Let's Fall in Love With Apps

Birds (Blue Jays) do it. Banks do it. Even folks who swim with tanks do it. Just about every form of modern human endeavour from the utterly trivial to matters of life and death, seems to have its own mobile application. And the field of digital application development is burgeoning like nothing we've seen since - you know - dot.com.

The smart-phone revolution and the evolving importance of the wireless device as the focus for personal computing are propelling this phenomenon. Other characteristics like the low cost of entry and the classic "long-tail" economics of the marketplace have made this one of the hottest spots in ICT. It's tough to keep track, but some estimates put the current census of commercially available apps at 200,000.

It all has an exhilarating frontier feel about it and, like the Old West, lots of interesting folklore... like the story about the nine-year old computing prodigy from Singapore who designed the iPhone Doodle Kids app for his sister or, closer to home, the one about Viigo, a group of Toronto developers who impressed the folks at RIM so much they bought the company.

Fortunately, the ITAC community is rich with companies who are already veterans in this bright new area and we're pleased to introduce a few of them to you in this issue of ITAC Online.

Planet of the apps

Tyler Lessard, Vice-President of BlackBerry Global Alliances and Developer Relations, RIM

The launch of the BlackBerry in 1999 introduced the world to the first smart-phone optimized for e-mail and helped to launch the mobile application phenomenon to device-driven personal computing. RIM’s leadership in the smart-phone market makes it an important player in this space today.

Tyler Lessard is Vice-President of BlackBerry Global Alliances and Developer Relations at RIM, and he was the featured speaker at this month’s ITAC Digital Commerce Forum, “Doing Business with RIM.” He spoke with us about what exactly he does, what it takes to do business with RIM, and how he sees the mobile apps market – now, and in the future.

“Our team is responsible for building and supporting the global community of third party vendors who are offering wireless applications and value-added services for BlackBerry targeting both consumer and enterprise customers,” Tyler said. “We manage the BlackBerry Developer Program, which provides technical resources and support tools for the broad developer community, as well as the BlackBerry Alliances Program which is designed to help commercial organizations be successful in building and selling solutions on BlackBerry through dedicated technical, business and marketing support. With over 250,000 registered developers and over 2,000 members of the BlackBerry Alliance Program, there is a tremendous amount of activity and excitement building in the ecosystem!”

Excitement indeed – some analysts estimate that the mobile apps market will represent a $9-billion industry by 2011. And still, there remains a sense that anyone can enter it. However, Tyler says it takes more than just a great idea to break into the scene.

“It is true that the barriers are lower than ever and we see an increasing number of hobbyists, commercial developers and corporate developers getting on board with mobile applications,” he said. “And of course, the demand for apps is increasing all the time as more and more people are moving to smart-phones like BlackBerry and awareness is building thanks to direct-to-consumer storefronts like BlackBerry App World. In fact, we recently announced that we now have over 20 million customers that have used BlackBerry App World and we are now seeing nearing one million app downloads per day.

“However, developers can’t just expect to put their applications out there and have immediate success. It takes thoughtful engineering to design an application in a way that truly solves a problem for the user, or brings them incremental value over what they are already using today. It often takes several iterations to learn what experiences resonate with the users and how to optimize the use of the wireless network to deliver an experience that is both compelling to the user and able to scale with market demand.

“We are trying to help our developer community understand how to leverage the BlackBerry platform to deliver experiences that are truly compelling to customers, so that they can rise up and grab the attention of the customers out there. We call this the idea of “Super Apps” and we now have a dedicated web site for the topic (www.blackberry.com/developers/superapps) and have launched the Super Apps Developer Challenge to as a way of educating the community at large and rewarding those developers that are delivering the best experiences in the market.”

With the thousands upon thousands of mobile apps that exist, one would assume that an ideal way to break into the market would be through a partnership with a major player like RIM. Establishing these types of partnerships is part of Tyler’s job. The key to a good one, he says, is a shared vision.

“First and foremost, we look for a commitment to excellence and a desire to work together to deliver the best possible solutions to our customers. I get really excited about a developer, a systems integrator, or a solution provider when we start talking about how we can work together to exceed customer expectations, to deliver an application or set of services that really make a difference to our customers and are unique in the industry,” he said. “We’re always looking for innovative ways to bring more value to our customers and we are seeing an incredible number of partners in the industry who share that vision.”

As a leader in this vector of the ICT industry, Tyler says RIM is constantly seeking out ways to innovate, and make the mobile apps market a better place for both developers and consumers to inhabit.

“By continuing to invest in both the enterprise and consumer markets, we are committed to opening up as many doors as possible for our developer community, and to helping the industry push forward through innovative, high-value applications on our platform. We are also investing significantly in our new Services Platform for developers that will bring new online Payments, Advertising, Location and Push APIs to our developer community,” Tyler said. “These new services will bring great new opportunities to monetize applications as well as enhance the “Super App” capabilities of our platform to enable even richer always-on, highly contextualized app experiences. And of course, we are continuing to invest in BlackBerry App World as a global distribution platform for applications, and we’ll be coming out with great new features such as carrier billing integration.”

