Songbeat Gets A Second Life As Excellent Music App With Uncertain Future

We get free TV and radio for so many year. When we switch to internet, we not quite able to work out a model that music label get pay (are they too geedy) and consumer get what they want (the TV model is not ideal either as rubbish program grow day by day

Songbeat Gets A Second Life As Excellent Music App With Uncertain Future: "

I liked Songbeat the minute I started using it. First released as a desktop app for Seeqpod back in January 2008, the upgraded version that was introduced nearly 12 months after that not only made searching for music extremely simple but also offered an excellent way to download tracks to your computer.

And like Seeqpod, it was also an easy way to obtain copyrighted material from the many places on the Web where that kind of stuff can be found.

Up, down, and up again

Evidently, the music industry took notice and sought to shut the service down in court. Warner Music was the first to file a lawsuit against the startup behind Songbeat and ultimately forced the fledgling company to take the service offline, but not without them promising to return with something bigger and bolder in the future.

Yesterday, the guys behind Songbeat came out with a revived version of the desktop client, which has been renamed Songbeat 360. Music lovers are going to love it.

The music industry, however, is not.

The app

Songbeat 360 is an Adobe AIR powered desktop music player with a powerful music search engine - unambiguously baptized Songbeat Search - at its core. Search for artists or songs and the app returns a list of 50 search results, along with links to the originating source. Double-click tracks and you can instantly play them from the integrated player, or right-click to download tunes to your computer. Drag music tracks to the left-hand column and create custom playlists straight from the app. Slick, fast and easy.

Wanna learn more about an artist? Simply hit the ‘Discover’ button and you’ll get all sorts of information from across the web delivered right to the desktop client interface, including similar artists so you can find more music you like by browsing their profiles and albums. Interested in knowing when the artist in question (or another) is playing at or nearby your location? Click the ‘Live’ button and you’ll get a list of gigs based on your location, which you can easily modify. Wanna let your friends know what you’re listening to? The integrated Twitter button will make that easy for you too.

The cost

Songbeat has set up an unusual way of monetizing the service. When you launch the application for the first time, you’ll see 50 credits at the right top of the client. Every time you do a search for an artist or song, a credit comes off your inventory. Scroll to the bottom of the list and you’ll get 50 more results, once again taking a credit off your account. If you run out of credits, which takes away the ability to search music using Songbeat Search, you can purchase additional credits at any time through Paypal, with a rate of €10 or roughly $15 for 1,000 credits.

Here’s the funny thing: actually streaming music or downloading music doesn’t cost you any credits at all. Nothing. Zip.

And that’s of course what will make users love it, and labels (and many music artists) hate it.

The problem

The announcement of the all new Songbeat starts like this:

“Why should I pay for music when it’s available for free everywhere anyway? This is the question everyone is asking themselves today.” says Claudio Fritz-Vietta, CEO of Songbeat Distribution Ltd.

Nothing short of provocative, and when I inquired about the specifics of deals that are in place with record labels or artists to make sure the latter get adequate compensation for their work, Fritz-Vietta made it clear that he is trying every trick in the book to prevent having to pay up for that. Which means that, unlike Spotify (which Songbeat loves to compare themselves with), there are zero arrangements with the music industry in place yet, and I doubt there ever will be.

Like Seeqpod before them, Songbeat hides behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by stating they are only search providers offering users access to music that is already available on the Web, and that the company never actually hosts any digital files on its own servers. Seeqpod tried to play that game, got sued all over the place anyway, ultimately filed for bankruptcy only to be (presumably) picked up by Microsoft for its core technology and team some time after.

Songbeat also says it actually wants to help artists and their labels market their music, concerts etc. better by - get this - offering them free ad space inside the client interface. The idea is that they’d advertise better quality tracks, concert tickets, etc. using ad units that are displayed whenever someone ends up on the artist’s profile.

Somehow, I don’t think that’ll stick.

This is part of their pitch:

“There are no deals with any labels in place yet, but we are open for talks and are willing to work with them and with each individual artist. We are not doing this to steal from anyone. Whatever we earn with this we are willing to share in a fair way. We want to offer a new and alternative revenue stream. Artists and labels will have to use as many revenue streams as possible to keep their businesses going - we will be one of them.

