Should the app cost money to purchase? Should it be given away for free and paid for from ad revenue?

Pros and Cons
Earning money from mobile apps whether paid or free can be difficult, but working backwards to best ensure the financial success by coming up with the right model can help your app to be successful from the start, and provide the capital for future improvement or new projects altogether.

Free apps are appealing to users (and developers) because they are more likely to be downloaded. Paid apps have their advantages through more immediate and more predictable revenue than through ads. No developer who has created an app wants users to be dissuaded from downloading the app because of the price, but how can you confidently come up with a plan to price and add your app to app stores and know you’ve made the right decision for your situation?

Market Matters: iOS versus Android
For starters there’s a huge cultural difference between iPhone and Android users. iPhone users come preconditioned paying for content dating back to the days when iPods roamed the earth. For that matter, iPad users are even more tolerant, with 80% of all iPad apps listed as paid apps.

Meanwhile, the Android market is less mature and more skeptical of paying for apps. Pingdom.com created a great graphic showing the difference between the iOS and Android marketplaces, and the difference between which two markets is staggering.

As you can see, Apple’s iOS App Store has just under 70% of all apps listed as paid apps while the Android market only has 36% of its apps in the paid category — almost the numerical reverse. Pingdom has a few theories on why there’s such a huge disparity, but the bottom line is that Android is less tolerant to paying for apps so knowing that going into a development cycle could change development priorities or plans.

Know Thy App: Every App Vibrates to that Iron String
If you’ve never developed an app in the exact same space before, it might be hard to know definitively what your market is. Is your market a niche or a broad audience? Games like Angry Birds or Draw Something have a mass appeal, while an app that charts the details of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War likely has a much smaller audience. Knowing a user’s behavior with the app will help you to plan for your monetization model. If it’s not expected to have a wide user population, how does that change the revenue model? Is the development cost going to be less than the potential payoff in paid downloads or ad revenues?

If the app is something that’s wildly addictive or something that has sticking power (games, entertainment news or sports news would be examples of categories that have more proven stickiness), then even a loyal and small user base might be able to float the right ad revenue numbers.

Do Your Market Research
BASF’s age old tagline is “we don’t make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better” and they might be onto something. No one will argue that disruptive technology is what propels the tech economy forward, but while new and original ideas in the app-space can be good things, they can’t be counted on for being wildly successful. Here’s what Chad Mureta, successful appreneur wrote on Tim Ferriss’s blog a few weeks back:

I can’t stress the importance of emulating existing apps enough. It’s easy for people to fall in love with their own idea, even if the market doesn’t show an appetite for it. But this is one of the costliest errors you can make. Unfortunately, developers make this mistake all the time. They focus on generating original ideas and spend a lot of time and effort creating those apps.

Before getting too deep into the development of the app for the purpose of profit, be sure to understand what your market is and more importantly download other apps that are in the same space you might consider competitive. Read the reviews, make notes of the apps and try to find a way to bridge gaps in that space with a better product than what currently exists.

It’s Money That Matters
The more niche the app, the more likely charging for an such an app should be.

Why?

Because it’s purely about the numbers.

Until an app’s usage data proves otherwise, app rarely have supernatural stickiness, according to Pinch Media, most apps get only 12 total uses. Pinch Media has created apps with millions of downloads, and a while back crunched the data to come up with best practices for creating paid versus free apps.

You can see all the data here, but in brief, here’s the crux:

- The average free app gets only 12 uses by its users
- Apps that are free are 6.6 more likely to get downloaded than a paid app.
- A paid $0.99 app at the lowest price will net its creator $0.70 per user in the iPhone App Store
- Free apps, using the 6.6X modifier still only equals 80 total ad impressions
- Can the average app make $0.70 off around 80 impressions?
- $0.70 in 80 sessions translates to an $8.75 CPM rate

From talking to advertisers within the last two weeks, most current ad markets bear anywhere between $0.50 — $5.00 and guess which end you’re most likely to get at the start?  It’s fair to say that the numbers are not even close to the $8.75 mark that would be the break-even. In summation, there’s very little chance that you’d make as much, even with 6.6X less users than had you charged $0.99 for the same app. Now imagine you create a killer app in your area that can command a higher price like $1.99 or $2.99?  What would the CPM rates need to be in those cases?

Of course, the downside here is that paid apps will more likely create negative feedback from the user-base if you don’t deliver with a clean, intuitive, and well-coded app and a group of negative comments on the app can kill it’s potential.

There Are Always Exceptions to the Rules
Are there exceptions to the rules of making apps for monetary reasons?  The growing trend of in-app purchases cannot be discounted, and while this post didn’t dig into it, it’s a very promising model.  If the app created is sufficiently sticky to garner thousands of views from the user-base and the base gets big enough, then there’s the potential to make lots more money from ads than from just a single download fee.  To make the $8.75 CPM rate, the typical app would have to carpet-bomb users with obtrusive ads to beat the money it would make in the same number of total impressions from a paid version.

