Who’s Who SA is a South African based service for professionals. While most of you are probably thinking ‘Linked-In’, you would be right, to an extent. However, there is a difference. That it’s of a local nature.

Today, their iPhone application is available in the iTunes Store. Download Now

WWSA is a professional network for South Africans. The thing that makes it quite interesting is that it has been pre-populated with information that pertains to key people in South Africa. As well as constantly updated company information as provided by McGregorBFA.

Recently Naspers Ltd. contracted Panacea Mobile to help out with a strategy for the mobile side of WWSA, we collaborated to create the WWSA iPhone application. The idea was to get an application out that like-minded South African business people could use to familiarise themselves with each other.

We also introduced some Location Based services, although in it’s current form, it still has room for improvement, it is already quite sophisticated. You will be able to sport companies around you and view information about them. You will also be able to spot other WWSA users around you, however, this is dependant on the application becoming more populated

You can find me on Who’s who here.

Screen shots:

This morning MyBroadband had an interesting  article about the sales of iPhone vs Blackberry in SA. Despite the success of iPhone worldwide, somehow the handset has reached less than 1% of the SA mobile market. While this low figure is probably more to do with the SA mobile demography, I thought I might look a bit more into it. A user called Filip Chudzinski over at iFun put together a infographic chart with the worldwide cost of unlocked iPhone 4s. Unfortunately SA was not on that chart, so I decided to add SA to it as well, seeing as our iPhones are unlocked as well.

But first off, you might ask how am I able to “project” iPhone 4 prices? Well, this is the current price of the iPhone 3GS in SA. Since the iPhone 3G was launched in SA, the price of the iPhone has not dropped in SA. In fact, it has gotten more expensive. Now we can say this is because of exchange rate, but the Rand is a bit stronger these days, but iStore stills charges a price of R8699 for 16GB or R9999 for 32GB. So, if we assume the iPhone price stays the same with the release of iPhone 4, here is a comparison of worldwide unlocked iPhones. Please note this does not include phone which are network locked, like in the US with AT&T.

It looks pretty grim right? With iPhone 4 there is bound to be some competition however – it is not only Vodacom who is carrying it this time around, lets hope MTN can somehow drop the price somewhat. On the other hand, with the 3GS, the price was suddenly a thousand rand more per model than the 3G.

But lets stay optimistic, competition can be a great thing after all…

Sources:

iClarified (Creative Commons)

iStore iPhone Tariffs

Euro to Rand pricing on 2 August 2010

Thanks to Distimo, we can look at what is the most popular apps in the various appstores of the different mobile platforms – the report covers the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone (with specific focus on in-app purchases), as well as BlackBerry App World (Worldwide), Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for June 2010 in the United States.

Here are the top selling apps by platform:

True to form, the top selling apps on Android remain tools and utilities, which pretty much confirms who the Android phone’s current target market is:

On the iPhone, games dominate the top selling apps. Its clearly the preferred platform for game developers currently.

On the iPad, things look a little more productive. Like in the last report, Apple’s Pages word processor app is the top seller. It seems people are willing to actually pay for apps to make work easier on the iPad.

And then on the Blackberry front, here are the top sellers. The best sellers are themes for the OS:

Some other interesting tidbits out of the report:

The percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the Apple App Store for iPad (10%) than in the
Apple App Store for iPhone (2%). The Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of
applications with in-app purchases available.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
MobiTV (MobiTV), ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup (ESPN) and Tap Fish (BayView Labs).

The most successful paid applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
Guitar Hero (Activision Publishing, Inc.), TomTom U.S.A. (TomTom International BV) and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II
(Activision Publishing, Inc.).

Mirroring the Distimo report covering May 2010, Pages and iBooks, published by Apple Inc, are again the number one paid and free
applications on the Apple App Store for iPad, respectively.

Three out of the ten most popular applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone were published by Electronic Arts.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad entered the top 10 highest ranked paid applications chart in the 6th position. It was the
top grossing application in the Apple App Store for iPad after Pages by Apple Inc.

Nine out of the ten most popular paid applications on the Apple App Store for iPhone are Games, however only two out of the ten
most popular free applications are Games. In the Nokia Ovi Store, seven out of ten of the most popular paid applications are
Games, while only three out of ten of the most popular free applications are Games.

If you want to see the report for yourself, go look at it here.

