (interrupted by sultan)

????? : So are you saying that they continue to charge for that once they pick it up?

Germano: No, I think what Developers should be doing is they should be building free apps that has something that is AD supported. Build them a base, go to a couple of brands and be like “ Hey, this compliments what you are marketing thing offers… this should be your brand and rename it, pull away the App, Just have the Brand sponsor it and just walk away from it. And all the data goes along with the users.

????: Right, because that for me is kind of my rate of category with the Apps. It’s the purpose of it to drive revenue in….. to itself. Or is the purpose of it to support over all Brand activities. And those are very different and I think that they can get you in a lot of trouble if those get confused. When you’re saying I really want to support my brand but you get a little greedy and say I really want to make some side revenue as well, you kind of have that Onion situation where it back fires on you. So I think that’s got to be defined on your paperwork.

Belmont: well then its not kind of thing where you turn to Micro transactions to kind of may be offer the App for free build up that user base and start adding value to it?

Ali: ……….
Mosquera: And I think that, Studies have shown that actually selling things besides advertising is actually growing faster than just advertising in an app itself. So its kind of interesting to see that people are willing to download the app, get used to the app, kind of click around and really like it and then find some added value where they can, that they are willing to pay for right? So I think there is a market for that, you just have to look for it and see “what is it that I have that people are willing to buy?” and for some reason other actually people are even starting to pay for content that the wouldn’t pay for other once. So there is something interesting happening in the psychology of Mobile and people’s brain. They are willing to pay for content on mobile but they wouldn’t on the websites. It’s very interesting!

Germano: But is it because it’s like “Cigarettes”? And you are giving them something you know you give for free and you expect them to buy when addicted and want to do it? Or do people perceive it as a digital convenience tax. That pays now and say “well I could go online and get this but I wont spend the .99cents right now to get it now. I mean which way is it, I mean really of course the once that are addicting things you will get people to buy, buy, buy you know the game part, people don’t want that. But how much of that is do you really is in the market?

Mosquera: I think what you are saying about the Cigarette thing you look at it as games that are crazy addictive to some people. I don’t even know what the are buying online. They by these digital coins just to feed their addiction and they do well with that.

Belmont:…….

Mosquera: Yeah. And then you got the other side of the market, that is the digital convenience. You know there are many times that I don’t read a certain websites. Because I’m on a bus or what ever, what have you and I cant download their content and actually consume that information. So I’m willing to pay a $1 or $2 to get it in a format that I can actually consume other than beside you flip the screen and its just not legible. So I think you have got two different markets. You just have to find what type of content and what type of digital coin that you can sell for what ever you are making and Speaking in very generic terms, what would actually work for you. I think there are two markets there that will work for people.

Belmont: Thank kind of brings me to my next point which is, Where do you think big money lays in Apps? Is it the initial selling pricing point? Is it Micro transactions down the line? Or is it Advertising?

Mosquera: I think there is Markets for each one. It really just depends on what you are doing and who is willing to pay for it. Like you were saying earlier, you have a market if you are dealing with the iPhone market people that are Kind of just …… spending a Dollar here a Dollar there for what ever you maybe selling. That may work out for you. There are certain News outlets that have content that nobody is willing to pay for. So you go to the advertise route because that’s what works for you. And then you have games where people are willing to pay a Dollar, two dollars for an Angry birds and you download that and that’s how you make your money. And you got all the Zinga market, that’s obviously doing you know, Billions of dollars.

Belmont: They are doing okay..

Mosquera: Yes they are doing. That sell your digital Coins and they get you going for your crops or carrots and what have you.

