17/08/2010 | Filed under
Discover
Big Question

What’s your favourite mobile app, and why?

Internet playboy
Drew Curtis
Fark

Without a doubt it would be Vuvuzela 2010.

Drew is the owner of Fark.com

Ecommerce expert
Ben Dyer
Actinic

Having owned iPhones, plus Android and Blackberry smartphones over the past few years I can categorically say there is one app that stands head and shoulders above the rest … step forward Evernote.

If you don’t know Evernote I suggest you find it in your respective app stores immediately and start organising your life. Evernote enables you to record voice, take photos and make notes and saves it all online for archiving and searching. It comes with a great web, desktop and of course mobile interface, allowing complete synchronisation across all platforms, so you need never forget anything ever again.

Ben Dyer is director of product development at Actinic

Graphic designer
Nicki Frech
True Design

The diversity of apps out there is truly incredible, if not sometimes a bit overwhelming. But we love all the creativity; the apps market is great for allowing people to bring small and big ideas to a massive marketplace and an easy way to see if anyone else thinks your idea is cool.

As graphic designers working internationally, we’re often doing work on the go – from airports or trains, or on location with clients, and some of the apps are great for facilitating that. In terms of what we like and actually find useful, my vote is for the newly launched iPhone app from iStockphoto. We use it to create lightboxes on the move and share them between clients and colleagues. It’s ideal for keeping up a spontaneous flow of ideas on the go.

Nicki Frech is a graphic designer at True Design

Marketing expert
David Donnan
MSG

Call me old fashioned but the best apps on my mobile phone are still voice and email.  The ability to call people and to send/receive email while on the move has much greater value to me than many of the other apps on my iPhone. In fact, when I was upgrading the software on my phone to the latest OS I found it quite liberating to delete many of the other apps that were simply clutter on my screen.

If I had to pick a favourite mobile app at the moment it would be AgingBooth, which takes your picture and shows what you would look like when you are old.  It is a bit of fun, if a bit scary, but it is the one app I have people end up passing my phone around the room to play with.

David Donnan is MD of MSG

Business specialist
Dickie Armour
Fibranet Services Ltd

I have too many mobile apps to pick just one favourite so here are my top five!

1. Hootsuite – Great Twitter app.

2. Tweetdeck – Great Twitter app.

I use both as each one is better at certain tasks.

3. Amazon UK – So simple to quickly buy a book via this app. Great for when you’re at a conference and a speaker refers to a book.

4. iBooks – The new app on iOS4 on the iPhone. Like the Kindle but with a neat bookshelf that stores all my books.

5. BC Reader – Good tool for scanning business cards, which then imports the data to your contacts.

There are loads more too, as well as some good fun ones like The Moron Test. Better than it sounds and very addictive!

Dickie Armour is general manager of Fibranet

Hosting expert
Andrew Saunders
Zen Internet

I of course have a mobile device and it’s an invaluable business tool, especially when I’m out of the office, providing voice, text, email, electronic diary and internet access. Beyond these functions I’m not much of an app user, but I am rather fond of  the “off” button as I think it’s important to stop work life and home life completely blurring into one. 

Andrew is head of product management marketing

B3ta guy
Rob Manuel
B3ta

Currently addicted to Drop7 – a pattern sorting puzzle game that’s making me hide on the loo for just one more game.

Rob is co-founder of B3ta, a website that “celebrates the best stuff on the internet”

Hosting guru
Dominic Monkhouse
PEER 1 Hosting

WINEfindr  is brilliant. Not only does it make me an instant wine buff, it’s a really clever app. You take a photo of the label on the wine bottle and it sends back all the details including tasting notes, food type matches, guide price and the cheapest place to buy it right to your phone. The actual app is a software triumph for graphical processing, but aside from that, anything that fulfils the inner sommelier in me can only be a good thing.

Dominic Monkhouse is UK MD at PEER 1

Hosting specialist
Neil Barton
Hostway, UK

Facebook’s mobile app is my favourite because in many ways it supersedes the experience you get on the website these days. Unlike on the web, it’s a clean interface and provides you (internet connection permitting) with quick and easy access to status updates, photos and the like, without the intrusion of advertising. It’s very much how Facebook used to be! 

Neil is the director of Hostway UK

Software specialist
Siim Vips
Modera

I don’t have a favourite app on my mobile phone, because I use so many of them. I think that mobile apps should have some useful character. The most useful to me are the ones that are extend different services like weather, LinkedIn or similar applications that are used in fully functional internet realms.

Siim Vips is founder and CEO of Modera

Payments expert
Jon Prideaux
SecureTrading

Where to start? Being a bit of a nerd, I’m constantly downloading different apps onto my HTC Desire. Right now my favourite is an application called Tasker. It’s only available in beta, but it enables you to perform certain tasks based on various triggers. These triggers can be times, places, or events on the phone.

For example, you can set it to switch the Wi-Fi on when you get home and off again when you leave; to turn the volume up when you get an incoming text; to pop up a menu of different audio applications when you plug in your headphones; to kill a bunch of apps when the battery gets below a certain level. The list, and the scope for fiddling, is endless.

Jon Prideaux is deputy CEO of SecureTrading

Ecommerce specialist
Nick Vincent
Neoworks.com

My favourite mobile app is Shazam, as it’s saved me hours of anguish trying to name songs that are right on the tip of my tongue. I still can’t work out why I don’t have to pay for it.

