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Carnival of the Mobilists 232 Up At Little Springs Design
Posted by Carlo on 26 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : News • Carnival of the Mobilists •


Mobile design stalwarts Little Springs Design have this week's installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists up at their site, so be sure to check it out for the week's best mobile blogging. This edition features topics such as mobile advertising, app stores, open source in mobile, the future of devices and more.



Carnival of the Mobilists #231 Comes To WIP
Posted by Carlo on 19 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : News • Carnival of the Mobilists •


It's time for another installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists, this time hosted right here on the WIP blog. A big thanks to all the mobilists who sent in their posts this week, and a big welcome to everybody visiting our site for the first time. After you're done checking out the week's best blogging about mobile, be sure to take a look at our Events Wiki, a comprehensive listing of mobile events and conferences, as well as our App Store Wiki, the most complete listing of mobile app stores -- currently tracking 84 -- on the web.

But let's get on with the Carnival!

Windows Phone 7, the latest work from Microsoft, was a popular topic this week, with both Terence Eden and Tam Hanna taking it on. Terence has a solid list of pros and cons about the new OS, with quite a few problems but a lot he likes about it as well, while Tam features an interview with a Microsoft evangelist for the corporate line on what to expect from WP7. Another emerging technology that's been getting a lot of hype lately is HTML5, but Carl Martin at Mobsessed says it will be a while before it's ready for prime time (or the mass market) on mobile.

Elsewhere:

Once again, thanks to all the contributors and visitors! Next week, the Carnival visits Little Springs Design's blog, so keep an eye out for it.



Carnival of the Mobilists #230
Posted by Carlo on 15 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : News • Carnival of the Mobilists •


Steve Litchfield has this week's installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists up at his Phones Show site, so be sure to check it out for the week's top mobile blog posts, including Caroline's recap of her NGMN presentation on developer risk. Check back in with us on Monday, when we'll be hosting the next edition!



Catching Up On WIPJam Berlin
Posted by Carlo on 07 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : WIPjam •


Thibaut and I were in Berlin a few weeks back for a Jam Session at the Messe there, running alongside IT-Profits and LinuxTag. Despite the sweltering heat and a greenhouse of a building, it was a day full of great discussions. We had a smaller crowd than at many of our events at major mobile-industry events, but the quality of discussion enabled by its intimate size made up for it! Big thanks to our sponsors, Intel and GetJar, and to our friends at IT-Profits for helping with logistics.

We kicked the day off with a brief recap of some of the latest news from Apple's WWDC and Google I/O. The crowd seemed less interested in the previous day's announcement of the iPhone 4, and more interested in the news from Google -- perhaps explained by the strong open-source influence of LinuxTag and the enthusiasm for open source in Germany overall. One major point that generated some discussion was the expansion of the Android platform into the Google TV set-top box, and the resultant ability for apps to run across phones, other devices, and now TVs. This opens a new set of possibilities for developers, but also creates some challenges for how they must think about user interfaces and product features.

Up next was our first UnPanel discussion of the day, featuring Jackson Bond from Xing, Bruce Jones from GetJar and Bill Pearson from Intel. The title of the UnPanel was "IT or Marketing, who drives your mobile choices?" but the conversation veered more towards an examination of how developers can go about choosing the platforms they target, and how they can best distribute their applications to users.

After some well-earned coffee, we broke into discussion groups for some deep dives into a few different topics. Thanks to all our great discussion leaders:

  • Mobile Enterprise (Thorben Primke, Moon Monkey Labs)
  • Redefining Mobility - Netbooks and Tablets (Intel)
  • App Store Placement Optimization (Bruce Jones, GetJar)
  • Making Money From Mobile Apps (Christian Geissendorfer, Yoose; Mark Herringer, Countryman Media)
  • Cross-Platform Development (Nikolai Onken, Uxebu and Andrew Savory, LiMo Foundation -- who gets special recognition for the detailed notes he took and passed along, on an iPad no less!)
  • Augmented Reality (Dan Romescu, Augmented Citizen)

We ran another set after lunch, and even had a couple of BarCamp-style breakout sessions led by attendees that were interested in particular topics (it's that open-source mentality again! :) ).We then opened things up for reverse pitches from the audience, and heard about a number of interesting projects and companies. It's always great to hear about what people are working on, and what they're looking for and how WIP and its community can help.

As the temperature rose in the building, we took on our final UnPanel, covering the mobile cloud. Our speakers represented a diverse set of interests: Thorsten Hesse from ThinPrint, which is pushing printing up into the cloud and allowing people to send documents from their mobile device (or any other) to cloud-connected printers; Peter Lindgren from Mobile Documents, which is developing a cloud-based mobile email system that delivers amazing performance over the mobile network; and Barry Downes from FeedHenry, a company that's just opened its API to developers allowing them access to its cloud services.

A big thanks to everybody who came out to the event, and again to our sponsors, speakers and discussion leaders who helped make the day such a success!



The Android appstore competition v2
Posted by ThibautR on 07 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories :


On Monday for our WIPJam @ Mobile Day & Night in Marseille  we ran the 2nd round of our Android appstore competition  If you missed the first installment have a look here to see the results.

