This October Apps World will be returning to London and moving to the new venue of Earl’s Court 2. With over 60 speakers already confirmed this year’s event is set to be the biggest yet with  high discussion and insight on the latest in the apps ecosystem.

This year Apps World will be introducing 10 targeted workshop tracks which will feature a collection of senior representatives from some of the world’s leading brands and most influential organisations in the sector including;

Daniel Danker, General Manager, Programmes & On Demand, BBC

David Murfitt, Global Mobile Services Director, UnileverIlja Laurs, Founder & CEO, GetJar

Randi Rosenkranz, Vice President, Digital Development, Random House

Omid Ashtari, Director of Business Development, Europe, foursquare

Jay Bregman,CEO, Hailo

Krister Karjalainen, Head of Digital, Procter & Gamble

John Conlon, Global Innovations, Mobile Barclaycard

Suresh Sudera, Head of Games, Vodafone Group

Carlos Gracia Armendáriz, Mobile Banking Director, Santander Financial Group

Alex Balfour, Head of New Media, London 2012 Olympic

Ian Mecklenburgh, Director, Consumer Platforms and Devices, Virgin Media

And many more!

Visit the Apps World speak matrix to find out who else is on the line-up.

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To register your place at this year’s Apps World please click here.

Of all the questions associated with app development, the most popular, most obvious one has to be, “how do I make it pay?”Amazon recently took steps to address its reputation with cash conscious developers, making an interesting move of launching an in-app payment system that analysts believe will resonate with users.

But how does it compare to in-app purchase functionality from the other leading app stores? Could Amazon’s late-comer pose a serious challenge to the established market leaders?

A recent report by IHS iSuppli predicted that in app purchasing revenue could soar to $5.6 billion by 2015, with the freemium model becoming an increasingly popular technique with developers to generate revenue. Research firm NPD found that 40% of users were willing to make in app purchases after downloading an app for free.

The Amazon App Store has already proven popular with developers looking to generate in app revenue. One such developer Tiny Co. has reported that per user their apps in the Amazon app store are monetizing 80% better than in Apple’s App Store. So we decided to take a look at Amazon’s offering and compare it to its Google and Apple counterparts.

As the chart shows despite the market dominance of Android (51.6% of market share in December 2011) Apple’s App Store has by far had the most app downloads to date, and is still making the most revenue per user. However, the Amazon App Store is not doing too badly in comparison despite its smaller selection of apps.

Some developers have previously raised concerns with Amazon’s revenue policy for app purchases. When Amazon launched its store last year, it reserved the right to set app prices itself, offering discounts regardless of the price the developer had suggested, this meant developers earned 20% of the price they wanted to charge, or 70% of what Amazon ultimately charged depending on which was greater. Regarding in-app purchase revenue, Amazon is matching the 70/30 revenue ratios of Apple and Google, although Amazon will still have the right to discount in-app purchases.

The benefit that Amazon and Apple have over Google is that they are both already well accustomed to taking payments. They already own large databases of credit card details, reducing friction for many users when they make want to make in-app purchases.

Android’s poor in-app revenue performance in comparison to Apple and Amazon point largely to Google’s lack of commerce experience compared to its competitors, though Android has all the characteristics of a sleeping giant waiting for the pieces to fit together. With new in-app payment solutions emerging all the time, many of them able to integrate with Android, Google could be only moments away from finding a way to convert its scalability and market dominance into revenue.

Amazon’s trump card is the integration of its popular one click payment service into the in-app SDK. Anyone who’s used Amazon services should be familiar with this system, which is partly responsible for the buzz around the system’s revenue earning potential. One click payment is something Amazon customers are already comfortable with using, and is proving to be effective in achieving in-app payments.

Time will tell if Amazon’s App Store will be able to rival the established market leaders, but for developers there are definitely exciting new possibilities being created with their new in app payments.

Issues for developers will be discussed in further detail at the free to attend Developer Zone and Droidworld workshops at Apps World on 2-3 October – www.apps-world.net/europe

Register for your free pass here

Mobile search is a key factor to deliver a successful mobile marketing campaign. It’s hard to deny the umbilical attachment we have formed to our smart phones and tablet devices; the growth of the mobile device industry has been astronomical with eMarketer estimating that half the US population will access the internet from a mobile device by 2015.

