BrightSight Group speaker and co-author of I Hate People (with Marc Hershon) is featured in BusinessWeek’s Innovation blog written by Reena Jana.

There is an excellent article in Business Week (April 6, 2009 print edition) this week on Mobile App Store wars by Reena Jana and Peter Burrows. Below is a summary with some additional comments by us. At the end we make some mobile app market share predictions for 2011 and suggest some strategic ideas :

Business Week article (“An All-Out Online Assault on the iPhone”) :

RIM, Nokia, Microsoft and Palm are planning an assault on the Apple’s Red-hot App Store by launching their own App Stores for mobile phones. Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of RIM is set to launch BlackBerry App World at this week’s CTIA in Vegas. App World will have minimum pricing of $2.99 per app and will provide 80% of the dev revenue to the developer vs Apple’s 70% rev sharing. This is bound to entice more serious App Store developers who like the higher cut in case of BlackBerry. Moreover the latter is more prominent in the corporate circles so is likely to get corporate-minded developers. Mike McGuire of Gartner estimates that there will be significant threat to the Apple App Store with these plethora of App Store offerings. No wonder then that Apple has released an enhance iPhone 3.0 with tons of new functionality for iPhone developers. Rumors abound of a new iPhone device come June – Apple WWDC conf is around that time so a likely point for new hardware announcement.

Apple has created a new business model which these other Apple wannabe mobile firms want to copy now. While the simple mobile phone continues to take a hit from recession, the smartphone market is expected to jump from 139 million last year to 295 million in 2010, per Gartner. This will exceed the 300 million-unit PC market in due course. If not for netbooks, PC market is set to be outpaced by mobile phones in few years.

RIM is not a newbie to mobile app market. It has seen download of its application kit 100,000 times and there are BlackBerry apps for QuickBooks and clinical apps. However BlackBerry does not have a consolidated site strategy where the applications are hosted and distributed leading to Apple being a first in the most intuitive delivery strategy.

Well, Apple is way ahead for now. It remains to be seen if others can catch up in Mobile apps or Mobile Web world. Nokia, RIM and others sell far more phones than Apple but iPhone growth continues to defy gravity giving a shiver to the other entrenched mobile players. Who imagined that a formidable and innovative firm like Nokia would have to worry about a new-to-town cellphone maker ?

Apple App Store has 25,000 apps which span the spectrum of uses. Santoshi Nakajima, president of photo editing startup Big Canvas claims that they don’t even bother with non-iPhone App stores. iPhone is that strong in hearts and minds of developers. Many developers say that Apple’s real edge is in providing the tools to help them build cool, innovative programs. Mark Woolen, an Oracle VP claims that they make apps for both BlackBerry and iPhone but iPhone offers a more elegant approach to app development over mobile phones.

The good thing is that this competition is great. It is bound to fuel innovation among mobile phone developers. Microsoft strategy is to offer Windows mobile phones which work seamlessly with its Windows OS (yawn!@), Nokia Ovi Store, scheduled to open in May, is adopting a creative approach – it will offer content based on user’s tastes, location and friend’s recommendations. Nokia is trying to offer personalization in app search and delivery. Interesting.

It is all good. We look forward to these app store wars. May the best win and may innovation thrive…

Now some predictions from CellStrat for next 1-2 years :

Strategy for success for Mobile App Stores :

We believe with these ideas, non-iPhone App Stores can cause some dent in iPhone App market.

5 questions in 5 min = a big +1 for Jane

WWO’s own Participation Architect, Jane McGonigal, continues her business-of-ARGs evangelism in this article in Businessweek, and answers five questions posed by Businessweek about Alternate Reality Games in this 6-min video. As Jane notes, it’s important for businesses to take note of and get involved with the sort of massively peer-peer learning, collaborative brainstorming, and shaping of win-win futures that alternate reality games can spark – not just for their own business success but for the improvement of quality of life in general. Or as Jane puts it, “increasing the odds of us collaboratively inventing a future that we all want to live in.” Go Jane!

Originally posted on Slice.

About two years out of college, I’ve started attending panels and discussions. There’s so much to be learned, and with marketing and communications moving at such a fast pace, I realized that my education has just begun. Surprisingly, I’m enjoying the quest.

Last night’s panel at Swissnex, a forum dedicated to connecting Swiss companies with those on the West Coast, the topic was innovation and design and their contribution and sustainability of big business, a.k.a. the Fortune 500. Reena Jana from BusinessWeek did an excellent job moderating.

GM was brought up as the old dinosaur that lacked the processes to change, while GE became the epitome of companies who transformed it’s corporates structure to be able to continually innovate.

[Photo via Baia's Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.]

The point that stuck was that from a designer’s perspective, good innovation is something that the customers and designers both wanted. It’s the glue that held business and sustainability and marketing and engineering. I don’t necessarily agree. The struggle with marketing and engineering is that what the customers want doesn’t always overlap with why the engineers want to create. Of course, customers don’t always know what they want. Until BOSE designed super small speakers, their audience didn’t think it was an option. So how can companies know what’s the next best thing?

All the panelists agreed that focus groups and customer surveys rarely make a good indicator of if the product will do well in the market place. And just because a small group of evangelists at the company love the idea doesn’t necessarily correlate to a stellar sales record.

[Photo via Baia's Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.]

It’s a problem the companies deal with on a daily basis. Is there a one size fits all solution? Or will some companies follow the suggestions on the market, while others like BOSE and Apple simply continue forging ahead and presenting their audience with what they think the people want?

Post by Jany Xu

About two years out of college, I’ve started attending panels and discussions. There’s so much to be learned, and with marketing and communications moving at such a fast pace, I realized that my education has just begun. Surprisingly, I’m enjoying the quest.

Last night’s panel at Swissnex, a forum dedicated to connecting Swiss companies with those on the West Coast, the topic was innovation and design and their contribution and sustainability of big business, a.k.a. the Fortune 500. Reena Jana from BusinessWeek did an excellent job moderating.

GM was brought up as the old dinosaur that lacked the processes to change, while GE became the epitome of companies who transformed it’s corporates structure to be able to continually innovate.

[Photo via Baia's Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.]

The point that stuck was that from a designer’s perspective, good innovation is something that the customers and designers both wanted. It’s the glue that held business and sustainability and marketing and engineering. I don’t necessarily agree. The struggle with marketing and engineering is that what the customers want doesn’t always overlap with why the engineers want to create. Of course, customers don’t always know what they want. Until BOSE designed super small speakers, their audience didn’t think it was an option. So how can companies know what’s the next best thing?

All the panelists agreed that focus groups and customer surveys rarely make a good indicator of if the product will do well in the market place. And just because a small group of evangelists at the company love the idea doesn’t necessarily correlate to a stellar sales record.

[Photo via Baia's Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.]

It’s a problem the companies deal with on a daily basis. Is there a one size fits all solution? Or will some companies follow the suggestions on the market, while others like BOSE and Apple simply continue forging ahead and presenting their audience with what they think the people want?