Mobile Mashups
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What is a mobile mashup?
Mobile mash-ups take free or low cost
data sources (Twitter, snow reports,
metrics conversion, etc.) and/or multiple
services (maps, flickr, etc.) and build a
mobile application.
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Some examples of mobile mashups
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Inquisitor | Free
BOSS API (free)
Web
News
Search Suggestions
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Delicious BookmarksPro | $0.99
Delicious API (free)
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Tweetie | $2.99
Twitter API (free)
TwitPic Integration (free)
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Ski Lodge | $4.99
Weather data (free)
Snow reports (low cost)
Mountain Maps (free)
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Ingredients for Awesome Mobile Mashups
Fast
Efficient
Beautiful
Fun Hook (i.e. marketing)
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Fast
More importantly, it lets you start typing in a
query less than four seconds after
launching it,...about two seconds faster than
Google's voice-powered search app, and
slightly faster than starting a cold search from
Safari.
CNET
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Efficient
Pre-loads web-pages before they fully load Extracts Phone # and Directions
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Efficient
Efficient doesn’t = lots of features:
Test A Test B Test C
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Beautiful
Texture in support
ConvertBot
of a theme
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Fun Hook (i.e. marketing)
Tweetie PEE
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Fun Hook (i.e. marketing)
Shaking the phone
clears the search box.
Metaphor from Etch-a-Sketch
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Fun Hook (i.e. marketing)
Voice Search
Cool feature, yet...
Doesn’t solve a big problem
(typing ~2 words with search suggestion is
very fast)
Privacy issue
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OK, now you have a fast, efficient,
beautiful app with a fun hook feature.
Put it on the App Store and nothing
happens*. Oh yea, Marketing.
*It is not Apple’s fault.
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Do: Marketing Your App
Get cool people to use it (Tweet about it)
Make People Laugh (Tweetie PEE)
Viral enable the app (don’t force it)
Demo video (with great music)
Get on blog best of lists (not easy)
Blog about how you built it (help others)
Treasure hunt (requires $)
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Don’t: Waste of Time Marketing
Ads (any form)
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Remember, Nothing Happens Overnight
$40
$20
1st Generation 2nd Generation 3rd Generation 4th Generation
$10 October ’01 July ’02 April ’03 October ’04
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Stock Quote: Yahoo! Finance
Concept from: Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences
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Emergent Phase is About
Experimentation
Cost of
Maintaing
Product
of Maintaing
Cost
Addressable
Market
Time
In Emergent Phase Experiment
to get Product/Market Fit
Team
Learning systems
Improving product execution
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Sample App Micro-Economics
Costs Type Amount
iPhone SDK Upfront $99
Costs
Data Upfront $5,000
$100/hr @ 480 hrs
Your Time Upfront (oppty cost)
Domain, Website
Upfront $1000
Hosting, misc
Apple fees Each Sale 30% of Gross
Total Upfront $54,099
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Sample App Micro-Economics
With costs (cash & oppty cost) of
$54,099 break-even at:
$0.99 $2.99 $4.99
78,065 25,848 15,488
8K sales per week to stay in Top 100
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Why does Yahoo! care about
mobile mashups?
Data
Yahoo has lots of open data:
developer.yahoo.com and YQL.
Talent
Recruiting ground for talented developers
Acquisition Signals
If something strikes a chord with users could be
interesting acquisition.
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How to contact me
aseidman@yahoo-inc.com
www.aseidman.com
twitter.com/aseidman
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