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Next Line On The iPhone Horizon: Micropayments

Apple has a tried and tested approach of creating complete, yet simple ecosystems and the one it has developed for the iPhone is testament to this genius.

However, ecosystems need to evolve or they devolve to the lowest common denominator. Much has already been said about the “commoditisation” of apps to very basic one offs with gimmick appeal.

Allowing for a deeper level of engagement within an app is key to this “appolution”. And one of the most important steps forward in achieving this in my view is to open the spigot for micropayments.

Om Malik has also called for this:

I would be spending a lot more if Apple extended the API to allow for the ability to transact within apps.” Nothing like buying a song, an application or a ringtone with a simple click, only to be billed in a batch, later. Such buying habits are the reason why we believe Apple’s iPhone could prove to be an ideal micropayments platform.

Mapping Minds: Google Trends Meet Twitter Thoughtstream

Two of the most powerful tools for currently mapping how humanity thinks are Google Trends and Twitter Search.

I whipped up an analysis of Google versus Twitter on Google Trends and the result put Twitter far ahead in our collective consciousness. This is a really useful tool for tracking across a timeline, with clear pointers to inflection points, but it does nothing for point of origin or realtime tracking.

This is where Twitter’s Search function shines. I did an exercise last week in which I tracked a number of key words on Twitter. “jobs” not surprisingly brought up a bunch of results, mainly from job board feeds, “Sydney” alerted me to a number of interesting events taking place in the city, but the clear topic du jour was the “iPhone” - the amount of traffic on Twitter related to this device was enormous.

Imagine if we could mash up these two tools, and extend their reach beyond Twitter’s audience - this would be an extremely powerful way for marketers, politicians and many others to map our minds.

Hattip to Erick Schonfeld for getting me thinking about this.

Feed Your Social Media: Facebook Grows On Attention

I have been a huge advocate of feeds - they are an incredible attention grabber, able to keep users engaged and as a result drive up traffic on social media sites.

Take the Twitter phenomenon - and apply it to the real world analogy of being in a coffee shop having a conversation or penning an email when you overhear something - just the sound of a keyword or two can grab your attention away from your current activity.

Facebook cottoned onto this recently and as Eric Eldon over at VentureBeat points out, this has been hugely to their advantage.

Contextualizing Your Social Networks: Reid Hoffman

Michael Arrington, who is supposed to be taking a break from blogging, has a great Davos interview with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.

Key takeout:

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

iPhone Emerges As Clear Cameraphone Leader

Back in August I posted a chart from Flickr showing the most popular cameraphones being used to post photos. It’s instructive to compare these charts again some four months later. The iPhone has torn open a huge chunk of white space from other cameraphones. It will, however, be interesting to see how the slight dip in the last week trends.

DeWolfe Talks Up MySpace

Speaking at the Reuters Media Summit, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe forecast advertising revenue growth in 2009. While advertising in general has slowed, he points to a continued switching trend form off to online media.

Still one of the world’s largest social networks, MySpace enjoyed an 18% year on year growth in revenue last quarter. It will indeed be impressive if they are able to keep this up.

There is growing speculation that MySpace may move towards a subscription model, something that DeWolfe does not corroborate nor does he rule it out.

He further points out that now is a good time to be contemplating acquisitions for cashed up companies (and private equity players looking to put their funds to work) as valuations are dropping off significantly.

MySpace Taps The RIM: Record Breaking Blackberry App

Designed to help Blackberry users stay connected to the MySpace social network, a new app from the Fox Interactive company has been downloaded 400,000 times in its first week. This goes a long way towards dispelling the unhipster Blackberry myth.

A Facebook app, which launched in 2007, has been downloaded 2.5 million times.

iPhone Image Recognition: Snap And Tell

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a picture of a book someone is reading in your local coffee shop and before the sugar sinks into your cappucino you have all the data on it and where you can buy it.

