One feature we’ve been asked for more and more recently is a way to take “top level” tabs and place them all a subtab. For example, take all the social media tabs (Share My Trip, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & Foursquare) and put them all in a single “Social Media” tab. The reason for this is to reduce clutter on the home page of an application.

Well, it’s done. This:

Becomes this:

This feature is available only on the iPhone right now, but we’ll be moving it to the .mobi, BlackBerry and Android versions soon.

We’re added a new Setting to our iPhone application – Update via WiFi-only.

When this setting is turned “on”, the application will only download data updates when the user is connected to a WiFi network. This isn’t so important for domestic visitors, but international visitors will appreciate being able to keep their roaming charges down. By default, the app ships with this option off but we can selectively turn this on for any destination.

This feature is only available on the iPhone version, but we’ll be moving it to the Android and iPad applications soon.

Our iPhone and Android application can now import and display your destination’s YouTube channel. Clicking on the entries in the lists below will start the videos playing. If you’d like to add your channel to your applications, contact us through the usual channels.

TUAW reports:

Blogger asymco did a little calculating from last week’s announcement numbers, and has hammered out a rough estimate of just how many of each iDevice are floating around the world today. According to Steve at last week’s event, there are 120 million iDevices total in the world, and we already knew from SEC filings that 59.6 million of those were iPhones. The current number of iPads in the hands of customers around world is 3.2 million, which (with estimates for the past month on both of those devices added in), means that there are likely 45.2 million iPod touches around. That’s 37.7% of iOS devices at large — not as big as it used to be, as the iPad’s arrival shook things up a bit, but still a very significant total.

Your apps need to work without a network connection, or you’re missing almost 40% of the iOS handheld market.

Comscore reports (via AdMob):

• there’s now 45 million smartphone users in the US, up 21% in the last 3 months
• Google/Android is the big winner, having over doubled its market share to 9% over the last quarter
• RIM and Apple hold stead in terms of share, meaning their absolute numbers are still growing
• Microsoft and Palm are the big losers, and are likely to continue to do so

Discover Anywhere Mobile notes:

• the rapid adoption rate of smartphones is a sign that many people are choosing to replace their cell phones with something more modern: expect smartphones to dominate the market in the next 2 to 3 years
• we expect Apple to start growing market share again after they release a version that does not depend on the AT&T network
• Palm blew it
• Microsoft will make a recovery next year after Windows Mobile 7 becomes available, but not until its share drops to Palm-like numbers

We noticed last week at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit that there were a lot of Androids amongst DMO attendees – not as many as iPhones, but still a remarkable number.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

One issue that comes up often is whether one should develop an “app” — a program built specifically for a mobile phone — or just make a mobile optimized website.

Here are the key advantages of developing an app:

• Immediacy – except for exceptionally-well developed websites, there is often a several second lag between doing an action on a mobile phone and seeing a result come back over the mobile network. Apps are immediate: when one does something, you see the results instantly. Immediacy leads to a different type of interaction between the user and the device, more playful, more experimental and fundamentally deeper.
• Offline Use – apps don’t depend on a network connection, which means they work in airplanes, in below-ground floors of buildings, in tunnels and (especially) they work on iPod Touches which comprise nearly half the iPhone device market.
• Gizmos – your app can access your device’s camera, compass, GPS, touch screen, motion sensor, and so forth. Mobile sites, not so much.
• Privileged space – people who own devices that can run apps, run apps. The first place they’re going to look for information is their apps which are given a “privileged” place on the screen of the user’s mobile phones. Your mobile app is just another website, that they may or may not get to when they use their browser.

We’ll also briefly mention here that most “mobile optimized” websites rarely are: they don’t work with the user’s location, they don’t design for limited bandwidth and high latency network connections, they’re not tested against a range of devices, and they rarely provide the right amount of information in the right way. In short, the user experience is awful.

Related reading:

• Five Reasons Mobile Apps Rule
• Mobile apps: Cemented into your business’s tech strategy?
• Mobile apps: Does your business need one?

The iPod Touch is an iPhone without a cell phone, cell network internet connectivity or a camera. It can, however, connect to the Internet through WiFi. In the travel means (sometimes) in a hotel, (sometimes) in a Starbuck’s and (almost always) pay-per-use. Tourists with an iPod Touch can sometimes reach the Internet but usually they cannot.

It is very important for DMOs and CVBs to realize the implications of this.

