Mobile content marketing has emerged as a strong force to be reckoned with as far as commodities go, especially in a world where technology and commerce have merged in many ways to produce diverse, specialized markets that keep moving forward with each technological advancement and enhancement. Mobile phones have transformed from somewhat single-minded, call-and-text-making implements into lifestyle items, beyond even their old functions as status symbols for the new rich and into personal items that help us streamline and manage our increasingly-hectic everyday lives. Advancement after advancement steps into allow phones to do more and more for us, whether in the realm of keeping track of business and personal appointments or in the realm of entertainment, where increasingly-well-distributed music and video provide us with endless enjoyment.
Mobile apps have also hit it big in recent years, spurred on by the development and promotion of smartphones that could run complex applications instead of merely playing music and video or sending and receiving images, short text messages or calls. Whether it’s applications that allow us to plan and schedule meetings, or create and manage our ringtones and wallpapers, or play a mobile version of a console videogame, even run other applications, mobile apps have exploded onto the scene and look to be here to stay for the foreseeable future. Companies such as Microsoft, Nokia and Apple have made the most of this situation and taken the chance to provide their users with App Stores from where to source the apps they want for their phones.
Mobile provider Orange has also jumped onto this fast-moving bandwagon, with an on-device app store incorporating app-purchase transactions in the phone bill much in the way that mobile operator Ovi would do in as recently as the past eighteen months. The Orange App Store, as it is being called, will be preinstalled on handsets in the UK and France as of January 2010, making widgets and ringtones – but not music from the Orange Jukebox, at least not yet – available to the users who avail of its services. This is a significant new step for Orange’s app store, which has been around for some time but has never been integrated into the device.
This may be due to the sheer number of platforms that an operator would be required to support with such a move. Indeed, Orange will only be providing app store support for a few handsets – the Nokia 6700 and the Sony W995, as well as the French Sony Yari – initially. The rest of the Orange signature range should receive over-the-air updates adding the store to their access points within the month. This would be a significant move, putting the Orange App Store into some 1.3 million handsets all over the UK and France. Orange is also looking to expand the service eventually, to countries where Orange has its European footprint – Romania, Switzerland, Spain, Moldova, Portugal, Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, and Austria – with content customization as needed by each market. This expansion would of course create an even bigger market for the Orange App Store to cater to. As such, Orange is now wooing developers in the hope that they’ll be able to stock their app store with plenty of high-demand applications and content.
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