Vision+Media hosted two events at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool last week: The second in our Visionary Sessions series; Experimenting with New Business Models took place on Thursday 8th July featuring a knowledgeable and varied panel of speakers including Nicholas Lovell (Gamesbrief), Sean Marley (Lime Pictures), Chris Cooke (UnLimited Media), Dan Calladine and Chris Meehan (Sentric). This line-up saw the Games, Music and TV production sectors all represented with insightful examples of the challenges and opportunities overlapping these sectors. For a full review of the presentations take a look at Amalie’s blog post.
Nicholas Lovell returned to Parr Street Studios the following day to deliver his masterclass – Making Money From Social Games to an equally varied group made up of financial directors, marketeers and developers all eager to unlock the market opportunities of the social games space. Leading on from the previous night’s discussions around self-publishing, distribution platforms and alternate revenue streams, Nicholas’s masterclass covered the six routes to compliance, eight different revenue streams and how to FARM your users by Focusing on Acquisition, Retention and Monetisation.
Having attended both of these sessions myself, I have become much more astutely aware of the techniques implemented by businesses to encourage me to part with my pounds and pennies in return for their products and services. However further than just being aware of being sold to, I am also more conscious of the different strategies behind these businesses’ marketing and sales techniques.
To give you a hot-off-the-press example, yesterday I purchased my new phone. After weeks if not months of deliberating whether to upgrade from my iPhone 3G to iPhone 4, or whether to jump ship and head towards an Android handset, I caved-in and stuck to what I know. I’m not so much of a techie that I would fully take advantage of the open nature of Android and actually take comfort in the walled-garden of the iPhone and the Apple App Store. The quality, usability and aesthetics that I am used to with iPhone have given me no reason to leave…yet.
So what does this have to do with what I learnt about business models I hear you ask. Well this morning I read something that, had I read it just one day earlier, might have made me think twice about my allegiance to iPhone. Google App Inventor is a tool that enables non-coders to design and build their own Android apps and release them into the Android Marketplace without having to go through an approval process. This could not be any further away from Apple’s low tolerance to so-called ‘cookie-cutter apps’ – applications built from templates. As CEO of Medialets, Eric Litman described it in a TechCrunch story on the subject, ‘This is the ongoing balance point between encouraging innovation and growth on one side and wanting to tightly control user experience on the other.’
Herein lies two quite different strategic approaches to user acquisition between Apple and Google (where ‘user’ refers to app developers). Apple provided the development community with a lucrative platform from which they have been able to make substantial revenue, albeit subject to an approval process to get their app into the Store. This has created an app development community loyal to the platform, whose apps enrich the App Store, which in turn strengthens the appeal of the device. This ecosystem continues to be successful because it remains mutually beneficial to the consumer, to the developer and to Apple.
In order for competing mobile platforms to lure app developers away from Apple they have needed to offer added value. The added value that Google offers to developers working on their platform, consistent with the rest of their brand, is openness, i.e. no approval process and fewer restrictions on app content. However, to create a large enough community of Android developers at the bottom end of the funnel, Google need to maximize the number of developers at the top end of the funnel. It is my belief that Google App Inventor is part of this strategy. However, to return to Eric Litman’s point, in doing so will Google chase growth in the mobile platform space to the detriment of user experience?
