Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Miko Matsumura, Senior Vice President, Developer Relations, Kii Corporation (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at the iOS app store, for instance. I recently read an article that said that the top 25 apps make most of their revenues. Those include companies like Electronic Arts. A lot of them are games. Games seem to be dominating the monetization category. What is your observation about that very short “head” that is followed by a very long tail of free apps?

Miko Matsumura: I believe that as you take a snapshot of a slice in time, then you are going to see a power distribution – a curve with the area under the curve going dominantly to the top apps. That has been consistent. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Miko Matsumura, Senior Vice President, Developer Relations, Kii Corporation (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Series A can be five million dollars, a million dollars, half a million dollars, and so on.

Miko Matsumura: We have done stuff in the half million dollar range. That tends to be very suitable for one- to two-person jobs. We certainly have the capacity to go bigger, but we are just looking for what fits the bill. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Miko Matsumura, Senior Vice President, Developer Relations, Kii Corporation (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Could you give me an example of the types of applications that really take advantage of your technology?

Miko Matsumura: It is a very diverse lot. We have a couple of different applications. One is called Astro File Manager. It is a utility-type application for use on Android. This is another one of those funny companies where we also did an investment. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Miko Matsumura, Senior Vice President, Developer Relations, Kii Corporation (Part 1)

Miko Matsumura is the senior vice president of developer relations at Kii Corporation. He studied at San Francisco State University. In this interview, Miko talks about how Kii Corporation helps entrepreneurs develop mobile apps and introduces us to an interesting and innovative business model that bears new and exciting possibilities for mobile app creators.

Sramana Mitra: Miko, let’s start with some context. The audience may not know the company. They are going to be confused about whether this is a software company or a venture capital firm, because it seems to be both. Help us understand your company as well as your background. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have a lot of e-commerce customers, does that mean you are building in the capabilities of running a full e-commerce shopping cart, for example, into your portfolio?

Joe Langner: With the number of customers we have and the time we have been on the market, we either produce those capabilities ourselves from our core products, or we work with business partners who complement some of those additional features.  Shopping carts, web stores, e-buildings, or digital signatures are using technology to automate processes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where does BlackBerry fit into all of this?  This is a segment that has high BlackBerry adoption.

Joe Langner: The devices we are writing to are those two [Android and iOS] at this point.  I haven’t seen the BlackBerry adoption as much.  They lost a lot of mind share in the marketplace. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bottom line is that you provide mobile app content to the entire ERP suite.

Joe Langner: Yes. The change within our business is that we change the apps once, but then they work with the multiple solutions we have. The customers don’t have to change their whole backup by turning off their systems; they can just add this if they have the need to extend the use of the tool. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your customers consists of IT or IT-enabled businesses?

Joe Langner: Depending on what you define as IT or IT enabled, across all of Sage mid-market customers, 16% to 19% fall into that category.

SM: What are we seeing in this segment as far as needs and behaviors? >>>