How else can a neophyte stand out in a market overflowing with competitors? Tyler says know your customers’ needs.

“It’s been amazing to see how “personal” mobile applications have become, and I think that is the key to where they are going to go over the next few years. Not just consumer apps, but business-focused applications as well,” Tyler said. “It’s all about engaging the end user in a very personal way, anticipating their behavior, understanding what role they are playing and what their interests are, and proactively notifying them when something has happened that is most relevant to them as individuals. Apps are truly transforming the way that people work and play, and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come in the years ahead.”

Flirting over apps

Andrew Osmak, Senior Vice-President of Business Development and New Ventures and Shane O’Neil, Chief Technology Officer, Lavalife Corporation

Gone are the days when courting took place solely in person, through face-to-face contact. With the advent of online dating in the mid-1990s, many have grown accustomed to finding romance through scrolling, clicking, and typing. Now, a fling can be born right in your palm – if you own a smart-phone, that is, and have downloaded the proper app(s).

Andrew Osmak is Senior Vice-President of Business Development and New Ventures at Lavalife Corporation, and Shane O’Neil is the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Together, over the past six years, they have developed a mobile application for Lavalife, bringing their customers the ability to flirt through their smart-phone.

It has been Andrew’s responsibility to define what exactly a mobile experience should be for a Lavalife customer, while Shane is in charge of figuring out how, technically, to make that happen.

“Our first approach to mobile business was to take a very simple version of what we thought could be Lavalife Mobile. So we started with a little SMS dating service that cost $0.50 per message, then we expanded to a mobile web version of that service for $5 per month and went knocking on carrier doors asking for billing arrangements and distribution agreements,” Andrew explained. “We then expanded into a whole bunch of chatting or flirting services or games.

“Our version 1 approach of exploiting mobile was actually to not interfere with the existing web business or voice business; instead, we went ahead and started a whole service from scratch. It had Lavalife DNA, and the products felt like Lavalife products, but they didn’t necessarily interact with the same folks that were on Lavalife.com or that were on the voice service or database. That business grew quick to a pretty significant size – at one point about the same size as our web business.”

But things have changed, Andrew said, to the point where Lavalife is now toying with the full integration of their web, voice, and mobile services, instead of keeping them all separate.

“We have debated integrating our databases for probably about 10 years,” Andrew said. “In my mind, eventually we would get to integration, yet the company needed to evolve and the market needed to evolve to the point where we knew our customers were asking for mobile services and therefore we should deliver them.

“Interestingly enough, as we look at the users we’ve had across the different services we offer, you don’t quite see as much overlap as you might guess. I think people select their preferred access, and once they get used to it, they like it and they keep doing it. In the outside world, however, as cell phones all have keyboards and become smart-phones – as talking, typing, computing all can be done on one device – it becomes easier and easier for people to hop from one usage preference to another. We are riding the coattails of that hardware convergence, and we intend to offer a converged or cross-medium service, which you should be able to access any way you’d like.”

The emergence of app stores (there are currently 42 of them, at Andrew’s last count) has been one key factor in the growth of the mobile app market, and a motivator for Lavalife to immerse itself in it, Andrew said. But as Shane will tell you, a successful entrance to the market is a multi-faceted endeavour; one which requires more time and money than you might think.

“The challenges are around the cost of mobile development if you want to be everywhere,” Shane said. “You have to build, and have the different talents that can deliver an iPhone app, versus Android, and other platforms like BlackBerry which are typically Java – and then there is a percentage at the end which you have to customize. It can be very expensive if you don’t have a good strategy on how you’re going to go tackle the market.

“It’s no different than building a website, or an online property, and you need to attract people to it. You need to be smart. You need to get to the market fast. You need to either spend a lot of money on marketing, or make sure that you’re marketing is built into the product so that it has that viral aspect that’s going to allow you to take off the way companies like foursquare are doing right now,” he explained. “There is a fallacy that people think they can go build an app because it’s easy, and that the hardest part is the idea. But really, you have about seven days to aggressively market yourself before you just fall into the bowels of an app store – and that’s if you’re getting uptake.”

Shane said app stores are currently affecting smart-phones similarly to how the internet affected PCs over a decade ago.

“I align the notion of app stores with what a PC was before the internet really came out. The days of you installing software on your computer are going away. Software is just always on. And now we have this notion of an app store where you have to go in, build an app, then put it on and download it, and deal with all these constant updates. When you see where the trend in technology is going, these smart-phones are going to have much better capabilities, not just a normal web application experience. So it’ll almost go back to what we’re seeing with the evolution of software as a service, where you don’t necessarily have to install something on your device, specifically talking about where we’re going with things like HTML5.”

As for keeping your costs down, Andrew said a developer should be ready to put in the long hours, and potentially, collaborate.

“Do your homework – you need a crisp idea of what you’re trying to develop. And don’t necessarily expect to do it all on your own. There’s a growing number of app development shops around Toronto, Canada, the US, and the world, so you might be able to get someone to build it for you for less than you could for yourself.”

After all, in this case, partnerships are what it’s all about…

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