antonybrydon

Best-of-breed vs mobile application suites

Many companies developing mobile applications are currently deliberating whether it is better to deliver one or more best-of-breed point applications vs. a suite of integrated applications.

The iPhone AppStore is dominated by best-of-breed applications, where each icon on the iPhone desktop is a gateway to a focused, single-purpose application. Pandora is a great example, where a simple icon opens a killer web-radio application that is receiving rave reviews.

Examples of integrated suites include Lightpole and Where for the Blackberry Curve. Focus on location-based services, each of these applications acts as a portal into a suite of related, location based applications. Lightpole features 'channels' that offer me location aware versions of Wikipedia, Yelp and Yahoo! Local, while Where offers me a suite of location aware applications like StubHub, Zipcar, Flickr and Yelp and a set of location aware widgets like BuddyBeacon, GasFinder, etc. Unfotunately, it seems like much more time was invested in the portal and the suite, rather then the individual applications, and most of the applications and widgets in both these service are disappointing;

I'm firmly in favor of the best of breed approach, for a couple of reasons:

Android, open networks and location

A few interesting snippets are emerging in the 'friendly' back and forth battle between Sprint and Google about Android phones Sprint hopes to ship shortly. Jake Orion, an Android product manager at Sprint Nextel, heavily critiqued Android in general and complained that the OS: "needs a more proactive and direct linkage to the carrier’s network and service requirements."

My translation? "We need the control we are used to."

Two issues are at stake: one strategic, one tactical:

A funny thing happened at last week's social networking conference...

A mobile conference broke out (punchline). OK, seriously, I participated in a wrap-up panel (after my panel) that included folks from across the social networking spectrum. The agenda was to simply follow the conversation where the audience took it, and after one mobile social networking question served as the bridge, the conversation moved squarely to mobile and stayed there for the next hour, only peripherally touching on social networks.

Granted, last Friday coincided with the launch of the 3G iPhone and the debut of the iPhone app store, and the technology cycles in the audience's mind was fully utilized by Apple, but there was a broader trend. Location, open networks, 3G bandwidth, mobile devices were the things people wanted to talk about, the topics that captured the imagination. Two things hit home for me:

Fire Eagle buzz at the Web 2.0 expo

There's a fair amount of buzz about Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new location service, at the Web 2.0 expo this week, where the Yahoo! team has been promoting invites to the private beta of Fire Eagle and a new application called Fireball has launched. There is good information available on the web, but the best explanation is Tom Coates presentation at ETech in San Diego last month: