As the Irish media industry slowly emerges, dazed and bruised, from the horror of the past 18 months, a new sector is blossoming as if the recession had never happened. It is diverse, sells directly to the consumer and does not need fortunes in start-up capital, and so its success has yet to be measured in any reliable way. Indeed, its innovators do not even need offices and many have no media background. With minimal investment apart from their time, ideas and a fast computer, however, they are creating oodles of fresh content. Welcome to the world of the Irish app developer.
Anyone who still thinks that mobile phones are for texting and talking is not a teenager, a well-paid middle manager or a gadget freak. These groups have one love in common, the Apple iPhone, launched here to frantic demand as the downturn loomed in 2007 and already in its fourth generation. The word app is short for application, but chimes perfectly with the parent brand name; Apple is almost as adept at marketing as it is at dreaming up new products.
Apps allow one to do almost anything imaginable with a small, portable screen, from downloading information, to playing games, to virtually drinking a digital glass of beer. An unlicensed app that did the rounds in the early days even invited one to sniff a line of virtual cocaine. Normally, Apple licenses independent developers in return for a 40% share of revenue when consumers download their new creation from Apple’s App Store.
Every designer dreams of creating a killer app, one that captures worldwide imagination, and other mobile-phone manufacturers are now playing catch-up.
In 1991, with his film directing career on the slide, Francis Ford Coppola declared, “One day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart.” He was referring to the then imminent advent of cheap digital technology and the universal access to creative media that it offered. The internet proved his metaphorical prediction correct. Nearly two decades later, apps are now seen as the new internet, with the same febrile atmosphere of young visionaries working out of bedrooms, dreaming of the millions to be made simply by hitting on a genius idea.
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In the past two years, a rash of small Irish companies has sprung up that not only creates apps but also provides tuition to would-be designers and walk them through the licensing process. As with the early years of the internet, advertisers and businesses are also waking up to the merits of having their own apps and all sorts are available, from the highly practical to the utterly useless. Travel and tourism downloads are in demand; there is even an app that allows one to fry a virtual brand-name Irish sausage on one’s phone screen.
The ideas that promise to make lots of money are concerned with money itself. Irish companies have long been at the forefront of internet encryption and Dublin-based pay technology company WorldNet has created the first application, iPay, that permits electronic commerce, or e-commerce, through the iPhone while bypassing Apple’s expensive infrastructure.
With every new medium comes a blizzard of new buzzwords and, perhaps predictably, WorldNet is hailing a new dawn in m-commerce, pointing out that, until now, Apple’s charging structure has made anything but the smallest monetary transactions unattractive to mobile phone users — but, it seems with iPay, no longer.
Ireland’s future as a digital paradise — the so-called smart economy — is often invoked, but with much less in the way of fundamental initiatives to make it a widespread reality. However, the thriving cottage industry in app development proves that the talent and therefore the potential for innovation are out there.