By Chris Janota, Navigation App

Have you been following Apple’s new iOS subscription rules?

Opinions on this issue vary greatly, but mine is that Apple has every right to implement a subscription service, but there’s no way they can charge a 30 percent fee for many of the services that wish to use it.  Music streaming is one example, but publishing services are another.  At 30 percent, most publishing services simply could not afford to stay in business. It’s ridiculous. And Apple needs to either wave the fee or cut it down to some low single digit percentage in circumstances beyond traditional media publishers.

Good article: Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple’s Subscription Strategy Will.  TechCrunch  Tien Tzuo Feb 19, 2011

The Huffington Post outsources cheap, specialized content. 

Read Lessons of the Huffington Post.

By Chris Janota, Navigation App

There is a perfect storm setting for mobile garage sale applications.  The experience for avid “professional” garage salers and  just causual “saturday morning salers” is about to change.  The tools used and the time spent preparing a route attack is suddenly becoming easier opening the door for more entreprenial opportunities and more opportunities for garage sale fun.  Three big trends are changing the landscape.  We have a growing trend of thrift.  We’re coming off a 20-year boom in which consumers filled ever-bigger houses. Now people need cash because of the bust.  And buyers are searching for garage sales to make their dollars stretch further.  High unenployement is fueling an resale boom where entrpreniers are makiing a living buying garage sale merchandise and resaling it for profit.

We have a growing trend of recycling.  There is a growing awareness garage sales can be good for the environment because it’s making someone else’s trash another person’s treasure… and keeping it out of the landfills at the same time. Garage sales are just another form of recycling with a different culture to it. And helps make some extra cash on the side.

We have a growing trend of mobile computing.  According to Google CEO Steve Schmidt the future of computing is mobile.  Schmidt says that businesses should have their best developers working on their mobile applications. The successful launch and growth of the iPhone and Android phones have created an entirely new and largely blank canvas for garage sale application features.  These devices offer new native services and OS-specific features (location, multi-touch UI, local media, wireless networking APIs, cameras, offline) that are giving birth to a growing list of app feature possibilities.

Where the garage saling ecomony and technology meet is where Navigational App stands.  Navigational App  provides serious garage sale entreprenials or causual “saturday morning salers” GPS turn-by-turn navigation for garage sales and simple product search.  Easy route planning functioanity and garage sale  “in range” alerts are more upcoming features.   We focus on garage sale and mobile technology so you may focus on providing local content.

How Can Navigation App Help Your Newspaper?

By Chris Janota, Navigation App

Have concerns trying to promote  your mobile news website and trying to make it more relevent to readers and advertisers? Leverage your garage sale listings to help build a mobile presence and attracting more readers.   Your mobile news suddenly becomes more valuable to readers when your mobile garage sale map app becomes downloadable from your mobile news site.  Build cross traffic by sending your mobile news readers to your new garage sale map app.  Users of your app can be drawn back into your mobile news site through links within the app.