Why are brands creating apps? Because a mobile app brings together all the essential components of your brand: useful information, advertising, social networks, products, special offers, loyalty solutions... If well structured, it is the perfect container for your content marketing strategy. With an app, clients can find all the information they need to buy a product, all in one place. Simple and direct. And now, with our E-commerce section, you can easily connect existing Amazon, Shopify and Etsy boutiques.

There are a few ways to directly earn money with apps: by creating and selling apps for clients, by monetizing through advertising, and by directly selling the app in the stores. In this article, we'll be covering two main questions for publishers who want to sell their app in the stores: 1/ What type of apps are users willing to pay for? 2/ What you need to do if you choose to charge a price for your app.

"Smartphones have become indispensable in our daily life. Their penetration has grown up to 41% of the population and who possesses a smartphone relies on it more and more for an increasingly numerous amount of tasks. 63% of this population accesses the internet from their phones daily and most won't leave their houses without them." (Source: Our Mobile Planet Smartphone Research )

Many companies today have chosen to be present on mobile by creating an app to support their business. An app is an extremely powerful tool because it’s extremely versatile, businesses can communicate in a much more personal way. Also, people access the internet always more from mobile devices and less from pcs. Why? Because it’s more practical, we carry our smartphones around with us all day and now there is a good connection practically anywhere, also apps are easier to use. On a phone you don’t have any desktop clutter, you just have to enter a specific app to get the information you need, in a few seconds you can check the weather, find the best restaurant in town, buy those pants you saw in a shop at a cheaper price. But it’s not all as simple as it sounds, many companies have missed the mark when trying to take advantage of the great opportunity an app represents. You mustn't forget there there are some specific rules to follow when going mobile, this channel is very different from the web so you cannot just transplant your web strategy, you have to plan a specific strategy for the mobile segment. Here are series of common mistakes that to avoid if you want your branded app to be a success and bring your business that extra value!

Today we spoke to David Gomez, Director of Bien Pensado, a Colombian company that provides information and marketing resources for SMEs. Author of El día que David venció a Goliat  (The day David defeated Goliath) and Facebook Toolbox.

Today, we're honored to talk to Nicola Guerra, web designer at the agency Extera.

A few months ago, Apple unveiled its strategy for conquering the in-car entertainment market. Even if we don't yet know very much about CarPlay , it's still interesting to think a bit about the perspectives it will offer, both from the point of view of the final user as well content creators.  Speaking with Jérôme and Arianna , I realized that this could radically change the way I think about cars.

As we know, crowdsourcing is an increasingly used problem-solving method because it is one of the most reliable, fast and cheapest ways to get a job done. Instead of spending massive amounts of money on R&D, many companies are now using online communities to solve tricky issues, discover fresh ideas, eliminate the need of market studies to find out what their customers want and increase customer loyalty. In this article I’ll explain how this is possible.

You spend a lot of time and energy to create your app. But what do you do to promote your mobile application? In this article, we'll review 7 actions you can take to market your app on the App Store and Google Play.

Have you ever wondered why social apps like Facebook and Twitter are blue and conversation apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and native sms apps are green?

“It’s not about ‘gamifying’. It’s about driving revenue, saving costs, making people more efficient.” – Bob Marsh, CEO, LevelEleven Gamification is officially part of the set of marketing tools that every business should use to develop its marketing strategy. It is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game application to make them more fun and engaging. I’m sure that if you use even only social networks you know what I’m talking about. I spend so much time on internet and in the past months I found that many more brands are embracing a gamification strategy to engage their users and promote their products. The modality depends a lot on the brand, the platform chosen to gamify and type of gamification.  We can actually divide gamification into two big families: The first one is more visual and is closer to a real game, with levels, scores and social competition. It usually implies the development of a dedicated app or website and a higher investment.  We have an example of this with Nike  and the Nike+  app that they created. In 2011 they registered a 40% increase of subscribers of the app Nike+; this contributed to increase the business revenues of the running sector by 30%.

This year's f8 conference was all about helping developers build, grow and monetize their apps. Facebook's main objective is to become a stable mobile platform for developers to build on top of.   I took the time to watch the keynote . It's a 1 hour video. If you have the time, go ahead, it's worth watching it. If you don't, I'll give here the main points covered.

"Downloads only enable an app to succeed, they do not indicate actual success," says Brant DeBow , EVP of technology at BiTE Interactive .  As with every emerging phenomenon, the first studies are more simplistic, perhaps for a lack of data. At the beginning of the App trend, the studies made to understand and predict the user’s behaviour were essentially focused on the number of downloads. According to DeBow there’s much more to the success of the app than that.  With breakneck speed growth of the app industry, the available data increased and the studies of the metrics became more accurate. A few months ago we talked about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on the “How to do the web analysis of my mobile app?” article.   Today the challenge is to relate some of these Indicators with app engagement. So I want to explore some of the metrics that I think are important for you to consider, to make your beautiful app interesting and engaging. Although there are other metrics I could mention, I prefer talking about the ones that are that are mainly used on all kinds of apps. So let’s start!

Everyday, I'm in contact with people who have a WordPress site and want to turn it into a mobile app. It's not surprising since more than 19% of the web runs on WordPress   During the conversation, we always end up speaking about the best way to make this transformation, so I thought about sharing this with you in this blog post.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about it you'll do things differently " Warren Buffett

We have already talked about it in the past, now we will resume what has been said and delve further into the subject. As you all know, an app can help you to increase your customer base and your traffic. But before this can be possible is important that your new app is presented to the world! You must to expect a normal period of transition in which you will try to redirect the users of your mobile website to your app. At this point, it is usual to undertake marketing strategies to promote the app and make it known to the world.

We have discussed many times the "benefits" that the creation of an app can bring to your brand, not only as a commercial brand, but also as a blog, a VIP, a radio, a club, etc.   Nowadays, native apps provide a better user experience and improve the way content is made available. The experience that a mobile application offers to users is much more rewarding than the one offered by a mobile web app.

With the rise of app builders, making an app has never been easier, but creating a successful app is a whole different ballgame. In a market where we count published apps by the millions and their downloads by billions, it is certainly not a piece of cake. Here are 3 points to focus on when making an app.  

Have you ever wanted to have someone do some stuff for you? When you're too busy to do it? GoodBarber thought of you, with the automatic push notifications, you'll be serene ;) If you don’t have the time to send a notification after you wrote your last article on your blog, turn on automatic notifications to trigger one as soon as your article is online. Make automatic notifications recognizable by adding a prefix to your messages in order to give your users a clear information.

An article published on www.igeneration.fr on February 14th, echos a study published by Cisco on the same day: Cisco expects an explosive growth of mobile Internet traffic via moblie devices. In 2016, 10 billion mobile devices are expected to be connected to the net for 7.3 billion people. In a study on trends in mobile data traffic , Cisco identified 10 main trends. Cisco anticipates a monthly traffic volume of 10.8 exabytes in 2016. There have been 0.6 billion exabytes in 2011, and should be 1.3 billion in 2012. Traffic will be multiplied by 18 between 2011 and 2016; and by 2 between 2011 and 2012. The growth rate of traffic data was higher than expected in 2011. At the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people in the world. In 2016, the ratio between the number of connected mobile devices and world population will be 1.4. Of the 10 trends described by Cisco, three of them particularly characterize the mobile market in our view.