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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  It got me thinking:  Is 99.999% (.99999) or ‘five-nines’ an outdated goal for operators?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...

If you couldn't attend our un-panel at WIPJam @ OSIM... and want to hear more about Mobileapps2.0. No worry! We had someone taking notes!!

Thanks a lot to Dave Nokku for his great drawings!

My next exercise in "event moderation"   will be at the app-tly named Planet of the Apps which would surely call for some singerie from the so-called moderator.

While the role of panel moderator is fairly well documented  and respected activity the "whole day moderator" at a conference tends to be seen as a mix between a water-boy and  a linkedin profile reader.

Refusing to be either of them, I gave go at putting the job in the spotlight it deserves, by listing the duties of he moderator:

• Keep a straight line: Every event sometimes feels like a hazardous stumbling walk through presentations of various flavors, styles and topics. That's why the moderator helps connect the dots to give the event a sense of completeness and cohesion.
• Be a good companion: It's always annoying to see a good mate's best story wasted because the audience is left asleep by a lunch, scattered by a break, dreaming from a presentation or simply muted in the expectation of the closing beers. This...

One week to go before wipjam in London, so here's our penultimate take on the Mobileapps2.0 theme. After a deep focus on the technical issues this week's interview (with a slight delay) will be looking at the marketing issues for developers or how the "race for the deck, winner takes all " is changing to a seemingly random brownian movement of marketing activities...

Noam Yasour (@nyasour) from Inmobi tells us more about how Froggy jump from Invictus made it to a commercial success.

TR: Tell us about an application that caught your eye lately?

NY: Froggy Jump from Invictus Games. It's a free game and has been downloaded over 3M times and had numerous updates, adding more content and features to the game. The game is based on a type of a freemium model - combination of mobile advertising and in-app purchases and proved to be very successful for Invictus Games. We have a full view of the case study downloadable here.

TR : What do you think they do right?

NY :   Most...

In the 4th installment of  our mobileapp2.0 saga, we have invited John Cooper from Viafo to talk to us about their applications developed for WInMo, Bada and soon Nokia WRT. Without spoiling the interview I can say  that it focuses on one of the key aspects of mobileapps2.0, the increasing reliance on standard back-end web technology to offer rich, ever changing, flexible services & content with little changes to the client side code. Enough of me, here he goes

TR : What is your latest app you wanted to talk to us about?

JC: We actually have 3 – two designed to showcase the power of our solution, and one showing off a client solution…

• ViaNewz – is an RSS reader showing full integration with Twitter, Bookmarking and other services.
• ViaSearchz – is a local search app with personalization and location based social networking.
• ViaTripz uses the TripIt API to provide a travel service with integrated Twitter and other social networking.

And now for the 3rd installment in the mobileapps 2.0 saga our exploration of the gradual opening of the mobile development space....

Subject which is rather typical this week as Verizon's announcement of their Android appstore is bringing much comments on the goodness of openness in mobile see Openworld's "Android is OPEN but  open means different things" or their "Myth of Android openness"  on a backdrop of stories about Apple relaxing the appstore rules. 

Which is why we asked Chetan Damani at Acrossair to tell us more about his experience on iPad wit this app:

TR : What is your latest app you wanted to talk to us about?

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...

At our WIPjam in Barcelona Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic spoke about his "new feature introduction" routine... not quoting him in his exact terms it sounded a bit like this:

"Launch the feature on the site; wait 1 day, look at the response rates; IF very positive THEN keep; IF very negative THEN remove; if marginal THEN expand trial period;" 

Not the type of words you would typically associate with mobile apps.. yet mobile app development practices are changing, frequent updates distributed by the appstore, hybrid apps, cross-platform apps, absence of certification... 

And what a great subject for the opening  un-panel of our WIPJam @ OSIM!

To get ready for the event we'll publish interviews of developers talking about their development process for the next few weeks.

Enough of me, here's Sam Pickard from Datilo!

T : What is your latest app you wanted to talk to us about?

S :  The app, like the company is called Datilo.  It’s a contraction of date, time and...