Stephen King to speak at Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2009

Mob4Hire CEO, Stephen King, has been selected to speak at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2009 in London on Oct 27 and 28th.

Stephen draws on his 25 years of software development experience to apply traditional software user feedback techniques to mobile development. His topic "From Concept to Commercialization," is all about making great software. Great software leads to “stickiness”; increased customer loyalty to your brand (also known as "going viral"). In a world where developers have limited marketing budgets, they must rely on a great user experience so that people will tell their friends and post great reviews.

In short, you can't make great software without users!

Celebrating Wavefront's Grand Opening!

We've been a partner with Wavefront (http://www.wavefrontac.com) for awhile, and we couldn't be happier than to congratulate them on the grand opening of their new facility in Vancouver. It's a great focal point for the thriving mobile scene in Vancouver, and should be a good thing to check out in 2010 at Mobile Monday's global conference in May.

A couple great blogs popped up on the announcement regarding the Wavefront announcement (and Mob4Hire partnership):

http://www2.canada.com/theprovince/news/money/story.html?id=734cd099-6c50-41ba-b2a4-4e8b62cba889

http://www.mediacastermagazine.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?aid=1000338220

"Wavefront is developing partnerships to address the spectrum of testing scenarios which differ for each developer based on their stage in the mobile development process," said James Maynard, President of Wavefront. "Our partnership with Mob4Hire is giving developers a way to test their mobile applications, leveraging location and language specific data."

"As part of the Wavefront community, mobile developers in B.C. can work with Mob4Hire to assess how their application performs on live operator networks during peak usage times. Although developers can access many solutions that simulate these network conditions, testing on a live network and gaining real user feedback is invaluable in determining the technical capabilities of an application," said Stephen King, CEO at Mob4Hire.

Congrats to James Maynard and his whole team on the new 7,000 sq ft. digs!

5 Million Mobile Apps by 2014

Apple iPhone app store has over 1.5 billion downloads. Android is on fire and gaining on new apps (2,300 as of March). All the big handset players, Motorola, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, Apple, RIM are trying to make it easier for developers to get apps to their handsets. Operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft Mobile are pushing ahead to make themselves better and easier. External data suppliers like NAVTEQ are doing very well and have their own developer communities.

A new report from Frost and Sullivan predicts the number of downloads of apps is 6.67 Billion downloads by 2014 ( I think this is conservative).

But even at this early stage of mobile apps, discoverability is a big problem. This means that it's not only the number of downloads that's interesting, but it's also the number of apps.

I saw online an interesting site recently that could make things even more interesting for mobile apps.

iLike will generate apps for bands. These iphone apps will allow bands to show their blog, band pictures and allow fans to download their music via iTunes.

Think about it… Your own personalized app available from the app store.

Hmmmmm

Apple has around 65,000 apps right now (I estimate 100,000 by the end of the year).

It is hard right now to think about not just about the number of downloads but the number of individual apps that will be available.

With services like iLike, I believe that their will be many millions of individualized apps available within the next few years.

I am going to stick my neck out here.

I believe there will be approximately 5 million individual mobile apps by 2014.

Apps will follow the rule of the Long Tail

The apps that will win will have big marketing budgets behind them and they will be excellent apps in regards to UI and usability. There will many small apps out there with niches. Those apps will rely on word-of-mouth, and the best way for that is to make an excellent mobile app.

How do you make an excellent mobile app? You need to ask people … lots of people what they think. You need to listen to people and get their feedback.

And you need to find this out before you launch the app. If you have a bad app, people will rank your app very poorly and all the work you put in will be lost. People will not download a badly ranked app. Best to find out at the alpha (pre porting stage) and Beta (post porting stage) before you launch.

I look forward to my own personal app. And I bet you do too.

Paul

P.S. BTW, we' at booth 106 at the CTIA San Diego show in October in the Developer's Pavillion ... come by and see us!

Meet Shaun ... our new Community Manager

Hi everyone:

It happens in the evolution of all successful online communities ... a person who is solely dedicated to managing the community. Answering questions. Providing resources. Helping out with recruiting. Making sure everyone feels welcome. Now that we've reached 17,000 testers and over 600+ mobile developers in the community, it's time!

We're excited to welcome Shaun King to our team as Community Manager. Email info@mob4hire.com if you want to say hi! Shaun's got a background in both computer science as well as business and marketing.

In addition to all the above, he'll also be reviewing Test Plans posted by Developers to help them get the best results, and generally making the community run smoothly.

Welcome to the Mob, Shaun!

Exciting things happening for Mob4Hire this fall; we're hard at work this summer! Stay tuned ...

Stephen