Why we chose the iPhone vs. Android for our app

Developing a mobile application is the number one goal of almost all startups these days. Without it you're just not sexy enough. DishClips is no exception. In fact, being that DishClips is the Social Video Guide for Restaurant Dishes, our application is really a mobile application.

Trouble is, contrary to popular belief, mobile applications cost a lot of money to produce. There's the server side components and API, the graphics, sounds, UI design, UI programming, testing, marketing and hundreds of hours of constant pivoting is required to produce a worthy mobile application that has any social ties. At a minimum, you're looking at $15k + 3 months of time to get your first iteration released to the market. And that doesn't including any marketing costs. Also worth noting, is that the cost of developing an iPhone app and an Android app is nearly the same as developing two different applications. That is to say there isn't much gained in the way of leveraging one towards the other. So while developing an iPhone app might cost you $15k, developing on both platforms will likely cost close to $30k.

The fact that most startups are cash strapped not withstanding, it doesn't make much sense to develop the app for both platforms at the same time. The two platforms have different audiences and different advantages. Additionally, the lessons learned while developing on one platform can be leveraged when developing for the second platform. An advantage that is lost if you're developing for both platforms simultaneously. It is not surprising then that most applications are developed for one platform first and then for the other.

So how do you make the decision on which to develop for first? Here's a list of things we had to consider and so can you.

1) Who is our audience? As a social video guide to restaurant dishes we're targeting the 20-45 crowd in major metropolitan areas with dispensable income who can afford to eat out several times a week. As it turns out the cross section of this population with the iPone-Owner world is over 75% vs. 45% for Android users. This made our choice a lot easier.

2) What does your app have to be good at? For instance, our app has to be great at video capture and geo-location. The video capture quality of the iPhone 4S is consistently great. On Android devices however, depending on the device the experience may vary. It will likely take several days of quality testing on multiple devices to ensure the same quality on an Android device as it does on an iPhone device when it comes to video capture. Precious times that startups like DishClips just can't afford.

3) What is your competition doing? Being a startup has lots of great advantages. Being small is one of them. The big competition in our market segment like Yelp does lots of research on our behalf. We looked at several foodie applications on both iPhone and Android before making our final decision. It turns out that the adoption rate of iPhone apps within foodies is far greater than that of Android apps in the same localities within the United States.

Our application is currently in it's second beta release and we're super excited about it's upcoming release in early August 2012. We've learned so many things while developing our application that have changed the original design tremendously. I cannot imagine the additional costs we would have had if we were making all these changes on two separate development platforms. We're also learning that what will work on the iPhone seldom works the same on Android so the UI design elements will have to be completely redesigned for our Android application which we're currently wire-framing. I'll leave the differences between the two for another post.

Instant Ubiquitous Access to Actionable Information

Sounds great right? I mean who would argue that instant access to information is a bad thing? Some might even think we have that now. What with smartphones permanently attached to our hands we're a living, breathing encyclopedia of information. But what is information anyway? At the heart of it there are two types of information. Actionable and In-actionable (I know that's not a real word).

The Internet is filled with in-actionable information. That is information, that once understood, doesn't prompt any new action. Like the air-speed velocity of an African swallow. It might be interesting, but it's not quite actionable. It certainly is something that can be researched and discovered almost instantly.

And example of actionable information might be the supply and demand information for heating oil in the Southern California region for the past three months. Now if I knew that information I might be able to make some real decisions. There are dozens of companies (Mostly startups) working on just that kind of information delivery today. And while that sounds awesome, I invite you to consider that it's eventually not very good for business.

For years, retailers have depended on the inequity of information on the part of the buyer to make a profits. I remember years ago when I was in high school and I went out to buy what every high-schooler wanted at the time. A booming car stereo. I went to the local Good Guys (or Circuit City) or whatever other thing it was called that's not in business any more. The guy behind the counter rattled off a bunch of terms like "Cross-over", "EQ", and "highs, mids, and lows" then pointed me over to an Alpine unit that cost $400. At that point, in 1993, he was my entire source of knowledge. There was really no other way I could find out more information about that unit and how well it compared to other units unless I waited for Car Audio Magazine to do a comparison story on it. And even then I'd have to wonder if it was a sponsored advertorial or a real story. What's more is, I really had no way of finding out if I was being charged a fair price for the unit or not. For all I knew the store 6 blocks away was selling the same unit for $200. So in 1993, or for that matter the thousands of years that proceeded 2008(ish), the retail world depended on this inequity of information to make money. Retailers could literally charge 1000% on most products without ever being questioned and consumers had no way of ever finding out if they'd be had. This is how retail has worked for thousands of years.

