Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Today’s article on Mashable proves a prediction I made months ago about the superiority of native mobile phone applications over mobile web-based ones.

Mashable contends that the iPhone App Store means the eventual death of online web applications for iPhone. When it first launched iPhone, Apple had promoted the latter as the best way to develop applications for the device. Indeed, to install applications on iPhone, it had to be “jailbroken”, meaning modifications to the firmware had to be made. Says Mashable,

Apple was ostensibly under the impression that users wouldn’t mind using Safari to access applications and the lack of native software wouldn’t really matter. But after few people jumped on the bandwagon, it became abundantly clear that developers weren’t all that willing to jump on-board and more often than not, online applications were plagued with lag issues, few updates, and only simple games were available.

Of course, the real proof that people hated online applications materialized in the form of a cottage industry that revolved around unlocking the iPhone. And as the number of people who wanted to be able to add native applications to their iPhone grew exponentially throughout the year, Apple was forced to make a move (to launching the App Store).

Back in April, I had said,

That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally… the reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”).

The App Store is a wonderful thing to happen for the mobile application industry in general. As Robert Scoble says, “The new things (apps) available for the iPhone are just years ahead of other phones.” Developers of mobile applications for other phones (Nokia S60, Samsung smartphones) will inevitably copy the functionality, usability and revenue models of these applications for iPhone. Perhaps other handset manufacturers will also get into the business of hosting and selling high-quality mobile applications. I think Nokia has already begun to do this, but  the experience is rather fragmented.

What do we put online today? What sort of people put all those things online? Is there a pattern? And is there a way you can figure out whom to target with your web startup? (And how much money you need to make from each user?)

We began leaving a data trail online with email in the late 90s with Hotmail, all the way to actual videos with YouTube. Major landmarks were search history with Yahoo! and then Google, and profile information with Myspace (and then Orkut and FB).  Today we put not only text, but photos, music, video, maps online.

Kinds of online data

On a whim, I began to list the kinds of things we put online today, and began thinking of what sort of users put what sort of stuff online. I quickly realized the obvious – the most enthusiastic folks put the most kinds of data (not necessarily the most either in terms of volume or monetizable value) online.  So I grouped the kinds of things by who would most likely put them on the web. This is another way of looking at looking at the state of adoption of several web applications by the online population. Here is the grouping I made (Click on the picture for a larger image):

Skeptics/Laggards are the vast majority of Internet users – they use one email account to stay in touch with friends and relatives occasionally, browse and search the web, and that’s pretty much it.

The Mainstream have a MySpace/FB account, use chat clients, share photo albums and make the occasional Amazon purchase.

Early Adopters (in addition to the above) might write a blog and comment on other blogs, use Twitter, use an RSS Reader, and have an iTunes Music Store account.

And pushing the envelope are the Enthusiasts. They create rich digital content – videos on YouTube, perhaps streamed live or uploaded from a mobile device,  or create custom maps, or simultaneously work on documents with Zoho/Google Docs, or backup online with Amazon’s S3.

Thoughts on monetizing these groups

This grouping made me recall Adam Smith’s (of Xobni fame) post on User Bases and Pricing. I’d recommend you read it after this post. In a nutshell, the number of Laggards > Mainstream > Early Adopters > Enthusiasts. Therefore,  to reach a certain revenue figure (revenues = users x per-user-revenue), your product will need to have high per-user-revenues if it is in the rich content space whose creators (and consumers) are primarily enthusiasts – since their numbers are small [1]. On the other hand, firms like Google (search), Xobni (email), Soocial (contacts management) can live with tiny per-user-revenues.

What category do you think you fall in? Do you put some kind of data online that I haven’t included here?

[1] This is regardless of whether you make money by charging users themselves, or through other parties such as advertisers.