A report on Application Development for mobile phones

8/12/2019 A report on Application Development for mobile phones

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NEW TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS, DESIGN

AND BUSINESS MODELS

(NTADBM)

IIM-NID Joint course

Final Project Report

Submitted to

Prof. Rakesh Basant

Prof. Jignesh Khakhar

Prof. Bhavin Kothari

Group 1:

Aditya Singh - IIMA

Anil Kumar Vishwanadhula - IIMA

Deepanjana - NID

Vineet Sharma - NID


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1 APPLICATION CONCEPT AND BACKGROUND

We named our app as Muzzikand in one sentence its a personalized radio with additional capabilities

such as search and crowd-sourced playlists.

1.1 BACKGROUNDMusic is integral part of everyones life and as Steve Jobs said, Everyone loves music. We also wanted

to build a product that has an emotional connect with the customer and finalized on the music app idea.

For this idea, we are dealing only with the Indian market.

Before finalizing on the features of the idea, we did analysis on the existing apps that are available in the

Indian market. The apps we looked at include Saavn, Hungama, Gaana and Raaga. All these apps are

global which means they have a single app for all the 18 different languages and the major stream of

revenue is advertising. This poses certain challenges because of which these apps are not doing well

financially in the market.

The first one is the film industry that creates this music is local and the potential customer base for

these music apps are movie lovers. Because of the global nature of these apps, the film producers are

not interested in this advertising space. After talking to industry expert, Abhishek Jain ( Director of first

Gujarati multiplex movie, Kevi Rite Jaish) we also found that the knowledge of the customers about film

industry is different in different languages. For example in film industries like Telugu and Tamil,

customers know the director, music director and sometimes even the cinematographer of the film and

would like to search by any of the fields. The same is not the case with Gujarati industry. In short, the

customer needs of each film industry are different, so we cant have an app that caters to all the

different languages. SO THE APP WE ARE BUILDING IS TARGETING NICHE MARKET AND OFFERS SONGS

IN A SINGLE LANGUAGE.

The second major challenge working with Indian languages is people write different spellings for the

same word when they convert it from native language to English. One of the best ways to solve this

problem is to give auto-suggestions. The existing apps are doing a sloppy job with auto-suggestions and

search. One more limitation is search is restricted to only a limited set of fields.SO THE SECOND MAJOR

FOCUS OF OUR APP IS ON BUILDING THE BEST SEARCH ENGINE AND A PERFECT AUTO-SUGGEST WITH

IT.

The third major area where would like to make difference is with DATA. We had extracted a lot of meta

information about songs from different websites including Wikipedia. The meta information include

artist information, album information and the image for the album. The data is useful to enrich user

experience and provide the user with more search options. The other powerful advantage data gives is

customer usage patterns. Using the customer usage patterns we can recommend songs that are

personalized for the user. SO THE THIRD MAJOR DIFFERENTIATOR IS DATA AND PERSONALIZATION OF

EXPERIENCE USING DATA.


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1.2 GOALSSo the major goals of creating this app is to do following things,

1. To create an app for each language separately focusing on niche market

2. To build the best vertical search engine for songs within the app

3. To gather data for the songs and create a personalized experience using the customer usagepatterns

2 ONLINEMUSICINDUSTRY(SUPPLY-SIDEVIEW)

Mobile music streaming apps have been on an rise for bollywood and local music in India. Established

players like Saavn, Gaana, Dhingana, Raaga are operating in this space.

On the content side, most apps from major players have started proving a localized music catalogue.

Some apps like Gaana.com also provide music of international artists. Apart from providing a playlist

form of music content, which has to be created by the user himself, some apps like Saavn, Gaana have

started radio streaming services as well from where users can access playlist from radio stations like

Radio Mirchi.

Over a period of time these apps have tried to become platform agnosticso that they can be played

across various versions of smartphones. They have also included features of social integration wherein

user can share playlist on Facebook, Twitter or through email.

Revenue modelof all these apps till now have been solely based on advertisements and the app was

provided free to the users. However, recently Saavn has come up with a paid subscription feature also

which allows users to skip ads and cache songs for offline listening. It wont allow users to download the

songs; instead it will cache the users playlist thatcan be played without having to connect to the Internet.

3 CUSTOMERNEEDS(DEMANDSIDEVIEW)

We did customer research for this app building the web-version of the product which can accessed here

- cccapps.iimahd.ernet.in/epaata (accessible only within IIMA). This is currently built for Telugu industry.

One more reason we built the web version first is that one of the group members have expertise in it.

3.1.1 CURRENT BEHAVIOR OF CUSTOMERS

1. The customers have certain old songs on the laptops and they maintain playlists to listen to

music every day.

With this customer is listening to same set of songs and over a period of time they get bored.

2. For listening to new songs, customers are using YouTube since downloading songs now a days

has become difficult. YouTube also gives them a set of playlists for listening to songs


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Listening to songs on YouTube is very costly in terms of band-width and YouTube is not built for

providing rich online music listening experience.

3. Customers are not interested in new songs, but on older ones which are all-time hits.

All the existing music apps offers playlists with Weekly top 10 which a lot of customers are not

interested in.

4. Nostalgia is one of the important factor that explains the customer usage or the songs they are

interested in.

3.1.2 REACTION TO THE WEB APPLICATION

Although the web version of the app is built focused on customer needs, the customer usage patterns

are not impressive ( this data is obtained through Google analytics). One of the main reasons later found

out was that the application was not giving users the pre-populated list which customers are used to.