The Android appstore competition v1 (follow up)Sony Ericsson Developer World failure

A quick summary of this first round was "no public vote winner" , the mark of a slight disappointment with the offering...But a great learning experience for all. Interestingly enough Sony Ericsson Playnow who were the only one not to have published the app have since "shut down" submissions to the appstore while they're fixing their processes! Not an easy job, so good luck to the team!

The Android appstore competition v2 - The process

For this second round, the principles was similar as for the first round at Droidcon Berlin:

  • Take the kick-ass WIP Appstore wiki app by OpenIntents (available in an Android appstore near you)
  • Place it in a series of France based/operating Android appstores :
  • Measure the results
  • Have a chat with appstore presents on the day to discuss the results
  • Get the public to vote !

The facts

Contrary to the last competition where the (kickass) app ended up in the majority of the launched stores (except the one mentioned above). The track record this time was pretty bad. Orange despite a prompt answer within 24h rejected the app on the ground that it was not interesting for Orange customers as it is targeted at developers (I'm still hoping I can change that!). Appcity did not answer our submission email. And Vodafone are... still not launched. So finally I could only test the uploading process fully on 3 appstores, hence the absence of nice graphs and xls spreadsheet this time):

  • Time to load :

    1. 1 Appoke
    2. 2 Vodafone
    3. 3 Nexva (40 min!!! as I had to select manually all the Android phone in a list of 3000 phones!!)
  • Number of fields to fill in:
    1. 1 Appoke
    2. 2 Vodafone
    3. 3 Nexva
  • Number of uploads needed:
    1. 1 Nexva
    2. 2 Appoke
    3. 3 Vodafone
  • Time to market:
    1. 1 Appoke - Nexva (less than 24hours)
  • Number downloads:

    1. 1 Appoke Nexva (20 downloads)

The discussions

Nexva and Appoke were present on the panel, and commented their results.

Both of them are still in beta, but downloads were pretty good putting them as equal 3rd if we merge this competition with our previous one).

Shaun from Nexva announced that they were aware of the difficult upload and were putting a new process will come in the coming days!

The public vote

Hadrien from Appoke won the public vote and is our first winner in the Android appstore competition! (albeit by a narrow margin)

Congrats and good luck!!

Next steps

Let us know what you'd like to see!



Update on Singapore and CommunicAsia 2010
Posted by Caroline on 05 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : Events • WIPjam • Mobile Developer •


WIP was represented at CommunicAsia in Singapore this year by Teresa and I, from June 14th to 18th.  My favorite things about Singapore - the food of course (pepper chili crab the new favorite) and the great energy of the people.  Whereas in Vancouver we have two types of high rises - those with green glass, or those with blue glass (quite boring); Singapore is much much more interesting.  Take a look at the picture of this new building in Singapore, a combined hotel, casino and botanical gardens - ready to beat the next tsunami!  CommunicAsia is moving to this location next year!

We started the week attending a series of events hosted by the Canadian High Commission in Singapore, who always does a nice job of supporting Canadian companies.  For a change this year, we did site visits, one to SingTel and the other to StarHub. 

Interesting in the different approaches of the two  companies, SingTel being very aggressively international with interests in the following operators for a combined subscriber base of 249 million (as of March 2009):
- Warid Telecom – Pakistan (18.5 million subs)
- Telkonsel – Indonesia (79.8 million subs)
- Pacific Bangladesh  (1.98 million subs)
- Globe – Philippines  (23.1 million subs)
- Bharti Airtel – India (110.5 million subs)
- AIS – Thailand (28.3 million subs)
- Optus - Australia (8.2 million subs)

While on the site visit, Mr. Loo Cheng Chuan, Principal of the SingTel Idea Factory told us about the trends he is following in mobile:
- webTV (especially keen on TV widgets and social TV)
- 3D TV
- NextGen Cloud, particularly for gaming
- Music streaming
- eReaders
- NextGen apps, particularly keen on Virtual Assistants
- Android Apps

For third parties looking to partner with SingTel, The SingTel Idea Factory aims is the business development arm, looking for innovation application and technologies.  SiX, SingTel Innovation Exchange is the very nascent  partner programme for third party developers and has two marketplaces myBusiness and AppZone.

Starhub, the smaller company, was the most enthusiastic of the operators we met and seemed very keen to meet with third parties.  In general, the operators in Asia are much farther behind the 'open innovation' initiatives found with operators in the US and Europe.

  

Our WIPJam Session was held on June 16 at the Convention Centre sponsored by MoSync.  It happened on the day that Singapore had flash flood and Orchard Road was under six feet of water, so traffic at the convention center was really low.  Despite the low turnout and freezing cold room (it didn't go above 18C the whole day), we had a good lively bunch of developers and other members of the ecosystem from Singapore, Malaysia, India, Germany, Sweden, Hong Kong and China.  Many of the developers were successful in working with local operators and focused on local applications; while others such as Home Camera have been getting traction around the world and are set to showcase at DEMO in September.  

