I have broken this blog post into 2 sections. The first section covers the applications that I use every day and yes that means 365 days per year. The second section covers applications that I are my favorites and help me solve specific problems but do not fall into the 365 days per year usage category.

For the purposes of my top list I am not including the default apps of Mail, Message, Calendar and Clock that I use daily.

5 Additional iPhone Apps that I use everyday of the year

FourSquare

What I like about it: Foursquare is my historical view of places I have been. I use it daily to help me solve 3 specific use case; 1) it helps me remember some of the great restaurants I have been to and which ones I want to go back to in the future, 2) I use it to discover new restaurants that I want to visit based on my friends checkins/tips as well as the foursquare community and 3) it is always fun to save some money by taking advantage of FourSquare specials.

My tip for new users: there is an option in FourSquare to share your checkins on Facebook and Twitter. I recommend that you don’t post all your mundane regular checkins but instead reserve it for travel locations and unique places you visit. This way you don’t upset your friends or followers.

Some data points on my FourSquare usage. If you check out my tripsQ page (http://tripsq.com/darbysieben) – you will notice that as of this posting date I have travelled 481K kilometers. Other data points, I have been using FourSquare for the past 1060 days and have compiled 5507 checkins during that time.

Waze

What I like about it: Crowdsource traffic conditions and turn by turn navigation. My use cases; 1) when at home keeps me up to date on travel times and gives me recommendations if I should change my regular routes, 2) when I travel and rent a car my go to app for turn by turn directions and the ability to accurately predict my ETA to my location and 3) when I take a taxi this app keeps the cab driver honest and has saved my money in the past when taxi drivers want to take me on a different route.

My tip for new users: Carry a charger in your car. This app, if you run it all the time like I do, drains the battery just like any turn by turn / map navigation app for the iPhone. Second find a good spot to mount it in your vehicle. I am lucky as both my vehicles allow me to mount right behind my steering wheel.

Some data points on my Waze usage. I started using it everyday in Q3 of this year. So far I have posted 122 alerts for other drivers and have racked up 8810km’s in driving data.

Zite Personalized Magazine

What I like about it: This app keeps me up to date with all the industry news that I require to do my job as well as personal interests that I want to stay on top of. My use cases; 1) its my primary news feed – nuff’ said and 2) is the primary tool that I use to populate my twitter account twitter.com/darbysieben.

Google Chrome

What I like about it: I do a lot of searches and viewing of websites on my iPhone. For me, Google Chrome is much better than the default Safari browser. My reasons for stating this; 1) syncs with my Google account so that I can move from desktop to iPhone and have my search history/bookmarks move with me, 2) search within the URL browser – I hate the fact that on Safari you have a website URL entry and then a separate search entry box and 3) faster – although I don’t have any concrete numbers to validate this, it appears to be faster.

Facebook App

What can I say about facebook; it’s always nice to stay up to date with friends and family.

Here is a list of other apps that I use regularly and solve specific needs.

For Discovery:

YellowPages App for Canada – when you need a phone number, driving directions or need to find a new business in Canada, this is the only complete database of listings in the country. It is also an aggregator of local content from OpenTable, TripAdvisor, FourSquare and has daily deals in your area. This app also features a find a person function and gives you a complete list of residential listings in Canada.

ShopWise – when you are planning to buy products this is a great app to reference to see if there is a deal on a particular product in your area. They have recently embedded ShopToIt’s product catalogue which gives uses access to over 7M products. One nice feature is that you can save to Passport or turn on notification when a product comes on sale.

Yelp – if you are looking for a new place to eat, whether inside or outside of your city, this is a great reference app. The content in Canada is somewhat lacking but in the US this is the go to app when it comes to discovery of new restaurants.

For Business:

DropBox – this is really about the service not the app, but if you are a dropbox user than you must have the iPhone app to access your documents when on the go.

Evernote – like DropBox, this is really about the service. For me, this is more than just for business it is also a personal assistant when it comes to remembering things – it is “my store it all in one place” service.

LinkedIn – a must have if you are in the business world to stay connected with your contacts. The calendar feature of linking your contact details to your appointments is handy to give you a quick refresher of who you are about to talk to.

