For Bachmann, Gay Rights Stand Reflects Mix of Issues and Faith

?We will have immediate loss of civil liberties for five million Minnesotans,? Mrs. Bachmann, then a state senator, told a Christian television network as thousands gathered on the steps of the Capitol to rally for a same-sex marriage ban she proposed. ?In our public schools, whether they want to or not, they?ll be forced to start teaching that same-sex marriage is equal, that it is normal and that children should try it.?

Now that she is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Mrs. Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, is talking more about federal spending than about gay rights. But her political rise has its roots in her dogged pursuit of an amendment to the State Constitution prohibiting same-sex marriage ? ?her banner issue,? said Scott Dibble, a Democratic state senator who is gay ? and her mixing of politics with her evangelical faith.

The ?Bachmann marriage wars,? as Mr. Dibble calls that legislative debate, offer a case study in the congresswoman?s ability to seize an issue and use it to circumvent the party establishment ? the same tactic, analysts say, that made her a Tea Party star in Washington and a hot commodity on the campaign trail.

?That?s her recipe: find the issue, then use it politically to mobilize previously marginalized or disconnected groups,? said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. ?For those of us who followed her from the beginning, it?s like reading a romance novel with a formula.?

Mrs. Bachmann?s strong stance on homosexuality ? she once likened it to ?personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement? ? and her anti-abortion views have appeal for some Republican primary voters. In Iowa this month, she delighted conservatives by signing a pledge opposing ?any redefinition of marriage.? (Her fellow Minnesotan and presidential rival, Tim Pawlenty, a former governor, was left explaining why he did not.)

Yet her position has also become a distraction for her campaign, drawing critics and subjecting her family to the kind of scrutiny once reserved for the relatives of nominees. It has exposed a longstanding rift between the congresswoman and her stepsister, who is a lesbian. It has also raised questions about whether her husband, Marcus, who runs two Christian counseling centers, practices ?reparative therapy,? or gay-to-straight counseling, derided by critics as an effort to ?pray away the gay.?

For the Bachmanns, the issue is entwined with faith. Until recently, they were members of Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, part of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which holds that ?a believing member? cannot ?remain a practicing homosexual in defiance of God?s word.? Friends say they now attend services at another evangelical church, Eagle Brook, closer to their new home in another Stillwater neighborhood.

 ?They are absolutely not against the gays,? said one close friend, JoAnne Hood, who also attends Eagle Brook. ?They are just not for marriage.?

Same-sex marriage was not much of an issue here when Mrs. Bachmann, who declined to be interviewed, arrived at the Statehouse as a new senator in January 2001. Minnesota had already enacted its own version of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which for legal purposes defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Then, in November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that state?s law banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Mrs. Bachmann sprang into action.

?She was holding press conferences and saying, ?We can?t have that in Minnesota,? ? said Don Betzold, a Democrat and a former chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee. She vowed to introduce a constitutional amendment and, seemingly overnight, emerged as Public Enemy No. 1 to Minnesota?s gay rights advocates, who were alarmed by her word choice and her intensity.

?The threat she represented was very real,? said Mr. Dibble, who remembers Mrs. Bachmann ?trotting out junk science and debunked claims that being gay is a choice.? During visitor tours of the empty Senate chamber, he said, Mrs. Bachmann would bring people in ?to pray around my desk.?

When Out Front Minnesota, a gay rights group, conducted lobbying days at the Statehouse, Mrs. Bachmann made clear she was opposed to its agenda, which included legal recognition of domestic partnerships and nondiscrimination initiatives. Sometimes she would meet gay constituents with guests of her own, said Monica Meyer, the group?s executive director. ?She had ex-gay people,? Ms. Meyer said, ?who would tell her constituents that being gay was wrong and immoral.?

Inside the Statehouse, some Republicans were uncomfortable.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a9b2dad023df0653e4a81440f6f0b857

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Weekend Open Forum: Do you use a custom cooler?

A decade ago, custom heatsinks and liquid cooling solutions were all the rage among techies. While overclockers and other such performance junkies still commonly purchase aftermarket coolers, they seem less popular among your average system builder these days. Today's processors are more power efficient than ever and they ship with adequate air coolers, while full blown liquid cooling loops are generally more hassle than they're worth for most power users.

Considering the interest expressed in Sandia's rotating heatsink concept, we're wondering how many of you use custom coolers. My Thermaltake Tai-Chi shipped with internal liquid cooling when I bought it in 2005, but I eventually scrapped that for the Thermalright Ultra-120, and that was later shelved in favor of the Core i5-750's stock HSF. As always, you're welcome to flaunt your rig in the comments and feel free to use our gallery if you need an image host.

**Image via Desktopped.com.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44717-weekend-open-forum-do-you-use-a-custom-cooler.html

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Bey2ollak: An Egyptian start-up success story to aspire to

Bey2ollak is one of two Egyptian start-ups which are US bound, following their participation in the NexGen IT Entrepreneurs Boot Camp last month.

Hearing the news that American and Danish entrepreneurs were flying in to Cairo, to host a seminar especially for Egypt?s up-and-coming start-ups, one of Bey2ollak?s five co-founders, Mohamed Rafea snagged a spot at the table.

Bey2ollak is the brainchild of five cousins. Aly Rafea, Mohamed Rafea and Gamal Sadek, all computer science graduates, were responsible for development. Mostafa Beltagy, a business administration graduate, took on marketing, while Yehia Ismail, an architect by profession, was responsible for the design and UI.

Bey2ollak is a cross-platform mobile app allowing users to share real-time information about Cairo and Alexandria traffic. Available as free Blackberry, Android and iPhone downloads, the service can also be accessed using the mobile site.

Sadek came up with the name, Bey2ollak, an Egyptian expression used when telling someone about something you?ve heard. The name was chosen because it is quintessentially Egyptian. Aly Rafea explained to the The Next Web, ?It?s part of Egyptian culture, and the app is all-Egyptian.?

Bey2ollak started out as a concept to share information among friends. Like any other Cairo resident, Rafea faced the very real problem of spending far too much time sitting in Cairo traffic. Thinking of how friends and family often warn each other which route not to take, he thought, why not create an application that caters to that very need.

Talking about the initial challenges they faced, Rafea explains, ?We were lucky ?cause we didn?t have any costs. The only cost was our time. The difficulty we faced in the beginning, was that we weren?t experts in Blackberry development. But despite that, we managed to develop the app in two weeks.?

Rafea and his cousins very quickly found themselves with an incredibly popular app on their hands. The Blackberry version was the first to launch in October last year, and it received an influx of 5,000 users on the very first day.

Rafea admits, ?I didnt expect this reaction, but some of the other team members saw the potential in the idea.? And they were right. In less than a year, the number of registered users has shot up to 46,000 across 3 platforms. And this figure doesn?t take into account the people use the service on the mobile site without registering.

