No, didn’t think so.

The Sweb Development team took this very issue and created a solution for the citizens of San Antonio. Like many cities, the food truck movement has taken off and people are willing and wanting to explore the mobile culinary delights. With that in mind the team decided to focus their efforts on a one day hack event to build a product from the ground up. Now the citizens of San Antonio can use SA Food Truck Finder to find the food trucks in their city and pick the ones they want to try. It was an entire day of coding, designing, marketing ideas, fun, laughter and comraderie.

The end of the day resulted in a functional website and a web app. This allows for users across various platforms to access the app and find their favorite food trucks. Still to come is the iPhone and Android app to give a more native experience depending on the type of phone you have. The idea is to provide access across as many platforms as possible.

If you live in San Antonio or you’re just visiting, try a food truck. They are all over the city as individual trucks or located in parks, all ready to serve you.

Here are some photos of the Sweb team during the hack day. A huge thanks to Vanessa Velazquez who photographed the day’s events. They came out great!

Press Coverage

SA Food Truck Finder on MySA.com

SA Food Truck Finder on KABB Fox 11

SA Food Truck Finder on SA Current

There is a ton of content to choose from on every device and platform…but content does not drive digital marketing like it once did. As people go about their daily lives, they are being bombarded with a deluge of devices, channels and platforms. We all yearn for one simple device that could filter the content to a manageable flow of relevant info.

The creation of one simple device, that will manage this flow, will likely remain elusive. For now, how can marketers help consumers make sense of everything?

With the introduction of smartphones and tablets that integrate GPS to help users locate what’s around them, a term has evolved into what industry experts are calling Social Local Mobile Search (SoLoMo).

What is Social Local Mobile?

Ben Schott, the author of the article SoLoMo, says, “SoLoMo is unique to the mobile device; it doesn’t make sense on the desktop the same way steering columns didn’t fit 19th century horse-drawn carriages. He goes on to say, “And it’s taking form in local discovery. This shuns the search paradigm that ruled the desktop web in favor of pushing things to you. Deals, suggestions or events are pushed based on your check-ins or social activity as you wander across different tiles of the Earth.”

Our context shifts continually during the day: In the morning you might be a mom making breakfast, in the afternoon you are an executive catching up on business news, after work, you are at the gym in a cross-training class. and at night you’re someone looking to get out and have fun with friends. Smart marketing strategies need to combine behavioral – or personal relevance to create an individual digital experience.

A Sensor In Your Pocket: The Future Of Mobile Is User Context

Thomas Husson of Forrester Research, says, “We believe that consumers will “walk through” their own personal Internet experience. What does this mean? Consumers will receive more and more individualized content based on their current context. The Internet will no longer be just a “pull” mechanism, with consumers choosing to access their content in a fixed place; it will become a push-based approach in which information is automatically updated and personalized to match their past behavior and their real-time environment. As the remote control of our daily personal lives, the mobile phone will become both an enabler and recipient of merged physical and digital experiences.”

Do you have a mobile strategy for your business? How are you capitalizing on the social, local, mobile movement?

Image via Wikipedia

Mobile Website or Application?

Which product and service, for which audience, at what cost, and when?

More than 10 billion apps have been downloaded all together since the launch of the Apple App Store. 63 percent of U.S. iPhone owners and 72 percent of European iPhone owners access the mobile Internet on a daily basis, and more than half of European consumers and 60 percent of U.S. consumers who download an app at least monthly and access the Internet via their mobile phones at least daily, according to the article,” according to an article titled Why The Mobile Web Versus App Debate Is Irrelevant from Moconews.net.

Business owners considering designing and developing mobile applications for their consumers must decide on their development priorities. Heavy app users are also heavy mobile web users, yet, the majority of consumers don’t own a smartphone and don’t access app stores; they are more likely to access the Internet from their mobile phones. There are fewer barriers accessing the web than downloading an app, even for smartphone owners.

Mobile web and apps offer different benefits and serve different audiences. For now, mobile apps make the most of smartphone features because they interface more in-depth and greater scope with the unique features of smart mobile devices that use an operating system. However, mobile websites are more cost effective and reach a broader audience.

