iPhone Development Zen

Gizmodo broke the story on the Nexus One (NO – the Google Phone) pricing earlier yesterday. There is nothing innovative about the price it’s fairly standard way in which the mobile phones are priced: locked version which is subsidized by the carrier and unlocked full priced version. There had been a couple of earlier posts about the features and the form factor. All in all, NO is shaping up to be a competitive device and will further the cause of Android phones. It would be interesting to see how it all pans out with so many device manufacturers, carriers and now Google getting into the game so directly. There is also an indirect VoIP story in the NO launch somewhere and carriers will be sensitive to that. In a lot of ways, iPhone is actually a better play for carriers then anything Google can ever offer because the Google business model is so directly dependent on cheap bandwidth, ads and control over content discovery and delivery.

So what do I think about Google NO? It’s no iPhone killer. It will further cement Android’s position as a distant #2 in the smartphone category and become a second platform of choice for App Developers.

Oh and everyone at ZENTITY wishes you a very happy and prosperous year 2010.

Checkout a new review of Touch Carrom on http://www.amitbhawani.com.

Inbound marketing by Halligan and Shah is as practical as you can get about SEO and Social Media without actually describing the installation of blogging software, HTML code and HTTP server configuration files. The book starts by explaining what is inbound marketing and how it is different from outbound marketing (the current interruption based advertising model). Inbound marketing is all about driving leads towards your business, when they are seeking information or reading on a topic relevant to your business. The authors then build a case for why inbound marketing is important in today’s world and why it’s much more effective than outbound marketing.

The book is divided among four sections:

• INBOUND MARKETING
• GET FOUND BY PROSPECTS
• CONVERTING CUSTOMERS
• MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

The structure is quite logical having first explained you the basic concepts, it then moves on to increasing your reach within Google and Social Media, converting prospects into customers and eventually measure how well your inbound marketing efforts are doing.

The interesting thing about the book is that most of the advice is common sense and probably not new to anyone who has been following last 6-7 years of Web 2.0 and Social Networking boom (yes, I used the dreaded word). After convincing you, that inbound marketing is the most effective lead generation tool you have online, the authors then explain how to use modern social networking sites and Google to get found and build a following. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon – it’s all covered. There is some practical advice on SEO, but this is not an SEO primer. The book contains basic and most important (and legit) SEO advice and doesn’t go overboard in telling you tricks to exploit current bugs and loopholes in search engine algorithms. The whole promise is to build long term assets which would keep on giving after you have long stopped attending to them (however, if you want to keep maintaining and growing your leads quantity/quality you are never really done with SEO and content creation).

The last few chapters contain good pointers on how to effectively measure everything you do online from lead quantity/quality to internal staff efficiency. This is good enough for a start, but I believe every company would like to build their own matrices and measures. As Jack Welch said in his famous “Straight from the Gut“ book: what you measure is what you get.

I try to keep up to date on online trends and read most new books on the subject. Some of my recent good reads include The Long Tail, Everything is Miscellenous, Groundswell and Free along with whatever Gladwell and Godin write . This is a different sort of book and a comparison is not Apples to Apples, but this book stands tall even in such distinguished company. And that’s saying something about the first book by the authors.

Having said all that, there is one caveat, the era of outbound marketing is not over yet. You have to explore both inbound and outbound marketing approaches to make sure you attract the right segment for your product/services. The authors say this much even in the book that outbound marketing can be useful especially in the beginning when you are just starting to build your inbound assets.

Grab it at http://bit.ly/inboundbook, it will enrich you in every sense of the word.

In under two days Touch Carrom has added 99 fans as of now.

Announcing a new promo code give away: every 100th facebook fan will get a free promo code for the game. The codes are currently valid for the US store only.

Click here to become a fan!

The new version in the App Store rocks!

Well, this is no way to make a product announcement But I have to say that the version in the App Store for last 20 days sucked! There were some annoying bugs which we found in extended testing. Apple has finally approved our latest upgrade.

