To everyone I met at yesterday’s TechCrunch GeeknRolla event, hello! And thank you everyone for taking the time to listen to my presentation. Here is the Slideshare:
Ewan's Presentation for TechCrunch's GeeknRolla
View more presentations from Mobile Industry Review.
I’ll aim to write-up my experience shortly. (In summary: Fantastic).
Thank you Patrick Smith of TechCrunch for this super summary of my presentation.
And thank you Mike Butcher for thinking of me in the first place!
Great presentation, lots of solid stuff, but bit confused as to why you hammered on about Nokia/Symbian and then the penultimate slide quoted Simon Maddox saying “iPhone, Android, Blackberry. Ignore everything else. The other platforms are too expensive and you'll never see a return”. While I respect Simon's opinion, I'd also disagree with it.
Symbian now has something like 7 or 8 languages to develop in (unlike iPhone or Android's single one) suiting a variety of developer abilities, preferences and language capabilities.
Also Ovi Store has now also seen multiple single apps from different developers hit over 1 million downloads, and now a single developer hit over 25 million downloads of their apps, http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11426_…
(and note we're talking apps here, not wallpapers or ringtones as Ovi Store detractors like to claim)
And while I haven't seen solid figures for whether Ovi is making people money, the fact that many of these items are paid, and are achieving high downloads makes it seem inevitable, and a couple of developers in the comments at the above link attest to good money from Ovi, and (as we keep hearing from various places) little or none from Android.
And furthermore there's J2ME. It's now a much more stable and reliable platform, and you can't beat that installed base it has to be said, and it's clearly making some developers money. As a mobile developer I am mightily relieved to have taken the decision to avoid iPhone and Android. Further support for that from Tomi Ahonen, here: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/20…
where he says “For you to hope to break even [trying to make money on your iPhone app], you have to be among the 16% of the most successful apps among paid apps passing 87% of all who have already developed a paid app, and then you're going against all global brands and major marketing campaigns with massive marketing support. Why would you want to go this way?”
Ewan – plsd to have helped u with your pre pitch caffeine – presentation went great – and as someone new to some of the areas u opened several fascinating doors in my mind for the future – thanks so much !!!
Certainly the requests I initially hear from clients on a day to day basis is that if they want to produce their product or content through mobile, an iPhone application is the way to go. But this is often seen as the only mobile platform proposition.
It’s certainly a good starting point, but with device manufactures improving the UI experiences can companies continue to exclude a huge non-iPhone user base.
I am happy to report that there are some brave companies out there wanting to make their mark and willing to go the extra yard to invest in multiple platform deployments. I look forward to seeing the stats later in 2010 where application availability will surely start to spread mobile web and app usage across the smartphone market.