Anyone who needs to write a presentation or report on anything to do with mobile, iphone or app stores needs to get research and statistics on the app store to help back up their arguments.  For example, you might want to know the number of apps in the app store by category.  Also developers, publishers and marketers also need to get their heads around the data to help shape services and so on.  So here's a list of sources of iphone app store statistics plus some key highlights from a recent presentation on the subject:

Sources of iphone appstore stats

Pinchmedia  - release data on apps generated by their mobile analytics product such as this presentation

Distimo - offer a premium appstore analytics service, but also release some data for free

Flurry - similar to pinch media - release data from their analytics product on their blog

148apps.biz - have a great section on "app store metrics" with data by category and type of app, prices, no of apps etc

Mobclix - lots of nice graphs and lists of top apps by type

Appsfire - the social app sharing tool has some good stuff on their blog

Admob Metrics - mainly covers iphone browsing but sometimes some useful app-based data - they run a big iphone ad exchange and probably the largest iphone ad network so have good data 

Comscore - have been releasing a lot of good top 10 information on the app store since they acquired m:metrics - check their blog for releases

Finally the big iphone app aggregators such as appshopper and apptism are also a useful source of data, especially on number of apps submitted and so on

Also worth checking out is this presentation from Stuart Dredge - have pasted in the key appstore data highlights below:

Appstore key facts and figures

• Addressable base of 50 million
• 100k apps available
• More than 2bn downloads so far
• iPhone games market worth $2.8bn by 2014
• Avg user has spent $80 on 65 apps
• Avg user downloads 10/18 apps a month
• 90% browse and download on the device
• 30-day retention rate for games – 72%
• But 90-day retention rate is 16%

• Own-IP is popular – 58% of Top 100 Paid chart
• Pricing pressure – Avg price in Top 100 is $2.89
• But avg price in Top 10 is $2.09 (and $1.21 without Rock Band)
• 45 games cost $0.99
• Rapid churn – 59% of Top 100 released since August
• Level playing field – 47% indie, 38% publishers
• EA has 13 titles in Top 100, Gameloft has 12
• Glu, DChoc, Tapulous have 3 apiece

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists is over at Msearchgroove.  We nearly won post of the week with our iphone Appstore Search And Discovery review but this week's winner is a post covering our favorite mobile internet service flirtomatic.  There's a load of other good posts on there this week including from Mobithinking and Holly from Mobienthusiast so go check check it. 

So it looks like the iphone appstore is going to break through 100k apps pretty soon with some of the big tech blogs already jumping the gun a bit and reporting it. This is another major milestone in terms of the scale of the iphone appstore and the growth of the mobile internet in general.  At the current rate of growth there will be over 250k apps by some point in 2010. 

However, the current itunes appstore and native iphone appstore client is arguably not sufficient for providing a truly effective discovery channel for hundreds of thousands of applications.   As a result, the sheer growth in the scale of the iphone ecosystem has created an opportunity for other services to help people search and navigate iphone applications. 

For example, one of the interesting memes of the recent Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona was the idea from Dan Applequist that "Apps are like Songs".  To some extent the appstore is becoming like itunes (the delivery platform) and other services are emerging to be the last.fm or hype machines of iphone apps.  Similarly, Vision Mobile point out that as the iphone apps market matures, retailing will become the key part of the value chain with specialists emerging to focus on selling specific types of applications.  

"as with all fast moving consumer goods (from detergent to mobile phones), retailing and merchandising is the most important segment of the product lifecycle. As applications become ubiquitous, we see specialized app stores with segment-specific retailing of apps, inventory leasing for app promotions (CPC or per week rental as already seen in the Ovi Store and RIM App Center), social recommendations (your friends bought this app, so you should buy it too) and developer back-channels (allowing the developer to reach out to their customers via App Store facilities)."

So here's a quick run down of some of the different types of services that are springing up around iphone app discovery. 

Social

Social search and discovery has made a big impact on web search with the likes of delicious, stumbleupon and digg becoming important filters for the thousands of websites and pages out there.  We can expect similar types of services to emerge to help people find applicaitons.  At the moment, Appsfire is one g socially-focused iphone app discovery tool out there - it allows you to share a list of your iphone apps with friends and on twitter.   Yappler also allows you to share list of iphone applications.   Another similar service focused on social app discovery is Appboy, which recently launched as a kind of "threadless for iphone apps". 

App aggregators

App review sites

Overlapping with the app aggregators to some extent are the specialist iphone app review sites which focus on providing editorial / blogging focused around providing reviews, opinion, news and screenshots to help people find the latest, and the best, iphone applications.  Again, there is an increasing and growing list of these sites but the major ones include appvee, appstorehq and appcraver. 

