Bump, the flagship contacts, photos and file sharing application from the company by the same name, is today getting an upgrade on both iOS and Android in order to support file-sharing to and from your computer. The ability to “bump” your phone with your computer was first introduced in May 2012, but at the time it only supported photos. With the new release, users will be able to share any file from their phone to computer, and vice versa.

Bump Technologies co-founder and CEO David Lieb describes the added functionality, saying, “we’ve kind of turned Bump into an unlimited and ubiquitous USB drive. So you can throw your USB drive away, as long as you have a phone with Bump on it.”

For those of us who are earlier adopters of new technology, the USB analogy may seem a bit “old school” – after all, many of us have long since moved on to cloud services. But it speaks to the kind of users the company is targeting with its technologies.

“What we try to do is build products that ‘normal’ people can really engage with,” Lieb explains. “So yeah, you can do all these things if you’re set up on some cloud-syncing solution, but what we find is that normal people don’t really know how to set all that stuff up…we want to build stuff that has low cognitive overhead,” he adds.

In terms of the new file-sharing capabilities, Lieb predicts some fairly “normal” use cases, like backing up your phone’s contacts or saving videos from your phone to your computer, for example. These files are actually stored on Bump’s servers, though not publicly. Instead, users are given a URL if they want to share the files or photos with others. Most don’t do that, though – they simply click the save button to download the item they transferred to their computer.

Lieb says there’s no plan to turn Bump into a hosting service for files and photos, but it will continue to work with partners to integrate options for saving files to the wider web. Currently, Dropbox is the only one that has been integrated so far, but he says some users are now asking for Evernote, too.

Expanding upon Bump’s phone-to-web solution goes after another pain point the company has faced – the need to know other people with the Bump app installed in order to find a use case for the app. Originally, Bump offered a way for two people to share data between phones. With this Bump to computer feature, however, you can take advantage of the service all on your own.

While today, only around 5 to 10 percent of Bump’s users are “bumping” with their PC, that traffic is trending upwards, growing by 50 percent over the past couple of months. Bump to date has seen 125 million downloads, but it won’t reveal its current install base or active users. Lieb would say that a “large number” of those still have the app installed, and when the company pushes an update, over half of those users would relaunch Bump to see what’s new.

For what it’s worth, the app is still in good standing on the iOS App Store, where it’s currently ranked #24 in the “Social Networking” category. On Android, it’s #19. (source: Distimo).

The updated mobile app is available now for both iOS and Android, from the Bump homepage here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Don’t forget to make a list.”

“I have done!”

“Well, I’ve started one too.”

Bashes smartphones together.

Buy Me A Pie!, the cloud-powered grocery list maker for iOS, has released a nifty – and, potentially, relationship saving — update for its app which adds support for Bump, so that users can now sync their shopping lists simply by bumping their iPhones together. The idea is to make it even easier for households to collaborate on and share grocery shopping duties.

Technically, the feature is implemented using Bump’s API, while I’m told that the idea came about as a direct response to user feedback. “Often users couldn’t figure out how to setup lists sharing and it wasn’t very simple since it involved entering account information on the tiny keyboard of a mobile phone”, says Buy Me A Pie! maker Skript’s CEO Oleg Nederev.

Sharing and syncing is a key part of the cloud-powered service, but then so is simplicity, so this might actually be a good use for Bump’s technology. Perhaps more than payments, grocery lists are likely to be shared in person in close proximity as one or more members of the household writes the list and another actually goes out and does the shopping.

In fact, Buy Me A Pie! has tried to encourage multiple downloads from the get-go — the previous update saw the app add ‘app gifting’ functionality, making it easy for friends, housemates and family members to purchase the app for each other, motivated by the convenience of sharing and synchronising their grocery shopping lists.

What’s still missing, however, is an Android version, though Nederev tells me this is getting closer by the day and that the company is now soliciting pre-registrations. Screenshots of the app show that it takes many of its design cues from the iOS version, retaining the same simple but fun (can I say skeuomorphic?) design.

Meanwhile, the newly-released iOS version is currently being discounted — $.99, down from $2.99 — until the 29th of December, which shouldn’t come as any surprise. Time-limited sales and giveaways are a key part of what looks likes a pretty successful ‘organic’ marketing strategy for Skript, seeing the app strike up 2 million downloads in total, as reported in September.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Now it’s as easy as a fist-pound to pay a friend back for dinner, drinks, or a cab. Bump, the popular contact sharing app developer, today releases a new standalone iOS app called Bump Pay that lets you transfer money via PayPal to anyone in arm’s reach. But that’s also Bump Pay’s biggest limitation. Unlike Venmo where you send money to any phone number near or far, Bump Pay only works in-person.

