Monthly Archives: May 2011

Tech Talk: Create Your Own App on Appsbar.com in about 60 Minutes –for Free!

As digital engagement spreads from the web (Facebook, Twitter, websites) to smart phones and tablets, apps have become a critical factor to gain user attention by providing a function, service or information. It’s more than the icing on these devices that we buy and use. With the smartphone/tablet dimension, apps are embedded into the user experience landscape as serious, useful and fun additions to their device. Often the availability of the apps to improve the function of the devices from phones to tablets and the variety of apps available make the choice of host product purchase a real effort in research prior to purchase.
(Article first published in abbreviated presentation as Tech Talk: Create Your Own App in About 60 Minutes with Appsbar.com – for Free!! on Blogcritics.org)

There are a few key few issues concerning the app marketplace. First is the exclusivity of an app to a particular platform. Often your favorite iPhone app is not available on Android or Windows or tablet platforms. Cost is an issue. While there are a number of apps in the free to three dollar range, there are apps with premium prices ranging from five to twenty dollars. The third issue is that perhaps the app or function you want or need is not currently available or doesn’t function in the way you need. I heard of a woman who wanted a “mirror” app so that she could see what she looked like on the fly– but she couldn’t figure out where to find that app.

Should you be so entrepreneurial as to want to create an app, you have a few choices. If you were smart enough to get into IT when in college or are taking classes for that, you know where you can make extra bucks — creating apps on the side. If you are a “geek freak”, you could dig into this as a DIY project and buy the books to create an app yourself. Or if you are like the rest of us (especially moi), you could hire a programmer and find out what it will cost. The price tag– even on the bargain end can be about $3000. Most of the pro apps cost about $10,000 and can cost up to $100,000 or more depending on the sophistication of the app. The time frame for app development can range from six weeks to three months. Until now, these were the only options you had.

The apps paradigm has shifted courtesy of Appsbar.com, an open-to-all-ages website that offers members the ability to quickly and easily build an app for a specific platform with lots of bells and whistles in about 30-60 minutes– and it’s free! Plus once you create the app, it’s funneled to the Apple, Android or Windows markets for others to download. It’s a win-win proposition. In a little more than 2 weeks since the site launched, eleven thousand apps have been created.

Appsbar.com is a new website that allows anyone of almost any age to build their own app on a variety of platforms including iPhone, Android and Windows and also get them into their respective markets. The “digital engagement” that appsbar.com provides allows you — as the user– to create the app for anything or everything you want– depending on how much time and creativity you bring to the table. Generally speaking, if you are thinking about a relatively simple app to build, it could be done in about 30 minutes. The more complex you want to make it, the longer it will take– 60 minutes is about the baseline. However if you get really creative and want the veritable kitchen sink, it could take longer.

Here’s what the site (and their press release) says you can create on an appsbar app
•Event Notifier – which delivers real-time or scheduled notifications to app users.
•Menu – allows creating of catalog of products or services.
•Form Builder – which can be used for customer service surveys, a restaurant to-go order, or answers to questions asked through the app.
•Social Interaction – adds the ability to share content within an app across social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
•Soundboard – lets users create a unique “app ringtone” by uploading any sound which can play when a user shakes or taps their mobile device.
In addition, appsbar can also handle RSS, photos and videos like other similar services

This isn’t just for play boys and girls. This is serious business masquerading behind a fun game-like wizard that will be blowing away the competition in a very short time. As the community grows, watch what happens as the members connect, communicate and collaborate. It’s bound to create something exponentially better than anything out there. This isn’t just for consumers only– bloggers. brands, companies can create their own apps for micro-consumer engagement. There are a wealth of uses for this application wizard.

I was able to snag an interview with CEO/founder Scott Hirsch to talk about this new site and honestly- to ask a lot of questions because appsbar.com is as big a shift in paradigm in the app world as iPhone was to cell phones. Flat out truth, appsbar is on its’ way to changing the perspective of the marketplace and how apps are created and how much the public wants to be involved in the creation. So far there has been little public involvement until now because the public had no way to get involved in the interface of building an app. Hirsch and company have remedied that situation.

