Branding and Apps session at SxSW

This was one of the better sessions I attended at SxSW this week. The title was, “Extending your brand? There’s an app for that.” You can read more about it here and see the guys that presented.

The group talked about the pro’s and con’s of using apps but perhaps the best part of the session was when the panelists listed the apps they love and the apps that they think suck. Here’s that list:

Apps that are great

ViceTracker (Shiv mentioned this one and although his company produced it and I think there probably should have been a rule against picking your own apps, it does look very cool)

Shop Savvy – I agree, this app is great and starts to show us the future of mobile, i.e. connecting the capabilities of online shopping with offline shopping

Amazon – this was an easy one, wish they would have picked something less obvious, but I can’t disagree that this is a killer app mainly for the photo-capture “what’s this item” functionality

Apps that suck

NY Times – a) they don’t charge and they should, b) no location-aware functionality and c) you can’t filter news by your social graph

AMG Mercedes – just an extension of the website, nothing smart about it

GTI Real Racing game – 99.9% of people that used the app never acted on it afterwards (by buying a car), all it did was produce a good feeling for the brand and there are better ways to use your money to do that