In Conclusion
This post was meant to discuss some of the most common app monetization factors, but it bears saying that there are many more models that are proving profitable and that should be taken into consideration. In-app purchases is one of the biggest growing areas in apps, free apps promoting mobile based transactions, free apps meant to build brand awareness, apps created for generating sales leads … etc. There’s a million ways to go based on your specific situation, but hopefully this was at least some food for thought.

If anything the hope here is that this post brought to mind some alternative monetization models. We’d love to hear your experiences, concerns and questions in this process. Please share your thoughts in the comments and as always, follow us on Twitter @Shockoe or join our Facebook Page for more app-related insights!

You’d think so, right?

Not necessarily if your are the Ritz-Carton Hotel Company.

While the luxury hotel chain’s App does do those things, they certainly are not the focus of the marketing campaign or of the the mobile application itself, according to a recent announcement by Ritz-Carlton. The company has unveiled a new mobile application for Apple iOS and Android smartphones which provides more than just standard hotel searches and reservations. The Ritz-Carlton App highlights a feature for hotel guests called “Presidential Tips” in which Ritz-Carlton president Herve Humler shares his favorite spots, features and unique touches of each and every Ritz-Carlton Hotel from their chain of hotels around the world. It’s like a guided tour by the president, available for every guest in every Ritz-Carlton hotel, available at all times.

Brilliant, right?

“In my role, I am fortunate to be able to visit all of our stunning locations around the world,” said Humler about the App. “I want to enrich the Ritz-Carlton experience for our guests further with details about the things I have found to be quite unique and memorable in my travels. With The Ritz-Carlton App I can now do that very easily and in real-time.”

For even the most seasoned and pampered of luxury travellers, staying at a Ritz-Carlton is still a special experience, so allowing their exclusive clientele some VIP insider information delivered directly to their smartphones can only enhance their experience and will only increase the guest’s likelihood of sharing that experience with others.

The value of the Ritz-Carlton brand is in its luxuriance, its privilege, its uniqueness and its cultural and historical value for each of their properties, sharing those details can be difficult for a fully functioning hotel, even one with the level of service that even Ritz-Carlton affords. But the mobile application has made it very easy to provide more service and enhance the experience while tying right back into the core identity of what Ritz-Carlton is.

This mobile application ties in nicely with the overall exclusivity and luxury of the brand, while giving users reason to continue to use the App as they travel from one city to another to learn more about the company’s offerings, maybe those users will even find a deal or two along the way.

Even luxury travellers like a deal now and again … right?

What is unique about your organization or brand? How can you use that differentiation to your advantage through a web or mobile application? Can Shockoe help you uncover and utilize those key distinctions for your own mobile or web application? Please let us know in the comments, we’re here to help!

So …

Entrepreneurship and Richmond?

Absolutely!

TechCrunch’s visit brought together over 100 entrepreneurs, angel investors, tech industry insiders, and even the idle curious in an effort to encourage attendees to pitch entrepreneurial ideas to each other or to TechCrunch themselves and see where it might lead.

via TechCrunch

While we’ll have to wait and see what pacts were sealed with a ride on the Snagajob slide, TechCrunch’s visit validates a shift that many are already noticing in Richmond, but we’ll let TechCrunch tell you themselves:

It looks like this town is just starting to unwind a little and consider entrepreneurship as a viable alternative to the corporate life, so we’re pretty excited to be here.

While Richmond has been home to some titans of industry, entrepreneurial examples like Snagajob and Create Digital are proving that there’s room in Richmond for grass-roots growth in the new economy.  While the recession has been tough on many, it’s also provided the proper creative and financial push to explore new opportunities and create new technologies with much lower barriers of entry to a global marketplace.

Of course with any new venture, there’s always going to be risk, but one of the TechCrunch hosts encouraged attendees to thoughtfully consider the risk versus the reward – and to be bold.  “Make your pitch,” Jordan Crook urged attendees when it came to their business ideas. “What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?  A potential investor says no?  That’s nothing, then you just move onto the next one.”

Crook noted that right now is the very best time for new ideas and new companies to jump into the deep end.  Good ideas will prevail, and Crook noted that in the present economic climate that starting a business or product now that proves viable will only set those entrepreneurs up all the better once the economy picks up.

So we ask … how do the risk and reward truly measure up?  Are you poised to gain from the rapid expansion into the mobile environment?  How can we help your idea become a reality?

Enter Box2D’s mouse joint. In our modifications to the ti.box2d module, we have added the mouse joint for use in Titanium games using Box2D. Creating a mouse joint is simple, as shown in the code below.

