I gave a presentation at CocoaSlopes 2013 in Ogden Utah this weekend. It was extremely well received by a wonderful crowd. I thought I’d share the slides with everyone:

Build Businesses Not Apps

The few complaints I received was that it was depressing. My guess is that this came from people who haven’t experienced the App Store yet, those who haven’t had their bubble burst by the hard realities of the Store.

Personally I thought the presentation was hopeful albeit realistic. There is opportunity there for all of us if we just choose to think differently about the problem at hand.

In the early days of the Internet you could build almost anything and make it. Then reality hit with the stock market crash and things had to change. We are at that inflection point now for mobile as well.

I hope I get the chance to give this presentation again. It was a ton of fun to give, albeit somewhat grueling to create.

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All links in the lower right corner give credit to the material source if there was any. In addition I added a slide at the end with credit links to all the images, which I found with Google image search.

Next weekend I’ll be speaking at the CocoaSlopes conference in Ogden, Utah. This is an offshoot of the CocoaConf that tours the nation. CocoaConf is one of the premier Cocoa development conferences around.

Looks like it will be a great cast. If you are available, I hope you will come out and join the fun!

I was in an AT&T Store a week ago activating an iPhone 5 for my wife. We had some time as the staff was busy with other customers. So I wandered around the store. There were all three iPhones on display with the new ones strategically aligned closest to the door, plenty of Android phones, and a couple of Windows Phones.

I noticed something conspicuous. No Blackberry devices. An intern came around to check on me and I mentioned this fact. One of the sales guys at the counter, overhearing our conversation, called out that they had some “in the back.” I commented back that it is hard to sell phones that are “in the back.”

I don’t hold out much hope for BlackBerry. A few weeks ago Fairfax Financial (an insurance company?) agreed to buy it. BlackBerry’s market cap is down to $4 billion, 8% of its high less than five years before. Already rumors are swirling that the price will drop from $9 per share to $7 before the deal closes.

It strikes me that that conversation with the AT&T salesman perfectly reflects the demise of the company. It used to be that BlackBerry phones had the iPhone shelf position, right up front closest to the door so you can see them the moment you walk in. Now the products are in the back. Soon they will be sent back, marked obsolete and eventually destroyed.

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If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend the Globe & Mail article entitled How BlackBerry Blew It: The Inside Story.

Yesterday I linked to a Marco Arment article that referenced David Smith’s podcast Developing Perspective. David Smith (affectionately known as Underscore David Smith because of his Twitter handle) was working on a new service called FeedWrangler when Google announced they were shutting down Reader. His timing was perfect. For $18 per year you can have your RSS feed delivered to most any news reader, including one he wrote, and have an independent developer dedicated to making a better product working on it. I’m happy to pay my $18 per year.

But what David is doing now is really smart. He recently released PodWrangler, a podcasting app. He made some of the features available for free and more paid, but if you subscribe to FeedWrangler you get the entire app for free. I downloaded it this weekend. A very solid first release.

The business thinking here is brilliant. Get your customers locked in and provide those willing to pay an annual fee more value for their money. I hope it works for David. More of us need to find business models that keep us in business.