App per cellulari: l’Antitrust ha avviato un’istruttoria contro Google, iTunes, Amazon e Gameloft per comportamenti scorretti con i consumatori
Oggi confrontando le offerte degli operatori di telefonia mobile si può scegliere un’offerta che includa sia la tariffa che i cellulari. Il comodato d...
Leggi tutto: Giochi per cellulari, istruttoria contro colossi del settore
#App, #Cellulari, #Giochi, #Mobile, #Telefonia
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Stocks were higher in early trading on Friday as traders try to figure out what to do with weak job-creation data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' non-farm payroll report, the economy generated 113,000 new jobs in …
For more info: Weak jobs report has traders pondering Fed's next move | Breakout …
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Steven Perlberg Jan. 30, 2014, 8:25 AM8,257 Email More Share on Tumblr Steve Jennings/Getty Images Following strong earnings growth, Facebook is up huge in pre-market trading. Earnings per share were at $0.31 ($0.27 estimated) while revenue was at $2.59 billion ($2.35 billion expected).Shares are launching up 18% pre-market.Mobile ad revenues paved the way for the earnings beat.”Facebook is basically a mobile company right now — a majority of its revenues come from mobile, not from the desktop product,” explained our Jim Edwards. “And the vast majority of its active users are mobile users.”The company is seeing upgrades across Wall Street today.Bank of America has a $64 price target on Facebook. “With better-than-expected 4Q revenues and expense commentary about in-…
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Following strong earnings growth, Facebook is up huge in pre-market trading. Earnings per share were at $0.31 ($0.27 estimated) while revenue was at $2.59 billion ($2.35 billion expected). Shares are launching up 18% …
For more info: Facebook Up 18% Pre-Market – Business Insider
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Jimmy Wales’s Plan to Save the World With Mobile Phones | Social ROI: A Social Entrepreneurship Blog Main menuSkip to contentJimmy Wales’s Plan to Save the World With Mobile PhonesPosted onJanuary 28, 2014by johnGreat to see more stuff like this:“The basic concept is that 10 percent of your [mobile phone] bill goes directly to a cause of your choice, straight off the top,” he said.via Recode This entry was posted in General. Bookmark the permalink. Post navigation © Social ROI: A Social Entrepreneurship Blog
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“The basic concept is that 10 percent of your [mobile phone] bill goes directly to a cause of your choice, straight off the top,” he said.
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For more info: Jimmy Wales’s Plan to Save the World With Mobile Phones
Social ROI: A Social Entrepreneurship Blog
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TechMore: Apple EarningsAPPLE TANKS AFTER WHIFFING ON IPHONE SALESJay Yarow Jan. 27, 2014, 3:25 PM98,666 Email More Share on Tumblr Reuters/Stephen Lam Apple fell over 8% in after-hours trading after earnings results disappointed investors. Though it beat expectations on revenue and EPS, Apple had a huge miss on the only thing that really matters, iPhone sales.It sold 51 million units, a 6.7% jump in sales year-over-year, which was lower than sell-side expectations of 54.7 million. The whisper number was 56-57 million.On the earnings call with analysts, Apple hinted the low growth was due to a contraction in North American iPhone sales. Apple CEO Tim Cook blamed changes in carrier policies for the North American sales drop.Previously, customers could upgrade their iPhones after less than 24 months. …
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Apple fell over 8% in after-hours trading after earnings results disappointed investors. Though it beat expectations on revenue and EPS, Apple had a huge miss on the only thing that really matters, iPhone sales. It sold 51 …
For more info: Apple Tanks After Whiffing On iPhone Sales – Business Insider
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Last August, small-scale farmers in rural Zimbabwe were preparing to harvest their crop of chilies just like they do every year. But this harvest would be like no other.What made this season different was that two months before, almost 450 farmers in the region had registered as “EcoCash” customers. By linking their phones to the local mobile money platform managed by EcoNet, these farmers now had the option of being paid for their crops through their phone. And because a local chili buyer had also signed on to EcoCash, it worked. The farmers were paid immediately and in full for their chilies–not usually the case when cash is involved.It didn’t happen organically. Last June, in Zimbabwe’s Domboshawa region, Mercy Corps piloted its Agri-Fin …
via Global Envision:
Last August, small-scale farmers in rural Zimbabwe were preparing to harvest their crop of chilies just like they do every year. But this harvest would be like no other.
