iakttakelser (observations)

iPhone vs. Android | Facebook vs. Groupon... Today I wanted to show you a complete infographic created by Lucid Agency that depicts how the mobile and app market is doing now and how it's supposed to be doing in the upcoming years. A few observations: - Apple is still market leader as far as apps is concerned - Almost 100 million smartphones were sold in the first quarter 2011 - Subscriptions are growing and growing. As you know, iFacturas will be based on a subscription model very soon. Seems this is the most comfortable way to try and trust an app developer. - Loyalty to Apple devices is still higher than Android, but loyalty to this last OS is growing. Are you an iPhoner or a Droider ?

Mobile banking is in the Early Majority phase. That's nice! A post from mFoundry Blog by Drew Sievers has the whole story . Here is a part: Rapid Growth There are two ways to evaluate the success of mobile banking: the number of financial institutions offering the service, and/or the number of customers using the offering. A combination of absolute growth numbers and velocity can give you a decent view into the market health. Users At mFoundry, we’ve been watching user adoption increase by double digit percentage points every month, meaning that we’re looking at wicked fast year-over-year growth. Are we unusual in this regard? Of course I’d like to think that we’re something special, but there is evidence from a variety of other sources that the mobile banking market is humming along quite nicely. In fact, a recent survey from comScore shows that mobile financial account users surged by 54% to 30 million Americans in the past year. Most of the growth is, not surprisingly, ...

I've bought 14 photo apps on iPhone of which you can see 12 above here. The two apps I use dayli are QuickCam and Instagram. When I have 3G access, that's when I'm in Norway, I tend to use Instagram most. But when  abroad I use QuickCam. For three reasons: It's starts blistering fast. 1 sec. faster than Apple own photo app. It shoots fast. Well, I just click and there it is. No delay and waiting. It shoots repeated images as fast as a machine gun. So it's all come done to speed, which I find quite interesting as an app developer. And the prize is right - one buck! A post from Two Teeth Technologies by has more : Why QuickCam? As my daughter has grown, I've been amazed by how easy it is to take photographs and videos of her anytime, anywhere.  With a 5MP / HD Video camera in my pocket at all times,  I haven't missed much in her first 17 months.  But I certainly learned the limitations of iPhone camera apps.  The slow startup of the default camer...

A post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) by Mike Schramm has the whole story . Here is a part: The iFund has been pretty influential  ever since it was announced a couple years ago  -- it's a pool of money set up by Apple and a few other companies to support and grow companies that are contributing to the iOS ecosystem. It's been  growing along with Apple's platform , and now the fund has made its first contribution to an enterprise developer.  Apperian is a company  that helps enterprises create and deploy their own mobile apps, and it's  picked up $9.5 million in a round of funding  that includes money from the iFund.

Intuit can pay it's user in 2-3 days. That's in comparision to Square who use 30 days. That's because of Intuits experience in fraud detection. A post from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld has the whole story . Here is a part: Mobile payments are finally taking off right now. But it is  not mobile wallets  for consumers with NFC-chipped mobile phones leading the way. It is payment apps for small merchants like those made by  Square  and Intuit’s GoPayment . Tonight at an Intuit showcase in New York City, I got a sneak peak at several new Intuit products still in development, including an upcoming GoPayment tablet app that aims to replace the cash register for small businesses, Intuit 401k, and an iPad Check-in app for doctor’s offices.   The GoPayment app will work on both the iPad and Android tablets In addition to taking credit card payments with a swiper that plugs into the headphone jack, it also lets merchants set up a cash register with their own pro...

The post discuss Flipboard and Newsy, two news apps I've been using for quite a time. Of the two, Flipboard, is the one I use most. I use it mainly to find posts in Twitter and Facebook that I've missed. A post from ReadWriteWeb by Richard MacManus has the whole story . Here is a part: What Makes Flipboard Better Than Other News Apps? One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad's unique functionality was  Flipboard . A self-styled "social magazine," Flipboard allows users to browse news and other content using a sophisticated but easy-to-use user interface. In fact earlier this month, Flipboard upgraded its UI to an even slicker, faster version. When I think about what makes Flipboard a better user experience than the news apps of traditional media like The New York Times and Washington Post, there are two things that stand out. The first is that it's simply a pleasing experience to flip through stories using Flipboard's hand-swiping page t...

This rise of mobile internet will inevetiably let the same happen with ERP and other finance applications. A post from mFoundry Blog by Carlo Cardilli has the whole story . Here is a part: Mobile apps seem to be everywhere these days.   Angry Birds , anyone?  But how does the app craze translate to the drier world of mobile banking? From a macro view, some pundits always expected a strong shift to apps because the browser was “just a phase” and its best days were behind it.  For example, Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine editor of “ The Long Tail ” fame) penned a controversial essay last summer: “ The Web is Dead ”, or Farhad Manjoo’s “ Will the Web Have a Place in a World Full of Apps? ”.  Anderson reproduced an interesting graphic from Cisco that shows bandwidth usage being dominated by non-browser communications: Recent data from comScore  shows that the exact same trend is playing out in mobile banking today.  Over 36% of mobile banking users toda...

