app

Instagram’s new app Bolt is pretty good

Instagram is testing their new app Bolt in Singapore, New Zealand and South Africa for iOS and Android, and I got my grubby hands on it.  Bolt is one-tap photo messaging, like a simpler Snapchat.  And you know what…I kinda like it, though I don’t know how defensible it would be as a business.

It’s attractive and single-minded.  There’s no confusion to the app’s purpose.  One tap to send a photo or video might not seem much different than say, Snapchat’s three taps, but surprisingly it’s increased the number of messages I usually send.  Maybe that’s because testing Bolt is top-of-mind, but I don’t think so.

One tap messaging feels so effortless — it’s easier than typing a text and yet can say so much more.  Sending dozens of photos and videos throughout the day to let someone know how things are going doesn’t feel like work.  With Bolt, it feels natural.

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The food app you want to marry, not just date

Foursquare is pivoting to a focus on place recommendations – e.g. restaurants and cafes – and this made us wonder how the app actually stacks up to the competition already there. Food is the biggest category and since we are in Singapore and food is inherently local, we examine the competition here: Yelp, Hungrygowhere, SoShiok, 8 Days Eat, Pickat and Burpple in addition to Foursquare.

We pit all seven apps against each other, reality game style, to see who comes out on top. The answer may surprise you.

Note: We tested the iPhone versions of all seven apps.

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Foursquare is no longer Foursquare – blame it on success theater

Recently, Foursquare had split itself into two: one new app, Swarm, to focus on check-ins and seeing friends’ locations; and a new recommendations app to compete with Yelp. The latter will keep the Foursquare name.

This division makes no sense. We’re not even talking about the wisdom behind unbundling, although that’s still questionable. Founder Dennis Crowley made that division because he thinks recommendations is the future and he wants to give it the best possible start, thus inheriting the Foursquare namesake and its 40 million user base. This is success theater because what makes more sense is for recommendations to be the new app, and for Foursquare to still be about check-ins.

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Why doing a mobile app start-up is a bad idea

“You have to be in mobile,” venture capitalists will instruct you.  “We have to be in mobile,” tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo will echo.  Obviously, it’s because we’re living in a mobile-first world.

Yet, becoming the next Instagram or Snapchat is insanely difficult and increasingly so.  A hit app is a rarer unicorn than a hit website.  Why?  Unlike websites, apps aren’t linked to each other; you can’t click on a link to discover a new app, you have to purposefully search and download it from the app store.  Then you have to learn how to use the app before finally getting some value out of it.  Some apps — especially on Android but even from bluebloods like Facebook — behave badly and mistreat your phone’s battery or privacy settings.

The result of the above is that, according to Nielsen, most people use only 30 apps on their phone.  What are the chances your mobile app can make a person’s top 30?  Let’s break down how difficult a threshold that truly is.  What are the 30 apps you’d typically use?

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Skype 5.0 is dead on arrival; here’s how to resuscitate it

With Microsoft in the news recently (18,000 in layoffs!), we thought we’d check in with Skype 5.0, which launched last month for iPhone and will soon debut on Android. Skype used to be the name in messaging, but in today’s mobile world the venerable brand has become an afterthought to Whatsapp, LINE and even Google Hangouts. So how does Skype 5.0 fare?

The Skype team apparently rebuilt the app from scratch with a focus on speed. I’m glad to report the new version doesn’t feel slower than its competition. It looks good too. Microsoft wisely decided to stick to one common design (Windows Phone) and apply it everywhere. One nice upgrade is that if you use Skype for both desktop and iPhone, if a message is read on one it’s automatically marked as read on the other.

However, Skype remains as unusable as ever. Why? Contacts still works like it’s from the 90s. To message a new contact, I have to first search, hope the right person shows up and then manually add her. What makes it worse is that I haven’t used Skype in a long time, so most of the contacts in the “people” section are outdated.

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Facebook’s Slingshot will fail because few will understand its purpose

I’ve been using Facebook’s new app, Slingshot, intensely since it launched last week.  It was initially thought of as a Snapchat competitor and the successor to Poke – which I argued could have beaten Snapchat – but it’s actually quite different.

It’s hard to describe Slingshot and that’s the biggest problem.  It’s difficult to understand its purpose, and few will invest the time needed to do so.  Even after much thought, it’s still not clear why one should use Slingshot over other apps.

Get_Facebook_Slingshot_small

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Yahoo Weather enters storm with only design as a defence

There was a great story on re/code about how Apple’s iOS8 has replaced Yahoo’s weather app with one from the Weather Channel.  This is an embarrassing loss for the purple icon.

The real value of Yahoo Weather isn’t in its fancy design; it’s in its data and distribution.  Neither of which belonged to Yahoo.  The data for weather was provided by — you guessed it — the Weather Channel, who unsurprisingly supplied better data for its own app.

Apple provided the bulk of the distribution.  Marissa Mayer wants “daily habits” to be the cornerstone of Yahoo’s strategy, but in this case iPhone users didn’t have a daily habit of using Yahoo Weather; their daily habit is to use whatever weather app Apple provided.  Discovery remains the biggest challenge of the apps business and Yahoo Weather is no exception to it.

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Why we didn’t vote for Taamkru to win Echelon

e27’s Echelon is the TechCrunch Disrupt of South East Asia; it’s the region’s largest and arguably most influential tech conference.

Echelon also has its own start-up battlefield, and in cornerplay tradition, we’re giving our high level assessment on the winner: Taamkru, an iPad educational game for kids five and below (iOS only for now).

In the words of the company:

Taamkru helps your preschooler achieve academic success in both an enjoyable and productive way while allowing parents to monitor achievement with personalized progress reports…Taamkru’s kid-tested inventory of nearly one million creative learning exercises has been developed by trusted child development experts and aligned with Ministry of Education standards. Our productive learning app has been carefully designed for preschoolers to use and help them achieve academic success with fun, interactive and premium quality educational content of increasing difficulty.

Taamkru is a worthy winner, but it wasn’t my first choice for the competition.

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What apps and websites should copy from IKEA

A good friend asked for my feedback the other day for his start-up, still in stealth mode.  It’s a finance website with lots of cool ideas, but I thought the website and especially the homepage was a bit of a mess.  (He agrees.)

Given a choice between one big feature or many small features, it’s better to have one big feature.  You don’t want to be the product that can do lots of little things but nothing great enough for users to remember you by.

People don’t have the energy or desire to understand your product’s nuances; they need to be grabbed right away with that one thing they must know about you.

My friend’s website has a lot of useful tools and interesting content, but it wasn’t well packaged.  You don’t know what you’re supposed to do when you first visit it.

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Extensibility can make the app world a better place

Of all the announcements at WWDC, iOS8’s extensibility feature excites me most.

A quick introduction in case you don’t know it — Apple is finally allowing apps to communicate with one another.  For example, let’s say you’re on the Facebook app and you upload a photo; there might be a button to launch Instagram and use Instagram’s filters for that photo while still on the Facebook app.  Instagram’s interface appears like a pop-up over Facebook.

Android actually already has a version of this kind of extensibility, but on first impression I like Apple’s implementation more.

(Isn’t that Apple’s real magic?  Not actually being the first, but being the first to enthrall the press and technorati about something.)

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