For generations the garage sale has been an american summer time tradition. In college they could be a gold mine for finding that once piece of furniture you needed, yet knew would be destroyed. With the growth of the e-commerce generation, we’ve begun to see a shift towards selling more online.
Is a mobile health app a medical device? Should an app that shows you how many steps you’ve taken be regulated exactly the same way as a blood glucose monitor? According to the FDA the answer is yes, and if pending legislation passes in the U.S. House of Representatives it could sound a death knell for innovation in the healthcare sector.
Its always great to see your local startups making big moves. Today former Spotlight: LA Tech company ParkMe announced their partnership with Magnifis. ParkMe, a leading provider of parking information to navigation companies and smartphones, and Magnifis a voice-based driver assistant application.
For most the dreams of becoming a guitar shredding god are lost if not playing since your youth. Although you may not be able to become that mega star on stage playing the Hollywood Bowl, you can still become the guitar shredding god of your household. Music Prodigy is changing Music Education through its patent-pending technology and proprietary teaching method that enables any aspiring musician to learn any instrument
Google Drive is a cloud-service for files that offers 5GB of space to use however you wish right out of the gate for free. The first question that came to mind, personally, was “How do I get more if I need to?” The simplest answer isn’t “spam your friends on Facebook and Twitter to get’m to use your referral code”, it’s “show me the money”. Apparently, Google just piggybacked the Google Drive storage space expansion off the already existing Picasa Web Albums service.
One thing Internet technologies have brought us over time is the increasing ability to create customizable or personalized content for ourselves. It started as basic as signing up for a newsletter from your favorite site to customizing a profile to display particular topics. Then we took a giant leap with social media integration. We could now not only see content we were aware of but we could discover new content via our friends and their friends.
Mobile social discovery is all the rage as evidenced by the early success of apps like Banjo, which achieved an astounding 500,000 downloads in its first six months alone.
Apparently the momentum is continuing. Earlier this week, Banjo announced it doubled its users in the last three months. For those of you who don’t do math, that’s one million people using Banjo in just nine months since launch.
So far, I’ve covered how to decide which type of app you’re looking to create and how to use your market research to decide what features you want your app to have. The next phase in making a great app is the creation of solid User Stories. Part of this will help you continue defining your feature-set, but it will also help you know what sort of brand you need to create and how you’ll eventually market your application to those users.
Customer loyalty, one of those seemingly innocuous facets of both large and small scale businesses that can be easily overlooked, but generally understood as ultra important to how well a business thrives. You’ve taken care of the 1) product, 2) marketing, 3) overall experience (to garner positive reviews), but then what? How do you guarantee a simply favorable review versus a regularly returning loyal customer?
Have you ever found yourself standing in a crowded bar during happy hour, waiting for what seems like hours to get a drink or food? Don’t feel bad, we’ve all been there before. You stand around hoping to catch the bartenders attention. When you finally do, you order up your round and snacks. Then you get to think about starting a tab or cashing out? Should you have ordered an extra drink so you don’t have to fight through the crowd again?