What made this season different was that two months before, almost 450 farmers in the region had registered as "EcoCash" customers. By linking their phones to the local mobile money platform managed by EcoNet, these farmers now had the option of being paid for their crops through their phone. And because a local chili buyer had also signed on to EcoCash, it worked. The farmers were paid immediately and in full for their chilies–not usually the case when cash is involved.
It didn't happen organically. Last June, in Zimbabwe’s Domboshawa region, Mercy Corps piloted its Agri-Fin Mobile program, which built the partnership between EcoNet, specialized produce buyer KAITE, and small-scale farmers. Though everyone benefits, Mercy Corps' focus is to reduce hunger by increasing small-scale farmers’ productivity, and stabilizing their income. In trying out the idea, KAITE had a lot of lessons to share.
KAITE trains thousands of small-scale farmers around Zimbabwe in cultivating and processing organic herbs and spices to be sold at international fair trade markets, including chilies. Prior to the mobile phone option, coordinating cash payments was a huge challenge for KAITE. With only rough estimates of the quality and amount of produce farmers would bring to collection points, KAITE had to rely on approximations of the cash required. When purchasing in remote locations, this often resulted in cash shortages. Farmers would have to wait until KAITE could travel back to their village with more cash.
With EcoCash, KAITE purchased all of the produce available at one time. This allowed farmers to receive the exact payments for their produce via a secure, private mobile account on collection day. And, cashless payments meant both KAITE and the farmers weren't vulnerable to robberies.
Mercy Corps' Zimbabwe pilot, in which 448 farmers were trained and registered on EcoCash, proved that farmers were interested in the idea and able to receive payments through their mobile phones. In fact, they actually preferred it over cash.
For the farmers, the mobile payments options has also improved personal financial transactions. Farmers can now receive and send money to family members and friends, and make payments for groceries and school fees through the mobile phone.
For KAITE, the upfront investment in training and registering farmers paid off in increased overall efficiency. Now, even without Mercy Corps support, KAITE is planning to expand mobile payments to all regions of Zimbabwe where they operate.
“To reach Binga, in the northwest of Zimbabwe, costs us $528 just for the transportation, not to mention time and labor,” said Dominic Collenberg, CEO of KAITE, explaining the move to mainstream mobile payments in their operations.
“It's 1,600 km round trip – 10 hours minimum one-way. The whole trip takes several days. There’s no bank there, so we have been bringing cash. Just last month, we had planned on paying around 470 farmers $25,000 for rosella and safflower, but they had an excess of product worth around $2,000. So we registered the farmers still in need of payment and sent them the money through EcoCash.”
Obstacles remain, however. Some rural areas are still without network coverage. Still other areas lack nearby EcoCash agents to let farmers turn their mobile money into cash when needed. Sometimes local agents have limited cash themselves and aren't unable to provide the adequate amount farmers wish to withdraw.
Yet the benefits of mobile payments to farmers and buyers alike seem to outweigh current inconveniences. Users are finding ways around obstacles, and are optimistic that further improvements are coming, including the expansion of network coverage. For example, KAITE has reached multiple farmers through one farmer who was better able to travel to a nearby agent, withdraw funds, and distribute to the other farmers.
“At the moment, it’s still in the infancy stage, but I see huge potential – if EcoNet installs boosters to improve network reach, as it has planned – then after we register all farmers for making payments, our next priority is pushing information and then improving coordination for production, collection and messaging to negotiate selling prices,” said Mr. Collenberg.
Registering farmers to make mobile payments is an important first step in laying the groundwork to bring numerous services to rural farmers and agro-buyers. As remote areas like this gain more access to mobile networks, new opportunities are soaring for rural farmers to reap the benefits of financial services and timely agriculture information through their mobile phones.