On the very day Bey2ollak launched, Vodafone Egypt approached the founders with an offer to sponsor the app. Rafea explained, ?We received an email from someone at Vodafone and they told us ?We want to get together and see how we can help you.? Three weeks after the launch we finished the deal with Vodafone.?

Vodafone promoted the app, spreading the word to its customers, posting information about it on its official Facebook page, and launching an advertising campaign on Sarmady?s websites, including FilGoal.

Asking Rafea about future plans for the app, he said, ?If theres an opportunity in any other city we will go. We want to help as many people as we can, and if there are global opportunities, why not??

With the summer vacations in Egypt in full swing, Bey2ollak has recently added more local traffic information for popular summer destinations in the North Coast.

Taking part in the NextGen Bootcamp was an inspiring experience for the founders, and there were of course plenty of personal benefits for the team. ?We got in contact with successful European and American entrepreneurs, who made us think globally. They made us open our eyes to new things, like looking for international markets. They helped us to start thinking about the app in different ways.?

As one of the winning start-ups, the team will be travelling to the US to participate in a 3 week internship at iContact. The trip will give them an opportunity to take a tour of the company, visit the various departments, and also get a sense of the business culture abroad.

The experience has also given Rafea high hopes for Egypt. ?We want to help each other, and improve the entrepreneurial society in Egypt, because this is the future. We can?t depend on the government to secure jobs. We have to take part in this ourselves if we want to make Egypt a better place.?

Rafea also wants to use Bey2ollak?s own success story to push other entrepreneurs in Egypt to take the plunge. ?We want to encourage more people to start their own business because it will help. After the revolution, we want people to dream. We?re lucky that we came up with an idea and actually made it come true. It was easy and we want to encourage people to dream, and achieve their dreams.?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/me/2011/07/17/bey2ollak-an-egyptian-start-up-success-story-to-aspire-to/

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Will licensing issues spoil the online media party forever?

It?s one of the Internet?s biggest killjoys. It stifles innovation, holds back progress and drives normally law-abiding people to crime. What is it? Licensing.

Whenever an innovative new online approach to media comes along, it seems ?licensing issues? turn up to trash the party. Just think about how long it took Spotify, a service that has been running in Europe for nearly three years, to launch in America. Consider the retreat of services like Turntable.fm and Pandora to being available in the US only. Think about how Apple can offer TV show rentals on its Apple TV set-top box in the US but not elsewhere. Why can?t people in Sweden or New Zealand (or anywhere outside the US) use Netflix or Amazon Cloud Player if they want? Why can?t Americans watch the latest episode of Doctor Who on the BBC iPlayer?

Technically all these things could be overcome easily, but a licensing system that clings on to an old-fashioned view of the world stops them.

Licensing limbo

?Everyone knows it?s a problem, but no-one has a clue how to solve it,? says Ross Tones, a music consultant and producer at Hear No Evil. ?Using music as an example, it?s a throwback to the old way of how things were set up. Music would be licensed to different labels and publishers in different parts of the world because local companies would have the expertise to exploit the songs and recordings in their local territories. These territorial licenses all work in different ways and have different terms.?

And that?s the problem in a nutshell ? despite the fact that consumers are happy to buy and consume content online from anywhere in the world, the media industry is still built around an infrastructure designed to distribute physical products to specific geographic areas.

?We?ve been in a state of limbo for a long time now ? nearly ten years,? says Francis Rodino of social media agency Softwind Studio. ?The market is over-saturated with free content, which will make it really difficult for new licensing models to work. There have been lots of attempts at different ways of monetising free content but nothing has kicked in.?

Indeed, the failure for media licensing arrangements to move with the times has actually encouraged widespread use of barely legal, and just plain illegal, workarounds by users who want music and video content on their terms, not those of an out-of-date media industry.

?People are very innovative at getting around copyright restrictions,? says Andrew Lowenthal of video distribution project Engage Media. ?The current licensing regime has encouraged its own violation in many ways by refusing to adapt to the new technologies, refusing to change its business model or just not knowing how. The innovation has come from the outsiders such as the DVD bootleggers and the BitTorrent sites. The new generation finds it difficult to understand why there are such legal restrictions when the technology essentially makes it so easy to share.?

Media in the ?post-geography world?

?To quote Clay Shirky, ?Institutions will seek to preserve the problem for which they are the solution?,? says entrepreneur and computer security expert Rodolfo Rosini. Speaking of traditional big media companies, Rosini says ?These agencies were created to supply media in a world that doesn?t exist any more.? Noting that geographic boundaries are no longer an issue for consumers, he continues ?We?re in an age of post-national consumption of media but these companies want to force the rest of the world to adapt to them. They?re swimming against the tide though ? they?re delaying innovation, not stopping it.?

Rosini argues that while the existing licensing situation is a pain, it can?t last forever. ?The writing?s on the wall for established business models ? they can?t survive. These companies haven?t been growing for the best part of a decade. Just look at EMI ? it keeps being sold for less and less. These companies? cost base will get to a point where they?re no longer sustainable. They?ll become smaller and smaller, and less relevant until someone bigger can push them around or acquire them.?

It?s certainly true that technology giants are well positioned to dictate terms to the media industry in the future, especially in the case of the music, where it has been argued that Google could (theoretically, at least) buy the entire, declining industry. But if we do want a truly open future for online media, where, for example, a startup could launch a new movie streaming site globally from day one, how would it work? People still need to get paid for their creative work.

As Ben Cockerham, Chief Strategy Office and CFO at New York-based royalty and licensing service provider RightsFlow says. ?To be sure, the existing web of overlapping rights infrastructure and pre-existing vested interests have not made life easy to experiment with new models of music consumption. But it?s important to also remember that there are real legitimate concerns about how the monetization of music will evolve, and the copyright community is constantly balancing the need to get new revenue streams with the risk of massively devaluing their assets.?

So, what?s the way forward?

Getting paid in a brave new media world ? how it could work

?If the world had one giant blanket license, managed by one collection agency or a network of agencies, that could be a way forward,? says Ross Tones. ?That would be great for online businesses and for consumers but it?s not as simple as that. In that scenario, control gets taken away from artists. They should have a right to choose how their work is used. If we go down a route of simple, blanket licenses that anyone can buy, artists may see their work used in a way they?re not happy with.?

Another option, Tones suggests, would be some kind of digital media tracking system. ?If everyone gets behind some kind of audio tracking as digital distribution becomes norm, digital audio fingerprints could be sent to a central database for automatic validation. But then you have the problem of ?Who pays the royalties?? Imagine a KFC ad on YouTube that uses a copyright controlled piece of music. Would KFC pay? Would the production company who made the ad pay? Or would YouTube, as the distributor, pay? And how would the tracking system know who to charge? It could be a nightmare.?