Via: MBA Online

The Distimo report is a monthly report that shows current trends in the mobile application development marketplace. It takes into account all the handset manufacturers’ different stores through which they distribute applications on their devices. Here are some of the interesting developments:

- Mobile apps are cheap, or free. More than half of apps are below $2. So developers who charge high prices, remember, the large group of users out there should make you worry less about profit per sale.

- The iPad’s current application seems to cost a bit more than the iPhone. This can be attributed to increased development costs, but I have to commend developers who write universal apps. Universal apps you purchase once, and they run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Dont make me pay twice for two devices.

- The Android market is made up of more than 57% free apps. Why? Is it because Android users are less likely to buy apps than on other platforms? Or is it because the free apps are good enough?

- Games are still by far the most popular apps. Out of the top 10 paid for apps on the iPhone, 8 was games.

- Amazon’s Kindle app seems to be under fire. Apple’s iBooks app is the number one app on the Appstore. But its still great that Amazon is making their platform available to other platforms as well. After using the iPad, I have to say my Kindle has become neglected. And with good reason.

What is interesting is seeing how the appstore ecosystem is changing. iPhone still seems to be the one that has the monetary edge, but that might change soon enough. With the number of Android handsets being released, there is plenty of oppurtunities for developers. The number of free apps on Android might sound great, but this does not take into account the quality of these apps. Whereas the iPhone Appstore is verified by Apple on a app for app basis, Google’s marketplace has no such process.

The disadvatange to this is of course that low-quality or poorly designed apps get in there as well. While people criticize Apple’s quality control, there are just as many postive aspects as well.I really reckon Google can do with a similiar process – not to replace the current marketplace, but a “Google Verified” section for apps that Google does approve of. That way you have the best of both worlds.

That way you cater for both developers who want to quickly and easily want to get into the marketplace, but end users who want high quality apps can find them as well. Tools like AppBrain does address this somewhat, but what I am talking about is a official source of apps. Maybe Google should have a chat with AppBrain?

You can download the full Distimo report here.

SA Lotto, a combined project by tech blogger Marc Forrest and Cape Town-based developer Juliaan Evenwel, was approved by Apple’s app store last week.

Here’s a rundown of what you can do with the SA Lotto iPhone app:

• Get results for the Lotto, Lotto Plus and Powerball draws (result are updated 30 minutes after the live draw has taken place)
• See how much you have won based on your number selections
• Enter any set of numbers and see what you would have won had you played them
• Use the intelligent quick pick number generator to generate numbers for a draw

Visit the SA Lotto website, or download the SA Lotto app to your iPhone.

I recently got contacted by the folks at ALK – they wanted to show off their new CoPilot Live product for South Africa. In case you dont know, CoPilot is available on iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. I have been using the iPhone version for the past week, and yes, I am very impressed.

Key Features

I have used alternative solutions by other vendors on the iPhone, and over time certain things started to irritate me. It has gotten so bad, that in most cases I just fire up Google Maps instead of actual GPS apps. Their database is up to date, and their routing is good as well. But of course, Google Maps does not actually navigate you to the your destination, with a convulatuted next, next, next type of interaction which is downright dangerous to use in a car. (Maybe one day they will grace South Africa (or even the iPhone) with that feature.

So lets get round to CoPilot Live 8. The install is easy enough – it is on iPhone after all. Standard Appstore solution. At 100MB+ you do want to download it through wifi however.

First off, the interface is slick and easy to use. Buttons are large, and easy to interpret, which is necessary when using a GPS in your car. Most things can be understood at just glance, which I appreciate. It’s pretty clear when you open it that it is a ported interface (it is almost exactly the same as on the Android and Windows Mobile), which I normally dont like. But after playing around with it, I realized that it works very well, despite not following the typical iPhone app look. Integration with the iPhone keyboard is perfect, which is more than I can say for NDrive. The level of detail on the maps is also great – in fact much better than with my Garmin with the latest mapset. The maps move along at a good pace – and there is a very cool feature where the top of the screen is changed to indicate where the current lanes you are driving down is heading. Orientation switch between landscape and portrait is quick and without bugs.

Voice instructions are clear and loud enough (on the 3GS at least). Routing was very good, and seems to be very similiar to my Garmin dedicated device. Talking about Garmin – they bring out new mapsets, and still havent included my security village’s road, which is by no means new. With CoPilot, it is there, with all the streetnames. And here I thought dedicated devices like Garmin have always been the best.  Small issues include the strength of the GPS signal, but this is a iPhone issue, not the software. On cloudy days, it did take a while to grab the signal, but just leaving it under the windscreen seemed to do the trick.

