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As I peer into my crystal ball I see a year of more growth coupled with higher expectations for mobile along with a few upsets along the way.

The Growth

If you didn’t rest over the holidays, don’t expect to relax anytime soon no matter where you fit in the industry.  We will continue to see more devices, more demand for apps, and more demand for developers. 

It was March when we declared 2010 The Year of the Mobile Developer.  Developers were in hot demand and were finally being embraced publically and vocally as a key piece of the mobile ecosystem.   

With that, we will continue to see huge growth in the number of mobile developers entering the scene.  I do think we will see a combination of really newbie/webby developers, given the rise in toolssuch as AppMobi.   As mobile has now become ‘mainstream’ we will also see more traditional software folks entering mobile.  Expect more development tools and enablers (analytics, advertising etc) on the scene too.  Choice...

* Note:  This is a first in our series of 2011 Predictions.  Check back every day next week for others, and on January 1 for a collection of all of them, and to vote for your favorite.

One of my favourite people in the mobile developer ecosystem is Ed Schmidt from AT&T.  Ed is a Director in their Developer Program which is a nice title and all, but doesn’t really speak to the volume of his knowledge of mobile development nor his passion for developers.  I thought it would be fun to interview him and get his predictions for 2011. 

Deeper Apps vs Lighter Apps

As other technologies are evolving around mobile development, Ed sees a trend toward deeper and more capable applications coming in 2011.  Ed’s definition of Deeper Apps is similar to what we at WIP have been calling Mobile Apps 2.0 – a confluence of stronger technology, better tools, and better product/life cycle development.

Ed noted that some of this will come because of ‘the cloud; and the networking based...

 What do you get when you put mobilists in a bar from Australia, Belize, Cambodia, Canada, China, Finland, France,  Germany, Hong Kong, India,  Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Japan, jordon, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan,Thailand,  UK , USA, Vietnam and a Bull Dog??

A WIP Connector party of course!

We hosted 'THE' Developer party @ MAC (Mobile Asia Congress), last week, on Tuesday, November 16th at Bull Dog's pub in Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong.  We had a great turnout of over 175 people that kept the room buzzing and the beer flowing. 

Thanks so much to all of you who came out and enjoyed yourself.  A big shout out to Bull Dog's who were so great to work with, especially helping to retrieve my phone that was left behind in a taxi.  Thankfully it was returned   Thanks also to our marketing partners:  Mobile Alliance of Singapore, Mobile Monday Hong Kong, The Code Project, HKWDC, Mobile Future in Stockholm, StartUps Hong Kong, HKWTIA, and...

I’ve spent a lot of time supporting; watching and monitoring operators roll out a variety of programs and services lately – new app stores, new networks, APIs, new and improved developer programs.  It got me thinking:  Is 99.999% (.99999) or ‘five-nines’ an outdated goal for operators?  I think it might be.

Five-nines is the standard for measuring the network availability, which is pretty close to always on, never down.  It equates to about 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.  According to Tomi Ahonenand some banter we had on twitter this week:  “mobile phone network serving millions cannot go down for half a minute per year, unacceptable.. hence five nines needed”.

The fact is a network down or a dropped call is already a reality.  Rogers was down for an afternoon in Vancouver last week; and if you travel to London, New York, San Francisco you expect to have a few calls that won’t connect; and SMSs that go nowhere.   Interestingly, consumers have already accepted...

Simon Lucas from Enough Software won a ticket for Nokia's annual developer conference Nokia Developer Summit (Thanks to Nokia!).

As a Thank you note he proposed to share his thoughts about the summit!, and especially on the stream he attended dedicated to Qt development and development in Qt :D 

Seat down and go through the content of the 2 days of conference seating comfortably in front  of your computer!

Nokia Developer Summit 2010 – Technical Stream 1: Qt SDK

“Nokia is back” was the message Nokia spread at the opening key notes of the Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit (NDS) 2010 in London. But this statement not only referred to the new devices Nokia introduced to the public in the last couple of months and of course the brand new ones they presented here at the Nokia World. A big deal of this statement also referred to Nokia's new Qt SDK which Nokia branded under a well known credo only put in different words: “Code less, create more, deploy anywhere”.

In...

In the lead-up to Verizon’s Developer Conference 2010, WIP sat down for a frank Q&A with Terry Hughes and Tom Mullen from Widality, to discuss a few highlights from their latest app developer white paper: Squaring up to the app challenge. Meet Terry at the Verizon Developer Conference where he is leading a WIPJam panel on how to stop sucking wind as an app developer!

Some quick background: Widality is the developer of one of the popular BlackBerry business app momentem. The company was recently acquired by Wmode, a leading managed-services provider of mobile Internet services to operators. Now, as a new business unit in Wmode, the team is “expanding the widality of apps”, helping app providers to get above the noise and monetize, by delivering scalable quality services.

Terry is the Head of Market Development for Widality. Tom is the CTO of Wmode.

WIP: Congrats on the merger. Why Wmode?

Terry: Since the launch of our momentem app + service on BlackBerry App World over a year...

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...

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...

Google announced yesterday that it's added iPhone and Android apps to its search results when users search from a mobile device running one of those platforms. So, for instance, if a user searches for "download shazam", the top search result should be a link to the relevant app in the Android Market or iTunes App Store. In theory, anyway -- Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read/Write Web says there are still some kinks that need to be worked out (indeed, I can't seem to get it to work on my Droid Eris running Androind 2.1 yet).

One of Thibaut's current interests is what he calls "App Store Placement Optimization", or APO for short. Just like search engine optimization, APO is concerned with making apps appear at the top of search and other listings in app stores. As the number of apps grows and grows, APO will become an important skill for companies and people trying to drive downloads and sales of their apps.

The question then becomes, how will Google's app results work, and how will...

Calling Canadian MobileDevelopers - Join a GSMA OneAPI Hack-a-thon

The GSMA has put together a global initiative called OneAPI.  It's all about network APIs and making it easier for application developers to work with the operators - you only develop to OneAPI, have one set of T&Cs and get access to multiple carriers. 

The first pilot is in Canada, with Bell, Rogersand TELUS! And the first APIs open are messaging, location and operator billing.   We need YOU, the developers, to work it, play with it and tell us WHAT YOU THINK!  Other international operators will follow shortly.  So get in on the ground floor now!

Join us for a briefing session and stay to hack-a-thon with refreshments and prizes.

Sign up on the WIP website for a Hack-a-thon in these cities:

- Montreal:       Thursday, May 13

- Ottawa:          Monday, May 17

- Toronto:         Tuesday, May 18

- Vancouver:    Thursday, May 20

http://www.wipconnector.com/wipjam/oneapi

OR  Get started right away,...