It’s about controlling what’s out there at the moment - and right now - as we can see the labels & artists have no way to control it. We want to help them control any content that’s out there may it be claimed legal or illegal.

Regarding the legal situation Songbeat 360 and Songbeat Search fully comply with the DMCA and all major copyright laws internationally. Songbeat has learned a lot in the past after being sued by Warner Music in Germany. There is a take-down notice and each source from each individual track found is shown. It would actually be a perfect tool for labels to find all copyright infringements that are online and get them taken down.”

In a perfect world, maybe. A serious shame we’re not living in one.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

"

(500) Days Of Apple And Google

(500) Days Of Apple And Google: "

If you haven’t seen the movie (500) Days of Summer, you should, it’s a great movie. But I’m not giving anything away (that the trailer doesn’t) by saying it’s the story of a relationship that ends for seemingly no good reason. And following the release of the documents sent to the FCC, it would seem that we’re in the midst of watching the same thing happen between two tech titans that previously had a close relationship, Apple and Google.

The statements by the two to the FCC are full of information — except for the information that Gdacted, I mean, Google, declined to release to the public. We’ve already written about some of what Google likely has in its missing portions, but the most interesting aspect of it may be why they chose not to release those portions. The answer may well be because those portions go against some of what Apple is saying, and that would put both companies in a tough position. And it would put further strain on their relationship.

This is a story of software company meets hardware company

A few years ago, much of the tech world looked at Apple and Google as the two companies that could possibly take on the Microsoft juggernaut. Apple would take on Microsoft’s heart, Windows, with its OS X. And Google would kick out its legs by taking on Office with Google Docs. The two were perhaps best suited for such a fight because each had other revenue streams to sustain a war against Microsoft (Apple with Mac hardware sales and the iPod, Google with search and more importantly, search advertising).

And the two grew closer together. In 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire,” wrote Schmidt in a statement. Alongside Schmidt on Apple’s board was Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who was also on Google’s board, and former Vice President Al Gore, who also was acting as a senior advisor to Google.

Apple started launching products that were closely tied to Google. iMovie could export directly to YouTube. iWeb offered easy embeds of Google Maps and AdSense ads. Apple TV got a special YouTube channel. And of course, the iPhone featured Google search as the default, made it easy to access you Gmail emails in mail, came with a YouTube application, and had a Maps application that used Google Maps and in fact, was built with the help of Google. It’s also interesting to note that the all of the YouTube integration required (and still requires) Google to encode videos in the h.264 format because the iPhone doesn’t support Adobe Flash (which is how YouTube videos play on the web).

Then there were the less obvious connections. Multiple reports now point to Apple asking Google not to include multi-touch support in the first Android-based phones, and Google complying, much to the dismay of many customers. And then there’s the unwritten agreement that the two sides apparently had stating that neither would hire one another’s workers.

Yes, when you used to think of the relationship between Apple and Google, the term “buddy-buddy” came to mind.

So what happened?

In (500) Days of Summer, when the main character, Tom, asks his girlfriend, Summer, what went wrong with her previous relationships, she responds, “What always happens. Life.” The same may well be true for Apple and Google, though seeing as they are giant companies, it may be more appropriate to replace “life” with “growth.”

While Apple and Google both benefitted from their close ties, both still existed as separate companies with their own agendas. While Apple was primarily a hardware maker, and Google an online software company, the two had few conflicts. But mobile changed all of that.

The iPhone launched in 2007, and the first Android phone the following year. Still, the two companies got along just fine. Sure, Schmidt found himself having to exit Apple board meetings when the iPhone was brought up, but both sides clearly saw it as a small price to pay for Schmidt still being on the board. But then the iPhone exploded in popularity, to the point where it’s now Apple’s second biggest business (behind Macs, ahead of iPods), and it’s certainly not crazy to think that one day it could be the biggest.

While Android phones haven’t exactly taken off compared to the iPhone, the platform is making progress and Google is poised to release another dozen or so Android phones before the end of this year. With all due respect to the BlackBerry (whose apps are generally considered to be sub-par), Android and iPhone are seen as the two mobile platforms right now. Some people are iPhone people, some are Android people. They are competitors. And so by extension, Apple and Google are competitors.

