A New Icon For Our Time by Chris Lawson

08Apr

Well maybe that’s a little bit strong… not yet anyway. But it was with real pleasure that we saw that our “Brand Icon” had been adopted by iTunes for their music section. This means that the Absolute Radio iAmp is the number 1 free music application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. We are also the number 9 free application in total above some other lesser known brands that are trying to establish themselves such as Google Earth and Facebook.

There are an estimated 25,000 applications for the iPhone and we only launched our radio player application last Friday on the breakfast show. It was a brilliant introduction! So all in all a fantastic achievement. Thanks to John and Duncan who worked on this with our development partner UmeTV.

We have made a real impact, by a combination of great on air/online promotion, and a simple, useable product. There are a few other radio apps out there, but ours works best. If you haven’t seen it yet, Duncan or Clive will gladly give you a demonstration. It shows what we can do as a brand when we focus on promoting a product – a great case study.

The reviews are really positive and the vast majority are really pleased with the simplicity of the app and there are a lot of new listeners out there that have discovered us for the first time and like the sound.

So this is just the start, the applications create a potential new revenue stream and we are looking at new ideas such as location based opportunities for the applications using the phones GPS functionality. We also plan to roll this out shortly to Blackberry, Nokia and Google’s new operating platform Android.

Any ideas for new applications please send them through!

Chris

Comments (4)

Kathy Horner @ April 8, 2009 at 10:26 am | Permalink

I have had the app since it was released and must say its stability and sound quality are far superior to the old Tuner app I used to use! Two tiny little suggestions, though, a Play/Pause button rather than a “mute” button would seem a little mor user-friendly to me. Also, in a perfect world, the app would continue to play in the background like the iPod function, so one could listen and, for example, tweet nonsense at the on-air DJ at the same time… :D
KDHUK @ April 8, 2009 at 1:06 pm | Permalink

It would be great if you could get the Absolute miniAmp for iGoogle/Netvibes/Facebook actually working
Lee @ April 8, 2009 at 2:14 pm | Permalink

In addition to the platforms mentioned, will the app be rolled out to Windows Mobile?
Chris @ April 13, 2009 at 8:03 pm | Permalink

Since we can’t run the app in the background (not your fault, I realise) it would be good to have access to News, Weather and Travel (ideally localised by GPS) while using the app.

Also, the option of a high quality stream for WiFi connections (though the current one is great since it very rarely drops out on the go!) would be handy.