A colleague sent me a stack overflow thread today entitled “How much does it cost to develop iPhone applications?” It’s worth taking a look at, most interesting is an answer suggesting around $10,000 ($50/hr for a Developer and $50/hr for a Graphic Designer x 200 total hours), which the stack overflow community quickly jumped on, providing insight and information to back up a more realistic $50k-100k (and some say $200k) price tag.

At Mosio, naturally we get asked about mobile applications from clients all the time. I love my MacBook Pro, iPhone and iPad, but Apple has spent plenty of money in advertising to convince us all that “There’s an App for That.” They even spent money trademarking the phrase and that’s fine, they benefit by doing so. The craziest thing about the mobile apps hype is that it caters to less than 1/3 of the mobile subscriber market. Consider recent research about Mobile Content Usage for the month of July 2010 in the image above from Wireless Week:

Among all U.S. mobile subscribers ages 13+:
31.4% Used a Downloaded App
33.6% Used a [Mobile] Browser
66% Sent a text message to another phone

Why, then, do people think it’s so inexpensive to develop iPhone apps?
I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that it’s a combination of people wanting to believe it costs less combined with the misinformation from people selling shoddy development services or app workarounds trying to capitalize on the hype. And before those of you developing “affordable” iPhone applications start flaming me in the comments, consider the fact that by saying it’s inexpensive and cheap, you’re essentially selling yourselves short, commoditizing your expertise. The misinformation hurts your skills and service.

The world is mobile and we want to provide a mobile experience beyond text messaging. What should we do?

If you are a library and looking for a great way to mobilize your website or catalog, we recommend you visit our friends at Boopsie. They have a great team and wonderful experience in helping libraries on an existing platform that makes the process simple.

Thanks Rob for the great interview!

Video embedded below:

In February we launched a “Post to Twitter” function within the Mosio mobile messaging platform and Mosio’s Text a Librarian. We wrote a blog post about why this was good for libraries: user generated marketing.

I’ve pasted the original blog post about why it was good for libraries below. It’s great for every business and now the post to Facebook function gives organizations the ability to post questions and answers to the world’s largest and most powerful social network. If you’re a librarian you can read the information below as is, but if you’re a marketing or customer service manager at a company, simply replace the word “patron” with “customer” and “library” with “company” and you’ll see that the feature holds the same great function for either.

Enjoy!

Original Post

GoldMail announced today that they’re offering a freemium version of their audio slideshow messaging software. We’ve been a GoldMail customer for awhile now, thought of a great way to use text messaging for sales people to be able to “text a GoldMail” when out in the world and I’m happy to see them offering a free version. I think many organizations will benefit from it, definitely a great fit in sales, marketing, training or even just fun presentations. It’s easy, viral and extremely useful.

Videos grab people’s attention and there’s something about being able to easily add a personalized voice message to a slideshow (or powerpoint) that makes this technology a homerun. Add the email (or embeddable code) element and you have a product that literally sells itself. You watch a GoldMail to learn what it is, how cool is that?

If you’re in any business that needs to update content on a regular basis and benefits from a personalized message over a canned one (who doesn’t?), definitely check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

My wife loves to read magazines and books every night after work. I love to read articles on my iPhone. The problem is that when you’re reading a magazine or a book, it’s obvious what you’re doing. When I’m “reading” my iPhone, in her eyes, I’m working. Yes, some of them are articles, news and blog posts about work, but many other times they are not. I can’t think of too many other reasons currently why I’d like an iPad, which is being announced by Apple tomorrow.

Note: I have $.50 riding on the fact that it’s called an iPad and plan on using my winnings to pay for half of a bus ride on MUNI.

There has been a lot of talk around the office about what this and other e-readers will do for the publishing industry and we’ve signed up to get our Kindle Devloper’s Kit, but based on some of the recent news and talks that happened at ALA Midwinter recently, it got me thinking again about libraries and how e-readers and specifically the iPad will change or not change libraries.

Here’s what I’ve determined: Outside of the discussions going on about mobile technologies in libraries, I don’t think it will change it too much. The iPad will offer some great new graphic interfaces where buttons will be bigger, browsing experiences will be more tactile (as the iPhone and other mobile phones do), but e-readers and libraries becoming more mobile-friendly will play into the fact that an iPad will just be a bigger version of the iPhone. Obviously at this point I haven’t seen one, so I’ll update if I’m wrong, but I can’t help myself in thinking people will be holding up the iPad to their ears as a silly joke, looking like they’re talking on an iPhone.