How?
1) it’s free
2) they created a very simple wizard to walk you through the building process so that anyone from 18 to 70+ can create their own app.
3) the collective imagination of the appsbar user community is creating new processes for and ways to create apps and the appsbar team is learning from that collective imagination just how to integrate or improve upon what the users have created or asked for to facilitate the building of the most customized app around at the phenomenal price of free plus your own time.

I had the opportunity to interview CEO Scott Hirsch about Appsbar.com and ask a slew of questions about the site– and app development; questions about funding, advertising and how long the site will remain free. The podcast provides answers to all these questions.

I tried the Appsbar.com wizard to create an Android app for my blog. The app creation wizard is easy to use and it’s a lot more fun than a Zynga game. Pick your platform and get started. Do realize that after you complete the first version of your app, you will want to upgrade it as you figure out all the options that you can add to the app and how to make sure that it integrates with your goal.

The community of members can share information and also ask for additional features (coupons, discounting capacity) and the Appsbar.com team will start working on it. While it’s taken me a little longer than the hour, it’s because I kept changing the visuals, the essential app is easily done in 60 minutes or less and I took longer because as I saw the options come up, I was playing with the integration of those options into the app. In other words, I was throwing the kitchen sink into the app and it was definitely fun. Check out the site www.appsbar.com

Thank you to Scott Hirsch of Appsbar.com and Joe McGurk/ Rubenstein PR for facilitating this interview which literally was done in 3 days.

Thanks to Chris Abraham & MarketingConversation.com too.

Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com

Facebook Engagement Increases ROI

According to Erika Barbosa of 10 Golden Rules Marketing, over 50% of Facebook’s users log-in on any given day. This equals over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. You do the math– we’re an internet charged generation and this statistic is only growing. The difference between a proficient social media strategy and a successful one? Engagement. Your viewers can see information or they can communicate information. If they’re involved in the brand, they’re more likely to support it.

Five definitions of ROI: money, traffic, followers, donations, email addresses.
All are easier to obtain if viewers have a say in their brand and the direction that it’s heading. Here are some new keywords that should be implemented in your Facebook strategy, no matter whether your company is established or up-and-coming:

Entertain.
Question.
Showcase.
Reward.

How? Make them laugh, appreciate them, give them a behind-the-scenes peak at the action and makings of the brand. Teach your viewers, share their experiences, give them a break from the “blah factor” of social media overload. It’s easy enough to make a page, request your whole friends list, maybe even post a funny status once a day. It’s quite another to search competitor’s pages and do your research. See what works, it’s in the numbers. A successful Facebook page leads to higher traffic of twitter accounts and blog followers.

Facebook Developers suggests a variety of plug-ins which may increase engagement on your Facebook page. The Social Media Examiner also recommends a compelling introduction video. This is a great way to personalize your page and you kill two of the above goals- Entertain and Showcase. All videos should be short and sweet. If you lose attention after thirty seconds, you’ve turned a fan back into a visitor.

Contests are another way increase ROI. Make sure that the prize is a great enough incentive. Andrea Vahl also reminds us that there are many Facebook rules which you need to adhere to:

The biggest rule is that you need to administer the contest through an Application. That means you need to run your contest on a tab on your Page rather than by having them respond to a Wall post or uploading a picture to your wall or similar-type no-nos. Luckily there are several companies who are dedicated to administering Facebook contests while following all the rules.

Check out apps like Wildfire, North Social and Votigo for help administering set-up. They run the gamut in prices but all are easy to use.

With plug-ins like contests and videos, your audience will increase but that’s only one factor of ROI. Ensure that your incentives are the incentives that “just keep giving,” stengthening likelyhood that your fans and clientbase will pass the good news on.

