We went to APPNATION last week. The big question the speakers were attempting to answer was ‘How to grow the app economy and drive more dollars?’.From a developer’s perspective the aim is ultimately to add value to the user by making your mobile phone more useful and entertaining. But the question remains: how turn this into revenue? Obviously, we think that Telesocial can help in doing this.
The big issues are, as always, around discoverability and monetization and we know that some of the most important parameters driving both of these are: engagement, retention and virality. I wanted to give a few examples of how Telesocial’s API can improve these mechanics, when integrated to a social app or game.

Engagement:
The more engaging an app is the more time we spend using it. I believe that talking to a friend is engaging in itself, but if you can do this in the context of a social game or app, the app becomes more social and fun. If your friend also happens to be an expert at the game you’re both playing you might get help moving ahead, hence enjoying it even more. And if your friend is buying virtual currency to advance, it’s likely that he will convince you to do the same.

Virality:
When I enjoy something I always feel an urge to share it with somebody (and this occurred even before Facebook, believe it or not;-). So, this goes back to engagement. But, there are some built-in functionalities in our calling features that are inherently viral, as in
- if I want to call you from the app I must invite you to register and download it;
- Once a friend has registered for web calling, via any TS enabled app, I can see that in his or her profile by the calling button being active;
- Invites to conversations happen on social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and will be visible in timelines and feeds.

Retention:
In order to keep users returning, we must make sure the app is useful and/or engaging. Talking to a friend, or a like minded, within the app has proved to work via chat and messaging features. We argue that voice would add another (more intimate) dimension.
And if a social app, by allowing you to click to call your friends, turns into a seamless phonebook wouldn’t that surely make you return to it?
APPNATION also talked about how carrier API:s will leverage network platforms to build better apps. I will return on this theme.

Finally, they touched on the subject ‘Why Siri and Speech recognition apps will change man2machine interaction forever’. We tend to side with the people who believe this is the future. And imagine if, in the near future, you could tell your phone ‘Get the marketing team on the phone!’.. and it just happens! Seems pretty valuable to me.

Hanging up for now.