Artilium

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Where are the Killer Mobile Applications?

I am not talking about figuring out what the next “must have” mobile applications might be, I am simply talking about how we might find them! Over the next few years many great mobile applications will be created – many, many more will be the usual garbage, but how will we find the great ones? How many great singers and musicians, writers or artists have been discovered after their death and how many more were never discovered at all? The problem is a lack of visibility and exposure to the right audience.

The mobile applications market exhibits the classic long tail characteristics, i.e. there are lots of applications but a large proportion of the revenue will be generated by a small proportion of the applications. To become very successful the application needs to be desirable, visible and useful or compelling.

According to recent research only 1% of iPhone App Store downloads continue to be used for any length of time (i). So these apps must have some visibility, they must have appeared desirable, but few are seen to be useful. Current App Stores measure sales and create top 10 lists but they cannot measure usefulness and that is one of the keys to discovering the Killer Apps. Other research has shown that subscribers are having a hard time finding what they want in the long tail and need improved methods for searching and for filtering out the garbage (ii).

Applications developed on the Artilium Mobile Application Platform have the significant advantage of being easily searchable and their usefulness is measurable! Each application has rich embedded metadata which makes them searchable by name, title, category, keywords and functionality. This alone is powerful, but the really clever bit is not only knowing what has been downloaded, but the ability to detect how often the application is used, where it is used and when it is used. Amazon are able to tell you that 10% of a customers who bought that book also bought this book and that is really useful. However, Artilium is able to state, for example, that 12% of subscribers who actually use this application also use this other one regularly!

A simple application buried in the long tail might be used by only a few subscribers due to its low visibility. However, if these few subscribers make regular use of the application this indicates that it is useful. It is therefore logical that the useful applications are promoted (given visibility) and suggested to other subscribers in a targeted way. The platform is able to use subscriber profiles to assist the searching, suggesting and promoting of applications. This mechanism ensures that the really useful applications are visible to the right subscribers.

Artilium’s platform is optimised to find genuinely useful applications for subscribers. Some of these will inevitably become the “must have” Killer Apps. The platform is not so good at discovering low-value novelty applications that will be discarded after one day, but then again subscribers will get bored of these soon and want to do something more useful with their phone instead.

(i) http://www.macworld.com/article/138959/2009/02/app_usage.html
(ii) http://www.pcworld.com/article/161410/android_market_needs_more_filters_tmobile_says.html