Sunday, July 20, 2008

Social Networking Mobile Applications

You might have missed the news two weeks ago, but myspace and facebook released their mobile applications for smartphones. One important thing I noted is that there is no advertising on the facebook mobile application. From the screenshots of the myspace application, it seems that it is the same thing there too. As more people will access and share content and updates through their mobile applications, how will myspace and facebook monetize these interactions?

There's great potential for location based revenue opportunities but they are mostly based on some sort of ads (coupon). If the screen size is a limitation, they have to think about inserting them in another way. The integration of GPS data can certainly make the ads extremely relevant to the user while making sure it is not perceived as a nuisance.







Friday, July 18, 2008

iPhone 3G and App Store: The Long Tail

Much has been written about the new iPhone 3G released by Apple last week. While it is a great device, attention should be paid to the release of the App Store. The App Store can be installed through an iTune update, and allows you to buy and install applications on your new iPhone. This is a major achievement for Apple and more importantly for the developer community. I wrote about such an environment back in 2006: "harness the millions of developers to work on creating value for your network, bring the new media content to your subscribers' handsets".

I'm very curious to see the number of applications (good and bad) that will be made available to the public. I won't try to forecast that number but it will be another order of magnitude to what carriers could bring to market. I believe we will see a true example of The Long Tail where consumers will be offered a large (huge) selection of applications at a very low price.