“Although we haven’t started pushing information yet, we are preparing for it," Collenberg added. "We regularly hold farmer trainings and have developed brief ‘grower guides’ for each product we buy. It describes the complete cropping timetable, as well as recommendations for the type of soil to plant in, the rotation with other plants, laying out the seedbed, fertilizing, weed control, irrigation, pest and disease control, harvesting and drying. All of that information is too long for a text message, but we can use texts to send simple prompts to remind farmers of all these things at the time they need to act.”
“Moving to mobile payments is something we never would have done without Mercy Corps’ actively bringing us together with EcoNet,” said Collenberg. “It's a lot of work–very time consuming, and we would never have initiated it on our own. But we will make the time to register all our farmers in the future, because we realize it’s worth it.”
This article was adapted from Mercy Corps.
Learn more about Mercy Corps' Agri-Fin Mobile program, which bundles financial services and agriculture information on a mobile platform.
For more info: Zimbabwe case study: Lessons from a buyer’s experience of mobile money
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A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute highlights the economic power of the Internet in Africa: “By 2025, Africa’s iGDP (Internet contribution to overall GDP) should grow to at least 5 to 6 percent, matching that of leading economies such as Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.” “If the Internet achieves the same kind of scale and impact as the spread of mobile phones in Africa, iGDP could account for as much as 10 percent, or $300 billion, of total GDP while producing a leap forward in economic and social development.” Read more about the McKinsey Global Institute’s findings about the Internet in Africa, or download the whole report, here.
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A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute highlights the economic power of the Internet in Africa:
“By 2025, Africa’s iGDP (Internet contribution to overall GDP) should grow to at least 5 to 6 percent, matching that of leading economies such as Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.”
“If the Internet achieves the same kind of scale and impact as the spread of mobile phones in Africa, iGDP could account for as much as 10 percent, or $300 billion, of total GDP while producing a leap forward in economic and social development.”
Read more about the McKinsey Global Institute’s findings about the Internet in Africa, or download the whole report, here.
For more info: Quotable: The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa
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Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem. We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference. LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the…
via Start Up:
Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.
As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem.
We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference.
LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the wrong product–versus tactical fails, where people build the product wrong. This is a great distinction; so how can a mobile app developer know which of these is their particular problem? In other words, are there dead giveaways that the problem with an app is strategic rather than tactical?
Mariya: A strategic failure occurs when–as Paul Graham is fond of saying–you build a product no one wants. This means that you can’t easily get users through the door despite solid marketing efforts, they aren’t proactively inviting their friends and colleagues, or no one is paying for your product. A tactical failure occurs when you do grow quickly or easily attract passionate users, but see major drop-offs at key points in product usage due to poor implementation and user experience.
When you build a product that is clearly performing poorly from the get-go and you’ve ruled out basic technical, marketing, or executive issues, it’s very likely the product is a strategic fail. However, what often happens is a startup builds a product people like but don’t love. They’ll typically appear to do well early on, but won’t have enough of a passionate following to achieve meaningful growth or revenues.
There are two questions that I recommend startups use to differentiate between being liked versus being loved. First is the question Sean Ellis popularized, where you ask your users, “How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use our product?” and have them answer with either, “Very Disappointed,” “Somewhat Disappointed,” “Not Disappointed,” or “I no longer use the product.” Sean did research across hundreds of startups and discovered that companies that had fewer than 40% of their users answer “Very Disappointed” tended to struggle with building a successful and sustainable business.
The second question is known as the Net Promoter Score, where you ask your users, “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” You mark those who answer 0-6 as Detractors, 9-10 as Promoters, and 7-8 as Neutral. Your Net Promoter score is the percent of Promoters minus your percentage of Detractors, which should be a number between -100 and +100. The world’s most successful companies typically score around +50, and top performing tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon regularly score over +70.
LSC: You’ve also spoken before about the fact that mobile apps suffer a major dropoff in engagement between opening the app and registering it. When that happens, what has a developer typically failed to validate before this step? How can they test for this in the app development?
