Notes from planet of the apps ...

The planet of the apps conference was a nice event, quite small but a good line-up of speaker (including yours truly). Though the speakers were a bit iPhone centric mostly, most of them seem to worried about 'fragmentation'. I still think there is a lot of misunderstanding about Android out there ...

Some highlights for me were:

Mobile apps dragons den (day1): Nerad Marovac (DN Capital) and Frederic Court Advent Ventures) represent angel investors and helped explain their investment strategies. It was interesting to see their perspective. Some like to go for early stage startups ( when they have have input on the product) and others go for growth stage (where the product is proven and the company needs to expand)

Magic solver: is a market platform that has had quite a lot of experience in building app downloads. The model involves giving free apps out and up selling. People sure do love free ...

App longevity: This was a panel discussion on factors surrounding an apps lifetime. There was a lot of concensus that utility apps would be longer lived, but probably wont attract the sales levels in a short that games do. As well as strategies for keeping people interested (e.g. regular updates, the need for UX).

And of course: Re-enabling the cloud: My Presentation about considerations when choosing a cloud provider. Mainly:

• Make a decision early on the data you want to keep as storing it forever just leads to increasing costs.
• Be careful of lockin to a cloud API. Platform as a service (PAAS) providers (e.g. Azure, App-engine) generally have customised APIs, that will likely require significant recoding of you want to move. Though this is likely a function of their limited age and more are building support for standard APIs
• Here are the slides PPT, ODP

Here are some notes I made in Vectoroid for anyone interested (they are a bit unstructured): Day 1
Day 2&3