Renaissance of Mobile Applications: New ad-enabled business models
Smaato welcomes the new iPhone 3G
Sometimes innovations from the Valley are brought to life first in other parts of the world. Last Friday, the Smaato team in Hamburg got an 9 hour advantage on having the new iPhone in their hands ahead of the U.S. based Smaato team.
On Friday the 11th at 10 AM in the T-Mobile store - in 300 feet distance from the Smaato office in Hamburg - there were exactly 3 people ahead of us buying the new shiny smartphone from Apple. We got the 16G black edition and started to bring it to life with our CMO’s T-Mobile contract to get the whole “legal” experience – after playing a year with “opened” iPhones from the U.S.
Smaato is especially keen on getting the iPhone user experience first hand, as we announced earlier our beta program for developers of our iSOMA SDK for Apple iPhone developers. Today we like to re-invite Developers to start working with iSOMA.
The launch of the new iPhone AppStore was a great success as Fierce Wireless reported today:
“[Apple] … announced more than a million devices sold within the first three days of release, with iPhone and iPod users also downloading more than 10 million applications from the fledgling App Store, which debuted Thursday. According to Apple, there are now more than 800 native iPhone applications available via the App Store, with 200 of them offered free of charge.”
Mobile Analyst Dr. J. Gerry Purdy of Frost & Sullivan was all the rave about the new opportunities for mobile developers in his column last week. Gerry states: “I believe that custom applications yield the best user experience in mobile. … The advantages of custom applications include a better user interface, access to remote data, a ‘mash up’ of data from multiple sources, which is almost impossible to do with Web applications for mobile.”
Purdy even goes as far as saying: “Due to the launch of the Apple App Store later this week and richer operating environments in a larger number of phones, custom applications (and their associated services) will become dominant on phones over the coming five years.”
You can feel the creativity in the mobile market is heating up in the last weeks with more developers signing on to the different operating systems and more applications being announced. Symbian is getting more support from Nokia and their intention to go open source means more support and innovation for the 50,000+ registered developers.
The launch of the app store is now an official outlet for the developers who generated more than 200,000 downloads of the Apple iPhone SDK in the first days. But, as Fierce Developer newsletter also pointed out last week – not all developers are agreeing with some of the restrictions of the AppStore: “Navigation app developers turn away from iPhone 3G”. Jason Ankeny reports about a controversial piece in Forbes online that some navigation developers can’t bill in the usual way – by subscription. Well, if you can’t bill a one time fee as Apple allows – how is Mobile Advertising for a disruptive change?
The renaissance of the mobile applications also will come with new business models and opportunities for innovative developers to grow exponentially with new phones and new smarter operating systems. This is going to be exciting!
Check out SOMA™ – our mobile in-application platform and our free SDK to help developers monetize on the new business opportunity. And stay tuned for the upcoming Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2008 to be announced at CTIA San Francisco.