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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Can Nano-Apps Work on Mobile?  There’s an app for that. What is the latest breaking news on cupcakes or coffee? Yup, there’s an app for that too. Hearst-incubated company LMK has deployed scores of simple, one-note apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform that pull into a handsome template news feeds and images related to the topic at hand. There are more than 60 apps in all, and they cover sports teams, celebrities and select passion points (coffee, for us). They run from 99 cents to $1.99. Each app has a “News River” that aggregates news from multiple curated sources. Tap on an item and the app brings you to an intermediate page that synopsizes the item and gives you the option to save it for later, email it or click through to read it on the destination site. An embedded browser keeps the user in the app to view the landing page, although the pages themselves often are not optimized for mobile viewing. The “News River” does brand the item with icons indicating its source. The “Photo River” aggregates just that—photos. This galleries we tested seemed to have Getty Images as their common source and included pop-up captioning. They tended to be redundant and lack variety, however. The apps do not have any ads built-in as yet, but there is a cross-selling feature that offers the user of one app additional apps in a similar vein. LMK suggests that marketers might want to align themselves with a specific topic and sponsor the app, however. The LMK apps are an interesting attempt to leverage the limitations of the mobile platform to deliver .jpg) nano-targeted content that appeals to a personal passion. In that sense the apps map well against the gestalt of mobile. People have a personal and intimate relationship with their phones, as evidenced by the early trend of customizing devices through skins, wallpapers and ringtones. In a sense, the next wave of smartphone use can be just as personalized, but with content as the distinguishing element on people’s decks. At heart, the LMK model is a gussied up and glorified RSS or blog feed for mobile. That is a great model for minimizing overhead and efficiently satisfying the passions of select audiences. While the content model has an appeal for the relevant niche audiences, the real challenge is having these apps find that audience in a sea of 130,000-plus mobile apps. The nano-content strategy has worked online in large part because content aggregators are highly visible to search engines, which help researchers on a favorite topic find these fan sites and aggregators. AOL, for instance, built a new niche content model largely because its massive portal and search engines could push interested users into these new brands. On mobile, especially in the app environment, search is neither a reflex for users nor is it a path into app content. And there are no all-powerful content portals that can funnel eyeballs to grow new brands. There is very little cross-linking among mobile sites and apps that would make discovery of new sources easy. Ultimately, a nano-niche content model is going to have to find or make a distribution system that can match these apps to their prospective audiences. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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