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Today is the last day to save $200 on your tickets to ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 ! Tomorrow the price goes up to $595. Register now! The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will take place May 7, 2010 , in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like : Sponsor Deb Schultz of Altimeter group Patrick Chanezon, Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless Scott Raney & Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the "unconference" format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful - we got a lot of great feedback about that. As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin , who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We're using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum. Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth , so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you - the attendees - who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now. We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business . Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks: Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Current sponsors include: Platinum Sponsor: CallFire CallFire allows SMBs and developers to easily & cost-effectively build rich interactive phone systems. In minutes, users can create useful toll free hot-lines, send notification & emergency response phone calls, and even setup cloud call centers with agents located anywhere in the world. CallFire's text-to-speech engine lets you create database-driven appointment reminders, toll-free information hotlines & outbound power-dialing campaigns for pennies a call. Call 877.897.FIRE to learn more, or check out a video: IVR , Cloud Call Center , Toll Free Numbers . CallFire will be introducing our very own Richard MacManus for the keynote and has a surprise giveaway for all attendees of the morning keynote - so make sure you arrive early! Travel Sponsor: World Mate WorldMate, the world's leading mobile travel assistant with over 5 million members worldwide, is the official travel sponsor of the upcoming 2010 ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. Add WorldMate to your Blackberry or iPhone today and use its powerful features to deliver an unparalleled travel experience as you make your way to the Summit on May 7th in Mountain View. WorldMate can recommend flights, hotels and ground transportation to suit your individual needs - you can even book your travel through the mobile application. Visit www.worldmate.com for more information. Lunch Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Finally, Alcatel-Lucent will be sponsoring the lunch at the Mobile Summit. By the way, this isn't a boxed lunch, we know that shaping the future of mobile takes energy and therefore you need good food - so we're pleased to announce the lunch will be fresh grilled made to order tacos, burritos & quesadillas. Also, while ordering your lunch make sure to drop your business card in for a chance to win one of the six iPads Alcatel-Lucent's team will be giving away! Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options. The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can't wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here , if you're so inclined. We hope to see you on May 7! Discuss
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Mobile Summit Second Round Pricing Ends Today! Last Day to Save $200!
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With the launch of the iPad, the value of content is being reconsidered once again. It's clear that free (the way of Google) isn't the goal of the publishing industry. As a result, many new iPad owners are faced with the question of whether the book or magazine they own or consume should be purchased again on the iPad. Similarly, developers are faced with a set of decision on how to appropriately extract payment from consumers. In this post, we'll take a look at the solution offered by Apple and a host of solutions that exist on the web that are available to the iPad as applications or web sites that charge for views. Sponsor To App, or not to App, That is a Question For content providers that have websites, or an existing relationship with Amazon, the question of whether to push content to Apple's book store, or to build an app is more complicated than first meets the eye. On one hand, getting paid through multiple channels makes a ton of sense. Apple, being very wise is working to find balance in the closed and open ecosystem. Its breakthrough product, iPad, supports web sites, applications like Kindle, and its own book store simultaneously. On the other hand, it can be a pain to track customer relationships and inventory across multiple channels. If your content is recurring (weekly, monthly), it is even more complicated. And, if you already have subscribers on your web site behind a paywall, it can be even more challenging to rationalize how to merge these customer populations and price points. In a way, we're all learning together and competition across channels is going to make it harder in the short term to figure out the right mix. Distribution Matters Apple's StoreKIt Framework is the tookit for developers to enable payments in iPhone and iPad applications. Apple has evolved its own rules and technology in the last several years to do this, and in 3.0 released last summer offered the Store Kit API. When first launched, only paid apps were able to offer recurring payments through Store Kit. However, in one of the more recent updates offered by Apple, the company changed the terms of Store Kit to allow developers to set the price of their application for "Free" and then to offer updates or subscriptions as additional payments. In the release of iPad this week, we saw veterans of the industry release amazing reader applications , but as reported in The Huffington Post , price does matter, and parity across offerings is still a question to be answered. Amazon offers its books and other goods via the iPhone in its Kindle for iPhone applicaiton, in this free application, Amazon is the back-end for payment and Apple is the distributor of the application. Amazon, like Apple has a direct relationship with publishers to offer their inventory in its stores. In recent weeks, it has been reported that intense negotiations have been underway between the publishers and Amazon on pricing and margin. As reported by AP , Amazon has seemingly conceded a new level of pricing control to publishers. Amazon and Apple are setting the pace for the future of computing. Both are engaged with content providers to work out all the kinks of pricing in this new world. We wonder if there is a way that both can win, as certainly they are both extremely