Here’s why PC giants like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and everyone else all want a piece of the smartphone market: By the end of 2011, worldwide smartphone sales will pass worldwide PC sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimates, approaching 400 million annual shipments of each.
Silicon Alley Insider
How did Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users discover the 1.5 billion apps they downloaded before July 14, 2009?
Mostly by browsing and searching, according to a survey of 190 users conducted by mobile advertising firm AdMob. That’s not a shock, but we were surprised to learn that 20% of respondents said they learned about new apps from ads in other apps. (Of course, it benefits AdMob, the conductor of the survey, to point this out.)
See the chart above for the rest of the break-out. Note that AdMob asked respondents to “check all that apply.”
HONG KONG, China (CNN) — Are comics made to be read on cell phones, Kindles and iPods the new pulp of pop culture?
Argentinean artist Sergio Carrera’s “The Eternal City” has gained fans around the world.
While mobile manga has become increasingly popular and lucrative in Japan, in recent months start-ups have been mushrooming around the world to bring comics and graphic novels to both loyal fans and new audiences — all in the palm of your hand.
“I wanted to break all the barriers between comics and their potential readers,” said Hermes Pique, director of Robot Comics, a company that produces and publishes comics for mobile devices.
“In a world where 60.6 percent of the population has a mobile, and where mobiles have evolved from phones to all-purpose gadgets, mobile comics seemed the best way to start.”
Apple’s App Store, a hotbed for mobile innovation, has seen an increase in applications dedicated to reading comics, many of which are also available for other mobile platforms.
Among these, several offer digitized titles from top U.S. comics publishers such as DC Comics and IDW, while Dark Horse has even launched its own series of iPhone comics.
Comic series, like their print counterparts, are usually divided into parts, which in the App Store sell from $0.99 to a few dollars or more for graphic novels. The first installment is sometimes offered as a free preview.
The mobile Kindle reader can display e-versions of graphic novels (albeit optimized for the larger-screen Kindle DX), as can other mass-market e-readers such as Barnes & Noble and Stanza.
Independent developers have also been finding ways to get comics on to handheld devices, from applications that display comics through RSS feeds to others that convert online comics for mobile reading.
If getting the comics onto these devices is one challenge, another is to improve the on-screen experience, evolving from straightforward zoom-and-scroll browsing to more sophisticated navigation.
Some readers offer panel-to-panel transitions that appear to simulate the visual movement of reading a comic book, while other companies work with the artist to optimize each panel of the story specifically for the mobile screen.
And in France, where comics and graphic novels are known as the 9th art form, 2006 Angouleme Grand Prize winner Lewis Trondheim’s “Bludzee,” produced by Ave!Comics, will launch its daily made-for-mobile “strip” on September 1, 2009 — simultaneously in 19 languages and available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia.
So it seems that for this generation of comic artists, interface designers and content creators of all kinds, when it comes to telling stories on mobile screens, they’re spoiled for choice.
(this piece also appeared on Silicon Alley Insider)
As a number obsessed techie and ex-management consultant, market sizing and research were a big part of my launch preparations for Exit Strategy NYC. Since launch, I’ve received many questions from people struggling to estimate the market for their iPhone app ideas.
I’ve put together this document as a guide for entrepreneurs considering developing an app. Below, I’ve compiled some up-to-date numbers about Apple devices. I’ve also laid out a framework for estimating what kind of sales can be expected from a paid app.
Right off the bat, there’s a few back of the envelope calculations to make: 54% of the 45M devices are in the US which means ~ 25M devices. The US has about 300M people. That means about 8% of the general American population has one of these devices.
How To Use These NumbersCombine this data with your own numbers about how large of a market your product is addressing. For Exit Strategy NYC, our addressable market consists of all subway riding New Yorkers. In 2008, there were about 5M weekday riders and about 3M Saturday riders [MTA's ridership numbers]. The Saturday number is the more relevant one as it better captures subway usage by NYC residents rather than regional commuters. Neither number counts unique riders though, and given that there are 8M residents of NYC our addressable market size is probably somewhere in between these numbers. Let’s say 6M subway riders.
New Yorkers probably skew more techie than average, so let’s assume 10% (rather than 8%) have an Apple device. Also, Exit Strategy NYC works on both iPhone and iPod Touch devices. If your app requires phone/gps/camera/internet to work well, exclude iPod Touch users from your calculations.
How many Apple device toting subway riding New Yorkers are there? Well 6M subway riders with 10% penetration = 600,000 potential users.
Entrepreneurs are optimists by nature, and it’s tempting to think that 100% of people will buy your product. After all, your product is awesome, right? But reality is a quite different story. In fact, only about 3% of users have purchased the most popular paid apps. To determine that number, I used sales figures from one of the all time best selling paid apps, Firemint’s Flight Control game. According to Firemint’s Alexandra Peters, sales to date have been 1.4 million. As a percentage of the 45M Apple devices, this is ~ 3%.
You should expect a similar upper bound of 3% to apply to whatever market vertical you’re addressing. Of course it’s possible that your app meets some crucial compelling need and therefore achieves a higher penetration rate in your vertical. But don’t count on it — it’s equally possible that your app gets lost in the noise and can’t get traction. Flight control has held a constant spot on the top paid app list for months now. Few others have this advantage.
Returning to the Exit Strategy NYC figures, we knew that if we had an effective marketing and press strategy, we could probably achieve something close to this 3% penetration figure — perhaps higher as many New Yorkers are very passionate about the subway (see? there’s that ever-present entrepreneurial optimism!). 3% of the 600,000 subway riding devices would mean 18,000 unit sales. Does this translate to $18,000 total sales? Our maximum penetration figure was based on a 99c app, but what effect would Exit Strategy NYC’s $1.99 or $2.99 price point have on total sales figures?
Factoring in price into market sizing is difficult. Based on our own informal market surveying, we estimated that the most profitable price point would be $2.99 or $1.99. Around 75% of people willing to pay 99c would also pay $1.99 or $2.99. So 75% of 18,000 units at those prices works out to an ballpark range of around $27k – $40k. Like all software, the app’s unit costs are zero, it’s important to focus on maximizing dollar sales rather than unit sales.
One thing to remember is that the user base for apps is growing by leaps and bounds. In their latest quarter, Apple sold 5 million iPhones and 3 million iPod Touches. This means that the potential market for an app grew by more than 20% in only 3 months!
One last thing to note: The iPhone certainly dominates headlines, but it’s not the only game in town. In fact, Blackberry outsells the iPhone every day. And in a town dominated by Wall Street, it seems like everyone and their mother owns a Blackberry. Realizing this, we carefully designed Exit Strategy NYC to be easily portable across different mobile platforms. Our app is available for iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry Bold, Curve, and Storm, Android Phones, and even as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. Combined, the Exit Strategy App reaches a significant portion of New Yorkers.
But are device sales a good indicator of a platform’s expected app sales?