Both technologies will improve over time but will continue to coexist.

Today, apps seem to be more about emotions wanting a ”shiny new app” than strategic decisions. Competitors have an app at the App Store, so companies want an app as well, although it may have been smarter to choose a mobile web app.

Magaly Chocano, CEO of Sweb Development says,” We work closely with clients to discover and define what their actual digital marketing goals are. Sometimes a native app is perfect for their product or idea, but many times a mobile presence is what would be most appropriate for them and in that case a mobile website is the answer.”

Improved browsing technologies will force apps to evolve. In the future, apps will provide richer experiences by improving their inherent use of context, and expand into new areas. Browsers and native apps will be work in tandem, each dependent on the other. Customers will expect a seamless, cross-channel user experience.

Here’s a sample of our digital capabilities along with some of the work we’ve done with some amazing partners.

None of us walk into an event and make friends just by saying hello and sharing what we do. In the real world relationships take time and tending to. The same rules apply to online relationship building, except you can do this on a larger scale.

Sweb Development had the opportunity to present key ingredients to a successful social engagement plan by sharing the importance of a strategy and the tactics involved in achieving those goals. Measurement is required to identify successes and failures, adjustments are made, and the process is ongoing.

The team at ACCION Texas were gracious to have us return for another round of great discussion with business owners from various industries all seeking guidance on social engagement and how it can work for them. Below is our presentation and let us know some of the things you’re doing to build a strong online presence for yourself.

Photo credit M i x y

5. The Exponential Growth of Smartphone Users and M-Commerce

With US smartphone penetration set to reach 50% by summer 2012, the numbers make it imperative for businesses to move into the mobile arena. By 2015, the number of worldwide smartphone users is expected to hit 1.2 billion. Now, businesses can reach record numbers of customers through traditional channels, as well as in places they normally wouldn’t have access. With the mobile market growing such as it is, users are making more purchases via their devices creating a boom in the m-commerce industry.

4. The Ability to Distribute Incentives

Mobile platforms are a great way to incentivize purchases, visits and other behaviors. What better time to ask a potential customer to try your restaurant than around lunchtime when they are at work? Think of an app for a political campaign that alerts a user on voting day, revealing the closest locations where she can cast their ballot.

According Business 2 Community, in an article titled 3 Reasons Mobile Apps Are the Future of Mobile Marketing, “Mobile Dependence Day conducted in June 2011, 31% of US smartphone owners completing a purchase a result of mobile marketing did so through usage of an app.”

3. Your Website Analytics Say So

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there are 4.6 billion mobile subscribers around the world and as they expected the number of mobile cellular subscriptions globally reached five billion in 2010 and continues to climb. With current growth rates, web access by people on the move is likely to exceed web access from desktop computers within the next five years.

This means that mobile phones have become the most universal communication device in human history. This also means that the website owners around the world need to think about what this means for their customers, audience, and websites.

2. Your Target Demographic Is The Smartphone Demographic

Pew Internet and American Life Project said that 50% of all U.S. adults have apps on their cellphones either coming from downloads or pre-loads by the carriers. Nielsen says that 43% of all U.S. adults have smartphones and that 62% of adults aged 25-44 have smartphones. This all brings us to a question all mobile developers should be asking themselves: Who are you developing for?

The smartphone sweet spot, and by extrapolation, the target for mobile developers looking to make money, is the adult market of college educated, urban and suburban males. We see this through Pew’s survey results. Games, social networking and news are the top apps that people spend time with. A study by analytics firm Flurry shows that 25-34 males spend the most time with freemium games and make the most transactions.

1. Your Customers Are Asking For It!

There’s a problem to solve, you can provide additional value for your customers. Apps are not an ideal way to attract new customers – but mainly to provide additional value to customers gained through other means.

While the reason for creating them may be similar, before you engage in a mobile development project, you
need to ask yourself some key questions.

• What business need will the mobile application serve?
• What methods will the development team use?
• Can your infrastructure handle success?
• Does your team understand more than just development?
• What does the user really want?

Smartphones have already become an integral part of our daily lives, and it’s clear that tablets have taken hold as the next evolution in mobile.