Or similarly, what if you could snap a billboard as you hurtle down the 101 (preferably with someone else driving) and before you reach your destination you’ve already pulled up more details on the concert being advertized and bought tickets.

Palo Alto-based SnapTell has the solution. Their image matching technology handles real life photos snapped on the majority of cell phones and parses these against a growing database of products. They are also able to extract text from pictures and use this to drive search.

The company has recently launched an iPhone app - read Jason Kincaid’s review.

How To Price Your iPhone Apps

This evening I got a hold of Google’s Voice Search App for the iPhone. Something struck me as it was downloading - I had not even checked to see the price. In fact, up to a certain price point I doubt I would’ve balked at downloading it even had I checked.

I am perceiving, as are others, that there are certain price thresholds for iPhone, and in time - other mobile, apps.

Let me run through them:

* Blind at price
The combination of a trusted source and high anticipation results in a “blind at price” threshold. As with the Google app - I would not have hesitated, but see later for the upper ceiling. The caveat here is that subconsciously I may have anticipated the app would be free given it is Google’s modus to give apps away for free and make money off ads.

*Buy to try
$2 seems to be the common wisdom of a price point at which most people are prepared to front up with the cash simply to try out an app. It is also a price point at which you are not likely to make much noise if you don’t get sufficient value for money. Adam Ostrow, in reviewing PhotoArtist, agrees as do a number of the people who commented on his story.

In contrast, when I downloaded CameraBag for $3.99 I was disappointed with the initial functionality and seriously considered creating a stink. Thankfully the app has since wobbled straight and I am loving it. In fact it is the primary photography app for me on the iPhone, which I am experimenting with as my primary photography device at present.

* Excellent marketing
Between $2 and $5 an app needs to both satisfy an immediate need and promise sufficient value. This translates into having excellent marketing of the app - a great picture, brand and blurb about the app and most of us will download it. This is what hooked me on CameraBag for example. It took about three “look sees” before I decided to take the plunge, but their story eventually thresholded me.

* Trusted name, compelling app

Between $5 and $15 there aren’t many apps that get me interested. However, with Will Wright’s Spore app I had no hesitation in putting the cash. The combination of his name, the corporate behind him and the actual app’s reputation had me hooked.

Microsoft Is (A)Live With Photo Sharing, Social Roll Out While Apple Searches

Microsoft has rearchitected its Live.com portal to be more of a social network on which users can pull in data from various sources and interact with their friends. TechCrunch has more coverage:

Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on Windows Live Messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (Comscore: Microsoft Messenger has 268 million worldwide users, compared to 116 million for Yahoo and 6 million for Google Talk).

Users are asked to build out their profile, and can also bring in content they create on blogs (or any RSS feeds, Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, iLike, Twitter, Wordpress and Yelp. When you do something new on those sites, the information flows into Live.com for your friends to see (in a very similar way as FriendFeed, Plaxo and others do today). Eventually, says Microsoft, more than 50 partners will be supported. When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into the activity stream as well.

The hope, of course, is to get people to hang out a lot more at Live.com. At least those people who use Messenger, since they already have their contacts established. Like Yahoo, Microsoft is going with its strengths, which in their case is instant messaging.

Microsoft’s software plus services strategy has clearly infiltrated Live.com as well as their approach with Office. Live.com users can now access a variety of online services like mail, calendar, photos, online storage, etc., as well as downloaded services that include a mail client, instant messaging, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, the Toolbar and other services. And now it’s also one big social network.

Included in this new roll out is a photo sharing site call Live Photos. ReadWriteWeb has a solid review.

They point out that the slideshow background changes color depending on the dominant color in the photo being displayed at any given time - this is an interesting feature and points to photo sharing services growing their intelligence of what is taking place inphoto as it were.

Furthermore:

You can share your albums with very granular permissions, and also share individual photos. Every photo can be tagged and your visitors can also leave comments.

On the other side of the spectrum, Apple is reported to be working on a search engine. This one’s more of a rumor than substantiated Valley lore at the moment. Again from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.