A third option, Tones suggests, could be direct taxation of consumers. In Canada, for example, a debate has raged in recent years over taxing consumers in return for legalisation of music sharing via methods such as BitTorrent. The question then, though, is how are royalties distributed? Tones gives the example of PRS surveys in the UK which take a data sample of the music played in, say, a shop for one day of the year as a representation of its whole year?s worth of music played. The shop may play independent artists all year round, but if it just plays Lady Gaga and Robbie Williams on the day of the survey, the money goes to them. As such, any taxation system could see less well-known artists losing out as their music would be less likely to show up in surveys.

Is the future bright?

So, there are a number of options, but can the significant hurdles around them be overcome? Ross Tones sees the current situation as echoing earlier challenges to the media status quo that were overcome. ?It?s like when radio came along in the 1920s. People complained that it would mean the end of sheet music sales, but the industry got through it.?

Ben Cockerham is upbeat about the future. ?The world is getting smaller every day. It might not look like it from an outsider?s perspective, but both the copyright community and those developing businesses around music monetization are actively working towards the same goal of integrated, seamless licensing. ?

?What?s missing in the current landscape is a centralized infrastructure ? a licensing backbone ? that both copyright owners and copyright users can lean on to make the flow of rights and royalties more efficient. The result of such a backbone and the resulting economies of scale would make save costs across the board for both sides of the table, and will be absolutely necessary to achieve truly global results.?

So, it looks like media licensing will one day catch up with the pace of online innovation, but there?s a long road ahead as media companies restructure and work out the finer points of how that future might work. In the meantime, expect the frustration of that ?hot new way to watch videos? or ?share music? being impeded by false geographic restrictions to continue for a good long while yet.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/07/16/will-licensing-issues-spoil-the-online-media-party-forever/

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Why Orkut Will Survive Google (For Now)

Are you on Orkut? You probably haven?t heard this question for at least a couple years. That is, unless you?re Brazilian. While it globally declined, Google?s seven year-old social network still claims 30 million active users in the country. But what will happen now that Google+ was launched?

Google isn?t killing Orkut (yet)

According to a Google spokeswoman, ?Orkut and Google+ are different products, and will both exist. Over time, we?ll determine what makes the most sense in terms of integrating these products.? It?s not just a façade: despite the launch of Google+, Google is still actively promoting Orkut.

Or better to say, Google Brasil is: it fully manages the social network since 2008. Only a couple days ago, it released a promotional video in Portuguese on YouTube, with a telling title: ?Orkut doesn?t stop growing?. Targeted at advertisers, it reminds them of key numbers: 85% of Brazilian Internet users access a social network (well above the global average); Orkut has almost as many active users as there are inhabitants in Canada; 62m pictures were uploaded to Orkut in one single day after New Year?s Eve. Beyond this video, the recent introduction of new features that aren?t included in G+, like badges and a new logo, also confirms that Google isn?t giving up on Orkut as a standalone product.

Orkut ? Google+

Yet, the decision is not entirely up to Google: if Orkut users want to migrate to Google+ or another social network, they will. Actually, the Brazilian presence is already visible on G+: the Brazilian entrepreneur and professor Edney Souza ranks 116th on The Next Web-affiliated  Social Statistics, with over 5,000 followers. That?s little compared to the 109,000 followers of his Twitter account @interney, but let?s not forget that it all happened in only two weeks. Still, the lack of an easy migrating tool provided by Google is a big disincentive: why would people migrate if they can?t easily find their friends?

Features are an even bigger problem: Google+?s ambition isn?t to replace Orkut, which means that key Orkut elements are missing. According to Brazilian serial entrepreneur Roberto de Brito Nunes, CTO of incubator Samba Ventures, what Orkut users would miss the most on Google+ right now are Communities, games and the OpenSocial set of APIs. Communities are very different from G+?s philosophy of private Circles and it?s unclear if they are on Google+?s roadmap at all. For Roberto, that?s the way it should be: Google+ should (and will very likely) prioritize the additional features that make sense for its product, rather than mimic Orkut.

Orkut vs. Facebook?

Actually, the main threat to Orkut may well be Facebook, as we pointed a few months ago (see previous story): Pages and Groups are somewhat similar to Communities, not to mention all the casual games available. Last year, Facebook already overtook Orkut in India, one of the few countries where it remained popular. In fact, Brazil is the only country where Orkut still dominates, and Facebook seems determined to challenge it. Back in February this year, Mark Zuckerberg?s company poached Google?s Latin America MD Alexandre Hohagen, who now heads Facebook?s newly created office in São Paulo. He?s currently working on building a team, as confirmed by the 8 open positions listed on Facebook?s careers page. As a result, Facebook is already gaining ground in Brazil: it?s the country where it grew fastest in May, according to stats site SocialBakers.

This growth of Facebook was initially driven by the upper class youth, who could read English and had friends abroad. In the US, social media researcher Danah Boyd had highlighted class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. The same happened in Brazil: wealthy people wanted to differentiate themselves. According to Raquel Recuero, a Brazilian researcher who authored a book about social networks, affluent Brazilians started to criticize and leave a social environment they deemed too democratized and unsafe; ?Orkutization? became a pejorative buzzword, used in different contexts. However, analysts have recently reported that the Brazilian middle class also started to migrate as well, which quickly prompted critics against the ?Orkutization? of Facebook. Will it lead the upper class to head for other social networks again, including Google+?

? and many others

The answer is still unclear, but Raquel is sure about one thing: Brazil will never experience another ?Orkut phenomenon?. The tremendous success of Orkut in the country was the result of a unique context. Since then, the Brazilian Internet landscape has evolved considerably, meaning that attention is now divided between many online destinations. As a proof of it, Facebook isn?t the only social platform to be gaining traction in Brazil: so is Twitter. Recently translated into Portuguese, the site has a reach of over 21% in Brazil, which comes second in the global penetration ranking. Likewise, LinkedIn has over 3m members in Brazil; not to mention other platforms such as Foursquare, Formspring and Fotolog.

Actually, it seems that Brazilian users don?t mind having profiles on many, many social websites. For an example, have a look at Edney Souza?s page on MeAdiciona.com, a service which groups its users? different online profiles. Does this mean that Brazil is so much into social networks that several of them could co-exist successfully? Will Orkut survive G+ on the longer term? Only time will tell.

Do you use many social networks or do you prefer to focus on one?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/la/2011/07/16/why-orkut-will-survive-google-for-now/

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Mobile Apps: A look at what makes a good app great

As the smartphone market continues to grow, as a large number of featurephone owners migrate to more powerful, Internet-connected and advanced devices, the demand for mobile applications has boomed.

