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2011-09-19T04:00:00Z

Most branded apps are a flop says Deloitte. But why?

2011-07-11T16:07:27Z

Global and consumer healthcare brands finding the app stores a challenging environment

A new report from Deloitte has confirmed what many app developers know already: the majority of mobile apps commissioned by brands are failing to take smartphones by storm.

The report was based on analysis of apps published on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry by big healthcare and consumer brands. Deloitte says that less than 1% of these apps have been downloaded more than one million times, and that only 20% had been downloaded enough to be considered for its survey.

Or, to put that latter stat another way: 80% of branded apps analysed by Deloitte had been downloaded less than 1,000 times. This, despite the fact that every month, the three stores in the study generate 1.6bn downloads – 1bn for Apple's App Store, 500m for Google's Android Market and 90m for Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World.

"Brands view apps as a golden opportunity to communicate directly with consumers and in a more meaningful, long term manner," says Howard Davies, media partner at Deloitte. "When brands get it right, the returns can be huge." The problem appears to be that most are getting it wrong.

It is easy to forget that one of the first big hits on the App Store – fuelled by word of mouth – was a branded app: Carling's iPint, which racked up several million downloads in the first few months after Apple's store launched. There have been other brand-app success stories too, like the Barclaycard-branded Waterslide Extreme iPhone game, which had been downloaded more than 12.5 million times at the last count.

Some branded apps have been successful, then, so why are the majority flopping so badly? A few reasons suggest themselves:

First, the majority of these apps are low in quality, and/or are pure marketing. iPint's success as a novelty branded app turned out to be one of the exceptions, rather than the rule. Actually, the way forward for brands is more likely to release apps that have real functionality, solving a problem for users or providing features that are genuinely meaningful.

Pizza Express' iPhone app, which enables people to book tables and pay for their food, falls into that category. Tesco Groceries is another: in fact, most of the large retailers' apps have majored on functionality rather than pure brand messages. Lynx Stream, meanwhile, was an ambitious attempt to wrap social location features – sharing photos of nights out – around a deodorant brand.

The second reason many branded apps have struggled, though, is that they have been eclipsed by apps and games that have come from nowhere to become brands in their own right.

To name three specific examples: Rovio Mobile's Angry Birds is now well past the 200m downloads mark on all platforms, and when the company launched a spin-off game for blockbuster animated movie Rio, it was clear that the former was the lead brand, rather than the latter.

Mobile gaming firm Storm8 has passed 210m downloads for its free iPhone and Android games, while Outfit7 just passed the 150m mark for its talking character apps for iPhone and Android. In an ecosystem where three new (or in Rovio's case, unknown outside the Java game industry) developers can total 560m downloads in three years, the news that most branded apps are struggling is not a surprise.

But the third reason is more of a shock: branded apps simply are not being promoted very well. Whisper it, but it is not actually that hard to pass one million downloads even on one platform, if you have money behind you.

Strategic use of promotional services like Free App a Day, along with some intelligently-targeted advertising within other apps or mobile websites, mean the seven-figure milestone is far from insurmountable even for an average app. The fact that few branded apps are promoted in this way suggests a belief that the brand itself is sufficient to cut through the app store clutter.

It is not. Deloitte's report suggests that the answer is to make more use of smartphone hardware, including the accelerometer, touchscreen, camera and GPS. That will help – albeit with caveats in the latter case as smartphone owners get more savvy about sharing their location – but brands must ask themselves two basic questions too. What is their app for, and how do they plan to promote it?

Stuart Dredge

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tortoise Economics

2011-07-01T06:29:32Z

While I run to lock down the trailing ends of several projects, examine this article by Dean Wesley Smith on the 99¢ e-book controversy: Oh, the Math of It All

Smith posits this as a theory about why he should charge $4.99 for an e-book: it spoke to me about the value of doing a little of something every day, versus trying to accomplish an enormous task all at once.

Zombie Mario T-shirt

2011-06-27T13:38:59Z

By Phil Jones for Woot, this fantastic Mario tee is just $10.

Go the Fuck to Sleep: a storybook for exhausted parents

2011-04-26T22:53:01Z

This is going to be my default gift for my friends who have kids.