Magazines

Whilst print media isn't the force it once was, there's still room for magazines to emerge around new trends, and iphone apps are no exception. 

Believe it or not there is actually a magazine on sale at the moment in the UK which is completely focused on providing a Guide to iphone applications.  It's apparently in the second edition, and sells for £9.99.  (no web link available, photo coming soon)

Cross platform appstores

Whilst a lot of aggregators are focusing on providing a view into the iphone appstore only, there are some cross-platform open appstores beginning to emerge.  The main one is getjar, which treats the iphone as just another handset and platform amongst the many others it supports on its site.   Other cross platform stores include handango and mobihand.

At mjelly we are also adding what we consider the best iphone applications to the site alongside those from other platforms.  For apps like Nimbuzz, or Fring which are available on multiple platforms, we provide a single listing and rating for iphone as well as all the other major platforms.  

App Guides

Similar to app reviews a number of sites are beginning to develop guides to apps across different verticals,  For example, there's the App Guide from Macworld which covers apps by type or Apps for Everything from apple itself, which lists things like Apps for Cooks, apps for the Great Outdoors etc

Apple Advertising

To some extent the apple TV and print ads themselves are acting as a search and discovery tool for the appstore.  The "there's an app for that" series highlights key applications, whilst the print ads typically show 10 or so applications and what they do.  

App apps

Finally, in the ultimate circularity, iphone apps which help you to search the iphone app store are also popping up.  For example, App Gems offers daily app suggestions. 

Applications search and discovery is definitely a rapidly evolving area and something we are very interested in over at mjelly so watch this space. 

The post on Appstore SEO has been getting a lot of attention and it was featured as the first post on last week's Carnival of the Mobilists over at Tams60 blog. 

There's some other good posts on mobile advertising and a cracker from mobithinking on "why mobile versions of sites still pay off". 

It seems that Peggy from Msearchgroove has taken over the Carnival organisation duties - massive thanks to Judy Breck from teh brilliatn Goldenswamp who has done an amazing job running the Carnival. 

At present, the iphone app store search system pretty unsophisticated, which means that some of the tricks that stopped working many years ago in the PC web can still be effective.  However, the app store search algorithm is rapidly evolving and already some methods such as keyword stuffing no longer work so easily.  That said, there's still a lot you can do so here's a guide to the top 12 things you can do to improve your ranking.  

1. Do your keyword research

Just like conventional SEO iphone appstore search engine optimization depends on an understanding of the types of keywords that users are going to be searching for.  Once you understand this, you can think about including those that are relevant into your app listing in order to drive search traffic.  High traffic keywords on the app store include:

• Popular apps of the moment e.g. the top 100 charts
• All time popular apps - the all time most popular and big iphone app brands such as Ocarina 
• Major PC-based online brands such as myspace, facebook, youtube and so on
• Generic keywords like "fun" or "sex"
• Iphone specific keywords such as "lite"

The guru of mobile internet SEO is Bryson Meurnior and he has put together a great list of iphone app store keywords based on mining of the app store search suggest feature. 

The aim should be to find keywords that are related to, or relevant to your app.  For example over at howtomakeiphoneapps they give the example of relevant keywords for a wine-related app such as “tasting note”, “wine journal”, “wine’ and so on.

Once you have a list of keywords you can include them in your app listing.

2. Optimize your keyword list

In July iphone developers were asked to submit a list of keywords for new and existing apps.  This looks set to become the key source of meta data for the appstore, to some extent, replacing or reducing in importance the weighting of some of the other fields which have been used in the past, such as the description text.

You are limited to 255 characters for your appstore keywords and these can be changed whenever you submit a new app version. 

3. Optimize your description text

update: It seems this no longer works at all for new listings (existing listings still get the benefit) - thanks to Aaron from The Appency Press for the info in the comments

Until recently it was easy to game the apple app store search algorithm by including a load of keywords in the description text.  This lead to a lot of blatant keyword stuffing - for example developers would include a long list of un-related but popular applications.  For example by using devices like "similar to ... " or  "People who bought this also liked" or "If you like ... you'll like this app" or "Recommended for fans of" it was possible to insert the names of the most popular apps and then achieve a ranking when users searched for them. 

Some developers are even using words which might lead to their app being listed in general itunes searches, e.g. when people are searching for music or video. For example Zaptap is listing words like "Miami vice" and "Madonna". 

However, it appears that already some developers are getting their apps rejected from the store for overdoing keyword stuffing like this. Simiarly, until recently, digital chocoate was getting ranked for searches including the word EA (for Electronic Arts) as they included the abrieviation ea. for each.  However, Digital Chocolate was forced to remove this from the description text and their games no longer rank for the keyword.