Yes, they have different models for how they want to do things in mobile. But it’s not entirely dissimilar to the Apple and Microsoft battle in the 1980s. Microsoft built an OS that they wanted to get on as many machines as possible, Apple built a hardware and software combination to provide the best controlled experience. These days, in mobile, Google is taking the quantity approach, with Apple sticking to its quality approach.

Meanwhile, outside of the mobile sphere, Google continued its growth despite an economic slowdown and decided the time was right to start branching out. And while it’s not ready yet, the announcement of Chrome OS is another element of its business that will directly collide with one of Apple’s. The impact might not be so big on Apple, but when so many parts of your businesses start to collide, one can imagine that it’s hard to stay so buddy-buddy.

And the Chrome OS bombshell had much larger fallout. It intensified and perhaps even reinvigorated the FTC’s investigation into the relationship of Apple and Google, and specifically their interlocking directorates. And then Apple rejected (or “didn’t approve” depending on who you believe) the Google Voice app, prompting an FCC investigation into the relationship between the two companies as well. A few days later, Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board.

The missing app that gets no love

But let’s not forget that before the whole Google Voice thing, Apple “requested” that another application Google made for the iPhone instead be made into a web app, Latitude. While it’s not entirely clear if Google submitted that app and Apple rejected/didn’t approve it, it really doesn’t matter. It is another example of Apple shooting down a Google app, turning one incident into a pattern. And that pattern points to something. (As does the fact that Google mentioned Apple’s “request” very publicly in a blog post.)

As we have heard from multiple Google sources, it would seem that Apple is getting paranoid about Google taking over the iPhone. Maps, YouTube and Search were apparently fine, but with new apps like Latitude and Voice, it was certainly starting to look possible that eventually Google apps would take up the entire first screen of apps on the device.

And while most companies may not mind that, and would let the customers decide, Apple is not most companies. Their stated reason for both the Latitude and Voice removals say more or less than those apps would cause confusion with consumers because they are similar to core iPhone functions (Latitude is like Maps and Voice is like the phone). And no matter how buddy-buddy Apple and Google were, no company likes the idea of another company controlling so much of its product.

Naturally, if someone else controls your product, your product may be in trouble if they pull support. Or, and I’m just speculating here, maybe Apple felt that Google was using the iPhone as a gateway drug of sorts to give users a taste of what their apps can do, get them hooked, and then getting them wanting more with more functional versions of the apps on the Android platform.

Just look at some of the examples, Gmail works on the iPhone, but it doesn’t have push support for some unknown reason. On Android, it has push support and better label support and star support, etc. Maps work on the iPhone but doesn’t feature Latitude, on Android, it does. Further, Latitude would have worked on the iPhone (and does through the web browser), but it’s a lame version. Android, which allows apps to run in the background, has the better version. Same with Google Voice, even if it was on the iPhone, it would not run in the background.

The bottom line

The real bottom line for all of this is money. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense why Apple would want to reject the Google Voice app. It actually would have made more sense if Apple worked with Google to integrate Google Voice into the iPhone, giving them more leverage over the carriers that Apple still very much relies on for its device.

While Google Voice still requires the carriers for its functionality, eventually, it’s not hard to see it having a VoIP component that bypasses the carriers. As we learned from all of the open spectrum stuff, Google clearly envisions a future where there isn’t just a handful of carriers that control all wireless access in the U.S. Instead, it wants a more open system with many different providers. And there won’t be confusing and ridiculously priced voice and data plans in their system, there will just be fairly-priced data plans.

Of course, all of that sounds great to us, but Google has an agenda too. They want all of this because they believe that easier access to the web means more people using Google, which helps their bottom line.

So why wouldn’t Apple want to help Google in shaking up the system? Because doing so would hurt its own bottom line. Where do you think Apple is making all of its money off of the iPhone? It’s making it on the subsidy that AT&T pays them every time someone buys an iPhone.

