PointAbout was featured this month in Engage magazine, a trade magazine by TMG Custom Media that serves the publishing industry. The video is below, with the full article below that. You can also read TMG’s PDF on mobile best practices.
Gold Rush: There’s an App for That
Just this Monday, Apple announced a feat that wasn’t even imaginable two years ago: 2 billion mobile app downloads in the last year and a half; a billion of those downloads occurring since April. That’s 6.3 million app downloads a day.
Talk about a gold rush: There are more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone, and tens of thousands more for other smart phones, including Nokia’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android. Research firm Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion app downloads will garner $4.2 billion in revenue by 2013, and advertising dollars will follow. A report released by eMarketer just yesterday predicts spending on mobile advertising in the U.S. will grow to $1.56 billion by 2013. That’s almost five times what was spent last year.
“We’re watching the establishment of the app economy,” said Aileen Lee, a partner at Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which just announced a $100 million iFund for app developers, in an interview with AdAge. “It’s a mistake for brands or other companies to not think of mobile totally different from the web.”
Daniel Odio, co-founder and COO of PointAbout, a mobile applications company based in Washington, D.C., saw the light early, and the company is riding the wave of this new app economy. “Mobile is the way that people are starting to get content on a device they are carrying around with them all the time anyway,” he says.
Watch Daniel Odio talk about developing mobile apps.
His company, PointAbout, is breaking ground by making it simple for publishers to produce mobile apps through “lightweight” or “disposable” apps: just upload your RSS feed, some branding, and away you go. It’s quick, cheap, and a business model can be easily wrapped around it.
For many publishers, this type of mobile app is the shining light at the end of the tunnel-a new content distribution channel that can be monetized-even though, initially, “a lot of publishers don’t want to spend money on mobile because they are not sure what the ROI is,” says Odio.
Need proof? Just look at Rodale’s Men’s Health and Women’s Health, which launched a series of iPhone apps a few months ago, offering everything from workouts to drink recipes. The paid apps have been downloaded more than 50,000 times.
The Rodale apps are “native” apps, meaning they are rich, interactive little pieces of software that users download onto their smart phone. Publishers can also take a wider approach by creating extensions for the mobile web, which will reach more than just iPhone users: According to a July Pew report, one third of Americans have a cell phone to access the internet for emailing, instant messaging or information-seeking.
But be prepared to invest. “Developing apps is expensive now, mostly because it’s new,” says Odio. “If you want to make a foray into mobile space, you can do it with $5,000, using an existing RSS feed with some branding. If you really want to get into the richness of the experience, you should budget $25,000 to $50,000.”