According to Mobithinking mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year, with one in seven searches being mobile for most items. Search ad spending is definitely on the increase; according to Adobe’s Global Digital Advertising Update 11% of search spending in the UK is mobile; which is a whopping 250% increase year on year. So how can you best target your keyword campaign to target mobile searches?

Unleash the power of analytics

It may be worth exploring your analytics to work out how the behaviour of visitors from mobile sites compares to their static desktop counterparts, once they hit your site. Use the data as an indicator of what mobile visitors are looking for to plan your search campaigns. For example if you run a website for a local zoo and the majority of your mobile visitors are going to your ‘star attractions’ page and spending the most time there, it may be worth considering setting up a keyword campaign for mobile that links to that page and uses keywords related to it.

Differentiate your mobile and desktop users

If you’re going to spend on search it’s worth considering having different keywords set up for your mobile and desktop visitors. Mobile searchers tend to be looking for more local content and are more focused in their search, research suggests they complete a task in one hour compared to desktop users who take one week, so ideally you should have a separate keywords targeted at the behaviour of both desktop and mobile users. Make a list of your keywords and then use that as a basis for two separate lists one that incorporates more general terms around your keywords for desktop searchers and one that drills down and focuses your keywords for your mobile searchers.

Make mistakes a key part of your strategy

Another key consideration is that mobile users tend to make more misspellings when they search due to the lack of accuracy with touch keypads and the, sometimes annoying, corrective text; as a result it’s worth including common misspellings of your keywords in your search campaign. You won’t want to include the misspellings in your SEO strategy so structuring them into your ad words campaign is the best way to avoid missing out on mobile miss-searchers. You can use tools like this one that will help you generate a series of misspellings of your keywords, so you can integrate them into your campaign.

You can also use analytics to find out which searches led visits to your site and if there are any recurring common spelling mistakes consider including them in your search campaign.

For more tips on your mobile marketing strategy don’t miss the workshops taking place at Apps World on 2-3 October at Earl’s Court 2.

Relevant articles:

• 3 key trends for digital marketing strategy success

There are a myriad of different factors to consider when evaluating operator lost revenues, as free IP-based instant forms of communication gain traction over traditional SMS text messaging. A new report from Ovum predicts that the social messaging trend is going to deprive mobile operators of over $23 billion worth of SMS revenue, so how can operators claw back their position in the mobile arena beyond being just a ‘dumb pipe’ providing data for OTT services to run?

1)      Exploiting their ‘pipe’ status

Operators may be afraid of becoming ‘dumb pipes’ required only for providing a data infrastructure, but the point is the pipe is an unavoidable piece of the equation for OTT services and social messaging – data is currency in the mobile arena. This position is something the operators can leverage which we’ve seen reflected in consistently growing data tarrifs.

The massive future data requirements predicted will put pressure on operators to properly monetize their investments in new technologies like LTE and spectrum acquisitions so that they maintain their pivotal position in the mobile ecosystem.

2)      Making SMS relevant

When the three day BlackBerry outage occurred last October causing RIM’s BBM service to falter reports found an 85% boost in SMS usage suggesting that text-based messaging has become a staple form of communication and customers were willing to substitute one text-based service for another if forced to.

In Ovum’s “The Casualties of Social Messaging” report it was found that although operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, they still earnt a total of $153 billion from the text based service. Although it’s a revenue stream under threat it is still sound. Industry thought leaders suggest that SMS will never be truly replaced by social messaging as there will always be a need for it for example sending official notifications from banks and other institutions via SMS. The question for operators is how they make SMS stay relevant.

3)      CDNs – the weapon against OTT?

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are predicted to become a significant revenue opportunity for mobile operators and may be the weapon they need in the battle for OTT service revenues. CDNs will offer mobile operators the capability to deploy multi screen delivery of video to smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs using premium content services with differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) to OTT providers.

This is a value-based response which should allow operators to challenge the dominance of OTT providers, as operators will become not only the pipe for blind OTT services but also the provider of value added CDN services. The hope for operators is that the CDN market will exhibit a positive ‘network effect’ with additional users joining to send and receive high quality media content.

The challenges faced by operators will be discussed and debated at this year’s Apps World event within the Operator workshops. Find out more here.

