With the Argus Cycle Tour around the corner and every avid cyclist frantically increasing their cadence to reach a fitness level that would possibly give them a chance of catching up to and getting a glimpse of the 7 time Tour De France winner, Lance Armstrong, it’s no surprise that SA roads will be dominated by cyclist during February and early March.

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Following on the success of Afridoctor winning the Nokia innovations competition, the labrats have done some planning to take the application to the next level.

Below is an edited version (for we cannot reveal all :)) of a powerpoint presentation, by myself and Blueworld’s Bradley Voges, which describes our future strategy. The original idea for Afridoctor came from wizz-kid Werner Erasmus — his idea beating 12 others in an “ideas” competition we had internally in 20FourLabs.
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Google’s Nexus One has officially launched and while I haven’t yet been able to get my paws on one (still sadly unavailable  in South Africa), I have managed to gather some  reviews, comparisons and useful specs to help shed-light on the first official Google Phone. However, unlike most blogs, this will NOT be a Nexus vs iPhone type post. … Continue Reading

I recently had the displeasure of having my iPhone stolen out of my hand and out my car window which happened to be less than half-way open while sitting bumper-to-bumper in traffic in Koeberg Road. Yes, you read all of that correctly.  My phone was snatched from my hand through my partially opened window from my semi-stationary vehicle. … Continue Reading

It’s been over 6 months already since the launch of 20fourLabs so here is an update on the state of our mobile apps:
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We were sent some pics of Apple’s App wall at the 2009 WWDC earlier this month (Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference).

The 24.com app was spotted there, in amongst the thousands Nice.

The app has regularly featured in the top ten for the local app store since we launched. It has received over 10, 000 downloads and counting
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I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, most marked to be read later.

However, the one newsletter I always look forward to and open right away is the Springwise weekly newsletter

According to its website, Springwise “has a network of over 8000 spotters that scan the globe for smart new business ideas, delivering instant inspiration to entrepreneurial minds”.

At 20fourLabs our aim is to create innovative products by thinking big, thinking fast and to never stop learning. Springwise is a great resource for doing exactly that.

Do yourself a favour and check out the Springwise website, sign up for their free weekly newsletter or follow them on Twitter.

News24’s iPhone app launched about a month ago, and the uptake has been pretty good as of late. Although the uptake decreases with time, it’s amazing how much time is spent within the application. I’m going to show you a snippet of info pertaining to the last 3 weeks of usage.

I find it astonishing that 6250 uniques over a period of 3 weeks are able to spend 1 year and 105 days within the application. That’s an average of 1.7 hours per visitor in 2 weeks. Woah… That’s not so bad.

iPhone users are heavy internet users and this proves it. Although they are a small % of the market make up, they are the ones who are consuming the most.

Compare this to our m.24.com WAP offering, where the average time spent per visit is in the region of 3-4 minutes! Obviously, the WAP offering appeals to a wider audience, of which a large part would fall under the lower LSM categories. M.24.com’s properties are generating in the reagion of 100-110k unique visitors a month with approximately 1.3 million page impressions. A lot more than the iPhone app.

This leaves the question, who are advertisers after? How efficient is it to purchase advertising based purely on stats (Obviously it depends on the product / service being advertised). I think this confirms my solid belief in advertising by way of branded mobile applications as opposed to slapping a banner on a WAP site purely because of it’s numbers.

What do you think?

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