The standalone app comes from Bump Labs, Bump‘s experimental wing for trying out new features. Rather than risk complicating its 84 million-install flagship app right away, the developer will only bring money transfers to all its users if Bump Pay generates traction and delight.

To use the app, you just connect your PayPal account ahead of time, then type in the amount you want to pay, bump your iOS device against a friend’s, and confirm the payment. As long as you have a checking account connected to your PayPal, there’s no fee for the transfer. However, you’ll get docked a few percent if you’ve only got a credit card connected, and you can’t set up a new PayPal account from within the app. Your payment recipient also needs to have Bump Pay installed. You can’t send them money first and have them pick it up later. Finally, Bump’s technology has vastly improved over the years, but its apps still don’t always recognize each other on the first fist-clap.

Back in 2010, PayPal was one of the first companies to try out Bump’s APIs. These allowed PayPal’s app users to initiate money transfers by physically colliding their phones. PayPal dropped the Bump functionality from the latest version of its app in the name of simplicity, opening a window for a dedicated Bump Pay app.

I’m a big believer in peer-to-peer mobile payments, however Bump Pay is much more limited than my current favorite Venmo and other apps from banks like Chase. I understand the desire for a streamlined experience — I like that Bump stripped out music and calendar sharing from version 3.0 of its primary app, and CEO David Lieb tells me this “hasn’t adversely effected anything. Various internal metrics for confusion in the app have plummeted.” But Bump Pay’s gone too far, eliminating many core use cases by denying you the option to pay people remotely.

If my friend drops me off in a cab, rides it home, and then wants to split the final cost, I can’t hit him back with Bump Pay until we see each other next. By then we might have forgotten…or just Venmo’d or PayPal’d each other. Plus I don’t want to pay fees on peer-to-peer payments…ever. So compare the two flows of when I want to pay a new user:

• Bump Pay: “Hey, do you have a PayPal account? OK, is it powered with a bank account? Alright, then download Bump Pay and connect your PayPal account. Now stick your fist out.”
• Venmo: “What’s your phone number? Ok, I just sent you money. Download Venmo to pick it up.”

Lieb tells me the reason behind the lack of remote payments is that “we found in our own use that when people weren’t with each other anymore, it’s hard to coordinate payment.” Personally I don’t find SMS that tricky, and I think the company may be too enamored with its software alternative to NFC. Still, I commend Bump Labs for trying something new rather than stagnating, and Lieb says there’ll be more products from its internal incubator in a few months.

Bump Pay could be the end of IOUs, and if added to the primary Bump app it could explode in popularity because Venmo is still tiny and doesn’t have an 84 million-install brother to piggyback on. Bump could dominate as soon as it realizes people can’t always sort out their debts right away.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Seeking a way to reduce friction while exchanging contact information, David Lieb and his two co-founders launched Bump – a service that allows users to swap everything from calendar events to music samples by simply tapping their smartphones together.

In part II of his Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon, Lieb tells Dixon the big picture plan. “There is a lot of time spent figuring out how I interface with this [smartphone] to go access the virtual world, but nobody has really spent a lot of time thinking … how do I want to interact with other people and things in the real world, and that is the problem that we want to solve, we want to build that new UI layer for the real world.”

Prior to making this point, Lieb and Dixon discuss Bump’s decision to allow companies like PayPal (and hundreds of others) to embed its code into their apps. While this would seem to be a big opportunity for Bump, Lieb notes, “as it turns out, our growth has been so rapid that our app just dwarfs any of these other apps that use our API.” Regarding PayPal specifically, Lieb says, “last time I checked I think there were like 10-million installs, maybe, so we have 6-times that.”

Helping Bump hit that 60-million mark were Sequoia Capital who led a Series A round and Andreessen Horowitz who led a $16 million Series B round.

Having steered the company though such growth, Lieb says managing emotions is still a bit tricky. “There are definitely days where I am like wow, we are just killing it, this is awesome and then 18 hours later, someone says something or we get some new information and we are like, ah man, we are totally screwed, and usually the answer is somewhere in the middle.”