Many iPhone app companies are just traditional web developers offering what are called “wrapped apps”. A wrapped app looks – more or less – like an iPhone app, except it’s really just a shell of an application connecting to a web server over the Internet. This means that if your visitor is not connected to the Internet, they can’t use your app! And when they can connect to the Internet, there’s still very little immediacy – things take seconds to happen, rather than the instant touch-response cycle people expect from great apps.

Not only does this affect all iPod Touch users, it is also detrimental to any iPhone-using foreign visitor who will be paying very high data rates to connect to the web over the cell network. If they can’t use your app, or don’t want to use your app because it’s costing them a lot of money, they’re not going to get that great experience they’re looking for in your destination from your app.

How would using a wrapped app affect your DMO? The numbers follow…

From The Apple Blog, iPod touch Now Outselling iPhone:

At the iPad event, Steve Jobs announced 75 million iPhone OS devices had been sold to date, though whether that date was January 27 or January 1 is not known. It won’t matter either way, but let’s assume the latter. Through 2009, Apple sold 42.517 million iPhones. Subtract that number from 75 million iPhone OS devices and we get 32.483 million iPod touches.

If you’re still awake, here’s the bottom line: the rate of sales growth of the iPod touch is very likely greater than the table shows, as in double that of the iPhone. True, the period includes the holiday quarter, the best quarter for iPods, but it just doesn’t matter. The iPod touch, the stealth device for iPhone OS, will be the best-selling model for the platform in 2010, if it isn’t already, and it is.

To reiterate: there are about 32 million iPod Touches out there and a wrapped app won’t reach them when they need it most: in your destination.

From AdMob January 2010 Mobile Metrics Report:

iPod Touch users download an average of 12 apps a month, 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users.

The bottom line from the AdMob report? iPod Touch users love to use apps – but you have to make sure that they can use yours! A wrapped app – an app that depends on being connected to the Internet – does not allow them to do this.

Discover Anywhere Mobile produces native iPhone apps. All the essential data your visitors need is stored right in their iPhone / iPod Touch. This means that whether or not they’re connected to the Internet, they’re going to be able to find the things they’re looking for – and that’s why your DMO/CVB created the app in the first place, right?

All images taken from original blog posts.

IDC is reporting that smartphone sales is 4Q09 are up almost 40% from the previous year, and for the full year, almost 175 million smartphones (about 15% of the entire mobile phone market) were sold worldwide.  The iPhone showed a healthy (!) 100% growth year to year and RIM brought in an additional 40%.

Top Five Converged Mobile Device Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q4 2009 (Units in Millions)

Vendor	4Q09 Unit Shipments	4Q09 Market Share	4Q08 Unit Shipments	4Q08 Market Share	4Q09/4Q08 Growth
1. Nokia	20.8	38.2%	15.1	38.5%	37.7%
2. Research In Motion	10.7	19.6%	7.6	19.4%	40.8%
3. Apple	8.7	16.0%	4.4	11.2%	97.7%
4. Motorola	2.5	4.6%	1.6	4.1%	56.3%
5. HTC	2.4	4.4%	2.2	5.6%	9.1%
Others	9.4	17.2%	8.3	21.2%	13.3%
Total	54.5	100.0%	39.2	100.0%	39.0

Top Five Converged Mobile Device Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, 2009 (Units in Millions)

Vendor	2009 Unit Shipments	2009 Market Share	2008 Unit Shipments	2008 Market Share	2009/2008 Change
1. Nokia	67.7	38.9%	60.5	40.0%	11.9%
2. Research In Motion	34.5	19.8%	23.6	15.6%	46.2%
3. Apple	25.1	14.4%	13.8	9.1%	81.9%
4. HTC	8.1	4.6%	7.5	5.0%	8.0%
5. Samsung	5.7	3.3%	5.4	3.6%	5.6%
Others	33.1	19.0%	40.6	26.8%	-18.5%
Total	174.2	100.0%	151.4	100.0%	15.1%

Via MacRumors.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Time Magazine lists the iPod Touch as one of the best travel gadgets of 2009. May I interject here that perhaps its time you put your destination’s content on it. (As The Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, some of the inclusions and exclusions are a little odd though).

A couple of recent articles on iPhone apps that we think are worth sharing.

Pizza Hut’s app has generated $1m in sales:

After being live in the App Store for three months, the Pizza Hut application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch has surpassed $1 million in sales.

[…] Rather than consumers simply migrating from calling in or visiting the PC Web site, Pizza Hut believes that the iPhone application is driving sales it may not have closed otherwise.

“We see it as being highly incremental, as much for the reason that people have a genuine need to order pizza and they want to engage with a really cool app that says something about them,” Mr. Acoca said.