4. Use keywords in the app title and developer name

You can also incorporate keywords into other fields in the listing such as the app title and even developer name.  This does still seem to be effective in achieving a ranking for certain keywords. For example, a user searching for "fun" sees a number of apps with "fun" in the title in the top search rankings. 

Again, there's balance to be struck here - if you are planning to build a long-term brand in the appstore with lots of releases, then altering your app title or developer name just to pick up a bit of short-term search traffic probably isn't a great idea. However, whilst it is still possible to get traffic to your app in this way it's definitely still worth considering. 

5. Use numbers or the letter A in the app title

Using a blank or listing your app with a number at the beginning of the name ensure that the app will feature near the top of the results in the "sort by name" view under a specific category.  It will also rank the app above others with the same value, but less optimized title in the other views like "release date".  For example, "1001 pick up lines" or "AAA Bubblewrap".

It is likely thtat Apple will pick up on this fairly quickly but for now there's still benefits in using this sort of naming convention in order to rank higher in alphabetical list views. 

6. Encourage reviews

One element to the Apple app store search algorithm appears to be the number of reviews.  However, users are not really prompted or encouraged to write a review, except when an app is being deleted. As a result only around 0.5% of users leave a review, and this is often negative, as many don't even know they can leave one until they try and delete the app.

One option is to write your own reviews, which is something some developers seem to be doing.  Although this isn't a long-term viable strategy it is well worth encouraging friends, family and friendly contacts to review your app when it first hits the app store and has no reviews at all. 

Alternatively you can encourage users to write a review within your app or wherever your app is promoted.  For example, the appirater code for iphone apps prompts users who have a launched an app 15 or more times, and used it for 30 days (and hence likely to be satisfied users) to leave a review in the appstore, with an on-screen pop up.  

There are also options emerging for buying reviews - for example Fuelmyapp has recently launched and enables developers to gain app store reviews in return for offering free downloads of premium applications to users.  Ratemyapp from The Appency Press is another similar service. 

7. Use price drops

Another way of moving up the charts can be to reduce the price of your app.  Firstly, many of the review sites and directories such as 148 apps specifically track price drops, which can help get your app picked up by them.  Secondly, reducing the price of your app will obviously increase sales, all other things being equal, which can lead to increasing returns if you can generate enough additional demand to push into the charts.  For example,  the Wall Street Jounral recently reported that one of the leading games publishers had some success using this tactic:

"PopCap Games Inc., maker of the popular Bejeweled puzzle game, experimented in June by cutting the price on its Peggle game to 99 cents from $4.99 for four days. Peggle, which had been ranked at around 60 in top paid apps, shot up to second place within 24 hours.

Andrew Stein, PopCap's director of mobile business development, declined to provide revenue figures but said sales during the discount period increased 20 to 25 times the previous volume."

8. Make your icon active

A nifty visual trick some developers are using is to include calls to action or price drop information in their icons.  For example, the use of a "sale" text is already pretty widely established.  Visual hooks like this can be very powerful so it's worth thinking of what can be included in your own icon, even something as small as an arrow can potentially have an impact on the number of clicks you might get. 

Image via the ieverythingcafe

The guys over at A Clever Twist have also written a great guide to improving your iphone app icon - which is well worth a read. 

9. Buy downloads

The more downloads your app has the higher it will rank in the popularity filter of the app store.  One way of moving up the download rankings is to buy traffic to your iphone app store page using an iphone-friendly mobile ad network like admob or by paying for premium listing on getjar. Admob will even let you use your own inventory as credits in their network via their iphone app exchange, which means you don't have to spend anything directly.  

However, if you are looking to boost into the top 100 charts then it is going to cost you.  According to a study by adwhirl it costs at least $1850 per day to deliver the 2500 + daily downloads to hit the charts. 

10. Make the most of your screenshots

11. Promote your app

An alternative to paying for downloads is to use other types of promotional methods.  This includes conventional PR, social media (facebook, twitter, youtube), your own channels (e.g. your website) and submitting your app to the large numbers of iphone application review sites that are springing up such as apptism, appvee and appcraver.   Ultimately, anything which drives buzz around your app can improve your appstore SEO, either directly via increased downloads (and rankings) or even through inclusion in Apple's own pick lists if you bring the app to the attention of an itunes recommended section manager/ editor. 

12. Understand app store analytics

In order to optimize your app listing over time you need to be able to get information and analytics data.   Appviz downloads all your iphone data on the fly and makes it easy for you to review it and see how your app is doing in terms of downloads.  However, the native iphone app store analytics are pretty terrible.   Distimo , Flurry and Pinch Media all offer different types of analytics and reporting solutions to help your optimize your app distribution. 