Last week I walked into a Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a fabric steamer for our green screen. There were 6 models on the shelf. I scanned all the UPC codes on each one and within seconds read dozens of reviews on each product and determine which was the right unit for me. What's more is I compared prices with several thousand other retailers around the country and decided that I was getting a fair price for the steamer I picked up. Bed Bath and Beyond was not able to make more than just a few percent profit on this bulky unit that takes up several feet of shelf space. Good for me, bad for them.

This phenomenon is very similar to what occurred in the late 1800s with the advent of the Telegraph. Prior to the Telegraph, speedy horsemen and train conductors would deliver information on pricing and trends from town to town to secure large profits on commodities. If the price of gold or cattle had gone down by 20% for example, the first vendor that had access to that information in a city could afford to lower his prices in anticipation of a new and cheaper shipment. He could potentially beat the competition by days. When the Telegraph first was introduced to the market place, the inequity of information widened and retailers had to learn to be more agile and update their information sources. It took decades for world to catch up to this new method of communication. In the mean time some extreme fortunes were made on day old information. Some today liken it to knowing the lottery numbers, days before they're announced. Imagine if you, in California, know something about the price of gold days before anyone else did.

Consider that what I was able to do with my iPhone is still not available to more than 70% of the US population. What will become of retail when there's always some vendor, somewhere across the country that's willing to make only pennies on the sale of the same product? You guessed it, they can't survive.

Many brands are keenly aware of this phenomenon and are putting in measures to correct for it. LuluLemon, Oakley, and Apple for example have retail stores of their own and fix prices on their branded products so the consumer is always aware and confident of the pricing they're getting.

This ever narrowing information gap applies to far more than retail however. It applies to everything. If you had real-time, actionable information about every company listed on the NYSE for example, you might make some better trades. But if everyone had the same information instantly, what would happen? Mind you I'm not talking about news, I'm talking about actionable, decision-ready information. For instance, imagine a decision support system that would determine the price of Oranges based on thousands of metrics and could also provide you with actual demand information world wide, minute by minute. Now imagine that information was available to everyone. How difficult would it be to make money trading Oranges then?

It is difficult to imagine that the information gap can get so narrow. But who would have thought ten years ago that I, the consumer, would be able to stand inside a store, and find out the prices for thousands of competing products and vendors within seconds and make actionable decision about my purchase?

Online shopping engines like Amazon will eventually eradicate all retailers. But what will become of the marketplace that runs capitalism when the information gap collapses? Will the spirit of competition be enough to win? Only time will tell.

How I would save Research In Motion (RIMM)

Every week there's news of some new device RIM is coming out with that's going to be a supposed game changer. Well I have some news for the stockholders and executives at RIM. The device is NOT the problem. The OS is. It has nothing to do with how fancy your new device is anymore. I don't care if you get a Giga-Pixel camera, and a fold-able 32" OLED display squeezed into a phone that has a keyboard attached to it. If you can't motivate developers to develop new applications for your platform then you're dead on arrival. Learning a new development toolkit is a real commitment for us developers. We have to do tons of reading and debugging before we can get that very first app to even open a window. And when we finally create an app, we'd like to be ensured that there's a real mechanism for distribution and an actual audience for it. In short, RIM needs to adopt Android as it's operating system and it needs to do so immediately.

The next Black-Droid or Driod-Berry must run the Android operating system and it must also have a dozen native apps for the avid BB-addict. Features like an alert light, and BBM need to be app driven and ready at first boot. The form factor of the device can still resemble whatever it is that BB-lovers love so much about this relic of a company, but the innards need to support the Android operating system.

I hear analysts on CNBC talk ad nauseam about the many patents RIM still holds and how the company still has some inherent value. Really?? That's like saying Sony is worth something because they hold the patent to the VCR. Patents are only worth something if they're still relevant. In the new mobile world, RIM patents hold very little value other than those that have direct enterprise application.

So what's the plan RIM execs? Doird or Bust!

Space unlimited - The end of an age old tradition

The question of property ownership reaches back to the ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who held different opinions on the subject. Plato thought private property created divisive inequalities, while Aristotle felt private property enabled people to receive the full benefit of their labor. Whatever the case might be, the concept of property is central to the very ideas of ownership, wealth, and capitalism. After all, money is not actual property and it's value is only transparent. How many times have you heard your parents talking and utter a phrase like "...and that was in 1965 dollars, which is like a million dollars today..."? Real property however, be it gold or real estate has always been thought to "hold value" if not "increase in value". Value however is like money itself a variable concept. The value of something is only determined by what people who don't own it are willing to pay for it. The perfect example is the price of gold. Gold is no more rare or useful that it was five years ago but it's price has risen from $600 to $1600 (per oz.) in that time.

Why is that you ask? Short answer: Because people are willing to pay more for it and there is a limited supply of it. But what does this all mean for commercial real estate? Let's take a poll: what do the following businesses have in common?

