Mobile Roadie

Duke Greenhill is the founder and CEO of Greenhill+Partners, a premiere New York-based creative marketing agency specializing in luxury brands and engaging the emerging affluent. You can reach them at TheFutureOfBranding.com. Lately people are talking about luxury brands and digital marketing. I can’t count the number of times this week I’ve seen tweets asking, “Is Digital Killing the Luxury Brand?” Invariably, these discussions evaluate the dangers of leveraging a wholly democratic platform in order to promote a wholly exclusive industry. But, as usual, the discussion misses the point. The question is not if luxury brands can safely leverage digital media. The question is how. With that in mind, here are five commandments for marketing luxury brands using the most democratic media in the world. Luxury brands obsess over losing exclusivity in the digital space, but this concern puts the cart in front of the horse. A luxury brand generates exclusivity by cultivating a block of consumers who wish they could buy the brandʼs products, but cannot afford them. Simply, if luxury brands want to remain luxurious, they have to engage not only their paying customers, but also people who want but canʼt have. This is where the democratizing power of social and new media comes into play. Social media enables luxury brands to build tremendous clout among the aspirational set. In some cases, social media may be the only place aspiring consumers can reach the brand at all. This, in turn, builds tremendous prestige among the affluent set. In order to democratize without downgrading, luxury brands must maintain the digital conversation by engaging more aspirational consumers and including them in a controlled brand dialogue. On the other hand, the brand must prevent brand downgrading by embracing cleverness and avoiding mimicry, by ensuring innovation and not stealing from their traditional campaigns, and by treating digital media like the marketing powerhouse that it is. All the while, luxury brands must strive toward the highest creativity, elegance and production quality. Only in this way can luxury brands both cultivate desire and maintain exclusivity, and thus, grow in the digital world safely. Luxury brands worry that if they allow interactivity or user-generated content, if they initiate a conversation between brand and buyer, they will lose control of the brand image. This is simply not true. There are many ways to encourage interactivity while still maintaining control of the brand. Look at Burberryʼs “Art of the Read More

This is an important holiday weekend for both U.S. and Canadian citizens. July 1 was Canada Day and July 4 is Independence Day in the U.S. Here are five apps to celebrate your patriotism: This app puts all the fine details and documents of U.S. politics in your pocket. Contents include a copy of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights and other amendments, the Emancipation Proclamation, how the different branches of the U.S. government works, information on landmarks, lyrics to national songs and more. It's a great reference for students, those new to the U.S. or those wanting to brush up on their American history. Wave a sparkler without burning your fingers. This app will let you create your own sparkler from an array of colors. When it comes time for fireworks, you can wave your iPhone instead of a little stick. You can save and share your customized sparkler and even set your own patriotic music to it. Speaking of fireworks, if you can't make it to one of the big displays in your area, you can create your own for your iPhone or iPad. This particular app allows you to create a fireworks show and set it to music in your iTunes library. If you don't fancy a U.S. location for your particular fireworks show, you have 15 different global locations (and one extraterrestrial one) where you can virtually teleport yourself to instead. It's not Independence Day without the music of John Philip Sousa and other soul-stirring marches. If there's one near you, it's a great time to take in a drum and bugle corps show. Summer is the high season for this activity as drum corps around the nation compete leading up to the annual Summer Music Games in August, this year in Indianapolis. Phantom Regiment, founded in 1956, is one of the top drum corps in the world. Its app has current and historic videos of the corps, lists of events and more. Phantom isn't the only drum corp to have an app. Check to see if your local drum corps has a listing on iTunes. This weekend is a favored one for having a picnic or camping out while taking in fireworks and outdoor concerts. Coleman, known for its line of grills and camping equipment, has a free app that allows you to plan an outdoor meal based on the ingredients Read More

A century is not a very long time. Life is short or whatever, but people live to be 100. One hundred years ago yesterday, we had never touched the southernmost point on earth. More » Read More

Mobile Roadie, has been updated to allow even more customizations to the mobile apps created with the app building platform. The new offering is called Mobile Roadie Pro, and it provides users (app makers) with full customization of menu layout, colors, buttons, and fonts. Moreover, this version also supports multiple categories of content, a global search for users, and newly designed landscape views. Right from the bat, Mobile Roadie has three “Pro examples” to share: Among other Mobile Roadie clients we find such names as Madonna, Live Nation, Levi’s, Twilight, Drake and Vera Wang. Price wise, Mobile Roadie starts at $499 to setup and $29 per month. Building apps requires no tech knowledge and can be done in about 30 minutes. Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis. Read More

Rating: Disney Digicomics – 7 out of 10 Captain Glyph– 7 out of 10 iHorror– 5 out of 10 Pain Medication Manager– 6 out of 10 Links to the App Store: Disney Digicomics– FREE – click here to be directed to the app store page Captain Glyph -$1.99 – click here to be directed to the app store page iHorror – $.99 – click here to be directed to the app store page Pain Medication Manager– $1.99 – click here to be directed to the app store page Read More

Comme moi, vous avez peut-être prévu d'aller faire un tour dans le courant du week-end au Salon du Livre, qui se tient du 26 au 30 mars Porte de Versailles à Paris. Dans ce cas, vous serez sans doute ravis d'apprendre que pour ça aussi, il existe une application iPhone. Réalisée par Mobile Roadie, elle est gratuite et offre les fonctions suivantes : - Liste des exposants. - Liste des 90 auteurs invités avec biographie et photo. - Liste des conférences majeures. - Galeries photos. - Informations pratiques. - Partagez vos impressions. Les addicts pourront suivre ce qui se dit au sujet du salon sur Twitter directement au sein de l'application. Read More