In the above code sample , world is the result of a call to ti.box2d’s createWorld function. All joints require 2 bodies, even though we generally think of the mouse joint as really only effecting a single body. When creating mouse joints, that second body (the first parameter in this function) is generally a static ground body. The second parameter in our createMouseJoint function is the body that we want to drag around.

We’ll come back to the other options in a moment. First, let’s actually drag the body around. In order to have the body dragged towards a point, we must call the setTarget function on the mouse joint with the x and y coordinates that we want to drag the body to. You’ll generally want to do this in an update loop or anytime the mouse (touch point) moves.

That’s all you need to start dragging a body around. Now lets circle back to those other options in the creation of the mouse joint. The maxForce property is the maximum amount of force that will be applied to the body in order to get it to its target point. collideConnected indicates whether the draggableBody should be allowed to collide with the groundBody.

The last two properties, dampingRatio and frequencyHz, are the parameters you will need to tweak the most to get the kind of dragging feel that you want. If you want very tight dragging, you will need a higher frequency and damping ratio. If you want some oscillation after the body reaches it’s target point, you will want a damping ratio less than 1.0. Check out the Box2D Manual to learn more about these options.

Let’s begin by listing our currently attached devices.

As you can see, we have three devices attached to our system. Two emulators and one physical phone. Now let’s logcat our physical device because it’s running our application that we want to debug. Just pass the -d switch to adb to target our device.

If we had a single emulator instance and one or more physical devices attached we could pass in the -e switch to adb which targets emulator.

The final switch we can use for device targeting is the -s switch, which stands for serial number.

iPad3

The roar around the arrival of Apple’s latest version of their market-dominating tablet drowned out pretty much anything else tech in the last few weeks. Even the buzz at SXSWi had a distinctly “when will I get my hands on my new iPad?” character. Most of the big voices in mobile that we follow came home fast from SXSWi so they could crack open the shipping boxes on their new iPads.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable said this about his iPad3 on Facebook:

It’s certainly worth getting if you have an iPad 1, but if you have the iPad 2 it’s probably only worth the upgrade if you use it a lot … Or if you work in the tech industry and are expected to know about these things!

And speaking of iPads, the company that designs that tablet’s chips has designs on something else:

ARM wants to crush Intel

Who is ARM, you might ask? If you’ve got a mobile device, it probably has an ARM chip in it. The British chipmaker has gone on record that their goal is to snag 60% of the microprocessor market. They’re currently at 30%, which isn’t bad for a company that most people have never heard of. Our bet is that Intel has heard of them. There’s a good piece CNN Money about ARM and its plans for world domination. We love mobile tech. We also could love the idea of investing in ARM’s stock, particularly based on their established track record and their audacious-but-achievable goals. [Just an observation, not investing advice!]

Samsung: there’s a camera for that?

Samsung has rocked the Android smartphone space, and they’re now looking at creating stand-alone Android-enabled cameras. Obviously, they’re already in the smartphone camera space given that they include cameras on their smartphones, but we’re looking forward to seeing what an Android camera from Samsung might look like.  Would make sharing high-quality pictures on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook easier than ever.

Got a trend you’re watching? Let us know!

Titanium is indeed a powerful development platform that allows you to build and deploy mobile apps quickly that will work on any platform. We’re proud of Appcelerator’s win, since we can bask in the glow ourselves as Titanium developers and trainers. Our CEO, Edwin Huertas, just picked up a Master Certification in Titanium last month, and on the way back home to Richmond he stopped by Accenture-Austin to teach mobile development and best practices to their developer team.

So that’s the local mobile news, with a global spin. Here are some other trends we’re watching:

iPad 3 launch

Apple is launching the iPad 3 this week (if they want to take advantage of SXSW crowd hype) or next week. We’ll be watching closely to see what changes are really in the tablet after all the pre-launch speculation is either proven or myth-busted. One big question: will it include LTE? GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard has a great post on what LTE’s inclusion, or exclusion, would mean for the mobile space. Stay tuned for that answer.

Augmented reality for navigation

Texting while driving is a bad idea. There are, however, a few apps in development that use augmented reality to help drivers navigate traffic by using the camera lens on their smartphone. One in particular got a lot of attention at Mobile World Congress last month: iOnRoad, an Android app developed by an Israeli company who envisions the technology being integrated into existing vehicle navigation systems.

Are you looking to build a mobile business?

That’s one trend that will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, as more people across the globe get connected via mobile devices even when terrestrial connections aren’t available. If you need help exploring the idea of making your business, your idea, or your cause mobile, we’ve got expertise and the tech savvy to make it happen. And the training programs to help you build your own mobile developer team.

Got a trend you’re watching? Let us know!

How does someone figure out what’s really worth it, and what’s the latest shiny object that’s really just a tin can?

Great minds spend great big chunks of time and money thinking about this very question. Gartner releases an annual Hype Cycle report that looks at tech trends and predicts what their adoption and long tail might be.