Nick Vincent is a senior ecommerce consultant

Hosting provider
Neil Hodson
11 Internet Ltd

My favourite has to be the iPhone app ‘Flight Status Pro’.  I’m not a huge fan of apps for recreation: the best apps just really help out when you’re perhaps in a squeeze and need info fast. Flight Status Pro is really rather deep as it enables me to track in real time my own, my colleagues’ or friends’ flight departures, arrivals, delays etc for over 4,000 airports and 1,200 airlines. There are airport plans, weather forecasts and baggage claim information too. A real boon for me has been the zoomable map of airports, which I’ve used when running late for flights – it’s an excellent resource all round.

Neil Hodson is UK General Manager at 11 Internet, a global web hosting company and domain registrar

Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications

It’s nigh on impossible to choose just one favourite app on the iPhone. The obvious choices that require no explanation are Google Maps, Facebook and Tweetdeck.

Other apps I like include 20 Min Meals by Jamie Oliver and Hobo by Depaul UK. Jamie Oliver’s app is really slick and one of (if not the) best app I’ve seen in terms of usability, design and content – from the written tutorials (with each step having its own image), to the video instructions, to the shopping list functionality.  It’s been thought through to perfection, and it’s incredibly clear that the end user rather than commercial objectives have been put first at every stage. The video tutorials are really well done, and you can download them to your phone, and then remove them if they’re no longer needed.  It’s pricey when compared to the average app (£4.99), but considering there are 50 recipes on there, it represents great value for money.

The iHobo app is conceptually brilliant. You befriend a homeless person for a three-day period, and during that time the app will push notifications to you when he is hungry, scared, cold and so on. The app gives you a certain amount of time to respond. Lack of responses will make iHobo feel like no one is there for him and may make him turn to drugs. It really makes you think more about the plight of homeless people in this country. The one thing that didn’t sit right with me about this app is the Donate function; if you donate £1 the charity will receive just 60p; £3.00 they receive £2.18; and if you donate £10 they receive just £7.14. That’s too much of a percentage if you ask me, and after my three days had finished I donated direct to the charity instead.

It shouldn’t be just about the iPhone, though. I have a Sony Ericsson X10 (Android device), and the Timescape on that is really neat. It collates your social profiles with your emails, texts and calls and displays them visually on the homescreen of your phone. I rate it.

Rachel Hawkes is an account director at Elemental

Hosting expert
Paul Harris
UKFast

As a hosting provider, it’s essential for us to respond quickly to customers at any time, including weekends and evenings. Mobile social media apps enable us to engage existing and potential customers outside of normal office hours and facilitate essential rapport building.

Social media can have devastating effects on a company’s reputation if not managed properly, so Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn apps enable our directors to respond quickly and efficiently.

With the mobile applications market predicted to exceed £16.7bn by 2014, companies must capitalise on the efficiency it offers. Recognising its potential to enable our clients to access their account information from anywhere, our RD department has been developing a series of new applications.

Paul Harris is marketing director of UKFast, a global hosting provider

Search guru
Mike Fantis
Make It Rain

Taking laptops to meetings is fast becoming ‘so noughties’, which is why my favourite app at the moment is Dropbox. Having recently purchased an iPad to continue our Apple eulogy, the Dropbox app is a great way to share data between everyone in the office. Our iPhones and iPad are now armed with all the necessary docs, presentations, reports, graphs and so on, so we can access them whenever and wherever we need them. Whether presenting on the iPad over a coffee or sending docs via the iPhone as we discuss them with clients over drinks, all the information is just there.

Mike Fantis is head of paid search at SEO agency Make It Rain

Media PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications

My initial exposure to mobile apps was somewhat refined with a Sony Ericsson X1 because of the limited number of apps that were available to me. Even with the restrictive nature of the Windows mobile apps, I still found what was available gave me an appetite for what was to come. The move to an iPhone meant that I experienced app overload and I thoroughly enjoyed trying to max out my 32GB S with apps, and failed. With a combination of business and personal apps on the iPhone, with every second person eager to show me their best app (and why it’s an essential addition to my ridiculous number of use-once-only apps), it was starting to become overwhelming. A great conversation starter, but it was cluttering my phone with apps I really didn’t need, find useful or enjoy for that matter.

The multi-app novelty quickly wore off. I don’t need to go past three pages of iPhone apps, because what I have service me well. Most of the apps that come as standard suffice for me and I really couldn’t do without them. Email is critical to what we do at Elemental and having IMAP across all of my email accounts saves me a great deal of time and repetition dealing with what I need to on a daily basis.

The ability to read Microsoft documents is equally important to email, so QuickOffice Connect suits me nicely. If I wanted to edit and mirror other functionality that the software on the Mac does, the upgrade is relatively cost effective. QuickOffice is easily synched with my Mac and simple to manage, so it’s ideal when I need to have eyes on documents that need my input when I am away from my machine. So this is my favourite app right now, with email a close second. Augmented Reality (AR) apps are just getting better and having seen the recent Wimbledon app, there’s no doubt I’ll be experimenting with these very soon.

Tim is director of Elemental Communications

Comments

Rob D /
18/08/2010 /
16:53 /
http://www.marketinggrin.com/Digital-Marketing-Capabilities/Digital-marketing-agency-in-London.html

Amazon is a very good app. Taking a photo of a book and getting all the reviews for it is amazing, as well we the feature to save wish lists on the go.

For productivity, I am currently using AwesomeNote, which is excellent. Another good to-do app is 2Do. I have the desktop version of Things, which is great, but I read that the iPhone version leaves a lot to be desired with regards to features and updates.

James /
18/08/2010 /
22:39 /
http://cheapsubscriptions.co.uk/net-magazine/

I agree with many of these. The Facebook app would have to be my number 1 choice – it’s just designed perfectly for smartphones, and a much better experience than the regular web version. Shazam is probably at number 2 for me – in about 15 seconds I can get the song name and artist and find out if they’re touring near me. Kayak’s flight application is brilliant and I’m also seriously addicted to Stick Golf

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