Whilst many download a large number of apps on their smartphones the average number of installed apps that are frequently used sits at around 23 apps per device, with iOS device owners said to download more than their Android counterparts.

Research analysts IDC estimates that manufacturers will ship more than 472 million smartphones this year alone, an increase of over 160 million units from 2010 ? that figure will nearly double to reach 982 million by the end of 2015. As a result, app downloads will rise to 183 billion within four years.

With nearly a billion people set to own a smartphone by 2015, downloading and using an average of over twenty apps, the already burgeoning app market is set to explode as new hardware technologies open up what is possible to achieve on a smartphone or tablet device. Where a number of developers (big and small) have already experienced the power of the App Store, thousands more are tuning their apps to mimic the success of Instagram, Angry Birds and Shazam.

Like any other saleable object, apps need to be unique to sell. Some of the most successful apps on smartphones today haven?t introduced new ideas, they just do them better. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at what makes a good app great, what differentiates one photo app from another photo app, to become a top seller on a mobile app store.

UI, UI, UI.

The way an application looks and operates is imperative to its success. When an application is downloaded, a user is going to open that app and will instantly form an impression. Especially in the case of free apps, there is a huge amount of churn ? if the app doesn?t look as good as a rival app and navigation isn?t fluid, the chances are the user won?t even bother getting to learn about what it can do.

A great app keeps in mind that in most cases, the user is operating a device that has a small touchscreen. The user interface needs to be as unobtrusive as it can be, leaving out any design elements that don?t add a use or function to the app. Bundling in too many design elements can leave it feeling bulky and will feel unintuitive.

Apple?s own User Interface Guidelines suggest that to make an app that people will care about, app developers should focus on the primary task, elevate the content that people care about, think about how a smartphone screen is viewed in different environments, to give users a logical path to follow and make usage easy and obvious ? to name a few.

Photo applications are excellent proponents of Apple?s ideas, shaping experiences that make users care about the processes associated with sharing their photos. Take Path for example; on the iPhone, the application instantly loads photos taken by friends (elevating the content that people care about), emphasis is placed on a green camera icon which provides the user with the opportunity to share their own photos (focus on the primary task) and annotates each of the options on the toolbar (to make usage easy and obvious) and showcase other parts of the app.

The Path team realises that its users can only see one screen at a time and makes excellent use of categories to separate content. Because users will never want to access content simultaneously, developers need to ensure that different parts of the application can be accessed sequentially, giving necessary focus to each feature to ensure users understand what it required of them and highlight tools the app can actually provide.

Some applications by their very nature have numerous features that even the best designer will find hard to adequately incorporate without confusing some its users. Path tags people, places and things in each photo, incorporates moods, adds filters and allows other users to comment and like a user?s photos ? it needs to highlight these features without taking too much away from the photo-capturing process.

To assist fluid navigation, Path?s developers have kept onscreen help to a minimum whilst retains the standard icons and buttons that a user will be familiar with in other applications, so they instantly know how to use the app. We take it for granted but the use of back buttons, cancel buttons and home buttons within an app help us retrace our steps and find the place we ideally want to be.

Path excels because it not only looks good, the number of options it provides are smartly labelled and organised so that a user never feels overwhelmed using it. Whilst the application hasn?t got quite the following of its rival Instagram, the Path team continue to iterate the product to walk its own Path (see what I did there?) and entertain its own large userbase.

Play To The Strengths Of Mobile

A presentation by Nick Watt suggests a good app ?plays to the strengths of mobile?. In his eyes, this consists of five things: Communications, Spontaneous, Geo-sensitive, Short periods of use and Focused activity.

Shazam is a music discovery application that utilises a smartphones microphone to listen to ambient music and correctly identify it. The application passed 100 million users in December 2010 and continues to add thousands each day via its free and paid apps.

It is a great example that utilises the principles Watt outlines, encapsulating each one in its own way within the app.

The beauty of Shazam is that it isn?t a regularly used application, but it serves a purpose that could be much more important than a number of other apps on a user?s smartphone.

Upon launch, Shazam immediately displays a giant Shazam logo and asks the user to tap the screen to begin. If a track is playing on the radio, the user has no idea when the song could be changed or a DJ will start to talk over the track, so time is of the essence. Shazam wastes no time, elements are minimal and the main feature of the app is displayed front and centre, conveying a very simple but effective call to action.

The app will keep a log of each track it correctly tags, allowing the user to immediately quit the app after successfully identifying a song. However, the addition of options to buy, listen or share a track via Twitter or Facebook increases app interaction time, increasing the likelihood of bringing the user back to the app to grab the name of the track many days/weeks/months after it was first tagged.

Shazam started a text messaging service that would identify music many years before smartphones came to market. The company hasn?t changed the service it provides, it has simply adapted the way users can interact with it. The Shazam app is simple in design ? because it needs to be ? any additional elements could impede users in their attempt to quickly tag a track.

Travel applications also keep things simple, obtaining a user?s location to suggest the best route to a predefined destination. An app that maps of the London Underground or the New York Subway can operate purely on its own; the user simply states the station they are at and the place they need to disembark, the app will crunch data locally and suggest a route without needing Internet connection or location input.

Adapt To A User?s Needs

Creating a successful app is one thing, maintaining that success is the real headache for developers.

With app downloads come app updates; a way for developers to submit fixes for their apps, introduce new features and streamline the way it operates. An app user may have paid a full 59 pence for an app but they will want far more in the way of support and feature iterations if a developer wants them to stay loyal to their brand or their specific set of applications.

Angry Birds is the most successful app on any platform, recently hitting the 250 million app downloads milestone and is now downloaded over one million times each day. The franchise hit the heights it did because not only was it a fantastically fun game to play, Rovio works tirelessly to release updates to the game, completely free of charge, to keep its customers satisfied.

Today, there maybe five Angry Birds apps on the App Store but at the start, Rovio had to find a way to get its customers to return to the app. Rovio?s idea was to introduce a scoring system that would reward users based on how sparingly they used birds to complete levels. This ended up being a scoring system that utilised stars, issuing the maximum amount of stars should a player destroy the evil pigs with a lower-than-expected amount of birds.

If a user completed the game without getting three stars on each level, you can bet a large percentage kept coming back until they did.

Once gamers had scored three stars on each level and effectively completed the game, Rovio might have hoped that they would come back to the game and play it over again, much as a console gamer would do with an older title. Instead, the Finnish game developer rolled out level updates to existing customers, completely free-of-charge to keep Angry Birds fresh in their minds and increase the chances of that person recommending the game to their friends and family.

As new titles became available, those customers ? fuelled by a desire to obtain three stars on new levels ? would instantly buy the new games, effectively starting the same cycle but with a slightly different version of the game.