Almost every day I open Newsy. I like their reports from different medias. I now looking forward to beam their videos to my TV screen. They've also get a series B funding, and astoundishing little. They have to be very effective as a news broadcaster. $1.5M is just peanuts even for a Norwegian broadcaster. A post from TechCrunch by Rip Empson has the whole story . Here is a part: Newsy , a multisource video news service that analyzes the world’s news coverage, announced today that it has closed a $1.5 million series B round led by a St. Louis-based private equity firm. The second round adds to the $2.75 million in funding Newsy has already raised, bringing total investment to $4.25 million. The funding will be used to grow the company’s editorial, marketing and sales teams. As its name would suggest, Newsy is a news-destination service that monitors, analyzes, curates and presents the world’s news coverage. Through bite-sized 2 to 3 minute video segments, Newsy offers busy...

I expect Apple will follow suite, letting us try the apps before we buy them. Anyway, this is a huge feature on Googles behalf! A post from Engadget Mobile by Sean Hollister has the whole story . Here is a part: When  Amazon's Appstore rolled out last week , we glossed over one detail that merely seemed neat. Today, we're inclined to say that Test Drive may be the most significant part of Amazon's announcement that day. Basically, Test Drive allows US customers to take apps for a spin at Amazon.com, with all the comfort that their tried-and-true desktop web browser brings -- but rather than sit you down with a Flash-based mockup of the app, Amazon is giving you a taste of bona fide cloud computing with an Android virtual machine. In other words, what you're looking at in the screenshot above isn't just a single program, but an entire virtual Android smartphone with working mouse controls, where you can not only try out  Paper Toss , but also  delete  it, brow...

I would add, that if you ever looked for books in your own library, you would love this app. It's for Android however, so I cannot use it myself. But this is one of the best ideas I've heard on in many weeks! A post from ReadWriteWeb by Audrey Watters has the whole story . Here is a part: If you've ever worked in a library, you're familiar with the drudgery of shelf reading. That's the process of verifying that all the books on a shelf are in the right order, based on their call numbers. Books get out of order fairly easily, when they're taken off the shelf and examined, for example, or when they're just stuck in the wrong place. Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group ( MU ARRG ! - that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android's camera, the app "reads" a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay,...

What do you do if your you are not able to use you hands? Drop email, social media and news? No more. There is an app for that, and it is named Voice Brief! A post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) by Mel Martin the whole story . Here is a part: Want an assistant to help you keep up with your world and the world at large?  Voice Brief  might be just the thing. This US$1.99 app will read your Facebook updates, Twitter feed, email (with limitations), weather, schedule, stock prices that you follow, and even the latest news from RSS feeds of your choice. The voices are computerized, but very clear. There are four voices to choose from: an American male and female, and a British-accented male and female. You set up the app by giving it your location (for weather) and stocks you'd like to follow, pointing it to your iPhone calendar, and selecting some news feeds (I selected CNN and TUAW). Voice Brief also allows you to add custom sentences, like a personal greeting whe...

I have to admit I don't use mobile banking. For me, that's too risky. But bare over with me. Grandfathers should be allowed to some hick-ups, no? What really caught my interest is the driver, convenience , Porter was talking about. Mobile browser aren't that convenient. They hard to read and hard to navigate. Browsing is much more suitable on iPad and PC. So it's quite natural that apps are making mobile access more convenient. So convenience is key. It reminds me on some other areas where we are seing convenience as a huge driver: App Store for application distribution iTunes for distribution of electronic content like music and video Amazon and iBooks for distribution of ebooks App Store's In app purchase of newspapers like VG+, NYT and The Daily Apple Game Center for iOS Gaming Don't forget the smartphone and the tablets . When made good enough, their so convenient that we accept their limitations. I'm betting on that Enterprise Resource Pla...

Why do we love and use an app and not others. I agree with Om Malik that money doesn't buy me! @mortjac Morten Jacobsen likes Can't Buy Me Love by The Beatles on Ping  itun.es/i6x542   #iTunes 52 seco A post from GigaOM by Om Malik has the whole story . Here is a part: ...  Many entrepreneurs and their backers don’t quite give the proper weight to “attention.” If a new startup can carve out time in our Facebook- and Twitter-dominated, Cityville-playing, Lady Gaga-listening, Rebecca-Black-video-sharing day, then it should really be the one to watch. Instagr.am is one of those apps that managed to figure out a way to squeeze itself into our busy lives. It has several million users now, and only a few thousand of them are what would be described as technology insiders. Similarly,  Beluga  (acquired by Facebook),  Spotify ,  Evernote  and  Instapaper  have found a way to draw   attention (and thus usage) from its users. Do th...

