I gave a presentation at the TechStart event of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society on mobile and startups. Why mobile is now an interesting opportunity for a small early-stage startup?
In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 years ago, when we started Jaiku. Only reasonable way to get a mobile application to users was through operator or device manufacture deals.
Another interesting opportunity is that new App Store in iPhone OS 3.0 is providing a small payment solution in a user-friendly way. You can build and test business models that have been very difficult in web services as there hasn’t been widely adopted solution to pay few bucks in user-friendly way.
Now, very interesting future possibility is that Apple and others are not actually building application stores, but more general small payment systems. What if iPhone OS 4.0 would provide JavaScript APIs to App Store in-app payment system?