Rodrigo Coutinho writing on the Outsystems blog says that apps need to be ?easy to change?:

Great apps are evergreen. Even if in subtle ways, they?re always improving and adapting to the latest requirements. To build a great app, you need to make sure your application can change as fast as your users? needs.

Rovio has embodied that approach, but many other application developers consistently update applications to appease their users. Adding a new feature might make sense at the time, but if it is incorporated and the user?s don?t like it, the developer needs to be ready to adapt and update as quickly as possible to maintain good relationships with their customers.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, a smartphone owner can quite as easily delete an app and move to a rival which is more understanding to its users? needs.

Know Your Market

App developers need to be aware of the market they operate. We have spoken to people who say some apps are lucky because they were featured on Apple?s Featured listings on the App Store, when their app didn?t.

When Tweetbot launched ? to considerable praise ? its makers knew that if they wanted to capitalise on the successful launch of the app, they would need to incentivise casual users to download and install the app. With this in mind, the team dropped the price of the application by a dollar and market the reduction as a special introductory price.

The team then took to Twitter and its blog, keeping their followers updated as to the progress it was making on updates it was scheduled to roll out. Over time, the team would tease new releases hours before they were due to hit the App Store, in an attempt to generate buzz, ensuring that news of the updates would proliferate across various social networks and tempt even those who had not yet downloaded the app but were aware of what it could do.

It?s most recent update saw Tweetbot finally get Push Notifications. News of the feature was posted to the developer?s Twitter accounts and when it became available, the 1,000 invitations were snapped up within minutes.

It took the makers of Tweetbot three months, but the application has returned to its original price, now that millions of existing users are willing to sing its praises to those that will listen.

Coming back to Rovio, it knew that smartphone owners on different platforms interacted differently with apps, with iOS device owners not only downloading more apps but paying more for them. The team did its research and launched an Android port ? for free ? because it knew Android handset owners weren?t as spend-happy as their iOS counterparts, choosing instead to integrate an advertising model that at one point was said to be earning the company $1 million a month (possibly more now).

Conclusion

There is no magic formula to app success; it always needs a good ? if not unique ? idea to make the hundreds of millions of smartphone owners take notice. However, a good understanding of what users will expect from an app is paramount, developers cannot expect people using their app to suddenly adopt new menu structures and use buttons that do not fit with the platform they are running.

The app market is still in its infancy, it could be said for smartphones in general ? as new technologies make their way into mobile phones and into our pockets, the scope of what apps will be able to achieve in the near future is mindnumbing.

Consumers want something that can reduce the time to undertake something or entertain them when they are bored. It?s up to the developer to assess what is missing on the app market and make their idea it a reality. Innovation breeds success in a variety of markets but it will especially pay off in the world of digital apps.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials

Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/07/16/mobile-apps-a-look-at-what-makes-a-good-app-great/

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Mobile Apps: A look at what makes a good app great

As the smartphone market continues to grow, as a large number of featurephone owners migrate to more powerful, Internet-connected and advanced devices, the demand for mobile applications has boomed.

Whilst many download a large number of apps on their smartphones the average number of installed apps that are frequently used sits at around 23 apps per device, with iOS device owners said to download more than their Android counterparts.

Research analysts IDC estimates that manufacturers will ship more than 472 million smartphones this year alone, an increase of over 160 million units from 2010 ? that figure will nearly double to reach 982 million by the end of 2015. As a result, app downloads will rise to 183 billion within four years.

With nearly a billion people set to own a smartphone by 2015, downloading and using an average of over twenty apps, the already burgeoning app market is set to explode as new hardware technologies open up what is possible to achieve on a smartphone or tablet device. Where a number of developers (big and small) have already experienced the power of the App Store, thousands more are tuning their apps to mimic the success of Instagram, Angry Birds and Shazam.

Like any other saleable object, apps need to be unique to sell. Some of the most successful apps on smartphones today haven?t introduced new ideas, they just do them better. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at what makes a good app great, what differentiates one photo app from another photo app, to become a top seller on a mobile app store.

UI, UI, UI.

The way an application looks and operates is imperative to its success. When an application is downloaded, a user is going to open that app and will instantly form an impression. Especially in the case of free apps, there is a huge amount of churn ? if the app doesn?t look as good as a rival app and navigation isn?t fluid, the chances are the user won?t even bother getting to learn about what it can do.

A great app keeps in mind that in most cases, the user is operating a device that has a small touchscreen. The user interface needs to be as unobtrusive as it can be, leaving out any design elements that don?t add a use or function to the app. Bundling in too many design elements can leave it feeling bulky and will feel unintuitive.

Apple?s own User Interface Guidelines suggest that to make an app that people will care about, app developers should focus on the primary task, elevate the content that people care about, think about how a smartphone screen is viewed in different environments, to give users a logical path to follow and make usage easy and obvious ? to name a few.

Photo applications are excellent proponents of Apple?s ideas, shaping experiences that make users care about the processes associated with sharing their photos. Take Path for example; on the iPhone, the application instantly loads photos taken by friends (elevating the content that people care about), emphasis is placed on a green camera icon which provides the user with the opportunity to share their own photos (focus on the primary task) and annotates each of the options on the toolbar (to make usage easy and obvious) and showcase other parts of the app.

The Path team realises that its users can only see one screen at a time and makes excellent use of categories to separate content. Because users will never want to access content simultaneously, developers need to ensure that different parts of the application can be accessed sequentially, giving necessary focus to each feature to ensure users understand what it required of them and highlight tools the app can actually provide.

Some applications by their very nature have numerous features that even the best designer will find hard to adequately incorporate without confusing some its users. Path tags people, places and things in each photo, incorporates moods, adds filters and allows other users to comment and like a user?s photos ? it needs to highlight these features without taking too much away from the photo-capturing process.

To assist fluid navigation, Path?s developers have kept onscreen help to a minimum whilst retains the standard icons and buttons that a user will be familiar with in other applications, so they instantly know how to use the app. We take it for granted but the use of back buttons, cancel buttons and home buttons within an app help us retrace our steps and find the place we ideally want to be.

Path excels because it not only looks good, the number of options it provides are smartly labelled and organised so that a user never feels overwhelmed using it. Whilst the application hasn?t got quite the following of its rival Instagram, the Path team continue to iterate the product to walk its own Path (see what I did there?) and entertain its own large userbase.

Play To The Strengths Of Mobile

A presentation by Nick Watt suggests a good app ?plays to the strengths of mobile?. In his eyes, this consists of five things: Communications, Spontaneous, Geo-sensitive, Short periods of use and Focused activity.

Shazam is a music discovery application that utilises a smartphones microphone to listen to ambient music and correctly identify it. The application passed 100 million users in December 2010 and continues to add thousands each day via its free and paid apps.

