1) Optimism rules at 2010 CES show. Gary Shapiro, Chief Executive of CES, said the CES show “seemed more upbeat than a year ago, reflecting a return to optimism for the industry,” reports Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat by VentureBeat. Attendance at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show reportedly reached 120,000 visitors this year, an increase of about 6 percent from last year. Participants were reverberating with the latest device and the latest apps to go with it.

2) Apps will be everywhere. Thanks to Apple, apps are now sexy and offer the consumer more value from their device, and the marketer the ability to enhance their device with little effort, as well as a potential new source of revenue.

• Apps in television set-top boxes: Samsung announced the launch of Samsung Apps, a multi-device application store with content partners, including Blockbuster, USA Today, and others. Samsung plans to make apps available for a range of devices from mobile phones to HDTVs.
• Apps in car electronics: Ford recognizes that users want information on demand. Ford’s Sync feature uses an 8” touch-screen in the dashboard as well as voice commands. You can catch up on Twitter, listen to Internet radio, check movie times and get free online maps with turn-by-turn directions.
• App Store for Netbooks – Intel launched a beta version of its app store, called the Intel AppUp center for netbooks. Currently offering about 100 apps.

3) Integrated, multi-platform app strategies are being considered. Brands should create apps that are integrated across multiple devices: mobile, desktop, social, browser, and other emerging platforms like television set-top boxes and car electronics. Cooliris bases its success on building its app for both mobile and desktop platforms. They were recently selected to develop Media Gallery for the Nexus One Device.

4) There will be a mobile app for almost everything, but adoption outside of iPhone is still low. With the phenomenal growth of the Apple AppStore fueling over 2 billion downloads from some 100,000 plus apps, the race is on from other mobile device companies to woo app developers. (Living in Minnesota, one of my favorites announced at CES is the SmartStart app by Directed for remote starting a car from a smartphone.)

5) Top app marketers will start focusing on improving their key operating metrics. Most app marketers are doing a poor job of developing key operating metrics and reporting surrounding their app marketing initiatives and campaigns. There is a lot of emotional decision making rather than data driven decision making. This appears to be starting to change, as better analytical thinking and tools are starting to take root with top app marketers.

If you identified other app trends, share your thoughts by submitting a comment.

After using BestBuy.com’s user ratings to sort through and find the best-rated 23-inch monitor, I settled on an Acer H233Hbmid 23 inch Widescreen HD LCD Monitor listed at $209.99.

Thankfully for me, I use a couple of different browser add-ons which provide me with timely shopping related information while I am browsing the web. For this purchase, I followed through a relevant message that came up from PriceGong, which I had installed through W3i’s Install IQ process a few months back. PriceGong alerted me that CompUSA.com had the exact same monitor for $199.99 with no shipping and handling, and no sales tax.

Later on, I proceeded through the checkout on BestBuy.com just to see what my final total would have been had I purchased this monitor through BestBuy.com. With $14.99 for shipping and handling, and $16.37 sales tax, my total would have come to $241.35. I saved $41.36 because my installed application, PriceGong, recommended CompUSA.com while shopping at BestBuy.com!

Most tech bloggers talk down about any application that requires an install, such as Windows applications and hybrid applications, like the PriceGong browser add-on. Most tech bloggers are so caught up in the cloud these days that they fail to remember why operating system integration can be so useful. How can the cloud compete with the kind of timely information an installed application can provide?

According to a report Merrill Lynch put out, Symantec might not have been such a great account for Digital River after all. Apparently that portion of Digital River’s business had slowly been declining for a while now, whereas the rest of Digital River’s business had a higher growth rate. My prediction is that Digital River will bounce back. I have always been impressed by their resiliency as a company, having watched them from the sidelines for a number of years and hearing stories from former employees, such as Lisa Nistler, who works with me at W3i and who was recently promoted to VP of Marketing at W3i (congratulations again Lisa!).