The rise of the enterprise app store and in general mobile application management are creating opportunities for companies to mobilize their workforce.  Recent reports have indicated that the global mobile apps market is expected to be worth $25billion by 2015, so how are businesses going to capitalise on the mobile revolution?

Enterprise app stores are allowing companies to control employee interactions by managing the apps they install on workplace devices. According to the GigaOM Pro Survey “The Future of Workplaces” 38% of businesses are now using mobile phones, and 43% of businesses plan to better incorporate mobile into their work practises in the future.

This movement towards mobile has obvious gains for employers in terms of reducing overhead costs and streamlining operations – according to an Aberdeen Survey of 240 enterprises mobile apps designed to help employees complete works increase productivity by 45%.

Mobile apps for internal use have already been introduced to the market, like the Box app which allows colleagues to collaborate with others by accessing documents on the go, and exchanging feedback with colleagues by leaving comments. The increasing popularity of enterprise apps is in turn increasing the need for enterprise app stores. These will be app stores that are only accessible by authorised mobile handsets and will allow employers to control what apps are downloaded on to corporate devices.

The stores will host purchased or internally developed apps on the corporate server and will be a secure place where employees can go to download apps without the risk of jeopardising the company’s security. Fujitsu announced its ‘Business Solutions Store’ at the end of 2011 to be mounted on top of the PaaS within Fujitsu Cloud Computing Services. The store is expected to be launched in the first part of this year, and will host third party applications as well as software developed in house. The aim of the store will be to help companies move away from paying traditional software licences to a ‘pay as you use’ model that avoids the costs of operating their own IT environments.

If we are as industry commentators suggest in the midst of a shift from PC to a smart device business culture the security enterprise app stores can potentially offer is going to be key.

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Find out more about how enterprise apps and cloud computing are enabling a new corporate efficiency and workforce mobility at Apps World on 2-3rd October in London. The event has an entire day of workshops delivering the insight required to make informed business decisions on the new technology available.

With Mobile Marketing forecast to be worth £14.4 billion by 2016, this year’s Social Media World Forum event (27-28^th March) sets out to deliver a wealth of practical advice around using mobile social media and integrating mobile into your existing marketing strategy.

The growth in this market is due to the surge in smart phone ownership, which has also led to a knock on popularity for location based services. Research from Deloitte suggests that apps location features are significantly more popular than other apps.

“People in 5 years will probably wonder how they previously lived without location aware apps,” says Omid Ashtari, Director of Business Development at Foursquare and SMWF speaker. “We can and will provide our users with so much valuable information about their surroundings that they will perceive their cities in a completely different way.”

Industry commentators suggest that, while location services continue to increase in popularity, we’re yet to see the deep service integration that geo-location technology could provide.  Services currently in development will see location enabled apps able to react not just to where you are, but also what’s going on around you and where you’ve been before.

“Our CEO, Dennis Crowley has been thinking about the relationship between people and places for close to 10 years, and mobile technology has finally evolved to a point where we’re able to build many of the tools he started envisioning years ago,” says Ashtari, “we want you to think of Foursquare as a service that you have in your pocket always on that becomes active when there is something relevant around you”. With developments such as the opt-in Radar feature, this functionality is starting to become a reality.

Come along and meet Omid Ashtari at SMWF, he’ll be joined in the Mobile Marketing workshops on 28^th March by:

Volker Hirsch, Global Head of Business Development, Research In Motion (Blackberry)
Kevin Mathers, Head of Media Solutions, Google
Moderator: Howard Scott, Executive Director, BIMA
Neil Swanston, Mobile Experience Manager, Centrica
Dylan Fuller, Head of AdCommerce, eBay
Oliver Ripley, Head of Mobile Services, Travelex
Ben Watson, VP of Marketing, Hootsuite

The workshops will be exploring the following topics:

Apps as part of your mobile marketing and social strategy
Building your location based marketing strategy, will social tools bring about a mobile commerce revolution?
How mobile is integrated within traditional marketing strategy?
Leveraging mobile to build communities
What are the latest developments in mobile commerce?
Using the mobile presence of Facebook to promote deals and encourage on the move purchases

You can find out more about the full agenda here or book a pass for the session here.

