Check out http://www.juncanoo.com. I’m a student at the university of Pennsylvania developing apps for museums and I’d love to talk with you about it all. The application we’ve built straddles this problem by generating content both to apps for the iphone (Blackberry and android versions are coming in may) and to web apps (for which the DMA provided some inspiration). I’m sure you have some great ideas and ton of knowledge on the space. Please email me if at all possible and we’ll talk in some detail.

We’re in the appstore here: itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exhibit-by-juncanoo/id344358052?mt=8 or search for “exhibit by juncanoo”. Would love to hear what you all think.

Ayo

(Sorry, called you Vincent!) I’d love to chat, too. I’m on skype at xxx or drop me an email maureen@xxx.xx. I can show you Mobeum (which goes public in April).

Maureen

Clear, comprehensive and well-reasoned post! Thank you very much.

Having early on abandoned an iPhone app for Open Museum’s mobile tour, we settled on a web-based one. Called Mobeum, it’s up and running with our pilot partner the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. We’ve written a series of posts about its development in the Open Museum blog and will be presenting a paper about it at Museums in the Web. You can also take a peek here in the Open Museum mobile view if you go to the Hood and select “Tour”.

It would be great to learn more about your experience. If you’re interested in talking, just let me know!

Maureen

The iPhone is great, and developing apps is also simple, but developing a platform for your institution that is dependent on one platform sucks.

I much prefer the idea of developing content via web apps for phones. It means that you can use a single framework to optimise content for whatever device, and as more of them advance, we can more readily start building sites with on and offline content. I don’t think being online or offline once in the museum need be an impediment.

Exceedingly sophisticated apps can be developed for the web and directing people to your museum site is much more useful for tracking purposes, than it is to send them to the app store. This also means that the domain for the museum, is the single source for information about the museum, rather than spreading it across the net, and people know where they can find it.

Being able to develop an iPhone app is an unnecessary barrier to entry for museums to a single platform and relying on browsers to share content is a much more viable means. Whats more is, this doesn’t necessarily preclude you from rolling out an app too, but at least you have a lot more bases covered to begin with.

Anyhow, that’s my 2 cents for now. Thanks again for the great post.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by museummedia: Web Apps vs iPhone Apps for Museum Content… The power is in the cloud, not on one type of phone. http://bit.ly/aisdYS...

With Layar and Muzar contentowners can make use of this 1 platform for IPhone, Android and Symbian (approx. q3 2010). Free, easy to use and widely available.