Make sure to watch the entire video of additional insights, along with episode I here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories, featuring Drew Houston, Eric Ries, Kevin O’Connor, Christopher Poole and other leaders are here.

Episode III of Lieb’s interview is coming up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was all the way back in February when RIM first promised that “many, if not most” BlackBerry handsets in 2011 will feature NFC technology. It proved true with both the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930, along with the BlackBerry Curve 9350/9360/9370, and we should see plenty more where that came from. That said, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie had one more trick up his sleeve at this week’s GITEX conference in Dubai, unveiling for the first time BlackBerry Tag.

BlackBerry Tag will come as part of the next BlackBerry 7 update. The idea is that you can share photos, documents, URLs, and contact information by just tapping your BlackBerry devices together — not unlike the Bump application on iOS and Android. The only difference is that the Bump app employed Bluetooth connectivity while BlackBerry Tag uses NFC technology.

Instead of scanning codes, BBM users will now be able to make connections by simply tapping the devices against each other, which will automatically swap BBM contact info. Even better, developers will have access to the BlackBerry Tag API, meaning they can bake the Tag functionality into their own apps.

It’s been a trying year for RIM. But perhaps this, along with other new software offerings, will get RIM back on track.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Many years ago, after graduating college, I came home before moving to NYC, wondering how I would scrounge together the money for the first month’s rent and security deposit so my friends and I could all live together in the Big Apple. I had one month to get the cash, and instead of going out for traditional, hourly-wage work, I decided to go through all of my old stuff and throw it on eBay. In those days, I got online through dial-up, would have to mail a hard copy of the pictures to interested buyers, and would ship items to auction winners only when their check arrived by mail and cleared into my bank account. In one month, I got rid of winter jackets, sports equipment, and baseball cards to the tune of $7,000, tax free, enough to buffer the move to NYC.

A few years later, when I moved to San Francisco, it was Craigslist to the rescue, helping with initial sublets, furniture, stereo equipment, and the odd jobs I did to soften the transition. Without knowing it, I was stumbling through life fueled mainly by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and economy that helped me connect supply and demand, as well as time and money. Instead of using consignment shops or hosting a garage sale, or instead of buying new items in a traditional store, I buffered my moves to NYC and SF primarily fueled by P2P networks.

That was P2P 1.0, anchored by eBay and Craigslist, networks that have connected billions. And, while these companies continue their march, we are already into the next peer-to-peer evolution: P2P 2.0.  Unknowingly at the time, I was exposed to the thought a few years ago in graduate school, when my classmate, James Reinhart, came up with the idea for a “Netflix for used clothes,” which has morphed into venture-backed thredUP, a P2P network connecting parents to trade gently-worn baby and kid clothes, goods that are very expensive to buy new. Another success is Lending Club, a peer lending site connecting lenders with borrowers primarily for refinancing credit card debt or small business loans.

Today, P2P 2.0 is in full-swing, and that’s putting things lightly. Y Combinator breakout Airbnb began as an ad-hoc solution for the founders to earn a little extra scratch during a convention when tight hotel supply provided an opportunity to rent out air mattresses in their apartment, with the added touch of breakfast. The result today is a rapidly growing company and brand that aims to connect those who seek space with those who need it—you can rent boats, treehouses, and even castles. Airbnb has been so successful that it’s spawned a handful of international copycats and motivated the likes of GetAround, a P2P car-sharing network.

The newest entrant into the P2P space is the concept I’m most excited about: Zaarly. The founder, being taller than average, realized prior to boarding a flight in economy class that he would be willing to pay someone on the same flight to swap for an exit row seat. That moment gave birth to Zaarly, a new service that will leverage a mobile device’s location to connect those who demand something to those who can provide it. Imagine busy New Yorkers with disposable cash demanding something immediately, delivered right now: “Zaarly it.” The Zaarly concept connects time and money in the P2P vector, just like eBay connects sellers and buyers.

All of this activity in P2P 2.0 is now possible because of advancements in location sensors in mobile devices and social network platforms. The time is ripe for even much more advancement in P2P ideas, leveraging today’s technologies in new ways. Even as consumer-focused entrepreneurs work to build the next solutions, they are raising money on P2P services like Angel List, which connects fundraising entrepreneurs with seed stage capital and has shaken up the early stage investing game. Task Rabbit connects individuals and businesses with “task runners” that provide an outsourced task service, and Listia is an eBay for trading free stuff, where site users earn and spend credits. (Many others are also emerging, please add them here.)