Distimo monitor is a service making life easier for app providers. With their service I can see a combined curve of downloads for both our iPhone and WP7 apps. Obiously, they get an unique insight into the app market by helping the app developers. A post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) by Mike Schramm has the whole story . Here is a part: Distimo has released its latest publication, containing  an overview of the various app stores currently running , and the findings about  the Mac App Store  are quite interesting. While Apple's newest App Store is not quite up to the speed of the mobile platform, it's growing quickly -- the average top 300 Mac application generates roughly half the revenue of a top 300 iPad app. And there are other encouraging stats: the Mac App Store's average price (US$11.21) is by far the highest of the three stores, with the iPhone down at $1.57 and the iPad at $4.19. Two months after launch, the Mac App Store has 2,225 applications, wh...

I think I will try it! A post from VentureBeat by Matthew Lynley has the whole story . Here is a part: Mobile fitness tracking application  Endomondo  launched additional features geared toward making a social network for cardio training today and announced that it has raised $800,000 in a seed funding round at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla. It’s one of a new series of applications that are trying to turn fitness into a game by giving users the chance to compete with friends and earn points for their fitness achievements, such as Runmeter and Nike GPS+. Endomondo tracks runs, cycling circuits and other cardio exercises and records distance, time and a few other health elements. Users can then see how they match up with their friends through the app’s network. The company added voice feedback to the application, it announced today. The voice-over tells users how far they have run and, if they are competing, tells them how much faster or further they h...

There is nothing we have used so much time, as to decide how to set the prize for our apps. So reading a discussion on prizing is always welcome. A post from .com by has the whole story . Here is a part: One thing many companies — in any industry — can learn from Apple is the importance of simple pricing. If you make it easy for people to understand how much they’re paying, and what they’re paying for, it is more likely that they’ll buy it. Or perhaps this is driven more by the converse: if people are confused about how much they have to pay, they’re more likely not to. The decision to purchase and the act of paying are part of the experience for any product or service, and should be designed accordingly.  Not paying is always simple.  Those companies that succeed with complex pricing schemes tend to be those with no competition (e.g. cable companies and land-line phone services) or those with a limited number of competitors, all of whom offer similarly complex pricing s...

For less than 500 bucks you will get an test for an mobile app if it is English. A post from TechCrunch by Mike Butcher has the whole story . Here is a part: uTest  has a community of over 35,000 professional testers in 170 countries to help tech companies test out their web and mobile apps. But until now it’s the likes of Microsoft and Intuit who have mainly been able to afford these services rather than startups. But today it’s launching a more affordable version aimed at early stage startups and individual app developers. uTest Express  offers different plans and the ability to create a simple test case which testers will follow. Once the project scope is outlined, uTest then handpicks members of its tester community who best match the testing requirements and have the right mobile devices and operating systems. The customer’s mobile app is tested by these paid professionals on real devices in a real life setting.

Danske Bank has a lovely way to pay bills. Just take photo, and their iPhone apps fills out the payment for you! A post from .com by has the whole story . Here is a part: Danske Bank just made it easier to spend money. Banking customers can  now pay bills with nothing more than a photo and a tap , boosting the convenience of online payments. Danske Bank's  official app  is available for  iPhone ,  iPad , iPod touch and Android  devices. Once installed, users simply launch the app, snap a photo of the bill they wish to pay and press a confirmation button. The app uses the photograph to rapidly enter the details for a bill or electronic funds transfer, for example the amount due, payee name and account numbers, without forcing users to key in the information by hand. It's a welcome new feature for those of us with fat finger syndrome. The updated app is the latest from the banking industry to find innovative uses for the cameras found in mobile d...

An agile consumer with a desktop? No way! Agile Commerce is linked to the mobile IT and the cloud. And of course agile development and deployment. Where the ultimate in agile is apps. A post from ReadWriteWeb by John Paul Titlow has the whole story . Here is a part: According to the report, 58% of online adults in the U.S. like to research products online before purchasing them. Of course, a growing number of those adults own smart phones and tablet computers and are active on social networking sites, which they often use to solicit advice an input on buying decisions. To adapt, businesses must realign themselves to adopt practices of agile commerce, that is, commerce that takes place across a wide range of devices, screens and other interfaces. This adaptation may require a literal organizational change (think smaller, integrated teams), but at the very least, calls for a shift in a company's philosophy.

Google translate to the rescue. With the iPhone app you can do realtime translation. Currently between English and Spanish. But more will come! A post from itunes.com by has the whole story . Here is a part: A month old, but I missed this when it was new. Jeff Richardson reviews the new Google Translate app for the iPhone: For example, make sure the app is in English to French mode, press one button in the app, say to your iPhone “where is the train station,” and then a second later your iPhone displays “où est la gare” and you can tap one button to have that spoken in French so that the person in Paris can hear and understand you and point in a direction. You could even press one button to switch the translation from French to English, have the other person speak the answer in French, and then you can see the answer in English.