Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

Czwartym partnerem Play Weekend 2012 jest Nokia Na pewno przetestujemy model PureView i zrobimy kilka zdjęć zachodzącego słońca nad Bałtykiem. W poprzednim poście zadawaliście wiele ciekawych pytań. Na niektóre odpowiemy w czasie Play Weekend a na niektóre nie Lista uczestników wygląda następująco: Silvester Aldobasic Karol Kozłowski Damian Tomkowiak Adam Dębiński Robert Olejnik Grzegorz [...]

Już od jutra w sprzedaży! LG E610 Swift L5 LG P700 Swift L7 Dodatkowo do oferty na życzenie wprowadzamy: LG P880 Swift 4X HD LG E400 Swift L3 Cennik

Dziś dzień należy absolutnie do LG. Miałem przed chwilą oba modele w ręce i jestem przekonany, że te smartfony znajdą wielu nabywców. Podczas prezentacji koledzy z LG wspominali sukcesy kultowych już Chocolate i Shine. Pamiętacie? Myślę, że Swifty L 3,5 i 7 mają szansę, dzięki połączeniu oryginalnego designu i technologii, na spory sukces. Na Hel [...]

Koniecznie zobaczcie fotki!

Już od jutra w sprzedaży! LG E610 Swift L5 LG P700 Swift L7 Dodatkowo do oferty na życzenie wprowadzamy: LG P880 Swift 4X HD LG E400 Swift L3 Cennik

In this sixth weekly app promotion tip together with our friends at App Promo, we’re tuning into the marketing power that is social media. If you’re not already using communications channels such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, you’re really missing out on powerful, yet inexpensive marketing tools. In this article, learn how to maximise the opportunities with each of these social media channels and properly brand your app with success. Find out how after the jump.

Social media has become the holy grail for marketers and it’s no wonder that if it’s done properly, a brand can see tremendous success for significantly less money than traditional marketing and advertising. But where social media saves you in money, it makes up in its need of significant time and effort. If you choose to use these as part of your marketing strategy for your app, make sure you are invested to keep your networks active. Social networks need constant and consistent attention if they are to grow and be a successful part of your marketing strategy.

Create a Facebook page

The first thing that comes to anyone’s mind when you mention social media is Facebook. The effectiveness of Facebook comes from its social reach. Interactions with your product Facebook page by one person has a ripple effect with their entire network, meaning you only need to convert one to instantly communicate to many. Facebook has made it pretty easy for brands to market their products through Pages. Your first step is to create a Facebook page for your app. If you already have a page for your brand, update it to market your app.

Some key marketing opportunities to take advantage on your Facebook page:

• Use your Info About & Description fields to highlight what your app is and the benefits they will provide to your user.
• Update your Info Website section to include download links to your application.
• Create an album featuring screenshots of your app as well as the QR codes.
•  Take advantage of defining a username (or vanity URL) for your Facebook page after reaching 25+ fans.

Your Facebook page will only be effective if you have traffic and fans, so you will need to include plans to grow this page as part of your marketing. Running Facebook ads is one way to do this. But also be sure to include mention of your Facebook page in all of your marketing collateral, including your website.

As you gain fans to your page, you are going to want to interact with them. Some effective ways to keep them engaged are:

• Create a poll surveying the most utilised scenario for your app.
• Start a discussion topic related to your app’s subject matter or asking for feedback.
• Ask questions to your fans via your wall.
• Post your announcements and product releases.
• Leverage your Tweets and YouTube videos.

Facebook’s “insight” reporting is extremely useful and, beyond the social reach factor, is the other reason marketers and brands gravitate towards using it. Be sure to review your Facebook reports often to get a good understanding of your demographic and use this information to better your marketing and your product.

Be present on Twitter

The key to Twitter is to see it more as a broadcast tool than a community builder. You still have an opportunity to grow a following and interact with your audience using this social network, but it is less personal compared to Facebook. Be sure to update your profile on Twitter with your app logo. Use the 160 characters they give you to state what your app is about and include the download URL. Once you are up and running, start following to get followed. Follow people and brands that align well with your offering. The secret to growing your Twitter community is to follow others. When someone follows you, follow them back. You can increase the discovery of your Twitter page through the use of Twitter directories but avoid opportunities to pay for followers, as Twitter heavily frowns on this and could suspend your account.