A big thanks to all of our speakers:  Alex Jonsson, MoSync; John Wernecke, NAVTEQ; Emmanuel Allix, InMobi; André Schmidt, Enough Software;  Varun Arora, Home Camera; Clive Wright, Xybec; Chandra A, Muvee; Chris Silverston, hyperWALLET; Olaf Loman, The Mobile Gamer; Ashish Thomas, SingTel; Raghu Chandrapati, Yoose; Roy Avinash, Ten Cube; Rohit Dadwal, MMA; Kevin Chia, ClearHub.

A special shout out to David Lim from BlackBerry, also one of our speakers for sending me a phone to Singapore as mine had crashed in Phuket the week before.  Unfortunately it was lost/stolen in San Diego, so I am phoneless again :-(

We finished up with our WIPJam After Party,sponsored by NAVTEQ Network for Developers, by returning to Brewerkz at Merchant Point where we held it last year.  Another sell out - you know it is a good party when the free beer is gone, but the party keeps going! 

 

Singapore in general has a very small mobile developer community, with limited deep knowledge of mobile development, so there tends to be more web developers, folks with 1-3 years of experience.  The government is keen to change that  with the new AMPlify program  for local mobile applications developers to gain advanced technical skills training and hands-on experience with leading mobile MNC partners. This is made possible with the newly launched Applications-on-Multi-Platforms Simplify (AMPlify) initiative announced on June 17, 2010, by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Working with MNC partners such as Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM), developers will receive training in technical areas relevant to the partners' operating platforms, including cross-platform technologies, web-based technologies, and user interface and experience design.

As well, stay tuned for SingTel's new DevCon taking place in September.



NGMN Report Card on Developers:  Consider ‘Absolute’ vs ‘Relative’ Risk
Posted by Caroline on 05 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : 4G • Mobile Developer • News • App Stores •


I had the pleasure of being asked to speak again to the NGMN Industry Conference, this one was held in Shanghai from June 2-4, 2010 at the Shanghai World Financial Center.  The last conference was held in June of 2008 in Frankfurt.  Both times I was asked to bring the developer perspective.

For those who don't know, the NGMN or Next Generation in Mobile Networks is one of the most significant organizations in our industry.  Their mission is to: to complement and support the work within standardisation bodies by providing a coherent view of what the operator community is going to require in the decade beyond 2010.   It is a C-suite group that decided that LTE IS the next generation mobile network the industry will use.  I am always flattered to get the opportunity to present to this group, which also included presentations by the likes of Jianzhou Wang, Chairman and CEO, China Mobile.  I am also impressed that they have made the effort to think about the developer perspective at the early stages of deployment.  We hope that this early involvement and thoughtfulness can go a long way in supporting mobile development in the next gen or LTE world  by reducing fragmentation and increasing innovation.

In 2008 when I spoke to the NGMN conference, my message  (see slide on Gaps for Developers that Must be Closed) was quite novel to most of them, and I think paved the way for some good thought and activity over the next two years (see slide on Report Card) with increased support for developer programs and other support mechanisms for developers (like sandboxes), changes to structure and fees in certification,  increase in app stores and just overall appreciation for developers.  Fragmentation of course continues to get out of control.

 

NGMN preso 2008

 

So here is the succinct advice I gave to them to keep up with the challenge! 

1.  Consider 'Absolute' vs 'Relative' Risk - the same sentiment we presented in our Open Letter to WAC.  A hundred million dollars to an operator may be the same relative risk as a $100k to a mobile development company, especially when payroll and the small company itself may be at stake.  We hope this understanding leads to increased payments for developers to reward their effort in risk taking, as well as a reduced time to payment for developers for that crucial cash flow.

2.  Open up the Clique and Mend the Broken Links in the Ecosystem - if 3rd party apps are so darn important to the ecosystem there are a few broken links that need to be fixed.  First, get developers involved with your program.  This is Marketing 101, getting customer and partners involved in strategic planning up front, not after something has been launched.  A few operators have implemented Dev Advisory Councils (WIP has one too), but I am still very disappointed with the WAC initiative who is 'not ready yet' to integrate developers.  How can you  assume you know what developers need, if you don't ask them.......    Second, why do we let developers fly in the dark with limited knowledge and tools?  We hope this creative class can come up with the innovative applications that our users need.  Many times developers do, in spite of industry support.  Wouldn't it be easier to give them some insight into who your customers are and what they need?

3. Become Story Tellers - this advice specifically went to NGMN in regards to LTE.  They need to become better story tellers to let developers know the potential and  capabilities of what LTE performance means to applications beyond all the tech hype - yes we know about higher speeds, lower latency, better QoS; but as we've known about mobile developers for a while, they have shifted their focus from 'cool tech stuff' to being a very market driven crowd (this has been confirmed in the recent Vision Mobile's Developer Economics Report). 



July App Store Report Now Available
Posted by Carlo on 04 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : News • App Stores •


The July edition of the WIP App Store Report is now available for download. Based on data from the WIP App Store Wiki, the report this month takes a look at the growth over time of the number of app stores in the mobile ecosystem. The wiki now tracks 79 app stores; while that's up just 2 from June, it brings the total number of stores launched during the first half of the year to 36. So can we expect the number of launches to continue to grow so rapidly? Check out the report to find out our predictions.