Out With A Bang

The Artichoke at Brome now needs a second blue plaque, me thinks.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=20

A bit of background before we get to the ‘light bulb’ moment.

Our Ian has been otherwise engaged of late; he of Addiply-build fame, has been banging out Apple iPhone apps… the latest of which is ‘Cocktails Made Easy’.

The lad from the WSJ certainly liked it…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123336498619035515.html

And having sat there in the corner table at The Artichoke this lunchtime and seen it in action on Ian’s iPhone, I can see why.

The fact that you can touch a ‘cabinet’ button and find out what cocktails you can still make from their 500-strong list with the bottles of spirits you’ve actually got left in your house… is genius.

We’re out of gin, all I’ve got left is a bottle of JD, and a can of coke and two slugs of tequila… Touch, touch, touch… Here’s my drink. Superb.

At which point, a penny dropped.

If I put ‘Jack Daniels’, ‘Coke’ and ‘Tequila’ into an Internet search engine, would any web browser have delivered me the same level of service and functionality as just dished up off Ian’s mobile phone?

Er, no.

And given the fact that the likes of Blacberry, Google, Nokia et al are all busily building mobile app stores as fast as their little legs can carry them, the fact that I’m sat there, jaw-dropping, with my Blackberry Storm in hand thinking: ‘Boy that’s good… wish I could do that off my phone…’ hits the nail on the head.

For give it 6 to 12 months and Ian will have re-wired ‘Cocktails Made Easy’ to sit on a Blackberry platform and I’ll be able to do that too.

I won’t need to entrust that job to a web browser; I won’t have to rely on Safari or Opera or whoever else to wade through cloud upon cloud of murky drinks data to pull me out the kind of combinations that my mobile phone now delivers in an instant. And looks sooooo good whilst doing it…

Tailor-made; into the palm of my hand; for $1.99.

It’s a specialist tool; for a specialist need – to deliver me a decent cocktail of flavours and alcohol from whatever bottles we’ve got left in the Waghorn larder.

Go back to that WSJ article and note the step change that the author, Eric Felton, discovers…

‘Several years ago a friend gave me a Bar Master — a faux flask in silver-toned plastic housing a computerized database of drinks. I never used it much, perhaps because I have a horror of carrying faux flasks of silver-toned plastic.

‘But it is a delight to use the technology that has superseded it: A variety of cocktail “apps” have been written for the iPhone, and they make the old Bar Master look like a Kaypro running MS-DOS…’

Got you thinking yet?

Try this… Only insert ‘hyper-local news’ and ‘web browsers’ into the thought process.

‘Comprehensive databases are a great help if you know exactly what you’re searching for.

‘But if you’re just browsing, hunting for something tasty to try, how do you narrow your selections down to a manageable lot? One iPhone app, Cocktails Made Easy, solves that problem admirably.’

Now, what if we created an iPhone app that wasn’t so much a cocktail cabinet stocked with JD and coke, but playground news and planning applications?

If we start to see local news as something that we buy as a mobile phone app; ‘Local News Made Easy’ and then we – as news consumers – can pick and choose the ‘cocktail’ of local news and content that we’d like to consume for ten minutes after we’ve put the kids to bed, doesn’t the world look a different place?

You’re taking the growing confusion and cloudiness of the browser out of the equation; here’s a surgical application that delivers the combination of video, audio and words that I want every night to fill me in with what’s happened in NR2.

Now, let’s say that I’m a football fan. And I live in Norwich. The natural web ‘cluster’ would be to put a link through to MyFootballWriter.com/NorwichCity…

But you know what, I’m a Derby County fan… so I like a different ‘cocktail’ at 7.40pm of an evening; so my app allows me the flexibility to pull in MyFootballWriter.com/DerbyCounty – just as I would pull in a different brand of Tequila; Southern Comfort instead of JD.

It’s fascinating. That if the world may yet start to belong to the mobile phone apps – be they Apple’s, Google’s, Nokia’s or Blackberry’s – maybe it is time that we though app first, web second. Thought about cutting the browser out of our thinking altogether.

Make me ‘appy’; make me a local news app that’s browser-lite, but mobile heavy. �