GPS BN: And what about the pricing of these applications, in your case - like many others - you have different pricing according to the channel you sell your solution?
RR: You are right. We have a different pricing for example on Handmark, Blackberry App world and with wireless operators. What we have seen so far is that consumers don’t really complain about that. But I think this is due to the fact the market is still very small and very immature. So right now we are not seeing blowback from consumers, but overtime they will get savvy enough to make decision, and it is going to force people like us to have unified price point.

GPS BN: And what about marketing these applications, how do you drive consumers to your products?
RR: We have been experiencing many things in that area; we got a lot of knowledge and we are still learning. What we found is that the act of discovery is particular to each channel and it is the same problem with wireless operators. They are all different.

What we also learned is that iTunes consumer behave differently from others and their expectations are entirely different. They search more deeper into the long tail of content and they are also very vocal about what they like and dislike, which means the review process and the number of star you get is getting very important.

If you look at the applications in the top 25 list they tend to introduce updates with new features and fixes every 3 to 4 weeks, and they communicate through Facebook, Twitter, in a way that was never been done with traditional carrier app customers. These application developers are building micro communities.

What we found also interesting is that the iTunes customers don’t use traditional customer support tools like 24/7 phone support. Since we have it per our contract with wireless operators we also offered it to our iPhone customers, but it turned out we had proportionally very few calls from iPhone customers, they prefer to use emails or other means of communications.

GPS BN: Talking about the reviews I was told some developers are getting as much as 5% of their users to review their app, do you think it is real?
RR: Well, it seems a bit high, in our case I believe we are more around one to two percent. But knowing how hard some developers are pushing their customers to post a review I suspect that it is possible some of them get 5% reviews.

GPS BN: Have you tried banners in app stores and in-app advertising?
RR: We have done quite some extensive work on that front and what we discovered was again that results were not consistent across the various application stores. For example we are doing very well with our ads in the AT&T media mall but not so good with the Verizon equivalent. We have also tried to run in-app ads with the iPhone, but we did not get a good ROI so we decided to pursue other marketing activities to drive customers to our app in the Apple store. The bottom line is that every channel is different, one size does not fit all.

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