Amazon Covered my Broken Kindle Under Warranty

The day after I wrote the completely doting post about my Amazon Kindle 3G in graphite, Why I Love my Kindle but Not Only in My Words, I went on a long walk and stupidly took off the my leather Kindle Lighted Cover off to make it slimmer and lighter and look what happened:

The brilliant news, however, is that I found the If my Kindle is broken or damaged, how can I get a replacement? page on the FAQ support page on Amazon and called the toll free number, 1-866-321-8851 (outside the United States: 1-206-266-0927) and, on a Sunday, I got a lovely man who, within 20 minutes, assured me I would have a replacement Kindle by this Thursday and it would already be set up for me.

And, I would receive my replacement Kindle immediately and only then send back my broken unit. Bravo! And, were it not for the Sunday before Memorial Day Monday, then I am sure it would be by Wednesday.

Mind you, the moment my Kindle broke, even before I called customer support, I ordered a Kindle Wi-Fi with “special offers and sponsored screensavers” at only $114 — a brand new model for Amazon as a way of a) collecting reader data b) directly engaging the reader c) all sorts of other stuff — because I never want to be without one in the future until even Thursday.

That said, I have been seriously curious about the whole Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers model and want to check it out personally (and I will write a review when I check it out).

Here’s something I just learned: when you subscribe to magazines, newspapers, and journals via the Amazon Kindle, your subscriptions are for only one of your devices while the books you buy are shared all over them. So, when I get my $114 Kindle with Special Offers it won’t work with my MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times subscriptions — those are only going to work with my original “latest generation” 6″ graphite Amazon Kindle 3G. I didn’t know that before but it is bloody good to know.

M EdgeNewYorkerGroupShot 17 Amazon Covered my Broken Kindle Under Warranty I will keep the new KwSO&SS home, maybe at my bedside, since it will only have my books on it. I don’t plan to drop almost $60 on a leather cover with a light

though I may well get myself a novelty cover, maybe from the New Yorker or maybe in the form of a favorite book (what would you get?). If I do buy the The New Yorker Kindle Jacket then I will surely have to switch my New Yorker subscription to the second one with the cover — and then I will probably swap my subscriptions to the MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and The Economist as well — to keep my focused on the daily paper while I am on the 3G unit.

Mind you, I am putting way too much thought into all of this.

Amazon Covered my Broken Kindle Under Warranty

Why I Love my Kindle but Not Only in My Words

Cover via Amazon

I carry my Amazon Kindle 3G device everywhere.

Currently, I read MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times exclusively via my Kindle, delivered via WhisperNet.

I run through as much content as possible at the gym on the machines or maybe on walks. Yes, I have books as well. I can buy them too easily and on the fly.

I found a gorgeous bullet list of reasons I wish I had thought of as to why I love the physical Kindle device, with 3G Whispernet, from Robin Sloan in the form of The Kindle abroad:

The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.

It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.

It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)

The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)

The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.

Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.

Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

I am going to add a few more of my own:

