– Advice on publishing strategy
The founder, Jason Dunne, has published market-leading consumer and professional information products for some of the world’s largest publishing companies. See here for a full list of titles commissioned by Jason Dunne and here for his professional biography.

– Advice on costs and procurement
Clients benefit from London Smartphone’s relationships with freelance developers and agencies. London Smartphone can write a technical specification for your app and then circulate a request for tender among an extensive list of programmers; you’ll be presented with a choice of programmers’ quotes, plus a recommendation. Clients can then choose whether to project manage in-house or have London Smartphone look after the entire development and publishing process.

ADVISORY FEES

London Smartphone’s offering is tiered to reflect three very different stages of app development.

Stage 1 – Initial Consultation – Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile apps
£400 per day

- Ideal for senior managers seeking strategic advice, or for executives from content and marketing seeking practical advice on creating apps
- Up to a full day at client’s offices
- Presentation from London Smartphone about the iPhone opportunity, covering market size, revenue models, success stories, strategic and technical considerations and limitations.
- Open-ended Q&A session from client, meeting as many employees as necessary. Any client questions that cannot be answered on the day will be researched immediately afterwards, then written up & circulated.
- Concludes with strategic recommendations from London Smartphone

Stage 2 – “I know what I want to do, but I don’t know what it should cost”
£750 flat rate for drawing up a technical specification for your app and obtaining price quotes

- London Smartphone to visit clients office to gather user requirements, then to draw up a technical specification for target app, before writing the specification and circulating among developers to obtain a range of price quotes.
- Unusually complex apps may require additional fees – client will be notified in advance.

Stage 3 – “I know what I want but don’t have the time to make it myself”
£400 per day; flat rates or budget caps negotiable

- Project management from first idea to publication of your app on iTunes. Includes all stage 2 services + publication on iTunes + marketing and awareness consultancy for launching your app.

Please note all prices are exclusive of VAT.

Finding out for yourself

Uniquely, Jason Dunne also hosts a monthly “seminar and social” event in central London – the iPhone & Smartphone Publishers and Developers meetup – designed to help novice clients meet developers and other app publishers in person. The event is free, non-affiliated and open to all, although you’ll need to register.  In addition to socialising in a friendly atmosphere, attendees also benefit from event’s free seminar programme, where interesting and successful folk from the mobile world present their case histories and personal views. Previous speakers include:

- Luke Johnson, Channel 4 chairman and noted entrepreneur
- Ravi Damani, co-founder of Across Air and one of the UK’s foremost exponents of augmented reality
- venture capitalist Nic Brisbourne, author of The Equity Kicker blog and one of the UK’s best known VC commentators.
- Dave Castelnuovo, creator of the smash hit iPhone app “Pocket God”, which sold over one million copies on iTunes in just six months.
- Kostas Eleftheriou, creator of iSteam, one of the UK’s biggest hits on the iPhone, as featured in The New York Times.
- Veteran mobile games producer/programmer John Chasey, CEO of tech companies Finblade and Metismo.

The evenings are an enjoyable and friendly way to ease yourself into the industry. Attendees come from a wide range of industries, from investors to photographers to programmers to book publishers.

…you can socialise, meet developers in person and listen to lots of senior folk from the mobile world give seminars (seminar motto: “Always interesting, never long”). You’ll need to register on the site, but otherwise entrance is totally free – unlike the drinks.

OUR BLURB

Purpose: To bring together developers and publishers of Iphone/smartphone services

Developers: this event will help you showcase your ideas, find interesting work and swap notes with other developers.

Content publishers: this event will introduce you to the programmers who can make your content come alive on the iPhone and other smartphone devices.

It’s hoped that both content and tech folk will gain a fuller understanding of each other’s needs. Our first few meetings will be in small and informal settings, so much the better to have the one-to-one chats that lead to paid work and finished products all round!

Invited to attend:
- Content publishers – print and online (book publishers, newspaper and magazines publishers, games, web publishers etc)

- Software developers – individuals or agencies

- Phone manufacturers and operators

- Angel investors and VCs

- Associated professional services e.g. SEO and advertising

- Anyone with a commercial or organizational interest in the iPhone and other smartphones e.g. novice app producers

Organisers
Jason Dunne and Craig Smith have worked in UK print media since the early 90s. Jason is formerly the publisher of the “…For Dummies” series of how-to books; Craig is a business development executive at O’Reilly Books and author of the O’Reilly GMT blog.

Fortunately, the iPhone does have inherent security features which are good enough to make piracy the least of your worries as a newbie app publisher. So, don’t let the fear of piracy hold you back from publishing for the iPhone. For now, you need only make yourself familar with the way in which iPhone piracy does occur.

