What Can You Do With Your Cell Phone

The article below provides some surprising information and insights into the applications being developed for your mobile device. Shake your iPhone, drive an Audi A4 and have fun with fashion. Of course, the ubiquitous chicken-chested Burger King in a Jacuzzi gets my vote for the worst app.

Mobile Marketing: Is 'App-vertising' the Answer? - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

. . . 1 billion applications served, 35,000 applications available and more than 30 million devices in market. Apple's meteoric success with the App Store (launched a mere nine months ago) is fueling a mobile-application market boom.

IPhone owners download an average of 20+ applications to their devices. Pinch Media analyzed 30-million iPhone app downloads. They discovered that only 5 percent of users would open either a free or a paid app 30 days after the initial download.

This finding, however, did not stop development of new apps for other platforms.

• While the selection is currently limited, you will see more apps on Android. There is a downloading software development kit on the site.
  
  
• Microsoft introduced Windows Live for mobile.
  
  
• There are quite a few Blackberry apps available on Built for Blackberry. As you might imagine, the apps are mostly news, travel, sports, music and online banking and trading.
  
  
• Nokia, with nearly 40 percent of worldwide smart phone market, announced the opening of its Ovi Store with 20,000 apps available for download.

All these statistics have marketers desperately trying to monetize the apps. It has been posited that the worldwide mobile-advertising market will grow from $700 million in 2008 to $7.2 billion by 2012.

While marketing on the small-screen has its own unique set of problems, I think you will see more embedding of product brands into video or game clips. Some applications provide a needed service, like banking, which is definitely brand building.

You can also find apps for Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr and many other social sites I have not visited.

Now, if they would just invent a app that would banish the dirty sock odor from my son's room. LOL

Tags: mobile phone apps, iphone, blackberry, nokia, google android, downloads