Photo Credit – joe.ross

On February 9, 2012, Sweb Development will play host to another “Lunch & Learn” session focusing on “Keeping Your Digital Resolutions for 2012.” Whether you’re in  marketing, public relations, digital creation, interactive media, account management, or any related industry, we invite you to come join us. Share your experiences and thoughts on the topic. We’ll be focusing on a few things we know you’ve encountered in your own business and working with your own clients.

If you can join us, be sure to join us by signing up here, and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the Ustream link as we get closer to the date.

We hope you’ll join us!

The mobile industry is booming and many are thinking of ways to create profit from a mobile app. Creating mobile apps is just one aspect of Sweb Developments capabilities, but we often get calls from individuals that have great ideas and the dream to make lots of money. We hear things like, “If only “X” amount of people buy my app, I’ll be set,” or “There’s billions of people around the world, I just need “X” percentage to buy the app and it’ll be great.” If only things were that easy.

Free apps still dominate the majority of apps on the market. There’s a fair share of paid apps that bring a great amount of value to users, but most will seek out a free alternative before opening their wallet. One of the things we advise our clients on is the importace of value to the user. The value of an app and the information within needs to be something users in a particular market need and cannot get anywhere else. More often than not, with the expanse of the internet growing daily, that’s becoming a harder thing to do. Are there alternatives?

Freemium over Premium

In the past few years we’ve seen freemium models crop up. The freemium model establishes a foundation with access to a free app with content inside that users find interesting. The idea is to give a little and then rely on in-app purchases to increase the value of the app over time to the user. Game apps provide excellent freemium models, but more serious apps are also taking notice. Say for example you’re a public speaker or an instructor of some sort. Your app has value as a stand alone free app for those seeking the information  you’re providing, but for a little extra charge they can download videos of your engagements, documents, or components of the app that increase the value and interest of the user.

According to a Mobile Entertainment article, In-app Purchases Will Be 64% of all Market Value by 2015, they quote IHS Screen Digest in stating that “in-app purchases contributed 39 percent of all app revenue in 2011, with a total haul of $970 million.” That’s a hefty number that’s close to being half of the mobile market revenue. What’s more interesting is that with the going trend of in-app purchases, 2015 is going to be a big year for in-app purchases across all markets.

To further support the in-app purchase strategy, IHS Screen Digest encourages app owners that “best way to make money in the smartphone apps market is to give the apps away for free-and and then generate revenue on subsequent sales of in-app purchases,” from an article in Mobile Marketing Watch. Of note though, the path to riches is not always the same, so when as your app is being developed, make sure you work with the team closely and be sure you’ve done the research.

So while a mobile app may be the path to the riches you seek, take some time to think of the value you provide and if the users in your target market would pay for the continuing updates that in-app purchases would require.

Photo Credit, Jorge Quinteros

Related articles

• Mobile in-game purchases to hit $4.8B by 2016 (gigaom.com)
• Make Money with Mobile Apps (joelcomm.com)

ActionCampSA 2011, focusing on education nonprofits on new media and marketing techniques, brought together NPO’s of all types to share, learn, talk, and grow with one another. Sweb’s Online Marketing Account Coordinator, Luis Sandoval, who is well versed in social marketing, presented a Podcasting 101 session for all the nonprofits. Throughout the day, others, from around the city, shared their expertise to prompt and promote new ways for these organizations to find funding, thank donors, increase awareness, and encourage volunteers.

There was a huge need from from the attendees to have mobile opportunities explained to them. It’s a new frontier for many of these nonprofits who are just now getting a grasp on the power of social media. Many are wary of these new techniques, relying on “what we’ve always done.” The importance of an event like ActionCampSA is that we bring these organizations together so they not only hear some great leaders in various professions speak, but also see what other nonprofits are doing in this digital space. There still a huge mountain to climb, but some great strides were made and our office looks forward to supporting the efforts of nonprofits and encouraging them to grasp the mobile space and conquer it.

Below is what has been put together by one of the organizers on Storify. You can find the Storify for the rest of the conference presenters for ActionCampSA 2011.