Caught this off the business wire this morning;
DENVER, Sep 22, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) —
UDR | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — UDR, Inc. (NYSE:UDR) announced today the launch of a new website that
can quickly and efficiently deliver information about UDR’s
apartment homes to millions of Apple iPhone and iPod(R)
touch users.
“We’re excited to
become the first company in the multifamily industry to offer an
iPhone/iPod touch-friendly website,” said
Jerry Davis, Senior Vice President of Operations for UDR. [Read more here]
I am bringing it up on my iPhone now. I will let you know what I think.
0 Responses
Mike,
I have to get an IPhone soon so I can too create pages for my rental site for IPhone users.
Dave
Does making an application for a phone that has such a small market share (of all mobile phones) make sense? While the % of “smartphone” users is increasing, they still are the minority in the total cell phone market. I just wonder if it makes more sense to just insure your website is mobile friendly to all phones and not just focus on the iPhone. I will admit it is cool, but not sure how practical.
Mike thanks for the post. Did some research into the smart phone makret and as it turns out Apple is not exactly making it easy for developers to build applications for the iPhone. You have to pay ~$300 to join (all other major platforms are free to develop for e.g., Blackberry, Nokia) and then there is a series of restrictions on what you can develop. Once you have developed you app you can only sell it through the Apple store and Apple takes 30% of the revenues. This is very much inline with Apple’s philosophy though and helps them maintain control of their product and market. For the time being at least there seems to be still quite a bit of momentum behind iPhone so Apple can afford to have developers pay to be part of the club (watch for Google Phone). It is encourging to see that a real estate company of this size sees promise in using high-tech to reach its market. Mike are we seeing a sea change in the profile of the typical property manager to a more tech-savvy group? Is this a generational or cultural shift or both?