At present, ~350 iPhone apps have been actually created by museums. Of those, only one out of ten was created by a U.S. museum (the rest are non-U.S.). The other 760 iPhone apps matching “museum” in their title or description were created by travel and culture publishers, most of which are poor quality.

These pathetic numbers ignore smartphone reality. In the U.S. alone, half of all mobile phone customers now have smartphones, and there will soon be 1 million new smartphone (smartphones run apps) subscribers a week. This will be virtually all U.S. households in 5-7 years. Currently, Android and iOS are the two main app platforms. Numbers in Europe are similar. 

Despite mobile’s potential to connect to visitor’s pockets (and pocketbooks), of the ~17,500 museums in the U.S., fewer than 2% currently have a mobile app.

Two recent surveys reveal some of the thinking behind this. These surveys asked questions to a few hundred internet-savvy staff. This was a self-selected pool who saw the surveys in blog posts, Twitter postings, and emails. Even among this internet-savvy community, only 29-40% currently have apps.

These surveys found that history museums are less inclined towards apps than arts and science museums, and European museums are ahead of the U.S.

Since the real number of museums with apps is closer to 1.7%, that means that 95% of museums are not even part of the discussion (or are ignoring surveys about apps).

Most museums are small, and it’s the small museums that don’t have apps. From the Pocket-Proof survey, the red bars are museums with no apps and no plans to make one. Annual visitation is the left axis:

Among the survey respondents who don’t have apps, it was mostly a lack of experience that has led to ignoring apps. Other factors were that it was “not a priority,” and high cost:

This means  there is still a big void: There’s a lack of support in the field for sharing resources and information about making apps, and there are insufficient tools on the low-end for making nice, useful, inexpensive apps that will get these museums onto mobile devices.

Another big problem is that mobile apps and social media are considered “marketing” expenses, as opposed to tools to educate and inform the public. Unless curators and educators are involved, apps will be further hampered because they will be vacuous and uninteresting. NOUS’ survey asked what departments in museums were in charge of mobile and social media:

Will museums get a clue, and realize that the museum experience should not stop at the edge of their property? We’ll see.

Notes: 

• The third of museums apps actually created by museums was calculated by randomly sampling 2.5% of the 1060 iPhone apps matching “museum,” was returned as search results by iTunes. Of the 9/27 which were real museum apps, only 1 was a U.S. museum. Analysis by IDEA on 16-April-2012.
• The ‘2012 Museums and Mobile Survey‘ was conducted by Pocket-Proof and Learning Times, and surveyed 554 people currently working in museums, 78% of which were in the U.S. Their respondents where 43% from historical organizations (museums, monuments, local heritage), 20% from art museums, and the rest from other types. Data collected Nov 2011 – Jan 2012.
• The ‘Mobile Communication’ survey was conducted by NOUSGuide, and surveyed 122 institutions, reflecting mostly European respondents (the countries were Austria, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and the US). Data collected Dec 2011 – Feb 2012.

Keeping it simple

Apps just need to be good enough. No need to get too fancy or reinvent the wheel. While custom apps run from $25-100k, many vendors will create an app for you for less than $25k, and some for well under $5k. This is a summary of the vendors offering apps for less than $25k at yesterday’s 3rd Museums & Mobile online conference.

The key to a tour app on a budget is creating a ‘templated’ app. You upload content (“tour stops”) to the vendor’s online content management system (similar to creating blog posts), and then the vendor packages your content into their pre-existing framework, creating an app that gets submitted to the Apple or Android app stores.

Summary of vendors: 

TourBuddy: List of tour stops from 'Savannah Walking Tour', detailed view of a stop, and their GPS view. Good for large outdoor areas.

TourBuddy – $1-2k per app, with reasonably priced updates, and options for additional features. Inspired by the IKEA model of anchoring on a low price, yet delivering good design, Yvonne Jouffrault, says Tour Buddy is creating apps for organizations who want an affordable app, and don’t need a lot of customization. Jouffrault says GPS maps are one of their best features. The GPS works well for any large, outdoor location with a clear view of the sky. The map mode allows users to pan over a map to choose a tour spot, or see their location on a Google map. TourBuddy has created approximately a dozen apps so far, and their apps run on both Apple iOS and Android. Coming soon, TourBuddy is adding a web app option, a better organization of tour stops, and more visual styles. Later in 2012, Tour Buddy may add support for tablets and video. They have two apps with many ratings: their “Savannah Walking Tour” has a free and $10 version, and 4/5 stars in the Apple App Store; “Dutch Utopia” is free and has 3.5/5 stars. See pricing.