Avoiding a Mobile House of Cards:

Well, building a successful mobile marketing channel for your brand requires careful thought and patience.   Too often there’s a failure to appreciate the opportunity to nurture extended or ongoing participation or an expectation that mobile is some sort of silver bullet.

[…] The second mistake was getting swept up in the iPhone hysteria. I won’t call anyone out, but I can think of several brands that launched apps that were either so gimmicky that they were likely deleted or forgotten after a single use or the customer base was clearly not well represented among the iPhone user base.  Flurry, a mobile analytics firm, has some very revealing stats about application loyalty. Unless you have a strong core user base on the device and an application that genuinely adds value, save your money.  While launching an app can open up a new audience for your brand, it also creates tremendous pressure to offer something compelling and useful.[…] Consumers aren’t going to give you a share of mobile without getting something in return. There has to be a value exchange that’s weighted in their favour. Contest prizing certainly fits the bill, as do coupons and other discounts or exclusive opportunities. But the value can also take the form of something that offers genuine and repeatable utility [see our post on custom iPhone Development].

All emphasis add by us. It’s not enough just to do an iPhone app — you have to have an app that provides real utility and a real experience to your visitors.

There are two issues that come up over and over again when we talk to prospective clients: “if I’ve bought the application, why should I keep paying for yearly maintenance” and “We’re thinking of just developing this ourselves”.

These two issues are related.

Shopping List.

iPhone applications should not be an exercise in box ticking — iPhone app, check, next…. A useful iPhone application comes with a set of expectations from the user about the way it feels, the way looks, the way it reacts to way the user interacts with it. A failure to respect this leads to the fate of about ⅔rds of iPhone applications: they never get opened more than once or twice. For your destination this is a disaster – you’re supplying the best information possible on behalf of your members and your visitors are not even bothering to look at what you have to say.

There’s a reason you don’t photocopy your destination brochures, even though it has exactly the same information that your expensive glossy stock paper version has – it just doesn’t feel right.

Or to put it another way, you want an iPhone application that people look forward to using again and again.

Generic App. Wow?

Now, there’s two non-Discover Anywhere Mobile solutions for getting a custom iPhone application built: cheap or professional. Cheap is going to give you the photocopied brochure: it has the correct information but there’s no appeal. If data is being pulled from a website live (the easy approach, often taken for quick and dirty iPhone applications to solve the ‘keep-the-app-up-to-date problem’) your visitor is going to experience a delay getting to what they want to see. As Google has extensively studied in the past and has nearly perfected solving, even the tiniest delays ruin the user experience. You now have shelfware. Professional will give you the solution you’re looking for, given time and money. There’s some great looking iPhone apps out there in the tourism / leisure categories. Some of them cost 6 figures to develop, almost all the others a reasonably sized fraction of that. Why? Because great work – great graphics, a feel for the user’s needs, well-tested applications – requires talented staff at all levels of the development agency.

This is what you want!

Discover Anywhere Mobile has the solution for your destination. We’ve done all the hard work for you: we offer great looking interfaces that visitors will want to come back to again and again; we customize the interface for your destination’s branding and message, so visitors don’t feel like their getting a generic product; and – behind the scenes – we keep your visitor’s iPhone updated with your latest information to give them the immediacy they’re looking for while actually using the app.

And we’ve figured out how to do all of this at a price point that, quite frankly, is well below what anyone should be quoting for custom development, even for the “cheap route”.

And this brings us to the issue of ongoing maintenance. Nothing, not websites, not software, not mobile applications are “fire and forget”. Issues of bugs aside (which will always requiring fixing) no application remains fresh. Great websites are redeveloped every few years as our understanding of how people interact with the web evolves – every website is effectively amortized over the period you have it for.

Maintenance, for Discover Anywhere Mobile apps, covers several things. It covers the ongoing costs of getting your data, reorganizing your data for best presentation on the mobile web, and pushing out that data to all of your visitors for that great destination experience through an iPhone app. It covers access to all of our other features and apps for other devices that Discover Anywhere Mobile has and will make – yes, these will cost extra money but only a marginal incremental cost. The iPhone didn’t exist 3 years ago; the capabilities to do Augmented Reality weren’t there 6 months ago. Apps _always_ needed to be updated in the mobile world or, once again, you’re shipping shelfware.

In short, Discover Anywhere Mobile wants to be your partner in making sure your apps deliver the best possible destination experience for all of your visitors. Our solution provides the best of both worlds – low cost, with professional polish.

