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Later, I was talking to some friends who had a mind to start an iPhone App development business - would I like to be a part of it? Well, yes! Though the volatility of any new market can be a challenging place to start a business.

Weren’t they worried about planning for their business before the economics of iPhone apps was really clear? Beyond the obvious risk of not yet knowing how long it takes to build apps, how do you know what to charge and what your revenues are going to be? What the hot categories will be? How best to market your apps?

Their response was the right one: we don’t know, but the opportunities are as big as the risks - if we happen across a successful formula we could have a great business. I think that’s a great attitude and I hope to tell you more about this new Aussie iPhone App developer when the time is right.

Meantime, the volatility of a virgin App economy (”apponomy”?) trying to establish itself is becoming clear. Average prices for apps started way up, and now developers are concerned that prices for some apps have been cut in half, others have gone from paid to free. I think Marco Arment, the lead developer at Tumblr and developer of the iPhone App Instapaper, has it right when he predicts that app pricing should turn out to be fairly inelastic - that it shouldn’t matter whether you’re charging $2 or $10, the challenge is in getting someone to pay at all.

The problem with inelastic pricing is that it comes with significant momentum, both up and down. If consumers come to an Appstore and the average price for apps is $0.00, that makes it very difficult to charge even $2.00. If Apple had a problem with apponomics and decided to institute, say, a compulsory $2.00 charge for apps, that would set the expectation that apps are not free, and consumers would then be more likely to pay $5-$10 because of the perception that “apps are not free.”

The challenge for Marco and other developers trying to make a living doing this is: for most app developers, this is not a living, it is not even a main focus of work. Never mind the hobbyist developers doing it for fun, it’s the big businesses using Appstore as a marketing vehicle for their main desktop software that can really hurt your business. They don’t need iPhone customers, but they do need their desktop customers to have access to their software on their iPhone - those are two different things. A big software company that doesn’t really care about iPhone app revenues can really hurt your business if they’re in the same space.

Marco also talks about whether or not to make the iPhone version of Instapaper his main business and not developing any subsequent apps. His first app has been very successful: is he best to build on that success by developing more apps, or by improving the app he’s already built? Many would say to keep one foot in each camp, but Marco calls it right when he makes his decision: you double the complexity of your business and how it is affected by the volatility in the apponomy if you keep a foot in each camp.

The apponomy will settle down as it grows, though Apple may need to assist it in doing so - using the same email marketing it uses to promote music that will be popular on iTunes Store, featuring app developers on Apple.com and by supporting good developers with pricing breaks, free training and access to advice from the App platform development team. Whatever actions Apple takes, it needs to be fast, but subtle. Lots of small, incremental changes please - if they wear their hobnail boots as Apple sometimes does, it will only start the apponomy oscillating more wildly.

Meanwhile, this is a gold rush. Is there really gold in them thar hills, or is it just iron pyrite? There’s only so much you can learn from the greenhorns running out of the supply store with shovels and wheelbarrows. Sooner or later you have to buy your own shovel and go see for yourself… Marco, where’s the store?…

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With me at the start and the finish and every step of the way were close friends (now even closer friends) Tony Burrett, Roger Crawford and Sacha Ward, fed, watered and motivated at eight checkpoints through the day and night by Helen Crawford and her partner Norm, Jean and Graham Jones, Kate Brady, Sarah Burrett, Charlotte Burrett and Edward the dog.

Sacha, Tony, Roger and myself a few minutes before the start

The 100km Trailwalker Sydney course covers some of the biggest. roughest bushwalking ascents and descents in the Sydney basin and weaves its way from Brooklyn on the far northern edge of the Sydney metro area to Middle Head, right in the heart of Sydney. Next time you take almost an hour to drive north to Brooklyn on the F2 freeway, think about walking the entire way!

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I don’t have very many pictures of the event because unfortunately I dropped my iPhone down a small cliff while trying to climb, shoot and moblog at the same time and it is now deceased, but I’ll upload some more shots taken by the rest of the team in the next couple of days. However, you can find many great photos on the Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney 2008 photo pool on Flickr.

At 27 hrs, 41mins we were 142 of 519 teams. The winning team, Berowra Bushrunners, completed the 100km in an incredible 14hrs, 6mins, and while that’s a very fast run rather than a walk, it’s a couple of hours slower than the winners in previous years, perhaps indicating that we weren’t the only team who had trouble with the challenging route and weather overnight. While many teams have yet to finish at this stage, 26 teams and 473 (one in three) walkers have retired from the event. It’s not a walk in the park!