During all these P2P transactions, companies like Square, Roam, and Bump leverage mobile phones to help drive payments. For instance, buyers and sellers can trade data by bumping their phones together, where Bump technology measures the movement from the accelerometer and pairs two users together. Square connect buyers and sellers using a credit card and mobile device. A merchant can charge a customer for goods or services by using the Square reader attached through a device’s audio jack to read a buyer’s credit card (like a cassette tape) and transmit the signal to help complete the transaction. (Surprisingly, not many others have yet fully leveraged the phone’s audio jack or accelerometer, making Square, Roam, and Bump standout.)

The driving force behind all of this P2P activity is the fact that today’s technologies make many more types of transaction possible between average consumers by finding an equilibrium between time and money, supply and demand. Transactions once locked up and never realized now create entirely new economies, free of established brands and fat middle-men.

In a world where everyone is rushing to drive all commerce online, some P2P solutions sprinkle a dose of humanity into the transaction. Will P2P services keep bringing more of this human element, personalization, and discovery into the foreground? Will services like Housefed, which provides a personal meal service, create a welcome alternative to nuking frozen food for dinner? It will be fascinating to see what new types of businesses are built on top of these P2P engines, and what traditional businesses they will disrupt.

The U.S. economy, struggling its way slowly out of a major recession, will only benefit from a continuous flow of new ideas to help connect people and keep things going. And, the potential for these services overseas is just staggering, especially within cultures that already have strong informal economies baked into their DNA. So big, in fact, that the simple desire to swap airline seats or find a reasonably-priced place to crash during a convention could create, accelerate, and fortify new informal micro-economies in the far corners of earth.

Photo credit: Flickr/ NASA Robonaut

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Few VCs have a hotter hand right now than Fred Wilson. His firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Clickable, and more . In this episode of Founder Stories, he talks to host Chris Dixon about Union Square’s investment thesis has changed from going after all web apps to companies that are “building a large networks of engaged users.” (Watch the video above).

It has to be be both a large network and engaged users. By that requirement, he says he wouldn’t invest in Pandora (which just filed for an IPO yesterday, although this was taped a couple weeks ago) because Pandora listeners just sit back. The users aren’t doing anything in Pandora,” he says, “even though Pandora is a great company.” Similarly, he wouldn’t invest in Groupon. Not because he thinks it’s a bad business, it’s just not his area of focus. “Groupon is an ad network,” he says, “we wouldn’t invest in that.” Within ecommerce, he feels that marketplaces (like Etsy) do fall under his definition, but things like Diapers.com or Zappos would not. Wilson also mentions some companies that got away which he wishes he had invested in: AirBnB and Bump, which he lost to Sequoia.

Dixon and Wilson also talk about the relationship between founders and VCs, and the importance of injecting capital when a company needs to scale, as happened with Twitter and Tumblr. Dixon recalls a study that showed the farther way the VC is from a company, the better it does. Wilson agreed, citing as proof Twitter and Zynga, which are both in California, while Union Square is based in New York (as an early investor in both, this gave the two companies about a year of minimum meddling).

In the video segment below, Wilson and Dixon dive into the mechanics of the VC business, and talk about Union Square’s new $165 million Opportunity Fund, the “cancerous management fees” VC firms charge their investors, and why it might be a good thing to let startup founders take money off the table before an IPO or sale. “It allows them to take more risks,” argues Wilson, “because not everything is riding on the company.”

If you want to hear more of this conversation, check out Part I where Wilson and Dixon talk about today’s frothy valuations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee’s background choir? You get the idea.

Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it’s the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted.

Bump has just launched a new version of its iPhone application that makes it easy to share apps with your friends. Fire up the new feature, and you’ll be shown a list of apps that have been installed on your phone (more on that in a moment). Tap the ones you want to recommend to your friend, Bump your phone with theirs, and they’ll immediately receive a list of your recommendations along with links to the App Store for each.

Now, Bump isn’t the first application that lets you get a list of your iPhone applications. We’ve seen others like Chomp and Appolicious, which let you share app recommendations with friends and can also suggest applications based on your previous ratings.

The difference, says Bump co-founder David Lieb, is that the app exchange using Bump is more personal. You aren’t posting your recommendations to followers on Facebook, or through the application’s internal social network — you’re tapping your phone together with a friend and swapping recommendations immediately (assuming they have Bump too).

