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.

Apparently I won two free tickets to Wicked, the musical playing in San Francisco. Let me start by saying when I got this text message last night, I was thrilled. My wife and I have talked about going for a few months now and other things have come up. So on January 9th we were shopping and I saw a “Win Tickets to See Wicked!” poster in the BART station in San Francisco. Being a curious person and also “in the business”, I will pretty much text anything. I vote for American Idol contestants, text questions to The History Channel and get text message alerts from Wired Magazine and the Syfy Channel. I’ve seen my fair share of both great and poorly executed mobile marketing campaigns.

After texting WITCH to 42903, I promptly got a response back saying “We’re sorry but the contest has ended. Thank you for your interest in Wicked the Musical.” My first thought was “bummer, I missed out” and my second thought was “bummer, they missed out on an opportunity to keep me interested.”

How did they miss out on an opportunity?

1. Use the Space.
Their “sorry” reply was only 89 characters, leaving 71 characters on the table (45%). I’m a huge fan of white space, but in my opinion, a text message is no place to try and get artsy. 71 characters is plenty of space to create an additional call-to-action.

2. Wicked has a wap site.
Being interested in the musical, I would have clicked on a wap link on my phone had there been one.

3. Wicked has a Twitter account.
A Twitter account can easily be made mobile friendly by adding an “m.” in between http://twitter.com/wicked_musical

Two months have passed…
That was January 9th and a lot has happened since then, none of which has involved my wife and I buying tickets and going to see Wicked. I’m telling you honestly, we really want to go, but life happens and other things grab one’s attention. So last night, almost 2 months to the day, I get a random text message with “Congratulations! You won 2 tickets for WICKED! You will receive the redemption instructions via email within the next 48 hours. Please REPLY with your EMAIL.” So I did.

I’m not trying to be nit-picky here and even though they said they’d get back to me within the next 48 hours, I think there’s one more opportunity missed here. Instead of being like a friend who texts you and says “I have something AWESOME to tell you and I’m going to do so within the next 2 days” they could have sent an auto-responder email to tell me my email has been received, that more exciting details are on the way, but also give me photos, links, post-to-social-media buttons, etc. So here I am…waiting.

Wicked marketing folks: I hope you’re not reading this with a harsh tone and no, I’m not just saying that because I haven’t gotten my free tickets yet. In fact, I’ve now officially blogged about it and will be posting this to Facebook and Twitter as well so you get your proper “bounce” from the give away, but I thought this was a great example of how a mobile marketing could have been better utilized in an advertising campaign. Call me.

UPDATE:
Wicked (and not in the Boston way)…I just got the following message: Please disregard the txt u received re: WICKED. It was due to a transmission error. Ur info is secure & we apologize 4 confusion. For questions intsit@gmail.com

In case I have questions I can email their, uh, gmail address. I actually DO have a question: Will you call my wife and break it to her that we’re no longer going to see WICKED for free? Cuz that would be great. KTHXBAI!

Seriously, though, I do not envy the panic that took place when they realized they sent a “Winner!” text to everyone who entered the contest. That probably sucked. But, besides this mobile marketing fail, I stick to my original points about how other opportunities were missed in the first place. And speaking of opportunities…WICKED Mobile Marketing folks: If you’re looking for someone new to handle your text messaging campaigns, please consider Mosio.

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.

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).

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