As I write this, my friends in Team 43 (Final Legs) including Greg Todd, Judy Evans and Hugh Wakelin-King are still walking the final leg (32hrs, 25mins and counting). Fourth team member Meshlin Khouri retired at CP1 as she was suffering badly from the flu, and the rest of the team have suffered flu symptoms as well as the usual blisters, hurty knee, and other common Trailwalker ailments. They’re showing tremendous determination to have even made it this far. [UPDATE: the mighty Final Legs showed incredible guts and determination to slog it over the line in??37hrs, 5min in 377th place - a??Herculean??effort! 492 of the 519 teams that started made it to the finish.]

Neither are the Glutes for Punishment entirely unscathed. Blisters, cuts, abrasions, chafing and bruises are all part of negotiating your way over irregular and steep sections of muddy sandstone trail, crossing swollen creeks, and dodging branches and even sandstone overhangs. We’re all carrying injuries. I have two blisters, a lump on my head the size of my thumb from a sandstone overhang in the dark, as well as two grazed knees, a grazed forearm and a big cut and bruise underneath my chin. I fell into a gap between two big boulders and mostly stopped myself with my chin. Ouch.

The injuries will pass but the memories will remain. I’m proud of the courage, humour and determination I saw in my team mates. I’m pleased by the reserves of strength I rediscover in myself every time I do Trailwalker (this was my third time.) I’m still on a high from the incredible positive vibes radiated our way by all the friends and Trailwalker volunteers who cheered, clapped and encouraged us along the trail. And I know from past experience that the fitness I’ve built up through months of training will see me running easily up the stairs for many months to come. But the most important benefits are mental: I highly recommend trying Trailwalker as a way to get to know yourself better.

Wait until the injuries heal and the bad bits fade from memory - I bet you we’ll be doing this again!

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What is Trailwalker? For me it’s an opportunity to prove I’m not old yet under the guise of raising money for a worthy charity. In teams of four we walk 100km through some of the roughest bush in NSW. Only stopping briefly to eat and add/remove clothing, we walk through the night, getting to the finish in 25-27hrs (or that’s the plan.)

Not sure if HTML will work from this phone but if this link doesn’t work, google “Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney.”

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*”Juley” means “hello” in Tibetan.

I was on a speaker panel at Mobile Feast today so I suppose I can’t pretend to be in the Himalayas any longer! Yes, I’m back, though it took me a week to complete triage on 1900+ unread emails and deal with a pile of bills and other snail mail.

I’m still in the process of uploading some 8Gb of photos I took while in the Himalayas, but there are already some good shots there if you have a moment to check them out. I’ve sprinkled a few at the end of this post if you don’t have time to go to Flickr.

This was the first Mobile Feast conference, and while any new conference can use a tweak, it was a promising start for a conference that aims to help businesspeople from outside the mobile industry understand what the future of the mobile internet might look like. I was speaking on a panel predicting what future mobile content might look like, and with me on the panel where Stephen Kilsby of game developer Viva La Mobile, Jennifer Zanich from mobile social networking startup Xumii, and Christina Thurn from Walt Disney’s internet arm.

While I didn’t have to present with any slides (yay) I had a few things to say along these lines:

