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When All Roads Lead to ‘Mobile’

January 4th, 2012

A decade ago there were many new technology areas that seemed roughly as promising. And in fairness, the promise of ‘mobile’ was actually more risky, even more doubtful because of the vast expenses involved in ’3G’ technology. There were some pundits and forecasters who even suggested 3G would bankrupt the whole mobile industry.

Since then mobile grew and boy did it grow. Over the past decade mobile was the fastest-growing major industry on the planet and by year 2009 mobile passed the 1 Trillion dollar level in annual income, becoming one of the biggest industries on the planet. So to be clear, mobile today is far bigger than broadcast media (television and radio combined) and far bigger than the computer and IT industry, and far bigger than music, movies, videogaming, the print industry (magazines, books and newspapers) etc etc etc. Mobile accounts for about 2% of the total GDP of the planet, and sits with a rare few other giant global industries like the automobile industry, housing/construction, food, military spending, banking etc. But mobile, as an industry, is only 32 years old today (commercially launched in the autumn of 1979 in Japan) and among industries that are worth more than one Trillion dollars, mobile was by far the fastest-growing industry to reach that milestone ever. We have witnessed the birth of the fastest-growing industry ever seen by humankind. Thats pretty dazzling, isn’t it. And no wonder we see such astonishing success stories in mobile as Apple and Google and Angry Birds.

MEGATRENDS CONVERGING

But that was the past. What about the now, leading into the future? I put it to you, visitors to this blog, that we are facing a moment in time, that has more giant industries converging into one point, than ever before. So I am not talking about the evolution of mobile ‘from the inside’ of mobile. I mean looking at others from the outside of mobile.

Mobile cannibalized voice calls from the fixed landline telecoms business. Today if you telephone someone, in 5 cases out of 6, the phone that answers will be a mobile phone, not a landline phone. Similarly email just celebrated 40 years of age last year. Mobile messaging entered consumer use in Finland only 18 years ago and is already far larger than email. SMS text messaging, the world’s biggest data service has 3 times more users than email (SMS has 7 times more users than Facebook). But that was still ‘communication’ and if we offer mobile communication, it is quite reasonable that the utility of a mobile phone or mobile messaging device will soon drive the mobile side to dominate communications. What of non-communication uses of mobile?

The content services on mobile started in Finland in 1998 with the advent of the first downloadable ringingtone. We’ve seen basic ringing tones outsell MP3 files in digital downloads. We’ve seen subscription music services appear on mobile starting with ringback tones which are now bigger in revenues than global iTunes music sales. The second big area was gaming (remember the Snake?”). The World’s biggest videogaming company is EA Electronic Arts. Already in 2007, its CEO John Riccitello said that mobile devices help videogaming grow. We’ve since seen the iPhone become the world’s widest-reaching gaming playtform with more gaming users than the Playstation platforms, or Xbox or Nintendo gaming devices (according to Morgan Stanley). Sony brought its Walkman brand to musicphones and Apple admitted that it had to create the iPhone because the musicphones like Sony’s Walkman phones were cannibalizing iPod sales.

What of television and radio? The BBC’s (past) Managing General Greg Dyke said that in the future all broadcast content will be available on mobile phones. Now we hear not only that people watch full episodes and even full movies on the tiny screens of their phones, we now have premium ‘voice’ services that deliver niche radio services, via the mobile phone to specialized groups and smaller audiences. In India for example the radio services (often live Cricket games and Bollywood music) delivered via cellular phone networks generate more money than the total radio broadcasting industry according to the Economist in 2010.

The PC industry? The world’s first smartphone was the Nokia Communicator and while early on most PC executives were dismissive of the smartphone as supposedly being ‘a real computer’. That story changed when they saw Apple’s iPhone and since all big 5 computer makers, HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba have accepted that a smartphone is indeed a true computer. Last year 2011 was the first year when more smartphones were sold than all types of personal computers combined (including desktops, laptops and even the tablet PCs like the iPad). Apple is the world’s largest computer maker if we count all of its computer products including the iPhone.

On the internet side, the world’s first full ‘real’ internet service on mobile was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo in 1999, so the ‘mobile internet’ is only 12 years old. But already today there are more people accessing internet services from their mobile phones than using personal computers. Google has been saying for five years now that the future of the internet is mobile. That is also what Yahoo! has been saying for many years now.