The first version of the iPhone didn’t have a subsidy, and at $600, not surprisingly, not as many people bought it. So Apple switched things up and agreed to waive the money it gets per month from AT&T contracts, in exchange for AT&T subsidizing each phone and paying Apple the difference. If AT&T (or any other carrier that eventually gets the iPhone) doesn’t exist with the outrageous rates they charge, they don’t pay Apple the huge subsidy. And if they can’t charge the ridiculous rates (which they wouldn’t be able to do and survive in Google’s dream scenario), they can’t subsidize the phone down to $200, and pay Apple the difference. If the phone isn’t $200, not as many sell. And so on…

And so now we see a few different ways in which the Apple/Google situation has become complicated. And any combination of these can certainly sour a relationship — even one that looked so promising for so long. It would seem that the story has turned to one about growth, control, and above all, money. Those aren’t exactly the things that love stories are made of.

[images: Fox Searchlight]

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"An interest analysis on the inter-dependency between major software vendor due to the system architecture. However, apart from board seat, there is no other way to coordinate this company, any means to drive them to make the whole system continue function and create more useful stub

Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes

Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes: "

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years. The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the world’s economic growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper and in many cases competitive academically, and then there’s the H-1B issue. If America won’t allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the student loans to begin with?

Make no mistake: This is a huge blow for the United States, and particularly Silicon Valley. It’s killing diversity in graduate schools at a time future business leaders most need to understand other countries, especially Asian ones. Xenophobic, anonymous cowards may leave as much bile in the comments as they want: The reality is one out of every four tech companies is started by an immigrant. In the tech industry, immigrants have created more high paying jobs than they’ve “stolen.”

And nearly every CEO will tell you how much added cost and hassle there is in hiring a foreign-born worker—they do it because they physically can not find enough appropriately skilled workers in the U.S. (Below is an interview I did with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman about this very subject a few months ago, and he wrote a guest post on TechCrunch discussing the issue as well.)

Indeed, a recent study by the Bay Area Council, the Campaign for College Opportunity and IHELP showed that we’d need a 90% upswing in people graduating with degrees in science, technology, math or engineering to keep up with all the new jobs being created in that discipline. What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things. Money and talent are fungible assets that flowed to the U.S.—and specifically the Valley—because that is where they were supported and rewarded.

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech; that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

(Flickr image by Stephen Pierzchala)

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"The biggest problem is, where is the innovation go today. Although there is a lot of new web site, little break through is discovered. Even the most expected Wolffram Alpha doesn't result in commerical succes.

For Twitter, Sharing Data WIth Google Would Be Suicide

For Twitter, Sharing Data WIth Google Would Be Suicide: "

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. We all have a vested interest in its success. Facebook is soon to monopolize the social stream to the same extent that Google has done with search. That is not good for anyone, including Facebook. I have had many discussions with people in recent weeks about the face-off between twitter and Facebook and also about the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google. When I was asked by Erick Schonfeld at the Real Tiime Stream Crunchup (Video) event about my opinion on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed, I responded that they could do that if they don’t plan to sell their company in the future. In other words, it is my humble opinion that if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced and for good reason.

Twitter is important. How often does a company come along that really changes consumer behavior? That creates a new form of media consumption and connectivity? For all the thousands of startups covered on Techcrunch only a few have a profound impact on the arc of internet history. Twitter has earned its spot in that pantheon and now it remains to be seen if it can play a bigger role in how to monetize the stream and in the process build a real business.

At this moment in time, Twitter has such a stronghold on this new form of real-time consumption that it has the potential to dominate the category. But its window of opportunity is closing fast as Facebook and others hurl themselves at that prize. The experience of real-time communication and search, that sense you get of unfolding streams of relevant information to your interests and queries flowing in a digital river has arrived with Twitter coursing first through the rapids. But now that we have arrived at this new medium, what next? Does Twitter become an example of a utility that is emulated by others that already have a monetization engine, leaving Twitter to ultimately drift to a respected place in Wikipedia like Netscape? Or does it continue to push the boundaries and create a sustainable and growing business that will allow it to continue to ride the whitewater?

If twitter is to confine itself to being a communications medium, or even worse, a news distribution engine, it will surely perish. By analogy, Google as a business is not a search engine but an advertising business that is printing money at unprecedented rates. Google does this by owning the equivalent of distribution in the digital age. Its just that the meaning of the word “distribution” in the digital age has shifted. Google, as the entry point for such a vast audience, effectively owns the distribution on the Internet as a business leader and brand. Its lead continues to grow as the audience grows.