OnCell iPhone App: On the left, list of stops, and map view. On the right, a view from their sample web app.

OnCell – $1.5k for audio tours, $3.8k for multimedia. OnCell built their business creating audio tours run from cell phones, i.e., visitors call a phone number and enter stop numbers into the phone to hear recorded tour messages. Their call-in business has hundreds of clients in the US and Canada, including many major institutions like the Grand Canyon and 80+ other National Parks, the Met, the Smithsonian, etc. The call-in market is being disrupted by the tour apps, which don’t require visitors to make a phone call and burn their cell phone minutes. They have two apps so far on the “OnCell App” platform, the “New Orleans Jazz” app was published this summer, but has no reviews yet. See pricing.

TourSphere: Underground Railroad app, list of stops, a stop, and a keypad mode. Not shown is a non-GPS map mode.

TourSphere – $500-900/month for native apps. $400/month for web apps. They have a CMS for uploading content. No upfront fees, no contracts. The price depends on which combination of phone and tablet sized iOS or Android apps you make. Their ‘National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’ has 3/5 stars. See pricing.

Tristan: Browsing stops and viewing detailed information in the 'Canadian Museum of Civilization' and the 'Infinity of Nations'

Tristan – $8-15k per app for an exhibition guide and walking tour. Tristan’s authoring platform is called Autor. Vanessa Vanzieleghem, Tristan’s Global Sales Manager, notes that Autor supports up to 7 major languages, and publishes to iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad and creates a web app. Their more expensive, custom apps have ratings in the range from 2.5/5 stars (“Phillips Collection,” U.S. app store), to 3.5/5 (“The Art at Cowboys Stadium” and “Smithsonian: Infinity of Nations,” U.S. app store), to 4.5/5 (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Canadian app store).

GuideOne: Alaska Native Heritage Center app. Alternating between portrait and landscape orientations, the app has coverflow-like and map methods to browse stops. The stops play as videos. At right is a scavenger hunt, visitors go find the object and answer a quiz question.

GuideOne – $15k+ per app. Their “plug and play” apps draw on a number of preset modules: audio tours, zoomable floor maps and images, scavenger hunts and quizzes, membership/donation features, and links to social networks. GuideOne has lowered their prices and improved their offerings since the Spring. According to product manager, Juan Sanabria, their Alaska Native Heritage Center app launched in May (4/5 starts), the Inupiat Heritage Center app launching soon for iOS and Android. Their app for the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA) was released in February, but has only garnered one review. Coming soon is a Boston Historic Sites iPad kiosk and Android and iOS app launching in launching in Spring 2012. Their apps have an offline mode, but the option to download content into the Alaskan app didn’t work for me on a high-speed network.

KanvaSys' Biosphere app: List of tours, map mode (non-GPS), a tour stop, and empty search results for "ecosystem" with no alternative suggestions.

KanvaSys – $20k+ one-time, or $8k+/year if hosted. KanvaSys is part of Ideeclic, a Canadian company which began creating web sites and educational games for the Alberta and Quebec school boards. Their platform is called “inSitu,” and they can skin it for different apps. KanvaSys’ latest app, “Biosphere” for the Environment Museum is free, but doesn’t have many reviews in the app store yet. Their “Cleveland Metroparks Zoo” app has a 3/5 rating.

Adlib – €2k EUR/ year for a 3 year contract, plus the cost for underlying Adlib Museum system, a local collection management system. The advantage is that the app content comes from the collection management system, so it does not need to be re-entered.

CMS and custom hardware from Antenna International.

Antenna International – Full pricing is not disclosed. Antenna is a big player in audio tours. They have two billing models. Their ‘Universal’ plan involves Antenna taking the risk, owning all the content, and handling all the logistics of the hardware. All visitors have access to the tour as part of their admission fee, and the museum commits to pay Antenna approximately 50 cents per head for 3-5 years. So a million visitors = $500k to Antenna, with no upfront cost to the museum. Their other main option is ‘leasing’ which costs $17-20/month per device. As with the Universal plan, Antenna handles logistics (headphones, maintenance, repainting damage, staff training on best practices, and delivers sufficient devices to meet demand). Often museums have seasonable demand, so Antenna will ship over a few hundred (rarely as many as 1000) additional devices for a few months. A baseline of 250 devices would cost around $55k per year. Prior to launching their proprietary XP Iris device, which is a touch screen and number pad, they had options to buy iPod Touches, but Antenna is phasing out commodity hardware, and pushing customers to use their devices. A downside of working with Antenna is that you usually don’t own your own tour, and especially not any celebrity voices they might recruit, so you can’t spin the content into less expensive tours, post them to YouTube, or use them for any other purposes in the future. Antenna has a new CMS, called “publisher” which allows organization staff to rearrange a tour, or upload a new piece of content. Examples of the CMS in use, offered by Ken Husband, was the marketing department adding a “stop” promoting a sale in the museum shop, or the curators removing a stop for an item which is on loan.