• Record stores
• Video stores
• Book stores
• Video arcades stores

Yes, they've all been replace by their online equivalent. What's more is, it hasn't fully happened yet, but you can very likely add the following to the list:

• Office supply stores
• Electronics stores
• Other specialty/hobby/gaming stores
• Personal hygiene supply stores

And that will basically leave you with a large number of grocery stores, eateries, and clothing stores. Even the clothing outlets are mostly online now. They're becoming mostly a place where you can try things on then shop online for them.

And then the coup de grâce to the commercial real estate market is the advent of virtual private networks that allow employees to mostly work from home, eliminating the need for billions of square feet of office space around the world. 

So basically now we're down to food places, and living places. What is going to fill the void left behind in commercial real estate? Sure, there will be tons of warehouses, call centers, and server farms, but those can basically be anywhere now. With ever increasing supply and little demand for commercial space, unless a big game-changer enters the market with a large demand for space, I predict a lot of conversions of commercial into residential real estate, along with a flood of bankruptcies and foreclosures in the next 10-20 years. 

As usual, I'm sure I've taken some wild assumptions and completely missed something somewhere, so I invite you to continue this conversation as I certainly hope I'm wrong.

The new flat

A few years ago, when they could still call guys my age gen-x-ers, Thomas Friedman wrote a book called "The world is flat, a brief history of the 21st century". Well that wasn't really true then but I think it might finally be.

Friedman, was of course aware of the spherical shape of our planet, what he was referring to was the globalized nature of today's economy. With the advent of remote technology, high speed networks, and ubiquitous availability of everything technical, businesses began to hire workers in remote parts of the world with minimal setup and labor costs, small businesses and one man shops were able to compete against giant corporations and in a sense, with this new level playing field, the world started becoming more flat.

But did it? It isn't exactly flat when workers in the U.S. cannot afford to live on the same wages that workers in India can live luxuriously on. Truly flat works both ways. In a truly flat world a worker in India would compete on the same level as a worker in the US. Well, with the booming growth in Indian economy and the devastating loss of jobs in the U.S. one might think there is an eventual break-even point. I believe today I found that break-even point.

Last night I posted a small web-dev gig on a popular virtual worker website I have used dozens of times before. This was a very small project and 5 years ago, when I first used this site, I would have probably paid $10 or so for this work to get done. Last night, I put a cap of $40 for this work which I believe will take about 3-4 hours to complete. That's somewhere between $10-$13/hr. Certainly a respectable wage for the developing world where I expected to get many bids from and where the average annual salary is often on the order of $500!

I posted the project just before mid-night and made sure it was accepted by the site before I went to bed so I could pick my developer in the morning and get the work started. I woke up this morning to a slew of e-mails from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia and China. Naturally excited I began reading. I was shocked to find comments like:

the bid price is very low.....there must be some reasonable amount.

from jaipur, India

Thanks for inviting me on this project. However, I can't accept it in this budget. Sorry.

from Belgrade, Serbia

WHAT?!?!?! Are you kidding me? This is Serbia! Where according to Wikipedia the average salary is only $727. And India where the average salary is $1527. $40 is supposedly 5.5% and 2.6% of their annual salary respectively. And all for only 2-3 hours of time. $40, 5 years ago would have bought me at least 10 hours of work from India and perhaps 20 hours in Serbia. I was ready to give up and double the cap when another e-mail came in with a $40 bid. Excited I clicked on the message and almost fell out of my chair. The bid was from a developer who had completed 150 projects with an average rating of 10 out of 10! and ranked #1,479 out of 352,927 (higher than 99.58% of his peers). That's not what made me nearly lose my seat though. It was the fact that this developer was from Albany, New York. I'm afraid I've used too many exclamation marks in this post already or else I would use a dozen just then.

The implication here is that I can get a 10/10 top 1% developer in the US is cheaper than anyone in India or Serbia. It would appear that the world is now finally flat. I certainly hope we are near that tipping point or close to it. Personally, I hate sending work abroad. Aside from the fact that I'd rather have the dollars stay in the states, I know that I have to spend twice as much of my own time managing the communication with a worker abroad than a worker here. I hope this is a start of a real trend.

Obligatory post

I've been meaning for some time now to organize some of the posts I make "here" and "there". For while I e-mailed an unsolicited list of friends with discussion topics and then I took to Facebook to express some thoughts all the while knowing that the time would come when I would have to create a real blog. Well, here it is. On TanRants, I intend to create conversations that will lead to revelations about

• Health
• Family
• Business
• Finance
• Food and Fun

Not necessarily in that order. As many of you know, the past year of working on DishClips has been a regular roller coaster of highs and lows. Many of my conversations will originate from my daily experiences as we fight the upwardly mobile battle of the "Startup". But I hope that you will engage and suggest new conversation ideas. I will follow this with my first real post.

Thank you for reading and please share, comment, and contribute