Opportunities for Monetising Mobile Sites, Apps, and Services
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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.
In our March event I presented a somewhat negative, glass half empty, view of IoT and the hype and confusion surrounding it. I am still not entirely convinced any two people actually mean the same thing when they say IoT ...
There is of course a positive, glass half full, side to IoT and Wearables, with a plethora of novel devices and capabilities capable of being put into the world around us or around our person. This is opening up a huge range of new possibilities which the creative entrepreneur can take advantage of. Our view of what is “normal” in the world is on the move again and that always creates opportunities!
To explore this we are delighted to have three speakers who are very much active in the space to share their views, experiences and challenges of working in the IoT and Wearables space.
Mobile is a necessity for most digital startups and in many cases it is at the core of their proposition. Unfortunately mobile usually means an app, and potentially multiple apps on different platforms, and apps are an expensive luxury on a startup budget.
For the typical “lean” startup (whether formally “lean” or just accepting the truism that the final product is in most cases not precisely the one they first thought of) sinking £20k into building a mobile app which is likely to need to be repeatedly reworked if not scrapped and replaced is a huge barrier.
Fortunately over the years a number of cross platform and/or rapid development mobile frameworks have come onto the market, e.g. Titanium, PhoneGap, Unity3D, Xamarin, MoSync and Livecode amongst many many others. They allow apps to be rapidly prototyped and delivered for far less investment than previously. This is due to a combination of the use of more mainstream development technologies, and the abstraction away of the often rather perverse and challenging details of the specific mobile platforms.
Of course this isn’t a panacea. The same abstraction involves compromise and makes some use-cases much harder or even impossible to achieve. It is critical for the team to understand where the limits are relative to the intended scope of their app when deciding to use one of these frameworks.
To help understand these issues we will hear from a number of startups who are successfully using this approach to build their apps, as well our local cross platform development framework provider.
The speakers will be:
* Geoff Ballinger of deltaDNA will briefly introduce the topic and give an overview of the major frameworks.
* Billy Jones of Appointedd will tell us how they have used Appcelerator Titanium to create a mobile interface to their small business services platform.
* Jamie Sutherland of Mallzee will tell us how they have used Phonegap to produce their personal shopper mobile app.
* Neil Polwart of Novarum DX will tell us how they have used Xamarin to develop their mobile reader solution which includes sophisticated and challenging image processing on device.
* Kevin Miller (RunRev) will tell us about Edinburgh’s very own cross platform framework LiveCode, and how it can be used to rapidly create mobile apps on iOS and Android using a very accessible natural language syntax.
As usual we will finish with an open discussion session followed by a networking reception with wine. We are delighted to be hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club (http://www.business-school.ed.ac.uk/eclub) again, and will kick off in LT2 at the Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, at 6.30pm sharp.
This is a free event but places are limited so pre-registration is required.
In partnership with the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club [e-club] Creative Edinburgh is hosting our next super speedy business to business networking event this May. The format for the evening is fast paced, helping to accelerate new business connections & contacts. Our expert guest speaker Jennifer Tough [Social Stampede] will start the evening, followed by a Q&A before the fun begins. Speed networking is a great way to broaden your connections whilst honing your elevator pitching skills. The evening will be jammed packed with creative, startup & entrepreneurial professionals all ready to mingle.
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