Open Tech Calendar

We are delighted to be hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club at the Business School as the mobile part of their 10th anniversary series of events.

Mobile provides myriad opportunities for new, original, and compelling products ranging from games and entertainment, through communication and sharing, to things that simply make our daily lives easier and safer. Also the mass market has never been more willing to adopt these new products on scale.

The hard bit is often not the product itself, but how best to build a sustainable business around it, in short how to monetise. The best product in the world won’t get off the ground if there is no way for it to make money.

Many apps in particular still monetise their users directly, either via up front payment, or in-app payment to unlock features or similar. Mario Viviani from Amazon will talk about Amazon devices, distribution opportunities and services designed to help developers reach new customers and monetize, including the recently announced Amazon Underground program, which provides a new approach to monetization. The Amazon Appstore allows developers to distribute and sell their Android and HTML5 web apps to millions of customers in 236 countries and territories, and now has over 400,000 apps globally.

For a number of years advertising has been touted as being the cure-all for monetising on mobile, but more recently it has become clear that it is very hard to do effectively. Isaac Roseboom is Head of Insight at deltaDNA and has spent a lot of time analysing the do’s and don’ts of using advertising in games in particular, and will cover some of the lessons learned.

While related, for services in the right sector affiliate sales can potentially provide a more effective and reliable stream of revenue than simple advertising, and locally Skyscanner are the obvious example of a company built round that. Their Developer Advocate, David Low, will talk about where and how the affiliate model can work, and the monetisation tools they provide in the travel sector.

As usual we will finish with an open discussion session followed by a networking reception with wine.