Bonus Tip: List your app in directories

Finally, you should look to get your app listed in third party directories and aggregators.  For example, you can list your app here at mjelly.com in our iphone applications directory.  Each listing links to your iphone app store page from within a relevant category to help drive users, downloads and reviews.  

That's it - as we say Appstore SEO is definitely changing fast so let us know what works for you in the comments. 

The guys over at Welovemobile  have announced the launch of a new BBC mobile search service as the result of a project they've been working on. 

We all know that mobile search is totally broken - Google have essentially stopped even bothering to provide a mobile specific version or index, so it's an area which desperately needs more innovation.   At the same time, as the BBC note, mobile search is more important to them than ever, as mobile internet usage grows and there is more and more content available for mobile devices.  

"There are thousands of BBC web pages on the mobile site, a whole world of additional content that you more than likely don't know about. Offering search on mobile is a no-brainer - it gets you to the content you want with the least possible effort ...."

The new search service covers news, sport, radio & television web pages and iplayer radio and TV content.

Welovemobile helped the BBC to create a search interface design that incorporates 'best of breed' features from other types of search engine and discovery interfaces.   The aim of the design is to allow for advanced content search and discovery, with the emphasis on providing very relevant and personalised "content surfacing" around the BBC's mobile content and services assets.  The search solution contains some interesting new content filtering and presentaiton concepts and a slick UI.

The BBC say it was a tough job coming up with the end solution:

"our colleagues in Search have had many 'interesting' challenges developing BBC search for mobile. We know it's crucial to get the results right first time on mobile ...  we spent weeks fine tuning the search logic, weighting our search terms, and we now know more about the idiosyncrasies of search logic that we ever thought we would need to. Mobile search is still not perfect, but it's been a long time coming and we wanted to get it launched .... "

The end result looks pretty good, and it's great that The BBC has invested in developing a bespoke mobile search tool for its site, rather than relying on a third party white label solution or just bunging in a google or yahoo site search integration.  According to Simon Liss from welovemobile what they have done for the BBC is to 

"...think mobile from the ground up. We’ve applied what we know about mobile devices, mobile usage, user experience and design to create what we believe is a truly original and innovative search concept and interface.’

The BBC mobile search product launched in an early Beta version on 3rd September - you can check it out at http://bbc.co.uk/mobile

Mobango was the mjelly.com mobile 2.0 service of the week over at Mobile Zeigeist a few weeks ago.  Mobango is an interesting mobile startup based in London and Italy which is a bit like the mighty getjar in that it hosts applications but it also offers other content types like ringtones, video, wallpapers and so on. 

I spoke with the CEO of Mobango, Fabio Pezzotti and got some exclusive stats that show the huge scale that mobango now has in the market:

• 5 million unique visitors/ month

• 12 million visits/ month

• 60 million page views/ month

• Downloads (2009 Jul 13 – 2009 Jul 19): 2,872,264

• Registered developers: 23,245

• Registered users: 4,864,284

• Total Game/Application Files: 42,000

Mobango is now positioning itself as a promotional channel for application developers who can buy mobile advertising for their software on a "pay per download" basis.  So - rather than paying admob for clicks, which might not lead to any installs, developers can work with Mobango on more of a CPA model. 

Anyway, you can read the full article over at Mobile Zeitgeist.  

You can find Mobango on the mjelly directory over at mjelly.com (PC)

A belated link back to the Carnival of the Mobilists last week hosted by Rudy at mtrends.  There's a load of great stuff on there as usual including from some of the best mobile commentators out there including Carlo at Mobhappy, Marek Pawloski, Tomi Ahohen and Denis from Wap Review. The content spans Mobile Widgets, App Stores, Touch screens, Mobile Widgets and mobile learning and is well worth a read.  Here's the link

Rudy has also launched an interested new company directory and business social network called dot open which you can check out at http://www.dotopen.com/

Just back from the Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona - wow - what a great event!  It was brilliant to be able to hang out with other mobile people from around the world and listen to a load of great talks, presentations and panels.  The event was brilliantly organized and I think everyone got a load out of it. 

