we will be holding the next UK mobile and devices user group meeting on Wednesday 4th November @ the adobe offices in London.
We will be having the Device Central team over to talk about the new version, and give a sneak peek at some of the new features that will be available to you in the upcoming version. You will also get a chance to ask questions, give feedback and talk about feature you would like to see available.
Mark Doherty will be giving a demo of the new work flow for developing iPhone applications, using the flash IDE that was announced at MAX this year, as well as going over some of the new developments we will be seeing for the mobile space in upcoming versions of the Adobe software.
As well as all this breaking news, we will be providing some drinks, as well as the chance to win a full version of CS4 Creative Suite, as well as some more adobe goodies.
Places will be limited, so please RSVP to matt AT ustwo DOT co DOT uk to secure yours, and be entered into the software draw.
Venue :
Adobe Offices
12 Park Crescent
London
W1B 1PH
Tel: +44 (0)207 317 4100
But to be honest, after just day one of release from ben 10 mouthoff, the new iphone app we have created in partnership with turner/Cartoon network, I think I am starting to get an idea…
“lots of luck, or a huge marketing budget”
Ok, broad statement, so lets break it down. When I say lots of luck, it’s a bit unfair. Luck is part of it, but mostly it will come down to a really great app idea, and the fact that someone has picked it up and tried it out, that can influence others to buy it (itunes apple recommended section manager for instance). This is a typical example of a way a single developer can have a huge success story. Also, if it is a single developer that has created this, it is very probable that they have created it in their own time, while still holding down another job or have some other source of income. Out of the however many tens of thousands apps on the appstore, realistically I would say there are only a handful of individuals that have got seriously rich. But then that ’seriously rich’ is only relative to the amount of ‘investment’ they have made.
The other part of my statement refers to others, like myself, who work for digital studios or development companies that create apps, which invest serious man (or women) hours and capital. All of a sudden, after a couple of weeks work on an app, with a couple of developers and designers working on it, you can already equate that to a fair amount of billable hours which would have been charged for on a normal service client contract. So basically, after two weeks or so, tens of thousands of sales to get a decent return on investment.
This is where the huge marketing budget comes in. How can you make sure you get tens of thousands of people to download your app and make sure you make your money back? The best bet is to make sure at least a hundred thousand people know it exists at a bare minimum. There are numerous ways you can do this ‘cheaply’, such as social marketing, viral videos and great concepts, hooks or news coverage. But the way to get real exposure, is to be included on TV adds, advertised in national newspapers, or be included in national competitions. And this is where you start to drop serious marketing £££s. Even with this type of exposure, your key to selling huge numbers of downloads will be attaining the holy grail of the top 25 apps, or at least be featured in the staff favorites or recommended sections.
So, it will be interesting to see what happens with ben 10. Already, due to turners PR company, the application has been featured on a large number of high exposure blogs and publications, a competition is being run in the daily mail featuring it, and hopefully we will be seeing it featured on the CN website (and if we are really lucky, on the channel). It will be even more interesting to directly correlate the difference between running our own social media/viral campaign with mouthoff (original). Although the best part of me wants to believe that major success can be achieved without paying a huge amount to promote your app, I have a sneaky suspicion that the money and major clout of a huge brand and marketing budget will win..
Wow, over 8 months, and my site is now back online, at a brand new domain, mattpollitt.co.uk. Over the next two weeks, I’m hoping to get back to posting and put some of things i have been up to lately on here, including a few conferences, work @ ustwo , and as recently announced, some details into the work we have been doing on notus.
This was originally a test post to see if i could get flash working ok in wordpress. Since it looks nice, i have decided to leave it here.
This is actually a little fun particle generator i knocked together on the plane to Torronto, on my recent trip to FITC Mobile to run on a high end fl3 device. The motion is code generated, and the particles are a mix of minimal code and pre-made timeline tweens, including the colour shift. At the end of each particle motion, the clip deletes it’s self and frees up memory . The combination also means the processor is not bombarded by multiple instances and movies.
I have multiplied the number of particles created by 3 for the desktop version though, and added motion on 3 axis using a basic sine calculation.
Christmas has come early – ustwo has just price dropped the FULL version of Steppin™ for iPhone and iPod touch so it’s now FREE!! That’s right nada, nil, zero, zip, nothing! You can get your hands on this exhilarating racing game that tests speed and dexterity across 5 stunningly designed levels from the app store now – http://iphone.ustwo.co.uk/get/steppin.