• Youth finds its own uses for things. Young film makers took cinema - originally a fine art medium - and invented Hollywood blockbusters. Young music producers took the music production industry built for recording jazz music and used it to make something 100x bigger - rock and roll. TV and computers were both built by an older generation, then ‘hacked’ by a younger generation who did things that were new, different and world-changing. The next big generations (Y and Z) will be consuming content and services primarily via a mobile, not a desktop or laptop. They won’t grow into a desktop as they age. They will make content and services on mobile devices that are as incomprehensible to us as Jimi Hendrix was was to the men who invented the LP, but which will find millions of customers and make millions of dollars for those of us smart enough to back the right young innovators. We should stop trying to define how this generation ’should’ use the mobile web and focus instead on observing how they use it - that’s how we’ll discover how to make the mobile blockbusters of the future.
• The iPhone Appstore is the beginning of the end of the mobile ‘carrier deck’. The appstore is the mobile equivalent of the ‘My Yahoo!’ and ‘My Excite’ personalisable homepages of the late ’90s desktop internet - a necessary middle stage between the walled garden of AOL and Compuserve and the open, unrestricted access of Google. On mobile devices, the carrier deck will be replaced by a user-generated deck - a mobile homepage created by the mobile user and their sphere of friends - the content, topics and products they love/hate right now. Find the right taste-makers and mavens in the mobile youth market now if you want to get big usage of your mobile content or applications - these people are nearly free at the moment but will become more expensive as they realise the commercial power they have.
• The demise of the carrier deck will also allow content and application publishers to derive some ‘long tail’ revenue. Carrier decks kill long tail revenue by burying old content/apps too deep. To illustrate the potential of long tail revenue for mobile content I pulled out my iPhone and played ‘Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century’ - a Daffy Duck cartoon made by Warner Bros. in 1952 - I’d just rented it on iTunes Store for my son to watch on my iPhone and Apple TV. 1952 and still renting? Talk about a long tail!
• Carriers will soon be forced to share data revenues with content/app publishers like they do with handset manufacturers. Too much of the revenue in the mobile industry still rests with the ‘dumb pipe’ providers. Too much consumption of that data will be driven by the publishers. Critical mass will be reached sometime in the next five years, probably with a deal between social network or social messaging providers.
• Apple’s total market cap recently overtook Google’s. I’ve been a user of Apple’s ’soup to nuts’ delivery channel from content publisher tools to online content sales systems to home entertainment hardware for long enough to make this prediction with confidence: Apple will be the largest entertainment company in the world, measured by revenue, in the next five years. Feel free to remind me I said that!

Finally, what I didn’t get to say was that eight years ago this month I was busy delivering the first mobile content for an Olympic games - the Sydney Olympics 2000. So much amazing progress has happened in less than a decade!

See, in 2000 Yahoo! was angling to try and be the major online partner of the games. Though no mobile content rights were made available by the IOC, Mark Jackson and the good folks from the Sydney Olympic Organising Committee did their best to help us out. Problem: there were almost no web-enabled handsets in Australia at the time.

So we recruited and trained spokesmodels to ride visitors around Sydney in Yahoo!-branded rickshaws and offer to show them our WAP coverage and SMS alerts, driven by content licensed from local content publishers.

The content was served in an early WAP browser, was text only, woefully behind the live results available on TV, and was delivered incredibly slowly on Nokia 7110 handsets. If you were really in no hurry to get somewhere, our spokesmodels would help you login to your Yahoo! account on the handset (it took about 4-5mins per login) and set up some SMS alerts (which most users would soon turn off because not only were they out of date, SMS was punishingly expensive.) The spokesmodel could also take your photo at the Olympics in Sydney and upload it to Yahoo! Photos so you could share it with your friends… only, not until the spokesmodel returned to a desktop PC later in the day, since the handset didn’t have a camera and even a 100k image would have taken centuries to upload even if there was a way to get the image file onto the handset. My first cameraphone was a SonyEricsson T68i that had the camera as a separate plug-in device, released the following year.

From memory, I think we had 10 spokesmodels on rickshaws at any one time, each with a Nokia 7110 and we just about emptied Nokia’s stocks of 7110s - we had most of the 7110s in the country at that time. Let’s be generous and say maybe there were a hundred 7110 handsets in Australia at that time and assume all of them had been setup for WAP access (the 7110 didn’t usually come with WAP settings pre-installed) . So in August 2000, less than a decade ago, there were maybe a hundred mobile handsets in Australia capable of mobile browsing. Desperately slow browsing, in greyscale only, at very great expense and with almost no Australian-generated content or applications to browse.

Yes, we have a long way to go, but we have already come so far.

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Where are we going? Well, last year we visited the Himachal Pradesh region of northern India, part of the Himalaya ranges to the north west of Nepal. This time we’re going back to Himachal Pradesh and staying in the village of Tabo for a few weeks, enjoying a three-yearly Chakkha festival there, going camping with a busload of schoolkids up around Ki, then off to Leh in Ladakh via some of the highest driveable mountain passes in the world.

Most Aussies head to Nepal when they want to see the Himalayas. Himachal Pradesh is a bit more off the beaten track and yet just as beautiful, maybe more so. There’s a fascinating mix of Tibetan and Indian cultures and you can experience a simple, happy way of life that hasn’t changed much in a few hundred years. Just going off the grid for five weeks has got to be good for me. I’m sure the interweb will still be here when I get back…

If you ever fancy doing something like this yourself, I highly recommend the lovely and knowledgeable people at YakTrak Tours. Here’s some photos from the trip last year (and the complete collection is on Flickr.)

