Building Mobile Mashups at Yahoo!
- 1. Mobile Mashups Ariel Seidman Director Product Management Yahoo Search 1
- 2. What is a mobile mashup? Mobile mash-ups take free or low cost data sources (Twitter, snow reports, metrics conversion, etc.) and/or multiple services (maps, flickr, etc.) and build a mobile application. 2
- 3. Some examples of mobile mashups 3
- 4. Inquisitor | Free BOSS API (free) Web News Search Suggestions 4
- 5. Delicious BookmarksPro | $0.99 Delicious API (free) 5
- 6. Tweetie | $2.99 Twitter API (free) TwitPic Integration (free) 6
- 7. Ski Lodge | $4.99 Weather data (free) Snow reports (low cost) Mountain Maps (free) 7
- 8. Ingredients for Awesome Mobile Mashups Fast Efficient Beautiful Fun Hook (i.e. marketing) 8
- 9. Fast More importantly, it lets you start typing in a query less than four seconds after launching it,...about two seconds faster than Google's voice-powered search app, and slightly faster than starting a cold search from Safari. CNET 9
- 10. Efficient Pre-loads web-pages before they fully load Extracts Phone # and Directions 10
- 11. Efficient Efficient doesn’t = lots of features: Test A Test B Test C 11
- 12. Beautiful Texture in support ConvertBot of a theme 12
- 13. Fun Hook (i.e. marketing) Tweetie PEE 13
- 14. Fun Hook (i.e. marketing) Shaking the phone clears the search box. Metaphor from Etch-a-Sketch 14
- 15. Fun Hook (i.e. marketing) Voice Search Cool feature, yet... Doesn’t solve a big problem (typing ~2 words with search suggestion is very fast) Privacy issue 15
- 16. OK, now you have a fast, efficient, beautiful app with a fun hook feature. Put it on the App Store and nothing happens*. Oh yea, Marketing. *It is not Apple’s fault. 16
- 17. Do: Marketing Your App Get cool people to use it (Tweet about it) Make People Laugh (Tweetie PEE) Viral enable the app (don’t force it) Demo video (with great music) Get on blog best of lists (not easy) Blog about how you built it (help others) Treasure hunt (requires $) 17
- 18. Don’t: Waste of Time Marketing Ads (any form) 18
- 19. Remember, Nothing Happens Overnight $40 $20 1st Generation 2nd Generation 3rd Generation 4th Generation $10 October ’01 July ’02 April ’03 October ’04 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Stock Quote: Yahoo! Finance Concept from: Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences 19
- 20. Emergent Phase is About Experimentation Cost of Maintaing Product of Maintaing Cost Addressable Market Time In Emergent Phase Experiment to get Product/Market Fit Team Learning systems Improving product execution 20
- 21. Sample App Micro-Economics Costs Type Amount iPhone SDK Upfront $99 Costs Data Upfront $5,000 $100/hr @ 480 hrs Your Time Upfront (oppty cost) Domain, Website Upfront $1000 Hosting, misc Apple fees Each Sale 30% of Gross Total Upfront $54,099 21
- 22. Sample App Micro-Economics With costs (cash & oppty cost) of $54,099 break-even at: $0.99 $2.99 $4.99 78,065 25,848 15,488 8K sales per week to stay in Top 100 22
- 23. Why does Yahoo! care about mobile mashups? Data Yahoo has lots of open data: developer.yahoo.com and YQL. Talent Recruiting ground for talented developers Acquisition Signals If something strikes a chord with users could be interesting acquisition. 23
- 24. How to contact me aseidman@yahoo-inc.com www.aseidman.com twitter.com/aseidman 24