Germano: I think developers are ….. in this room we are looking at some want to have a high price app if you are really building software. I mean App is unfortunately App is being roomed for every other that is happening on the plat form. But the reality sometimes, Apps are really kind of these fun little things. These real software that received an application developer just build this really true software programs. That they are charging $10.99 and they should. And its great distribution. I think it works, I think that will be there and those developers that have the understanding of the software; they are going to do well. The rest you know like what was the hottest App yesterday, Popping my Pimple or something like that, I mean like it was a free game. We laughed at that. I don’t want to say we pitch that to you know a “ face wash company” two years ago and that is the dumbest no one ever downloaded. Now email them and they look at the kids in the basement, this was a fucking great idea and you should have did it. But you know those little things; those little games 99% of the Apps in the App store are little tiny Apps. Its not like every App is a winner by far. So you’ve got to take a look at it and see where you are trying to be. These people that are making these little apps, its all in the App sizing. You know I think they should be selling off. If you have any type of game, all lines will lay in micro transactions. That’s it! You are going to have subscription services; you’re going to have people that play games that are on different level the better. The best thing about USA, no offense, is that we are Number One. We always love being number one. We can not….18: 18 Get people to play games, make them feel like number two, charge them .99 cents to be number one and they will always do it. And that is like the whole…

Ali: No offense..

Germano: Your kind is doing better Apps right now.

Ali: First of all, the best selling app right now is the Turn by the Turn navigation system right now. Which sells for almost 90 US Dollars. That is the best selling app right now. It bring something to the table which is actually very hard in this App economy which is utility and as a developer building …… which brings utility to use you can very well sell apps. Well probably not as …… but at a good price..

Belmont: What are some of the challenges that you seen developing for other platforms? Specifically something like Android or Blackberry where there are multiple ….. Of the operating system. How do you kind of Port from operations system to another or do you just make a totally different App?

….. : I mean, the answers are really depends on the app that you are starting with. We set up a completely separate practice purely for IOS and Android. Because we can look at it like you know, just to kind of jot down the key things that we need to look at. You sort of have to look at the frame works, you say okay: users experience, navigation, UI controls, screen size resolution, development and QA. So you basically have to take very App put it against that matrix or what ever, or the matrix everybody has or some version of that and then say what needs to change and what doesn’t. So sometimes it can be relatively straight forward and sometimes it’s a big change.

Germano: I mean the …… that is Apple, will give them predefined user experience makes it so much easier to design for them. We were launching Apps for MTV and we had to launch it in every single platform. We the best thing is when we design for Apple products there is a template that not everybody uses but that’s what you use. That’s how you play around, that’s how every user wants to use, that’s what they know, that makes it a million times easier. Of course Android has …. Devices, and certain things you can and can’t do that make it Pure Fucking Hell for us Developers. We absolutely, you know we what happens because then it wont use the camera, this one is not …. It for us, for our profit margin as a developer, I don’t think when we do custom work its not there for Android as it is for Iphone.

Mosquera: Yes, I mean same experiences. You’ve got million different screen sizes. How do you even know what that is? It is practically impossible. But what we try to do is, we try to make reusable components right. and you can do that using some lower level languages or a lot of times what we try to do is what can we do an HTML that is acceptable to the user, acceptable from the UI experience because you cant deny the fact that doing something natively either on Android or Iphone is going to be better than HTML. But where do you make those sacrifices so that when you move forward, your margins won’t get crushed. Because your Margins are going to be crushed when you go from a platform. Inevitably some CEO at the company that you are building an App for will have some crappy Android phone where that App just won’t work on his phone right? And you’ve got to deal with that CEO’s problem. It kind of annoying. So you do the best you can and you try to explain what is going to happen when you go using HTML. Yea you may loose a little … experience but at the end I think everybody will gain.

Germano: I wouldn’t lie to you. We had a CEO problems using …. Phone. We then sent them saying they won a brand new Phone. We actually sent them saying “ you won from so and so..” and the just totally bought it. So now so …. Everything works so we actually saved money to by some guy a brand new Iphone. Say something like “ you are a winner “ and he gets “ oh I’m excited” and ditch this crappy old phone that he wouldn’t want to buy on his own. So actually is by far the best thing to do, just buy them a new phone.

Mosquera: That is an amazing idea. Its either a new $400 phone or 3 hours of Developer time. What do you want to pay for?

Germano: Exactly!

Belmont: Well, lets talk about Location base and social a little bit. Where do you think Location Based is really going in terms of being a valuable trend for Apps going forward? Companies like 4square have obviously have done very well. They are taking off and you know pretty much everyone I know is down with the App all through different platforms. But where does the value really lay in these services and is it going to change the Client that are going forward for development? It’s kind of a big question.

Ali: It is a very good question. ….

Belmont: Yes what keeps bring people back to using it. You know that’s a thing I can’t figure out.

Germano: Bragging, bragging. It is 100% about bragging. I mean we built, when we built the Facebook App… Baseball a couple of years ago, it was people were checking to Games. You know, Not to get much information but to let their friends know “ Hey, I’m good in the game in your network” you know then we build something like Cross-wordy. Bright kite? We built like, we took all the … …….. They had Iphones, and they just used bright kite and they checked in and we just pulled out and the put their product on the web site. So it was like convenience and information so here is where I am. The online Bragging is which is initially why people get involved with it, why the continue to get involved with it. And then you talk about incentives and convenience of why people would jump to a different platform right? So of course we are involved, they haven’t …. right now. Everyone is trying to get in to this space and trying of coupons and all those things right. But you know is the online bragging to me to me enough to why I check in to that place and potentially get coupon? People don’t like to online do anything publicly. Where they are saying like “ Oh my God, I just totally saved .50 cents on a Slurpy at 7-11” People don’t want to do that. They want to close that. They want to privately do that, have that in their phone but they don’t want to publicly post that. Its like you are checking a four square. You know I got 10 Badges for being a Mayor at a local Gas station and got publicly announced that I saved 50cents; I would feel like a fat piece of Shit! I don’t want people to know that right! I’m going to hide that. ….So its at the point where the convenience whereascell phone is a very private device to people and it should be. This check-ins is the most public interaction imaginable. Where does it lay between making sure it’s not that is not a public interaction, it’s actually serving private thing that I want to keep to myself.

…. I actually think that the Dating, the all sorts of Dating side of things which is very private way of doing thing. Its taking off like Apps you cant give up. The idea of being able to say okay I want to look and see if there is anybody potentially its kind of like hook up Apps.

Belmont: Are there like dating Apps like that? Or is it like off the market? I have to check this out

Germano: I recently have got engaged two weeks ago! Her twitter name is @Appmaker_Girlfriend. And honestly the best thing that happened to her is Grindr? Does anyone know what Grindr is? Its for Gay couple to find each other……. and its just for hookup.

….: We built it.

Germano: That is the fucking most awesome thing. So smart! I sat there and looked at that and said that is the smartest thing ever. You guys are ………. Unfortunately I ….. engage market and that’s a market that you go to. That.. YOU WIN! hands down some one give him a trophy. What that App does is, like when some one showed it to me I was like I’m not Gay myself but I was like that is brilliant, I had to actually, I wanted to download the App and see how it works and of course .. “ Trust me look at this guy right here, he is totally a ….., how amazing is that?!”

?????: I’ve had to experience a lot ………. but Boy is it popular?!?! and there is a …..

Belmont: Is there a man and women dating version as well?

???: Not yet!

Belmont: Not yet!

Germano: Because that market doesn’t care. That market there is not a bunch of attractive females saying “ Oh I’m totally going to hook up with some random people right now!” It just doesn’t happen.

… : But other than Vegas I don’t think that happens.

Germano: But that market, everyone keeps saying, when is the straight person…..? Its not going to happen. Because all users are not going to react the same. But its incredible.

Belmont: Its a pretty interesting Idea! How do you kind of draw in the line between too much information being publicly shared and stuff you just want to keep personal to your App position. Sometimes I find myself using things like 4square just to keep track of where I’ve been not really I care about sharing and I find myself checking in more often privately than anything else. So I was like “ wait, why exactly am I using this?” . Is it going to be more for just kind of knowing where you have been or is it really like you said for bragging rights? or there are different Apps for those things?

Germano: It sounds like that’s a Personal Journalism is what you are doing. I forgot what the web site is called but you access your 4square, it shows you where you’ve traveled. You know I like doing that. So you are right, don’t check in sometimes publicly and I like to click in. In terms of information sharing, there are two sides. The data that companies are collecting and they are collecting absolutely everything that you do, I would say
“ Stop everyone who complains about that. Just Shut up, because like you are getting better service because we are knowing more about you” but that’s different story. The problem we are facing is we consult all the NFL players and social media. The biggest problem they are facing in this type of situations is: A guy will go with his wife to get dinner, babysitter comes in, checks in “ hey, I’m sitting at the Smith’s house babysitting”. It broadcasts to all her friends. The know that she babysits for this Football player “ Smith” and they know exactly who that is. That’s a house in BuffloBills. Now people know where that football player lives and when he is not at home and when he is at home. So now the biggest concern now when we are working with the NFL is like the fact that they checked in at Bars, or the fact that even what is worse with Facebook is you can Tag people who checked in. So like I don’t really want to. Sometimes people are checking in like “Mike shopping at IKEA” and I just told a a client that I’m at work, that I’m skipping the day and they know I’m going to IKEA. So you know I think that the bigger fear is less about the GP, it’s about the personal checking and about your friends being able to check you in because you don’t really have too much control over that. That’s seems to be the problem.

Belmont: I gotcha. So in all of your personal …. what Apps right now cross all platforms that just really doing gate busters!? Just like blowing it out the Water in terms of, not just popularity but the idea of what they are doing?

Mosquera: I think the most interesting one to me, just because I’m, I just kind of recently picked it up and started using is Instagram. Now the popularity of that is getting huge. How I think it was PBS that was actually using it as a distribution engine. I just saw that article which to me means now when a corporation starts to getting involved, it takes your App to another level. So that’s supper interesting to me. To get back to the point of Social there, I think that is a huge component what they do and its so important for their App because I would never know what the Insagram App was had I not seen other people using it on Twitter, Facebook and what have you and its so critical to have that Social component inside of your Apps. But yea so I think its Insagram is one of those Neat little Apps that are taking off and other people are trying to replicate it like Dave….

Ali: For me its definitely Angry birds…. My dad who is 75 years is actually playing it.

Belmont: I think I’ve been to a number of presentations and press conferences I was at yesterday and every single one of them mentioned “Angrybirds!” every single one. Samsung, Panasonic, Angrybirds is available in all their you know you plug your phone in to your HD TV and now you can play Angrybirds. You know on a giant TV.

Germano: I feel like every every Platform has that one App. So like … for Facebook, AngryBirds for your phone, so you know there is always like that one App that comes out, in reference to like you know one App I really like “ The Sherman Blooms color palette App”. You know just a smart service that that enticing to a brand absolutely perfectly but you know what it becomes useful.

Belmont: Is that where you take a picture of something and it colors with color palette?

Germano: It colors with color Palette. Unfortunately 99% of us are engaged in painting the entire carpeting. …
But just taking picture of something that you like the color and it giving, you know recommending color palette that compliments that, takes someone who doesn’t, isn’t have an eye for that and gives them service. And you know what I honestly, I watch them most because maybe they supply me with that information and help me make my process better easier, I was like of course I…. this paint. They not only get me and made an App that helps me, but it’s a service that was useful to me. So I thought that was a Good example of Service based App. Not silly marketing App, not a game but a service based app that actually provides better.

Belmont: And that’s Great! That’s interesting, you are not paying anything for the App but the money is actually making made at the Burke and …. Store.

….: I think it’s a key piece. And again to get back to that point. Is the point for the App to make money or is the point where your …… help you generate activities to make money. Because sometimes you were talking about where the big money is in Apps? Sometime big money is not in the App. Sometimes the big money is in the what the App enables. And I think that is such an important thing to remember. That’s a great great market. We need to see more of that. There are too many apps that are the Angrybird type of things. But since Angrybirds is …. , I’m going to go with Dog whistle for Android phone.