Now, Apple doesn’t actually let developers do this through a native API — every service that generates a list of your installed apps has to find a workaround. Lieb believes that Bump’s is generally better than the competition’s, and while he wouldn’t get into details on how it works, he says it involves looking at the list of applications that are currently running on the phone. The only catch: apps that you don’t run frequently won’t show up. Of course, if you’re recommending an application to your friend, then it probably isn’t sitting dormant on your phone.

Bump isn’t just available for the iPhone — it has a strong Android presence as well. Lieb says that the Android version already supports basic app sharing, and it’s currently working on an overhaul due out later this month. This new version is going to allow users on iPhone to recommend apps for Android and vice versa (assuming, of course, that the same application is available for both operating systems).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As every iPhone developer knows, Christmas Day is the busiest day of the year, as millions of people unwrap their shiny new iPhones and promptly go on an app download spree (I’m sure Android sees a similar phenomenon). Which means it isn’t terribly surprising when Bump, a Sequoia-backed startup that makes it easy to share data between phones, says that today is the biggest day of traffic it’s ever had. Then again, the fact that people are currently sharing 20 photos per second is quite impressive.

Bump CEO David Lieb says that Bump’s traffic is currently 2.4 times as high as it was a week ago, and that the service is on pace for 2 million shared items today, with a peak load of 30 items per second (in addition to swapping photos, you can share music, contact information, and calendar events using Bump).

These numbers are especially interesting for one big reason — Lieb says this is the first time the company has disclosed any traffic stats at all. Granted, the data obviously isn’t representative of Bump’s daily average, but it still gives some context about usage of the service.

For those that haven’t used it, Bump lets you quickly swap data between two phones by simply tapping them together (both phones obviously have to be running the Bump application). Bump’s applications have been downloaded 25 million times across the iPhone and Android since the service launched.

Lieb says that even aside from today’s big numbers, Bump usage is on the rise. This has been driven in part by the launch of music sharing in November (which is already the second most-shared type of file, behind photos). And last Saturday the service enabled ‘long-distance connections’, which lets you exchange messages with friends in your address book and from Facebook, without having to actually physically ‘bump’ your phone with them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: As the Web goes mobile, every Web company needs to build mobile products. Author Elad Gil, director of Geo at Twitter, has a lot of experience in that area. Way before selling his company Mixer Labs to Twitter last year, he kickstarted Google’s mobile efforts back in 2004, when Google’s mobile team “consisted of 1/4 of an engineer dedicated to maintaining an old WAP search server on the brink of collapse.” Gil pulled Google’s first mobile team together, recruited the first engineers, started discussions with carriers, and was involved in Google’s early mobile acquisitions which set the stage for Google Mobile Maps and Android. In this guest post, he shares what he learned.

In the early days of Google’s mobile team, we needed to navigate a series of misunderstandings most people have about consumer mobile app development, and how to build a great consumer mobile team and product. Given the ridiculous growth of mobile today, many companies I know are trying to start their mobile divisions and they are making the same mistakes over and over. Similarly, many mobile consumer startups are making a series of common mistakes. This post draws on my experience building Google’s early mobile team to point out how to overcome the myths people still believe about making super successful mobile applications.

Myth 1: You need to hire mobile experts.
Reality: Hire great athletes; mobile “experts” will be useless in 6 months

The natural impulse of someone doing mobile development for the first time is to assume that mobile is somehow different from other software development. This leads to the hiring of mobile “experts”, many of whom lack solid consumer product experience. They may have worked on handset design, SMS based services, or for a large carrier. While mobile client development obviously differs from web development (since you can’t just push a bug fix to all devices), it is very similar to any other form of consumer client development.

This means that while people with deep mobile experience may bring knowledge about a specific technology or the limitations of mobile clients, they often lack the deep consumer experience that is actually much more important for the success of your consumer app.