It is a great example that utilises the principles Watt outlines, encapsulating each one in its own way within the app.

The beauty of Shazam is that it isn?t a regularly used application, but it serves a purpose that could be much more important than a number of other apps on a user?s smartphone.

Upon launch, Shazam immediately displays a giant Shazam logo and asks the user to tap the screen to begin. If a track is playing on the radio, the user has no idea when the song could be changed or a DJ will start to talk over the track, so time is of the essence. Shazam wastes no time, elements are minimal and the main feature of the app is displayed front and centre, conveying a very simple but effective call to action.

The app will keep a log of each track it correctly tags, allowing the user to immediately quit the app after successfully identifying a song. However, the addition of options to buy, listen or share a track via Twitter or Facebook increases app interaction time, increasing the likelihood of bringing the user back to the app to grab the name of the track many days/weeks/months after it was first tagged.

Shazam started a text messaging service that would identify music many years before smartphones came to market. The company hasn?t changed the service it provides, it has simply adapted the way users can interact with it. The Shazam app is simple in design ? because it needs to be ? any additional elements could impede users in their attempt to quickly tag a track.

Travel applications also keep things simple, obtaining a user?s location to suggest the best route to a predefined destination. An app that maps of the London Underground or the New York Subway can operate purely on its own; the user simply states the station they are at and the place they need to disembark, the app will crunch data locally and suggest a route without needing Internet connection or location input.

Adapt To A User?s Needs

Creating a successful app is one thing, maintaining that success is the real headache for developers.

With app downloads come app updates; a way for developers to submit fixes for their apps, introduce new features and streamline the way it operates. An app user may have paid a full 59 pence for an app but they will want far more in the way of support and feature iterations if a developer wants them to stay loyal to their brand or their specific set of applications.

Angry Birds is the most successful app on any platform, recently hitting the 250 million app downloads milestone and is now downloaded over one million times each day. The franchise hit the heights it did because not only was it a fantastically fun game to play, Rovio works tirelessly to release updates to the game, completely free of charge, to keep its customers satisfied.

Today, there maybe five Angry Birds apps on the App Store but at the start, Rovio had to find a way to get its customers to return to the app. Rovio?s idea was to introduce a scoring system that would reward users based on how sparingly they used birds to complete levels. This ended up being a scoring system that utilised stars, issuing the maximum amount of stars should a player destroy the evil pigs with a lower-than-expected amount of birds.

If a user completed the game without getting three stars on each level, you can bet a large percentage kept coming back until they did.

Once gamers had scored three stars on each level and effectively completed the game, Rovio might have hoped that they would come back to the game and play it over again, much as a console gamer would do with an older title. Instead, the Finnish game developer rolled out level updates to existing customers, completely free-of-charge to keep Angry Birds fresh in their minds and increase the chances of that person recommending the game to their friends and family.

As new titles became available, those customers ? fuelled by a desire to obtain three stars on new levels ? would instantly buy the new games, effectively starting the same cycle but with a slightly different version of the game.

Rodrigo Coutinho writing on the Outsystems blog says that apps need to be ?easy to change?:

Great apps are evergreen. Even if in subtle ways, they?re always improving and adapting to the latest requirements. To build a great app, you need to make sure your application can change as fast as your users? needs.

Rovio has embodied that approach, but many other application developers consistently update applications to appease their users. Adding a new feature might make sense at the time, but if it is incorporated and the user?s don?t like it, the developer needs to be ready to adapt and update as quickly as possible to maintain good relationships with their customers.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, a smartphone owner can quite as easily delete an app and move to a rival which is more understanding to its users? needs.

Know Your Market

App developers need to be aware of the market they operate. We have spoken to people who say some apps are lucky because they were featured on Apple?s Featured listings on the App Store, when their app didn?t.

When Tweetbot launched ? to considerable praise ? its makers knew that if they wanted to capitalise on the successful launch of the app, they would need to incentivise casual users to download and install the app. With this in mind, the team dropped the price of the application by a dollar and market the reduction as a special introductory price.

The team then took to Twitter and its blog, keeping their followers updated as to the progress it was making on updates it was scheduled to roll out. Over time, the team would tease new releases hours before they were due to hit the App Store, in an attempt to generate buzz, ensuring that news of the updates would proliferate across various social networks and tempt even those who had not yet downloaded the app but were aware of what it could do.

It?s most recent update saw Tweetbot finally get Push Notifications. News of the feature was posted to the developer?s Twitter accounts and when it became available, the 1,000 invitations were snapped up within minutes.

It took the makers of Tweetbot three months, but the application has returned to its original price, now that millions of existing users are willing to sing its praises to those that will listen.

Coming back to Rovio, it knew that smartphone owners on different platforms interacted differently with apps, with iOS device owners not only downloading more apps but paying more for them. The team did its research and launched an Android port ? for free ? because it knew Android handset owners weren?t as spend-happy as their iOS counterparts, choosing instead to integrate an advertising model that at one point was said to be earning the company $1 million a month (possibly more now).

Conclusion

There is no magic formula to app success; it always needs a good ? if not unique ? idea to make the hundreds of millions of smartphone owners take notice. However, a good understanding of what users will expect from an app is paramount, developers cannot expect people using their app to suddenly adopt new menu structures and use buttons that do not fit with the platform they are running.

The app market is still in its infancy, it could be said for smartphones in general ? as new technologies make their way into mobile phones and into our pockets, the scope of what apps will be able to achieve in the near future is mindnumbing.

Consumers want something that can reduce the time to undertake something or entertain them when they are bored. It?s up to the developer to assess what is missing on the app market and make their idea it a reality. Innovation breeds success in a variety of markets but it will especially pay off in the world of digital apps.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials

Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/07/16/mobile-apps-a-look-at-what-makes-a-good-app-great/

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Election Cycle Emerges as the Year of the Pledge, but Some Candidates Resist

They are asked to state their opposition to abortion rights. They are pressed to pledge support for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

They have been asked to oppose pornography, women in combat and Sharia law ? all part of a ?marriage vow? pledge.

Candidate pledges, an incidental part of past presidential elections, have exploded this year as advocacy groups seek to hold a future Republican president accountable.

Driven by the same anti-Washington fury that delivered scores of new Republicans to the House last year, the pledges aim to impose litmus tests on candidates and discourage them from altering positions later under political pressure.

?At a time when voters have grown skeptical about politicians and candidates who run on a certain platform only to backtrack once elected, signing a pledge is a good way to strengthen our political promises,? Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania senator, wrote in an opinion column last week.

Mr. Santorum has been one of the most agreeable pledge signers. He has added his name even to compacts that rivals have abstained from because of controversial passages.

