A few brief notes from tonight’s Mobile Monday talk, at the New York Times Center.

Best practices in mobile media consumption

• Asish Patel, Head of Social Media at VICE Media
  • Favorite app is Twitter. With native applications, the key factor is providing a utility that can’t be found elsewhere, such as on the mobile Web.
  • How to make your apps “sticky”. Vice is seeing a huge bounce rate on mobile web, and the way to keep users coming back is to provide true utility. With mobile web applications, the key is leveraging the device capabilities and engaging users.
  • Find out what the value is to the user first, and then invest in native technologies. User experience is key.
  • Most compelling function of native apps for media companies for the public is content curation – personalized content curation, such as Stumble Upon and Flipboard. Send me new content based on what I’m looking at.
  • On a similar note, NY Times reports of the Vice empire being close to getting lots of cash.
  • Windows doesnt take a back seat, but how much budget we allocate for it ens up being decided by the amount of people using it, and what their demographic is.
• Dave Pinke, Product Manager, Conde Nast
  • Favorite app is “Post It” – tracking notifications for packages.
  • In creating an app vs a mobile website, you’re taking a hit in running through the app stores. Apple takes a cut of the app sales. Financial Times example – app was siphoning off too much cash, so FT made an HTML5 web app and it’s great.
  • Wonder whether NY Times
• Bill Readden, Thomson-Reuters Digital
  • Favorite mobile app – Twitter. Especially for Reuters, such a large news orginization must be on it. Since Reuters and other large news orginizations are basically “twitter before twitter”, being on Twitter nowadays is super important.
  • Target voice for Reuters is to use mobile tools to empower content creators.
  • Native apps vs mobile web – mobile web is coming up, but there’s still a lot with just HTML. Strategically it makes sense to do web, but as far as UX goes, native apps are still important.
  • How do you take into consideration the various consumption scenarios of a user when developing a mobile app? iPhone is more of a quick snack, and iPad is more for long form experiences.
  • NOT the right time to design for Windows Mango / Windows 8. Windows Live Tiles not really importnat enough just yet. There is huge value in it, but we’re not there. “Meh”.