What of news? The first mobile phone based news service was introduced in Finland by the Tampere-based newspaper Aamulehti in 1995, via SMS text messaging. It took a while, but in 2011 the Associated Press Managing Editors’ conference proclaimed that not only was mobile the future of news, but that while news outlets had failed to make money through the internet, they would be able to make money on mobile. So newspaper editors see that mobile is indeed a different medium compared to the internet (incidentially, that was the theme of my sixth book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media) but that it is easier to make money on mobile, than to make money on the internet.

Advertising arrived to mobile phones in 2000 with MainosTV3 of Finland offering free newsheadlines sponsored by advertising, via SMS. The advertising world moved slowly to mobile but after the iPhone we have seen the global mobile ad spending roughly-speaking doubling annually for now three years straight. And now we hear the endorsements. Omnicom is the world’s biggest ad agency group, and its largest arm is BDDO. The CEO of BDDO, Andrew Robertson said in 2011 “We are rapidly getting to the point where the single most important medium that people have is their wireless device. It’s with them every single moment of the day. Its genuinely the convergence box that everyone has been talking about for so many years.” That is quite a powerful endorsement of the advertising opportunities in mobile. But what of the advertisers? Ford became the first global advertiser to say that they will include mobile into every campaign they will run in the future. They said so in 2011. And Coca Cola says the way to do mobile adverising is to follow Coca Cola’s 70:20:10 rule, 70% of the money goes to mobile messaging, 20% to the mobile internet and only 10% to smartphone apps. That is well in line with US food giant, Kraft, whose mobile marketing strategy is built on ‘No Phone Left Behind.’

I could go on and on and on with the endorsements of mobile, but I will end with one more giant industry – credit cards. Visa said in 2011 that the future of payments is mobile. Yes, we’ve had cheques and plastic money in credit cards and bank debit cards, and contactless payments like Oyster and Octopus cards, and e-money like Paypal. But none of those killed cash. Mobile money was invented in Finland in 1999 when Coca Cola introduced the world’s first vending machines that could be operated with payments from premium SMS. Soon Smart in the the Philippines launched a full mobile banking and payments system around SMS and the world’s first full mobile wallet launched in Japan on NTT DoCoMo using NFC Near Field Communication. Today one in five Japanese consumers use the DoCoMo system called Osaifu Keitai and branded ‘FeliCa’.

But yes, returning to Visa’s proclamation? Sweden was the first country to start the discussions in 2010 about the end of cash – as Sweden already has nationwide payments working on mobile and every Swede has a mobile phone. Kenya, Somaliland, Estonia, South Korea and many other countries are in the race to be the first to eliminate cash and replace it with mobile money. The Dutch merchants association is lobbying the Netherlands government to allow shopkeepers to stop accepting cash payments in Euro. But the first country to give a definite date was Turkey, who said in 2011 that by 2025 Turkey will end the manufacturing of cash. Wow. After thousands of years of cash, we will live to see the end of cash, and Turkey may well become the first cash-less country in the world.

So we have giant industries, who all see the future of their worlds heading to mobile. What of other trends?There is a giant global trend called ‘social networking’ which goes far beyond commerce – just witness last year’s Arabic Spring and the role of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to the revolutions. This blog was launched to celebrate the concept of ‘Communities Dominate’ with the signature book of this blog (my fourth) ie Communities Dominate Brands that we wrote with Alan Moore in 2005. We said social networking was the biggest change in the past 100 years. Others have put it in equally dramatic scale. Business Week said it was the biggest change to humankind since the Industrial Revolution and the Economist took a more business-oriented view, stating in 2005 that companies who would not adjust to social networks would not survive. And more recently Google’s Chairman has said on Charlie Rose that social networking and user-generate content like citizen journalism was ‘the defining aspect of humanity for the next 20 years’. A huge huge HUGE change to our lives, definitely. So is it more important than mobile.

Haha, funny you’d ask. Did you see that already more than half of Twitter users and nearly half of Facebook users access the service on mobile phones? And every major social network including Facebook and YouTube have said that the future of social networking is… mobile! (Incidentially, we were the first to make that claim in our book back in 2005, with Alan Moore. When we said it, years before there was an iPhone, that was a bold and controversial view. Today the whole social networking industry agrees).

What of ‘Cloud Computing’ ? Yes, that is also a big tech trend. But you know what? Ask most experts in Cloud Computing and see what they say about mobile? They will say that mobile phones will be the primary access method to services that are on the cloud. Yes, Cloud Computing also only supports the trend to mobile.

