My big fat mobile app/from Mobile Marketer

As the marketing clock inches closer to Thanksgiving and the holidays, it seems that the rush is on to bring out yet another mobile application – which has become almost as ubiquitous as the mobile device itself.

There are roughly 250,000-plus applications in the Apple App Store, ready and waiting for download to the more than 30 million iPhone subscribers.

But it is not all about Apple.

The average Android user has, at any given moment, about 25 applications on that device, and the number of applications downloaded by any smartphone user across any platform – BlackBerry, iPhone, Android – has increased almost 23 percent since December 2009.

However you slice or dice it, that is a lot of applications.

For advertisers and marketers, that is a lot of impressions and interactions. And those, of course, are worth a lot of money.

What led me to explore the explosion of applications in this column was actually my last opinion piece, “5 arguments on why mobile is indispensable to marketing plans”.

No sooner had my column come out than a surge of mobile application developers began contacting me. Some admitted to openly copying others, and they all wanted help in promoting their next best thing.

So this trend of marketers and their client companies rushing into the mobile apposphere is hardly surprising. In fact, it is to be expected based on the above numbers. This is the future of marketing, right?

As with many trends – even viable, sustainable ones – the impulse to anoint The Next Big Thing is quite irresistible....

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Outside The Cubicle: When Creativity Kicks In

The work I do takes me to a lot of different places. I get to travel a great deal - which is both tiring and fun - but I wouldn't have it any other way.

What I’ve discovered when I'm on the road (or in a cab, or on the runway or at 35,000ft), is that being outside the proverbial cubicle feeds my creativity.

Being untethered to a desk and away from a routine working environment somehow unleashes a different part of my thinking process, one that is unencumbered by the barrage of calls and emails that I deal with at ThinkInk on a daily basis. Armed with my blackberry, laptop (and now iPad), I’m able to churn out an incredible number of articles, new ideas and projects to get started on.. So many, in fact, my office dreads when I go away now because I come back with so much more to do.

And not a minute seems to be wasted while I'm on the road; emails are answered, documents are checked, files are saved and work caught up on.. Alas, now I’m desk-bound again and the cycle starts all over.

Do you find yourself more creative away from your regular work environment? More productive even?

Here’s a short visual “diary” of the last trip, courtesy of my phone.

Bye bye beach


View from my London office – grey skies, what a surprise!


Luna the dog (my son’s charge for a day)


Streets of Toronto


Night time in Toronto


Interviewing Richard Cushing at the GuestLogix User Group conference, Toronto

Cheesy smiling with John Devin at the GuestLogix User Group conference, Toronto

Night out with the boys in Toronto – Jason and Richard at the GuestLogix User Group gala


Vieux Montreal – thank heavens for sunshine!


Atwater Marche – YUMMMMM


Brunch at Thursday’s, on Sunday


Montreal’s main thoroughfare in Chinatown.


And yes I did manage to work in between all that… I’ll be posting conference pics very soon.