Augmented Reality vs Virtual Reality: Which Trend Will Dominate?
Virtual reality has been dominating media coverage of tech, and when mobile app users imagine the coming VR revolution they usually imagine the sort of VR devices we saw at SXSW — big headsets, cords on the ground, complete visual immersion in a digital world. So Pokemon Go, the record-setting high-growth mobile gaming startup from […]
On-demand Service Startups Start Targeting the Suburbs
Food delivery startup Farm Hill announced their intention to expand into San Francisco last week, which doesn’t sound like hot news until you look at the context — specifically, the expansion “into” rather than “out of” a city. Farm Hill is backed by high-profile VCs like SOMA Capital and associated with Standford’s accelerator StartX. Regardless, rather […]
Uber Rushes to Claim the “Uber for X” Startup Market
Uber just made UberRush available publicly to mobile app developers, allowing anyone to build on-demand services on top of Uber’s existing driver and delivery network. The result? A much shorter runway for small startups looking to become “Uber for X.” Rather than sourcing and maintaining their own fleet of drivers or delivery people, developers can pay […]
Freemium Pricing: Can it Work for My App?
In just a few years, freemium pricing for mobile apps has gone from an unusual fringe strategy to the dominant pricing scheme in the mobile app industry. How dominant? Well, in 2014 98% of all app revenue in Google Play came from freemium apps in the form of in-app purchases and monthly subscription fees. Apple […]
Twilio Defies Brexit to Blaze Trail for Tech IPOs
Communication software startup Twilio’s decision to launch their IPO the day before Brexit was one of the more mysterious financial moves in tech this quarter. Depending on your perspective, it was either brilliant or deranged — particularly given the pressure on the company to perform after last season’s disappointing crop of tech IPOs. On the […]
How to Meet Investors Who Will Fund Your Startup Idea
You have a great startup or iPhone app idea. Maybe you’ve even assembled a small team or developed a prototype. The next step is ripe for the taking — but first you need funding to make hires, grow the product, and market it to relevant users. The question is, where do you look? The answer […]
How Can I Develop a Profitable App?
Growing your mobile app idea from concept to prototype may be relatively straightforward, but monetizing your app once it’s on the market is a totally different ballgame. In a mobile ecosystem where well over 90 percent of apps fail to generate significant revenue, any mobile app developer with industry experience can tell you that monetization […]
Eat, Sleep, Code, Recharge: Downtime Matters for Developers
The iPhone app development community, more so than other industries, places an extremely high value on efficiency and commitment to the craft. The ideal coder spends virtually every waking moment working through difficult engineering challenges and building digital products. The ideal mobile app coder doesn’t waste time cooking — instead, they drink soylent. They don’t waste […]
Microsoft the Latest Tech Titan to Enter the VR Space
Virtual reality (VR) is a hot topic among mobile app developers these days. We’ve lead panels on the technology with investors worldwide and seen some of the latest and greatest new technology at SXSW. Now, even Microsoft is getting into the VR game through the aggressive expansion of HoloLens, their “mixed reality” headset. Microsoft’s device […]
4 Lessons Startups Can Learn from Small Businesses
According to CB Insights, only 1.28% of startups become unicorns. Does that make the other 98.72% failures? Hardly. In startup culture — and even more so in venture capital culture — there’s a tendency to overlook the value of thinking small. While it’s true that a business model that can’t scale to a billion dollar business […]