Other vendors at the conference are higher-end, full service firms who create custom apps. These vendors are often vague about their pricing, though  vendors try to keep costs down by reusing features between apps. Full service firms at the conference were: Art Processors, EarPrint, Espro Acoustiguide Group, GVAM, and Imagineear.

Why native apps?

With a native app, visitors don’t have to struggle to read your web site into their small screen. And while you should have a mobile-formatted version of your web site (a web app), native apps give organizations better branding with an icon directly on audience’s home screen, and provides a smoother and richer user experience. Plus, a native app can work when there’s no internet connection.

One important detail: Make sure you are the official “publisher” of your app, so that when you improve the app in the future, or change vendors, your visitors automatically get the new version of your app.

Update: 27-Oct-11. Added new information provided by Tristan.

The codes are easy to generate. Several web sites and software programs will make the codes for you.

To read the codes, users need a QR reader app to take a snapshot of the code with their device’s camera. The app returns the decoded text or web URL.

In the photo at left, a pedestrian takes a photo of a QR code promoting an Andy Warhol show.

There are hundreds of barcode-reader apps (e.g., RedLaser and QuickMark for iOS and Android devices, and the Kaywa reader for dumber smartphones), and code-reading can be included in custom apps, e.g., a museum tour.

QR codes on the rise

QR codes are currently the best way to transmit information from the real world into an app. The codes were originally designed in 1994 for tracking car parts at Toyota, but they have recently exploded in popularity, and are becoming more familiar to the public. ComScore reported that  14 million American mobile users scanned a QR code in June 2011 (6% percent of all mobile device users). Linda Kelly at the Australian Museum recently surveyed 100 visitors, and 15% said they have scanned a QR code.

The EXPLORA Science Center in Frankfurt is using QR Codes to promote their exhibition (photo at right), and extensively within the exhibition. QR codes in the exhibits at Michigan’s Cranbrook Institute of Science link to Wikipedia entries and relevant websites like the census bureau.  The Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary posts QR codes to help its visitors find maps of the sanctuary. (See more expamples in the comments on this MuseumNext page.) Last year, NYC’s central park had a display of QR codes. Here’s a 4 minute promo video:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OCyfV_k2_g

Major advertising campaigns are helping propel QR codes into the public view. For example, this clever billboard shows you the rest of a Victoria’s Secret model:

Give visitors something extra

As an example, the Love Lace Exhibition (July 2011 – April 2012) at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has a free app for Apple iOS and Android devices. Visitors can scan the QR code on an object’s label, and see more information in the app

The QR codes are used by Love Lace visitors, but are not a hit. In the first month, the exhibit reported 572 iOS and 165 Android app downloads. People used the app an average of 5 times on iOS and 3 on Android (including when they are not in the exhibition). The QR feature was only used 844 times in the first month, with a 5% failure rate, and 2% of scanned code unrelated to the exhibiton. Visitors scanned fewer than 2 objects per app download, suggesting that visitor did not think it was worthwhile. Many objects were not scanned at all. App developer Carlos Arroyo says they intend to add more interactivity.

Annelies Valgaeren of the MAS in Antwerp says they use QR codes extensively to provide translations, and give objects a ‘voice.’

Nina Simon of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz noted last month that there should be consistency in what the QR codes do, and visitors should know what they will get. In developing a woodworking exhibition which included QRCodes, her team added a sentence next to each QR code, explaining that it would yield. e.g., “Scan the QR code to see the inside of this cabinet (1 min slideshow)” or “Scan the QR code to watch the artist carving these pieces (9 min video).”

What do QR codes look like?

The QR codes (short for “Quick Response code”) are a two-dimensional version of bar codes, consisting of a box of black & white squares.  The codes can vary in complexity.

Encoding up to 15 alphanumeric characters does not require many pixels (top left), while encoding up to 395 characters requires a more densely packed matrix (top right). Also, the codes can be customized (bottom row). The codes employ error correction, so your designers can replace up to 30% of the space, and the code is still readable. However, if you get too artsy, your audience might not realize it’s a QR code.

Try them out 

QR codes are useful for promoting your work because they provide an easy way for the public to learn more about your project, and they are rapidly being adopted by many industries. Book publishers are using QR codes to link to additional content. Academics like Katy Meyers have added QR codes to her poster at a professional conference, where she got 30 more hits to her web site than usual. Washington, D.C. middle school teacher librarian Gwyneth Jones has created cool library scavenger hunts with QR codes.

