Twisted Blog

Announcing PassMob - the easiest way to start engaging your customers using Apple Passbook

Today we are proud to announce PassMob - a new service for companies wishing to take advantage of the marketing opportunities presented by Passbook.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Passbook is a new iPhone application released with iOS6, which allows users to store loyalty cards, coupons, tickets, boarding passes and other forms of mobile payments on the iPhones.

PassMob is a comprehensive set of tools and services which allow companies to start creating and distributing digital Passbook passes in no time. We provide consulting, development and support - from integrating with existing sales support systems, to developing mobile applications and implementing mobile payments.

If you would like to find out more, read about PassMob at http://passmob.net, contact us at passmob@twistedhq.com, or visit us at stand 63 at the Apps World conference in London on October 2-3.

Meet Twisted Logic at Apps World in London!

On Oct 2-3, we will be exhibiting at London’s Apps World - one of the leading global meeting points for players in the mobile industry.

Be sure to visit us as stand 63 if you are interested in mobile application design, development and/or consulting.

We will also be showcasing our newest offering - PassMob, a service which helps companies boost their mobile sales by integrating with PassBook, the new application released with iOS6, which allows users to store loyalty cards, coupons, tickets, boarding passes, and other forms of mobile payment on their iPhones.

See you in London!

What’s new in the new Apple App Store Guidelines?

Among the things announced by Apple at the WWDC were some changes in the App Store Review Guidelines.

Here is a rundown of what’s new:

Added:

2.23 Apps must follow the iOS Data Storage Guidelines or they will be rejected

2.24 Apps that are offered in Newsstand must comply with schedules 1, 2 and 3 of the Developer Program License Agreement or they will be rejected

2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected

11.15 Apps may only use auto renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage) and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected.

Modified:

8.5

Before: Use of protected 3rd party material (trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, otherwise proprietary content) requires a documented rights check which must be provided upon request

After: Apps may not use protected third party material such as trademarks, copyrights, patents or violate 3rd party terms of use. Authorization to use such material must be provided upon request.

22.2

Before: Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations will be rejected

After: Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations or use names or icons similar to other Apps will be rejected

Removed:

8.6 Google Maps and Google Earth images obtained via the Google Maps API can be used within an application if all brand features of the original content remain unaltered and fully visible. Apps that cover up or modify the Google logo or copyright holders identification will be rejected

So in a word, no biggies - mainly updates to reflect new services (or removal thereof) and different wording of some legalese.

On a side note, they also updated a few statistics: the number of developers (from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands) and apps available in the App Store (from 350k to 700k), as well as the size limit for apps downloadable via cellular networks (from 20MB to 50MB).

Perhaps what’s most telling is the removal of the “We don’t need any more Fart apps” clause. I guess that means they’ve run out, so let’s get busy!

Apple’s search engine is called “Siri.” Apple added new tricks to Siri like finding out sports scores and stats. Cute, but not that bad for Google. What is bad is that you can now find a restaurant and make a reservation through Siri. This is a commercial activity that used to flow through Google and the mobile web.

Apple Really Is Going To Try To Kill Google - Business Insider

How to increase sales during one specific hour of a day?

Emart shadowQRcode - (by Hyun-Myung Kim)

The truly great consumer technology companies of the past 25 years have all had one thing in common: they created habits. This is what separates world-changing businesses from the rest. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter are used daily by a high proportion of their users and their products are so compelling that many of us struggle to imagine life before they existed.

Hooking Users In 3 Steps: An Intro to Habit Testing | Nir and Far

Sooner or later others will have your same features. Don’t compete on features

Don’t compete on features « PierG (aka Piergiorgio Grossi)

(via publichell)

iOS 5 captured approximately 75% of all iOS users in the same amount of time it took Gingerbread to get 4% of all Android users. Even more astounding is that 15 weeks after launch iOS 4 was at 70% and iOS 5 was at 60% while Ice Cream Sandwich got to just 1% share at the same age.

Developers Love iOS for A Lot of Reasons, This is One.

Turns out they had good reason to turn me down flat. TestFlight was in the process of being acquired by Burstly.

Burstly Quietly Acquires TestFlight And Secretly Builds TestFlight Live | PandoDaily

Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.

Nearly half of American adults are smartphone owners | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

Business apps were the fastest growing section in the Apple App Store from 2009 to 2010, up 186%. That growth remains strong and more development studios and large corporations, like IBM, are offering solutions for enterprise deployment.

Infographic: The Growth of Enterprise Mobility

There are various ways to try to mitigate this risk. One of the more extreme calls for all development to be performed by pairs of programmers: two coders at one keyboard, at all times, with almost no exceptions. The idea (to oversimplify a bit) is that a second mind will sanity-check every bad idea and support every good one, so you — counterintuitively — wind up with higher per-programmer productivity. Legendary development shops like San Francisco’s Pivotal Labs and Toronto’s Xtreme Labs(1) have adopted a 100 percent pair programming mindset, with considerable success. Great! Problem solved, right? …Not so fast.

Pair Programming Considered Harmful? | TechCrunch

You sometimes hear it said that newspapers are dead. Now, $20 billion is the kind of “dead” most people would trade their lives for. You never hear anybody say “bars and nightclubs are dead!” when in fact that industry’s current revenue amounts to an identical $20 billion.

The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic

Many years ago, advertising legend David Ogilvy commissioned research into the use of images. He wanted to be sure that when he wrote ads, the images in them would increase response rates. The prevailing wisdom was that any kind of image would attract attention, and therefore get people reading. But Ogilvy wasn’t so sure. What he discovered from testing various kinds and placements of images was quite different to the popular opinion of designers—then and now: Images can reduce readership.

The Shocking Truth About How Web Graphics Affect Conversions

Of course software doesn’t work this way. Software isn’t just the lines of code or bytes in the executable. It is the logic, thought, and personality of everyone who contributed to its creation. What is saved in the source code is less important than what is stored in the brains of the people who wrote it.

Software is People | Battle Hardened