Posts tagged tech

it is the interest graph that defines the middle ground between Google and Facebook — between search, advertising, and the social graph. I think we can be sure that whoever can collect a record of your current interests and package them for advertisers stands to make a lot of money.
And what all this means for SaaS companies remains to be seen as well. We’ve heard reports of those apps getting rejected as well on the grounds that they don’t use Apple’s in-app payment solution. But these apps aren’t technically offering content, just access. Does that fall under the realm of Apple’s new policies? It seems like that may be the case on the same grounds — Apple built the system and it will bring in more paying customers — but it’s not yet clear.

Crowd Fusion the technology behind The Daily

The Crowd Fusion website is out of date, latest item in the “news stream” is from March 23, 2010. No mention of The Daily. It does seem like their CMS is built on PHP.

Notes from the iKids conference

iKids, a one-day conference “that will help you bridge the gap between your kids entertainment properties and app revenue through better planning, better partners and better execution”.

Building your App-titude, Sarah Berliner, vp of content, ScrollMotion

  • iPad changing everything, but content is still king
  • content companies going back to the vault, bringing new life from existing content
  • ScrollMotion: in 2010 moved away from objective c to HTML5, build once and reuse, wrap your content bundle for each platform
  • App store is scalable and global
  • iPad apps command higher prices than iPhone apps; trend is to build universal apps, iPhone users will spend the extra $1
  • Analytics is growing in importance, tracking page views but also duration of actions
  • Aim to enable sync between devices and platforms
  • Apps as destinations, update with new content, invest in updating, and enable in-app purchasing
  • this year may bring UI best practices 

Where It’s At: The Current Landscape
Scott Chambers, svp of worldwide media distribution, Sesame Workshop:

Of all the paid assets [Sesame Workshop] has on iTunes 7% are apps that make up 45% of the revenue.

  • 15K to 150K per app to build, no correlation necessarily between success and cost to build; never entirely sure if success is because we spent more money or because Apple decided to promote the app
  • “juice-proof” devices, that can withstand a child spilling their orange juice on it

Josh Koppel, founder and chief creative officer, ScrollMotion:

  • iPad is complete game-changer
  • best way to sell an app is with an app, example is Sesame Store inside their app

Shai Samet, founder and president, kidSAFE Seal Program:

  • if you use data to up-sell or cross-sell than you need to properly inform parents and kids ahead of time

The Connected Consumer, Jerry Rocha, vp of mobile media, The Nielson Company

  • Length of sessions / engagement on iPad is 2.7x greater than on iPhone
  • 13-17 year olds are the demographic with the greatest percentage of tablet usage
  • year over year SMS usage is down and twitter and instant message usage are up with kids
  • 40% of kids below the age of 10 have a phone
  • magazine usage by platform: 25% iPad, 20% Kindle, 20% Nook

Case Study: Dr. Suess eBook Apps, Michel Kripalani, president, Oceanhouse Media

  • building a single app is dangerous, by building more apps you have a better chance of being found on the App store
  • building an app or a brand strategy?
  • simplify; are you spending your time and money on the right features?; identify your directive (i.e., help kids learn how to read) and stick to it
  • monitor file size of your apps to encourage faster downloads and easier installs
  • app cannot crash
  • build for 5 stars or don’t ship
  • how much will you lose by limiting your platform options? iPad, iPhone, Android….
  • Oceanhouse Media: license model, we publish the apps under our name; turn down all work for hire
  • book recommendations: “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Andersen
  • other companies doing interesting work: Loud Crow, Ideal Binary, Random House with “How Rocket Learned to Read

Case Study: Angry Birds, Claes Kalborg, svp of brand and licensing strategies, Rovio Mobile

  • the free Android version of Angry Birds which is ad-supported makes one million per month; better than iOS paid version
  • PSP version coming in a couple of weeks
  • when they venture into TV, they will not go the traditional route of 52 half hours
  • Angry Birds was a $100K initial investment, didn’t dream it would be this big
Of all the paid assets [Sesame Workshop] has on iTunes 7% are apps which make up 45% of the revenue.
Scott Chambers, SVP of worldwide media distribution, Sesame Workshop, speaking at iKids.kidscreen.com conference
Chetan Sharma: By almost every metric, mobile outperforms all other media. Since the mobile device is with the user all the time, the opportunity for engagement is maximized. Since mobile is context- and location-aware, advertisers don’t have to broadcast messages to anyone but their target, making their ad dollars work more efficiently. On top of the benefit of focus is the propensity to share.  The immediacy of the medium allows target users to share information much more quickly than the advertiser could ever do. A message about a brand or a product sent by a consumer to his or her social network carries a lot more weight than the same message coming from an advertiser. 

Chetan Sharma: By almost every metric, mobile outperforms all other media. Since the mobile device is with the user all the time, the opportunity for engagement is maximized. Since mobile is context- and location-aware, advertisers don’t have to broadcast messages to anyone but their target, making their ad dollars work more efficiently. On top of the benefit of focus is the propensity to share.  The immediacy of the medium allows target users to share information much more quickly than the advertiser could ever do. A message about a brand or a product sent by a consumer to his or her social network carries a lot more weight than the same message coming from an advertiser. 

5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings

 

Neil Patel: I used these simple tactics on sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, and around 30 of the top 100 blogs on the Internet and their traffic went up drastically.

  1. Your title tags have to be unique on every page and around 60 characters.
  2. Do not include your website name in all of your title tags, as this makes them seem more duplicate. Just include your website name in the title tags for your homepage, about page, contact page, and other generic pages.
  3. Your met description tag needs to be unique, represent the content on the page (don’t just stuff it with keywords), and contain around 25 or so words.

Developing Facebook's New Photo Viewer

In summary, we gave ourselves these requirements on the design:

  • There must be a minimum of 100 pixels below the image that is always visible for the caption and comments. This means shrinking the image to make room if the user’s display is too low resolution.
  • The lightbox must sit over the page and scroll if necessary, but the page underneath it must not change.
  • We need to be able to easily add new features and capabilities without having to change the APIs too.
  • We may forgo support for IE6 and default that browser to the old experience if the engineering work and loss in performance outweighs the gain from its support.
  • Use as little JavaScript as possible. 

Understanding node.js » Debuggable Ltd

“So you are saying I should write all my apps in node from now on?”

Yes and no. Once you start to swing the node hammer, everything is obviously going to start looking like a nail. But if you’re working on something with a deadline, you might want to base your decision on:

  • Are low response times / high concurrency important? Node is really good at that.
  • How big is the project? Small projects should be fine. Big projects should evaluate carefully (available libraries, resources to fix a bug or two upstream, etc.).