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??

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NameThis.com - prone to gaming?

Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

For a few moments, I loved the idea of using crowdsourcing to brainstorm new brand names, business names and taglines on??namethis.com.

The website for the business behind this, kluster.com, is the coolest I’ve seen in months, and everything from the front page to the jobs page has more sharply-defined character than a Raymond Chandler novel.

But can great brands be unearthed by the unwashed masses, or must they always be the domain of marketing genii? I have a half-day brand brainstorm workshop scheduled for a new client tomorrow morning, so this question couldn’t arise at a more pertinent time for me. Especially since I’ve been managing writer’s block by reading about namethis.com on Australian Anthill.

To an extent, any new brand does require a lot of new ideas thrown up on a whiteboard. Every brand brainstorm should include a free flow of ideas, guided by a moderator who is quick and experienced enough to encourage the workshop participants to follow some trains of thought into wilder flights of fancy in the hope of unearthing a golden nugget or two.

The moderator’s role is crucial. A good moderator is always on the lookout for groupthink, fatigue, cynicism sarcasm and other common symptoms of asking inexperienced communicators to do something as new and threatening as invent a new brand.

Namethis.com lets you write a brief, then just collects a single date/time-ordered list of user submissions, which appears to be the online equivalent of a brainstorming session without a moderator. Browsing through some of the active projects there I can see clear evidence of each of the symptoms of an unhealthy brainstorm, especially groupthink.

Another problem is that branding brainstorms can be much more effective if everyone in the workshop starts from the same point and heads in the same direction. A detailed brief helps, and none of the examples I found on namethis.com had what I’d call a good brief - they seemed to reflect the same level of emotional investment as the $99 dollar investment it takes to submit a request for brand names.

It can often help to work together on defining some of the elements of the brand - dimensions of personality, colours, sounds and practice with a few “if this product were a <product category> it would be a <brand name>” ??questions to make sure everyone is starting from the same point. There is no opportunity to do that on namethis.com

Finally, I do think that some products - like yet another bogus weight-loss pill - are open to guerilla criticism on a site like this.??I’ll be interested to see whether and how the site moderator or the pill merchant take action on my suggested product name, “Eating A Healthy Balanced Diet and Exercise Didn’t Work For Me“.

In the end, namethis.com probably represents appropriate value for $99.00 - your chances of turning up a gold nugget brand are about as likely as spending that $99.00 on 15 minutes of a good professional creative’s time. But you may have to spend a little more than that to get the result you need, either way.

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‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype - check it out

In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew - the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change - the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where?

Remember, the music industry still supports a small but healthy market for vinyl records. It’s still possible to buy movies on VHS tape. Everything we’ve learned about new media in the past 30 years tells us that no medium becomes extinct; it just assumes a minor niche in a richer, more diverse marketplace of media.

Could CDs become the default medium for servicing developing markets such as Africa that don’t yet have the disposable income and mobile carrier penetration to support a mass market of mobile handset downloads? Could the physical music production component of the music industry cushion its fall by repositioning to focus on servicing developing markets? My guess is no; that either the disposable income won’t increase fast enough or the penetration of mobile carriers will make the window too narrow and short-lived.

Having done some work in mobile content and mobile social networks, I’ve seen for myself how quickly African consumers have leapt onboard and adopted mobile technologies. Even (and perhaps because of) in cities where there’s almost no terrestrial internet access and where mains electricity is available for only a few hours a day, mobile handsets have become the communication tool and social glue for not only resident communities but the broader diaspora created by the guest worker industry, refugee resettlement and overseas study programs.

Instead I’d expect developing nations to create a new class of music consumer; one who wants to mix western top 20 artists with a melange of local artists and music genres.

For the next decade or so handset storage on low-end phones will be limited to a few gigabytes so this consumer won’t be able to stay loyal to a small set of artists or brands. Instead they will delete/download/delete/download, choosing new content over keeping old content. You’d be wasting your time trying to build a multi-song or multi-album relationship with them.

Music and video content will be intermingled and video will be listened to as much as watched since content will be chosen from mobile portals that tend to blend the two together to increase the odds of a download from limited screen real estate.

Distant future? Hardly. Here’s a living, breathing example of the music consumer of the future, who I found on a train between Delhi and Chandrigarh last July, grooving along to bangra dance music on his mobile while his battery held out.

Bangra on the train to Chandrigarh from bigyahu on Vimeo.

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