Mariya: The drop-off between opening the app and registering tends to occur because an app developer doesn’t clearly communicate the value of their app before demanding that a user put in work to register an account. This is a violation of the “give before you take” principle that governs social interactions.
For example, you’ll often see apps where the very first screen is a Facebook-only login screen. Most of the time, all you see here is the title of the app, some vague background image or tagline, and this big Facebook Connect button. While social registration can be easier than regular registration, you’re also asking users to give you access to their social data before you’ve clearly shown them WHAT your app does and communicated clearly WHY they should hand over sensitive information.
Imagine if a random stranger comes up to, someone you know nothing about, and immediately demands to know your birthday, your relationship status, and all your friend’s email addresses. Obviously that’d be wildly off-putting and you’d refuse his request. That behavior is socially awkward for people AND socially awkward for apps, and the numbers show this. The typical drop-off rate at these kinds of Facebook-only login screens is about 30% and I’ve even seen cases where it is over 50%.
My advice for developers who want to combat this immediate drop-off is to test different kinds of onboarding flows for brand new users and try to delay registration until user data is absolutely needed. There are many apps that deliver plenty of utility and value without mandating that a user create an account up front. Great examples include Yelp and Flipboard. Others like Airbnb allow you to browse listings to your heart’s content and only require registration when you are at the last step of completing a booking. That said, there will always be categories of apps — such as social networks or messaging apps — that require a user’s identity in order to deliver value. In those cases, I’d recommend testing very short “Learn more” overviews prior to registration and optimizing your social invite flows, as they will often be the most compelling ways to get new users over the registration hurdle.
If a developer has a live product with sufficient usage already in the market, I’d recommend running several split tests with delayed registration if he or she hasn’t already. For developers who are still in early ideation phases and are building utility apps that don’t require user identification, one quick way to get early feedback is to create a multitude of paper prototypes on index cards that test different opening flows and show them to potential users in the app’s intended context. For apps that are social or require a user’s identity to be useful, a prototype needs to be more fully fleshed out to give meaningful test results. Here I’d recommend developers build as minimal as possible of an HTML5 app, hook up all the requisite analytics, and test as early as possible for retention on the core action loop they want their users to take. For less technical developers, I’ll be covering some methods and tools to get functional prototypes built with less dependency on engineering know-how.
LSC: You do a lot of work in helping app developers create longterm engagement. Do you have examples of app-specific measures that developers really should pay attention to (and maybe generally don’t) in order to validate customers’ engagement?
Mariya: Compared to desktop usage patterns, mobile apps tend to see more frequent sessions but significantly lower session lengths. For example, a product that has both a desktop and a mobile presence might see desktop users visit 10-20 times a month for session lengths of over 10 minutes on average, whereas on mobile they might see users visit 30-50 times a month for less than 60 seconds at a time.
Another difference you’ll see is that people will visit hundreds of websites in a month on desktop, but their bandwidth for apps is much more limited. On mobile, despite the fact that there are millions of offerings in the app stores, the average consumer only uses about 15-20 different apps per week on a regular basis. There’s a limit on both the real estate on a mobile user’s home screen and their capacity for adopting new apps for habitual use.
Thus for many types of mobile apps, the holy grail is to become a daily habit for users. For your app category, you want to be the “go-to” app that users depend on. Aim to get your users to come back every day, maybe even multiple times a day, in order to have a shot at broad long-term retention. A popular metric for measuring retention in the mobile games industry is DAU / MAU, or daily active users divided by monthly active users, and I highly recommend that consumer-facing mobile app developers keep track of that metric as well.
LSC: How can app developers, particularly those working in a cross-platform environment, quickly test and validate new features and processes?