Me and dain will be giving a presentation on wednesday for Mobile design uk.
Generation UX
A light hearted look over the short history of mobile UI and UX, and were it might go in the future. This short talk will specifically look at the progression of mobile UI, personalization and overall user experience over the last decade or so, and how we as mobile designers can push the boundaries to create fresh, intuitive interfaces and user experiences.
Looking forward to meeting some more of the every growing mobile community in London, and thanks to Bryan for inviting us.
Venue :
Seren Partners Limited
55-57 Rivington Street, London
Wednesday April 22rd, doors open 6:30pm
Although the iPhone appstore and the iPhone has nothing to do with flashlite, i thought i would take a bit of time to write this article. One of the main issues developers have with the flashlite platform is that there is no direct route to market for your apps, and of course, many a developer has quoted the success of the iPhone appstore, and how (note inverted comas) “easy” it is to sell your content and make lots and lots of money. There has not been a lot of transparency in this process as of far, and it almost seems to be becoming an urban legend of sorts, that if you develop a iphone app and get it on the appstore , you are in line for instant success.
At ustwo™, over the last couple of months, we have created and distributed 2 very different applications for the iphone, each with polar differences in functionality, development time and success. Mills has been releasing figures over the last few weeks of sales, and has spoken in detail on twitter of the processes we have used to try and increase publicity ( you can follow him on @millsustwo if twitter is your thing).
The Applications
The first application we developed and released was Steppin Lite , a free game for the iphone and ipod touch that uses the touch screen to ‘run’ across a pond filled with Lilly pads as fast as you can. The users time is recorded @ the end, and uploaded to online scoreboards. This was then followed by a paid version, which retailed @ £0.59p, and added numerous more level styles with a much improved online score boarding system.
In contrast to that, Mouthoff is a much simpler ‘novelty’ application. The idea is to hold your iPhone in front of your mouth and talk, shout, laugh, scream or sing to get your new lips moving. The unique thing about MouthOff™, and what sets it apart from other similar apps, is that its sound reactive, so the animations move in real time with your own voice. This application had no free version, and also retails at £0.59p.
Development time
To give a comparison of the development time involved in these projects, Our first release, steppin (lite and full version) took a couple of months, with 2 people working on it. This was the first application/game developed in OSX, so there is obviously a learning curve to take into account. For those of you that haven’t played the game (which indecently you can down load from here )
Mouthoff was at the opposite end of the spectrum. With 2 people working on it for a week, it was ready to go live on the appstore.
Steppin is very much a full featured game, which is reflected in the development time, where as mouthoff has very simple functionality, but i suppose is very ‘novelty’. It’s important to note, that as a working development company, having people working on this full-time can be very expensive for a daily developer rate, so it is important to get that money back in revenue. And this is were the trend very much bucks the urban legend of the appstore. If you have spent ages creating a really cool app, surely you should make a fortune? With access to millions of users, all linked into itunes/appstore on there iPhones and iPod touches… According to the marketing given by apple on release of the appstore and the press, surely we should be millionaires in a month or two?
Sales
Unfortunately that has not been the case so far for us, although admittedly, the apps have only been on the market a short time ( so here’s hoping ). Below are a couple of images that show the sales for steppin’ and mouthoff, since they were released. I have only added the last weeks numbers here, if you want full details, check out the mills™ moblog , and you can get figures and downloads over the whole month.
The first thing you will notice is the difference in total revenue. To put that in to true perspective for you, steppin and has been out for 4 weeks, and mouthoff has been out for two and a bit.
When you start to see the figures, you start to get a true idea of the secret to success on the Appstore, which to put it bluntly , is marketing and exposure.
The mouthoff application has been heavily promoted , initially by us, but more recently by other blogs, and also tv shows. The viral campaign we started with the website (showusyourmouthoff) has played a large part in getting this exposure by giving users the chance to get their videos featured on the site, and showing people what great fun the app can be.
You’ll notice the massive spike in numbers when it was featured on bbc2 ’something for the weekend’ show. Before this the numbers were falling from the original release, but this picked things up again. The application suddenly shot to number 11 in the uk top paid apps chart. Later in the week, Creative Review magazine did a video blog post reviewing the app, which again has started to make figures rise, and since then , the application has been featured on a number of other reputable blog sites.