It seems that smartphones were top of everyone’s Christmas lists this festive season with an estimate of over 20 million iOS and Android devices being activated between December 25th and 31^st according to a new report by Flurry. The report also found that a record breaking 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the same week, known as “power week”.

The holiday “power-week” has become far more important for application makers than the run-up to Christmas and with the 60% surge in downloads in that week compared to the average, shown in the graph below; it’s easy to see why. This has led to a number of firms offering festive discount deals on apps with even Apple giving away free iOS apps through their ‘12 Days of Christmas’ app to encourage downloads.

According to Flurry’s report the US saw the most app activity with figures hitting 509 million compared to download figures of 81 million in the UK and, popular bird flinging app Angry Birds saw downloads of 6.5 million on Christmas Day alone. “Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace” said vice president of marketing at Flurry, Peter Farago, as the number of mobile internet devices grows.

On November 29-30, Altoros exhibited at Apps World Show London Olympia. Altoros is a global company of experts in software and application development, and provides new approaches in staffing technology projects.

Tristan Palmer, Altoros Managing Director UK, shared the company’s experience in building cross-platform apps,with the use of Rhodes, Titanium, Phonegap, etc. and developing for tablet devices. Also, for those who were curious about making the applications work faster without re-writing them from scratch, he dwelled on some strategies for enhancing the performance of existing apps.

“We’re glad that our presentation attracted so many people and encouraged loads of questions,” said Tristan. “Mostly, they were interested in mobile (iOS, Android, Blackberry) and TV-related apps development segment. Another trend under discussion was building applications for specific industries, e.g. e-learning, sports, marketing, etc.”

Tristan gave some examples of how Altoros helped other software companies develop their projects by supplying flexible IT talents and staff for HTML5, Flex/AIR, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and .NET projects of any size.

If you want to learn more about Altoros and how it can help you with your multiplatform apps, please, visit http://altoros.com/about_summary.html

Last week at Apps World buzzdoes the app distribution tool exhibited at the show and CEO and founder of the tool, Assaf Kolirin presented in the New Platforms and Technology Developer Zone.

buzzdoes is an automated word-of-mouth tool that turns apps users into apps distributors. All it takes is a click on the buzzdoes icon for users to recommend an app to a selected list of friends – they just need to pick the ones they want. The result is that each happy user can steer dozens of new ones your way.

The ‘recommender’ is rewarded for every download that occurs as a result of his/her recommendation. It’s a win-win situation. The users gain from their goodwill and the developers gain new users. buzzdoes, have added a social aspect to the tool, where users can see their friends’ applications. This serves as an advertisement area where the developer can earn money from every download that occurs through the buzzdoes button on his/her application creating a new revenue stream.

“A few years ago, I was involved in developing applications for both the games and business markets. We thought our ideas were great and couldn’t wait to get them in front of users and we started looking for ways to market our apps,” says Assaf, “This is when I had my Eureka moment. Why not use the most reliable and influential marketing model – word-of-mouth? It worked for Gmail, it worked for Facebook. Why wouldn’t it work for my app?”

If you want to find out more about buzzdoes you can view their website here

Apps World exhibitor LeadBolt, the leading mobile advertising network and in-app ad monetization company announced this week the release of a revolutionary new ad format. “App Wall” is designed to allow developers to monetize their apps quicker, with more consumer engagement options and without the integration issues of an SDK.

“We set out to create a solution for developers to monetize their apps without the need for much effort over the development of the app itself. Developers should be able to focus on what they do best – developing amazing apps,” said LeadBolt CEO, Dale Carr.

Released initially as a “Top Apps” wall, this new format will ensure high returns for developers by presenting the app user with an offer wall of the top performing apps. The combination of app installs, which are amongst the highest paying offers, presented on an offer wall, a high performing ad type, will ensure superior eCPMs for developers. However, its method of delivery is what makes this ad format even more revolutionary. Top Apps requires no SDK integration.

With just simple html, developers can integrate the “Top Apps” wall into various different forms that perfectly compliment the developer’s specific app, such as a menu icon, a top apps tab, a navigation bar, a simple banner, a hyperlink or app of the day announcements. From there, users will install one of the apps from either the Android marketplace or iTunes store. Advertisers will get quality non-incentivised app installs and publisher will get paid for each of these app installs.

For more information and a short video of the new ad type visit

www.leadboltapps.com/appwall