We’re considering a new look – or rather, a new way of creating a look – for our iPhone applications:

• no tabs on the bottom of the screen
• navigation is entirely “hierarchical” from the front page
• the front page can be anything that can be rendered in HTML: on the iPhone, this is saying a lot, as basically HTML can do almost anything
• the front page sideways scrolls to reveal more information about your destination or company

Click on the image to see a full size version – this is going to be our new Discover Anywhere Civil War app.

The existing tabbed version will remain available as an option, of course.

Discover Anywhere Transit – called “DA Transit” on the iPhone for brevity reason – has been submitted to the app store now that the iPhone OS 3.1 has been officially released. We’ll let you know when it’s actually out (i.e. when it gets past Apple’s mystical app store process)! Now with nearly 50 transit locations and shiny new Augmented Reality features.

Discover Anywhere “DA Transit” is now available from the iTunes app store (note: link will launch iTunes to show the application in the app store):

Transit information can be selected:

• by transit system
• by what’s near me right now
• by search
• by user favorites

When viewing transit stops, they can be shown:

• in “Augmented Reality” mode, showing the location information floating on the video screen above stops
• on a map
• as a listing, sorted alphabetically or by distance from me

Screen Shots

Updates:

2009-09-08: the following lines have been added: Amtrak, California ACE, California Caltrain, California Metrolink, Florida TriRail, Long Island LIRR, Metra, Metro-North, New Mexico Rail Runner, San Diego Coaster, South Shore Line, Tennessee Music City Star, Utah FrontRunner, Utah TRAX, Virginia Railway Express and Washington Sounder. We now are covering 49 rail lines!

2009-09-10: submitted to app store.

About Discover Anywhere Mobile

Discover Anywhere Mobile creates mobile applications for the tourism industry, particularly DMOs and CVBs. Our applications run on iPhones, iPod Touches, BlackBerries and mobile web browsers. All features in Discover Anywhere Mobile Transit will be available to our customers, including augmented reality.

Current Transit Locations

Amtrak

Atlanta MARTA

Baltimore Metro

Boston MBTA

Buffalo Metro Rail

Calgary C-Train

California ACE

California BART

California Caltrain

California Metrolink

Charlotte LYNX

Chicago CTA

Cleveland RTA

Dallas DART

Denver RTD

Edmonton ETS

Florida TriRail

Houston METRORail

LA Metro

Long Island LIRR

Metra

Metro-North

Miami Metrorail

Minnestoa Hiawatha Line

Montreal Metro

New Jersey River Line

New Jersey Transit

New Mexico Rail Runner

Newark Light Rail

NYC Subway

Ontario GO

Oregon MAX

PATCO

PATH

Pennsylvania SEPTA

Phoenix Valley Metro

Pittsburgh Light Rail

San Diego Coaster

San Diego MTS

San Francisco MUNI

South Shore Line

St. Louis MetroLink

Tennessee Music City Star

Toronto TTC

Utah FrontRunner

Utah TRAX

Vancouver TransLink

Virginia Railway Express

Washington Sounder

Gartner reports:

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Declined 6 Per Cent and Smartphones Grew 27 Per Cent in Second Quarter of 2009

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 6.1 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27 per cent increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market [...]

Company	2Q09 Sales	2Q09 Market Share (%)	2Q08 Sales	2Q08 Market Share (%)
Nokia	18,441.0	45.0	15,297.9	47.4
Research In Motion	7,678.9	18.7	5,594.2	17.3
Apple	5,434.7	13.3	892.5	2.8
HTC	2,471.0	6.0	1,330.8	4.1
Fujitsu	1,249.0	3.0	1,071.5	3.3
Others	5,688.2	13.9	8,085.8	25.1
Total	40,962.8	100.0	32,272.7	100.0

That’s well on target to exceed 25 million BlackBerrys and iPhones to be sold in 2009.

Sales of Apple’s iPhone are through the roof:

Apple continued to defy the recession, posting another record-breaking quarter on the back of the iPhone and its related applications.

Apple reported a profit of $1.23 billion for its third fiscal quarter of 2009, on revenue of $8.34 billion. That represented the best non-holiday quarter in Apple’s history, the company said.

[...]

Apple’s success was clearly predicated on the iPhone. Sales of the Macintosh notched upwards by four percent versus a year ago, to 2.6 million Macs. And iPod unit sales actually declined by 7 percent, to 10.2 million units. But sales of the iPhone surged by 626 percent to 5.2 million units. Apple said that 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store in the first year, and there are currently over 65,000 in the App Store.

[...]

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to have sold over 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter and users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from our App Store in its first year.”

This is a good time for destinations (and everyone else) to start engaging potential and actual customers on mobile devices.