That Conference 2014 Recap

Wow! Another fantastic That Conference experience.  This was my third time in a row going and I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out.  Some highlights:

• My first public talk!  I’ve been wanting to speak for years but the timing was always off or I procrastinated.  I spoke to a packed room about developing Hybrid Mobile apps, leveraging my experience building Fitwatchr.  The audience was very engaged, asking lots of questions both during and after my presentation.  I was nervous at first but had practiced extensively (about 10 times) so once I got going, I was in the zone and spoke fluidly.  I really enjoyed the experience and look forward to giving the talk again.  I plan to record a video of it, as well.  The biggest lesson learned is that it takes a lot more time then you’d think to put together a well made, focused, hour long talk.  I thought it would be hard to come up with 1 hour’s worth of material; quite the opposite, in fact! I had to cut out a bunch of content.  Overall, it took me about 30 hours of effort to plan, research, create, tweak, and practice my talk. I have a new found respect for speakers now!

• Kids activities: Each year, the number of full families that attend is noticeably increasing.  This is fantastic not for the water park aspect, but for the exposure to programming/development.  We have a severe lack of engineering/science graduates in the U.S., so getting children interested in science by bringing them along to Mom or Dad’s conference is a great way to remedy this.  This year, kids actually gave talks (and I thought it was cool that I gave one! ha!) and also had more adult-lead sessions to attend.  If I have kids someday, I will definitely be exposing them to programming.

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Adobe App Design Course Presentation

A few nights ago, I had the pleasure of presenting to an Adobe Education Exchange class on “App Design”, specifically using Adobe tools like Brackets and PhoneGap Build.  It’s a neat concept - a 2 week course, taught 100% remotely over Adobe Connect at night (7pm CST in this case).  I was happy to spread the word about PhoneGap Build!  

I presented for 10 minutes on how I used tools like PhoneGap Build to create Fitwatchr and gave some advice for beginners.  Afterwards there was a 5 minute Q&A session.  This was a lot of fun! There were tons of questions regarding how Fitwatchr works and even a bunch on the mobile industry, the state of wearable technology, and more.

Why I Charge for my Mobile App, Fitwatchr

The prevailing strategies to monetize mobile applications in 2014 involve the inclusion of ads, in-app payments, or charging a flat fee - typically $0.99.  When I was deciding how to charge for Fitwatchr, I read many articles on various approaches.  I didn’t expect to reach the volume of users needed to make decent money with ads, which is typically thousands with high engagement, so that option was out.  In-app payments seemed inappropriate as well, since I didn’t like the idea of presenting the most useful features behind paywalls.  Therefore, I decided on charging a flat $2.99 for the app, as I loathe the bottom barrel $0.99 price, which I will discuss later.  I’ve been charging for Fitwatchr for about 9 months now to some success - we’ll hit 10,000 users by mid summer 2014.  Without the obvious reason of a monetary incentive, I’ve also encountered some real benefits to charging for an app: