Life as a mobile developer can be tough. First, you’re hoping and praying your app will get noticed among the thousands in Apple’s App Store. Then, if you’re lucky, you hit the jackpot — your app’s downloaded by 10,000 users. But your excitement lasts only until you start getting tons of customer complaints and you have no money to pay a customer support staff.

Now, if you could outsource that customer support when you need it…Continue Reading

Research in Motion has announced that it is launching a mobile PowerPoint presenter, a device that completely does away with the need to carry around a laptop when you need to give a presentation with slides — consultants rejoice!

Able to store up to 100 presentations, the presenter only requires you to own a compatible Blackberry and have access to a projector. It’s like a Mac Mini dedicated just to the dreaded task of PowerPoint, only even… Read More

Mobile TV has analysts excited. ABI Research estimates that mobile TV will have 43 million subscribers by 2013, and research firm TeleAnalytics estimates 50 million mobile TV users in North America by the same year. But so far mobile TV has not nearly lived up to the hype. Qualcomm’s FLO TV, the technology used behind the current market leaders — AT&T’s Mobile TV and Verizon’s V Cast — still isn’t making money. For this holiday… Continue reading

Location based social networking keeps getting tremendous hype, but the question is whether it will live up to its potential.

The buzz continued this week when Loopt, one of the earliest location-based social networks, announced the acquisition of GraffitiGEO. Loopt recommends places to go based on… Continue Reading

AT&T announced yesterday that it will enable iPhone VoIP apps on its 3G wireless network. You’d think that’d be great news for VoiP companies, and market leader Skype in particular, and indeed, Skype CEO Josh Silverman rejoiced, asking for even more concessions. Read the full article »

Augmented Reality — the ability to superimpose data and information over a view of the real world — is arguably hot these days, and there’s no scarcity of articles and blogs on the space and AR apps. VentureBeat first reviewed AR apps two months ago. Read the full article »

Voice has been transmitted as data for a number of years now, through Skype for example. But the way we use voice hasn’t fundamentally changed: consumers still communicate and leave voicemails in very similar ways as before. Read the full article »

While the iPhone and Android platforms and their ilk have certainly opened up the playing field to a long tail of developers, they are by no means cash machines. In fact, if you had planned on quitting your job to get rich developing apps for these platforms, you might want to reconsider — the chances of your making enough money to build a sustainable business or even survive are slim (see my earlier article on iPhone apps). Read the full article »

Apple’s iPhone has triggered “apps store” wars (with the iPhone as the clear leader so far), with almost every major mobile platform vendor now launching its version of an apps store. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even remember their names: Google’s “apps store” is called Android Marketplace, RIM’s is called BlackBerry App World, Palm’s is called Palm Pre App Catalog, and so on. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to all of them simply as “apps stores”. Read the full article »

This is first in a series of my guest posts. Whenever I post as a guest author, I will also post a link and excerpt on my personal blog here.

The current economic climate has several people pondering whether to become rich by selling iPhone apps. Like anything else, making money by creating and selling iPhone apps is no easy task. If it were, most people would do it, thus increasing the competition and bringing down the revenue to zero. Sure, it did make some people rich instantly — Steve Demeter made $250,000 in two months — but that is an exception and not a rule. Read the full article »