CardMunch – another app by LinkedIn. Basically if you are one of the those people who get a business card and then type the information from the business card into your contact manager – stop it. Take a scan of it, let this app do the typing and it will automatically link the contact to their LinkedIn profile. Huge time saver.

Box – YPG just moved to the box platform so I am looking forward to using this application in 2013.

For Weather:

SkyMotion – is it going to rain or snow in the next 90-minutes? This app will tell you exactly when it will start and stop to rain. Many times this application has saved me from getting wet.

The Weather Network – need the 14-day forecast in your city or cities you are travelling to. My go to app for long-term weather forecasting.

For Personal:

FlipBoard – beautiful designed news reader. I tend to use this for highly visual feeds (as opposed to Zite for text feeds) such as Uncrate, Werd, JetSetter or Houzze to name a few.

AccuFuel – best app for tracking fuel on my vehicles.

ShapeUp – I use this app for tracking my calorie intake and monitoring my weight.

For Entertainment:

Cribbage – I love this game and when I need a quick distraction I settle in on a quick game of cribbage.

If you have a recommendation on a great iPhone app please provide a comment.

So what is data harmonization. In a nutshell, it is matching two separate databases and matching the records that are the same. In the case of local, its about mapping business “A” in one database to the same business “A” in the second database. Google was one of the first real data matching pioneers when they were aggregating local content from many sources into their place pages (remember those good old days).

What is really more important is the output of doing this. The output of matching data boils down to a creating a better and more robust user experience by combining presenting information from multiple sources to help users make better decisions.

So in practice here is what the end product looks like.

Let’s take a look at Tipperary’s Pub on YellowPages.ca. As an aside; if you like thick crust pizza, this is one of the best places in Calgary.

Here is an image of the standard information you would expect; name, address, map. Notice right above the map on the right hand side is the first indication that this listing has additional content from TripAdvisor.

When you scroll down the page the user has a couple of sources of reviews to look at. Reviews that comes from YellowPages.ca users and reviews that come from TripAdvisor

To the right hand side on the page, the user also has the ability to look at tips and who has checked into this location courtesy of FourSquare.

The mobile experience is the same thing. If you want to check out the Tipperary Pub mobile page.

On this page you will notice the reviews from TripAdvisor, checkins/tips from FourSquare as well as the photos from FourSquare.

So what’s next.

We are working on bringing more of these content partnerships into place. Soon we will be opening up the ID’s of our partner venue’s through YellowAPI which will then make it super easy for developers to mash up content just like we did on YellowPages.ca. If you have local content that can be mapped to a specific location in Canada that you think might be useful, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Click on any of the images below to see the full screenshot.

I also encourage you to visit Yahoo.ca and enter a local search query such as dentists in toronto, restaurants in calgary, etc. and play with this integration yourself.

Dentists in Toronto (Before)

Dentists in Toronto (After)

Restaurants in Calgary (Before)

Restaurants in Calgary (After) – Note the reviews, this is coming from YellowAPI

Lawyers in Montreal (Before)

Lawyers in Montreal (After)

Sushi in Vancouver (Before)

Sushi in Vancouver (After)

So what do you think of this new integration?

In fact, after I sold KS2 Solutions in 2005 I almost joined Pelmorex (known for TheWeatherNetwork.com or MetroMedia.com) to head up their sales in Western Canada. I ultimately decided to join Yellow Pages Group in early 2006. In January 2010 I ended up striking a partnership between YellowPages.ca and TheWeatherNetwork.com, read the post here – The Weather Network add Local Search and YellowPages.ca adds Weather – A Deeper Look at this Partnership.

Bottom line – weather has been an important part of my business and personal life.

My latest venture into weather is an investment in a new Montreal based start-up that is taking precipitation forecasting to a hyperlocal level, called SkyMotion Research. You can learn more about the company at SlideShare. They recently had some write-ups in popular blogs, check them out here:

TUAW –
Sky Motion for iOS lets you know what weather is coming on a very local basis

The Verge –
Sky Motion’s up-to-the-minute weather tracking app comes to the web

Mobile Syrup –
SkyMotion launches mobile web app to predict hyperlocal precipitation

Currently the application is iOS based with an Android version coming soon. See screenshot below which was a short-term forecast at my office in Calgary. You can download the iOS app here. You can also play with the online version at SkyMotion’s website, just enter your address.