Search online for “Jailbroken iPhone” and you’ll see there’s a solid movement of folks who like to make life more interesting by tinkering with their iPhone’s deepest technology. They download software patches which will do things to the iPhone that Apple really don’t want anyone to do, such as connect to any mobile carrier and not just the carrier Apple insists you use. Jailbroken phones can also be made to get pirated apps for free. There are those who are very concerned by this, but I for one am not too worried by iPhone piracy. I’m not worried because Apple definitely is worried. Apple really, really doesn’t want the iPhone to be a piracy enabler. The firm will go to remarkable lengths to keep jailbreakers in check.

If Apple detects that a phone is jailbroken then it will permanently disable it via the iPhone’s software update feature.  Many jail-breakers have been caught out this way. It’s true that many have evaded detection – the jailbreaking community is smart and nimble – but the point is that not many of us would risk having our expensive phone rendered useless.

Jailbreaking is for the uber-geek (I use the term fondly). There’s not too many uber-geeks. Let them steal your stuff. Let them run the risk of turning their phone into a £400 brick. I’d rather worry about the other 30 million iPhone/iTouch users who are happy with their phone just as it is. In fact, one of the things I love about phones in general is that, unlike my PC, they’re quite hard to muck up by tinkering. I think most of the world’s 4 billion mobile phone owners think the same way. Your content is probably safe with a significant majority of them.

There’s good news and bad news for book publishers seeking to publish iPhone Apps.

The good news is that, as of April 09, most of your traditional book publishing competitors have hardly any products on sale. The bad news is that you’re in danger of being beaten to it by upstart first-timers with no book publishing on their resume.

Most of the utility and reference apps on sale now – some of which sell very well – could have been produced by book publishers, yet most were made by one-man-band developers. Why’s that? My view, and a recurring theme on this blog, is that legacy content is a mixed blessing when publishing for new platforms or business models.

On one hand, publishers know their readership, have content more or less ready to go and can subsidise new product developments from existing cash flow. On the other hand, big publishers need to feed the beast, a point well made by this excellent blog post from Mike Shatzkin. The fixed operating costs of publishing hundreds of books a year means there is tremendous pressure on editors to find more of last year’s winners and to avoid anything that might cannibalize backlist income. Also, the transition from analogue to digital necessarily means switching from pounds to pence. Whatever they might say, most editors at the big corporates aren’t prepared to kill themselves making products such as apps if that means working at price points lower than anything they’ve ever encountered in their careers. I don’t blame them: the old print publishing models still work, for now, and publishing for the high street is tremendous fun.

Meantime, a fragmented legion of one-man-band iPhone developers, armed only with cut-and-paste and a desire to make money and/or great products, are cranking out apps that really ought to be the preserve of traditional book publishers.

You work for Harper Collins, have tons of self-help content and want to be on the app store? I’m sorry to say that someone you’ve never heard of got there first. You publish dictionaries? Great. So does Joe Public. You’re in the travel publishing game? Isn’t everyone?

Of course, I exaggerate in order to make the point that traditional book publishers need to get a move on. In time, expect traditional media to move in, raise standards, raise production costs and probably drive the little guy out of business or into ever-decreasing niches. Meantime, there’s money on the table for anyone, big or small, who can start today.

P.S. My guess is that most book publisher’s first attempts at apps will come from the marketing or publicity department, because they’ve traditionally got stronger links with new media and, of course, don’t need to make a profit… If that proves to be true it will be a bit of a lost revenue opportunity, because the iPhone has proved that people really are happy to pay for digital content if its served in a convenient form that works well on the platform at hand.

That makes for an interesting question. If mobile digital content is so wildly popular that it only takes nine months to gross between $0.5b to $1b on just 1% of the world’s handsets – you might like to read that again, slowly -  doesn’t that make mobile content add up to an addressable market of $50-$100b per year? Shouldn’t book publishers rush to make apps for every phone they can think of? I don’t believe so. Despite the stats, I believe that book publishers should stick to the iPhone for now, unless they’re in the mood to gamble. I can see at least four reasons why the Iphone makes sense:

1) It is very hard to develop a single app that works on a wide range of ordinary phones. Handsets differ in screen size, processor power, battery life, operating system, user-controls, connection speed and software reliability, to mention just seven factors out of many. Take those seven factors and multiply them across the several thousand different models of handset in use and you’ll present yourself with a fearsome technical challenge. Of course, over time you can expect handsets will converge and technical fragmentation will decline   – after all, the iPhone’s success has given Nokia and Blackberry an incentive to make their products simpler to use – but don’t hold your breath. The handset industry has predicted platform convergence for years but in reality it appears they often seem keen to fight endless format wars instead. Perhaps its because they all hope to be the last man standing.

