Tag Archives for android
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
It is great when you can get some reading done about a major electronics goods event without submitting oneself to the hype devoted to big things.
TechCrunch, surprisingly, pulled this off this weekend. Jon Evans did it indirectly with a strong post on the failure of interapp operability on smartphone devices (he’s looking at you, Apple and Android):
Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that “Facebook is gaslighting the Web” with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinskicomplain that Google Plus will “mess up the Internet” for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds “they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.”) Google’s Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page “hash-bang” JavaScript sites breaking the web.
Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough — clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page — but it’s hard to reliably link in to an app.
Oh, the infrastructure is there, as Sarah Perez pointed out last week in “A Web Of Apps.” In theory, Android’s Intents, and Apple’s Custom URL Schemes allow apps to open each other and pass information to one another. But it’s still very difficult and frustrating to use them for inter-app communication.
And then there was another indirect article, this time about Microsoft paying a commission to sales people to sell the Windows Phone. Nobody sells it well, argues Greg Kumparak, because Windows Phone is not good enough. I agree it’s a good phone and a great new OS, as I have written here. But I have a slight disagreement with his attitude about how sales should work.
Image via CrunchBase
Kumparak states:
When phone guys sell phones, they’re selling whatever they think will be the easiest sale and make their customer (and their managers) happiest. They do this not necessarily because they’re wonderful people who have deep compassion for everyone who sets foot in their store — but because dealing with angry people (and their returns) sucks. For now, this means iPhone or Android. Both do all of the snazzy things people see in the commercials. Both have a bazillion apps. Both have such massive user bases that few would ever look out into a crowd of people all with smartphones in hand and think “Crap. Did I pick the wrong phone?”
As I wrote in the comments, I think the perspective that created this article might be changed a bit. Kumparak’s point seems pragmatic, honest and right on point.
But, sales people don’t strictly behave this way because they hate dealing with angry customers doing returns. Sales works as sales works, because sales training is not aligned with true discovery of customer motivations and beliefs. You will not find many sales people who dig to find out WHY a person buys. Because to them, this isn’t selling. It’s prying.
If we could change this belief, I think you will see a radical difference in customer appreciation, not just of the devices they buy, but their experience with sales.
And what else in our CES wrap?
Image via CrunchBase
Nobody wins at CES, by Jon Biggs, was great.
CES is really for buyers. Sure it’s a hoot to see what gadgets will launch at back-to-school in September and we, regrettably, will be there reporting on start-ups and cool gadgets we find. But it’s buyers – men and women who love to spend a week eating steak and playing backgammon at MGM grand – who really drive CES. Buyers may be considerably more plugged in these days than they were in the past, but the orders they place at CES are usually the last time they actively pursue the noephillic instinct until January of the next year. Again, with the rise of the Internet, this is swiftly changing but for now the mom-and-pop electronics shop in Scranton trying to fight off Amazon and Best Buy comes to CES to see which TVs to stock.
The point is, consumer awareness is for the blogs, and blogs in the tech age are really marketing platforms for the people who are trying to boost sales and create the indoctrination relationship consumers need with smart devices to keep them churning.
We are at a point with trade shows and with tech blogging where it has become less about situational awreness and informatino about what is new and what is best.
The new pivot is about relationships with consumers. We need to know more about what consumers think and feel, not really what smartphones or mobile devices work, and how. We are moving away from tech geekiness to intuition and emotional savvy.
Watch this space.
Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and blogger at AVC, makes a great point in the comments section of one his recent posts about great apps being lost in the noise of the Apple apps store. He says, “You can’t market a great app if you can’t find shelf space.”
Image via Wikipedia
The issue is that nobody has really solved the big noise problem at the app store. How do you discover what you really need to discover for an app on your phone, for Android or for iOS?
Bob Moesta says that he just allocates himself $20 a month to discover apps and the price of admission is worth the two hours he might save if he finds a good productivity app. If he doesn’t, he’s just spent a dollar, and wasted ten minutes.
But should you have to waste any money at all? Appsfire, a mobile marketing platform, has come up with an advertising notifications tool that lets developers advertise a coming app. From the TechCrunch article, which reminds us that Appsfire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon used to work for TechCrunch.
The new ad unit, which functions sort of like a trailer for mobile apps, includes a full screen preview, a few visuals and the above-mentioned “notify me” button. Users can be notified both by push messages and via email, depending on their preference. On the backend, Appsfire tracks the application in real-time so it knows when the app goes live and then handles the automatic notification process.
Image via CrunchBase
This is an important part of marketing — keeping your app in the people’s minds. If you can do that, they are much more likely to find your new app, because they will be anticipating it.
This is not the full piece and it’s far from finding a real solution. As I said in the comments at the blog, “Great move on their part, but I still think the real juice in apps marketing and advertising is in social discovery, and it’s more about narratives of trial and error and what works for me and what doesn’t that sells or scuttles an app. I realize there is a structural problem to apps discovery, but this is only a very small piece, though a potentially lucrative one.”
The company is working on a version for Android.
It’s Friday, so what you probably need right now is some video fun to show you the future of the tech-robot apocalypse.
Here is a robot made out of Legos solving a Rubik’s cube in 5.32 seconds, using an android mobile device as it is visual calibrator.