If your organization is thinking about creating mobile content to complement a new exhibition, whether in an app or a mobile-friendly web site, think about what kinds of additional content, information, audio and video, interactivity or social media you can link to, so as to enrich your visitors’ experiences.

Smartphones are popular phones. According to Nielsen, 38% of Americans now own smartphones, and 55% of those who purchased a new handset in the past three months bought a smartphone (rather than a dumb one), up from 34% a year ago. Android’s growth curve flattened in 2011 while the iPhone’s got a boost. Collectively, Android and iOS are activating over 800k devices per day.

Tablet computers are dominated by Apple’s iPad which sold over 25 million units as of June 2011, since launch in April 2010. Competing manufacturers have been slow to launch compelling alternatives. The HP TouchPad (running webOS 3) is launching this week, and is lauded for being attractive and easy to use, but has started off with lukewarm reviews before launch for being bulky, and as Walt Mossberg at WSJ says, “poor battery life, a paucity of apps and other deficits.” The RIM BlackBerry Playbook (running BlackBerry Tablet OS) launched April 2011, but it was widely disliked by reviewers and the public, and sold only half a million by early June. Currently, monthly shipments of Motorola’s Xoom, Acer’s Iconia, Asustek’s Eee Pad Transformer (all running Android 3 Honeycomb) and RIM’s PlayBook average at about 100-200k units.

Tablet apps are exploding. Again this is dominated by Apple’s platform, as developers perceive it to be the best platform to invest their efforts. In 453 days since the original iPad came out on April 3, 2010, the App Store has more than 100k iPad apps available (i.e., targeting the tablet, not just a scaled up iPhone app).

Electronic books, such as Amazon’s Kindle, are gaining popularity as convenient, inexpensive devices dedicated to reading. Pew reports that 12% of U.S. households now own an eBook device. That doubled from November 2010 to May 2011. Meanwhile, in May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom.

Social media is related to mobile, and one new twist is Google+, Google’s latest foray into social media. It follows on Google’s prior ventures (Orkut, Buzz, and Wave), and is off to a good start with positive press and reviews. TechDirt thinks it’s main advantage is that it’s not Facebook.

(Left to right, top:  while waiting in line, socializing, in the bathroom, while watching TV; bottom: while using a computer, playing video games, reading a paper, or a book.)

The most common place to use a smartphones is at home (93% of smartphone owners), but people use their smartphones all kinds of places:

While people are out and about, they are often doing other things at the same time they are using their smartphone. These are opportunities for educational outreach. Time spent waiting and commuting are particularly good time windows of idle time which could be filled with art or science:

Aside from making phone calls, smartphones serve as pocket PCs, extending the desktop/laptop experience. 81% of smartphone users browsed the internet within the last week, 77% used a search engine, 68% used an app, and 48% watched videos. Moreover, 72% use their smartphone while consuming other media. Here’s how people multitask:

Source: Data fromes from The Mobile Movement Study, Google/Ipsos OTX MediaCT , Apr 2011. N =  5,013 US online adults (18-64 years of age) who identified themselves as using a smartphone to access the Internet were interviewed. Data collected Q4 2010. From Google Think Insights.

Smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile Americans and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold, signaling the maturation of the mobile industry.

In December 2010, nearly 47 percent of mobile subscribers were connected media users (used browsers, accessed applications or downloaded content), up 7.6 percentage points from the previous year. The growth in mobile media usage is largely attributable to the growth in smartphone adoption, 3G/4G device ownership and the increasing ubiquity of unlimited data plans, all of which facilitate the consumption of mobile content.

This is a major trend, as people upgrade their phones or buy new ones, and the networks get faster. Let’s look at what phones Americans are carrying in their pocket:

Looking deeper, the market share among smart phones is rapidly changing. Of the fraction of phones which are smartphones (currently 27% total), here’s the changes in their marketshare, based on Canalys estimates of platform shares, as graphed by Asymco. Android and iOS are less than 2 years old as platforms. In that time frame these two have taken 50.2% of the most competitive technology market on the planet. Meanwhile, Nokia recently announced that they are phasing out Symbian.

What this means for you

Organizations serious about public education had better keep smartphones in mind (tablets too, but that’s another story — see our recent post about tablets). And if you have to pick a platform, iOS and Android are the obvious choice.

comScore says that smartphone adoption, device innovations (including tablets) and improvements in network speeds all took hold – and it can be expected that these factors will continue to be strong drivers of mobile media consumption in 2011.