We have also been spreading the mouthoff application through Twitter, facebook, moblogs, Press releases and any other social marketing tool that Rowan & mills™ (self proclaimed PReam team) can get there hands on.
All this is a far cry from the ‘post it on appstore , and they will buy’ attitude that seems to be prevalent belief. If you look at the actual number of hours put into marketing and PR , it soon starts to add up.
Again, this is reinforced when you look at steppin’s sales. Even though they are much lower than mouthoff’s, you can see as soon as it became a ’staff favorite’ on appstore, sales tripled initially, and are now starting to rise again.
Conclusion…
So, are appstores nessecary to make decent money as a mobile developer/company? I’d have to say yes, but with a ‘BUT’. They are completely essential as a way to distribute your mobile content to your potential users. Without an easy to use, pre-installed way of accessing a market place to get these applications from, the user simply won’t bother. In my mind the reason apple managed to get the business model so right on their setup boils down to a few key elements.
It is so easy to buy
familiar system (basically itunes)
On every device, and heavily marketed in press and media advertising.
Decent developer split so more people develop more apps (really, who wants to give away 70%-60% of your revenues that happen with other traditional aggregation routes to market)
The ‘BUT’ comes in the form of if you want to truly succeed and make your development costs ( and a profit ) , It is all down to exposure, and getting people excited about your content. Without that, your just lost within the ocean of the 15,000 other apps out there fighting for attention…
Now we just need a similar setup for Flash lite content, but that’s another story….
To thank him for all his help with he flashlite community over the last year, we have created the one thing every mobile developer is without, the nodding dog-herty scrensaver for your mobile device and mac desktop.
Sit back and relax as you watch the rhythmic movement as his head sways from side to side, and he shares his love for adobe with you. You’ll never need to attend one of his presentations ever again!
this application by ustwo™ should be hitting an apple appstore near you soon. imagine the possiblities
ustwo™ are about to release a hilarious new game for iPhone that syncs an animated mouth with the sound of your own voice. Choose from 8 different mouths – rude-boy, robot, synth, grandma, kiss-me-quick, angry-emperor, dog or monster.
not strictly flash lite related, but thought i would post as a credit to the amount of effort and time the team at ustwo™ have put into making there first full iPhone game.
Congrats to PowPow and everyone else who has been working on this for the last few months
Steppin™ is an all new racing game that tests your reactions and co-ordination over 5 beautifully designed levels. Ranging from easy to hard, they each present a different challenge – skip across lilies in ‘Pond’, hop across icebergs in ‘Ice’, navigate a lava flow in ‘Lava’, go back to the playground in ‘Hopscotch’ and traverse a cliff-face in ‘Climbin’.
Steppin™ also has a new score board system that records your personal best time, player of the week, player of the day and best ever player. You can also make it onto the ‘Steppin™ Hall of Fame’, which calculates the best times in each level for the best players, and features the ‘Steppin™ Champion’ – the player with the best time across all levels.
The winners of the Content awards 2008 where announced today, and i can happily announce that ustwo™ won the Themes and Graphics Award this year. As i have only just joined the team, i can’t take any credit, but would love to congratulate the team on this great achievement. Special kudos to Laffers, nick and edwardo, who put in a great deal of effort to really make the ustwo wallpaper and screen saver content shine.
You can watch the virtual award short film by clicking here
Flashion is the name given to ustwo™ created Flash Lite wallpapers. Flash Lite is a medium that allows us to create Premium wallpapers with intelligent triggers. For example – time of day change, battery indicator, music mode, charging animations, accelerometer controlled graphics.
Most mobile backgrounds are static images that do little more than look pretty. This year’s winner of the Themes & Graphics category of the Sony Ericsson Content Awards offers backgrounds that have both beauty and brains.
I have been working in the mobile application industry for the last 4-5 years, initially cutting my teeth on some early Flash Lite based applications back in 2005. After a couple of years working for my self, and a number of other clients, i moved to London, and became part of the team @ ustwo™, a creative UX / UI mobile design and development studio.
This is my own personal blog, and as such , all of the opinions here are my own, and in no way representative of ustwo™