I can definitely say that I am not alone when it comes to the importance of weather. Exactly how big is the weather market in Canada? Here are some stats you might find interesting.

In May 2012, according to ComScore Media Metrix there where 27.4M Canadians who used the internet. Of that, 11M or 40.3% of Canadians accessed a Weather Site in Canada and collectively generated 264M pages viewed. The top 5 accessed sites by Canadians are:

The Weather Network, 9M (81.8% of category)
Environment Canada, 1.6M (14.5%)
The Weather Channel, 940K (8.5%)
AccuWeather, 408k (3.7%)
Weather Underground, 382k (3.5%)

As a comparison to the US market, in May 2012 there where 221.1M Americans online. Of that, 80.8M or 36.6% of Americans accessed a Weather site and collectively generated 2B pages viewed. The top 5 accessed sites by Americans are:

The Weather Channel, 49.8M (61.6% of category)
WeatherBug, 20.9M (25.87%)
Weather Underground, 9.8M (12.1%)
AccuWeather, 7.8M (9.7%)
Yahoo! Weather, 7.5M (9.3%)

A couple interesting things of note in the above data: Canadians are slightly over-indexed in terms of the amount of the population that accesses weather and both markets are dominated by 1 player, although more competitive in the US.

What about mobile?

Here is a pretty telling graph about mobile users who access weather in Canada.

The number of Canadian’s who are accessing weather at least once per month on a mobile device is up from 5.4M in June 2011 to 7.8M in June 2012 – that’s a 2.4M jump in 12-months. Users accessing weather on a daily basis is up from 2.2M to 3.2M in the same timeframe. Impressive growth to say the least.

So from a mobile perspective in Canada, who are the top 5?

TheWeatherNetwork, 3.3M
Yahoo! Weather, 1.3M
AccuWeather, 1M
OTHER, 676k
Environment Canada, 657k

What I find most interesting about the mobile data is that the ranking in the top players differ from the web. Weather like many categories in mobile is changing the landscape of who are the top players in their respective market. This is a discussion for another blog post.

This is Canada.

This is the age of mobile.

Yet marketing teams continue to waste time, money and effort on deploying useless mobile engagement. The result of poor execution for the company; time, cost and failure to collect valuable user information. The result for the user; frustration.

What is most astounding to me is that during the entire process of building the strategy, mapping out the campaign and the associated collateral that somebody did not test this execution and say, “Wait a minute, this is not functional. We need a different execution”.

So, what has me going. Here is the scenario.

Early this week I met a long-time friend of mine for lunch at Original Joe’s in Kensington. I had the Fish and Chips and my friend had the Cob Salad. All in all the meal was good and the conversation even better. When we received the bill they included the following;

I was impressed that they included a QR Code on the survey. To me this makes a lot of sense to capture feedback at the time of checkout. What also is smart is that by including a QR Code, it gives a person immediate access to the survey on their smartphone. This is definitely going to generate a higher volume of responses than waiting for a person to get to their home/office to complete the survey at OriginalJoesSurvey.com.

As I pulled out my iPhone, ready to provide some good feedback, here is what I encountered.

FAIL!!

Looks like they decided to simply forward me to the non-mobile website. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I decided to Click Here to get started hoping that perhaps the landing page is not mobile optimized but the survey itself it.

Then I encountered the following:

BIG FAIL!!!! 

How the hell is this functional?

What started off as a pretty good execution quickly turned into a waste for both Original Joe’s and myself. How many people on their smartphone are going through the same process and what is the opportunity lost to Original Joe’s by not providing a true mobile experience for their survey. I can’t help think to myself that either the marketing team at Original Joe’s are not digitally savvy or they just completely failed user experience testing.

Why this matters and why local businesses should start taking mobile seriously. 

Earlier this month IAB Canada released the following document, Mobile in Canada: A Summary of Current Facts & Trends. As it relates to this article here are some interesting data points worth taking note of.

There are 25.9M mobile phones in Canada with 45% of them SmartPhones. That is over 11.6M Smart phones in market.

In a given month, 1/6th or 16% of users are scanning in a QR Code. That means over 1.8M smart phones are used to scan in a QR Code. That is a pretty large number.