well positioned and successful in payments, computing, and content distribution. Getting Paid is Hard - However Recurring Billing is a Real Pain In contrast to these end-to-end platforms for distribution, we took a look at companies that focus on the process of payment itself as offered as a platform to content and application developers. Aria Systems announced a new release of its PCI compliant platform to support iPad today. The company's core vision is to "Simplify Your Billing". To do that, the company is making a bet that content providers will want to extend their relationships with consumers via the iPad and integrate their web applications by announcing a future integration with Safari. Aria Systems brings a plug-and-play solution to integrating with back-end systems that a company may be running, including QuickBooks and SalesForce.com. It also specializes in dealing with the process of recurring billing transactions, which can be a difficult thing to work out in the context of subscription revenue recognition. The platform is described as being PCI complicant, which can be a huge benefit for content and application owners that don't want to take on the burden and liability of all of the controls of handling credit cards and personal privacy. Chargify is another software-as-a-service application that suggests its core value being "Build Your Business, Not Your Billing System". We think this is the value-add that both Chargify and Aria bring to companies that want to offer recurring payments. Many do not have the time to also become experts in the hard word of accounting and compliance. The Chargify solution is offered as a set of APIs to integrate into an existing application and offers an iPhone application to peer into the payments processes in play. Here's a quick view of how it works. Content Distribution Enters Into a New Chapter We are left wondering whether Apple or Amazon will extend their reach further beyond their current distribution. Will they grow their payment solutions to become the center of gravity for all payments for content on the web? Or, will solutions like Aria Systems and Chargify get closer to the distribution channel and offer app developers and content owners they can have a deeper relationship to consumers when they remove distribution as the driver of payments? We expect that in the next years content providers will require the best of both worlds will require both great distribution and simple billing. Perhaps we're asking the wrong question by focusing on what Rupert Murdoch is doing. Maybe we should ask what Wolverine would do. After all, content is king. Are you looking at recurring payments for your content or application? In 2010, is it possible to choose a single solution? Discuss
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Channeling Murdoch: Choices for Content Payments on the iPad
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What applications are the earliest testers of the Apple iPad trying out? Even though the "official" launch day for the new slate touchscreen computer isn't until tomorrow, April 3rd, several journalists and even some celebrities have already got their hands on one. And what are the top applications for folks like this? There are the usual suspects, of course: The Wall St. Journal, iBooks, Netflix (yes, it was true !), USA Today, ABC Player, NYT Editors' Choice, NPR and others. But all these apps are free, big-name brands and precisely the sorts of things the iPad was designed for. What's more interesting is a glance at the paid applications list for the iPad. Sponsor iPad's Top Apps the Day Before Launch Yesterday, iPad applications became available in the iTunes App Store. They appeared in searches for terms like "XL" and "HD" - the new acronyms developers are using to denote which of their mobile apps have been reconfigured for the slate's larger screen. And although very few people actually have their iPad yet, a number of iPad apps have been downloaded, either by the early testers themselves or by those who are preparing their collection for tomorrow's first-time sync. In the free applications list, there are few surprises. From one to ten, the top free apps are: iBooks, Netflix, ABC Player, USA Today, The Wall St. Journal, NYT Editors' Choice, NPR for iPad, Twitterific for iPad, eBay for iPad and Shazam for iPad. Early Trend: iPad is Used for More than Media Consumption However, the paid applications list hints at two early trends that may bode well for the device's future and one that may not. First, the good news. The iPad, despite its consumer appeal, is already making headway as a productivity application.
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Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app - which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 - doesn't really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram's new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous. Sponsor Wolfram Alpha for E-Books The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray 's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe . The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010. As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction. Wolfram Alpha iPad App Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves. Discuss
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Wolfram Alpha is Coming to the iPad and E-Books
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Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its "computational knowledge engine" altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site , but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 and will issue a refund to every customer who bought the app at the full price. Sponsor A New Policy for Wolfram Alpha According to Wolfram Alpha's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram's earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking. Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won't return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund. To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone's or iPod touch's UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple. You can find our full review of the iPhone app here . New Mobile Site The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn't offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app). More To Come According to today's announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn't offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha's architect, "the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity." Discuss
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Wolfram Alpha Admits Mistake: Mobile Site is Back; iPhone App Down from $50 to $1.99
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