Highlights for me were:

• brilliant group of people there ranging from one or two man iphone development teams to CEOs of the biggest mobile startups to representatives from Vodafone and other bigger companies
• some great presentations from the likes of Skyhook Wireless, Future Platforms and Nokia 
• the smaller Developer Day which made a great complement to the main conference the day after
• pitches from some great new startups like Distimo, Pikkoo, Layar and Zensify 
• friendly and positive atmosphere - was great to forget the recession and doom and gloom for a while and be around people working in an industry with some sort of growth prospects
• the food and drink was great - breakfast pastries every morning and a wonderful lunch at the main conference
• venues were good - Barcelona Activa and ESADE were both brilliant spaces

Some of the key themes included:

• Mobile widgets / web apps have moved forward significantly but still suffer from fragmentation in terms of standards
• Location really starting to take-off with the data from the use of location services emerging as something really valuable when combined with demographic and other segmentation info
• Operators starting to open up with the launch of improved developer programs, APIs and their own app stores
• Business models not evolving as fast as the technological possibilities and consumer take-up...

I'll be blogging some of my notes from the conference here and you can find stuff with the m20eu tag on slideshare and twitter. 

Thanks to Rudy, Miker and the team for organizing - I really appreciated it. 

Future of mobile is touch

- 220m touch screens shipped this year - only a small proportion are iphones

- touch is a fluent, relaxed way of mobile browsing ideal for MASS MARKET

- 10% of the Quantcast top 1000 websites now have a touch-optimized mobile site (GREAT STAT!!)

- this moves to just 0.5% when you expand to top 10k sites so a long way to go...

Taptu is growing strongly

- 60% of Taptu's audience is based in the USA

- they had done 0.25m searches by Dec 07, 2.5m by June 08 and 25m by April 09

- new iphone app coming out which allows browsing and searching of mobile touch sites (it looked great)

Tom Hume from the mobile development agency Future Platforms gave a nice presentation of day 2 of the Mobile Web Summit focused on the idea of play, engagment, happiness and mobile.  The killer stat from this presentation was:

- Mobile quiz app players usually played the games 3 times, this increased to 7.5 times on average if they entered a league table

- Not just explained by these users being just generally more engaged - they played 2 times on average before entering and 5.6 times after entering league

- shows power of social elements, gameplay etc in driving mobile

Tom has written a short summary of his talk here:

"My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty."

Anyway the presentation is on slideshare and embedded below - it's well worth checking out:

Andy Smith, the Sales Director for admob was at the Mobile Web Summit last week talking about what they are up to.  He also hung around a lot during the conference to talk to people which was brilliant - I had a load of questions as a publisher using admob answered by him.  He really confirmed why I love admob as a company - great at what they do and nice people who contribute a lot to the mobile ecoystem.  Anyway, enough of the props, here's a few notes from Andy's presentation.

Mobile ad formats are becoming more developed:

- Text link/ banners
- Lozenge
- Home-screen takeover
- Video
- Interstitial

Actions "after the click" also expanding:

- Microsite
- Iphone app store (a lot of developer using admob to increase downloads and ranking on itunes)
- mapping/ location (e.g. best buy showing your local store on mobile google maps)
- Video streaming/ download (e.g. movie trailor)
- itunes (e.g. for a band pushing to music download)
- Click to call (actually very successful on mobile)
- Form fill in / data capture
- follow on Twitter (not seen that before - quite original)
- add vcard to phone contacts

Case Study - Capital FM iphone app advertised on admob

- aiming to increase rank on app store via advertising
- 1.35% click through rate
- 8% conversion to app store download
- 24k app store visites

- getjar has done 450m downloads to date - currently running at 35m downloads per month

- 46k apps for all major platforms

- 200k developer accounts

- 35k active beta testers

- have grown strongly since launch of the iphone appstore - expanded app market beyond iphone

- aim to provide "everything for consumers'' - support all platforms, all types of apps, all types of device

- aim to provide ''everything for developers'' - tools, distribution, monetisation

- 1% of apps created by established companies - 99% are small 1-3 man shops

- Google maps has 300 different builds on the getjar site!

- Getjar now focusing on improving search and discovery by aligning results to segments e.g countries, devices, platforms - have the scale to do this

- also offering billing - in-app billing 7* more effective than SMS billing in tests

You can find getjar in the mjelly directory

Mippin are a mobile content aggregation and portal company based in London and one of the most advanced companies in the world in terms of using applications stores as distribution channels.  The clever thing mippin realised early on was that you don't need to invest huge amounts in creating full applications for each platform - by using a "wrapper" or "launcher" driving to a mobile website, you can have the best of both worlds - the distribution power of an appstorea and the screen real estate of an app on the device but with the lower development costs of a mobile site.  

Here's some notes on a great presentation on how they use application stores at the Mobile Web Summit from Robin Jewsbury Co-Founder and VP Development.  I actually got them the slot for this presentation as I knew they would have loads of useful points and I wasn't disappointed. 

- initially mippin was 100% focused on an application business (Refresh Mobile) but out of every 100 people that downloaded their app only 20 would open and use (they couldn't find apps on their phone!)

