The old “cash is king” maxim is outdated. Not that cash doesn’t serve us well anymore; it’s the way that generates cash has changed drastically in the internet era.
“What’s worth money these days?” You might ask. The answer lies in the old wisdom: the things people pay most attention to these days are generally the money source. Examples? Instagram was worth $1 billion in 2012; Craigslist.com, which claimed to have over 50 billion monthly page views, once received $32 million from eBay in its acquisition effort; Facebook has over 1 billion monthly active users in the latest CNET coverage and was being valued at over $100 billion before their IPO… I could go on and on.
“Traffic” is seemingly the reason why those sites become popular. Think deeper: what do social networking sites such as Facebook offer? Professor Ashwath Damodaran of the NYU Stern School had a great analogy that describes Facebook’s business strategy. In valuing social network sites such as Facebook, Dr. Damodaran argues that they act like “a very large store with lots of foot traffic but nothing on the shelves.” Despite the recent efforts of linking business opportunities between users and products, Facebook has never proved what it’s truly worth. Nonetheless, Facebook has generated enough buzz in the market to make people perceive its seemingly high value.
We could contend that Facebook might really take off once it finds the right button to click; people can’t live without it, as evident from the traffic Facebook has been getting. Yes indeed. What drives Facebook’s organic traffic was the non-stop, self-generated content by the humongous amount of visitors backing it up. The kind of content that might be so trivial, yet successfully draws your attention. Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy Mather asserted that Facebook has created a platform that allows people to assign “badge value” to things that one might otherwise ignore. That’s a great accomplishment. The number of users is just an indirect measure of how much content Facebook has. It just so happens that we rely on the number of users as an indicator to gauge how prosperous the business model is.
It’s not just social network sites that rely on content. People crave guest post and the platforms and tools that help generate content, such as an AI writer or AI-powered content generator. Pinterest and Evernote both provide platforms that nurture that kind of content creation, that’s how they get us: we want to be part of the community where our creativity is being valued. The value of content increases as it’s being seen and commented on in the public domain.
But we want more than just having the communities for sharing. Mobile content creation has never been very easy. The proliferation of mobile devices gives us more ways to utilize content that has been created, rather than ways to create the works. We have rarely seen tools that are dedicated to content creation on mobile devices. We need more tools. Not just tools, but good ones. What happens if you need a scrapbook to jot down notes or just draw? Evernote doesn’t offer enough tools on the mobile device to create dynamic scrapbooks as often needed.
We have insatiable needs for tools on our iPhones or iPads. We want to insert multiple audios and videos into our note(s) as we travel and share them. We want to create drawings that could be played as animations to show our creativity and export them as PDF on the go. We want to sign, edit, and annotate our document files as we review documents on our mobile devices. We want to record our best moments in life as videos and later extract the stills, shorten the clips, or combine multiple recordings with just a few taps on our iPhone. And that, my friend, has been our mission.
Welcome to our new blog, where tools for mobile content creation are being valued and promoted. You can expect to see us pushing the idea of mobile digital content creation forward. You will see us sharing relevant articles. You will get to read our ideas about new technology. Most importantly, we will show how your quality of life will be improved with our efforts.