N95 and the iPhone

We posted an article on Forum Nokia and its causing quite a stir, lots of interest everywhere. It's possible to now have an iPhone look to you Mippins. Have a read of the article.

Mippin has launched a site for the iPhone

Mippin has now launched a fully functional iPhone site which all the sliding transitions and caching of pages. Apple liked it so much they added us to their iPhone Directory immediately. We found the programming of the iPhone site so involved we decided to write a whitepaper about our experience too.

Mippin to be shown at Mobile2.0

Mippin is to be demonstrated at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Fancisco on Monday. See the other companies showing and the speaker list, and conference details.

Mippin is Launched

Mippin is our new product and is launched today. See our press release.

And thanks to all those bloggers who have already commented

Ewan from SMSTextNews said "Mippin is just phenomenal. Really, really smart"
Alessandro from Biskero said "The guys from Refresh Mobile did it again"
David Cushman from Fasterfutre said "This is Widsets on steroids"

Also Read JemiMa Kiss in the Digital Guardian... http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/
, David Murphy of Mobile Marketing at http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2007/10/sitting-in-the-.html
, Mike Butcher of Tech Crunch http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/10/11/mippin-monetises-feeds-for-mobile/

and Ewan again at: http://uk.blognation.com/2007/10/11/mippins-mobile-portal-now-in-public-beta/

plus TVDigest, PerfectPath , GoMo News (sorry we'll sort you out very soon and thanks for being nice about it!!!) and ShinyShiny.

See the video of the service at:

3Million Downloads for EyeMags

EyeMags has reached 3 Million downloads in its first 6 months of existence and it continues to grow at an ever increasing rate. Also since we added the mobile site where you can view magazines online before downloading we've also got to 70K page hits per day (that's ~2Million every month).

However, you may have noticed that in the last 3 months there have been no new features. The reason is that we have been busy working on another project - and this is even more exciting and going to be even bigger than EyeMags. Its announced tomorrow so they'll be more in a blog tomorrow. In the meantime the news has leaked out and if you want to read the news before its officially released read it here, here, here and here.

QR Codes for EyeMag downloads

You can now download your Eyemags using you PC screen using QR codes






If your phone supports bar codes then you should be able to point the phone camera at the symbol and download the EyeMag. Currently the Nokia N95 is best known for this. Run the barcode application in the office folder and after a few seconds a URL will appear - just click it and your phone will go on line to download the application.

1.5 Million downloads in 4 months

EyeMags has been running for 4 months now and 1.5 Million EyeMags have been downloaded.

Downloaders are also now seeing the value of previewing their EyeMag on the phones and in the month this facility has been available there have been 1/3 million page views of the preview pages.

Search now available for EyeMags

We now have nearly 1300 different EyeMags available for download and search is long overdue.

Search of the title has been added, so you can find the EyeMag you want quickly and easily.

EyeMag Preview Widget now available

You can now preview all the slides in your EyeMag on both Phone and PC. On the PC we emulate the real phone experience using a phone "widget" which allows us to replicate a real phone within the browser.

On the phone before downloading you can see what the EyeMag really looks like within the phone browser too. This now means you now can ensure you only download the best EyeMags to your phone. This facility has been there for nearly 2 weeks now and we had been told it would reduce the number of downloads. The reality it increased the downloads because we made the experience better and in addition we've had 100K page views of the preview site.

As far as EyeMags downloads are concernedwe've now surpassed 900K downloads and looking forward to getting to a Million next week.

700K downloads and 1000 EyeMags created

So we're just over two months old and we've had 700K downloads growing at a rate of 20% per week.

On the EyeMags creation front we have had nearly different 400 people create over 1000 different EyeMags. Generally we get 7 new EyeMags every day.

The latest functionality to be added at the beginning of the week was Mobile preview of any EyeMag. Now before you download your EyeMag you can preview it in the phone's browser - this is to help you decide which are the best ones to download. We try to make the preview user experience as near to the application user experience as possible, by sizing the pictures for the phone screen size, but obviously the fast response and usability is far better in the application itself. Some people told us it would result in fewer actual downloads, but the reality is it has made no difference and in addition we're getting 6K page views per day of the preview site.

EyeMags goes Truely Global

From the start (9 weeks ago and more than 1/2 million downloads later) we've always had a Global audience. We decided to better cater for our international presence for adding the following new features:

• The above map shows where people are publishing EyeMags. Clicking on the markers shows the top 10 EyeMags from each country. Currently there are 43 countries represented.
• EyeMags web-site can now display in your local language. If you live in Russia, Spain, Italy, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Portugal, Korea or Japan you should see EyeMags in your language (if you enter from the home page). Let us know if its working for you and whether or not Google Translate is doing a good enough job!!

