Mobile strategy. It’s one of those line-items you put on your strategic planning to-do list each year. But invariably it gets bumped off the planning radar. Too hard. Space evolving too quickly. Too expensive.

We tackled it this year.

The first question we asked ourselves is what client (ie, handset) to optimise for?

There’s only one answer here and it begins with an i. As in iPhone.

The iPhone is a seam in the mobile fabric as it enables real online experiences and ties in with Apple’s micropayments model. So finally the promise of mobile can be unlocked.

The second question: build a stylesheet-optimised view of your site or engineer an application?

To me, this is a no brainer, but I’m still hearing lots of people opting for the former. So here’s the differences between the two options, as I see it.

Stylesheet view benefits

• Your site looks a bit better than if viewed natively on the handset

iPhone Application benefits

• Enables micropayments via iTunes
• Opens up new ad and sponsorship inventory
• Enables geo-awareness and geo-targetting
• Opens up Freemium model for content
• Reaches new audiences via App store
• Enables offline usage
• Enables future expansion of the app

It’s a compelling way to expand your business and get learnings on a platform you can’t afford to not be across.

So we received a number of quotes from dedicated iPhone app developers. It’s costly. For a basic application, you’re looking at $30,000+.

So we decided to build our own one, partnering with one of the smartest developers I’ve worked with.

The initial focus was to build an iPhone app for The Roar and Lost At E Minor.  But we engineered it in a way that allows it to be used by other publishers.

Our goal is to offer it to other publishers for a fraction of the price and risk of building it themselves.

The beauty of this approach is that publishers can now get a low risk, high quality and low cost mobile presence immediately.

If you suspect mobile will be core to your firm’s DNA, then this app will be perfect.

Why?

Instead of doing your mobile planning in meetings based on what you think will happen, base your strategy on real life learnings from actual usage.

Our application provides ad serving and reporting. So you can see usage patterns within the app, and tailor your strategic play based on actual usage.

Then when you’ve engineered your application, which has your own IP and is tailored to your audience and content, you can simply provide an update to the app and it seamlessly slips over to your own application code base.

Here’s the other benefit: our app provides a cost effective opportunity to test the mobile space for your company, rather than spending big bucks to have it fail.

I’m a big believer in moving fast (as opposed to failing slow, which like pulling a band-aid, accentuates and prolongs the pain). Get software into production and work out from there what the next step is.  Spend a little, but save a lot.

But the real benefit of the app is that it’s beautiful to use and unleashes your content to a new audience, revenue streams and medium.

A summary list of features for release 1.0

• All content available offline (means it real fast to use and can be used while commuting)
• Loads content over Wifi and Data networks
• User option to disable data load over data carrier (in case they don’t have much bandwidth on their plan)
• Loads images for each article
• Enables a YouTube video for each article if embedded
• View reader comments for each article
• Configurable maximum number of comments per article
• Configurable ordering of comments
• Ability for users to post comments to the website via the app
• Auto-saved user details for posting comments
• Email article links to friends
• View articles by category
• Various branding options
• Integrated advertising management and reporting system
• Configurable Article listings
  - Display image for leading article
  - Display article teaser text
  - Display/Disable category icons
• There’s also a lot of smarts behind the scene which checks for data connections before certain actions, and so on.

In short, we’re really excited to be launching this application for our sites and to offer it to other publishers.

[The applications will be live for download shortly via the iTunes app store.]

Screenshots

So, I’ve been doing a little test by using Microsoft’s new search offering Bing, as my exclusive search engine. There’s been a lot of hype about Bing; so I was interested to see how it stacks up against a service so comprehensive I’ve labelled it our collective brain.

First thoughts are that Bing does the 80% type searches well. Search for your homepage or a standard 80% term and the results are good. It also has some nice bells and whistles; such as thumbnail previews of search results.

But here’s the thing.

Once you get to the 20% type search terms (I guess you’d call this the ‘long tail’ of searches), Bing’s pretty average.

So today I reluctantly booked a cut (haircuts, how I hate thee). This was the search term I used:

tony and guy the junction

(Note, by the way, that there are five words in this phrase. A general pattern emerging in search is a lengthening of search terms being used as people get more ambitious to find the exact result they’re searching for, and/or re-search after a poor initial results page.)

So I ‘binged’ tony and guy the junction.

The results speak for themselves.

Bing’s results
www.myspace.com/flamingodude <— Que?
The Diary Junction Blog <—- heh?
Tony & guy salon Toronto | Yelp <— Ah, no….The Junction, not Toronto.

Bing very nicely copies Google’s search URL structure, so it’s easy to replace bing.com with google.com, and hit enter to see what Google chucks back.

Google’s results
www.toniandguy.com.au/newcastle.html

No need to look further. Perfect.

Ahh…Google. Come here my friend.