Yesterday I was kindly invited up to Edinburgh by the Interactive Scotland team Alisdair, Debbie and Anna-Marie to speak at their @Mobile event, hosted at the Edinburgh School of Informatics. There was a good healthy turnout with around 80 people in the room. First up we heard from Jim Morish from Analysys Mason. The highlight for me was Jim’s observation that people can’t just buy themselves out of the phone O/S fragmentation problem – not everyone one can afford an iPhone, so he sees a continuing opportunity for other Smartphone O/S’s, especially in developing markets. This was backed up by his analysis on the app catalogues for iPhone & Symbian. Jim noted that there is far more diversity in international language support with Symbian apps compared to iPhone, reflecting the platforms strength in developing markets. With the insight gathered from OSiM fresh in my mind, I took the opportunity to talk about the growing need for developers to think about the marketing challenges facing them, and the need to test and build a fan base ahead of publishing into App Stores and risking those dreaded 1 or 2 star ratings. My slides from the talk are available on Slideshare: I think the message was well received, especially when companies like Screenmedia who are operating at the coal face backed up the message with their learning’s. Thanks to @stephanierieger, @linedigital, @flackboy for the kind words. While we were sitting on the panel Graham Cruickshanks came up with a genius idea during a quick side conversation whist we were discussing the impact of apps on the mobile data network. The idea was the mobile app equivalent of an EU home appliance energy label, or a US Energy Star label, which would inform consumers about the resource consumption of the app in question. This rating could measure everything from battery drain, memory usage & storage at the handset level, through to the amount of traffic it generates across the network. Of course the fewer resources an app consumes, the more environmentally friendly it becomes. Is anyone aware of a similar initiative? Let me know if you are, as I’m firing off this idea off to a few people and see if we can get some momentum behind it. I’ll let you know how I get on... Till next time