Ali Crane’s thoughts on mobile
November 8, 2010
Last week Ali Crane, CEO of Grapple Mobile, visited Bristol to give a talk on, perhaps not surprisingly, mobiles. In the end though he talked about a whole range of stuff from his own experience. Here’s a few of the interesting points he made…
1 – Windows Phone 7 will be a success
2 – soon apps are going to start working within other apps a lot more seamlessly. This sounds similar to the prolific use of Google Maps in loads of different apps but I suppose there are other even more productive combinations.
3 – the mobile advertising platform Blyk was just ahead of its time and there’s still potential for a service that provides free minutes and texts in exchange for advertising space on phones (in address books / as ring tones / on your home screen). The fact that it hasn’t worked so far won’t mean it won’t in the future.
4 – the importance of being agile in your first year of business.
5 – soon brands will be creating packages of apps that work with certain telecoms providers. So for example, Vouchercloud, Foursquare and Byline would only be available on Orange and then the Guardian app and Videojug only on O2. I suppose though the really big apps like Facebook, Twitter and Nike+ wouldn’t be involved in this.
6 – video calls are looking like they’re only going to be niche thing (makes sense – never really considered using Facetime myself – seems a bit strange) and are just waiting for an interesting 3rd party application to come along.
One of the main points he made was just how important it is to consider the user with mobile and that often it’s the simple, clear solutions that will be the most successful.
