Using social medial for small businesses becomes an important part of their marketing strategy as most of them have a Facebook or Twitter account. Linkedin, Google + or Pinterest are obviously less used but certainly not less interesting.

Actually, several factors are to be considered before getting social: your business type, your target, which platform do your target use, how often they use it, which content do they like…
As many factors that will help you define your digital strategy and which campaign you’ll set up in the next months.

What kind of Social Media do you use ?

The chart below is quite telling. Read it in the context of Android taking now 56% of the smartphone market share and you get an accurate picture of how different the average Android user is compared to an iOS user.

The great majority of Android devices on the market are low-end devices which are bought as cheap phones, by people who download maybe a couple of apps, and one is probably Facebook.

If you’re in the business of making apps, you’re targeting the app users market, not the smartphone users market, so keep these numbers in mind.

Via Mobile Statistics – Statistics Made Visual.

A five-year report from Flurry reveals an interesting statistic about the time users spend on iOS & Android  devices. The outcome speaks for itself: only one-fifth of the time on mobile devices is spent on web browsers whereas 80% is spent in apps. An no wonders, I think, since the app user experience still wins over that offered by the mobile web.

I’m not surprised to see that 50% of the user’s time is spent on average on Games and Facebook – apps can be the best time wasters, and somehow the packaged, closed but also focused app experience seems to be getting most of our attention.

Furthermore consumers are continuing to use native apps and, as the chart below shows, they keep trying out new ones – we consume apps in a similar way to how we consume content.

HTML5 still has to prove itself as a valid replacement for native apps, for both developers and startups. I think there’s something right in the app-store discovery/download experience which the web is still failing to provide, but we’re watching this space very closely and look forward to see how it will evolve. Wait for another article on this coming up soon.

You don’t have to be a programming wizard in order to create an app – there are plenty of resources out there to help you, and it doesn’t mean handing over your entire project to a third-party designer either; you can still have a strong amount of input to make sure the outcome is exactly what you hoped for.

The Research Stage

First, check the market for existing, similar apps. There may be quite a few, but you could still feel that your app has something unique to offer, so don’t be put off if somebody’s already done something similar – remember, there are a lot of apps out there.

You should also think as early as possible about monetisation – are your profits going to come from the price of the app, in-app advertising, in-app upgrade purchases, subscriptions, or some other source?

In some instances you may define success differently, such as in terms of increased brand awareness among your target demographic, or number of app users driven to your website.

Before you go any further, make sure you’ve asked – and answered – Business Insider’s three key questions for preliminary app development. Also review our guide to choose between Native, Web or Hybrid Apps?

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With Mobiloud, we offer an affordable and fully customised solution for  online publishers and bloggers to create their own native iOS apps. We are really excited to announce that during the last month we have developed and launched three new beautiful applications, here they are: (more…)

The thinkers

We are proud to announce we won the “Best Web App” prize for our app Locker at the Autumn edition of Hackathon Central over at Google Campus last weekend. The aim of the hackathon was to build apps to make learning fun, memorable and cool. We decided to focus on solving a real problem for teachers and students: sharing materials and assignments files in a simple and efficient way.

If you were a University student in the last 10 years you probably had a chance to use either Moodle or Blackboard, massive online learning systems Universities install and maintain to allow professors to share course information, materials, assignments. But what about schools, colleges and smaller learning institutions? Do they need all  that complexity? Can they invest the time and resources required to set up those systems? Probably not. We think they shouldn’t. (more…)

I have started to write this little script with the idea to solve, at first, one of our problems: have easily the status of the review of all our applications on multiple iTunesConnect account.

Mechanize is a great gem with which you can scrape web pages pressing links, searching for specific tags etc..

Let’s start to install the mechanize gem

Download the script get_apps_status.rb from our lab public github repository

To use it just create an Account instance and set username and password attributes. Use update method to download account application details.

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itunes_account = Account.new itunes_account.username = "your@email.com" itunes_account.password = "password" itunes_account.update

In only two weeks (September 18th to October 1st 2012) the proportion of iPhone users on iOS6 went from zero to 60% (according to stats collected by Chitika). This means a developer can confidently start adopting all the cool new functionality introduced by this release in their apps. More importantly, developers can also safely drop support for old versions of the OS, like iOS3 and iOS4.

In ten months (it was December 2011 when Google made it available), Android 4.0 got to only 24% of Android devices, largely thanks to new phones and tablets getting released with the new version preinstalled. Not only you have device fragmentation (many different vendors, each with tens of different devices), but also OS version fragmentation. All making this platform extremely more complex for developers who wish to create apps with a great user experience.

Google launches Field Trip. It’s like having a knowledgeable friend always in your pocket. One that knows every building, restaurant and historical landmark around you. And tells you about it without you even asking. Annoying? Maybe, but quite cool too. It’s available for Android and iOS is coming soon. Get it here and don’t miss the cheesy video Google made for it.

(US only for now)

“The idea behind the app was to build something that would help people connect with the real, physical world around them,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product at Google who runs a small lab at the company building location-based and social mobile apps. “It’s always running in the background, so it knows where you are and is always looking to see if something interesting is in your immediate physical environment.”

While the app might seem small, it reveals a lot about the big directions Google wants to go.

Google, along with other companies and researchers, dreams of so-called ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence — computers woven into the texture of life as opposed to being separate machines. Eventually, the theory goes, computers will be part of the environment, know where people are and anticipate what they want to know.

Via NYTimes.com.

For web apps where browsing and messaging are key components, the transition to mobile is inevitable, as people expect communications to follow them on their mobile devices and touch has made browsing a much better experience. Airbnb has really leveraged this opportunity with well designed iOS and Android apps, now accounting for 26% of their traffic. Twice the rate from last year.

Take the popular travel rental site Airbnb: Amid significant overall growth, it now gets 26 percent of all its traffic from mobile, up from 12 percent a year ago.

Many of those visits come from Apple devices, which account for more than half of Airbnb’s mobile traffic, between the iPhone, iPad and the mobile Web.

The Airbnb iPhone app has been downloaded more than one million times, and now accounts for 12 percent of total Airbnb traffic, up from 4 percent a year ago.

Via AllThingsD.