Mobile Internet Growth Map Video

I was looking at the Internet World Map and immediately wondered if the Mobile Internet is different.

We have the data- even better is that with Google Analytics running against our webserver we can make a video of how the growth of our service of Mobile Internet world has grown over the last 8 weeks from the UK outwards whilst we've grown from zero to 1/2 million downloads.

The Mobile Internet IS different - there seems to be a band of usage across Europe through the middle east, India and into Asia. Although usage is high in the US it is much more significant on the fixed Internet.

Downloads by Country - bit of a surprise!!!

When I did this analysis I was really surprised - I could not believe it was right! The countries seem so random - is it statistically significant? Read on and make up your own mind.
I took 120,000 mobile phone download log entries from our EyeMags mobile wap site (wap.eyemags.com). I found the country from the ip address sent from the phone using InetAddressLocator. EyeMags is a C2C content creation tool for users to create their own magazine applications for mobile phones and share these with their friends. Its highly graphical with pictures and text and in the 6 weeks the service has been live the content has gravitated towards "girlie" type content. Although there are examples of all types of content on the system the "girlie" type content is dominating the downloads. The service is incredibly popular and we have now passed through a third of a million downloads. It could be argued that the high download content countries are those that are interested in "girlie" content but I would still argue that these are the countries that are leading countries for the Mobile Internet and in particular for Mobile application downloads.
Are the result statistically significant? Certainly the top 10 countries seem to be and its still quite surprising that to see Indonesia and Romania there. We knew about that India and South Africa were big but did not realise India was a significantly bigger downloader than the US.
However, whether or not the Maldives with 1000 downloads is the 20th country in the world for Mobile Internet application downloads could be seriously questioned. Reality is that we do not have enough data for the lower countries yet.

We've actually had downloads from 133 different countries. China is a position 33, Italy at 40 and Finland at 41 (all these with ~600 downloads each). We probably need to see how these change with time to see how realistic these figures are.

300K downloads already!

I was predicting we would get to 300K downloads on Saturday but its crept up on us earlier than expected. Also we're seeing more registrations from publishers and the magazines they're publishing is more varied - great news. And what more we now have 20K votes to play with so may be I'll be able to do that further phone analysis earlier than I expected.

May be it was the mention in TheRegister that did it.

TheRegister discusses EyeMags

TheRegister has talked about EyeMags - see their site for details.

They correctly described us as supporting lots of handsets but said our content was "patchy". Come on you content generators start filling in our patches!!!

Also see the Nokia blog on the same subject.

Voting leads to surprising results

The new Voting functionality has been live to 2 weeks now and we're starting to get some interesting data.

When we collect the vote we get the handset type and I quickly noticed some handsets were getting better votes than others (albeit for the same magazines). So I did the analysis in the graph below to see which handset manufacturers got the best votes and here it is. It's based on 10K votes over the last 2 weeks (generally ~20% of downloads result in the user looking for another eyemag in which case we ask them to vote on the one they came from). It may be unfair on LG (as it only had 70 votes in the result set), but I think it is generally accurate and in a few weeks I'll run it again and post the results here. When I have more data I suspect I will be able to break down by handset models as well.

10/4/2007 - Further analysis now we have >15K votes Nokia are still clear winner over all other phones and the ranking remain the same. We need to understand why the perception of Nokia users is that EyeMags appear better. When I have even more data I will break this down further by model to try to understand the reasons for this better.

1/4 Million downloads in a month

So the exponential rise continues with no signs of a let off.

Today is our first month aniversary and we've reached a 1/4 Million downloads. Now the question we're asking ourselves is when we get to a million?

Club Eye is Launched

We want everyone to create great EyeMags and to see their popularity grow through downloads. So we've created "Club Eye". Basically the club has 10 levels and you move up the levels as your downloads grow. To get lots of downloads you need good quality EyeMags people like, because the downloaders are now starting to look at the votes not just the number of downloads.

The club has 10 levels and if you have a high level you will get access to the cool features we're adding before everyone else. The list of Club levels are in the at the eyemags share page.

Let us know what you think about Club Eye using feedback or comments here.

100K downloads in just 18 days

So, EyeMags has been live for just 18 days and its reached 100,000 downloads already and its still growing exponentially.

In the last 18 days we added lots of new features including categories, voting and publishers can now see graphs of their download performance.... much more is coming soon. We've also integrated with several great blogs, including the excellent Biskero blog. Thanks to Alessandro for his blog about us.

Robin

Beta Eyemags is launched

Beta EyeMags is now launched. Please leave comments here on what you think about it.

EyeMags the beginning

coming soon...