Boston, Mass. (May 26, 2016) — The Yankee Candle® Scent Systems app creator, Rocket Farms Studios, was recognized yesterday at the 20th Annual MITX awards for the Most Innovative use of IoT (Internet of Things) category.
Month: May 2016
So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.
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10 Mobile Apps to be Movies After Angry Birds
Now that Angry Birds is the first ever mobile app that’s been adapted into a movie, and it seems to be doing well at the box office, it’s inevitable that more apps get the same Hollywood treatment. After all, they’re making a movie about emojis so there’s literally nothing they won’t do.
So if we’re doing this, and I guess we are, here are 10 movies we’d like to see come from mobile apps.
1. The Waze Movie
It’s no secret we love the Waze app, and we think it would be perfect for the blockbuster action film treatment.
Pitch: The Fast and the Furious, but with better navigation. The anti-heroes drive fast and avoid cops as well as traffic jams. Their getaway is crowdsourced by helpful civilians watching the chaos. Starring aging action stars who like to drive safe and know where they’re going.
2. The Tinder Movie
This has to be in production already, right? We feel like before Tinder actually existed, it was already a trope of 80s movies making fun of our dating future… and now here we are.
Pitch: In a dystopian future, beautiful isolated young adults have no emotions but must repopulate the Earth by finding their mates via swiping right through a vast database. One match sparks a love that the world hasn’t seen since World War IV, spreading hope and the resurrection of love across these beautiful young adults. Starring whichever beautiful young adults are available from the CW.
3. The Spotify Movie
The licensing for all the songs will make this one extremely expensive to produce, but perhaps you can show ads every other scene to recoup some costs.
Pitch: In a dystopian future, no one shares anything; beautiful isolated young adults all are selfish and own individual copies of everything, including music. One particularly beautiful girl writes a song about love and shares it. It becomes an underground hit when it’s streamed to anyone who wants it in a subscription model. Can the dream of socialized music bring people together to fight the evil Capitol (Records)? Starring all those singing kids from the Disney Channel.
4. The Tidal Movie
Pitch: It’s just like The Spotify Movie but no one sees it except celebrities.
5. The Venmo Movie
Who would have ever thought personal finance would be a fun, social thing kids would do with their friends? If the big banks can trick us into thinking financial transactions are hip, then a movie from the experience isn’t far off. Seriously a great mobile apps movie idea!
Pitch: Brewster’s Millions, but for Millennials. Three teens have to spend $30 million in 3 days in order to inherit $30 billion from an eccentric tech mogul uncle. As they live the high-life, their spending spree is live-cast as the public cheers or jeers them on. They don’t learn any lesson and win all the money. Starring 3 white males and set in 2008, just before the financial crisis.
6. The Boomerang from Instagram Movie
An Instagram Movie is too much of a low hanging fruit, and every movie already has a selfie joke or ten in it. Choosing to focus on the Boomerang app will make this movie much more relevant for the next week or so.
Pitch: A girl finds that she can travel back in time and relive the last 3 seconds of her life, but she can’t change anything about it, just relive it. It’s a deep, existential sci-fi drama about the inexorable march of time toward death and the meaninglessness of both the unexamined and the examined life. Directed by Spike Jonze.
7. The Minecraft Movie
Ok so they’re actually making this one into a real movie, but our pitch is better.
Pitch: Using just a pickax, a man crafts a chair from scratch in real time. Runtime of seventeen hours.
Note: our pitch is not better.
8. The Messenger/Snapchat/WhatsApp/GO SMS Pro/Kik Movie
It’ll be hard to get all the producers to communicate on this project. We recommend email.
Pitch: Aliens start messaging with 1400 humans across the world, warning of an imminent invasion. These 1400 humans just so happen to be mute. Now it’s a race against time to tell the world about the coming alien threat, one platform-specific message at a time. Can they convince anyone of the invasion without sending a single picture of any genitals? Starring anyone with thumbs and expressive eyebrows.
9. The Google+ Movie
Pitch: A dystopian future.
10. The Fart Sound Board Movie
This one’s a no-brainer.
Pitch: A hard-hitting documentary about the American presidential election process in 2016. Narrated by Ricky Gervais.
What mobile apps do you think would make great movies? Sound off in the comments below!
So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.
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What’s Next for Apple’s Mobile Strategy?
Apple’s been having a tough time in the press these days. It saw its revenue decline for the first time in 13 years, iPhone sales are likewise declining, the Apple Watch hasn’t made much of a splash, and rumor has it that the iPhone 7 will be fairly ho-hum. The most interesting tech to come out of Apple might be the fabled iCar, but that seems years away at the very least.
So, what’s next for Apple? Specifically, what’s next for Apple’s mobile strategy?
Has mobile hardware peaked for now?
Any popular device will eventually saturate the market. Apple’s been here before with the iMac and the iPod. At this point, the iPhone is such a capable device that consumers aren’t finding a hugely compelling reason to upgrade to the next device, and with lower-cost iPhones available, nearly everyone who wants one has one. More and more, people are looking at their current iPhones and thinking “eh, this is good enough.”
PCs, which peaked in sales a while ago, suffered the same fate. As the technology matured, the PCs became more than capable at running nearly any program and lasting for years. Back in the 2000s, we saw commercials on TV for the newest Pentium chip from Intel because PCs were struggling to keep up with software demands. We had to upgrade constantly to run the latest Adobe, the latest games, even the latest Windows.