The deal for using WhisperNet abroad is a bargian. When you are abroad, in whatever country, you only have to pay, I think, $4.99/week to connect all week, wirelessly, via their local 3G and once you agree to that, it will recur as long as you’re abroad. Considering how expensive 3G can be abroad for international roaming.
While you don’t want to do it, losing or breaking your Kindle doesn’t hurt as much as it could. I know you could read your Amazon content at the gym via your iPad or iPhone; however, losing a $114-$189 device is a lot more bearable than losing a $300-$900 device at the gym or in your travel bag or in your backpack or anywhere. In addition, all of the content is completely replaceable. If you lose your Kindle, disable it via your online Kindle home, order a replacement, and all your content will be there when you re-connect. And even if it is not, you can “send” any content you have purchased to your new Kindle.
You can afford and support more than one Kindle with mirrored content. You can buy one 3G Kindle and then a couple cheaper Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers at just $114 each and then leave them at home, leave one near the sofa, one in the bathroom, and make sure your Kindle 3G is reserved for the road — so just leave it in your “to go” bag like I do.
The only Kindle that sucks is the Kindle you don’t have. Be sure to either keep your Kindle, habitually, in your day pack, your work briefcase, or your purse, because there’s really no reason to have a WhisperNet-enabled Kindle unless you bring it with you. It should not be preserved at a precious thing — it is a lot more durable and tough, even without a pretty Kindle Lighted Cover like the one I have, with integrated, Kindle-powered light.
The official covers are the best covers for the Kindle, especially the one with the reading light. I personally use a black Kindle Lighted Cover which I use to read the Kindle on flights or in bed. Just beware that using the integrated light really sucks the power out of the device, rendering it as power-hungry as its cousins the Android tab, smartphone, the iPad, and the iPhone. Otherwise, Robin is right, the batteries last forever!
While it isn’t perfect, Kindle does have a sort of Social Network and Social savvy.So, this should be my official Chris Abraham Amazon Kindle Profile that you can look at and, I guess, connect to. Also, if you have a Kindle be sure to sign up in order to be able to share what you’re reading and selected excerpts to Twitter and/or Facebook, which I do; caveat, the links aren’t friendly and only go to a promotional page and not to the free, web-accessible, page, which is pissing my friends off, even though they all probably know how to use Google to find the content if they need to and are just being lazy bastards.
Finally, you don’t have to buy every single book you want to remember to read when you own a Kindle.Thanks you to the doctor who told me that I can add any title I think of without paying if I want to remember the books by adding them as “Try a Sample” instead of buying the whole book. Who knows if I will actually like A Game of Thrones; however, I can download a sample, which acts as a reminder, costs nothing, and also allows one to see if you like it by reading a bit, like you might do, at your leisure, while spending a lazy afternoon at Powell’s City of Books.
I have replaced a lot of paper media with ones and zeros towards saving the earth. I can gloat here in Portland because I have replaced a lot of paper-based monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers with digital content, saving the forest and oil and the gas-emission of Mr. Postman. Aside from the daily Oregonian and New York Times, which I receive at my door every morning, most of my weekly journals and magazines and daily newspapers are delivered automagically via WhisperNet currently in the form of MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. That says nothing of the hundred or so books I have downloaded to my ebook reader, both bought or downloaded for free. And, I am pretty sure that powered by technology developed by E Ink Corp requires a lot less energy for its batteries from the mains and is better for the environment anyway, all on its own, rather than needing to be charged nightly — or several times a day for the power users — like the tablets and smartphones are. Yes, yes, a well-used book is way more environmentally kind as is library use — unless you consider the overhead of heating, cooling, and lighting a library, that is.

Again, thank you so much to Robin Sloan of Snarkmarket in the form of The Kindle abroad for inspiring this post.

Why I Love my Kindle but Not Only in My Words

On Being, The Splendid Table, and Fresh Air

Image via Wikipedia

I just wanted to share three awesome radio show podcasts you need to subscribe to and consume. I have been listening especially to the unedited recordings that are podcast exclusives of On Being with the visionary radio host, Krista Tippett. The one I consumed last night at the gym was an unedited interview with Scott Atran.

Today, I have been listening to The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper and produced with the help of foodie Sally Swift. They also have a book out together I think I will check out today titled The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper because they had a short-lived eponymous podcast I discovered on iTunes. I boiled eggs and also made a fluffy omelet after listening to these short instructional podcasts.

I have been learning so much not only about cooking but also about ingredients and culture choices and variations of recipes and how diverse food and food preparation is.

Finally, I am sure you’re already listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I can’t throw the radio show or the podcast into Foodie or Spiritual but more along the lines of general culture interest. Not simply highbrow interviews with historically-important jazz men or explorations into books and so forth, but there is a lot of broader culture.

The thing I love the most about all three women in all three of these radio programs is that they’re inexorably linked to their personality. None of them try to remain detached or objective. They all three get wiggly about their guests or topics or their favorite thinkers, meals, or movies.

Terry Gross acted like a blushing little school girl when she interviewed Russell Brand, who charmed her and made her giggle — and she has such a funny little laugh. And that is good, and that is authentic to me, especially in the case of the unedited recordings that Krista Tippett generously shares to the point of really give us, the audience, a lovely insight into how these shows are produced.