Lovely visualisation by Horace Dediu @asymco

It’s hard to appreciate how popular the iPad is until you see it compared to its peers. In the same time frame, the iPad has completely obliterated the amazing success of the iPod and the fantastic success of the iPhone. At this point, I have run out of superlatives.

Distimo recently published a report saying there was no honest money in Android.

Highlights:

• 80% of all paid apps have been downloaded less than 100 times until now.
• There are only 5 Android games that cost money and have reached 250,000 downloads. The App Store has ten in the U.S over the past two months alone!

Yes, I’m being a little melodramatic here but advertising is such a bad experience on mobile, it’s a point I feel very strongly about. When you see apps like angry Birds being paid on iOS and advertising-supported on Android, it makes me feel very uncomfortable regarding the money-making potential on the platform.

Doesn’t it depend on the product? If your content delivery is what you’re trying to sell (and not additional services) then you are really just trying to sell the bits that you’ve crafted over many months. And when you can’t sell them, are you seriously supposed to survive on the pennies gleaned from producing a polluted application experience?

Over at MobileOrchard they have a different report.

“During the LeWeb conference in Paris Eric Schmidt (Google Chairman) commented that he believes developers will abandon iOS for Android in less than 6 months”

The reason for this shift will be the “high volume of Android shipments”. There’s no doubt that this will favour Google and they are motivated to make it easy for developers to sell advertising but they don’t have the same motivation to help developers make money directly off consumers.

It’s plain to me that Android has replaced Symbian in the market. There have been a plethora of app stores for Symbian over the years and still, bugger all money came out of them.

How do you reconcile releasing a polluted (advertising supported) product for free on Android and a premium paid product on iOS?

It is kinda important that you add your tuppence to this survey.

The biggest issue I see is this constant fascination with DOWNLOAD speeds.

“23% of consumers in Northern Ireland are on average receiving less than 2Mbits/sec over their broadband connections. This percentage is higher than anywhere else in the UK.”

“The Ofcom report also states that the average maximum speed available around Belfast is 8.9Mbits/sec compared to 5.7Mbits/sec in Coleraine, 4.3 Mbits/sec in Fermanagh, and 5.4 Mbits/sec in Down district.”

“Mobile coverage in Northern Ireland remains lower than the rest of the UK. 87% of the population of Northern Ireland live in a postcode district with at least 90% 2G coverage; however the figure for 3G coverage is much lower at 54%. This is well below the UK average of 95%.”

While Apple can do no wrong in software and hardware (other than be TOO POPULAR), they often fail in one area and that’s social. Find my friends is the third social attempt by Apple. They’ve failed to set the industry on fire with Ping (their music sharing social network) and Game Center (their game matching service) and now we have real world location with Find my friends.

Find My Friends is “better” for some values of “better” than the other attempts but it still highlights a lack of vision, a lack of “what could this do, where could this go”.

For instance: I’ve added a couple of people on Find My Friends.

Setting Status
Finding friends is one part of the equation but being found is another. Where is the option to set a status update so that people can see this. Even something as simple as “Busy” or “Available” will let people know if they should message you. This is even more important than selecting the “temporary” setting to be found.

Geofencing
Where is the alert that tells me my friends have entered within a mile of my location? Having a travelling GeoFence is an obvious feature for Find My Friends enabled smartphone users. And yes, it could be great for the untrustworthy or unfaithful but giving people an iota of credit, if there’s a ‘situation’ where location becomes an issue, the stupid will get caught.

Finding Friends Again. And again.
I have connections established by Ping and Game Center but Find My Friends wants to rifle through my address book to find people I can connect to? Really? In 2011, this is a solution? Why not give me a list of my Ping and Game Center connections and just ask me if I want to add them to my FMF list?

Time Alerts
Why can’t I set my non-existent status alert by the time of day or by the entries in my calendar? This stuff is all interconnected. Why doesn’t it just work? For that matter, why does my phone still ring when I’m plainly in a meeting! I don’t think Siri will help with that!

Group Messaging
Where’s the option to message all of my friends? Where’s the option to ping them with a “Anyone free for lunch” or to set a status change “Free for lunch”. Where does this actually work for friends? In the video, they say it’s good for when the family (obviously all toting iPhones) are at Disneyworld but seriously do we have to message each one individually?

The daft thing is that group messaging is excellently supported in Messages (via iMessage) but not in Find My Friends. Dumb.

So, in my opinion, Find My Friends, just like Ping and Game Center, is a pretty half-assed solution. Apple can still tie this all together and make it just work and maybe they will – maybe this is all part of the plan. Maybe the NEXT MAJOR RELEASE will tie all of these loose ends together? But I doubt it.

A new Cultural Tourism app competition for Northern Irish mobile companies.

The DCAL initiative aims to harness the innovation and entrepreneurial potential of culture, arts and leisure by encouraging local digital companies to use these sectors as a source of inspiration and content for mobile Apps. Digital technologies are transforming how people access information and how business sectors, such as tourism, communicate with consumers. Billions of Apps are downloaded globally each year and this competition offers opportunities to grow the creative industries and tourism sector in the north of Ireland.

The competition is being managed by Momentum / Digital Circle, which promotes the ICT and digital content sector in the north of Ireland. Local digital companies are invited to put forward creative and innovative ideas for two apps showcasing Irish and Ulster-Scots culture respectively. The winning applications will be funded to develop the apps in time for the 2012 tourism season.

The tender documents are located:

• Ulster-Scots Tender
• GAA-Comhaltas Tender

I was pitched yesterday by a local location-based-services start-up. I’ll not mention the company unless I get the nod from the founder. At one point I asked a question about location processing and while it was a slightly technical question, it caused a pause.

