The Dream: being able to project whats on the iPad screen to a Projector or Monitor. Perfect for Presentations and apps etc.

The Reality: Only apps thats permit the connection work. So far it’s Keynote and Movies.Not even PDFs in iBooks.

So rating 1/10. You should have the option to copy and show everything IMHO.

We launched our first paid for iPhone Application “My Movies” – with the aim to be the fastest way to find movie times on your iPhone.

We’ve had fantastic results to date – hitting the #1 Lifestyle App in the Australian App Store. This was a goal but not something I thought we’d hit in the first week with next to no advertising. A push to facebook/twitter friends, I still haven’t messaged my address book.

We got featured in the AIMIA Mobile Newsletter (well worth joining if you haven’t) www.aimia.com.au

So what have we learnt!

1) That people would rather write a negative review in the App store than contact us about the problem. The ones that did we were able to figure out exactly what bug was causing the problem and fix it.

2) There is no way for us to contact people through reviews, so we can’t fix their problems.

3) The % of people who review the app is so low, but the influence they have on people purchasing the App is high.

4) That the results you get back from Apple are 24 hours behind any marketing that you do, which makes it hard to know what is working and what’s not in this real-time web.

5) Checking the App Store constantly on position is very addictive and unhealthy.

6) That we went from submitted to approved in 4 days.

7) We’ve had sales in 10 different International App Stores including UK, US, Singapore, Russia, India, New Zealand, and South Africa.

That Apple only pay you when you reach a $$$ threshold in each App Store, so we will never see any revenue from Singaporean customers until the threshold is met (unlikely anytime soon). This must mean that Apple have tens of millons of dollars in kept fees. So our choice is to either make it free for secondary markets or put the price up to $50. It would be nice if we could give it to charity – Mr Jobs.

Some thoughts..

Paid / Not Paid App

I have been criticised privately by peers for not making the App for free. At present I still think its the best decision to have made it $2.49 as I don’t think we would have sold any less for $1.19. After Apple take their cut, there isn’t much left over – we still have to purchase the content, and cover the development costs (it’s the most expensive app I’ve ever paid for).

I would like to make it free if we could find the right advertiser to associate with (if that’s you please get in touch).

iPhone / iPad

Since having an iPad we have to make an iPad friendly version, I think all developers should now be thinking this way when developing for the iPhone now.

Upgrades

Our Upgrade to 1.1 is still waiting for review, longer than the first version.

New Features

Got some great new features in mind sitting down with our developers tomorrow to see what we can do. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

Store Choices.

I’m not entirely sure if the people who have bought the App from different countries are located in Australia or elsewhere. Makes me wonder if they are developers trying to copy the app, which would make sense to keep the IP hidden – but its still baffling me.

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To buy the App – look for My Movies in the App Store. It’s the one with the Popcorn.

Still loving iBooks – reading Seth Godin’s linchpin and its great being able to read a chapter every so often. Would be nice to copy and paste book text which you can’t.

Games. Having a lot of fun with the pinball HD game, flight control multiplayer and scrabble. Sodoku is good. People are most impressed with real racing which is just an immersive experience.

Flighttracker has been good whilst we’ve been away, maps fantastic, really the shirring of content of pictures and video is a really nice experience.

To save iphone battery I’ve found myself using the iPod function for listening to music.

Have been using keynote for wireframes play and touch is going to be a great way to build stuff in the future.

Email is fantastic. Calendar is strange – can’t add an event by clicking on the time of the day – weird.

Can see myself updating blog more often using wordpress.

The iphone app navigation between pages doesn’t really work very well. I find the icons too small and I’m sure this will be changed in future versions.

The other nice thing is its much more social over the breakfast table. Love reading the BBC news app and yes I can see myself paying for a quality publication.

Kids are loving magnetic draw.

Love the battery life.

Would like a Skype and Facebook iPad app.

Realistically as you cant really download files apart from in emails and the only weighty content is video. The odd youtube clip sure, streaming CNN is going to be a crap experience anyway on a 3G network. The quality may be okay on an N95 but i don’t think the networks are up for it perhaps Next G but I wouldn’t get too excited.

If you buy Avatar from itunes and wait two hours for it to download then that will be a costly adventure – I wonder if apple will safe-guard our data plans.

My experience so far is that the pad would be connected on wifi at home and work and having some data whilst on the move would be perfect.

Just need a man-bag to carry it in.

iPhone apps on an iPad = crap

iPad apps on an iPad = amazing

iPad without a wifi connection is torturous

iPad without a cam is bizarre its a great sharing machine and a cam for chat will make Skype my permanent phone connection.

IPad doesn’t melt legs when using on couch

Syncing iPhone apps user settings with same apps on iPad doesn’t exist

iPad doesn’t come loaded with weather

Ipad battery doesn’t seam to decrease

iPad remote by apple hasn’t been built yet… Why not ???

Why can’t I play my avi files on my iPad??

Why can’t I see a google map link from an address in a calendar??

What do I think…an amazing piece of hardware which hasn’t met my expectations….. Yet

How are you making it Location based ?

Unfortunately at the moment it is not feasible to link into the exact location of the person. Obviously we would love to do this, and I’m sure once the Carrier’s see that we have a real-working business case for them I would like to think it’s just a matter of time.

The way we have got around this for the time-being is to allow the user to setup their Home Work Play and Away settings. i.e. I’m always working in the City during Monday – Friday 8am til 5.30pm, and I’m at home in Bondi on the weekends and weeknights and quite often you’ll find me out in the City, North Sydney, Kings Cross. We will then auto-default your my247 location to those areas, and make it really easy to flick between them at those times of day. And if I set I’m going to Melbourne for the weekend, then as soon as I get off the plane my247 will automatically adjust to Melbourne with my preferences already locked in.
Thank F for the iPhone..

If AFACT had won the case against IINET there would be little need for the National Broadband Network.

My solution is having a Telstra 3.6MBPS Home 3G Network Gateway. The speed is fine for watching youtube clips, video-skype conferencing, surfing the web and doing 99.9% of what most people do.

What it doesn’t do very well is downloading movies. We have an Apple TV and can legally purchase movies but we don’t anymore. I used to have an XBOX360 online gaming subscription which I don’t pay for anymore…why, the issue is data.

We are on the maximum plan of 10GB download, which is more than enough apart from downloading major software updates and movies and the streaming of content.

The challenge with my Telstra plan is that I can’t even buy more data. It gets shaped at 10GB and that’s it. Very frustrating.

The other bonus, is that I can take the wifi with me. We have travelled around the country, even campsites and plugged it in and connected. As we have two laptops and two iphones – having a portable wifi spot is very handy. It’s worked in very remote areas where our Optus connection on mobiles has failed.

I even found myself having a skype call in remote South Australia the other week fine, where I didn’t have any mobile service.

So affordability and data are the real issues the govt should be working on. People’s homes having a 100MB pipe doesn’t really wash with me at the moment…

Who talks in hits ever? How could they even record it if the site was down? If they are trying to purport 4 Million people, then thats pretty close to the number of parents in this country I guess, wouldn’t they be at work or not on the Internet…

And these are the people that we’re trusting with the filter…. I just don’t think the govt attracts the right people.. where as Singapore.

Where’s the cam! That would have been a simple build in. More useful than the GPS – I’m not going to be sticking this on my dashboard.. or maybe I would.

Would be good for kids to read the map, or the wife to find a hotel to stop off with.. lots of ideas thinking..

Would be good to have a site where WE (the customers) tell the BUSINESS what we would like for their products.

i.e. a Foxtel / Austar iPhone remote record.

etc..