So we’re back to mobile. Do I think libraries should start spending money and resources to develop iPad Apps? Absolutely not. In fact, we don’t think libraries should spend money and resources on iPhone Apps. If you need some great reasons, Michelle Kraft (AKA the Krafty Librarian) just wrote a great piece called “Stop the App Madness” and Jason Griffey’s proclamation of 2010 being the Death of the App is actually something we’ve talked about a lot over here. And while it’s great to see these things talked about in the library community, we’ve noticed that Google is betting on the mobile web, plus some research stating that the cloud will replace mobile apps (and their stores) in the next five years.

All of this said, I’m looking forward to seeing how the iPad and e-readers “change” libraries, but only time will tell. In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to seeing what it looks like and ultimately what it does, other than to let my wife know I’m reading and not answering work emails.

In Simplicity We Trust.

One of the most difficult parts about being a start up is focus. Initially you look at a bunch of different ways your product solves problems in the name of getting customers. After you get a handful of customers buying your product, you’d think that problem would go away, you’d have more confidence in what you are building. In fact, the opposite is true, because now you have even more people thinking of new interesting and amazing things that you should add to make your software better, faster and easier to use. The more features and functions you add, however, the harder your software is to use.

We’ve collectively made a decision here to stick to simple. With the mission of making mobile technologies simple and accessible to more companies and organizations, we’ve collectively come to realize that simplicity starts with us. For our Text a Librarian and 2-way text messaging software it starts with believing in the “Big Red Answer Button” (a mantra that came from hearing one of our customers explain why she loved using our software).

In most others, however, it has come down to one thing: Showing, not telling. This means using visuals, videos, use cases, etc to illustrate our usefulness and reducing the amount of words used. This direction feels good. It didn’t come easy, but with everyone on board, it is easier to explain what we do and people are getting it.

Here’s to simplicity in 2010!

For those of you interested in learning more, here’s a link to the Ten Laws of Simplicity. It has played a vital role (along with us collectively asking “is it easy to understand?” at every turning point) in use moving this way heading into the new year.

The answer is simple: it violates Google’s Terms of Service.

Google Violation, Part 1: Screen Scraping and Polling
Google Voice does not offer any sort of API (permitted) way of letting you piggy back your technology onto Google Voice, to receive text messages via your Google Voice number and then use them in other software. What that means is that anyone using Google Voice to piggy back on their text messaging function is doing so by automatically logging into the system, which is known as “screen scraping” or “polling.” Doing this is a direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service:
“5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.”

Google Violation, Part 2: Reselling Google’s Services
Google as a company is a wonderful contributor to the open source movement and offer APIs to many of their products. Google Voice, however, is not one of them. Currently there is no Google Voice API and depending on who you ask, the response is either hopeful or “there’s no way that will happen.” Regardless of which side you stand on, any organization or individual selling software that includes Google Voice hacks is again doing so in violation of Google’s terms of service:
“5.5 Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Google, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose.”

It’s Unreliable
When Google releases APIs to their software and services, they are providing reliable access under an agreed upon set of circumstances (some involve commercial vs non-commercial rights, etc) and make product change decisions with APIs in mind. Simply put, when they make changes, they do so either without affecting the API or by giving those with API access appropriate information so adjustments can be made, ensuring the services will still work well. With no API, there’s no warning, no information on why code changes. If you’re accessing Google without an API and things begin not working, there is no recourse in getting things up and running again.

We hope this clears up any questions people have regarding Google Voice and why we don’t use it as an SMS gateway. We think Google Voice is pretty cool, but it’s not a legal, reliable way to offer text messaging software to libraries, companies or organizations, so we opt instead for legal, approved ways of giving our customers access to text messaging. As far as Google being a company the supports openness, we applaud them for being so, but also recognize that Google is open when it’s convenient for them. While it may not be “go to jail” illegal, it’s simply not a risk worth taking.

If you have any questions for us, please feel free to contact us.

The Mosio Team

Mosio Featured in inGEN Magazine’s “Movers and Shakers” Issue, November 2009

Who doesn’t love a little recognition? We’ll take it. This month Mosio is featured in inGEN Magazine along with some great local entrepreneurs, including Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), Chip Conley (Joi de Vivre Hotels), Ted Rheingold (Dogster.com) and Bijan Mirashi (Xoopit).

Page 42.

There are enough topics around the subject of library marketing for an entire blog. In fact, Jill Stover posted to her blog, Library Marketing, Thinking Outside the Book, for 3 years and it has some amazing ideas. That said, we’re on the final week of Library Marketing Tips, so we’ve decided to throw in a few Tools, Tricks and How Tos to think about, try out and share. If you’re finding this post randomly, you might be interested in parts 1-3, linked below.
Library Marketing Tips, Part 1: Avoiding the Noise (Templates Inside)

Library Marketing Tips, Part 2: The Morning News, Videos and Slideshows

Library Marketing Tips, Part 3: Word of Mouth, the Best Form of Social Media

Tool – Google Analytics

This is one of our favorites. Google Analytics allows you to go extremely deep with information about your site, but what makes us love it in its simplest form is that it lets you see where people are coming from (other webistes and search terms), what they are doing on your site while they are there (which pages get the most clicks and traffic) and at what point they left (exit pages). It’s free to sign up with a Google account and requires you to paste some code into your website. This may take a “pretty please” to your webmaster or IT Manager, but it’s well worth it and once they enter the code, you have access to the information on your own, requiring nothing else from them (unless what you find out about your site should be changed to provide a better experience for visitors).