Like Facebook, you are going to want to keep your Twitter feed active. And also like Facebook, you aren’t going to do well by hard selling your audience. Make sure you treat your tweets like micro-blog posts – something meaningful to you, your brand, and what your app is all about. It’s best to construct your tweets even shorter than the 140 characters Twitter gives you to set them up for re-tweeting. Re-tweeting is basically re-posting somebody’s tweet in your Twitter feed as is as commonly done as creating new Tweets. Your feed should be a good mixture of tweets you write and re-tweets from your followers.

You will also want to make sure that you are using hashtags in your tweets. Hashtags are used by Twitter to organise tweets. This makes it easy for users to search and find tweets related to a certain topic or subject matter. Become familiar with the hashtags your followers use and incorporate them into your own posts. The use of hashtags will help introduce your tweets to an audience outside of your following providing an opportunity for you to gain more followers.

Get active on YouTube

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. YouTube is undeniably the powerhouse of online video that is why it is a fantastic marketing opportunity for your app. Create a YouTube channel for your app making sure that your app brand or icon, description and download links are in your profile.

Next, shoot and upload your videos. You are definitely going to want to create a demo video for your app. These are becoming exceedingly common and can be leveraged in some app store product pages, as well as your other social networks and your website. For any video you upload, take some time to write a description that will convince users to view, but one that is also packed with keywords to help your video show up in the search results. YouTube also equips you with the ability to embed links in your video through the use of annotations. This is especially effective in your app videos to help drive users to download the app right from the video.

We also got in touch with Marius Mailat, an experienced developer and founder of the biggest Android community in Romania, Androider.ro. Marius agrees on the importance of utilising social media, and further adds his own marketing tips on how he uses them.

- For an Android developer or a small ISV (Independent Software Vendor), nowadays, it is much easier to go with a Facebook page for an application, instead of creating a microsite. Using a Facebook page as an app allows your audience to easily get information about new features, to report problems, and get fast replies to messages. Facebook isn’t the only solution available, quite a lot of apps are now also offering support using getsatistfaction.com or even Twitter. I also make sure that the sites I use include a comment module, which allows my users to get support and information using their Facebook, Twitter or Google+ accounts.

Marius Mailat, Android developer

Okay, developers, so are you promoting your apps on social media today? What kinds of activities do you see the most success with? Share your comments (and questions) with us in the Comments section below.

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App Promo is a leading app marketing and strategy firm whose goal is to assist developers and app owners in succeeding in the business of applications. App Promo provides services geared towards increasing discovery, optimising revenue and ensuring better positioning of applications to set them up for success. 

More information

• Read our previous App Promo developer tip on search engine marketing and optimisation.
• Check out all the app promotion tips (we’ll be adding more weekly).
• Learn more about App Promo services for app developers and app owners.
• Follow @Apppromo on Twitter.
• Check out our other helpful tutorials for mobile developers.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford,”

Samuel Johnson, September 1777.

As a Londoner, I’ve found Johnson’s words entering my thoughts quite a bit recently, particularly as the games get underway this week, with the UK capital as the host city for the world’s most important sporting event.

From William and Kate’s royal wedding to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and now the events over the next couple of weeks, I know I haven’t tired of this great city’s ability to meld history, pageantry and athletics onto the world stage.

And now there’s a new way to appreciate London from a bird’s eye view – and in 3D to boot. CNN has created some amazing flyovers of London using Nokia Maps 3D. You can track the Torch’s whereabouts as it’s carried through the city streets.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

You can peer down on Hyde Park, the setting for the triathlon, or take in an aerial of the aquatic arena that plays host to swimming and diving. It’s breathtaking to fly over London in high definition, and the maps give us a new way to experience the games.

Nokia’s 3D experience offers the highest degree of photorealism on the market, collecting data from satellites, airplanes and cars. Including London, we have 3D maps in 25 of the world’s most famous cities, including New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Rome. What’s more, these maps provide interactive visuals – not simply screen shots – that bring the traditional paper map to life.

Nokia and CNN kicked off our partnership in 2011 first with the CNN app for Windows Phone, which gave Nokia Lumia users direct access to iReport, CNN’s participatory news community. Recently CNN and Nokia shared a Cannes Lion Award for the app, with iReport named the overall winner in the “best use of social” category.

So, it’s all the more exciting to now see Nokia Maps 3D being used as a powerful tool for journalism and social engagement. With the mapping tools of Nokia Location Platform, CNN can create broadcast-quality maps on their own, no design or coding experience required. This makes it possible for CNN to build experiences customized for their viewers.