February 23rd, 2010 James Isabel I realize we’re approaching KRAPPS status on this piece of news but bear with me please as I guarantee you by the article’s end, I’ll have you LOL so hard. Everyone’s heard of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag right? Well they got their official app in SpeidiWeb ($1.99): “Gain exclusive access to unseen photos, candids, and videos unavailable to fans, until now. New photos, youTube videos, and UStream files will be constantly uploaded, to keep your experience ‘fresh’.” That’s some of the features the app has but it’s not exactly WHY we’re covering this app in the first place, it’s because of this GENIUS comment: Early sign of the apocolypse…. by RockybalBROa I have made one of the most heinous errors of life in downloading this app. I was under the impression that I was downloading a new spiderman game until the theme song blew out my eardrums when it launched. I did give it 1 star however as it does launch, and now I have access to spencers creepy flesh colored beard (that’s the problem) 24/7…. Beware the cultural abortions playing in the backround, if you listen long enough, you may even be able to interpret the gutteral screams as music, but if you listen to it too long…you will already be dead… How can you not cover an app with such a ridiculously funny comment like that? Regardless of you’re position regarding “Speidi”, you have to admit these couple have mad balls to create an iPhone app specifically for them. Though it’s really not far fetch from their previous antics, it’s pretty funny to see them go all “techie” on us. For their real fans OR if you just want to do something really stupid, go ahead and spend $2 on Speidi Mania… prove your worth! LOL You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Read More

The Random House Publishing Group has collaborated with Mobile Roadie to launch iPhone apps for its bestselling authors. Right from the bat, the two companies released apps for three New York Times bestselling authors: As for the features included in the apps – fans can preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more. Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis. Read More

Music apps are a huge category of apps, and 2009 was a huge year for music apps. Music Ally sums up the year's biggest music apps for us here. 2009 was the year of the App Store, as Apple passed the two-billion downloads milestone for its store. The year also saw labels and artists jumping onto the bandwagon with their own branded iPhone apps. The most successful, like Smule's I Am T-Pain (pictured right) sold tens of thousands of copies a day. It's only fair to point out that the vast majority sank down the app charts fairly quickly though – proving that iPhone apps provide a return on investment for the music industry wasn't a huge priority this year. Even so, there was plenty of creativity being put to work. To highlight it, we've chosen a selection of 40 branded music apps that we thought were innovative this year – which were all covered in the Music Ally Daily Bulletin. They're all based on artists, labels and other music brands – the list doesn't include apps for music services like Spotify or Pandora, nor does it include pure music games like Rock Band or Tap Tap Revenge (although one of the latter's artist-branded spin-offs is included). Read on for a snapshot of what was released this year, and let us know your thoughts on the best and worst of what the App Store had to offer. Oh, and yes, we've put them in a rough order reflecting how much we liked them, starting with the best. 1. I Am T-Pain might be an obvious choice for top spot, but it combined technical innovation with stellar sales. Eschewing pure promotion, it let fans sing along with a selection of T-Pain songs while having their vocals Auto-Tuned on the fly. It also had good sharing features, used in-app payments to buy and download new tracks for use in the game, and recently added the ability to sing over any song in your iPhone music library. App Store 2. Little Boots Reactive Remixer was a branded version of existing iPhone app RjDj. Yes, it involved remixing three of Boots' tracks, but in two cases that was done based on the user's movement and external sounds – a properly interactive ambient experience. Or something. App Store 3. Hi, How Are You was a beautiful iPhone game based on the artwork of singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. Read More

If you haven't already heard, this week is the Paris-based Le Web Conference. ReadWriteWeb will be live blogging the event in the next couple of days, with startup writer Dana Oshiro attending with the Social Media Club House and news writer Frederic Lardinois attending as a TravelingGeek. The event will showcase some of Europe's best and brightest tech companies. Below are a few resources for those attending the event: 1. Le Web iPhone app: A few days ago we wrote about the fact that Ustream and band app creation site Mobile Roadie have teamed up to deliver an official Le Web iPhone application. The service offers program information, maps and a feed of event-related news. PicTranslator: PicTranslator allows users to take a photo of a menu or signage for instant translation. For $1 you're given a chance to see basic translations, listen to pronunciations and try your hand at communicating in the language of love. 2. Tell Me Where: Based out of Paris, this service allows users to find nearby places in more than 15 categories including fashion, parking, tourism and restaurant-related picks. The iPhone app allows users to connect to their Facebook accounts and view places recommended by your friends. Users can also upload their photos and experiences using the app. 3. Metro Paris: This service allows users to navigate the Paris metro as well as the bus line with ease. Using your phone's GPS, the service allows you to view your closest metro stations and offers real-time alerts on line interruptions. In late August, ReadWriteWeb covered this service's augmented reality release. It is the first known augmented reality app to appear in the App Store. 4. Spotify: If you plan on being in Europe beyond the conference dates, you might want to signup for Spotify premium. The iPhone application offers users real-time file syncing and the ability to cache offline music playlists for use on the metro and other non-wifi enabled areas of the city. 5. Currency Converter: If you haven't gotten used to converting currency, this application calculates the cost of all your rich and sumptuous meals. This year's Le Web is dedicated to highlighting Europe's best and brightest real-time web companies. For a primer on the real-time web, you may want to check out ReadWriteWeb's latest report The Real-Time Web and its Future Read More