Here are two blog posts (The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips and Google Analytics Maximized: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You) that give a little more detail on what you can do when you’re ready, but after getting the GA code on your site, here are a few things to get you started:

1. Traffic Sources – This lets you know how visitors found you, via websites and search terms. This one is great because it can help you see whether your Facebook page and/or Twitter Tweets are worth the effort (you’ll find they will be). One thing Google Analytics has helped us find out: People search for our name over a dozen different ways to get to our site, including misspellings (“text a libranian”).

2. Content – This one is great because it shows you where people are going on your site, the busiest pages. You can see how many patrons are visiting your “Ask Us” or “Ask a Librarian” page and if it’s not up to par with some other pages, find the one most visited and make sure there is a prominent link to that particular page to see how you can direct more traffic to encourage patrons to ask questions (or more specifically, how to utilize your new text message reference services).

3. Site Overlay - As a part of the Content section, Site Overlay is where things get really interesting. It puts an “overlay” (as the name suggests) on top of your site and then gives you %s on where people are clicking to when they’re on that page.
There are many other great tools that are part of the Google Analytics package, but these are a great place to start seeing how people are finding your site and what they’re doing once they get there.

Trick – The “Marketing Possibilities are Everywhere” Exercise

This isn’t so much a “trick” as in a magic trick, but more of an exercise in getting your mind to think about all of the places where marketing can take place. If you’re already a marketing oriented person, you may already do this, but if not, it’s a great exercise. For a whole week, challenge yourself each day to write down at least 1 unique way of marketing a service that isn’t already being used. It’s ok if you find out later that it already is, it’s the exercise that’s important.

Example: Every time I fly, I wear my Mosio T-Shirt. Why? Besides the fact that I love it and that it’s very soft, there are thousands of people at the airport, including a few hundred that will be on the plane with me. Those are all brand impressions, I literally see people looking down at the logo. Plus, in some cases, someone will ask “What is Mosio?” and I get an opportunity to talk about our company and what we do. Our shirts are intentionally simple. No huge letters or slogans, no website addresses, just the logo, making it the only thing the eyes can focus on. We offer Text a Librarian T-Shirts on a site called Spreadshirt. We don’t make any money from them, people pay what we pay, but this is another great opportunity to promote your service or strike up a conversation about the service.

(You always get a second chance to make a brand impression)

So what ideas can you think of? What places would be great to put a marketing message? Write them down, 1 or more a day, for a week and see how your thinking has changed. After finishing the exercise and thinking about marketing for a week, begin thinking about the areas and places where you could market your own library services. See what new comes to mind and how it can be done in your library or community.

How To – Manage Social Media Presence Multiple Places

So you have a presence on: Myspace, Facbook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc, etc, etc, and managing them all can be a hassle. First, we’re not advocates of having an account on every social network on earth. In fact, we think it’s better to have fewer with focused strategies on how you’ll use them. Even adding 2-3, plus your own website, email newsletters, printed materials and anything else can be a full time job in and of itself. Luckily, there are several tools you can use to help you manage your social media output.

HelloTxt - Originally, I was going to post about how you can use the Facebook Twitter Application to post Tweets to your Library’s Facebook page, but with the sporatic reports of the Twitter App on Facebook not working I thought it best to write about another useful site called HelloTxt, that has been gaining steady growth since I first heard about it more than a year ago. It lets you post once and updates to any of 45 social networks through their APIs. If the last thing you want to do is join another “thing” (we can understand this), then we at least want to give you the link to the Twitter Facebook App that lets you post your Twitter tweets to your Facebook Page’s Wall.

Start Pages - We recently wrote a post about how you can use start pages as virtual reference tools, it included Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle, all of which can be also used as a way to manage multiple places at once. In fact, they are the absolute best way to do that. Each has varying options for widgets, gadgets, flakes, modules, etc (they differ in what they’re called based on the service, but all mean the same thing). They give you quick access to: Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, 43 Things, blogs and a handful of email programs.

So that’s all of them, Library Marketing Tips 1-4. We hope you learned some ideas on how you can better promote text messaging reference services to your community. Mobile messaging is growing at a rapid pace in the U.S., there is a lot of excitement around the mobile channel, so getting the word out to patrons and your community gives you an opportunity to extend your outreach by expanding the walls of your library on mobile devices.