Target audience: Businesses, mobile operators, marketers, Web publishers, educators.

Guest post by Joanne Del Gigante
Vice President, MDG Advertising

There’s no doubt that mobile has gone mainstream with consumers increasingly on the move and companies seeking more ways to stay in front of their eyes and right at their fingertips. As a result, businesses are realizing the importance of maintaining a mobile presence, yet many are uncertain whether a mobile application or mobile website is the best way to go to reach consumers on the go.

To outline the basics and benefits of a mobile website vs. mobile app, MDG Advertising developed the infographic below. It outlines the options and opportunities behind both mobile methods, along with the facts and figures regarding reach and response to help companies make the right move to mobile.

First, the infographic details the important differences between mobile websites and mobile applications on issues such as user access and digital accessibility. A side-by-side comparison shows that mobile apps provide faster speed, while mobile websites are more affordable.

Then, usage becomes the focus with graphic evidence showing the amount of time users spend on both mobile means. There’s clearly no contest with mobile apps gaining digital dominance over desktops within the past two years.

In terms of reach and engagement, the lines become more blurred as research reveals mobile websites having much higher numbers of impressions and visits. Yet the data also shows that mobile app users are more engaged and consume an average of 2.4 times more impressions.

Finally, content usage comes into play since this is a determining factor for many businesses. Once again, both mobile application development and mobile website development have their unique strengths for specific tasks. Mobile websites are preferred for the popular pursuits of online shopping, search, and entertainment. Mobile apps are favored for their superior connectivity, navigation, and ability to inform. The better option depends on how the company plans to connect with consumers.

The decision between building a mobile website or a mobile application is ultimately a decision unique to your business. If possible, companies should develop both in order to leverage these two powerful platforms. If only one can be chosen, business must first assess their goals and resources, then closely consider the differences detailed in the infographic and the audience they want to reach. Only then can a business truly tell which mobile method will provide more value, advantages, and opportunities with the massive mobile market.

Click to enlarge the infographic to full size in your browser:

The post Should you build a mobile app or mobile website? [Infographic] appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Why native apps are vital to the Internet’s future in the mobile era

Guest post by Gal Brill
CEO, UppSite

Content is king, but in the mobile era, it will only remain king if it is optimized for mobile devices.

Bill Gates was the first to coin the phrase “content is king,” and ever since he coined it in 1996, content creators, website owners, journalists and pundits of the digital era have recited it, dissected it, argued about it or agreed on it.

In 2007 Apple completely changed the way we consume content and digital media. That year, Steve Jobs introduced the first smartphone to the world, the iPhone, and a new era was born.

The mobile era, ushered in by the iPhone and the iPad, significantly changed the amount of content, its timing and of course the method in which we consume it – the iPhone 2G, Android and Windows-based phones gave birth to millions of mobile apps and the app store empowered us to install them on those little supercomputers in the palm of our hand.

One of the aspects that was left behind in this mobile era is the Internet itself. The Internet that heralded the dawn of the information revolution and the digital age has been largely neglected in the age of mobile. And when you really think about it, there is no surprise here at all.

How could this happen? The Internet is a competitive ring in which every content creator can create a website within minutes and write whatever is on his or her mind. For end users, the Internet delivers a lot of content for a low price — lower than cable TV, for instance — but content creators are faced with revenue streams that are limited when compared to those of their broadcast counterparts.

The result is that those content creators cannot afford the “holy grail” of the mobile era – a native application.

What is a proper mobile presence, anyway?

In the age of the Internet, content submission is relatively easy, fast and cheap. Take for example the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world today, WordPress. WordPress runs about 16.7 percent of the world’s top 1 million websites, is free and has quick and easy design options. The 5-minute website setup is one of the reasons the WordPress platform is so popular.

What is happening in the mobile era? Search engines and social networking platforms continue to be the driving force behind content discovery channels exactly as they are on the desktop version of the Internet. They have adapted to the mobile revolution and become available on any new platform. This is something that unfortunately you cannot say on most content websites.

We have conducted a study of the leading 100 content websites and discovered that 80 percent of them don’t have a native application or proper mobile presence. When we conducted the same study for 1,000 different websites, the number grew to a bit over 87 percent.

To be clear, let’s talk a bit about what a “proper mobile presence” actually is.

It is true that every mobile device we purchase has a built in mobile browser. It has been this way since the days of the original iPhone, with every Android device and as of late, every self-respecting browser has a mobile version. With those mobile browsers, you can access any website because they “speak” HTML, the language in which the internet is written. Some do it better and faster than others, but they all do it well.

So is the mobile browser in fact the solution for mobile content?  Maybe not.

A quality mobile presence cannot be a Web page displayed as it was originally built for a computer screen. A mobile device’s screen does not allow optimal viewing for pages 1024 pixels wide. An iPhone can display 320 to 640 pixels in width and has a 3.5-inch screen – rather tiny compared to a standard computer screen at 21 inches or so. All these numbers basically tell us that the content displayed is way too small for consumption and is laid out in an uncomfortable way on mobile  screens. Just remember all the times you had to “pinch-zoom” to read content.

So, what is a proper mobile presence?

Web apps vs. native apps

There are two basic terms you need to know before I can answer this question:

• Web app – changing the layout of the information (still in HTML) in a way that is more suited for a mobile screen. The new layout can be attributed to a dedicated design template, or (if we didn’t throw around enough buzz-words so far) to a “responsive design” that takes into account the width of the screen on which it is presented and rearranges the elements in the layout to fit the screen.

