Apps World London
Today I attended day one of Apps World at Kensington Olympia 2 in London.
Apps World has quite rightfully doubled in floor space since 2010, supporting predictions from earlier this year that the mobile app industry will be worth £11.2bn by 2012.
Brands such as Vodafone, Telefonica, Nokia and Spotify were out in full force to demonstrate their view-point and strategies.
Apple’s App Store is by far the biggest app distributer; dominating distribution similarly to how iTunes dominates digital music sales. Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales, enough to run at a break even, only making profit on hardware says Javier Lorente of Telefonica. Lorente also highlighted the strength of the Apple ecosystem which will drive HTML5 growth.
As you can imagine HTML5 was a hot topic for its integration into gaming and web apps. Michael Mahemoff from Nuvomondo defined HTML5 in lamens terms as the behavior of Javascript, the content on HTML and the stylings of CSS.
The future of HTML5 covers Web Intents (a framework for client-side service discovery and inter-application communication), real time communication and enhanced graphics and audio. Mahemoff recommends http://diveintohtml5.info
Mark Lister of digital agency Imano gave one of the standout talks of the day- listing the ten golden rules to improving ratings in the App Store. Whilst these weren’t particularly surprising i.e. Cross Platform, rewarding users for reviews, Lister did define rules that I’m confident will go on to encourage better application development. These included surprising users through the user experience of the app, social integration and not abandoning users without 3G/WiFi connections.
One of the final talks of the day I was about the potential for apps in news and publishing. The usual lazy question arose; whether mobile apps would kill print, just like how music television was going to kill recorded music. For advertising and editorial content the message stands that neither print nor digital can be disregarded just yet.
Obviously, the majority of attendees within the developer zone were not developers. However, the importance of decision-makers and financers witnessing first-hand what the ambassadors of the app world recommend can only be a plus to ensure a high standard of output is maintained in future applications and mobile optimized sites to come.