Google’s economics lay in the economy of intent. The intent of users to purchase a product or service when they use Google’s search is what drives its money presses. The context of the users’ actions and interests map to an intention which advertisers are eager to pay for. The ability to automate the placement of advertising next to relevant content and map consumer queries to useful advertising stands at the heart of Google’s success.

This is something that has been notoriously missing on communication platforms. See AIM as an example. What was once an omnipresent juggernaut of a product is inching towards being a footnote in internet history. One that has always struggled to monetize its vast audience. The same is true for other communications platforms such as Hotmail and Gmail. They have become strategic traffic drivers in companies with a broader monetization engine. Look further into innovative news aggregation platforms such as Digg, Google News, and Techmeme and you see that it’s pretty tough to generate significant revenues in news, certainly not Google-scale revenues. Even for pillars of the industry such as the New York Times, big online profits are elusive. So there are not many prospects for building a sustainable multi-billion dollar business for Twitter either as a communications platform or a news discovery engine.

The way to make Twitter into a sustainable business is to tap into the economy of intent. God knows Twitter has that potential, but it has a narrow window of opportunity in which to execute. The business promise is to create a new type of useful advertising for people that is consumed in the context of a new form of discovery—one that for the moment is unique to Twitter but, alas, not for long. If Twitter doesn’t pick up the pace at this moment in time and take the path leading to building a business, it will begin to destroy its value. By doing a deal that will give Google unfettered access to real-time results from Twitter in Google search, Twitter will effectively be giving up the fight and losing the war. For if consumers can get the same experience that is currently unique to Twitter on Google, why would they need to go to Twitter to search? If they don’t bring their intentions to Twitter search, then Twitter is not participating in the Economy of Intent and as such will diminish its value to the single-digit millions.

At the risk of stating the obvious let me throw out some constructs. There has been much speculation about how Twitter will make money. From #pastryto #diabetes, the world of Twitter is self-organizing in a highly effective folksonomy that is vibrant and useful. Today, Twitter users are left to their own devices when it comes to unearthing these gems in the stream. As Twitter further develops its discovery(taxonomy) and search engine, the valuable content streams will be unearthed. Think of the simple impact of auto-complete in the search box to # tags. This is but one simple move which could start to drive traffic to focused streams of information, which could also map to useful advertising, just like on Google. Start with creating a marketplace for advertisers around the #tags, then search queries, and see how valuable the experience Twitter created really is. Throw in the recent evolution in geo-tagging and you add another layer of usefulness. Typing in “amazing restaurant” when you are in Soho should show a fresh stream of nearby locations, recommendations, and warnings. As Twitter make these changes, users will start focusing more on discovery, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will alter their behavior to capture the search queries. The notions of surfacing more advanced trends and audience recirculation present further opportunities. There is so much that can be done in this domain once Twitter has the critical mass of audience and data.

Twitter has a unique opportunity to innovate and create new forms of useful advertising that will truly help both users and advertisers. This was the key to Google’s success and is the key to Twitter’s future. It takes time for advertising to become useful as it requires a significant liquidity of ads. Twitter has to start soon to build up that liquidity in time for the face-off competition for the advertisers. They need for buyers to know they are the go-to place for in-stream advertising. Google is at a big disadvantage at this junction in time. One only needs to set a Google alert to see how latent their Twitter discovery is (I have seen alerts come in for tweets that are 3 days old). Google has not made it a secret that the strategic importance of the real-time web registers with them.

For Twitter to give away the farm (its firehose of Tweets) at this stage is tantamount to suicide and can only be defined as a form of creative laziness. Twitter, you got this far don’t get too comfortable with all that money in the bank. Get off your asses and push, you owe it to history. There are so many things you could be doing short of giving up and serving yourself up on a silver platter. If you must do it, if you do sell your data or yourself to Google – make ‘em pay, they can afford it. If you give away your data to the majors, they wont need to buy you anyway and if you don’t create a solid way to make money, you can’t survive on your own.

Make your own path, and you’ve got it made.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

An interest analyst on why Google make so much money why twitter doesn't disregard both are so popular. A good reference for those who want to set up their own web busines.

