Mobile

I recently purchased the new iPhone app Men’s Health Workouts for $1.99 on the iPhone App Store. Yes, I really should use it to get in better shape, but rather I bought it to try out a new form of mobile app payment made possible by Apple’s recent release of the 3.0 OS for the iPhone.

Till now, iPhone apps could be purchased for a one-time fee (typically ranging from 99 cents to $9.99), and as a buyer you get free upgrades as new versions come out. But now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.

As the news industry tries to figure out a model for making money from mobile content, Apple has (at least for the iPhone) offered up a valuable new tool. We just need to figure out how to use it.

There are numerous news-related iPhone apps available already for free. USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times … all have an app that offers a better experience than reading their content on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Some publishers have experimented with paid iPhone apps: People magazine charges $1.99 for the “People Celebrity News Tracker,” which give celebrity junkies breaking news on the stars’ latest (scandal, baby, breakup, marriage, etc.) on their iPhones.

For a news publisher to take advantage of the ability to charge for premium or special content within its own iPhone app, it will have to charge something for the app itself. 99 cents is a reasonable price that should not scare too many people away, as long as there’s real value in using the app even if you never buy any premium content or service subsequently.

So let’s think about what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app, a la Men’s Health. I’ll toss out a few ideas and thoughts, but I hope you’ll add some of your own in the comments section below.

1. Perhaps the best opportunity is for one-off premium purchases, as the Men’ Health iPhone app demonstrates. If the phone user is reading a news organization’s coverage of climate-change (free, of course), then the publisher can sell an e-book, say for $2, via the app which may be of interest to those truly passionate about the topic and wanting more. … The current day’s interactive crossword puzzle on the phone app can be free, but the app user can pay 25 cents to scan older puzzles and instantly download another to play. … Reading free football coverage on the phone app, the user might be able to pay 50 cents for an audio interview with the winning quarterback.
2. Enable premium services for an added fee. For instance, a news phone app for the New York Times might disable the ability to leave comments on stories on the basic 99-cent app, but allow a user to pay an extra $1.99 to turn on that ability. Or perhaps an extra $9.99 turns on the NYT searchable article archives feature, which is disabled on the basic app.
3. Delay the news by an hour. I’m not sure how I feel about the wisdom of this idea, but it’s a possible revenue-generator. Charge 99 cents for the basic app, but delay delivery of all news content to the phone app by 1 hour. The app user can, from within the app, pay an additional $1.99 to remove the hour delay. This might make more sense on a niche advertising app, say the “Washington Post Rental Finder”; for-rent listings are delayed on the basic 99-cent app, but for an extra fee the app delivers new listings right away, and even notifies the user when a listing that fits requested criteria is first published.
4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
5. A news app might have a paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house. With the iPhone 3.0 OS, push notifications are now possible for iPhone apps; personalized push alerts could be a nice paid upgrade to the basic app.

It wouldn’t be difficult to spend the rest of the day dreaming up ideas for news-related iPhone apps and premium paid add-on, a la Men’s Health Workouts. But what ideas do you have? Tell me in the comments.

I can’t imagine this is new, but it’s the first time I’ve gone to a restaurant and received a coupon at the table prompting me to use my cell phone to get a free item. Last night when my family and I went to Beau Jo’s Pizza in Boulder, we each got the coupon above. Send a text message to the address printed with the special code, and you get back a text message showing you what you’ve won, which you show to your waiter/waitress.

With our two phones between us, we had two chances and both got free salsa and chips. (To go with pizza? We passed on our “winnings.”) But some lucky texting diners might win a $100 gift certificate at the restaurant.

I hardly think this is the state of the art for mobile coupons, but it does work, whether the diner has the latest iPhone 3GS or an old brick or flip phone. It reminded me that to effectively use mobile (for advertising and promotions or for editorial purposes), you don’t have to get super sophisticated. The uncomplicated phone text message can be an effective mechanism that serves everyone, vs. an iPhone app that has a (large but) limited audience.

So on Wednesday, Amazon will be introducing a larger Kindle e-reading device. I’ll be away from the Internet on my mountain bike in southwestern Colorado so will probably miss the announcement. But I can’t help but ponder the significance of the advancement of the portable e-reader.

While I do believe that Kindles (medium and large) and other e-readers will grow in popularity, I still can’t get too excited about them. Now, if a Kindle device ran the Mac operating system, was a serious replacement for my Macbook, and of course had a color screen, then I’d really take it seriously.

But for now, I can’t imagine wanting to add another device to carry around with me.

Here’s my personal history with extra devices (it’s short). Years ago I bought a Palm Pilot clone, called a Handspring. It was cool at first, and was one of my many attempts to find a to-do and calendar system that worked for me. Trouble was, I seldom took it out with me; I simply wasn’t comfortable carrying a cell phone AND a Handspring PDA in my pockets. The Handspring gathered dust for years; it’s probably in a box somewhere in my office.

