More Blogginess

Hello everyone, and welcome to a rare (in this space) blog about blogging. My name is Tim Bray, and I’m the new editor of this Android Developers’ Blog. I am only a student of Android, but I’m a veteran blogger, I’m part of the Android team, and they’ve given me a pretty free hand to find and publish the interesting stories. I’m expecting to enjoy this and hope you will too.

The work on Android is done at various places around the world, but in Mountain View, California there’s a building on the Google campus with an Android statue in front of it, positioned among dessert-themed sculptures that illustrate the major platform releases to date.

As of now, this blog has a header image taken from where some of the Android work happens, behind the statuary looking out. There are a ton of places on the Internet where you can read people’s opinions about what’s happening next with Android, and a lot of them are good. The one you’re reading now is the one that’s written from the inside looking out.

History

This space has been used mostly in a just-the-facts press-release-flavored way and, while that’s been useful, I thought it could be livelier. Because, even after only a few weeks’ exposure to what’s going on here, I’ve discovered that there are a ton of interesting Android stories, and while some of them probably have to be secrets, there are more than enough we can tell to crank up the interest level here.

I offered this opinion internally, loudly and repeatedly, and Android management surprised me by coming back with “OK, it’s your problem now.”

Future

I’m not going to write everything here; I’m going to track down the people who actually do the creative Android-building work and get them to tell their own stories. I will bend over backward to make sure the articles have the voices of the people who write them.

We will go on being a source for hard opinion-free just-the-facts Android news. But I’d like to surround each burst of that with a cluster of reportage about what it means and how we think it will affect the Android communities.

The immediate future is going to be pretty intense, because we’re only a few weeks away from Google I/O, and I don’t think that I’m telling any secrets when I say that there will be Android-related announcements at that event. So the problems that come with the new job probably won’t include scaring up content.

The first new-flavor post is going to be on a currently-hot subject, multitasking and background processing, written by an engineer at the center of the Android universe.

Wish me luck, and stay tuned!

Mobile Web and Mobile Apps Monetization Strategies

Faced with a prevailing culture where consumers expect web services and digital content to be free, mobile app and mobile web developers need to adopt the right strategy in order to monetize their efforts.

The Freemium model is a classic marketing tool available to mobile app developers to maintain the perception of a free service, while attempting to lock-in customers into some type of charging mechanism. (And I recommend reading Chris Anderson's 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' book for further insights into this).

But many of the decisions around charging will stem from a look at the value that the mobile consumer perceives he/she is getting from the app in question. Apps with a low perceived value will struggle to charge anything at all, no matter the charging mechanism.

I presented a basic introduction to monetization of mobile apps to the EAE Business School this week. This intro is based on a wider discussion included in the chapter of the same name in my new book on Location Based Services (for early access to the book, click here). In the same chapter, I include a toolkit for deciding how and what to charge for mobile apps and present some success examples of companies that cracked the key to generating recurring revenues.

I took a quick survey of the class (highly educated, international, 20-25 year olds) to see how many had smartphones and what type. About 25% had a smartphone, equally split between iphone and Blackberry. 0% had an Android device (which goes to show that Android still has some way to go in Europe...)

As part of the Q&A, one of the questions that struck me the most was along these lines:

"We hear a lot about mobile apps and the gold rush taking place, but is any app developer actually turning a profit from this activity?"

The answer is, of course, yes, though only those developers with the right combination of an attractive value proposition and the right charging mechanisms are able to succeed in an increasingly crowded marketplace. The potential, with 500+ million apps downloaded to date from the iTunes Store, remains huge. But it pays to have the right monetization strategy in place.

You can see the presentation below:

Mobile Web Monetization Strategy

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro.

Start-up Funding in times of crisis

As a follow on to the previous post on 'V is for Vulture Capital', here is a short article I submitted to a local business magazine about funding start-ups in times of crisis, based on personal experience in Europe.

"Whether in a boom or bust part of the economic cycle, obtaining funding carries a health warning for innovative start-ups. It can involve an enormous amount of effort for little (or no) return. This is particularly the case when seeking Venture Capital.

The matching of VC funds to start-ups is an imperfect market. The money will not flow to innovative start-ups unless they have the potential of being ‘the next Netscape’ –no matter how world-changing their inventions are.

Plus, there is the funding paradox –it is easier to obtain €20 million of VC money than €1 million. Many VCs will not even look at making investments below €5 million.

In Europe, we still witness a ‘funding gap’ left by Business Angel investment and VC investment. Few investors feel confident enough to sit in between the two and pump in investment amounts of under €1 million. This forces many European start-ups to grow organically and limit international expansion –allowing competitors from outside Europe to catch up all too quickly.

In times of crisis, the funding gap is compounded by the banking sector tightening the screws on their lending procedures. Without the ability to fund working capital using bank overdrafts, loans and credit lines, a larger number of start-ups seek private investment to prop up their balance sheets. As cash is king, these private investors will in turn limit their investments to those start-ups which are themselves cash generating. This compounds the problem and creates a financing vicious circle that is difficult to break unless economic growth resumes."