Go the Fuck To Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland. Honest, profane, and affectionate, Adam Mansbach's verses and Ricardo Cortés' illustrations perfectly capture the familiar--and unspoken--tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night, and open up a conversation about parenting in the process. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a perfect gift for parents new, old, or expectant. Here is a sample verse:
The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the fuck to sleep.

Go the Fuck to Sleep

Microsoft implores you: please stop using Internet Explorer 6

2011-03-04T23:19:23Z

Outdated and dangerous but if you are still using it then we have some tips on how to make it crash forever

Microsoft wants you to stop using Internet Explorer 6. It's got a site, ie6countdown showing you how badly we're doing in terms of using its horrendously old, buggy, security-lapsed browser: the worst country in terms of usage turns out to be China (and the country with the largest number of bot-infected PCs is..?).

There are plenty of other browsers: Microsoft has a bunch of them (choose between IE8 and the newer in-beta IE9), and of course there's Firefox, and Safari, and Opera, and..

However if you happen to be cursed for some reason with IE6 and would like to be able to complain to IT (they must have made you use it, right?) that it keeps crashing and you need a new browser, here's all you need to do.

Either:
click this link

Set the home page to
ms-its:%F0:

(the penultimate character is a zero.)

Thanks to Brian Krebs for the self-destruct links, which he says he was told by an ethical hacker at a Defcon conference:

"Alex Holden, the Wisconsin based researcher who showed me this crash, said the bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE. The crash does not appear to work in newer versions of IE.

"Holden said he notified Microsoft about his finding back in 2004. An e-mail thread Holden shared with krebsonsecurity.com indicates that Microsoft engineers believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, and that it would probably be fixed in a future service pack. Obviously, it never was."

Though as Krebs points out, that does leave the door open to some malware which changes the IE6 home page to that URL, which would mean it would always crash on launch, and you'd never be able to change it. A project for Microsoft?

Here's what it looks like. Enjoy..

Charles Arthur

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Game offers pre-orders on pre-owned titles

2011-03-05T07:05:02Z

Buy used games before they get used

Game has launched a scheme for customers to order pre-owned games before the title has even hit the shelves.…

Microsoft rallies IE6 death squads

2011-03-04T19:07:14Z

Voyeur site enlists netizens

Microsoft has launched a fresh campaign to eradicate Internet Explorer 6 from the web.…

Reg Webcast: Video in the workplace - The future of business comms?

Flying Cars

2011-02-23T05:00:00Z

Search Is a Super Simple, Time-Saving Web Search App for iOS [Downloads]

2011-01-26T18:30:00Z

iOS: It's not like searching the web on your iDevice is particularly difficult, but getting quick information from various sites can take some time. Search makes web searches much faster by letting you type in your terms and just go.

The way Search works is very simple. There's a search box up top, you type in your search time, and you tap the icon of the tool you'd like to use to search for results. Currently you can choose from Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Dictionary, YouTube, and Flickr. Results are brought up in an in-app web browser so you don't have to leave the app. Search doesn't do much, but it will save you a fair amount of time in your specialized web searches.

While the Search app is free, it comes with ads. A pro version is available for $1 and lets you add practically any search engine. If there's a search box, you can simply browse to the page, tap the search box, and save it as an option in Search Pro. That seems pretty handy for only $1.

Search / Pro | iTunes App Store via App of the Day

You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Good Code

2011-01-07T05:00:00Z

Wasps 37-30 Leicester Tigers | Premiership match report

2010-09-19T19:28:14Z

Shared by Rockhoppers
Hi Stu - not sure if you saw this :)

Seriously though trust all is well with you guys

Wasps 37-30 Leicester Tigers

Leicester's failure to replace their captain, Geordan Murphy, cost them victory at the end of one of the most remarkable games played out between two of the fiercest rivals in the Premiership. Wasps had drawn level with five minutes to go after trailing 30-18 at the interval when Murphy, who had just received prolonged treatment after taking a heavy tackle, dithered.

He tried to usher Dave Walder's raking kick into touch, but it bounced infield and as he tried to adjust his footing Richard Haughton chipped the ball over the line and caught it to leave the champions with two points instead of five and their second defeat in three matches.