Tell us what you think of the London maps, and if you had a bird’s eye view of the city over the next couple of weeks, what would you like to see up close?

Situations is a Symbian app for making your smartphone a bit more intelligent. At the core of the app is the ability to define situations that change your phone’s settings depending on the context. To give two examples:

• If I am at home (which the phone knows from its GPS co-ordinates) and it’s after 11pm, then switch all the ringtones to silent until 6am.
• When I arrive at the office, switch on the WiFi and start my News Reader app.

The app was originally created as a Nokia Beta Labs experiment, but has now been spun off and continues to be developed as a commercial application by Pastilli Labs, founded by Roope Tassberg and Heikki Haveri.

We spoke to Roope to find out more.

“We’re a very small development company based in Tampere in Finland. At the moment, Situations is a spare time project.

“But it seems very important to us. We call these things smartphones, but why don’t they do things for us? We want to let people get more out of their phones.”

The relaunch of Situations called for a complete rewrite of the app.

“We’ve made it much easier to define Situations, which govern how your phone behaves. The interface is a lot slicker and we’ve been able to introduce some very useful new features. For example, you can now select places from a map: so you don’t have to be physically present at a place in order to create a Situation for it.”

So where next for Situations? What’s the next big step?

“To be honest, we need a lot more innovation before the basic functionality of Situations can take a big step forward. To take an example, it would be nice if we could define a jogging Situation, where it automatically switches on your music when you go for a run.

“But how does the app know you’re not just running for the bus?

“Getting round that sort of problem needs some major breakthroughs in sensor technology and artificial intelligence.

“We think the main improvements in the shorter term will be around making the app easier to use. People like the idea of creating Situations, but doing it in a way they can understand is tricky.

“It’s easy to create a nerdy app: it’s a lot harder to create one that’s usable.”

But the future is looking bright for Pastilli Labs.

“Since relaunching Situations we’ve been astonished by the positivity that’s come from the community, especially through our Twitter account and Facebook page.

“People really like the idea of the app and have offered lots of support and ideas for new features. That’s really energising and makes us want to work hard to deliver what they want.”

Best of luck to Roope and Heikki. If you’d like to get hold of Situations for Symbian smartphones, then head over to the Nokia Store. It costs €0.99.

Seton Hall University, based in South Orange, New Jersey, is completely revamping their computing experience and taking it all-mobile with the Nokia Lumia 900 as the mobile part of the new offering. As we’ve covered before, all incoming freshman coming into Seton Hall this fall semester will receive Nokia Lumia 900 smartphones.

To make sure Seton Hall’s network will offer the best computing experience for all students and faculty at Seton Hall, the University is launching SHUmobile, a multi-pronged approach to advance communications at the Catholic university.

It’s good to be a freshman at Seton Hall
In collaboration with Nokia, AT&T and Microsoft, Seton Hall officials are giving a pre-release version of Windows 8 to incoming freshman, along with Nokia Lumia 900s and Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud Services.

To take advantage of Office 365 while on-the-go, AT&T is upgrading Seton Hall’s cellular network to lighting-fast 4G speeds.

With the new infrastructure, students and faculty can write and collaborate on documents in the cloud, whether on their Lumia phones or on Windows 8 desktops. No matter where the students can get online, they can access their documents without having to use messy email attachments with multiple versions.

Creating an efficient Windows ecosystem
As a part of the SHUmobile program, all Seton Hall freshman and juniors will be upgraded to either a tablet or ultrabook running Windows 8 and all undergrads will be using Office 365. Looking at the entire student population, approximately half will be on Windows 8 PCs and a quarter will be using Windows Phone on the Nokia Lumia 900 on AT&T’s 4G  network.

David Middleton, Seton’s Executive Director at the Center for Mobile Research & Innovation, told Conversations:

“The Nokia Lumia 900 is a critical component of the SHUmobile ecosystem. The native extension of cloud services such as SkyDrive and Microsoft Office, specifically OneNote, allow our students to collaborate on content creation anywhere, at any time.

“Tying together personal and professional uses, the Lumia 900 extends to students mew communication channels and opportunities for engagement with their peers and academic, administrative and social resources and services that otherwise might be limited to more traditional computing environments.”

Making collaboration easy
With SHUmobile and the build-out of this advanced computing environment for Seton Hall, the university is delivering an impressive online collaboration environment for students and faculty. The effort leverages the power of Windows, the cloud-based smart collaboration tools of Office 365, and the ability to do it all at ultra-fast 4G speeds on the Nokia Lumia 900.

Have you used Office 365 on your Lumia? Let us know what you think.

Any gadget fan will tell you that there is nothing they enjoy more than getting their hands on a shiny new toy and taking it out of the box for the first time.

So you can imagine my delight when I got my hands on a brand new, box-fresh Nokia 808 PureView last week. Right now, it is one of the shiniest new toys around.

Let’s not forget that the 808 PureView isn’t just another camera phone – it features a revolutionary 41-megapixel sensor, state of the art optics and cutting edge algorithms for lossless zoom and super sharp images.

The reviewers have already been falling over themselves to heap lavish praise on the 808 PureView’s stunning camera and now it is going to be my turn to reach for the superlatives.

Naturally, the only way I could contain my excitement was to take the device with me on a trip to the zoo.

First impressions

First, though, let me share my initial thoughts about the look and feel of the Nokia 808 PureView.

Yes, the first thing you notice when taking it out of the box is the ‘bump’ that houses the camera. 

Far from being incongruous, the phone feels very comfortable and natural in your hand. In fact, the ridge of the camera gives the index finger a natural resting place when you’re holding the phone upright with the screen towards you. 

A neat by-product of the camera’s bump occurs when the 808 PureView is put on a flat surface, such as a table or desk. It props the phone up at a slightly raised angle, which tilts the screen towards you and makes it easier to keep an eye on any alerts, messages or just so you can see the time. 

Standing out

So, as far as I’m concerned, the bump is very much a good thing – and that’s before we get to its core purpose of taking photos. Of course, it also makes the 808 PureView stand out from the crowd and that’s definitely where this phone deserves to be.

The 808 PureView is a little heavier than, say, my Nokia Lumia 800 but not outrageously so. If you have a thick protective case on your Lumia smartphone, then it would probably make up the difference.

As ever, the ClearBlack display is a thing of deep beauty and the phone’s body feels sturdy and tactile. Also, the loudspeaker is fantastic for playing your music out loud. Very loud.

Capturing the Zoo

During the summer months of June and July, London Zoo at Regent’s Park opens late on Friday evenings to give visitors a walk on the wild side with a nocturnal twist.

For my visit, there was a brief respite from the unseasonal rain showers and the fading light made it an ideal opportunity for me to put the 808 PureView’s camera through its paces.

At this stage, I should confess that I am not a particularly accomplished photographer. I am strictly of the ‘point, press and pray’ school of taking pictures.

With that in mind, I mainly left the camera’s setting in ‘Automatic’ mode. For most people, most of the time, this will let you take great pictures. 

Looking through glass

In my defence, the zoo was not an easy place to be experimenting with the advanced and creative settings on the 808 PureView.

The animals were often behind glass screens and I had to contend with large crowds to even get a sight of the more popular zoological exhibits. Often, I had to hold the camera above everyone’s head and just hope for the best.

That being said, the 808 PureView was a revelation. Professional photographers must hate the fact that modern cameras have made it so easy to take such good photos.  Now, of course, thanks to this leap forward with Nokia’s PureView technology, you don’t even need an expensive digital SLR camera to do it.

The greatest benefit of using the 808 PureView was the confidence that it gave me. After monitoring my first few pictures, I had total faith that it was not going to let me down.

Turn on the camera, tap the screen to focus on the subject and take the picture. It produced great results every time.

Long distance champion

One feature of the 808 PureView that I found astonishing was how it made a mockery of distance.

You take a picture and then when you are looking at the picture on your phone’s screen, you pinch in to zoom into a particular detail or part of the photo. And pinch, pinch and pinch again to go even closer.

It’s great for spotting things that you hadn’t even realised were, quite literally, right in front of you. 

A decade of progress

The joy of using the 808 PureView was heightened considerably by comparing my photos with those of my companion, who was using her smartphone’s camera. The difference in the sharpness, clarity and detail was satisfyingly massive.

The Nokia 7650, which had a 0.3-megapixel sensor, was Nokia’s first phone with a built-in camera when it came out in 2002.

Ten years on, the Nokia 808 PureView is yet another landmark device. The photos compare favourably with those taken on my very good digital compact camera.

Quite simply, unless you’re a serious photography connoisseur, you won’t need a standalone camera if you have an 808 PureView.

The new deal with Scalado shows that Nokia is not being complacent about its imaging expertise either. Who knows what the next decade could bring?