Introducing SmartApps

I just came home from Forum Nokia Tech Days in Budapest, June 7th – 8th 2007. HansaWorld was invited to speak about HansaWorld as a success story for Forum Nokia.

Three days filled with 30 minute sessions for 140 registered participants gave a brief but wide introduction to many topics all related to the growth in mobile content and mobile services.

More demanding customers
Uptil now, the early adopters have tried and used and paid for content and services. No matter the quality. When we now go into the majority of users, they are not willing to pay as much as innovators. They require better quality and is not very interested in the technology as such. It just needs to work.

Developers need to use design guidelines and quite a few suppliers out there are still using the “build first, test later and do not have any user needs” development method. We were urged to rather work with the policy of “fail fast, to succeed faster”.

Consumer vs. business applications
Most of the Tech Days was about games, content and services for the consumer market. Nokias new devices focus on making the features easier to use and the services easier to discover. Music, pictures, contacts, communication and location are the themes. And many of these themes go hand in hand with what businesses need as well. All devices will have free maps and navigation as addons to mention a few. HansaWorld and Oracle was showing Business Apps for mobile devices, and we both showed ie. Expences as one of many smart things you could do on your mobile phone.

Introducing SmartApps
I had pre installed SmartApps on my E90 on the way to Budapest. And I spent som time on the plane and in the streets actually using it: The Pictaphone for taking pictures of churches adding comments and voice the each record. I built myself a tourist info catalog on the fly. The same I could have done for shops, restaurants, boats, seminar participants, potential partners and more. I added my expenses, my daily allowances and created a shopping list as well. All to get to know SmartApps. It helped me realize the value for a mobile worker of the potential power of SmartApps. And if I could use it, so can others.

I spent 30 minutes talking about our company and about SmartApps. I think it went quite well, and after the presentation, several people came over to me to ask more about them. Nokia representatives, a potential polish partner and San Diego university, to be precise. The Oracle guy also came over to discuss how we could use their Oracle Lite as a tool to even further develop SmartApps…..

Discover and Access it
Forum Nokia decides what goes on the devices as preloaded software. As you know this might happen in the Middle East (MEA). The other version is to be on their Catalogs or what they might start calling is Downloads. There will be a large number of apps in that section and it makes a huge difference wether we are in the first, second or third layer of this. However, when discovered, we need to be good, because you do not get a second or third try by the customers, is what they say. Downloads is a live section for Nokia on content. With more than 200 million devices out there and a growing number, this off course can be interesting for us. By creating our own Market Place, direct from SmartApps, we can also reach more users for our development community.

Business Models
There are many models to choose from. Our “Pay as you go” or “Try and buy” seem be great choices, One time fee or subscriptions. Perhaps your content provider like Reuters can pay the apps provider and give the app away for free to browse their content. Advertising will also be one model, many will try out.

Get the right price
If we miss on this one, we will lose 95% of all potential income. The magic price is difficult, and it may change from market to market and from content or app to another. All markets are different, and there seem not to be one killer app or service equal in more markets. We use the “Whats in the customers pocket”. It seem to work, but the magic price as of today seem to be 7,5 eur.

Limit your App
Going from an “All in one” ERP suite down to SmartApps suites us great. The common recommendation seem to be limit your SmartApp or service to maximum 4 functions. That’s all the customer wants to pay for. As I see it, SmartApps is just like this. For any topic you choose one SmartApp. For another, you register another one.

Cash is King vs. Content is King
To sum up, our success is measured on turnover created by SmartApps. There is a great opportunity out there now, since we are early. This however will also take some time. Content is Kind, is relevant for us, both in generating business for our new partners, developers and content providers that need tools that their customers can us to access the content.

I am looking forward to downloading my first SmartApp from our pages and to follow our new development community create and publish their own SmartApps.