A match so rich in recent history was appropriately dominated at the start by players appearing against their former club. Tom Varndell, once of Leicester, opened the scoring after five minutes, taking Jeremy Staunton's high drop-out and wriggling through attempted tackles by Tom Croft and Ed Slater before sprinting 30 metres to the line.

Leicester were wearing their away strip of platinum grey, the same colour used by Manchester United at Southampton in 1996 ago when Sir Alex Ferguson ordered his players to change into a different strip at half-time because they had struggled to find each other. It was the same with Leicester in the opening quarter. Promising positions were squandered through misplaced passes and they went eight points behind on 10 minutes when Matt Smith was penalised after the Tigers took the ball into contact.

Leicester's response was immediate. Scott Hamilton claimed the restart and, after Mark van Gisbergen had made a try-saving tackle on George Chuter, George Skivington, who left Adams Park last summer, thought he had grounded the ball on the line only for the video referee, Geoff Warren, to disagree.

Leicester had the consolation of a penalty, which Staunton, a former Wasp, converted. Walder kicked his second penalty but again Wasps conceded the initiative at the restart. Alesana Tuilagi made up for giving away the three points by claiming the kick-off and setting up a series of attacks that ended with Smith scoring in the corner.

Staunton missed the conversion but equalised with a penalty and Leicester took the field for the first time when Simon Shaw was penalised at a ruck just inside the Tigers' half. Ben Youngs took it quickly, wrong-footed Van Gisbergen and set off on a 55-metre run to the line.

It was a remarkably open game and Varndell brought Wasps level when Walder fed the wing with an inside pass, but Leicester were applying the greater pressure and Wasps again messed up the restart. Joe Worsley knocked on and Billy Twelvetrees scored directly from the scrum, fending off the challenges of van Gisbergen and James Cannon while juggling the ball.

Leicester claimed the try bonus point just before the interval. David Lemi was robbed of the ball on the Tigers' 10-metre line, Youngs kicked into an unguarded 22 and while Andy Powell claimed the bounce, Croft robbed him and scored to put his side 12 points ahead.

Croft made a difference in his first start of the season for Leicester, repairing what had been a malfunctioning line-out and putting pressure on Wasps at the breakdown. The second period was considerably less hectic than the first with the third quarter yielding just two Walder penalties.

Leicester tried to defend what they had, aided by Wasps' indiscipline and Varndell's departure with a knee injury, but they were fortunate on the hour when Tom Rees lost the ball over the line. It was a cagier affair, more now about not making mistakes.

Walder did err when his long diagonal kick bounced over the dead-ball line rather than into touch. Wasps retreated for a scrum in their own half, Tim Payne was penalised for collapsing it and up stepped Twelvetrees. The centre missed from 40 metres out and within a minute Wasps had reduced the deficit to five points through Walder's fifth penalty. Five minutes later the scores were tied after Skivington went to ground at a ruck. Then came Murphy's Clément Poitrenaud moment.

Paul Rees

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

BT launches 'free' Wi-Fi mobile app

2010-09-07T10:09:25Z

BT Fon app allows Total Broadband customers with an iPhone or Android phone to connect to the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot for free

BT has launched a mobile app for broadband customers that automatically connects their iPhone and Android mobiles to free, unlimited Wi-Fi.

The BT FON app, which is only available to BT Total Broadband customers, notifies users of the nearest Wi-Fi hot spots. Users then enter their BT internet email username and password, and can choose to be automatically logged in whenever they are in a BT Wi-Fi area.

Because access is unlimited and free for BT Total Broadband customers, this prevents them racking up extra costs on their mobile phone bill. BT FON and BT Openzone currently has 1.6m Wi-Fi hot spots worldwide.

Mike Wilson, manager of mobiles and broadband at moneysupermarket.com, said: "There are a lot of users who don't know that they can use their bundle minutes away from home. The application even has a map that shows users exactly where their closest hot spots are. It's a real asset to bundle users."

Apple's iPhone already offers a non-app-based search option for Wi-Fi connections, as does Android. Both are a standard free function of the handset, but search options often direct users to password protected hot spots as well as unlocked Wi-Fi providers, and access to them is not always free.