I don’t mean that everything on the planet migrates to mobile. We can’t do teleportation (yet) so we need our cars and bicycles and busses and trains and airplanes. We can’t eat ‘virtual food’ (yet) so we need a real food industry and the agriculture that supports it, etc. But I would dare to say, that there has never been any industry that is at the center of so many other giant industries. Yes, the internet changed a lot, but even at its strongest point of growth, the internet was not seen to disrupt as many giant industries as mobile is doing now.

That means that mobile will continue to grow. Mobile is likely to grow even more rapidly. And the numbers already today are truly mindboggling. The world has 7 Billion people and 5.9 Billion mobile phone subscriptions (said ITU at the end of 2011). Note not all of those mobile phone active accounts are ‘unique users’ but even by unique users that my consultancy monitors and reports on, the planet has passed well past the point where more than half of every person alive has a mobile phone in their pocket.

The world has 3.9 Billion unique users of mobile phones, who walk around with 4.6 Billion actual mobile phone handsets (bearing in mind that many of us have two phones). In Europe for example more than half of the people with a mobile phone, actually have two (or more) mobile phone accounts which mostly also means two phones.

I am somewhat of a mobile stats fanatic, and I report often on the industry numbers, so if you want to see what is the global penetration of technologies (TV, internet, landline phone, mobile etc) across the digital divide, you might enjoy this. If you want to know how many smartphones are in use in major countries, I have that in this blog about smartphone penetration rates. I often report on SMS related stats such as this blog about voice vs messaging. If you happen to be interested in the handsets side, I regularly monitor the smartphone races as the quarterly sales data are reported and this blog tends to feature smartphone related writing almost weekly. I also keep studying the abilities and aspects of mobile, such as this blog when Russell Buckley discovered the 9th unique aspect of mobile. And here is a recent blog about the use of mobile in retail. And for those who want to understand the international dimensions of mobile, I monitor the international stats and comparisons such as this chart of global mobile leadership.

We already saw that a company that recently was making losses – Apple – became the most profitable tech company on the planet – only after it changed its focus to being not a computer company, or a music player maker, but a ‘mobile’ company. We have grown accustomed to thinking of PC industry tycoon Bill Gates as the wealthiest person on the planet. He isn’t anymore – that honor now belongs to Carlos Slim the CEO of Mexico based America Movil the mobile operator/carrier across much of Latin America. Rovio of Finland, parent of Angry Birds is spreading from mobile phone games to soft toys, tee-shirts, and into movies, television, even amusement parks. Mobile is the biggest economic opportunity of our lifetime, make sure you understand it and make mobile part of your future. And please follow this blog (and my tweets on Twitter, where I am @tomiahonen ) where I will regularly give news and updates of the mobile industry, from smartphones to SMS and from apps to the mobile web.

By Tomi T Ahonen
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Tags: future trends, internet, mobile, mobile app
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What’s your pitch?

March 8th, 2011

We’ve all been there: “so, what do you do..?”. For those occassions when you’re meeting someone new – you know, networking at an event, chatting a party, even stood in an elevator, every business needs a quick and clear introductory pitch. Here are some key tips for creating a good one:

1. KISS

This wonderful acronym stands for ‘Keep it simple, stupid’. You don’t want to bore people into submission with your sales pitch – you want to fire up their interest to learn more. Nothing switches people off like jargon, so if your pitch contains any of the following words: ‘solution’; ‘offering’; or ‘SaaS’, drop them.

2. Short and sweet

Your sales pitch should be the Dudley Moore of business summaries: short and a little quirky. No more than a few punchy sentences will suffice. Remember: this is just a taster of what it is that you do.

3. Reverse pyramid order

Like news writing, your pitch should be organised in order of importance. The most important aspect of your business should come first. Do you have the biggest network in your sector? The widest range of products? Think about what potential customers really want to hear, and give that priority.

4. Dangle the carrot

Don’t give it all away at once, folks. Be intriguing. Get them to want to know more. Hold back a little nugget of information that gives your sales guy something to talk about down the line. You need to give up just enough information to prompt people to formulate their own questions.

5. Try this easy exercise

Here’s how you put together your elevator speech. Work out the following about your business. The: Who; What; When; Where; Why; and How. Your first draft may be a little long. More soliloquy than elevator pitch. You need to simplify it down. Be hard-nosed about this: No more than five words for each section.