Most location services use either geofencing or check-ins.

Check-ins are where you hope that the user is so addicted to your services that they will remember to check in by launching your app. Tapping the “Check In” button then sends a message to the company server and your check-in is saved in the cloud. In my opinion, if your service relies on check-ins, then you’re an idiot.

Geo-fencing is a “virtual perimeter” service. The software maps real-world locations onto a virtual map and the software takes action when you move around in the real world because you may cross a virtual fence on the virtual map. This is the sort of technology used in criminal tags, for security of physically located services or for the protection of children or vulnerable adults. For this to work, location-based services have to be running constantly on the device. And when a match is found, EITHER a message is displayed on device or a message is sent to the GeoFence server.

The question is: is location processed on phone or in the cloud?

When the device moves and crosses a fence, does the software on the phone calculate this on its own from a locally stored database or is the location of the device sent constantly to a server in the cloud and compared to a database on the server.

Nearly every GeoFencing solution I’ve seen so far processes location in the cloud. This has some personal data security implications obviously (for those people who don’t like being tracked) but I’m more concerned about the data traffic and the drain on the battery.

A better solution, in my opinion, is to download the database of geofences to the device. A geofence, in its simplest form, is a point location and a radius. In theory, the entire database for a business could be downloaded quickly over a 3G connection. The location service checks location against the internal database and if it finds a match, posts a notification to the device screen or sends a message to the GeoFence server.

There’s a hundred uses of GeoFencing though I’ve seldom seen it used for anything really interesting. That’s a real shame because once you remove the security implications, it’s amazing technology. These implications are mostly in the minds of paranoid net-geeks and journalists desperate for a headline.

The show is on from the 16-25 September in Southampton, no less. Advance tickets are very reasonable. See here.

Just interested in seeing if other travellers would like to attend as I’d love to make the trip down maybe for one of the weekend days.

Bringing this back into the realm of the day job: I went to the London Boat Show earlier this year and I was struck by one thing: how few of the traders and chandleries in the exhibition stands were prepared for taking payments other than cash. I’d see this sort of market ripe for companies like AirPOS to provide mobile points of sale turning netbooks, tablets and even phones into a point of sale for small businesses.

The first business show that I exhibited at really drilled home the concept:

Don’t give me your business card, give me your credit card.

For smaller items, you just want to buy, for larger items you want it to be shipping to your house just after you get home (or waiting in your office). Having a connected Point of Sale with an online store can make all of the difference. It pains me that so few companies take this on board.

As we know, an iPhone or iPad can only be synced (usually) to one iTunes Library. And we know that Apple can contact every iOS device using Push Notifications, FaceTime, Find My iPhone and other neat network tooks. iCloud will apparently bring the ability to send any downloads to all associated devices on an Apple ID.

So, why can the Devices section not be permanent – why is it only visible when a device is physically connected?

Why can’t I choose to drag and drop media to a device in my list no matter where it is. That’s essentially the promise of iCloud but it seems counter to the “Apple Way” to just have everything download.

Kirsty Dorsey on NOKIA for Scotland on Sunday:

Elop, the first non-Finn to run the company in its 140-year history, joined Nokia less than nine months ago from Microsoft, where he was head of the division responsible for the Microsoft Office line of products. He subsequently drove through a tie-up with Microsoft to develop Nokia smartphones on the Windows Phone 7 platform, a deal that took the industry by surprise when it was announced in February.

Except of course if you were involved in the industry. For anyone who was remotely connected this wasn’t a surprise. During the summer of 2010, Nokia was pushing Symbian when we all wanted to hear about Meego. Symbian was already a dead platform that you’d have to pay developers handsomely to even consider developing for it.

When they changed their tune before Xmas 2010 and decided to talk to us about Meego, we already knew they were going Windows Phone 7. Any discussion of Symbian was pointless and even Meego with the lack of shipping hardware was a non-starter.

February and the subsequent changes since then have just proved us right all along. Symbian is now in sustaining with an external company, Meego is some sort of red-headed stepchild and the future is all WinPho7. And when the industry is rumbling that the Nokia phone business might be up for acquisition by Microsoft, I think others would be stupid to ignore it.

Why?

Two reasons.

1. Sony Ericsson, Motorola going Android
2. Apple growing in strength.

I’m bullish on WinPho7 anyway. I like the fact they haven’t just cloned the icons of the iPhone. It shows some of the brains that have been working at Microsoft over the years – innovation that rarely sees the light in a finished product due to the complex relationships within such a leviathan of a company.

The mistake Nokia made with WinPho7 was announcing the partnership in February and leaving it for at least 6 months before any hardware would be available. That’s just suicide.

Nokia as a company will come to depend utterly on Microsoft as a partner. I would be interested to see how they compete with the other WinPho7 partners. And at that point they may be an independent company or they may be part of the Microsoft machine. We are left to wonder who will care.

Somewhat resigned to never seeing Myth II on an iPad any time soon* so I’m wondering what game out there most accurately captures the feel of the game?

Not looking for a full RTS. An RTS is a mix of resource collection (Farmville), tower defence (PvZ) and real-time tactics (Myth).

On the other hand if there are any people who’d like to throw in some time to create a new game, then I’ll show you my notes, design, writing etc. And we can go find some money.

*John Siracusa and Wil Shipley talked about porting Myth (the code was released to some and lives on in community sourced updates) and previous to that I had spoken to Take2 about who owned the rights. Both dead ends – the rights for this game are so heavily tied up that it would take a contortionist to unravel them.