John Petter, managing director for BT Retail Consumer, said: "This represents real value to our customers at a time when more and more people are using their mobile phone to access the internet."

iPhone users can download the application from the app store (search for BT Fon) or by typing http://bit.ly/iPhoneBTFon into the iPhone's browser. Android users can download the application from the Android Market (search for BT Fon) or by typing http://bit.ly/AndroidBTFon into their browser. BBC's Children in Need appeal will receive 50p for each of the first 20,000 times the application is downloaded.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Last.fm's robots.txt

2010-07-27T19:18:04Z

The three laws of robots.txt.

Switch to Lower-Bandwidth Music Streams Without Sacrificing Quality [Streaming Music]

2010-07-23T13:00:00Z

If you've switched to a capped mobile data plan, or will be made to switch soon, you might think you can't fit streaming music into your service, or that you'll sacrifice sound quality with lower-rate streams. Both are generally untrue.

The Tested blog digs into the streaming functions of the major music services, like Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, Grooveshark, and others. At 128 kilobytes per second, generally the "high" or "better" setting, most apps channel music through in MP3 format. At 64 kbps, though, music services use a smarter AAC codec, which the tech blog states can sound just as good:

Those of you with sizeable bandwidth caps, might be tempted to opt for a high-quality, MP3-encoded stream, logically assuming that the quality will be better. But in reality, you're actually using more bandwidth than you need when compared to a comparable 64kbps HE-AAC encoded stream. If you're looking to keep the usage down, Pandora, Rhapsody and recent entrant mSpot are all excellent choices for low-bandwidth tunes, yet still manage to sound decent over 3G.

If you're concerned about getting overage charges on a newly capped plan, check out our guide to the best tools for monitoring your cellphone data usage. And if you've got first-hand experience with the quality or data usage of a streaming service, share it in the comments.

How To Keep Your Mobile Bandwidth Usage Under Control [Tested]

Firefox Tab Candy Organizes Your Tabs in Groups, Looks Excellent [Downloads]

2010-07-23T20:30:00Z

Windows/Mac/Linux: Firefox Tab Candy is a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. Not only does it offer incredibly handy features, but it looks beautiful.

Watch the video above, by Mozilla's excellent interface designer Aza Raskin, for a quick overview. The idea is sort of like the new app folders in iOS 4, or like a better version of OS X's Exposé—except for it's all about your browser tabs. You can drag and drop to re-arrange all your tabs into groups, create new groups by simply dragging a web page outside an existing group and dragging another item on top of it, and name all your groups based on what task they're related to.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

Another favorite feature is that Tab Candy effectively collapses different windows inside of one, so when you're looking at one group, your others are waiting inside the switching interface. Sure you can open a new window if you need multiple Firefox windows open at once, but most of the time you don't need the extra clutter. Currently Tab Candy has a few hiccups in use, and there's not much I can see for keyboard friendliness yet, but it's promising.

UPDATE: Good news, keyboard lovers. Reader Laren notes:

After installing the Firefox 4 w/Tab Candy, I realized that with my laptop it was annoying using the little dark box to switch to Tab Candy view. I knew there had to be a hot key or keys to make this much simpler, so I went to the FAQ on Aza's blog. It's Ctrl+Space bar. Once there I can tab between the tab candy boxes and then hit Space to bring that one up. It makes it a lot simpler to use and works very well!

I first tested Tab Candy on OS X, where these shortcuts don't (yet) work, but I gave it a try and the shortcuts do indeed work in Windows. Handy!

Tab Candy isn't currently available as an extension, but Mozilla is offering an alpha download of Firefox that includes Tab Candy by default (all platforms). We wouldn't recommend anyone jump to it as their main browser, but if you're eager to try it out and are comfortable with alpha software, it's worth a look.

We've just started playing with Tab Candy, but so far we're loving it. If you give it a go, let's hear what you think in the comments.

Firefox with Tab Candy Alpha Downloads [Mozilla FTP]
Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet [Aza on Design]

We still need libraries in the digital age

2010-07-13T12:04:06Z

Public libraries have a vital role bridging the digital divide and teaching people how to get reliable information from the internet

With the government axing public services, librarians are being forced to defend their existence against accusations of irrelevance in modern society. As one adviser on Newsnight put it during the BBC's recent "mini-consultation" on the proposed cuts, why do we need libraries when everyone has broadband and can access information without recourse to a librarian?

There are a number of problems with this argument.