From these five key words in each answer, you can begin to weave together your pitch. Apply the first four points to the finished product and bingo!

You know you’ve got your elevator pitch right when you can say it in two sentences and the person you say it to can walk away and confidently explain to someone else what you do. If they can’t, then you need to start again.

Posted in brand development, general, strategy, work | No Comments »

BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BRAND By David ODey

February 22nd, 2011

Michelangelo’s masterpiece, “The Creation of Adam,” located on the ceiling of the famous Sistine Chapel, shows God breathing life into Adam. Newly animated, Adam transforms from a lifeless shell of dirt into a vivacious being.In brand building, brand consultants play God, and each must breathe life into their own Adam. Without vitality and personality, a business’s brand remains a corpse, but with creativity and intelligence, a brand can become a powerful and engaging symbol that captivates consumers.

A brand is the personality of a company. Al Ries calls a brand the “singular concept or idea that you own inside the mind of a prospect.” To the business, a brand is the company’s representation of values and goals. To the consumer, a brand is a pin in the consumer’s brain and brings with it experiences, emotions and desires. Some brand consultants call it the corporate DNA. Like scientists, marketers and designers can control their DNA.

At the heart of a corporate brand is a mission. In order for that goal to be accomplished, the entire company must be on board. If a company stands for low-cost products and responsive customer service, each employee must hold those goals as their highest priorities.

THE BRAND STRATEGY
Brand consultants note that every effective brand has three crucial attributes: uniqueness, consistency and relevance. A trademark makes a special promise to the consumer, what marketers call a “unique selling proposition (USP).” John F. Hornick, brand consultants, corroborates by noting the brand differentiates a company and its services or products from competitors – it must be fresh, shocking, surprising, and memorable. The process of developing the promise called the brand proposition. The brand message must be consistently and constantly echoed by the entire company, from CFO to regional manager to local salesperson. Finally, the brand’s unique selling proposition, its promise, must be relevant to the consuming audience; successful brands address the needs of their consumers.

BURN AN IMAGE
Wolff Ollins spent nearly $700,000 for a new logo; Melbourne squandered $240,000. These costs do not include rebranding costs – just the new image. Why? Because powerful logos sear an irremovable image into a customer’s mind. In a commercial and advertisement-saturated world, a unique logo may mean the difference between budget profit and budget gone bankrupt. It is often the first image a consumer sees and is one of the easiest marketing tools to retain. A logo must, through color and line, present the defining emotion of a company, called the brand experience. A strong logo does not bespeak customer service or low costs; it radiates passion, simplicity, or innovation. Jean-Louis Gasse, former Apple executive, passionately proclaimed, “You couldn’t dream a more appropriate logo [for Apple]: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy.” The famous second-generation Apple logo, a simple rainbow-colored apple developed by brand consultants, spoke in simple language to consumers – and they listened. A corporate logo uses color, style, shape and size to form a concise snapshot of a company and its emotional promise.

WHO WE ARE
Absurd taglines are rampant. For example, Exxon’s short, sweet and stupid: “We’re Exxon.” Listen to Stillwell Ford’s humorous malapropism, “We put people in front of cars,” and Tyson’s similar quote, “We’re chicken.” A tagline is a short verbal phrase that condenses the brand message into a simple, meaningful quotation. Brand consultants recommend taglines be rarely longer than seven to eight words and use evocative words rather than vague, bland jargon.

BRAND EVALUATION
Like a tender baby maturing into a powerful human being, a brand grows into a powerful market force. It starts with an identity and blooms into an emotional attachment between buyer and seller. Brand consultants evaluate the lifespan and growth of a brand using several terms and ideas.

Brand awareness (brand recognition) is a measurement of how memorable customers view the brand and its message. Martin Lindstrom, author of best-selling, “Buyology,” notes that customers remember fewer brands and commercials than in years past, which challenges modern designers and brand consultants to overcome this obstacle. Once that barrier has been razed, and the brand has market strength, it has gained brand equity. When enough consumers recognize and believe in a brand, a company is said to have a brand franchise.

When has a brand achieved absolute success? When consumers trust, like a boy grasping his father’s finger. When customers are loyal to a brand, emotionally and financially, it has achieved success. Life has been breathed into a once lifeless shell, and a brand has burst forth.

