The smartphones are everywhere. You see people chattering with family and friends in the malls and on transit systems. You see people of all ages playing "Angry Birds", "Cut the Rope" or some other entertaining app. People can cruise through websites with a tap and swipe on smartphones, all while away from their home computer. For years, advertisers capitalized on the home-based (or office based) computers to provide real time and context specific advertisements to web surfers (via their browsers). Money could be made for "pay per click" or similar ad models. This method still works, but the problem for advertisers is that people aren't using their desktop PCs much any more. They're using their smartphones.
Due to the fact that this tool supports all handsets, you should find that you are able to promote your content to a wide audience when you use this tool. You can also retail a wide variety of media content files that enables you to tap into the entire global mobile phones market.
First some facts. Information Week says that 38% of small and medium sized businesses already depend on Mobile Apps. American Express is working on a new e-wallet application. Microsoft, Apple and Google are implementing near field communications (NFC) technology for mobile payments in their next generation of products. As we speak, Google is testing an Android payment system in New York and San Francisco. PayPal is teaming with innovative companies like Blingnation to bring mobile payments to its customers.
Pay close attention to what your competitors are doing, this is a great way to gain an edge in social marketing. Don't follow their every move, if you do, you're going to blend in with them. You have to stand out from your competitors. Blending in means, at best, you'll be splitting customers; at worst, you'll lose them all.
Last week Amazon announced that it would be providing up to 20GB of storage to its customers for anything they want - music, videos, ebooks, etc. They call it a "cloud locker." One thing's for sure - this locker will smell a lot better than my gym locker. And say what you want about Amazon, but these guys not only spot trends well in advance, they also start trends of their own. I never thought people would go for ebooks when they were first introduced. Now I see that Amazon's sold around eight million Kindles in 2010. Shows how much I know.
MetaTrader 5: This is an app version of the popular Forex trading platform MetaTrader 5. With it users can control their account, trade in the financial markets and analyze markets with technical indicators. It offers 14 most popular technical indicators such website as Average True Range, Bollinger Bands, Commodity Channel Index and Force Index. To use MetaTrader 5, users must have an account or they need to register for a demo account. This app also lets them handle more than one trading account. However, the developers should think about including a Help section, as new users may find this app a bit too technical. MetaTrader 5 is a free app compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad and requires iOS 4.0 or later. This app is also available in Windows and Android platforms.
There are also news apps. There are various apps that cater to getting all sorts of information when it comes to current events. You can choose to get information on local news. You can choose to get information on international news. All you have to do is download the appropriate app.
Around 30 billion mobile apps have been downloaded by the users so far. It shows people love apps as they want to customize their devices with things that they actually like. I believe that three apps listed here would deliver the magic for users. As these apps won't cost much, one can certainly try them!