Volkswagen goes all in on the iPhone for the new GTI launch
The iPhone's App Store has made a lot of people a good deal of money during its short existence. But can a new car launch on the iPhone alone? Volkswagen is betting it can. The automaker is launching an app to announce its newest vehicle.
The car maker is betting that the highly targeted app will reach the caliber of customers interested in purchasing the vehicle.
AdAge calculates that the new app will reach more of that demographic than a much costlier television purchase. But does the math add up?
Mobile web experience letting users down: report
After years of too much hype, it's safe to say that the mobile internet is here. Sure, a lot of the activity is taking place in closed gardens (App Store, cough). But thanks to the wide availability of internet-enabled handsets, the rise of smartphones and 3G networks, more and more people are accessing websites through their mobiles.
Unfortunately, access and demand haven't yet produced the ideal mobile web experience. In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Gomez, Inc., in the past year two out of three mobile users have run into problems while trying to access websites on their mobiles.
Conde Nast hunts for new revenue with GQ iPhone app
Amid staff layoffs and magazine closings, Conde Nast launched a new potential source of revenue today with the launch of a GQ iPhone app.
Conde Nast will start selling digital versions of its issues on the iPhone for the discounted price of $2.99 (versus $4.99 on the newstand). The first question that comes to mind is this: Who will start doing this next?
Will in-app purchases for free apps lead to a second iPhone gold rush?
If you're an iPhone app developer, free versus paid can be a difficult decision. Notwithstanding widely-publicized success stories, most free apps don't make any money for their developers.
One solution: use a free, watered-down version of your app as promotion for a paid version. The freemium model does work but it's hardly perfect. The problem: Apple doesn't offer a way for app users to easily upgrade from a free version to a paid version. Developers have to create two different apps and app users have to install both.
App review: Tesco Store Finder
Supermarket giant Tesco has just released its first iPhone app, which allows users to search for their nearest store, get directions, and look through the product range.
Unlike the recent Ocado iPhone app, users cannot actually place orders via the app, but it is a potentially useful app. I've been trying it out...
Google's new local advertising: a whole lot harder than it looks
If there's one thing that could tamp down the excitement around localized mobile advertising, it is the usability issue: it's not easy to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. And Google has just proved that point with its new sponsored search results on the iPhone.
Starting this week, Google's iPhone maps program features sponsored links that point users to nearby locations. The trouble is, it doesn't work.
Google skips past general mobile ads, goes directly to smartphones
If there were any doubts about the growing potential of the smartphone ad market, Google would like to put them to rest. The search giant announced plans this week to start serving richer media ads to smartphones.
By focusing on more more real estate grabbing ads for HTML-enabled phones instead of creating mobiles ads that will be uniform across mobile platforms, Google is betting on the future of smartphones and trying to establish its dominance over the mobile ad market. For a company trying to make a play for the display ad market, this could help it along the way.
App review: Yell.com for iPhone
Yell.com has just released a free iPhone app allowing users to search for local businesses in the UK.
There are already some pretty good apps available, such as Yelp and Qype Radar, that provide local listings, so I've been trying out the Yell.com app to see how it measures up...
Embracing the 'app store' model
Apple's success with the App Store is no secret. 50m+ iPhone and iPod Touch customers have downloaded apps more than 2bn times. More than 85,000 apps and 125,000 app developers compete for a piece of the action.
So it's no surprise that more and more companies are trying to find ways to replicate the 'app store' model in some fashion. From Twitter to Intel, the model is being embraced.
EBay shows that mobile commerce can work
Online auction giant eBay recently announced that it has generated $380m in sales through its mobile commerce channel, showing the potential value of m-commerce for retailers.
The figures are interesting, especially as other large retailers such as Amazon have yet to reveal their mobile commerce sales, and shows that enough shoppers are prepared to make purchases on their mobiles to make it worthwhile for retailers.
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
