If you’re a TV news station, newspaper, or online news site, you probably should get to know Minnesota startup DoApp Inc. For those of you in our local tech community who already know of this firm (it launched early in 2008), you may find this fact amazing: on a search for “DoApp” in the Apple® iTunes® App Store, you’ll see the company now has — count ’em — no less than 84 apps published, available for download. Now, you may have known DoApp only for utility and game apps, with which it had early success soon after the App Store launched in mid-2008. The firm ended 2008 with well over 3 million downloads of those apps — 11 of them are now in the store (and most have been updated multiple times). But what are those other 70-some apps (and counting)?
Well, throughout 2009, DoApp has been busy on another front: its “Mobile Local News” app, which is an ad-supported iPhone app it co-developed with partner Inergize Digital Media of Minneapolis. The latter is also helping DoApp market the app, primarily signing up TV stations initially, which brand the app for their own use in their local market. And each of those branded versions of the app is distributed via the App Store to consumers, who download them for free. DoApp also has the app available for the Android mobile platform, with Blackberry and Palm Pre versions coming soon. (By the way, DoApp’s first customer for the iPhone mobile news app was our own WCCO-TV, Channel 4.)
Now, however, I learned from the DoApp folks at the recent MIMA Summit (where they did a demo), that they and their partner Inergize are spreading their wings even further — now offering to build and publish branded versions for newspapers and other publications, as well as online news sites.
As you might expect, DoApp is touting its Mobile Local News as a tool for “citizen journalism.” Get this: it says 50% of internet users will be generating content by 2010, and that 100 million Americans now get their news from a mobile device. They don’t cite a source for those numbers, but they square with what I’m hearing elsewhere.
In a newsletter DoApp just distributed, it says this:
“Now it’s easy for readers (and writers) to create user-generated content with Mobile Local News. With our app, you can connect with a television station or newspaper and be part of the news-making process. No press credentials required! DoApp’s Mobile Local News is the first and only local news platform to provide user-generated content. You can easily upload video, photos, and text from your mobile device. Report the news as it’s happening!”
To get more perspective on these recent developments, I asked DoApp founder (and early Google employee) Joe Sriver if he’d answer some questions, and he was kind enough to agree. Here is that email interview:
Minnov8: Joe, you mentioned, for your news outlet customers, once they have your app set up, that activating the user-generated content (citizen-journalism) feature is as simple as flipping a switch in their browser. How many of your existing stations have enabled or actually now use this feature?
DoApp/Sriver: Well, 38 stations added it in the last few days, and the rest — I think we’re getting up to a total of some 78 — should have it available once they turn it on over the next week.
Minnov8: Do you expect this feature will cause even more stations to sign up for your Mobile Local News app? That is, did you find there was a big demand in the marketplace for this type of citizen journalism functionality?
DoApp/Sriver: Demand, yes. We did some qualitative interviews on what users wanted to see in an upgrade of our app, and it came up in the top 3. We also looked at the success of Facebook’s integration of video and photo sharing and sensed it made for a smart play to give easy access for uploading to the stations.
Minnov8: What’s a typical scenario for how your stations and news outlets would benefit from viewers in their area having this app on their phone?
DoApp/Sriver: Well, for example, let’s take the case of high school football. A single station or newspaper can’t report on every game that’s played on a Friday night — they don’t have the resources. But with our user-generated upload feature, they now have the ability to receive information on all the games. This is just one of the many features Mobile Local News offers. Our stations and papers love it.
Minnov8: But how will stations “curate” incoming submissions? Will they assign a specific person who has to monitor all incoming uploads throughout a shift?
DoApp/Sriver: The stations and newspapers specify an email address that will “collect” the photos, videos, and stories. A station employee determines if the submission is worthy of placement on their mobile app, their web site, or even on television.
Minnov8: Is that normally the news editor, or maybe the assignment editor?
DoApp/Sriver: The news entity chooses the email address(es) the submissions go to, so it will vary by station
Minnov8: What financial arrangement do you have with individual TV stations — is it a licensing agreement, or do they buy it outright? How do you get paid?
DoApp/Sriver: We have two models: a small set up fee with an advertising rev-share, or a small monthly subscription fee. In the case of the ad revenue-share, we get paid a percentage of the ad revenue. In the case of the subscription, it’s a monthly fee only, no ad rev-share.
Minnov8: Do you have any newspapers or online news sites yet with branded versions of your Mobile Local News app?
DoApp/Sriver: We have 70+ news apps in both the iTunes App Store and the Android Market. These include TV news stations as well as newspapers around the U.S. We are signing more newspapers, magazines, and publications every day.
Minnov8: How are you marketing to the media industry to get more adoption of your app?
DoApp/Sriver: We’ve presented our products at several conferences. We also keep in touch with the media. And the individual TV stations, newspapers, and other publications advertise their mobile app on their other properties.
Minnov8: Joe, tell us about your “Adagogo” mobile ad platform. Is it just built into the app? Do all your customers get that as part of the package?
DoApp/Sriver: Adagogo is a geo-located advertising platform that is built into our Mobile Local News platform. Media outlets love Adagogo because they can easily target relevant ads to their readers.
Thanks, Joe. And here’s a link to your still-stealthy Adagogo page for our readers, so they can enter their email address and get info sent to them whenever you decide to go wild with it! And for more information on the Mobile Local News app, readers should check out the DoApp web site “News” page, where there’s some media coverage going back to when the DoApp-Inergize partnership was first announced in May.
[Disclaimer: Graeme Thickins was an advisor to DoApp from its planning and launch stages, through most of 2008. And he still holds a teeny-tiny equity stake.]