Belmont: The Mosquito one does not work. I tried it.
So what kind of ….. Apps in your own company? What are people actively looking for? Is it…. to reality, its obviously that would be for … umm.. Social gaming is it games just alone upon them, or do you see the trends going in Apps for the future?

Mosquera: So, a lot of the Apps we do are, we actually separated the Consulting side the product side. In the product side, you have a lot of these news organizations or news outlets or people that just generally have content and want to get it out. For example actually maximum PC wanted to create CES App just to push content and Twitter Feeds and news and what have you. Now in order to create that App, that would cost $30,000 to $40,000 depending on the time it took for you to make it. But you are seeing a lot of these kind of worn off that we are seeing just for a specific even and then on the consulting side it was only interesting on there. We are seeing a lot more corporations do kind of be to be Apps or to service their own employees or kind of data collection Apps for kind of like the UPS man. He’s got that clunky tablet he’s got going on. That should obviously be replace by some sort of thin tablet and have better data impute and have a much sleeker interface for him to use. We are seeing a lot more of that on the consulting side where the corporations taking money to actually build these Apps to service.

Ali: We are seeing….. Phone censer …

Germano: One that unique trends that is happening this year, that is a byproduct of all this efficiency is that people used to get information prior in to doing something. Before you traveled to CES you went online, you figured out where you are staying, you did your research on your computer right? You are at home, you can call friends, and you bought a travel book or what ever. What’s happened now with the App market and people is that they are looking for such will time information that they fail to do traditional informational research prior to interacting. as silly as to travel, to going to starbucks or to what time you are suppose to pick your kid up from Soccer practice. So now what we are seeing is that not just every brand but Companies that are providing the little basic will time information are becoming extremely powerful because even with these devices people have become less educated about what hey are doing because they are expecting this to have the answer for them when they get there, when they interact with them. So we are now culture people have stopped doing the traditional research prior to and having that information and now what they are going to do and waiting for will time information to give them the answer of what is happening. Like you said before, we are seeing huge brands for their yearly corporate seminars and you know this massive fortune 50 brands that are not doing the traditional pamphlet. They are coming up with its actually invented to be held in Munich (we will talk about it by the way) and the ipad App you know who is talking, who is speaking, what is going on, and here is all the information about what you are saying so you are all with people from all around the world this is what is going on in this city, its just, its now taking the place of full experience. Every major conference seems to have an App. There are a lot of platforms that do allow that. But you know for traveling you are almost downloading an App for where you are going and now even doing a research and then waiting sitting in a hotel room saying “ oh yeah what was I supposed to do?” So this will time looking for information is always of course been there but its now even more important because people know its there but they are not doing what they are suppose to do in the past.

????: I think you are right. We got so used to on demand. We can all show up where ever we show up and then we just fire up a GPS App to you know to guess where we want to go. Good forbid there is no …..

Belmont: God we will total screw this whole CES…..

????: And so trend wise i think it’s two we are seeing. One is just kind of over all rise tablets and how important the whole tablet ecosystem is to the App space. For us, it showed up it really highly. Apps. It started to really see consumers build a life cycle Apps. One is the Betty Crocker recipe App and the other is All Recepies.com App. Two Apps we have done that has kind of a really interesting element that you have them at the planning stage where they say “ oh what should we have for dinner tonight? “ and then you have them at the supper market where they are doing the shopping list, and they from the tablet perspective and you have them in the kitchen right? Now we make sure the … is big enough for the knuckle so the greasy finger doesn’t have to hit it. So that has been one big transit. And the other when the consulting side of things is how mobile and apps are becoming the click through for digital outer home. We do a thing at the Can Festival we have a 12foot by 6foot touch screen wall as we are seeing more and more of the digital…. home…. digital experiences, what you are doing with your cell phone and mobile device is really going to enable you to make that personal experience and not just a from point….

Belmont: What do you think about Apps moving on to platforms that aren’t necessary mobiles. Things like Printer, Printer….. Do you see that as becoming big trend becoming going forward as well?