- not so long ago a lot of people therefore thought that mobile apps were dead RIP Mobile Applications and it was all about mobile web - until iphone appstore came along...

- iphone app store not perfect - QA process abysmal, not really a sustainable model? - mippin only getting 100 downloads per week on the app store - need to also look at Ovi etc

- however ... fragmentation of appstores and platforms is a problem

- Nokia - Java, Symbian, WRT, Flash, Blackberry - Java, iphone - C++, Windows Mobile - .net, Silverlight, Android - Java, Palm - Web OS etc etc

- but there is a way around this - use HTML, CSS and Javascript as a common platform and then create a "wrapper" for it -  Phone Gap framework can be used for iphone, android, blackberry mobile web apps, WRT for Nokia/ Symbian

- this has allowed mippin to quickly and cheaply launch a presence on a range of different appstores and be one of the first services on the likes of Ovi and Blackberry App World

- 400% growth in RIM traffic since launch on Blackberry appstore

- 21% increase in page views from Nokia handsets since launch on Ovi with a WRT app

You can find mippin in the mjelly directory

@jamesparton from O2 gave a short presentation at the Mobile Web Summit about their new developer platform O2 Litmus with some data on how well it is doing so far.   Great to see operators sharing more information like this with the community and being open about the performance of new initiatives.  Here's the key points I noted down:

What is O2 Litmus?

- O2 Litmus is a successor to previous O2 developer initiatives such as O2 Source and Revolution

- trying to create an environment that encourages experimentation without distracting from the core business

- NOT just an appstore

- engage customers, allow them to participate, offer early adopters a role to help decide what services O2 should roll out to the mainstream

- developers get 5 week payouts not 90 days, 70% revenue share and access to O2 customers in 18 minutes not 18 months

How has it done?

- O2 Litmus has been live for 4 months

- 617 developers have signed up, from 50 countries, with no real PR campaign apart from using social media

- 400 apps live on the site

- 3000 O2 customers registered (now rolling out a campaign to another 600k customers)

- Fring is the top-rated application

- events run with developers e.g. to help define product roadmap etc

What is next?

- being run on an agile basis - 3-6 month roadmap

- subscriptions and PC applicaitons

- network APIs

- more information passed to developers e.g. on devices

Here's some notes from the Mobile Web Summit from a presentation by Ben Tatton Brown of the mobile ad buying agency Ring Ring Media.  Ring Ring are pioneers in bringing the agency model to mobile - buying advertising inventory in scale and using deep analysis and testing to optimize campaigns.  I managed to scribble down a few key points from a great presentation that was full of useful data:

- Two types of mobile ad campaigns - Performance campaigns and Brand campaigns

- Performance campaigns typically £5k to £100k per month, run by mobile content companies etc require a lot of work to setup, in depth targeting, 10 different types of creative, multiple landing pages, line-by-line analytics

- Brand campaigns run by the likes of Tesco and Man United are much smaller in scale (£1k to £5k) per month so less interesting for an agency like RIngRing

- Buy advertising from a range of different sources including ad networks, portals, search engines

- CPM advertising typically costs £2 to £20 (for the really big portals)

- CPC from ad networks ranges from 1p to 30p

- Search £1 CPC - search converts much more effectively in general but very little supply - Ring Ring try and buy as much of it as possible

- Seeing a lot of demand for South African traffic at the moment - it converts well

- US traffic is cheap, Indian traffic as low as $0.01 per click

- Click through rates and conversations vary depending on the quality of the traffic

- Search has a 5-20% click through

- Display has a 0.3% to 3% click through (0.3% still higher click thru rate than online)

- track everything from CTR, to CPC, Spend, Conversion Rate etc down to the key metric which is CPA e.g. £3 CPA

Sean Kane from Bebo gave a great presentation at the Mobile Web Summit talking about how mobile is doing as a platform for their web-focused social network both in terms of traffic and usage as well as revenues/ advertising.  Mobile is also becoming a key way of extending and developing Bebo now that we are near "the end of the friending boom" e.g. user growth.  Here's the key points:

Mobile growing very strongly for Bebo

- mobile page views up 53% in the last 7 months

- SMS up 118% in the last 5 months, 5% of all SMS traffic in Ireland is generated by Bebo

- Revenues up 253% (not sure over which period)

- 800m + mobile page views per month

- 16m SMS sent per month

Engagement marketing on mobile working well for Bebo

- Get more Luv campaign with Coke - virtual currency in return for inviting users get coke icon on mobile profile

- 354k participants, 13% increase in mobile traffic

- 562 photo uploads in a single day - took this feature down as too successful and overwhelmed moderators