?The G.O.P. is reading the mood of a key part of their constituency as telling them, ?Hold the line, we don?t want you to compromise,? ? said Donna R. Hoffman, a political scientist at the University of Northern Iowa. ?A particular sector of the electorate believes compromise is invalid at this point; it?s selling out your principles.?

That conviction is apparent in the deadlock over raising the national debt ceiling in Washington, where freshman House Republicans, many elected with Tea Party support, are resisting any deal whatsoever that includes raising taxes. Others are opposing an increase in the debt ceiling under any circumstances.

Behind that orthodoxy, some analysts see the influence of the most successful pact of all, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge issued by the small-government champion Grover Norquist, who over two decades has gotten about 95 percent of Republican members of Congress to commit to not raising taxes.

Inspired by Mr. Norquist, other groups have jumped into the pledge game.

Mr. Santorum did not hesitate to sign the marriage vow pledge last week, which was written by an evangelical Christian group in Iowa. After public criticism, the group deleted a sentence stating that black children under slavery were more likely to be raised by both parents than ?after the election of the U.S.A.?s first African-American president.?

Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and presidential candidate, also signed the pledge, although she told Fox News that the slavery sentence, which appeared in a preamble, was ?not on a document that I signed.?

The pledge, two dense pages with footnotes, binds signers to try to block same-sex marriage as well as be faithful to their spouses, oppose women ?in forward combat roles? and support ?robust childbearing and reproduction.?

Other Republican candidates refused to sign, including Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor, who offered a lengthy explanation, perhaps mindful that the pledge?s sponsor, Bob Vander Plaats, is influential with the socially conservative voters who turn out en masse for the Iowa caucuses.

He also posted a six-minute video on YouTube describing how his faith shapes his view that marriage should be limited to ?one man and one woman.?

The campaign of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, was blunter. He found the pledge ?undignified and inappropriate for a presidential campaign,? a spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said.

Mr. Vander Plaats said that despite winning over only two candidates to his cause, the pledge was not backfiring. ?It?s raised the level of marriage and family in the debate,? he said.

Another pledge known as Cap, Cut and Balance has had a swift impact since it was drafted two months ago. Mr. Romney cites it on the campaign trail, and the pledge is the basis for bills to be introduced in Congress shortly that represent Speaker John A. Boehner?s latest response to the White House on the debt-ceiling crisis.

It would commit Congress to cutting current spending, capping future expenditures and passing a constitutional amendment requiring balanced annual budgets.

The pledge was written by national Tea Party groups including FreedomWorks; three Republican senators, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida; and a Washington public relations firm. ?It was a nearly unprecedented coming together of the conservative movement,? said Joe Brettell, an executive of the firm, CRC Public Relations.

Candidate pledges seem largely a Republican phenomenon this time, though liberal groups have promoted them in the past, including a Fight Washington Corruption pledge that MoveOn.org said about 200 Congressional incumbents and candidates signed in 2010.

Critics say the impact of pledges can be pernicious, and they cite the profound impact of the 25-year history of the antitax pledge from Americans for Tax Reform, Mr. Norquist?s group. While supporters say it has enforced party discipline on a central tenet of Republicans? belief, it has also backed them into an absolutist position.

Indeed, had Congressional Republicans been willing to make small concessions on raising some taxes, they might have already gotten many of the spending cuts they wanted from the White House by now.

?The danger of these pledges is it does prevent candidates from achieving 80 percent of what they want,? said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who worked for John McCain?s presidential campaign in 2008.

One candidate, Jon M. Hunstman Jr., a former governor of Utah, refused to sign anything.

?I don?t sign pledges ? other than the Pledge of Allegiance and a pledge to my wife,? Mr. Huntsman has taken to saying on the campaign trail.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d0206b762b787852546b27fe865ff954

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Mobile Apps: A look at what makes a good app great

As the smartphone market continues to grow, as a large number of featurephone owners migrate to more powerful, Internet-connected and advanced devices, the demand for mobile applications has boomed.

Whilst many download a large number of apps on their smartphones the average number of installed apps that are frequently used sits at around 23 apps per device, with iOS device owners said to download more than their Android counterparts.

Research analysts IDC estimates that manufacturers will ship more than 472 million smartphones this year alone, an increase of over 160 million units from 2010 ? that figure will nearly double to reach 982 million by the end of 2015. As a result, app downloads will rise to 183 billion within four years.

With nearly a billion people set to own a smartphone by 2015, downloading and using an average of over twenty apps, the already burgeoning app market is set to explode as new hardware technologies open up what is possible to achieve on a smartphone or tablet device. Where a number of developers (big and small) have already experienced the power of the App Store, thousands more are tuning their apps to mimic the success of Instagram, Angry Birds and Shazam.

Like any other saleable object, apps need to be unique to sell. Some of the most successful apps on smartphones today haven?t introduced new ideas, they just do them better. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at what makes a good app great, what differentiates one photo app from another photo app, to become a top seller on a mobile app store.

UI, UI, UI.

The way an application looks and operates is imperative to its success. When an application is downloaded, a user is going to open that app and will instantly form an impression. Especially in the case of free apps, there is a huge amount of churn ? if the app doesn?t look as good as a rival app and navigation isn?t fluid, the chances are the user won?t even bother getting to learn about what it can do.

A great app keeps in mind that in most cases, the user is operating a device that has a small touchscreen. The user interface needs to be as unobtrusive as it can be, leaving out any design elements that don?t add a use or function to the app. Bundling in too many design elements can leave it feeling bulky and will feel unintuitive.

Apple?s own User Interface Guidelines suggest that to make an app that people will care about, app developers should focus on the primary task, elevate the content that people care about, think about how a smartphone screen is viewed in different environments, to give users a logical path to follow and make usage easy and obvious ? to name a few.

Photo applications are excellent proponents of Apple?s ideas, shaping experiences that make users care about the processes associated with sharing their photos. Take Path for example; on the iPhone, the application instantly loads photos taken by friends (elevating the content that people care about), emphasis is placed on a green camera icon which provides the user with the opportunity to share their own photos (focus on the primary task) and annotates each of the options on the toolbar (to make usage easy and obvious) and showcase other parts of the app.

The Path team realises that its users can only see one screen at a time and makes excellent use of categories to separate content. Because users will never want to access content simultaneously, developers need to ensure that different parts of the application can be accessed sequentially, giving necessary focus to each feature to ensure users understand what it required of them and highlight tools the app can actually provide.

Some applications by their very nature have numerous features that even the best designer will find hard to adequately incorporate without confusing some its users. Path tags people, places and things in each photo, incorporates moods, adds filters and allows other users to comment and like a user?s photos ? it needs to highlight these features without taking too much away from the photo-capturing process.

