Mobile 2.0 In the Wild

Daniel Appelquist — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:46:44 +0000

My friend Adam is a small animal veterinarian in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I rarely get the chance to see him, but when I do it’s always illuminating in some way. Last night over some lovely steaks and shirley temples at San Francisco’s A5A, we got to talking about apps. Adam is an app fiend. He has completely filled up his iPhone with apps. He yelps. He tweets. Adam is super-connected. More interesting though is how he runs his business. Adam uses Freshbooks to do all his business management online (or “in the cloud” as fashion now dictates). Using the Minibooks iPhone app, he is able to get into all this information while mobile, including patient records, blood work reports, etc… everything he needs to do his job. He uses VoiceCentral/GoogleVoice to manage his calls, get transcripts and make appointments. He uses MotionX GPS to get to appointments. He accepts credit card payments with MerchantWare’s credit card app. Otherwise, Freshbooks allows clients to pay him through Paypal. He has all kinds of Veterinary reference material and medical calculator apps on his iPhone. He uses Osirix to carry around digitised xray images from hospitals. He uses Evernote to sync multimedia of pets (images, sound, and videos) taken on the iPhone to his Mac. His entire business is mobile. He can show up at a client, pull up their pet’s records and start working without a single piece of paper. This enables him to do something almost unheard of in this day and age: make housecalls. In fact, that’s all he does. The “cloud” + mobile apps have enabled him to create an innovative new business model and the result is happy pets and pet owners (read his Yelp reviews). How many other small businesses is Mobile 2.0 quietly re-inventing?

Apps are like Songs

Daniel Appelquist — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:06:53 +0000

One really interesting conversation that emerged at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last week was about the emerging Apps culture. Clearly, mobile apps (applications, widgets, webapps whatever you want to call them – I’m talking about data-driven experiences on the phone here, irrespective of platform and technology) are in the midst of a renaissance. However, I have also been hearing a lot of critical voices recently talking about “useless” apps and questioning “how many apps do people really use on their phones?” So I made a point at the Developer Day portion of the event that Apps are like Songs which I didn’t actually think was terribly original but people there seemed to jibe with it. Why are apps like songs? Someone else commented that you can “use them once and throw them away” but I’m not sure that captures it – because you don’t throw songs away really. They might stay in your music library unplayed for months or even years only to resurface at the right time. I was reminded of this today when someone challenged me to find an app that made effective use of the “shake” feature. I immediacy called up the “shotgun” app on the iPhone, which is kind of a “one joke app” like the Zippo lighter or the Carling beer. It doesn’t mean they’re any less worthy – and in the case of the Zippo or the Carling (ugh – I hate Carling — but I love the app!) you can see the marketing potential of apps as songs. But it’s not all about new avenues for selling you terrible beer. Apps can be art as well. One of the first apps I ever downloaded for my (then) jailbroken iPhone allowed you to take a picture and share it, as part of an ever-changing collage, with a community of other users who were also using the app that that given moment. No purpose. No monetization angle. But very compelling. Are these apps any less purposeful because a user might only run them a few times? I don’t think so. I think this apps-as-songs approach changes the way we need to think about software development in this context, and also reinforces my belief that software development is a creative discipline.

Dan's Blog (2.0) » mobile 2.0

Mobile 2.0 In the Wild

Apps are like Songs