To be fair, Steve Jobs said: “You don’t need apps, make Web apps.” After saying that, he realized that making apps is not where the tech world was going, and he created the App Store and billions of downloads have confirmed that this move was the right way to go.

• Native app – a dedicated app written in the original programming language of the mobile platform. This process creates the best results possible for an app.

There is a lively discussion on what is the best approach to adapt the Internet into the mobile world: Web app (because it is probably enough and it is after all the language of the Internet) or native apps (because of their strength and speed).

So what is the right answer? The truth is very simple – both Web apps and native apps are OK. The content consumption process isn’t going to change soon and search engines and social networking will continue to lead us to content discovery. However, in the mobile era the chain usually breaks. The user reaches a website that isn’t optimal for mobile devices. With that in mind, here is the ideal content consumption process:

Search or social networks -> Web app -> native app -> revisiting content through information pushing.

After we found the content, we are now random consumers. We don’t install an app but rather expect an optimal view of it on our mobile device. The ability to consume quality content will keep us going back for more, and only after consuming content in this method will we demand more from our content providers. Therefore, we will be ready to install a native app from that content creator, and enjoy the information push that only native apps can provide, along with more features.

This process is the future of the internet in the mobile era, and you can achieve this only by pre-meditating a holistic solution that provides all of these elements. It is commonly thought that the cost of this solution is expensive and time consuming, and is only available for big websites. This process of thought will soon change, with services like my company UppSite that are pushing the Internet into the mobile era for  a low cost (sometimes for free) with a high quality product.

Content is important, and how it is presented is also important, in the mobile era. So it’s vital for the content creators to take back the reins and give their mobile users, who are growing in numbers every day, the best consumption experience possible.

Related

• 10 best practices for your mobile website

• Making sense of mobile website solutions

The post Content is king: Still true in the mobile era? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Afew days ago I sat down with Gal Brill, the founder and CEO of UppSite, an Israel-based start-up that can turn your website into an app in just minutes. At top is a video UppSite produced about their service, and at bottom is my interview with Gal.

As the Web turns increasingly mobile — with a majority of online Americans set to access the Internet through their mobile devices rather than their desktop or laptop computers within a couple of years — any sensible Web publisher should be thinking about how to optimize his or her site for mobile users.

I’ve written about a few such services, including WPTouch Pro (Have you made your site mobile-ready?) and OnSwipe (Make your site ‘swipeable’ on the iPad). But UppSite is the first service to come along that can turn any website or blog into an app — on the iPhone or Android — for free, in a matter of minutes. That’s pretty cool. (A Windows Mobile version is coming in a few months.)

Watch, download or embed our video interview on YouTube.

CEO Brill likens UppSite’s entry into the marketplace as akin to WordPress’s disruption of the blogging world, when it make it drop-dead simple to get a blog up and running in 5 minutes. UppSite’s mission is to help you enter the mobile era “in a truly easy way,” he says. In the coming years, he hopes and expects millions of sites — particularly small or mid-size publications — to do so.

“We’re democratizing the mobile era for any publisher,” he says.

A cross-platform solution that actually works

Up until now, online publishers have had to deal with the nightmare of developing and maintaining applications for each separate operating system: iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Windows Phone 7 and so on. Not only that, you’d be out of luck in some cases, depending on whether your site runs on WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, etc. While other services often offer little more than a prettified version of an RSS feed, UppSite promises native apps that offer a complete version of your site, with all of the important content and functionality.

How simple is UppSite to use? All it takes is for the website owner to enter some basic information, choose a theme, upload a logo and you’re good to go. Presto! After you’ve gone through the customization process, a mobile, iOS and Android version of your site will be generated. Critically, UppSite handles the submission process to the various stores, and will keep you updated on its progress.

Says Gal: “Some app providers will create a compiled file for you but then leave it to you to upload and implement it. ‘OK, so head to the app store, here’s a manual, figure out how to do it.’ We do it for you.”

The other nice part is that UppSite apps sport features that enable publishers to engage with readers and users. For example, site publishers can engage with readers directly from the app or notify readers whenever blog content is updated, resulting in more engagement and retention.

Coming soon: A shiny new Socialmedia.biz app

We just put UppSite through its paces by creating an app for Socialmedia.biz and will report back here when it’s live in the iTunes Store and Android Marketplace. What’s nice, though, is that even though it can take a couple of weeks to get an app approved for iTunes, the Web version is good to go almost immediately. So a user arriving on your site through a smartphone will see a site that’s ready for a mobile experience, even if it’s not as perfect as the native app that a user would have to download. (Unless I totally misinterpreted this!)

Publishers can choose from three types of payment options: a free conversion that gives all mobile ad revenue to UppSite, a $9.99 per-month option with a 50 percent ad revenue split with UppSite, and an enterprise solution that can be customized with UppSite as a per-demand, per-month option that allows the site owner to fully control the application. Most of the competitors we know about, like AppMakr, Duda Mobile, Conduit Mobile or BloApp, typically charge a fee for converting a site to mobile and shepherding it through the approval process, but UppSite hopes to make money through an ad network it’s launching.

UppSite officially launched at DEMO Spring in Silicon Valley, and I caught up with Gal a couple of days later on a sidewalk in San Francisco. I’m still playing with the service — as with any start-up, it still has a few kinks to iron out — but if you’re thinking about how to serve this teeming new audience of mobile users, UppSite should be very high up on your list of services to check out. Give it a spin!

Let me know if you have any questions about the service and I’ll pass them along to Gal and his team. Here’s our interview:

The post UppSite: Turn your website into an app in minutes appeared first on Inside Social Media.