Tags: advertising process, brand development, brands, business, communities, engaging media, Intellectual Property, marketing
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The ‘Lean’ Ad Campaign

December 1st, 2010

The Lean Ad Campaign is a technique for applying lean thinking to the process of creating advertising campaigns. It is specifically tailored for situations where the problem (consumer needs) and the solution (commercial communications) are both unknown.

Traditional techniques for creative advertising campaigns invest large amounts of money and time into a linear process consisting of static research methods and fixed concepts built on assumptions of consumer needs. Often these assumptions are formed from internal opinions, past campaigns and controlled circumstances.

Decision makers in the advertising process weigh past campaigns’ performance heavily. Budgets from last year become budgets for this year, with some modifications. Strategies and tactics persist because they exist. Past decisions create an inertia of decision making.

This process of budgetary inertia and decisions based on past assumptions rewards a conservative culture isolated from real consumer needs and averse to the risks of discovering real consumer needs.

Yet by resisting risk this culture actually increases the chance of failure by consolidating risk in a few, high-budget, high-production, high-effort outputs divorced from early feedback loops. The process inhibits learning.

In contrast, the Lean Ad Campaign tests new ideas at the earliest possible stage — quickly, efficiently and with purpose. The Lean Ad Campaign operates from the simple assumption that at the outset of any ad campaign: we don’t know the problem we’re solving or the solution required.

We don’t know the consumer needs to address. We don’t know the commercial communication required.

In the absence of knowing, we experiment to learn lessons and validate or invalidate our assumptions.

Our goal in experimenting is to acquire real feedback as early and as frequently as possible. We then load that feedback into a loop of continuous learning that evolves the advertising campaign in conjunction with feedback.

We build gates of decision making at regular internals. The gates provide a go-ahead or go-again decision matrix — the campaign either moves to a wider investment based on the evidence of accumulate lessons (go ahead) or the campaign returns to the beginning to test new assumptions with new experiments based on lessons learned (go again).

To paraphrase from The Lean Startup movement (to whom we owe a huge debt of inspiration): No idea ever survives first contact with real customers.

Our goal with The Lean Ad Campaign is to get advertising campaign ideas into contact with real customers as early as possible and as often as possible — to learn in a living, evolving lab with feedback from real customers; to build an increasing tempo of lessons so we can bring experiments from idea to consumers faster.

Because if assumptions don’t bump into consumers until they’re already part of the execution of a campaign, the risk that they won’t work is magnified, along with costs and time.

Which is the situation we’re in today in the advertising world.

Tags: advertising process, consumer needs, lean ad campaign, lean thinking, methodology
Posted in general, marketing, strategy, work | 1 Comment »

5 simple reasons why your business needs Twitter

November 21st, 2010

Don’t think you (or your client’s business) need Twitter? Heres 5 simple reasons why you do…

1. SEO
Google uses Twitter when searching for content. Your tweets can have a huge impact on search engines ranking

2. Research & Analysis
Twitter is a fantastic resource for research. There is a vast array of relevant information available on your target audiences and industry-relevant topics. You can even conduct initiatives like focus groups for specific areas of your business.

3. Content generation
Twitter can provide your audiences a great insight into you, your business and what its doing. The use of #tags is a great way to create and engage in conversation, about topics relating to your business.

4. Word of mouth referral
Twitter provides massive potential to fuel good old fashion pass-along recommendation, for your products, services or resource.

5. PR
A huge volume of journalists use Twitter. If you are providing relevant, useful information about you or your business, they will find your content and serve it.

Tags: business, Content generation, PR, Research & Analysis, SEO, Twitter, Word of mouth referral
Posted in general, social media, strategy, websites, work | No Comments »

Marketing should be about making brands more accessible. Not using fancy words.

October 28th, 2010

Original post by @imjustmike

There is this feeling that in order to convince people you know what you are talking about, you need to make common sense sound complicated, by wrapping up seemingly simple concepts in obscure jargon. It’s got to the point where any randomly selected impressive sounding words put together in a sentence are being passed off as “strategy.”

There is an aspect of Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome about the whole thing. We go to these events where impressive sounding phrases are banded around and everyone nods in agreement. Hollow meaningless sentences are met with responses such as “Yes that’s exactly right” and no one points out that the phrases don’t really mean anything because they are scared that they’ll be branded as someone who “doesn’t get it.” And so we are all drawn into this pseudo intellectual speak, forced to speak this fake language where we all feel clever by saying a lot without ever saying anything.