Additionally, any specialist knowledge the expert may have had will be learned organically by your team within 6 months. This means the value of a “mobile” person will diminish dramatically over time. As with all roles, I would advocate hiring great consumer generalists to fill the spot, as they will have a much larger positive impact over time.

a. Don’t hire “mobile engineers”

The first thing people want to do is hire an “iPhone engineer” or “Android developer”. The best mobile engineers I have ever worked with were great generalist engineers who picked up iPhone (variant of C) or Android (Java) development. By focusing on hiring great engineers and having them pick up the programming language and platform (including learning its limitations) you will:

• Expand the pool of potential people you can hire. Grow the team faster!
• Avoid a “specialist” culture at your company. In general, I think it is good to build a culture of great generalists/athletes rather then specialists for your company. You want people who are hungry, brilliant, and adaptable, and who can move between teams and contribute to the next big thing for the company once they jumpstart your mobile efforts.
• Ensure the quality of your team stays high. Your existing engineers should interview the potential mobile hires and test them on general computer science skills.

For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for mobile engineering at Google.

b. Don’t hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs)

Just as you should hire generalist engineers for your mobile team, you should similarly find a great consumer product manager to run it. The worst hiring mistakes I have seen people make is to hire PMs with telecom or handset backgrounds to run their consumer products. You need people who understand that the phone is primarily a social device—for example, people love to take photos and share them with their friends (see Instagr.am, PicPlz, and PicBounce)—and that the screens are still small, so focusing on a few key features or interactions is key.

Myth 2: Your mobile codebase is different from regular code.
Reality: Its just code. You should treat it as such.

Obviously, developing for a client app that can’t be fixed via a push to AWS has its own challenges. But the mobile codebase should be something any engineer can contribute to at any time—even if it is just to run internal test apps to try out new features.

Similarly, don’t let your team use mobile as an excuse to avoid following good software engineering practice. A good release process can apply anywhere.

Myth 3: You need carrier or handset deals to distribute a mobile product.
Reality: Focus on standard consumer distribution first, not carriers or handset manufacturers.

When launching a mobile consumer product, many companies make the mistake of focusing on carrier or handset partners for distribution rather then just putting it out there for users to try.

a. Focusing on carriers means you will build the wrong product.

When dealing with a new consumer app, carriers and handset manufacturers will have all sorts of ideas, some of which may be bad, about how you should change the product before they agree to distribute it. This will likely ruin the consumer experience. They may also ask you to support a wider variety of handsets than makes sense for you to build for. Further, all the time spent negotiating with carriers will also distract you from spending your time building things that will delight users.

b. People naturally spread great consumer products.

Think of all the consumer apps that have widespread use and adoption from scratch (Angry Birds, Foursquare, Gowalla, Bump). None of these launched with any traditional teleco deals.

c. If your app is a big success, carriers will come to you for deals.

If your mobile app is being used (or your desktop app has wide enough distribution), carriers will approach you to add your app to their phones. Think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc…, as well as, back in the day, IM clients.

Don’t get me wrong—carriers and handset pre-installs can widen your distribution dramatically. However, as a startup or new mobile effort, you should focus on direct-to-consumer distribution first. Only deal with these intensive partnerships once you have proven traction with your core app experience and want to reach out beyond the relatively large population that discovers apps via the app store and friend recommendations.

Myth 4. You must build for all platforms from Day One.
Reality: Start with iPhone or Android only first.

One of the big fears when building a mobile property is that only a subset of the market can be addressed via each platform (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, XHTML, SMS). These days, the best consumer apps are launching on iPhone or Android only first. This provides enough distribution/addressable devices to see if the app can gain traction. Once it gets traction, other platforms can be supported. A great example of this is Foursquare, which launched exclusively on iOS and grew from there.

In part you should choose your platform based on your market and distribution approach. iPhone or Android (as well as increasingly HTML5) are good bets for the US, and increasingly, the rest of the world. You should only build XHTML or SMS based apps if you are focused on the low- to mid-range of developing markets.

Myth 5. (Once the app launches) We are mobile geniuses!
Reality: Stay hungry and keep questioning your mobile directions.

Congratulations! You got your mobile app out the door and it is growing 50% month over month. There is an old saying that a rising tide floats all boats. The rapid growth in the overall smartphone market may make your mobile efforts look brilliant due to this ongoing, massive market shift. Make sure to challenge your team’s thinking on their mobile choices, and don’t believe the mantra that “mobile is just different”. Focus on building an awesome consumer experience and you really will end up looking like a genius.

Mobile is a huge opportunity and will be the primary way many services are accessed in the future. Hopefully as you start a new mobile consumer startup, or build a mobile team for your existing web property, with the tips above you can avoid the mistakes people frequently make for mobile app development.

Photo credit: Flickr/JD Hancock

Article courtesy of TechCrunch