Firstly, as recent statistics from the Office for National Statistics demonstrate, not everyone has broadband access, let alone internet access. Statistics for 2009 show that 63% of the UK population have broadband, leaving more than a third who do not. Furthermore, more than 10 million adults in the UK have never used the internet. And, unsurprisingly, it is the poorest who are least likely to have an internet connection – only 52% of those with no qualifications have access.

Public libraries provide a key role in both facilitating access to information via the internet, as well as providing free internet access to bridge the digital divide, which does not only exist between industrialised and developing nations. Taking away this important role would disenfranchise people further, and mean they would have to refer to a commercial provider. Given that they are likely to have very few available resources, how can anyone morally argue that there is no longer a need for libraries to provide free internet?

Secondly, there is the issue of IT literacy. There is a common belief that once everyone has broadband, all problems relating to access to information will be solved. But it is not enough. There are still many users who cannot search the internet correctly and successfully. Some simply select the top result in Google rather than ensuring that their search terms are appropriate, and that the resource is reliable. It is not just the general public – even respected journalists seemingly fail to grasp the intricacies of search engines. Take, for example, this piece by Evelyn Gordon in which she claims that Amnesty International had made only one statement about the crisis in the Congo during 2009.

What appears to have happened is that she has used the search term congo amnesty international and clicked on the link Congo | Amnesty International, which does indeed produce one result for 2009. However, this refers to the Republic of Congo not the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is what the article itself was referring to (Amnesty actually made more than 20 statements on the DRC during 2009). A simple error has led to inaccurate information being imparted via a supposedly experienced journalist (which was then repeated by another journalist, Melanie Phillips).

Consider the implications this has in a democracy where the proliferation of misinformation is caused by poor IT literacy. And that is without even considering the issue of adult illiteracy, or the fact that it is not compulsory for new academies to include a library.

Librarians not only provide access to physical materials, they are also trained in using the internet appropriately to extract information for users – a skill that has been at the heart of the profession for many years. This ensures that misinformation is minimised and helps to maintain a well-informed society. Furthermore, as information professionals, they play an important role in facilitating access to government information that is otherwise inaccessible to the disenfranchised. This is also crucial in a democracy, particularly during times of economic crisis. And yet, when they're needed most, libraries are talked of as an irrelevance by policymakers who think libraries should be run by untrained volunteers.

Statistics may show a decline in library goers (although these are not accurate reflections of how the service is utilised), but figures obtained from Cipfa demonstrate a 49% increase in the usage of library websites. Libraries are not declining in importance – people are simply changing the way they use them. It does not then follow that we need to abandon libraries as they are now and shift everything online, which would be a disaster.

Libraries are a bridge between the information-rich and the information-poor. They need reinforcing, not dismantling. We need to continue to provide a highly skilled service that is able to meet the needs of the general public. The service ought to continue to innovate to take advantage of the way in which people are interacting with the service in a different way. It needs to continue to bridge the gap between those who have access to the internet and those who do not, while also ensuring it delivers on other aspects of its core service (book loans, local studies materials, etc). If the service is cut, we run the risk of an ill-informed society that is ill-equipped to prosper in the "information age" – a dangerous prospect for any democracy.

• This article was commissioned via the You tell us page. If you have your own suggestions for subjects you would like to see covered by Cif, please visit the page and tell us

Ian Clark

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Firefly Intro Re-mixed as 80s Style TV Show

2010-07-09T19:40:06Z

Just awesome. Someone went all Airwolf on the Firefly intro and re-imagined it as a 1980′s style TV show opening title sequence. Enjoy!

Forget Cookies: Over 8 in 10 Browsers Have a Unique Fingerprint [Privacy]

2010-05-17T21:30:00Z

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (they're the good folks on the digital frontier fighting for our digital rights) conducted a study of the uniquely identifiable information your browser regularly sends out in the open and found that "an overwhelming majority of web browsers have unique signatures — creating identifiable "fingerprints" that could be used to track you as you surf the Internet." That information includes things like operating system, browser, and common plug-ins, and you can test your own browser here. [EFF]

How to Get Your Brand Onto a Formula One Race Car When You’re Legally Banned From Putting Your Brand on a Formula One Race Car

2010-05-13T17:01:22Z

Brilliant solution.

★