Stanford's Bresnahan Lauds 'Invention of the Corporate App'

The rise of the corporate mobile application is the real “value proposition” of mobile apps over recent years, Timothy Bresnahan, an economics professor at Stanford University, told the Technology Policy Institute conference in Aspen, Colorado. Bresnahan, a former chief economist at the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, slammed a common model that has developed for apps designed to be entertaining to consumers: “I sell their attention to advertisers, I become just like Google or Facebook,” he said. “Overwhelmingly that’s been a fizzle. It’s true, it’s absolutely true.” Facebook and Google sell a lot of mobile ads, but the big entrepreneurs of the mobile era “did not have a lot of advertising revenue,” he said Monday. “This is not where the money was. What’s not been a fizzle is ... the invention of the corporate app.” The real value is “in consumer products and services companies that are trying to maintain high-value relationships with their customers over the whole selling life cycle,” he said.