But eventually, software got more efficient and the hardware got beefy enough that the PC itself was no longer the tech bottleneck. Today, many people have a Chromebook that costs less than $200 that can do just about everything they need. The beauty and curse of technology is that things always get more efficient, so once it’s “good enough,” we stop buying the next best thing.
It’s time to focus on software.
The iPhone’s “good enough” for most people. The speed, the camera, the form; the iPhone is no longer a technology bottleneck, and it hasn’t been for a while. Your iPhone 5 is still pretty darn amazing even in light of the 6. Yes, there’s no doubt that in a few years, the hardware will be the bottleneck again, be it because of more intense software demands or because a brand new technology arrives that everyone wants (as VR is trying to make a case for). But right now, the focus should be on the software.
Pro-level iPads and the Apple Watch aren’t big wins, but that’s fine! We’re betting that mobile software is where Apple’s next big win will be. Remember, the Apple Store is still far more profitable than Google Play, and it will stay that way for a while.
And Apple is quietly but decisively making it’s software push into the healthcare industry with Apple Health, CareKit, and healthcare might be the driving force behind the Apple Watch in the first place. Since this is a booming market, due to the Boomers, it’s smart for Apple to build mobile software and mobile apps in this industry. There will only be more and more need for healthcare support and Apple’s positioning itself to be the #1 developer. We think it’s a solid, smart bet; and the potential windfall could be huge if Apple corners the market in mobile healthcare.
So fine, ding Apple for its hardware woes. Mobile software seems to be where they’ll win next. Who’s taking bets?
What do you think is next for Apple’s mobile strategy?
So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.
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5 Innovation Marketing Truths
This is a guest article from Jeff Berman, Principal and Creative Director of bermanadvertising.com on truths in innovation marketing.
Advertising clutter is the single biggest problem with marketing,” according to Dr. J. Walker Smith, the head of research firm Yankelovich.
That’s already bad news for app marketers. What if you have something truly new, a better answer to an existing problem? It’s worse, because you’re asking people not only to choose your thing instead of the other guy’s, but to change the way they think about their problem. And most people don’t want to. Even if what they’re doing now gives them fits, most people will flat-out reject anything different.
How do you get them to pay attention to your new thing when they’re just focused on trying to make their current not-so-great thing work? The discipline begins with these five truths:
1. The more innovative the solution, the harder it is to build a business around it.
This is just a simple truth: Everyone is already doing something else. And even if your solution will make their lives better, most people would rather stick with what they know than take a chance on your new thing.
2. Quick early sales are great but don’t make a market.
A following, darker truth about marketing anything new, be it an app or another product: It’s relatively easy to get a small number of people interested. There’s always someone who wants to try the new thing, just to see if it works. But they represent less than 5% of your prospects*, and most are just as quickly off the new thing to go try the next one.
Many marketers have been energized by early sales, only to see them fizzle soon after. Building a business around your new thing involves getting people beyond early adopters.
3. How-it-works messages are great in the beginning and death soon after.
Turning a new solution into a business means looking beyond those early adopters to the people who have a problem and a budget. And they don’t care how it works. They only want to know how to solve their problem.
In fact, they’re so focused on their problem they can’t see that a how-it-works message might be relevant to them. Most people simply don’t have the imagination to connect your solution to their problem. Your how-it-works message is literally invisible to them.
4. Creating a market for a new idea means thinking of it as the answer to a question.
And that begins by understanding how the problem looks to your prospects. You need to get a clear idea of the people whose problem you solve. How do they think about the problem? What are they doing about it now? How’s that working out for them? What would they like to do if they could?
You need to walk around the issue to look at it from the point of view of your prospects. Only then can you frame your message in a way that feels relevant to them.
5. You have to make them want it before they know why they want it.
This is the trickiest part: finding a way to put the want up front. Most people think that people first investigate how something works and then decide whether they want it. In fact, people won’t take the time to look into anything until they want it. The dynamic goes, “Oh, I want that. What is it?”
How to make someone want something before they know what it is? You take your understanding of your prospects, combine it with the reason why you created this thing to begin with, and craft a message too compelling to ignore. Of course, that’s not easy to do. That’s why companies like mine still thrive. But when you get it right, it’s your most powerful business-building tool. As Ed McCabe said back in the day, “Great creative is the last unfair business advantage.”
*Ask Jeff how he came to this percentage.
So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.
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Rocket Farm Studios Recognized as Leading App Developer
Rocket Farm Studios was recently recognized by Clutch, an independent ratings and reviews firm, as a leading app developer in the Greater Boston Area. Our success in the category is based on our proven ability to deliver on mobile app development and user experience projects, as well as multiple, verified reviews from our clients. Check out one of our client’s testimonials below:
As a team of passionate, creative, and driven developers, Rocket Farm Studios provides a unique and reliable customer experience from concept creation to execution, and through the life-cycle of the app. When we partner, we partner for the long haul.
We pride ourselves on the lasting relationships that we form with our clients and the awesome products that we create for them. From Fortune 500’s to Boston’s very own stable of start-ups, if you’ve got an app in mind, we’ll help you launch your rocket.
It’s exciting to see the Boston tech industry burgeoning and to be featured on Clutch’s Leaders Matrix among other developers in the area. Take a look at our full profile, read all of Rocket Farm Studios’ reviews, and be sure to check out Clutch to learn more about how we were evaluated.
So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.
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