According to ComScore Mobile Lens, 18.7% of smart phones are located in the prairie region, which includes Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This means of the potential base 1.8M smart phones that are used to scan a QR code, one could calculate that 337K of those are located in the prairies.

Now if I do some quick math. Alberta represents 62% of this region (source:wikipedia). This means 209K QR Scans / month in the Alberta region.  Now, Calgary represents 32% of Alberta’s population. That represents around 67K QR Scans / month just in Calgary alone. Over the course of a year this a potential base of 802K QR Scans. At 1/10th of 1% this would be this would represent 802 opportunities to get feedback / year. This is probably still higher, so even if we take 10% of this base that is 80 opportunities per year to get feedback.

Now in the case of Original Joe’s, they have locations across all of Western Canada, including BC, so the opportunity they are losing by not providing a true mobile experience to solicit feedback is significant.

I shake my head on how such a blatant oversight in user experience makes it to this stage of execution.

What a waste.

Borrell does some interesting comparisons in their report such as average online revenue per site by operator and average per-market ad revenue for local pure-play internet companies. In the latter category Groupon leads followed by Craigslist.org and AutoTrader.com. However, I wanted to take a more CDN view of this data.

First, I decided to take a look at the past 6-months average ComScore UV’s for each of the networks listed above.

The data is as follows;

Yellow Media – 9.1M, Transcontinental – 4.4M, TorStar Digital – 5.8M, PostMedia – 6.8M

Second, I decided to look at the revenue earned by network based on the previous 6-month average and the 2011 reported digital revenues. Here is the monetization by UV for these top companies;

Yellow Media – $39.43, Transcontinental – $44.47, TorStar Digital – $18.89, PostMedia – $13.17

What is interesting and seems to be validated by the Borrell US data is that the transition of the traditional directory players have ramped up monetization quite a bit more than the newspaper traditional media companies. This is related to the fact that the directory players have a broader base of customers and in terms of the pricing, a placement model yields a higher value than CPM based advertising. In the US, most newspaper organizations are generating between 15-20% of their revenues from digital. PostMedia is around 9% and if they can execute on their digital strategy you should expect to see this revenue per UV increase.

This got me thinking about the integrated media companies, players such as BCE, Rogers, Quebecor. It is harder to extract the exact digital revenues from these companies as they tend to report as Media earnings which of course include digital as well as their traditional revenue streams. However, I was curious as to what the results would yield if I looked at the data the same as I did for the above 4 companies.

Here is the 6-month average, via ComScore for these 3 media conglomerates;

Bell Media – 14.7M, Rogers – 8.2M, Quebecor – 9.6M

Here is the revenue / UV generated by these companies, looking solely at their reported media divisions.

Bell Media – $104.97, Rogers – $197.67, Quebecor – $105.66

NOTE: The above revenue / UV numbers include traditional media sources as well as digital.

When you look at the above figures it would appear that Bell is lagging behind, however, when you look at its overall network reach, I think that Bell currently looks to be in a good position going forward to demonstrate growth.

If you assigned digital revenues at 20% and compared these 3 with the 4 companies above, the picture looks like this:

Finally, this got me thinking about the Bell / Astral deal.

If you look at the unduplicated reach between these networks, the uplift for Bell is 843K new additional users to its online reach network. Bell averaged 14.7M, Astral averaged 2.9M and combined their unduplicated reach is 15.5M.

The deal value was $3.38B and if you assign the lift in digital UV’s at 10% this gives a digital only value of $338M. Based on the lift of UV’s at 843K this means Bell Media would have paid $400.71 per UV. At Bell’s current revenue rate of $104.97 per UV this means that the multiple Bell paid for Astral’s UV’s is 3.81.

It would appear to me that in a growing digital revenue environment and more cross-media integrated advertising that this was a pretty good acquisition for Bell, based on the assumptions above.

What do you think?

Looking forward to the conference and hearing from some of the keynotes speakers; I am especially interested to hear what Leslie Berland, SVP of Digital Partnership for American Express. AMEX has really been active in the digital space around the deals segment. Some of other keynotes that should be interesting are Jay Herratti of CityGrid and Michael Silberman of New York Media to name a few.