I suspect many people will have the same experience with the Kindle, including the new one. Sure, there will be Kindle aficionados who are never without their e-reader. (I have a friend who fits that description.) But I don’t see the Kindle as a device that you’ll always want to carry with you.

For me, the iPhone changed my life, and for the first time in my life I have an organization system that I regularly use and is always with me. Between Google Calendar and Remember the Milk on the iPhone, I’m now more organized than I’ve ever been. The reason is simple enough: My iPhone is always with me (even on a mountain bike ride miles away from cell service).

The larger screen of the new Kindle may be appealing to newspaper and magazine publishers, and it well could be a boon for them. But if I had a $1 million development budget, I’d allot a small portion of it to publishing to Kindle and e-readers, and spend most on developing apps for delivering content and services to smart phones.

In my view, the small size of the phone’s screen is far outweighed by another positive factor: The phone is nearly always with me. Want to get your news content to me any time I’m awake? Get it to me on my iPhone.

As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, and at the end of the workout send the data to a website where you can later look at a map of your route. It’s pretty cool stuff, for a phone.

The first app I tried (and one of the first introduced) was RunKeeper, for which I paid $9.99 to download from the iPhone App Store. I’ve also tried out several free competitors that do pretty much the same thing: Fitnio, Trailguru, and Path Tracker. Peruse the Health and Fitness category of the App Store, and now you’ll find even more fitness-tracking applications, some free and some that cost anywhere from 99 cents up to several dollars. It’s getting really competitive in this little segment of the iPhone apps market.

So I was interested to receive an e-mail yesterday from RunKeeper’s developer, announcing that the app is about to become free. The reason is obvious: The company wants to become a dominant player in the mobile GPS tracker space and build up a large user community. The best way to do that with so many competitors is to give away the application.

Developer Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper Inc. says the company will shift to a business model based on selling advertising and possibly premium paid features (to be determined). For now, “We are … foregoing short-term revenues with the hope that our community will get to massive scale.”

I wonder if this will become a trend in the mobile-phone application community? Sure, you can charge if you’ve got an application that’s unique or has very few competitors. But for segments where the phone app market gets flooded with competitors, developers may be forced into the free model.

Well, it’s certainly a nice thing for consumers. We’ll see if companies like Jacobs’ can figure out how to make money from free and survive.

I finally succumbed to iPhone fever and got an iPhone 3G the other day. While I’ve been thinking about the expanded mobile footprint in our lives for a while, having this thing in my hands really brings the future into focus.

One big thing that the iPhone represents is the lessening of gadgets that we carry, since the phone now does so much. I used to carry my phone and an iPod when I went out for a run; now I just need the iPhone since it doubles as an iPod. I don’t need to pack a small camera if I go on a mountain bike ride; the iPhone will suffice to take snapshots. (Actually, the iPhone is better than a camera in some ways. While the resolution isn’t as good as a stand-alone camera, with the iPhone I can take a photo, have it mark my position using the built-in GPS, and send the photo to my Flickr account and/or to Twitter.)

Another gadget I sometimes carry is a Garmin handheld GPS unit, for when I want to have a map and statistical record of a trail I’m riding. But it’s kind of big and I don’t use it all the time. (And I broke it once on a mountain bike ride when it was mounted on the handlebars and I crashed.) But now I’m using a new iPhone application called RunKeeper ($9.99), which for some exercise uses replaces the Garmin. RunKeeper tracks my runs or bike rides, telling me how far I’ve traveled, what speed I’m going, average speed, and it produces a map of the route when I’m finished.

What’s very cool is that RunKeeper automatically sends my data off to its website, so when I get home and sit at my computer, I see my stats and a Google map of my route. The site stores all my runs and rides.

RunKeeper is new, and it’s not perfect. The iPhone GPS sometimes drops the signal; the software doesn’t track elevation gain/loss, which is a critical data element to any runner or cyclist. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that a Polar heartrate monitor (yet another exercise gadget I own) has. Worst of all, it can only record about 3 hours of trail activity, because the iPhone’s battery can’t handle more; so it’s only useful for short trail adventures, not epic all-day ones.

But RunKeeper (1.0) is a good start, and I’m eager to see how it improves with future releases. The software does get us closer to the day that a phone can be a decent GPS unit. The iPhone isn’t there yet, but I’m confident it will get there soon enough.

Thanks to a cool plug-in for Wordpress called WPtouch from BraveNewCode.com, this blog now has an iPhone version. That is, if you view steveouting.com on an iPhone, it will automatically pick up the mobile version.

If you’re curious what it looks like and don’t have an iPhone or iTouch, there are some iPhone emulators out there, and a Firefox extension. Apparently iPhone emulation works best on Apple’s Safari browser. Solutions are easy to find with a little Googling.