The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

Discovered: iPhone Video Recording Screen

April 14th, 2009 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

Apple’s next iPhone release is likely to include video recording capabilities. How do we know? Well, it’s not because Apple’s saying so. The guys at MacRumors have apparently discovered a way to tweak a configuration file for the Camera App so that its interface shows the new, not-yet-supported video features.

Boost Organic SEO with FAQ Pages

April 9th, 2009 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

SEO.com has a great post about using FAQ pages to help boost organic search. Apparently they’ve tested the technique and had good results. I’ve yet to try it out but it seems logical that it would work well for one very big reason: the average person creates search queries that are very similar in form to the questions on FAQ pages. This means their queries are likely to match with keywords and phrases on your FAQ page.

Using an FAQ page for SEO also gives you an opportunity to optimize for additional keywords that you haven’t used in other areas of your site.

On the topic of search query formation, you should learn more about natural language search engines like Powerset. This is where many people believe search needs to evolve to.

iPhones, Netbooks, and Websites

April 8th, 2009 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

If you design websites, build websites, or own a website, you might want to take note: iPhone users are surfing the web with a 480×320 screen resolution. The popular Blackberry 8830 has 320×240. And netbook users are surfing the web with resolutions as small as 800×480.

Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone App Craze

April 1st, 2009 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

There’s a lot of hype around the iPhone right now. It’s an amazing device, for sure. Companies seem to be scrambling to put something, anything on the iPhone. Shoot, we’ve even been sucked into the hype, working on developing some apps so that we’re able to help our clients get in on the action.

We might all need to take a deep breath, however, and think before we spend. The average iPhone app costs $30,000 to develop. In a rational setting, the ROI on that spend should justify the cost. It seems, though, like there are a lot of companies wanting to create an iPhone app just for the sake of having one.

If you’ve been sucked in by the iPhone fervor, this article is a good gut check.

Here’s an excerpt:

For all the euphoria over the iPhone, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has sold only 17 million of the devices worldwide, a sliver of the overall market. Mark Lowenstein, a consultant at Mobile Ecosystem, recently said at a conference that a successful iPhone application is one that’s been downloaded by at least 20 percent of users—but that’s still only 1 percent of the global mobile population. Further caution came from Bango (AIM: BGO), an analytics company, which said that according to its data, the iPhone is the 24th most-popular handset for browsing and buying mobile content on the mobile web—and that companies are targeting it at the expense of the mass market.