App Store

The invaders are at the gates of mobile

by alec on May 18, 2011

Kevin Fox muses that Microsoft, Apple and Google may be “quietly preparing for war with mobile carriers”. He cites the ten-year innovation desert in voice, coupled with the explosion of data on the handset, weaves in Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, and spins a tale of how the data companies take over the telecom industry.

Implausible? No. In fact, the innovation piece of the story has been being told for years now. A band of rebels in the communications industry, myself included, have been speaking at industry events like eComm, authoring documents like the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, and building business plans to pitch to investors for a very long time. Nobody in mobile, however, has been that interested in listening.

Today’s mobile industry is a bit like the music industry. Just as the music industry has been built around physical distribution of goods, and was slow to react to the digitization of music, the mobile industry has been built around a steady predictable minutes model, with share driven by the carrier with the current handset-de-jour. It has made them complacent, and ripe for disruption.

The App Store model was the first real disruption, as it capped new margin growth from software. Will Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype – the world’s largest carrier of international long distance minutes – be the next disruption? It’s hard to know, but one thing is certain – the invaders are at the gates and change is coming.

Change is coming.

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Three ways to improve the App Store model

by alec on May 17, 2011

App stores are all the rage, and it’s no secret that Apple is the current king of the software developers fruits and vegetables stand. But as PC World points out, Apple didn’t invent the store, and there are many possible variations from Apple’s blueprint that would advantage developers and customers.

Here are three ways that app stores, in general, could be improved for developers:

More transparency in curation. Apple’s acceptance criteria is a notorious black box. In goes the app, and either it is accepted, or a cryptic refusal is sent back. All app stores should make the rules obvious and transparent, and apply them even-handedly.
Independent management. One of the virtues of Microsoft’s age-old model for licensing the “Designed for Windows” logos to third parties was simply that Microsoft had very little to do with the actual licensing. Yes, they set the rules. But then an independent organization – the Windows Hardware Quality Labs – managed the testing and acceptance process.
Variable royalty rates. Most stores, including Apple’s, apply a flat percentage royalty rate to all products passing through the store. That works fine for low priced items, but might not make sense for higher priced items. In fact, when measured in bandwidth and transaction costs, a $1 item is much more expensive to sell than a $100 item. So how about giving the sellers of higher priced items a break by building in a sliding scale for royalties?

What do you think? Are there other ways to improve the App Store model?

Dutch company changes its name to get its app back in the App Store (tuaw.com)
BeamItDown Software to cease operations on the AppStore (hardmac.com)

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Two Bold moves by RIM.

March 5, 2009

RIM stirred the pot yesterday when they unveiled the BlackBerry App World (the new renamed Blackberry application store), and details of their pricing plans leaked out. The two most important details: RIM has set the pricing tiers for App World, and in the process eliminated $.99 and $1.99 as price points for applications. Blackberry applications [...]

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Squawk Box Conference Call September 5: Apple Censorship, Microsoft Advertising and Shifts in the Telecom Industry

September 5, 2008

Apple appears to be censoring applications in App Store. Yup. “Pull my finger” was turned down because of “limited utility”. My take? They’re trying to preserve the value of applications on the App Store. People want a field of dreams, not a field of trash. We talked about whether Apple should or should not censor, and concluded that if they choose to censor they will need to relax control of the iPhone so that competitors to App Store can provide an outlet for third parties who can’t get into App Store.

We also discussed Microsoft’s new advertising with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. I thought they were funny. But were they effective? Definitely not nearly as effective as Mac vs. PC, but on the other hand this is only the beginning of Microsoft’s rebrand.
And how about the latest 3G numbers, showing the US vaulting ahead of Western Europe in 3G penetration? We had questions about how the data was collected, but concluded that this is just the inevitable march of progress. It’s much the same as the latest reports that wireless now accounts for more than 50% of revenues, across the board in the telecom industry.

Squawk Box September 5 - Apple Censorship and more [ 35:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Squawk Box August 11

August 11, 2008

This morning we talked about the Olympics, and some of the tech stories that are coming out of there. So many of us were blown away by the way that technology was incorporated into the opening ceremonies. What made it work? We discussed the lighting, the fireworks and the CGI…

We also discussed the fact that there’s huge amount of high definition footage being shot by NBC in Beijing. The BBC also seems to have some great coverage. However, unless you’re a resident of either of these countries, with an IP address in those places, you can’t actually see that video. It actually irritates me, personally, quite a bit. The point of the web is connectivity – I can read the NY Times, The Financial Times, and the Jerusalem Post. Why is media different?

Changing topics — it’s one month to the day since iPhone 2.0 was announced. Over the weekend Steve Jobs announced that iPhone users have installed 60 million applications in the first month. There have never been download numbers like that from any application ever. Jobs says it changes software. But in the same breath we hear that the actual sales figures are around $30 million. $.50 average per application? So should we consider this a success?

Apparently T-Mobile does, since they’re planning to launch a store like App Store for their entire product line.

Now what about the kill switch in iPhone. Job’s acknowledged it was there and said “hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.” We chatted about who’s phone it really is… and when they might be justified in pulling that switch.

And we had a short chat about “I am Rich”… apparently 8 people bought it, and it seems that they bought it intentionally. One woman was quite upset at the press coverage she’s been getting about it. Was Apple justified in pulling this one from the store?

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