To assist fluid navigation, Path?s developers have kept onscreen help to a minimum whilst retains the standard icons and buttons that a user will be familiar with in other applications, so they instantly know how to use the app. We take it for granted but the use of back buttons, cancel buttons and home buttons within an app help us retrace our steps and find the place we ideally want to be.

Path excels because it not only looks good, the number of options it provides are smartly labelled and organised so that a user never feels overwhelmed using it. Whilst the application hasn?t got quite the following of its rival Instagram, the Path team continue to iterate the product to walk its own Path (see what I did there?) and entertain its own large userbase.

Play To The Strengths Of Mobile

A presentation by Nick Watt suggests a good app ?plays to the strengths of mobile?. In his eyes, this consists of five things: Communications, Spontaneous, Geo-sensitive, Short periods of use and Focused activity.

Shazam is a music discovery application that utilises a smartphones microphone to listen to ambient music and correctly identify it. The application passed 100 million users in December 2010 and continues to add thousands each day via its free and paid apps.

It is a great example that utilises the principles Watt outlines, encapsulating each one in its own way within the app.

The beauty of Shazam is that it isn?t a regularly used application, but it serves a purpose that could be much more important than a number of other apps on a user?s smartphone.

Upon launch, Shazam immediately displays a giant Shazam logo and asks the user to tap the screen to begin. If a track is playing on the radio, the user has no idea when the song could be changed or a DJ will start to talk over the track, so time is of the essence. Shazam wastes no time, elements are minimal and the main feature of the app is displayed front and centre, conveying a very simple but effective call to action.

The app will keep a log of each track it correctly tags, allowing the user to immediately quit the app after successfully identifying a song. However, the addition of options to buy, listen or share a track via Twitter or Facebook increases app interaction time, increasing the likelihood of bringing the user back to the app to grab the name of the track many days/weeks/months after it was first tagged.

Shazam started a text messaging service that would identify music many years before smartphones came to market. The company hasn?t changed the service it provides, it has simply adapted the way users can interact with it. The Shazam app is simple in design ? because it needs to be ? any additional elements could impede users in their attempt to quickly tag a track.

Travel applications also keep things simple, obtaining a user?s location to suggest the best route to a predefined destination. An app that maps of the London Underground or the New York Subway can operate purely on its own; the user simply states the station they are at and the place they need to disembark, the app will crunch data locally and suggest a route without needing Internet connection or location input.

Adapt To A User?s Needs

Creating a successful app is one thing, maintaining that success is the real headache for developers.

With app downloads come app updates; a way for developers to submit fixes for their apps, introduce new features and streamline the way it operates. An app user may have paid a full 59 pence for an app but they will want far more in the way of support and feature iterations if a developer wants them to stay loyal to their brand or their specific set of applications.

Angry Birds is the most successful app on any platform, recently hitting the 250 million app downloads milestone and is now downloaded over one million times each day. The franchise hit the heights it did because not only was it a fantastically fun game to play, Rovio works tirelessly to release updates to the game, completely free of charge, to keep its customers satisfied.

Today, there maybe five Angry Birds apps on the App Store but at the start, Rovio had to find a way to get its customers to return to the app. Rovio?s idea was to introduce a scoring system that would reward users based on how sparingly they used birds to complete levels. This ended up being a scoring system that utilised stars, issuing the maximum amount of stars should a player destroy the evil pigs with a lower-than-expected amount of birds.

If a user completed the game without getting three stars on each level, you can bet a large percentage kept coming back until they did.

Once gamers had scored three stars on each level and effectively completed the game, Rovio might have hoped that they would come back to the game and play it over again, much as a console gamer would do with an older title. Instead, the Finnish game developer rolled out level updates to existing customers, completely free-of-charge to keep Angry Birds fresh in their minds and increase the chances of that person recommending the game to their friends and family.

As new titles became available, those customers ? fuelled by a desire to obtain three stars on new levels ? would instantly buy the new games, effectively starting the same cycle but with a slightly different version of the game.

Rodrigo Coutinho writing on the Outsystems blog says that apps need to be ?easy to change?:

Great apps are evergreen. Even if in subtle ways, they?re always improving and adapting to the latest requirements. To build a great app, you need to make sure your application can change as fast as your users? needs.

Rovio has embodied that approach, but many other application developers consistently update applications to appease their users. Adding a new feature might make sense at the time, but if it is incorporated and the user?s don?t like it, the developer needs to be ready to adapt and update as quickly as possible to maintain good relationships with their customers.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, a smartphone owner can quite as easily delete an app and move to a rival which is more understanding to its users? needs.

Know Your Market

App developers need to be aware of the market they operate. We have spoken to people who say some apps are lucky because they were featured on Apple?s Featured listings on the App Store, when their app didn?t.

When Tweetbot launched ? to considerable praise ? its makers knew that if they wanted to capitalise on the successful launch of the app, they would need to incentivise casual users to download and install the app. With this in mind, the team dropped the price of the application by a dollar and market the reduction as a special introductory price.

The team then took to Twitter and its blog, keeping their followers updated as to the progress it was making on updates it was scheduled to roll out. Over time, the team would tease new releases hours before they were due to hit the App Store, in an attempt to generate buzz, ensuring that news of the updates would proliferate across various social networks and tempt even those who had not yet downloaded the app but were aware of what it could do.

It?s most recent update saw Tweetbot finally get Push Notifications. News of the feature was posted to the developer?s Twitter accounts and when it became available, the 1,000 invitations were snapped up within minutes.

It took the makers of Tweetbot three months, but the application has returned to its original price, now that millions of existing users are willing to sing its praises to those that will listen.

Coming back to Rovio, it knew that smartphone owners on different platforms interacted differently with apps, with iOS device owners not only downloading more apps but paying more for them. The team did its research and launched an Android port ? for free ? because it knew Android handset owners weren?t as spend-happy as their iOS counterparts, choosing instead to integrate an advertising model that at one point was said to be earning the company $1 million a month (possibly more now).

Conclusion

There is no magic formula to app success; it always needs a good ? if not unique ? idea to make the hundreds of millions of smartphone owners take notice. However, a good understanding of what users will expect from an app is paramount, developers cannot expect people using their app to suddenly adopt new menu structures and use buttons that do not fit with the platform they are running.

The app market is still in its infancy, it could be said for smartphones in general ? as new technologies make their way into mobile phones and into our pockets, the scope of what apps will be able to achieve in the near future is mindnumbing.

Consumers want something that can reduce the time to undertake something or entertain them when they are bored. It?s up to the developer to assess what is missing on the app market and make their idea it a reality. Innovation breeds success in a variety of markets but it will especially pay off in the world of digital apps.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials

Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/07/16/mobile-apps-a-look-at-what-makes-a-good-app-great/

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