Mosquera: Ya I definitely think that it’s a big Trend. I think for me what is interesting from business perspective and personal is Apps moving more towards the TV. I think what is interesting there is that for since the 80’s its cable companies that have introduced and locked down … just as career have locked down our phones. And what they don’t see coming is that what’s attracting the App is that, right now lets say you just want a ESPN, you cant get the channel just for ESPN. You have to buy a $100 per a month package with all the different crappy channel you don’t give a damn about but now that you have Apps on the TV, you start kind of deliberating and start revolutionizing how this whole industry has worked!

Belmont: …..

Mosquera: Exactly. You’ve got Apple TV kind of falling in to that space. So I think Apple TV will ultimately will allow you to have the Apps on there. You got the Maxim that is released today right?! Now you got Apps somehow came back to the desktop. That’s kind of weird. So you are going to see that everywhere and I think it’s going to be great for developers because you are going to have new applications. When you were talking about appliances, you are talking about Apps for your Refrigerator right? Where you know what’s in there, you know when its going to go bad, you know when to order stuff, come up with recipes for what ever that maybe in your Refrigerator. I think in 10-15 years we are going to have all those Apps everywhere where the information is given to a developer and the developer will decide what to do with that information from that device.

Ali: I think ….

(?) : I think, I agree. I think the future is very bright for Apps in different platforms. I also want to kind of a report card of a Failing grade or D or failing grade to what has been done today. And I take responsibility for this because we have been part of a lot of these things. We architected the Yahoo Intel TV widgets platform, which unfortunately did not do very well. And we also had done when really thinking about the TV in this case a lot of kind of custom Apps on …. TV System and we’ve had some successes but they take a long time to build and then the URY end up being not so great and then things are not flexible like the …. platform. But what we really seen today is consumers are not particularly ready, they are not particularly enthusiastic about how to extensive interaction with Apps?! That …. with the fact that the TV App system are incredibly confused because the CE manufacturer who put in a layer that has a Netflix App and then the provider with have a Netflix App and then the BlueRay player will have a Netflix App and these things we don’t know how to coexist with one another well. So boy, today is not a particularly exciting prospect for consumers or developers. I think it will be better when it matures, we will see.

Belmont: Ya, I think one important thing is to hold your connected home scenario. I know there are some Apps are doing really well. …. For example. Netflix can definitely do it better. Do you think there …..?

Here’s a transcript of the video:

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AppMakr on Social Wire: on KITV4, Honolulu’s TV News Channel

Video Length: 1:40
Time to Transcribe: 15 minutes (after fact checks, grammar, and spell checks)

Anchor: Mahealani Richardson
Anchor: Kenny Choi
Reporter: Yasmin Dar

M: Good morning and welcome back, the time now is 6:22.

K: Time now for KITV4’s Social Wire and there’s an app for apps I guess.

K: Social Media reporter Yasmin Dar joins us now. Yasmin, what’s app with that?

Y: Well we shared with you earlier that it was free and easy to make DROID apps; well now there’s an app maker for the iPhone and it’s apparently called- appropriately called- AppMakr! Not only is it a free web app but you don’t have to know how to read or write code because it comes with a WYSIWYG, or, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. AppMakr focuses on creating feed-based apps so you can start off by inputting your website or keywords. From there, you’ll need to sign up for a free account and you can start creating your app, customized with your own icon splash screen, app-header, tab icons, and more.

However, when it comes to publishing your app with itunes it can be a difficult process. But, AppMakr will walk you through that with clear and easy instructions. Now if you want to join in on the conversation you can always log into our Facebook page or tweet me at YasminDar. That’s a look at what’s buzzing at KITV4 Social Wire.

K: Alright so, soon Yasmin, we’re going to expect an app for traffic from you coming up pretty soon so you can make millions, right?

Y: Ooohh….yeah…

K: Well it’s 6:24 time for traffic and weather on the 4’s. What can you tell us about traffic now since you’re not going to make an app for traffic?

Y: Oh, they already have an app for traffic, it’s called Beat the Traffic app, remember? No?

K: Alright, well show us next time.

Y: We’ll show you next time. Well traffic wise here we have a live look for commuters…