The new iPhone news app for The Irish Times, launched last Saturday, heralds the beginning of application development for the newspaper.

On Friday, the newspaper is to launch a second app, for one of its weekly supplements, The Ticket.
Paul Farrell, Commercial Director, The Irish Times, told Prosperity Digital Ezine that from an Irish Times point of view app development will be a consistent focus with where the newspaper goes with its content offerings and connecting with its readers.
“In terms of mobile, no differently than the web, we will have a cycle of development on key areas and will be constantly looking at ways to enhance that.”
The Irish Times application for the iPhone was launched on Saturday and has been number one in the Irish App Store since launch day. Unlike the news app, which costs €1.59, The Ticket app due to launch on Friday, will be free. “The Ticket app is a sponsored app which we have worked in collaboration with Vodafone on.”
Vodafone has covered the cost of development and sponsorship of the app, and explained Farrell, it’s another model developing in the apps arena. The news app, he says, is one of the first media apps to have advertising as well as subscription revenue.
“As a traditional newspaper we obviously have to be very clever in how we sell and work with our advertisers. Now our print salespeople are selling online and mobile advertising. The apps idea came from a conversation about a print campaign to launch the iPhone for Vodafone. We are now as an organisation selling things that we never even contemplated selling 6-12 months ago.”
Farrell added that as the organisation produces so much content, it is open to good ideas from commercial partners around content. “If there’s ways to enhance that experience, connect with readers and generate commercial value we’re very much open to that.”
According to Farrell, The Irish Times had been looking at developing an app through the latter half of 2009, with a view to launching in Q2 of 2010. “We’d obviously been tracking where our traffic was coming from online, in terms of how many people were coming in via mobile, and how many were coming in from an iPhone. We obviously saw the growth in the iPhone proportion of that traffic,” he said.
The iPad, which yet has to hit Irish shores, will be taken into consideration in future development plans. Other plans include releasing updated apps, and areas such as sports, special events and business. The timing of the launch of the app has worked well, with the recent entry of Vodafone, sponsor of The Ticket app, into the iPhone market resulting in a lot more app-hungry iPhone users.

A biodegradable iPhone case which has been designed by Dublin-based company is to contribute to maintaining jobs in the north west of the country.

Confirmed orders for one million units of the Jivo LEAF could be contributing to saving a few jobs in Ireland where it is being manufactured and packaged. The JIVO Leaf was designed by Eva Grundy, design and marketing manager with TNS Distribution and JIVO Technology

The thinking process for the product started before Christmas, explains Grundy, and already a number of the products have been manufactured, taking just two minutes apiece.

They biodegrade after five years (once put into a biodegrable bin for example). “They do not melt in your hand,” explains Grundy.

The founders of JIVO, John McHugh and Ivan Eustace, saw a gap in the market for this product considering people replace their Apple cases often, for example if they scratch or they just want a new look.

“The Jivo packaging is all recyclable and the thought was it would be great to make a plastic case as eco friendly as their packaging,” says Grundy.

The assumption was it would be expensive to make. “We were thinking it would be great if we could make it here because if it’s going to be biodegradable and eco friendly you still have to ship it in from the Far East and then with its carbon footprint it defeats the whole purpose.”

The directors found a pharmaceutical injection mould company in the north west which they discovered could make a bio-degradable product – at a price that would still make the product affordable to consumers. The units take about 2 minutes apiece to make and have to be put on and taken off the mould by hand – not by a machine. The packaging had to also be designed to be recyclable and have no glue, varnish or plastic and is also being printed here.

“Everything is being done in Ireland – designed here, manufactured here. When it’s been shipped from here around Europe it has a lower carbon footprint and we can still all do it for €19.99. You would presume something like that would be more expensive and that we couldn’t do it all in Ireland.”

It is available online to buy and it still has to be confirmed which of the large mobile retailers will get exclusivity on it. Naturally, JIVO hopes to expand the range to other cases such as iPod and iPod Nano cases, maybe even the iPad – and all in Ireland.

Grundy hopes it will encourage other companies to have to look around at home to manufacture items here.

Fancy yourself as a bit of an app developer? Think there are too many iPhone applications and app developers to deal with? Believe that Google’s new Nexus One phone will be an iPhone killer?

Maybe it’s time to think back to the phone manufacturer responsible for filling every household in Ireland with 10 or 15 of their phone chargers. Yes, we’re talking about Nokia.
Nokia is holding a developer open day tomorrow, Wednesday, 13 January 2010, in Dublin. The Ovi Developer Open Day is sponsored by Forum Nokia and Nokia Ireland and invites developers, bloggers and other content creators along to learn about Ovi Store opportunities – Ovi being the name of its Nokia-specific application store.

Running from 4pm to 8pm at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8, the event will give interested parties the opportunity to network with Forum Nokia and Nokia Ireland teams.

A highlight of the evening for developers will be details of a USD$10 million grant programme for Flash mobile developers, the Open Screen Project.

Also on the agenda are developing for Ovi Store, Forum Nokia tools, developer programs, support and a market overview and details of opportunities with Nokia Ireland.
Interested? Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Click here to register for the event: http://short.ie/ovi

This new app is definitely the stuff of science fiction – it overlays the normal world with data in kind of the same way Arnie saw the World in the Terminator movies. As of now, Layar is available for the T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones in Android Market for the Netherlands (Other countries will be added later), while support for other platforms, including the iPhone 3GS, is coming later.

Tess - Prosperity.ie

Google’s mobile operating system, Android, competes in the smartphone market with operating systems such as Apple’s iPhone OS, Nokia’s Symbian, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, but chances are that Android is going to become the standard mobile phone software.

One of the major incentives for Handset manufacturers is that Google’s Android operating system is free. This significantly reduces the cost to the manufacturers and is likely to ensure that Android will sweep the market. It hasn’t happened yet – so far, HTC and Samsung are the only manufacturers with Android phones in development. But just like wave machines and electric cars, Android is going to soon be a fact of life.

Android is based on the Linux platform and is completely open source. Developers can easily make applications for Android or make amendments to existing bundled applications. This should ensure that the Android system will eventually offer numerous brilliant and powerful apps.

Google is exercising 20/20 foresight in bringing Android to market. The dogs on the street have been hailing mobile as the killer platform of the future. Well the future is now. No longer do we see our mobiles as a device for purely making calls or texting. Now we have a device which we drift to in moments of boredom, to check mail, stocks, weather, browse the web, or play games.

Google will now be able to spend all day with us; it will be our constant companion. Its advertising will piggy back onto its applications. Through constant access to Gmail or other Google apps, Google ads will be able to insinuate themselves into our consciousness at any time of the day. This is no Faustian pact – it is a small price to pay for what promises to be a life enhancing mobile operating system.

Jim Murray – Prosperity