(There are some promising firms like Metismo offering a software platform that can cross-develop for a range of phones at once, a pretty amazing achievement. I’m not in a position to comment on such services, but cross-platform development is obviously of great significance to the media industry, if not now then certainly in the future).

2) Many developers only have eyes for the iPhone. A few years ago, a lot of mobile phone developers quit the industry having grown disillusioned by device fragmentation. There were just too many handsets to make development worthwhile.  Some of those who quit have been lured back in by the promise of the iPhone. Few have been lured back in by the chance to work on other platforms, because they’re still very fragmented.  Actually, I exaggerate – there are a few cutting-edge developers keen to try other platforms, especially Google’s Android, but if you were a cutting-edge mobile phone developer would you work for the kind of money paid by book publishers?

3) Most mobile users couldn’t name their model of phone. Hard to believe? Ask MORI. The story behind that story is that users want their mobile content to be easy to buy. They don’t want to be forced to find out whether they own the Acme X5A or X5B before they can download whatever their kid is pestering them for. Most attempts to get round device fragmentation – like having pull-down menus so that the users can select their model of phone – simply dump on the consumer a problem that should be tackled at source. Apple tackled it at source. You buy an iPhone and you can buy apps, simple as that. As a former publisher of the “…For Dummies” brand, I can attest that simplicity is very powerful.

4)  Thanks to iTunes, Apple already has lots of credit cards on file. Book publishing lags behind other media when it comes to capturing customer data. Some book publishers make reasonable attempts to capture emails and credit card details, but many don’t. Magazine publishers are maniacal about credit cards and customer email - and iTunes couldn’t even exist without cards and email.

Until book publishers can get over their subtle reluctance to sell direct, digital content must be retailed through partnerships with firms like Amazon and Apple, both of whom have ongoing relationships with credit-card wielding customers.  Thanks to the all-conquering iPod, iTunes is second only to Amazon in terms of customer familiarity and card numbers on file: it’s pretty easy to give Apple your money, easier than giving it to Nokia anyway. If you’re a handset manufacturer your customers are Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse, not the general reading public, and that’s likely to be reflected in the quality of the forthcoming app stores currently in development by Nokia et al. The new app stores will get better over time, sure, but right now Apple has several years headstart in the business of selling digital content straight to a handset. For book publishers, Apple’s headstart is there to be used.

————————————–

I did start off this post by saying that iPhone is the way to go unless you fancy a gamble. What might that gamble be? Well, I believe there are at least 3 reasons why a book publisher might want to co-develop for other platforms – just don’t say you weren’t warned!

1) Firsties. The first few apps on the app store made a ton of money partly because there was nothing else to buy. You might just benefit from being among the first in the newer app stores from Nokia or Blackberry, though don’t forget your audience is likely to be smaller thanks to the dreaded handset fragmentation.

2) Apple’s position is not invulnerable. This view was expressed in a recent presentation given by venture capitalist Nic Brisbourne at one of my iPhone events for book publishers. Nic risked having rotten tomatoes thrown at him by the assembled Apple fans for daring to suggest that Apple’s strategy is flawed. Nic believes that the Apple platform suffers from being a closed system rather than an open system such as Google Android. If you’re not sure of the difference between open and closed technology systems, think of it this way: Wikipedia is likely to outlive the Evening Standard precisely because Wikipedia benefits from the efforts of whoever wants to contribute. Both Apple and the Evening Standard are closed shops to contributors, even contributors with potentially better ideas.  History suggests that open systems usually beat closed systems in the long run.   Nic’s probably right about Apple, though he also said that app developers are perfectly justified in making hay while the sun shines…!

3) The glittering prize. The world is home to 4.1 billion “live” mobile phone accounts. There is a payment system behind each one. Most of them will eventually want some form of third-party content on their phone, even if they don’t know it now. You might not regret getting in at the ground floor of the mobile industry’s attempt to beat Apple.

It’s the $64,000 dollar question for budget-cautious publishers.

The lowest I’ve ever paid for app development is £500; the most I’ve ever heard of is £250,000 for a top-end game.

Of course, you’ll have figured out for yourself that it all depends on the kind of app to be built, but even then it’s still possible to discern three categories of pricing: the rack rate, the overseas rate and the swap rate.