Do you have a good customer concentration story or perspective on Digital River’s future? If so, please post in the comments of this blog post.

I’ll give you a customer concentration story of my own… The risk of heavy customer concentration is one of the core weaknesses of W3i’s closest competitors, the toolbar players. W3i’s competitors that are dedicated to toolbar solutions that are monetized exclusively through search feeds run a very high risk tied to the search market. When these competitors have any kind of hiccup with their search feeds, whether it be from a reduction in rates from their search partner, a change in toolbar usage behavior driven by a new browser release, or any other possible factor, application publishers who use these competitors to provide revenue within their installers can see a sharp decline in revenue very quickly. I am so thankful that our business model is centered on a marketplace approach, where we provide a wide range of application offers, including toolbars and other high-revenue-generating Windows applications, versus the toolbar-only model.

I thought Britt did an excellent job summarizing the best practices of Central Minnesota sales leaders in her cover story “The Secrets of a Successful Sales Team”.

The following are the “Top 10 Ways to Build a Sales Team” as summarized by Britt-
1) Hire the right sales people
2) Hire the right sales manager
3) Maintain relationships
4) Check your motivations
5) Standardize approach
6) Develop metrics
7) Make a plan and a strategy to follow it
Keep an organized system
9) What makes a great sales team makes any great business
10) Continue learning

For both 5 and 8, Britt cites specific examples I shared with her about W3i’s very talented sales team.

The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal posted quite a few more “official pictures” of the event on their Shutterfly page- http://minneapolisstpaulbusinessjournal.shutterfly.com/
To access the pictures, use the password- pictures
and click on the collection called “Young Entrepreneurs”. You’ll have to browse around a little bit to find the ones of the Weber brothers.

Is it about creating a niche application (see mickeylonchar’s comment), or is it about having an application distribution strategy?

Social media and existing assets can certainly provide a spark to your application distribution strategy, but what do you do if you don’t have many fans to begin with? For the #13th lesson learned, consider “Get other popular applications to recommend your application.”

I’ve been looking at vendors which might be worth considering to drive application recommendations. Here are a few I have come across-
AppsFire
PurpleTalk
MobClix
Pinch Media
Medialets

Mobile applications are a great tool for advertisers to increase engagement with their fans if advertisers can successfully generate wide distribution, but what about other application types? Other large media and e-commerce players are quietly getting very significant results from Windows applications and hybrid applications like Adobe AIR and Firefox add-ons. See white paper

Two entrepreneurial stories in the book really hit home for me. The two stories were Nick Thomley’s Pinnacle Services and Matt Brezina’s Xobni.

Now 29, Nick created Pinnacle Services in 2000 to provide employment, housing, and in-home services to seniors and people with disabilities in Minnesota. Nick and I actually went to school together for a couple of years when we were very young. I bumped into him a number of years later through my sister-in-law Jennifer Castillo who does program planning for Hennepin County. More recently, Nick and I were honored as young entrepreneurs of the year by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal (http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2009/07/27/). Although I am not at all involved in the type of work Pinnacle does, I have a great sense of admiration for the risk Nick took to build a great socially needed business, and now topping $9 million in annual revenue, no one can argue with his success.

Matt Brezina co-founded Xobni in his late twenties. Xobni is a plug-in that brings Outlook to the Web 2.0 era. I have been a big fan of Xobni since I started using their application in March of 2009, and we became business partners in April 2009. The company I co-founded, W3i (http://www.W3i.com) helps distribute Xobni to massive amounts of new Outlook users. As Donna describes in her book, when it came to Outlook, would we have expected this kind of new innovation to come from software executives in their 40’s? Hardly…

Congratulations on a very interesting, well researched book Donna! I look forward to reading through the rest and sharing it with other young entrepreneurs.

1) W3i Blog- http://blog.W3i.com
2) LinkedIn- http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjweber
3) Twitter- http://twitter.com/robertjweber