To promote the Canadian newspaper Metro, Rethink Canada created mini newspaper boxes on busy city streets across the country. QR codes allowed users to instantly download the paper on their phone.

Market Research

It is crucial to make sure that there is a market for your app. Research different app categories, and specific apps that provide a similar service and or content to what your app will provide. There are several online tools that can help you with your market research. App Annie and Distimo are websites that offer app analytics and market intelligence. Apptrace is another good tool that provides insight to the app economy. With these tools you can easily find top listed apps within specific categories based on downloads and engagement. Do your research. It will pay off in the end.

via Mag+ Marketing Mobile Applications.

Create Your Mobile App & Spread the Word

Mag+ is a digital publishing platform based on an InDesign plugin.  Whether you are looking to make a consumer, corporate or enterprise app, the Mag+ platform is an easy way for you to create smartphone and tablet apps without any programming skills. Learn more about the Mag+ tools to get started with your app design and creation. It is critical to keep the user experience top of mind when creating your app. It must be easy to use, and a beautiful design certainly goes a long way.

As you are creating you app, start the hype online. If you don’t have one already, you should create a website and Facebook page for you app, and start to cross promote. Do you have a personal blog? This might be a good outlet to begin marketing your app as well. Begin building the online presence of your app.

Optimize for the App Store

We recently did a series of blog posts with Mag+ product expert, Anders Odevik. He provided best practices for naming your app in the App Store, selecting the best category for your app, designing app icons for the App Store, and using keywords in your App Store listing. Following these guidelines will greatly improve your visibility of your iOS app in the App Store. If your app is in English, we recommend you consider localizing your app. The translation of the app name in the App Store will increase downloads.

Engage with Your App Users

More and more tools are becoming available to improve engagement with your app users. It is important for you to understand your audience so that you can better meet their needs. As their needs are met, they are more willing to return to your app. Appboy is a fantastic customer engagement platform that pulls information from your app users to help you to better understand, engage and monetize your audience. Through this platform you can see how users are using your app, and send them relevant push notifications to keep them coming back for more.

Don’t Give Up

Don’t stop marketing your app after its launch. It is an ongoing process. Remember to measure your user engagement, cross promote your app on other online properties and continue your marketing efforts. There are tools to help you along your way! Apptamin is an app marketing firm that offers some fantastic services. If you have not seen their website you should. Their blog is packed with valuable information and marketing tools for developers, including this great iOS App Marketing Strategy Guide.

More information about creating mobile applications with Mag+.

Tutorial: Adding multiple background images with Mag+

For more on Mag+ on this site, click here

Mike Haney with Mag+ was part of the group that got Popular Science+ on the iPad when it launched in 2010, making it the first magazine on the device.

In fact, according to Gartner analyst, Phil Redman, tablets play a role in 60% of today’s enterprises and will reach 80% by 2015. As you can tell from any day’s reading of TabTimes, tablets are here to stay and will play an increasingly important role in all types of businesses.

What is ResponsiveAds?

ResponsiveAds offers solutions and ad technologies  geared toward the convergence of all screens.

The self-serve Responsive STRETCH™ banner ad platform is quite disruptive as it enables one-ad-creative to work ubiquitously and deployed as a standard third-party tag.

From the website we read: Either if you have a Responsive Web Designed site or separated mobile, tablet and desktop sites, ResponsiveAds services allow both publishers and advertisers to effectively enable existing ads to work/perform better across all screens.

Flow line concept

One of the many challenges is to set-up an ad to work across all screens is the shape of the actual foot-print. ResponsiveAds enables you to set-up a configuration that we call Flow-line that will make it easy to show the same ad across desktop, tablet and mobile.

For example the diagram below shows a what we call a “Flip Flow-line.”  A typical tower or side-bar ad can be converted dynamically on-the-fly to a horizontal banner ad unit.

Dynamic Content Optimization for Cross-Screen Attribution

STRETCH™

According to research done by Royal Pingdom WordPress is strengthening its position as the dominating blogging platform or Content Management System (CMS) used by the world’s top 100 blogs. This year, WordPress is used by 52% of the top blogs, up from the 48% Pingdom identified in their study in 2012.

With over 65 million WordPress sites in the world, it’s clear that Automattic’s platform is popular.

WordPress keeps on gaining in popularity

Pingdom used the list of the top 100 blogs in the world from Technorati and tried to identify which blogging platform or CMS the site is using. Out of the 100 blogs, they could identify and verify the platform in use by 94 of the sites.

Here is the result of Pingdom’s 2013 study of the blogging platforms used by the top 100 blogs:

To read article, click here.

• 291 Paper Letters.
• 2,454 Photographs.
• 140 hours of work.

Created by Ben Barrett-Forrest. © Forrest Media – 2013

• www.forrestmedia.org
• www.facebook.com/forrestmedia
• twitter.com/benbf

Information Sources:

• Thinking in Type by Ellen Lupton
• Just My Type by Simon Garfield
• If this video sparks any ideas, I would love to hear about them!

Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of “do-it-yourself” and the couture concept of “made-to-measure,” the seven galleries will be organized around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style. Themes will include New York and London, which will tell punk’s origin story as a tale of two cities, followed by Clothes for Heroes and four manifestations of the D.I.Y. aesthetic—Hardware, Bricolage, Graffiti and Agitprop, and Destroy.

Presented as an immersive multimedia, multisensory experience, the clothes will be animated with period music videos and soundscaping audio techniques.