- other forms of advertising not really worthwhile - massive crash in eCPMs in the last 9 months on mobile

You can find Bebo Mobile in the mjelly directory

Just back from a great day at the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit in London.  Took quite a few notes from the various sessions including some useful info and data which I'll be writing up asap.  The day covered a range of topics relating to mobile web and mobile 2.0 including mobile social media and mobile advertising, some of the highlights included:

• speakers from a number of leading mobile social services including Nimbuzz, ebuddy, Qeep and Itsmy.com which together account for 10s of millions of mobile users
• Ben Tatton Brown from Ring Ring Media sharing some numbers around mobile ad buying 
• Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic giving a really honest and useful view on what they had done right and wrong in terms of product and business model development 
• some great panel and audience discussion during the day - Andrew Grill did a great job of moderating the social media track in the main room 
• the presence of the O2 Litmus, Orange Partner and Vodafone Betavine developer programmes, all representing the progressive side of the major mobile networks
• mix of audience from big companies like Nokia, Google and Opera to small startups and developers

The food and drink was also very high quality and there was a great mix of people - really enjoyed talking to everyone.  I also finally got a demo of a mobile WRT widget - first time I'd actually seen one actually working on a phone (apparently you need to download the run time software that supports them).   Vodafone announced the winners of the Mobile Widgets competition and there was also a Developers Den competition which was won by Wild Knowledge - a mobile education startup. 

On the downside, the day did get off to a sticky start with a plenary session that was arguably a bit too general in scope and a first panel that went over the same old stuff around "who owns the data", a bizarre "me vs we" discussion and other generic "web 2.0" stuff that didn't really focus on mobile. 

However, after mid-morning the day really got going and the quality of the speakers and audience really shone through.  There was a nice buzzy and friendly atmosphere which lead to a lot of great conversations. 

Looking forward to hearing from Getjar, mippin, abphone and Taptu tommorrow. 

http://blog.taptu.com/2009/06/01/carnival-of-the-mobilists-176/

• personal site creation tools like peperonity or winksite
• more advanced site builders like mobisitegalore or phn.me
• blogging tools like wordpress with mobile plug-ins
• RSS to mobile services including mippin, mofuse of mob5
• professional platforms like wapple and net biscuits

Anyway - you can download the podcast here http://geekcast.fm/archives/building-a-mobile-site/

You can also check out the list of mobile site builders at mjelly.com

The mobile browser software UCWEB has a new English version out.  UCWEB is one of the most popular apps on the mjelly.com directory and it just got a lot better.  The user-interface has been massively improved and the software is really becoming a fully fledged mobile interface to the web, far more than just a browser, with features like a download manager, file converter, media player, bookmarking and storage.  The Chinese company behind the software seem to be taking the international market a lot more seriously and have revamped their English website quite significantly. 

Here's some stats - these guys are already major players in mobile:

Anyway you can read a fuller review of UCWEB over at Mobile Zeitgeist where it is our Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week. 

UCWEB download on mjelly (PC)

UCWEB download on mjelly (mobile)

Following on from some recent posts here on mobile internet affiliate marketing and mobile affiliate programs I recently found out about a new mobile internet affiliate network that has just launched. 

Mpex is a mobile web affiliate network which links marketers/ affiliates to a huge range of premium content providers and merchants. 

At the moment the service is mainly plugging in adult content services. However they do have some merchants in other areas including Casino and mobile content (ringtones etc).  It's a truism that the adult content sector always leads a lot of technical and business model innovation and this is definitely the case in terms of mobile affiliate marketing. 

The system MPEX has built is quite simply the most sophisticated mobile affilatiate platform available today.  Some of the features include:

• Choice of a range of different merchants and content providers
• Full microsite builder to create your own sites/ landing pages for the offers
• the ability to create your own network of banners on your affilliate site to retain traffic inside your own network
• full international support with multiple languages and billing system connections
• real time statistics and analytics

I was really impressed with the system these guys have built and the range of merchants available.  They are going to be expanding going forward into developing a non-adult front end and a few other things so lots more innovation to come. 

I really believe this could be on of the first big success stories of mobile affiliate marketing.  For anyone currently running mobile ads on their site or experimenting with mobile affiliate programs you have to give this a go.  Anyway - check out Mpex and see what it can do.

This week's mobile 2.0 service of the week over at Mobile Zeitgeist is Mxit.  We've got some new data on the types of mobile advertising formats that mxit is developing and a bit more info about their mobile education pilot. 

For example, the Petrol Station operator Engen ran a campaign in South Africa where it created its own zone on Mxit.  This was linked to a series of posers in station forecourts which had keywords on them which could unlock content such as ringtones and screensavers. 