The performance on the iPhone 3GS was very good, but it was a lot slower on the 3G, and I did get some warnings on the 3G about memory shortages. But it did not crash once, which is good. Battery life was also better than I expected, and a hell of a lot better than using Google Maps which has to continually download map tiles as you go along. A small thing I also appreciate is the integration with the iPod – and creating quick playlists were a breeze. Also, while playing music, it didnt stutter once while giving directions, and the music were slightly turned down while talking, and than smoothly increased back up to the previous volume. I really appreciate that.

Even if the interface of a GPS app is good, it comes down to routing ability. And this is where CoPilot really shines. It has calulated all my routes perfectly, and never once give me an error, or a situation where I had to second guess it. And just for that I really like CoPilot. I wouldnt hesitate recommending this to people who are still not happy to use GPS’s. In fact, I have stopped using my Garmin in the last few weeks.

One criticism I have is that the South African version of CoPilot is expensive – CoPilot makes versions of CoPilot for many parts of the world, and currently the only version that is more expensive than the SA one is a version for the entire Europe. Meanwhile, the entire US mapset costs $19.99 at the moment. What makes this even more unfair is that the SA one doesnt support many of CoPilot’s “live” features, such as traffic reports. Now I realize there isnt infrastructure in place for this in SA, but still, the price seems to target international travellers visiting SA for the World Cup. Maybe the map providers in SA ask very high prices, but I think the price should drop a lot. At least we do get weather, and you can easily ask for current location or just about anywhere:

Overall I am very impressed by CoPilot Live – it is clear that they have put more attention to detail in their product – it runs smoothly, and works well around the iPhone’s application framework shortcomings. I am actually very interested to see what how they will implement the GPS framework of iPhone OS 4.0 in the future.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (drop the price and I will give it a 5)

Pros:


Works well – nice speed, reliable
Routing works well
Very detailed mapset
Interface is excellent – good example of how porting is not always a bad thing

Cons:
Pricey for the SA version
Performance on the 3G is significantly slower than the 3GS

Dutch analytics company Distimo have just released their latest report, which focuses on the US App Store for the iPad and iPhone. The report makes for good reading for anyone with an interest in mobile device application development.

According to the report, the number of apps for iPad has grown to 4,870 since the release of the iPad on 3 April. Predictably, the largest application category for the iPad is Games, which has 1,577 titles (32% of the total), followed by Entertainment with 455 titles and Books with 396.

The average price of an iPhone app in the app store is $3.82, as opposed to $4.67 for iPad apps. 80% of the 4,870 applications for iPad are paid, compared to 73% of the 186,414 applications for iPhone.

Medical and Finance applications are the most expensive apps for the iPad, at an average of $42.11 and $18.48 respectively. This is significantly more than the average price for applications in these categories for iPhone ($10.74 and $5.74 respectively).

Visit the Distimo site to download the full report for free.

Apple yesterday made public the dates for their annual WWDC conference. On June 7 you can expect Steve Jobs to grace the stage again to welcome developers for the Apple ecosystem. While it has been primarily concerned with development on the Mac platform in the past, in recent years the focus has been much more on the iPh0ne. While the conference deals primarily with app development, iPhone fans everywhere are also interested seeing as this is where Apple traditionally announces their new iPhone. Perhaps also a sneak peak at the next generation Mac OS X. Cougar? Or Feral Cat?

Unfortunately this year the hype will be a little more subdued, seeing as most tech lovers have already seen the pictures and specs of the next iPhone, but this is not to say that prototype was final…

Update: Turns out this WWDC will focus much less on desktop development than ever before.

And the results are good… Apple shifted a total of 2.94 million Macs, an increase of 33% from last year, compared to an increase of 25% for the overall PC industry. However, iPhone is clearly Apple’s standout device. (Let me be the first to point out that Apple is still only 3.6 percent of the entire industry…)

A total of 8.75 million iPhones were sold worldwide, which is an increase of 131% growth over last year. Well, so which parts of Apple’s product line did not do well? iPods dropped about 1% from last year – but that is still 10.89 million of them sold. Apple also still insists that the Apple TV is a “hobby”…

“We’re thrilled to report our best non-holiday quarter ever, with revenues up 49 percent and profits up 90 percent,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve launched our revolutionary new iPad and users are loving it, and we have several more extraordinary products in the pipeline for this year.”

“Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2010, we expect revenue in the range of about $13.0 billion to $13.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $2.28 to $2.39,” says Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.

See more here.