By Payam Dastmalchi on August 10th, 2009
Interview with Razia Ahamed of Touchnote
Touchnote is an exciting web start-up that has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks. They were recently declared as Best Mobile Service at MobileBeat 2009 conference and have inked several key partnerships to help facilitate its growth. Touchnote’s mobile application was launched at the Ovi store at the end of May and is absolutely one of my favourite apps. The application allows users to create and send greeting cards directly from the phone to anywhere in the World. I recently interviewed Razia Ahamed of Touchnote to learn more about the application and plans moving forward.
Tell me about your company. How long you’ve been in business? What is the core focus of the service?
Touchnote is an online and mobile service that lets you design and create your own physical photo-cards. The core focus of the service is to bring digital photos to life in the form of real printed photo cards. Touchnote launched its service online in October 2008 and launched with Nokia in May 2009 to bring the first mobile application to deliver a physical personalised product.
What can users do with Touchnote mobile app on Ovi? Are there any significant limitations with the mobile app vs the web site?
Using the Touchnote application, users either take a photo or select one from their photo gallery…
They then write a message…
Tell Touchnote who to send it to (they can pull the postal address from their address book or enter it manually)…
The user then sends the order, using either a WiFi connection of their mobile operator’s data network (directly from the app, no need to email or send from a website)
Touchnote receives the order and prints and posts the card the same day … to anywhere in the world. It’s really that simple.
The Nokia app pretty much mirrors the user experience on the website in a more streamlined way. Users are unable to add speech bubbles or captions to their photos on the Nokia app, unlike on the website.
There are over 600 photo-related apps on various mobile platforms, how does Touchnote plan on standing out and being relevant?
Touchnote already stands out as one of the few applications that delivers a physical personalised product. In fact, we’ve gone one step further to offer our print-on-demand capability to other application developers while also offering them a chance for monetization. Most of the 600+ photo-related apps enable the user to save the image to the gallery or send it via email; such apps rarely have a revenue stream beyond the initial sale of the app. By incorporating the Touchnote fulfillment capability, they enable their user base to send physical postcards while receiving a share of this ongoing revenue stream. Touchnote has launched this print-on-demand library initially on the iPhone and will be extending to other platforms in the future. Touchnote has also announced a partnership with ShoZu as the first company to integrate the functionality.
What is a cool uncovered tip or trick that you can do with the app?
If you want to send the same card to lots of different people (cool photo of you next to Brad Pitt?), but to tweak the message then select ‘re-send this card to someone else’ at the end of the process.
Thanks to our tight integration with the phone’s address book, if you manually enter an address for posting, you’ll have the chance to save it back to your address book, making it easier to send cards the next time.
What has been the biggest challenge with designing an app for Nokia platforms?
The biggest challenge of developing an app in Symbian is that, while great for tightly integrating with the phone’s camera and address book application, it is not known for being a design-friendly operating system. It therefore, took considerable time and effort to retain Touchnote’s brand design while creating an application that was seamless to use on Nokia phones.
Can you tell us about possible future enhancements to your app?
In the future we would expect to incorporate new features that would make it even easier to send multiple cards in a single transaction
How do you internally measure the success of touchnote app? Is it based on revenue generated? Number of installs?
We measure the success of the app based on the number of cards sent and, to date, Nokia users have sent Touchnote cards to and from over 80 different countries around the world.
What advice would you give to other mobile app developers?
Focus on usability. Make sure the app is something customers want and make it easy-to-use.
Razia was kind enough to provide us with a free code that will give each one of our readers an opportunity to send a free card to anywhere in the world. Simply use OVIAPP-FREE code and enjoy this great application. This code is only valid through Touchnote’s website and can not be used with the Ovi mobile application.