This fancy language also enables people to hide their lack of knowledge and expertise in the area. A person can add a few buzzwords to a sentence and give the veneer of experience and intelligence to the lay man, but in reality have no real idea what it actually means. It’s bad enough that people do this intentionally, but the really alarming thing is when people have convinced themselves that they actually know what they are talking about simply because they can string these impressive sounding sentences together.

There is the argument that we have to add a certain amount of lingo to our language to ensure that clients know what we are talking about. But in reality all we are doing is talking to clients in a language they will not understand, demonstrating that we speak the language, and since they don’t we had better do the talking for them.

It’s a shrewd business model; after all, as Andrew Davis said, “Where there is confusion, there is money to be made.” It’s this fear that clients will see what we do as simple that is driving this desire to make the problems that we solve for clients sound more complex than they actually are.

At the end of the day, the problem we try to solve, the real aim of marketing, be it digital, social or otherwise, is to talk to people, and hopefully, on occasion, get them to talk back. That’s it. It’s not a complex problem. But this doesn’t mean that the solutions are easy, of course they aren’t. The solutions are the brand planning, the communications approach, the strategy, and of course, great tactical executions. Looking at advertising in particular as an example, the specific problem they are trying to solve is to get awareness of a message, be it about a product, a service, or a brand. That is a simple, easily understandable problem. The difficulty comes in getting the right ad to deliver that message. It’s a complex and difficult thing to get right, which is why truly great brands and campaigns are rare. We shouldn’t be spending time trying to make the problem sound more complex, we should be demonstrating that finding the perfect, tailored solution to the problem is where we add value.

As an industry we are so focussed on intellectualising what marketing is trying to do, rather than actually doing it. If we spent as much time developing strategies as we do trying to come up with new definitions for things, and clever ways of saying simple things just imagine how the world of marketing would progress.

Tags: brands, marketing, strategy
Posted in general, marketing, social media, strategy, work | No Comments »

Protecting your app’s intellectual property

October 26th, 2010

Every technological implementation has relevance to the subject of intellectual property. iPad Application Development is no exception. In fact, the aspect of intellectual property has now become a necessary consideration for the Mobile App Developers. The whole idea is to adopt some kind of protective measure to protect any concept related to the app from being copied. By having an exclusive right on an app idea or concept, one can make it unique and no one is allowed to copy it.
There are three major kinds of protective measures for your intellectual property – copyright, trademark, and patent.
Copyright: We commonly hear the term copyrights, and these copyrights can be treated as the easiest and common ways to protect the intellectual property. It is a simple and one of the common types of protection that many iPhone app developers make use of. Suppose you have made a song or written an article for your developed app. If you get it copyrighted, there is no chance that anyone copies it simply, without your permission. You, as its owner, have the sole rights to use that property and no one is allowed to copy that intellectual property without your permission. These copyrights can be of great use when you want to protect your graphics, videos, text, or any other matter directly or indirectly.
Trademark: There are many companies that try to fool the customers by creating a logo, banner, or name similar to those of successful ones in the market. The buyers may easily get confused and accept such a brand assuming it to be the original one. This way such companies succeed in grabbing a share in the market of some successful brand. Trademarks are used to register the banner, logo, look, feel, name, and other various aspects of a company and no other company is allowed to use the same kind of names, banners, etc. The same can be applied to iPhone App Development as app developers can use this feature to protect the name, banner, logo, and other aspects of their apps. Any app with trademark registration gets protection from the misuse of such aspects by some copycat. Those who intend to use the name, logo, banner, or any such aspect of that app won’t be allowed to do so. The trademark protection suits any developer who has created a good name in the iPhone app market and has a good market of his apps, as he would not want any other developer to use such kind of names or banners that he himself uses.
Patent: Patents are relatively difficult to obtain. These are issued by government to grant a monopoly to produce or use something. This protection costs more than the other types of protection. In addition to this, iPhone app developers who apply for patents have to wait till they are granted, which sometimes may even take years. However, there are some easy, affordable options in patents. When you don’t have money to apply for a real patent, you can go for temporary patents, which give at least one year to apply for the real one.
Hope this gives you an insight on how to protect your app’s intellectual property.

Tags: android, app, apps, Intellectual Property, IP, iPad, iPhone
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