March 13, 2011 | 9 notes

One of the coolest things about SXSW is bumping into random strangers and striking up interesting conversation. While grabbing a sandwich this morning I was joined by Jeremy Olson who shared my table. Jeremy introduced himself as an iPhone app developer and after a few minutes of back and forth about the relative merits of iPhone versus Android (I’m a Google man myself) Jeremy was showing me his newest version of his app, Grades.

The app itself was cool - enter your grades for your academic classes and tell it what your ideal final mark is and it’ll tell you the scores you need to get to reach that average. One of the counterpoints Jeremy made in response to my suggestion that Apple weren’t very developer friendly was that Apple emphasise a strong design consciousness in their third party apps, and Grades was no exception - it looked gorgeous. It’s aimed at students so it had a very visual look and feel, using a drawer metaphor with things flying around the screen to indicate where the user should look next - all very clever.

I was interested to know how Jeremy was monetising the app and he mentioned that although the app was paid ($1), he plans to introduce an ad-supported version where users can either pay $1 to buy the ad-free app, or ‘Like’ the app on Facebook for a month of ad-free usage. This latter idea was really cool and could be pretty huge with a college-age userbase. With the app featuring in some of Apple’s featured lists and magazine profiles, Jeremy has been pretty successful so far.

I mentioned my desire to build an app for the music webzine I run and asked Jeremy for tips. He gave me his formula for a quality app which was really interesting:

Great idea + exceptional design  + make your own splash marketing

That last point was how Jeremy really built his audience. Apple’s interest in his app stemmed from some self-generated publicity solely originating from Twitter. This leveraging of social networks to build interest is really key and it looks like Jeremy’s incorporation of this in his freemium app is a really smart touch.

I almost felt a little sad that I’m not a student anymore and can’t try out the app myself, but it was cool to meet a random stranger who ended up teaching me some of the not-so-dark secrets of writing an awesome app. Viva la SXSW.

- Matt Andrews

• Tags:
• apps
• grades
• iphone

March 12, 2011 | 6 notes

Perhaps inevitably, I had to attend a session that just wasn’t all that. Unfortunately for Paul Gelb of Razorfish, that dubious honour was his. His talk sounded promising and I had visions of being told how to build the killer app I dream of, while at the same time conquering the embarrassing risk of only having three people download the damn thing.

Gelb broke out some interesting (if unsourced) statistics:

• 95% of mobile apps are failures (in terms of active user reach)
• more people text than use a toothbrush
• more people have access to mobile apps than have access to fresh water
• people look at their phones 150 times per day

Stats aside, there were grumbles afoot on Twitter as Gelb spoke mainly to the projection screen (and thus away from his collar mic), not to his audience. He began to highlight some of his own company’s products, again leading to complaints on Twitter that he was plugging his own business. It did feel hard to concentrate on his presentation as it tended to take the form of “my company did this” and “our agency made this” rather than more concrete ideas and tactics for the rest of us. 

A few interesting parts came up: app development should be a continuous process, and they should be scalable and adaptable across platforms. Contrast this against the fairly controversial suggestion that “there are no best practices in app design” at the current time, and you have a talk that was half interesting, half business pitch.

Gelb ended earlier than anybody I’ve seen speak yet, with another 20 minutes or so of his allotted time left. While this did leave time for questions, half the room had already left at this point, so I took the hint and headed off myself.

- Matt Andrews

• Tags:
• mobile
• plugging
• apps