Mariya: Moving quickly across multiple platforms is tough because development and testing are both so much slower and more bug-prone than on desktop or a single platform. Generally speaking, I’d advise developers to focus on nailing the product experience on a single platform first before becoming too ambitious on the cross-platform front, but occasionally you come across apps whose value comes from being ubiquitous.Regardless of what app or feature you want to test, I’d recommend you first follow Eric’s advice in The Lean Startup and clearly identify your hypotheses and unanswered questions. Then you should decide effective ways to test your assumptions and pre-determine what your metrics of success should be in order for you to make a go or no-go decision to build. Much of this is the same whether you are building for mobile or web, though on mobile there are some specific tactics and tools you can use to prototype aspects of your new products or features quickly that I’ll share in my talk at the Lean Startup Conference. I shamelessly encourage all of you to attend my session on “Rapid Iteration on Mobile” if you’d like to learn more.
LSC: Let’s say an app has 2,000 monthly active users and a simple function those people like—but the developer has done some testing and thinks there’s a much bigger market in a related but different product. How would you recommend that the developer pivot to the new idea without losing all of the existing customers?
Mariya: My advice would heavily depend on the resources–time, money, and engineering prowess–that the app developer has available and what the growth metrics and business model look like for this existing app with 2,000 MAU. For the vast majority of social games or consumer-facing mobile products, 2,000 MAU is probably too low of a user base to sustain a real business model as typically only 1%-5% of your users will convert to paying customers and advertisers aren’t usually enticed into partnerships unless your numbers are well into the millions. If there aren’t real drivers of long-term growth behind this app, it may be the right (albeit incredibly tough) strategic decision to pursue a higher potential market even if it means abandoning some early wins.
That said, there are many ways to test new products and markets relatively cheaply so any major pivoting decision can and should be vetted thoroughly. If the new app idea is closely related to the existing one, the app developer should try cross-promoting the new product to his existing user base. 2,000 MAU is a ripe field for recruiting potential users and conducting user research and usability studies. He or she may even choose to launch the product in parallel with the existing one if the company can manage to do this without sacrificing too much momentum or morale. By comparing the live performance of both products in the market, you’ll get the most accurate data to inform your strategic product decisions.
For an existing product on mobile, there are many ways to segment your audience to test new features. One of the most popular is to release an app in a limited number of countries, such as Canada or New Zealand, prior to a global launch. Another is to “white-label” your app and release parallel apps in the same market that test different value propositions. Yet another is to test with mobile web apps or Android apps first prior to officially launching. For example, pushing new changes out on Android is typically much faster than with iOS so it’s popular, especially with mobile game developers, to fine-tune apps on Android rather than starting with iOS.
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Learn more at The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11 in San Francisco. Register today.
via Lessons Learned:
Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.As we’ve mentioned before, this year’s Lean Startup Conference features a lot of speakers who have incredible expertise to share but are new to our event. Mariya Yao is one such speaker. She’s the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu, a mobile strategy and design consultancy helping to guide app developers to success in a rapidly-changing, often chaotic mobile ecosystem.We asked her a few questions about how mobile developers can measure and address their product’s performance in an environment that is both incredibly competitive and rapidly changing. She provided some basic answers for us here and will go into more depth at the conference.LSC: You’ve spoken before about strategic failures–where people build the wrong product–versus tactical fails, where people build the product wrong. This is a great distinction; so how can a mobile app developer know which of these is their particular problem? In other words, are there dead giveaways that the problem with an app is strategic rather than tactical?Mariya: A strategic failure occurs when–as Paul Graham is fond of saying–you build a product no one wants. This means that you can’t easily get users through the door despite solid marketing efforts, they aren’t proactively inviting their friends and colleagues, or no one is paying for your product. A tactical failure occurs when you do grow quickly or easily attract passionate users, but see major drop-offs at key points in product usage due to poor implementation and user experience.When you build a product that is clearly performing poorly from the get-go and you’ve ruled out basic technical, marketing, or executive issues, it’s very likely the product is a strategic fail. However, what often happens is a startup builds a product people like but don’t love. They’ll typically appear to do well early on, but won’t have enough of a passionate following to achieve meaningful growth or revenues.There are two questions that I recommend startups use to differentiate between being liked versus being loved. …
For more info: Rapid Iteration for Mobile App Design
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