We have fixed those issues and then some. I can finally say we are closer to our vision of what a Carrom game should look and play like on the iPhone/iPod Touch or any touch control device for that matter.

There is still a lot to come very soon, but for now we are proud to announce this latest upgrade and hope you enjoy every moment spent with Touch Carrom.

Having said all of the above, we know there a long way to go before we perfect this game. Please help us improve by reviewing the game in the App Store and sending us your feedback (we love criticism)..

Here is a sneak peek of the latest version:

A lot going on around the CrunchPad story. Michael today announced that the lawsuits are now imminent. I also remember reading somewhere a conspiracy theory that this whole thing might just be a promotion gimmick and the involved parties will miraculously come to an agreement and do a join launch. Whatever the case, there are some lessons which startups can draw from this story:

• Have foolproof contracts: my lawyer tells me, if it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist.
• Never get into a deal unless your goals are aligned.
• IP is the single most important asset in today’s high-tech world. Shared IP is mostly trouble and not worth it.

Here is a bonus lesson , and not just for startups, most people are not inherently good or bad. It’s mostly a matter of their motivations and circumstances. Which goes back to lesson two above, in a common venture there should be no deal unless all parties have their goals aligned.

There is a lot of noise about AppRejections.com. I think it’s generally a good idea. Mostly it’s being used to highlight how ridiculous are some of the rejections, but I think there is an opportunity to use the site to learn what not to do to get rejected.

App Store is still a relatively new entity, and we are still learning the rules of the game. AppRejections.com can play an important role here.

We have just launched our first iPhone game (touchCarrom) and one thing I learned while doing research on the app store was that the reviews are not worldwide. Which is OK from a reviewers perspective, but as a developer you want to know what people have been saying about your application worldwide. One way to do it is to go to each country store and look for your app. This, however, is not very practical as you can imagine. A Google search on the subject resulted in an interesting application which I found to be really useful. The application is aptly called “AppReviewsFinder” and you can grab it at: http://code.google.com/p/appreviewsfinder/.

The application is not a native mac app, but a Java application. Which means you will have to run it in your terminal command line as following:

java -jar AppReviewsFinder_1_0.jar

You can then add the application for which you want the reviews. Here is a quick screenshot:

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I just finished reading Paul Graham’s essay on the current “mess” that the App Store approval process seems to be. As always, Paul brings fresh perspective and interesting thoughts.

One thing we often forget is that what Apple is trying to accomplish with the App Store has never been done before. There is no single worldwide quality assurance and software distribution model for a mobile platform. I for one would like to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and assume they are trying their best and that they genuinely care about the developers (not in a phony developers developers developers monkey dance way). The current “mess” is not as much a result of arrogance or worse stupidity, but is an ongoing evolution. The developer often forget that they are getting worldwide software delivery mechanism with access to 50 million strong market in return for a 30% cut and agreeing to few rules. A solution would emerge over time, as it has in other issues which the iPhone seemingly had when it launched.

However, I do agree with Paul that iterations are the best way to build software and the App Store approval process gets in the way. But for Apple, specially with a platform like the iPhone, there is always a risk that malicious software could have negative effect on the device performance and will eventually hurt their brand perception. I think what Apple needs to fix more urgently is the approval process for updates.

There is also a positive side to the approval process for developers (specially smaller ones) that it may actually serve like QA which they often don’t have resources to perform.

Finally, as they say, history is the best indicator of future success. Let’s see some of the older issues which Apple iPhone had and how Apple went about fixing them.

• The apps are web only: fixed with SDK release
• No cut/copy/paste: fixed with the OS upgrade
• No MMS: not really Apple’s issue, but also fixed with an OS upgrade

The list can go on, but the point is in last more than 2 years that the iPhone has been in the market they have fixed most complains and I am willing to bet that the App Store approval process too will be fixed (specially the updates part).