Business Translating Mobile Applications Into Orders

27-Apr-2011

Just what are mobile phone applications all about, and how likely is it that your business could translate a clever app into that useful extra slice of profit? Melandra Smith of Technical Translations explores the ever evolving world of mobile phone technology.

Some facts I recently learnt about the mobile phone “App” market:
• It could be worth $30bn by 2015.
• The Angry Birds game alone has been downloaded over 100 million times.
• Every two seconds someone in the world makes a purchase using Ebay’s app.

Impressive stuff that is calculated to make every marketer start wondering how we can jump onto what is obviously a highly lucrative bandwagon. So what exactly is an app, anyway? For those of us born into generation X this is a very salient question. We may use the Internet and smartphones as everyday business tools, but actually how savvy are we about the technology driving the next generation of must have accessories – gadgets that will probably become as ubiquitous in the future as the laptop computer is today?

An app is a piece of software that can be downloaded onto a mobile phone or other mobile device. It interacts with features of that device (such as the camera or GPS), and can be updated by its creator to bring the user updates on available products, features or offers. An app can use its location and details of the local environment to give its user information on local theatres, restaurants and attractions, for example.

Why would we want to develop an app? Some apps have been extremely successful. PricewaterhouseCoopers developed an app that gave its customers real-time information on the global credit crunch and consequently picked up a lot of users and new customers on the back of the additional service that they had made available to their clientele. Now the company has successfully launched a paid app service where its customers can download analyses of global media and entertainment industry - all for the modest charge of 23 Euros.

There are, of course, pitfalls. Applications can be very expensive to develop and take a long time to get right and unless you do your research properly and your idea is likely to be really useful to your customers, there is a danger of the whole exercise flopping and leaving you seriously out of pocket. Or once released “into the wild” applications can get a life of their own and leave the parent company struggling to cope with the amount of feedback they produce.

And finally, although it seems certain that people will continue to explore avenues down which mobile devices will be used to interact with providers of products and services, there is already a rival to the mobile phone application looming on the horizon, and being heavily backed by Google. "Apple is pushing apps hard but at the same time Google is very much pushing the mobile web - and I wouldn't bet against either Apple or Google," says Colin McCaffrey, CEO of mobile technology firm 2ergo. Neither would we, and so until a really good reason comes to mind to go down either of these routes, we’ll be watching with interest. What would you like to see from Technical Translations anyway? A mobile phone app for generating translation quotes on the move?

 

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