In response to developer complaints that more expensive apps were getting buried at the bottom of popularity rankings, Apple recently introduced a separate ranking based on revenue. (The Top 100 Paid apps ranks apps are based on number of downloads.) In this post, I’ll validate that compared to downloads, the Top 100 ranking based on revenues does contain pricier apps.

For each decile, I calculated the MEAN price of the Top 100 Apps over the 2 most recent weeks. Notice that for the most recent week, the MEAN price for each decile† of the Top 100 Grossing apps is more than $5. In contrast, none of the deciles for the Top 100 Paid apps had a mean of $4 or more. There isn’t much of a relationship between rank and price although there was a slight downward trend in the price of the Top Grossing apps over the most recent week: except for the blip in the 5th decile of apps ranked 41-50, the top deciles tended to have higher MEAN prices.

Being able to install new apps developed by third parties gave the iPhone a whole new dimension that other phones simply couldn’t offer, so the iPhone’s stroke of genius was its apps. Before the iPhone, your phone came with a pre-installed set of apps (usually games, a calendar and an alarm clock), and that was that. To get new features you needed a new phone.

The iPhone changed all that by letting you install new apps that fundamentally changed the features of the phone in thousands of different ways.

Except, it wasn’t a new idea, even years before the iPhone was released. Symbian had offered the ability to add apps to its phones for years.

So why did the iPhone become the phone with apps and Symbian become the forgotten mobile OS?…

Simple: Symbian’s obsession with security. In what should be a huge wake up call to Steve Jobs and the increasingly totalitarian regime that he’s creating around the walled garden that is everything i (iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iPod), Symbian insisted on approving each and every app that was written for the Symbian platform.

The only problem was that its approval process was even slower than Apple’s. Whereas iPhone apps can take from a week to 2 months to be approved, a Symbian app still takes half a year before it’s approved!

Half a year is simply insane. The smartphone market is so fast moving that an app is usually out of date 6 months after it’s first released.

According to Lee Williams, Symbian’s Executive Director, this is still the case now. So not only did Symbian squander the app advantage they had when the iPhone was first launched, they continued to do nothing about the situation for a full three years while Apple cut a swathe throught the market unabated.

Sometimes you want to just bang your head against the wall at the sheer incompetence of large organizations!

Found this really interesting article on MobileMentalism :

India has beat it’s government target of 500 million before end of 2010. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that the number of Indian mobile phone users will cross the 650 million mark by 2012.

India is now on a par with China and only the second nation in the world to achieve half a billion mobile phone subscribers – with nearly 15 million new customers being added every month.

Officials say that overall “tele-density” in the country has reached 43.5% – or 509 million subscribers.

But some areas such tiny remote north-eastern Indian state of Mizoram has now more than half the population is now using a mobile telephone.

The Mizoram state economic survey in January 2010 indicated there were 561,917 mobile phone users in the state – which has a population of about one million people – and the figures might have gone up since then. The survey said that Mizoram’s mobile phone users currently pay a total monthly bill of 50 million rupees ($1m).

All Indian mobile networks are doing roaring business in the state, where the government is the biggest employer.

Airtel is the largest network in Mizoram, with 192,000 subscribers in January 2010, followed by BSNL, Aircel, and Vodafone.

Officials say that the figures are remarkable because the state is one of the most remote in India and private industry is practically non-existent.

This seems to be the model that is replicated not only across India but also in Africa.

What does this mean for us in the mobile industry ? Basically that these people who often don’t have internet connections are going to be hungry for content. Not necessarily premium content for sure but they will want the same sort of services as others have world wide namely : search, social and info.

This represents a huge opportunity and also challenge for the present web and mobile players to offer to these new entrants what they want and to monetize all of this.. To be watched therefore.

This is funny.. probably gives shivers to Steve Jobs. This guy has managed to install Android on an iPhone.

Microsoft has announced their phone the KIN 1 and KIN 2. Formerly know as Project Pink this is a device that is specifically designed to “navigate your social life”.

“My phone is my lifeline. My social glue. My next of kin.”

Microsoft explains why the KIN is special in that “it is a socially aware phone, based on Windows Phone 7, and cloud service. This combination not only makes it effortless for you to capture and share your social moments, but also have them backed up for safe keeping and easy retrieval.”

Also this device connects to Microsoft’s music store Zune and shares many of the Zune’s features such as the browser. Another up side are the 5 and 8 megapixel cameras that come with the KIN 1 and KIN 2 respectively.

Up to this point it seems that finally Microsoft has gotten some features right to make the KIN a success.

Now lets talk about what the KIN can’t do. Flash isn’t supported though which is a bit of a deception. What is quite surprising and  the real clincher though is that it can’t download apps ??!! It seems that this option is blocked. Probably because in the near future Zune music store will want to be doing that. Still this is a feeble… very feeble attempt to do what Apple has done so well namely to make a closed circuit eco-system.

India has emerged as the second-biggest consumer of mobile Internet after the US, according to data from 15,000 mobile websites monitored by Google. However, it accounted for only 5.9% of the 14 billion web pages seen on mobile phones in February. More than half the web pages were seen on mobile phones in the US, Google said in a report on Monday.

The numbers represent statistics of only those countries where Google has a strong mobile advertising network, and may not have captured the full extent of the Chinese market, where Google continues to be weak.
In a separate briefing, Google’s India product head, Vinay Goel, said the number of mobile internet users has grown nearly five times in the last five years. “In fact the number of new data connections added globally this year will be higher on the mobile than on the PC,” he added.

According to him, around 25 million of the 500 million or so mobile users in India have paid data accounts and another 55-65 million use operator-provided data services. Goel said the number of Internet users on PCs in India is growing at around 50% a year and will reach 100 million by the end of 2010.

The numbers also revealed that the iPhone was losing Internet share to the Android in a big way in its home market, the US. The share of iPhone’s internet traffic dropped from 55% in November to 44% in February. During the period, the share of Android phones rose from 27% to 42%.

The last four months have seen the increasing popularity of Android phones such as Motorola’s Droid, which followed the iPhone on the popularity charts in the US.

by Mark Jaffe   www.mobilemandala.com

There was a lot of passionate response to the post a few weeks ago “Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople”. Even more reason that these three announcements this week caught my eye:

■  The Aberdeen Group published a report that stated in 2008, the total of digital signage market revenue stood at $766 million and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2014, growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%.
■  The London Daily Mirror reported according to unnamed sources that Nokia is planning to begin rolling out embedded NFC (near field communications) kits into its entire line of Symbian phones beginning Q3, 2010. The Finnish giant already has NFC in selected handsets, such as the 6216 Classic.
■  Malaysian manufacturer Fonelabs will produce two million low cost (under $100) NFC enabled phones in 2010
What do these three items have to do with retail? First, just as a refresher, Near Field Communication (NFC) is “a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.” In other words, if you have an NFC enabled phone and opt-in, your mobile phone will be able to communicate with another proximate electronic device automatically.