The Rack Rate
This being the cost to get a native-English-speaking programmer based in the UK or the USA to work full-time on your iPhone app. Most estimates I’ve seen put the current rack rate for iPhone development at about £100-£140 per hour.

Still reading?

That’s right, your friendly neighbourhood app developer can gross £250k p.a. if they put themselves to it. It’s because the whole world wants an iPhone app. Everyone from the car manufacturers to the train operators to Brian Eno wants an app. Developers are used to these spikes in their earning power. A couple of years ago everyone wanted to hire developers who could programme in Ruby On Rails. There weren’t enough developers to go round and so their prices went way up. The same thing is happening with iPhone programmers now, but, as with Rails, the boom can’t last forever.

Indeed, I was stunned to see that books about programming the iPhone are topping the Nielsen computer book chart in the USA ahead of the usual bestsellers on Windows, Word and Excel,  hinting at a looming oversupply of programmers. Developer prices will come down in future.

But until prices do come down, the rack rate is £100-£140 per hour if you want to get your app made in the most painless manner possible. For everyone else, there’s the overseas rate.

The Overseas Rate
This being the cost to get your app built by programmers or agencies based in places like India, China or Eastern Europe. The cost varies widely but you can budget for between £15-£35 per hour. I’ve worked with programmers in Turkey and the Ukraine. On both occasions I was pleased with the results and very pleased with the prices, even if language issues sometimes made it painfully hard for buyer and seller to communicate. In outsourcing overseas, I repeatedly saw how an instruction that might be obvious to me can be ambiguous to someone at a desk thousands of miles away.

I’m talking my own book to say so, but if you’re thinking of building your app overseas then you really should consider using a UK-project manager who knows what you want and can take the strain on your behalf. Otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time on the phone or IM with well-meaning people who say “No problem – I do it now”, when really they’re trying to say “Your instructions are unclear; I cannot proceed”.

If you’ve ever been put through to an Indian call centre you’ll know that the person on the other end of the phone is usually hard working and motivated but, just as often, its hard for you to understand them and vice versa. There is no getting round this problem except to throw a lot of time and patience at it. Just make sure it’s your project manager’s time and patience, not yours. You’ll end up with a lot less of both.

The Swap Rate
This being the cost to get your app built by someone who gives you a discount from the rack rate because they stand to benefit from having worked with you – you’re making a swap, in other words.

Swaps are more common than you might think. I’ve come across a few in a short space of time:

- The talented programmer in the UK who granted me a good price because I wanted to do something with Google Maps while he wanted to learn Google Maps
- The top-end programmers in London offering development at cost because they’re keen to show that they’ve worked with book publishers
- The developers who were happy to develop an app for  revenue share.

My point is that if you or your project manager has time to ferret around then you’re not doomed to paying the rack rate or shouting louder in English.

So much for hourly rates. How many hours will it take to build my app?

It’s impossible to say for certain.

This is where app development starts to resemble having the builders in to renovate your home. A builder can give you their best estimate but they can’t really know for sure until the floorboards come up and they can see the state of the wiring in your house. Sometimes a builder will eat the cost if a job proves to be harder than they first thought; other times they’ll ask for more money. So it goes with app development. A programmer can give you a time estimate but it is fairly meaningless until they’ve spent a lot of time on the job, by which time they’ll need paying anyway. You’ll always get a time estimate if you ask for one, but that’s largely because the programmer senses you won’t be happy until they’ve said something, anything. They can’t really know for sure until they break the job down into its constituent parts, which, to repeat, can take so long that they’ve effectively started the job anyway.

I used to think that anyone who could make it easy and predictable to buy building services would be a millionaire within weeks; I soon caught myself thinking the same thing about iPhone developers. I’d have been better off acknowledging that building work and app development work are inherently hard to predict.

If it helps, here’s how long it reportedly took to build some apps. The first two examples are mega-hits, so keep in mind that the durations quoted add to the hype of the iPhone rags-to-riches story. Journalists love to write about kids throwing together an app on Saturday and buying a Ferrari on Monday, but much of it is just a great story getting in the way of the facts. Common sense should tell you that good software is rarely simple to make or market.

Trism – “Six weeks, morning, noon and night outside of the day job”.

iSteam – “One week”

Wizzley Presto – “30 days”

Tea Time – “Three days”

Baby Tracker – “Over 100 hours”

As you can see it’s hard to discern development times merely from looking at other apps, because no two apps are alike. My advice to anyone looking to start app development is treat time estimates with a pinch of salt. You’re more likely to keep costs and lead times down by using a project manager to write a great technical spec and have them check in with your developer every day.