• 10,000 people added the contact on Mxit
• 3 million messages appeared in the chat zone
• users downloaded 12,000+ content items in 6 weeks

This is really advanced stuff in terms of mobile advertising - going way beyond banners and text ads and its happening in Africa not Europe or the US. 

Anyway you can read the full post over at Mobile Zeitgeist and find mxit on our mobile directory at mjelly.com:

Download Mxit pro on mjelly

Download Mxit elite on mjelly

Download Mxit Blackberry on mjelly

The Nokia 5800 is Nokia's first response to the iphone - a touchscreen handset but aimed squarely at the mass market with other differentiators such as unlimited music.  Anyway it has been doing very well in terms of sales

• Three million 5800s sold globally since its launch in November 2008, and currently shipping more than one million units per month.
• the 5800 was Nokia’s number one revenue and gross margin generating product, and was the number one volume and value product in the UK in Q1 2009
• UKs biggest selling portable music device - outselling the ipod
  
  

Another interesting thing is that there seems to be some developer buzz around the device.  For example, Nimbuzz the voip/ messaging mobile app has released a special version of its app for the 5800. 

With the launch of the Nokia Ovi appstore coming soon we might see more developers begin to roll out products focused on specific nokia handsets like the 5800 as a way of targeting the big nokia market whilst avoiding the problem of trying to serve every single Nokia/ Symbian device.  The iphone has shown that it's possible to target one device rather than trying to deal with fragmentation and the next logical step is extending this approach to other platforms.

You can download Nimbuzz for Nokia 5800 on mjelly

Rudy from the excellent m-trends pinged me with some details of the Mobile 2.0 Conference happening in Barcelona which is shortly after the Mobile Web Summit in London on June 3rd and 4th which I'll also be attending. 

Announcing Mobile 2.0 Europe : a two-day event on June 18-19, 2009 in Barcelona exploring the emerging Mobile Ecosystem and Disruptive Mobile Innovation, presented by dotopen and the Mobile 2.0 Organizing Committee.

After 3 events in San Francisco and a successful Mobile 2.0 Europe event in Barcelona last year we decided to make this 5th official Mobile 2.0 conference a 2-day event:

A Developers' Day on June 18 in Barcelona Activa, a day for developers in mobile & web convergent area's exploring the mobile ecosystem and the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference on June 19 at at the Espacio ESADE FORUM, a day to explore future visions on mobile and beyond.

At Mobile 2.0 Europe, we will explore the next big leaps of innovation in mobile for the coming years. Six main themes will be covered during this edition: Openness, Beyond Free, Play, Cloud, Context and Sense.

Each section, eventually combined will have about an hour including a keynote or visionary talk on this topic, followed by a panel discussion by C-level industry experts from major European Operators, Venture Capital, Device Manufacturers, Startups,  and Application or Service Providers.

Currently confirmed speakers:

Marko Ahtisaari - CEO of Dopplr.
Tommy Ahlers, Founder of Zyb, now Head of LBS at Vodafone / CEO at Wayfinder Systems.
Andrew Berglund - Global Interactive Creative Director at Cheil Communications.
Xavier Carrillo Costa - CEO / Founder Digital Legends Entertainment.
Andreas Constantinou, Ph.D. - Research Director at VisionMobile
Regine Debatty - we-make-money-not-art.com.
Dr. Lai Kok Fung - Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder BuzzCity.
Tom Hume - Managing Director of Future Platforms.
Matthaus Krzykowski - Mobile Correspondent, VentureBeat.
Brian LeRoux - PhoneGap and Nitobi.
Inma Martinez - Digital Media Strategist and Investment Advisor at Stradbroke.
Charles McCathieNevile - Chief Standards Officer at Opera Software.
Dr. Maximilian Niederhofer, Associate, Atlas Venture.
Pat Phelan - founder and President of Cubic Telecom (MAXroam).
Priya Prakash - Designer of Tools, Conversations & Experiences.
Tom Raftery is lead analyst of GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk.
Gustav Soderstrom, Director of Portable Solutions, Spotify.
Prof. Atau Tanaka - Chair of Digital Media, Acting Director of Culture Lab.
Andrea Trasatti - Director, Technology strategy at mTLD dotMobi.
Katrin Verclas - Co-Founder and Editor at MobileActive.org

More C-level speakers from the European mobile ecosystem (operators, handset manufacturers, VC's, startups, applications and service providers) are confirmed every day now, so stay tuned on our website for updates.

We'll also have some startup demo presentations of some new and innovative startups active in the themes we'll be covering. You can register your startup here, it's FREE!

Early bird tickets can now be ordered at http://www.amiando.com/mobile2europe2009.html