Although a brilliant search engine is present, it couldnt attract and retain the customer.This can be

seen in the figure below where there is huge drop in the usage after the first use.

3.1.3 CHANGES MADE TO THE PRODUCT WHICH MADE IT WORK

The following changes to the product worked out really well.

1. Creation of playlist for users based on the usage

2. Recommended songs to the user based on the usage

3. Making the app a continuous music stream which means customer wants a product which

continues to play music until they stop.

We used all the feedback we got to design the Mobile App which branded asMuzzik.

Results that we obtained from Google analytics in a test market with size90 can be seen below


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4 COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

4.1 COMPETITORSThe major competitors for this app in Indian market are

1. Saavn2. Hungama

3. Gaana

4. Raaga

5. Dhingana

4.2 COMPETITOR ANALYSISFollowing table gives an overview of the differences between some of the online music portals available

Saavn Dhingana Gaana

Content a.Bollywood as well as

regional music

streaming services.

b.Library of 1 million

tracks.

c.Doesnt have its English

assortment on the

mobile app.

a. Library of 1 million

tracks.

b. Not all the assortment

that it has on the

website is available on

mobile site.

Library of 1 million

tracks

Languages

Offered

Hindi, tamil, telegu,

punjabi, marathi, bengali,

kannada, gujarati,malayalam, bhojpuri

Hindi, tamil, telegu,

punjabi, marathi,

malayalam, Relaxation,Meditation, Ghazals

Hindi, english tamil,

telegu, bengali,

punjabi, marathi

Market Share

(as of March 2013)

2 million users on mobile

platform.

3.5 million mobile users. 0.5 million users.

Search Saavn provides song

suggestions in its search

option.

Dhinagana search is not

very convenient as at

times its suggestions have

no relation to what one is

searching for.

Gaana has a static

wallpaper under the

search option which

offers no assistance

whatsoever while

searching.User Experience Integrated with

Facebooks open graph

and have their apps on

Facebook.

Not the best music

experience. The app does

Integrated with

Facebooks open graph

and have their apps on

Facebook. Music

experience not better than

Gaana but does not crash.

Have the best music

experience and feels

like a stand-alone

player but bad app

experience as the app

crashes frequently.


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Table Source: yourstory.in

not crash often.

Listening

experience

Saavn has a steady bitrate

policy for all kind of

connection, and on a

mobile network, the

sound quality is great. But

sometimes the song just

abruptly stops and starts

buffering.

Dhingana has an adaptive

bitrate feature, where it

alters the quality of the

song to match the

bandwidth is great. The

app tries sensing network

speeds and moderating bit

rates accordingly.

Gaana provides the

best listening

experience over a

stable connection, but

at the first sign of

network flakiness, it

crashes the app.

Revenue Model

Ad-supported

Pays upfront fee and 30%

revenue to record labels.

Advertising is the main

revenue model.The app is free for

users, advertising is

the model used to

bring in revenue.


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5 KEYFEATUREOFFERINGS

The key features of the Muzzik include,

1. Personalized music based on customers interests

2. State-of-the-art search with auto-suggest. It gives real-time results !!!!

3. Ability to create playlists and share it with others

4. Featured playlists by the industry experts such as Party songsand 90s goldies

5. Playlists that gets created automatically based on mood, genre and other search criteria

6. Ability to find related songs for a given song

The app requires login using Facebook or Google account for personalization.

6 INTERACTIONSWITHECOSYSTEM

MUZZIK


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7 ASSETS

7.1 TECHNOLOGYASSETS1. Meta-data collected from various different websites using extraction algorithms

2. Enriched information about songs after processing of data collected from various sources andthe processing algorithms itself.

3. Search algorithm with excellent ranking system and auto-suggestion.

4. Search engine optimization logic

5. Optimization based on band-width of the customers

6. Customer usage patterns

7. The algorithm that recommends songs to customers based on their usage

7.2 DESIGNASSETS1. Radical change from album view to song view

2. Simple and clean interface with a limited set of features3. Better and most relevant ad space given to advertisers

4. Ease of use icons

Note : All existing apps focus too much on showing albums and not songs. The primary research on

customers show that they are not interested in albums but on songs.


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8 RISKS

8.1 SONGCOPYRIGHTSWithout copyrights of songs, this app cannot be built. But from our research we found out that there is

Creative Commons license ( CCL) available with which revenue sharing models with the copyrightowners can be worked out.

8.2 MARKETRISKThere is a huge market risk with this app especially the competitors have backed by huge companies, for

example gaana.com is owned by Times group. Although competitors can copy the features quite quickly

and offer them in their apps, with technology and data significant barriers could be created.


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9 BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

Green indicates the information related to customers who will be using the product

Dark Blue shows the information related to advertisers

Red indicates the information related to music labels and content aggreagators


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10APPLICATIONDESIGN

Keeping in mind, the value proposition to the customer, we built following screens of the application

based on the design orientation class we had in NID,

10.1SCREENSHOTS

10.1.1 APP STARTING SCREENSHOT


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10.1.2 APP HOME SCREEN

10.1.3 SCREEN SHOWING ADS


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10.1.4 SCREEN SHOWING LATEST HITS PLAYLIST

11EXHIBITS

11.1SCREENSHOTOFWEBAPP

A report on Application Development for mobile phones

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