"

Build Your Own iPhone App with New Service from Sweb Apps

Build Your Own iPhone App with New Service from Sweb Apps: "

A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don't have a technical background. The service is aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses who don't have an in-house or on-call engineering team capable of developing mobile applications. Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes, says the company.

Sponsor

On the newly launched site at swebapps.com, a big orange button reading 'Start Building' is all you need to click to get started creating your own iPhone application. Then, only six steps later, you'll have a completed iPhone application ready for App Store submission, a process which Sweb Apps will handle for you, too.

How to Build Your App

Since the service is designed for businesses, one of the first steps is to select your particular industry from the provided categories. At the moment, these include: Restaurant, Retail Store, Business, Non-Profit, Government, Education, Entertainment, and Customization, a category which lets you design your own personalized app if what you're creating doesn't fit into one of the other categories.

From within each of these sections, there are various buttons to choose from. For example, in the 'Restaurant' category, you can add buttons like 'menu,' 'reservations,' 'map,' etc. There are even buttons for Facebook and Twitter which allow you to direct customers to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Sample layouts are provided, too. After picking your buttons, you create your Sweb Apps account and submit the information about your business. The fifth step is to customize the application with your business's personalized info. In the case of the restaurant app, for example, that would mean filling out the menu, listing your hours and address, and so on.

The final step is to submit payment. Prices vary depending on which package you chose. Packages with 4 buttons are $200, 6 buttons are $300, and 8 buttons are $400. In addition, Sweb Apps charges a $50 one-time setup fee and at $25/month hosting fee. For an extra $10/month, business owners can optionally choose to add on a simple analytics package called 'App Tracker' which lets you track number of downloads and button clicks. By tracking this sort of information, it's easy to tell which buttons are accessed most and which are being ignored, allowing you to re-design the app to better engage your customers.

Customizations

While the process of app building is extremely simple, and yes, we were able to create a basic app in a matter of minutes (we stopped short of paying for it of course!), the end result is a somewhat basic-looking application. But there are a couple of things you can do to spruce it up a little. For one, you're able to select your own background color and this can even be a custom color of your choosing. Sweb Apps also lets you upload your own button images instead of using the defaults provided. This would definitely give your app a more unique and personalized look, so it's worth looking into. If you're not all that handy with Photoshop yourself, it would be a good idea to hire a designer or crowdsource the project through a site like 99Designs or CrowdSpring and have someone create custom buttons for you.

The Best Part: Real-Time Updates!

If anything ever changes and needs to be updated, you simply return to your Sweb Apps account and make the changes there. Instead of waiting on Apple to approve the update as is done with traditional iPhone applications, the updates to Sweb Apps go live in real-time thanks to the company's hosted Content Management System. With Sweb Apps, all the app's content is housed in the company's own database which is why it's able to be updated on-the-fly (and why there's a monthly hosting fee). The possibilities here are endless. This feature allows a business to promote one-time events, specials, coupons, sales, or anything else that would be offered on a limited time basis. This, in fact, may be the best feature of the app builder. Real-time communication with your customer base through the mobile is exactly what applications should provide, but when relying on Apple and their mysterious approval process, the delays involved often prevent this from happening.

Sweb Apps could function as a way for businesses to distribute mobile coupons, too. With buttons like 'Photo Gallery' which can be renamed to anything you like (such as 'Coupons' or 'Specials'), businesses could update their apps with pre-designed mobile coupons, if they so wished.

Lots of Potential, Future Plans

Not that long ago, we wondered why there weren't more iPhone applications for businesses available in the App Store. It's possible that was because there simply weren't good enough tools to make building mobile apps easy. With Sweb Apps, though, this could quickly change. Being able to build a mobile application with no technical know-how using a dead-simple onscreen guide is the sort of mobile service we're sure many businesses have been dreaming about. (At least we hope so! We would love to track the sales at a few of our favorite local stores via our iPhones).

The company plans to introduce more features into their service in the future including premium buttons, flash-based content (assuming Apple ever approves Flash on the iPhone), in-app advertising opportunities, and more. Next year, the company also plans to launch app builders for other mobile platforms including Android, Blackberry, and Palm Pre.

Discuss

"Look like something that worth a trial. However, it still have to sort out how to get application idea