Developing an app is far from an easy task. As app consumers, we always hear about the success of apps like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and others. However, as someone said last week at an event I attended, “For every Angry Birds, there are a lot of angry developers”. This is not a post about the challenges of app development, but if we were to sum up two of the major issues developers face, it would be discovery and monetization.
By now, I have done quite a nice amount of interviews with some of the most awesome people in tech. You can see a partial list here. All of the people I was fortunate enough to interview have had an effect in one way or another on my career as a content and marketing guy. However, MG Siegler leads the pack for me. He is one of the main writers/journalists on TechCrunch, which is widely accepted as the Web’s top authority on tech and startups, but that is not why I am such a fan.
One of the things I try to do here on this blog, is interview people who have inspired me and many others in the online world. My interviews include Guy Kawasaki, Walt Mossberg, Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, Mike McCue, Alyssa Milano, Peter Vesterbacka, Ben Parr, and many more. All of the interviews were done via email, as in I send the questions over email and get the responses over email. However, my latest interview was a little different.
As time goes by and I spend more time on Twitter, two things seem to be happening. On the one hand, I am finding that the number of great people and amazing relationships I build on a daily basis, is only growing. As more people join Twitter and the micro blogging service hits the mainstream, I am regularly meeting new folks that are not necessarily part of the “early adopter” community, and that is great. On the flip side, more and more people are talking about Twitter and its explosive potential, which results directly in people trying to manipulate the system.
This post is somewhat of a rant. As a person who pretty much lives on the Web, I am very exposed to the power of social media. Having said that, I think by now, that topic is pretty much covered from all angles. What is not covered and what people like to brush under the carpet, are the potential down sides and even outright dangers accompanied by the advancements that social media bring.
After years of writing about mobile technology, I was fortunate enough to start working in the field recently. At inneractive, I work with some of the industry’s leading names in app development across all platforms, as well as companies on the forefront of mobile advertising. Blue Bite is one such company.
The mobile app landscape is becoming a really exciting space right now. The two leaders, Apple and Google, are both pulling out all the tricks to maintain their lead, and we, the users, are eating the fruit. With hundreds of thousands of apps across various app stores, there is no shortage of apps in every category. Apple said it best in its famous iPhone campaign. No matter what you are trying to accomplish with your smartphone, there is most likely “an app for that”.
After all this time, some things never change when it comes to the Web and social media. While it has penetrated the corporate world on levels we would never have imagined five years ago, social media is still a buzz word companies and people throw around without really understandING what it is about. The errors are on both side of the spectrum and some do not appreciate the power of the social Web while others overplay it. Here are some examples…
It has been a few months now since I replaced my beloved BlackBerry Bold with a shiny new iPhone 4 (Read about the experience here). All in all, despite its shortcomings (yes, Apple is not perfect), I am extremely satisfied with the iPhone and despite what I would have said about the first 3 generations of the Apple device, I now recommend the iPhone 4 to anyone who asks me.
First of all, let me just say that I have come to the conclusion that blogging has made me a very cynical person. As I watched the Apple iPad 2 event yesterday and read the live blogging/tweeting coming through my various streams, it made me a little sick. In fact, the sick feeling started earlier that day, as I tweeted. All the tech publications are overly obsessed with Apple to the point that all I was reading about hours before the event were mockups of what the iPad 2 was expected to look like.
It is the same story every time. Another friend of mine goes over to the dark side, gets rid of his/her BlackBerry and buys an iPhone. Then the questions start pouring in. “How do I delete a song from my iPhone? What do you mean I can’t do it from the device?” “How do I create a ringtone?” Then there is the question that every single new iPhone owner asks: “What apps should I download?”
