Also at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgdgr5ct_19dtwck9
What East Bay iPhone Developers Meeting http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/234913/ Where Berkeley Coworking When Tuesday August 21, 2007, 7- 10pm. Who Chris Jonathan Patrick Jerry Ishan Minutes - Jonathan led a discussion of mobile phone billing systems and the differences between the European and American mobile market. - American mobile market carriers subsidize the cost of the phones and their locked to their carrier. - European mobile market users pay the cost of the phone and can move it between carriers. - In European market, the initiator of the call typically pays for the call vs. American model where both caller and callee are charge for a call. - Vodafone likely carrrier for iPhone European release. Speculation they may lock the phone to Vodafone, which is unusual for the European market. - In the iPhone may do better in European market, since customers there are used to paying the upfront cost of the phone. - In most European countries, users buy mobile applications, ringtones, etc. through the carrier. - In Germany however, users typically purchase through a portal (Jamba.de) - Most of these services are billed through SMS billing. - Open Question: Has anyone successfully got consumers to pay for iPhone Apps? - No one knew of anyone. - Possible Billing Systems: - PC: Users pay via their PC. - Kills impulse purchases. - SMS: Users sends SMS text code, then gets confirmation code from carrier to agree to a charge which shows up on their phone bill. - Perfect for impulse buys. Easier than credit card. - Popular in Europe. - Carrier usually takes about a 50% or so cut. - Minimum monthly revenue to join (e.g. $200/mo.). - Need to work with each carrier or a third party SMS gateway/aggregator (e.g. Wireless Developer.com ). - Web On Phone: Taking credit card or paypal payments through the iPhone Safari browser. - Pros: - Cheap. - Cons - Slow. Paypal is not iPhone optimized - Each click or page a user must go through for a payment will cost you 70% of your potential customers. - iTunes: Apple could like users purchase Apps through iTunes like they do for music. - Well understood and accepted by users. - Apple not supporting this yet. May never do this. - Must be on the computer to purchase through iTunes, so lose impulse purchases. - Voice: Use tel link to route calls to a billing operator. - Has infrastructure cost. - Not familiar to mobile users as a billing method. - Other? - Paypal mobile - No one present had any first hand experience with Paypal mobile. - Jonathan: In the past, Cingular has discouraged usage of 3rd party payment systes ( e.g. Paypal mobile) by mobile website operators. Claim was that you would be disconnected from the mobile network for using 3rd party payment system but don't know if it was enforced or carried out. - Brief discussion of Microformats for iPhone Applications - Some companies has come out with their own competitors to hWidget in the past month. Discussed on the microformats mailing list. - Format should distinguish between: - this site is an iPhone App - this site is an iPhone version of an existing desktop website - this is a mobile web page - Need a meta tag that redirects from a desktop page to its iPhone version. - Example: www.facebook.com has a meta tag telling browser that the iPhone version is at iphone.facebook.com - Needs Apple to support it. - Would be useful now for spidering. - Call for Action - Chris and a number of other iPhoneWebDev developers will be at the Apple tech talk this Friday. The iphonewebdev community may want to generate a list of top priority issues and bugs to present to the Apple folks. - Random/Miscellaneous - Restroom Web App (mizpee.com) - Jott.com. Transcribes voice calls to SMS. 877-568-8486. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iPhoneWebDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