Of course there are lots of meetings on tap with companies that Yellow Pages Group is interested in, companies we are already doing business with and of course companies who are interested in working with us.

If you happen to be at Kelsey and want to connect, send me a message via twitter @darbysieben.

I have had allot of firsts in the past 6-years (losing luggage, delays, getting spit on accidentally by kids, seen people get kicked off the plane, seats breaking mid-flight) but this past Sunday I experienced another first. This time, as I was boarding the plane, the attendant pulls me back and says, “sorry sir but you have been off-boarded from this flight by your concierge“. For context, I was on the 9am flight leaving Calgary to Toronto and was seated in 4A. After waiting until the plane was fully boarded the gate attendant spoke to my concierge service. Turns out she made a mistake by hitting the wrong key on the computer which off-boarded me that resulted in the gate attendant giving another person my seat. Anyway, I got my seat back after the gate attendant went onto the plane to tell the person sitting in 4A that they will have to move back into economy.

This day their might have been two firsts; getting off-boarded and being only minutes away from enjoying business class only to be bumped in the last minute. That person was definitely enjoying business case; they had already finished their pre-flight orange juice.

Speaking off travel I am also an avid user of FourSquare. Really interesting usage of the FourSquare API is by a company called tripsQ. Basically you connect your FourSquare account and it provides you with a nice visual of key stats regarding your travel. Since 2010 I have travelled 87% of the distance to the moon.

If I had data going back to 2006, I think I might be at the moon and back twice already.

Click here to see the my tripsQ page - http://tripsq.com/darbysieben

My motivation in taking this approach is three-fold,

1. I don’t really need to be carrying more stuff with me when I travel,
2. It is a convenient feature for potential contacts as they no longer need to enter my information manually
3. I have to believe their is a positive environmental impact of not using business cards.

What do you think? Would you consider not bringing business cards to an event or conference?

QR Code Generation

A really interesting site that allows you to make a QR code that links to practically any source such as a vCard, webiste, email, Google Maps location, twitter account, etc. is QRStuff.com. Here is my QR Code that will take you to my LinkedIn profile.

QRCode to Darby Sieben's LinkedIn Profile (Scan it for yourself)

If are you looking for a quick and easy way to create a QR code, this is a great site to start with.

Canadian QR Code Data

Of course the first question any marketer is going to ask is what is the usage. I have some data that I compiled from the US that shows what people are using QR Codes for. I also have some Canadian Data of QR Code usage.

The first set of data is from eMarketer that shows Sources of where US Mobile users are scanning a QR Code. Notice that the audience side of scanning from a business card or brochure is 1.9M.

Here is another snapshot from eMarketer that shows the reasons that US Smartphone users have scanned a QR code. As this is still in early days, I buy the notion that almost half of people are using our of curiosity. However, 41% are using to get more information, which of course means capturing a person’s contact information from a business card.

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Finally here is some data from CDN users. This was released by ComScore in November 2011, Smartphone Adoption Reached 40% in Canada. According to ComScore 8.1% of all mobile subscribers and 18.1% of Smartphone subscribers have used QR Codes.

What is Pinterest? In a nutshell, it’s a digital pinboard for things that you love by “pinning” an image from a web page onto your own Pinterest board (check out my pinterest board). If you want a detailed overview check out the Mashable article; Meet Pinterest: A Private Social Pinboard That Collects Your Online Memories.

Pinterest is getting a lot of coverage because of its explosive growth and the fact that the site is attracting females between the 24 and 54 which is the key demographic that influences purchase decisions. According to Google Ad Planner (United States), 82% of Pinterest users are women with the majority of them (79%) that fall within this age demographic.

Does this hold in Canada? 

According to ComScore in January 2012, 65.8% of Pinterest’s 749K users are women. Of that group 54% of them fall within the 24-54 demographic. What I found most interesting in the ComScore data is that 34% of users make over $100K per year and 62% have no children.

Pinterest Canadian Household Income Data According to ComScore MediaMetrix

In terms of overall traffic and growth, since May 2011, Pinterest has grown an outstanding 734%. Check out the graph below. It definitely seems that the Canadian usage is mirroring that of the US both in terms of growth as well as demographic profile.

Comscore Media Trend for Pinterest in Canada