Mobile Application Stores

Our moderator, Albert Antonini Mangia, Mobile Manager in the Marketing and Sales Area at Mediaset, will discuss about mobile application stores with the players themselves at the next Mobile Monday Milan on the 19th October.

Featured speaker: Gian Luca Cioletti Leader, Business Development - EMEA from Forum Nokia - Nokia Ovi

Featured speaker: Alberto Bevilacqua Director, Carrier Relationship at Research in Motion - BlackBerry App World

Featured speaker: Francesco Ponticelli Resp. of Internet Discovery & Branded Content - VIS Italy at Vodafone Omnitel - Vodafone 360

Mobile Applications Stores have been around long before the launch of Apple App Store – in fact since 2001 Qualcomm BREW offered not only an SDK for application developers, but also a complete developer-to-consumer channel for discovering, provisioning, distributing and billing applications on BREW handsets, mainly distributed in the American and Asian markets.

Despite lacking an on-device storefront, since 2004 GetJar and Handango were successful Mobile Application Store reporting million of downloads per month.

In June 2006 appeared Nokia’s Content Discoverer, later renamed Nokia Download’s.

Since the summer 2008, with the launch of Apple App Store, we have witnessed the emergence of a totally new kind of business and the re-definition of the fundamentals for a Mobile Application Stores to be successful:

• Single marketplace;
• Centralized billing: operator independent, reasonable 70-30 revenue share model which includes also basic marketing, developer’s free choice of the price for apps and In-App Purchases which will allow developers to offer subscription content and provide the ability to sell new content and features in a simple and secure process;
• Global distribution: no needs to make separate agreements with each MNO;
• Easy and transparent provisioning;
• On-device discovery;
• No entry barriers for application developers: even a private individual can publish it’s own app investing only less than 100 Euro;
• Free push notifications: free messaging capability to the device compared to the expensive SMS cash-cow;
• Enabler for location and context based mobile advertising.
  

Since the last quarter of 2008 several big mobile players have announced the opening of their Mobile Application Stores:

• Nokia - OVI Store
  
• Vodafone - Vodafone 360
  
• RIM - Blackberry App World
  
• Apple - App Store
  
• Google - Androids Market
  
• Microsoft - Windows Marketplace for Mobile
  
• LG - LG Application Store
  
• Palm - App Catalog
  
• Samsung - Samsung Application Store
  

Apple is undoubtedly the current market leader in this area, having clearly demonstrated the potential of mobile application stores on devices. The success of the Apple's App Store it is very well known and documented:

• in 30 days of operation: more than 5,000 new applications, $30M revenues
  
• in 15 month of operation: 2 billions downloaded apps, 85.000 available apps in the store, 125.000 developers producing apps worldwide, 50 millions users.
  

Will all these companies, entering this new multi-billion Euro business with their sizable consumers bases (50-100+ million) and owning most of the ingredients, catch up the Apple App Store?

When and Where

Topic: Mobile Application Stores

Date: Monday, 19th of October 2009

Time: 17h30-21h00

Place: Restaurant Art Bar Le Biciclette, Via Torti / Corso Genova, Milan

Admission: FREE, but online confirmation is required!