Their predictions for 2012 are in the chart below. You can see that most of where we operate here at Shockoe is already on the Slope of Enlightenment.

(c) 2012 Gartner

Here are our Three Tech Trends of Truth that rise above the hype-noise:

#1: Tech that connects emotionally

A great example of this is apps that deal with food. Our own iYummi app takes advantage of this by letting users share their favorite food across their entire social sphere. Angry Birds is another app that uses emotion – it lets users kill mustachioed pigs to blow off some steam. Instagram has an emotional component, too, in that images can have a significant emotional impact. Technology is a human tool, and humans are emotional creatures. Tech that touches human emotion will trend … forever.

#2: Education 2.0

Tech that helps students self-direct learning is coming on strong, and will continue to do so. We’re educators here at Shockoe, and we know from our experience teaching mobile development that learning face-to-face is the best way to acquire some skill-sets. However, there is plenty of room for self-directed education in primary, secondary and university programs, and that idea is starting to gain traction. Legendary tech investor Vinod Khosla posted some of his thoughts on this on Techcrunch last month. A favorite quote:

according to research by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, 60 percent of the top-selling iPhone apps on the education store are made for toddlers and preschoolers. Do we expect these children to relinquish and forget their app- and game-centered development after they get to first grade? This is completely unreasonable! And for me it is easy to envision how we can make education more engaging with these approaches, hence enhancing learning at all levels be it kindergarten or medical school.

#3: Near Field Communication will change money forever

We talked about this two weeks ago in our post on mobile trends. Mobile payment tech turned Africa into a mobile-payments case study, spring-boarding off the M-Pesa launch in 2007 by wireless provider Safaricom. Now a number of banks in the US and Europe are giving NFC-enabled mobile payments and banking a test drive. The early adopters among banks will be the winners in this race. Those in late will become the also-rans, losing increasingly-mobile customers in all geographic areas to the more mobile-friendly financial institutions.

What tech trends are you watching this year? Tell us on our Facebook page, or shoot us a tweet.

iPhone/iPad

iProcrastinate | $0.99

As 2012 hits full stride here in mid-February, and schedules become hectic, many people may find themselves in search of a good “To-Do List” app. For those who aren’t picky about their personal task management tools, more power to you! But for those of us who take pride in having only the best-of-the-best tools at our side, there is iProcrastinate. iProcrastinate is the ideal task manager for anyone who doesn’t want their todo list to get in the way of actually getting things done! With a full list of features, including due date classification, priority filter and project break down, this app has it all. Not to mention its beautiful color coded navigation, which is definitely one of my favorite features. You can even sync your ‘to-do’ list over the internet via Dropbox, and/or with the equally amazing Mac version of iProcrastinate here!

Android

Google Voice | Free

There’s nothing quite like an easy to use (free) internet service, especially when it comes from someone like Google. Google Voice is just that; free and super easy for anyone to set-up and use. As a matter of fact I would even venture as far to say that if all mobile phone companies were to take a page out of Google’s book on this one, the world would be a much better place or us all. If you have a google account, which is required on almost all Android devices, the chances are you already have Google Voice set-up and you dont even know it. If not than everything you need to know is here.  Once your all set-up you’ll be able to make cheap international calls, send free text messages, listen to your voicemail and read transcripts of new messages no matter where you are. In the latest update of Google implemented a completely new look and feel and added offline message sending, so that you dont have wait until you have service to send a message.

Come back and visit us every week for our new Apps of the Week!

iPhone/iPad

Call of Duty Elite | Free

Any gamer can appreciate the world’s most popular first person shooter that is Call of Duty. Now, as third-party ‘add-on’ to their latest saga Modern Warfare 3, Activision has now taken the action on the go with their new iOS (and Android) COD Elite app. Whether you just want to check your KDR (Kill /Death Ratio), change your kill streaks, or even create custom classes on the fly, this app has it all.  There is definitely something to be said for around the clock access to Call of Duty and for CODers of every level this free download is one that will easily bring your game to the next level.

Android

Osmos HD | $4.99

Finally the award winning iPhone sensation has come over to the Android market, and in amazing HD fashion I might add. For those unfamiliar with Osmos the objective of this microcosmic game is to survive, absorb smaller organisms and grow—but beware of larger predators! Winner of multiple “Game of the Year” awards, Osmos features unique physics-based play, stellar graphics, and a hypnotic soundtrack of ambient electronica. The first couple levels should prove to be fairly straight forward for any user, but as you move up in the ranks of evolution the real challenge begins. Addictive would be a severe understatement for this app, and although $4.99 might seem a little steep the hours of fun and entertainment are well worth the price!

$4.99 seem a little steep? Tryout the demo version here first!

Come back and visit us every week for our new Apps of the Week!