Saturday, January 30, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Top Five Changes For Application Development In 2010
http://www.forrester.com/rb/teleconference/top_five_changes_for_application_development_in/q/id/6227/t/1?elq=f9e4f817ae9d479b99505941a313bc0f
The Great Recession of 2008-09 forced everyone in IT to think differently about where to cut costs and which projects and tactics are still worthy of investment. What are those opportunities for Application Development & Program Management professionals? Forrester recommends that app dev professionals make five key changes in 2010.
- Embrace cloud as an early-stage platform.
- Follow in the footsteps of the Web giants and Web startups.
- Favor flexibility and cost over platform loyalty.
- Become passionate about user experience.
- Upgrade the talent on application development teams.
Your overall goal: Become lean and mean so you'll be ready to move as the Great Recession wanes, thus leaving no doubt of your development team's contribution to improving business efficiency and driving increased revenue.
Vendors mentioned: Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Apache Software Foundation, AT&T, Dojo Foundation, Caspio, Google, IBM, LongJump, Microsoft, Oracle, RackSpace, Red Hat, Red Hat JBoss, Salesforce.com, Sun Microsystems, VMware, WorkXpress, and Zend Technologies
Sunday, October 25, 2009
http://www.unwiredview.com/2009/09/25/the-vodafone-app-star-competition-e100000-for-the-best-360-widgets/
The Vodafone App Star competition – €100,000 for the best 360 widgets
Yesterday, Vodafone unveiled its brand new 360 services, as well as two LiMo-based Samsung phones (H1 and M1) that will be launched with the 360 platform.
The giant mobile carrier has also announced the App Star competition, which has a combined prize fund of €1,000,000.
Vodafone is searching for “the most innovative and useful mobile widgets” compatible with the new 360 platform and it’s ready to offer up to €100,000 to two developers of the best widgets.
The App Star competition will have two phases: the first one is open now, while the second one will debut in 2010. To enter the competition, visit this website.
The submitted apps must be based on the JIL (Joint Innovation Lab) Software Developer Kit – you can get it from here.
Analysis:
Its good to see some movement in the telecom industry to attempt a viable competition to the web players, but is it too little too late?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Apple Makes It Easier for Free iPhone Apps to Make Money
Apple said Thursday that it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.
- AFP/Getty Images
App developers said they received an email notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.
The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps. The caveat, however, was that the feature was only available for paid apps, which meant that developers had to charge at least 99 cents.
Developers say that the latest announcement helps in two ways. First, it makes it much easier for them to make a business out of free apps. Until now, developers sold ads within their free apps or tried to convert users to a paid version with more content.
“The reality is that the vast majority of apps have been free. If you were going to monetize your app, you were always going up against free apps,” said Jamie Berger, senior vice president of an IGN Entertainment division that provides digital distribution services to developers.
The new capability could also help clean up the App Store because it would make it less necessary to offer both a free “lite” version and a paid version of the same app, a strategy that many developers used to try to make money.
“This is really big news because we’ve been having conversations with Apple as have other publishers,” said Clive Downie, vice president of marketing at Ngmoco, which publishes iPhone games. “This enables increased choice for customers.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/15/apple-makes-it-easier-for-free-iphone-apps-to-make-money/
Monday, October 19, 2009
The New Web: A conversation Oct 19
- Internet moving from Internet with data to Internet of Context
- 4 Billion cell phones WW
- eg. #newnet at tweet
1. Location meta-data: Need API's (geonames, placemakers)
Every piece of data should be location tagged!
- Tech: yahoo fireeagle
2. Time: Internet Calendar can be mapped to
3. Who/People: will social graph be open?
4. What/Products: eg. RFID tagging
Data on Web to context
- Context changing the way we behave
eg. yahoo Flikr-- tagmaps: term-frequency
Discussion
- foursquare.com
- Wifi : http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ (~ 200 million locations a day)
Design and User Experience - (eg. twitter)
- openid
Discussion
- 330 million people on facebook
Thursday, September 10, 2009
iPhone Developers See Sales Slump After App Store Changes -- InformationWeek
For Apple, which gets 30% of every app sold, more applications mean more revenue, assuming they're paid apps. But for developers, more applications mean more competition and more difficulty being noticed. It's a needle-in-a-haystack scenario with more hay being added daily.
iTunes 9 changed the way apps are presented, with a larger scrolling section for new and noteworthy apps and more prominent promotional spots on the App Store main page. This is likely to drive sales for apps that win, or buy, a place in these high-profile areas.
Likewise, the expansion of the top 100 list to 200 and the addition of a 'Top Grossing' list expands the potential spotlights that can shine on an app and lift it to prominence and profit. The 'Top Grossing' category addresses a long-standing concern about the pressure to make apps that are as cheap and disposable as ringtones. By providing marketing lift to the sort of higher-priced apps that are likely to come from larger development companies, the 'Top Grossing' category could become an avenue by which pricier, and ideally more professionally coded, apps see their popularity magnified."
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Nokia's New Facebook World - Forbes.com
The Facebook logo is also pretty visible on Nokia's latest handsets, including the flashy new X6 phone, Nokia's first product to use the iPhone's capacitive touch-screen technology. Facebook Mobile is front-loaded on the X6 home screen, an important step considering Nokia's own investments over the past two years in its Ovi-branded services for sharing information, media and contact details among friends.
Why did all this take so long? Moissinac says Nokia's frequent late-comer status is just a 'coincidence,' but he admits that developers including Electronic Arts ( ERTS - news - people ) asked Facebook to make the iPhone a priority when it came to applications.
The iPhone's uniform operating system and limited device range have actually excited developers more than Nokia's far wider 38% mobile handset market share. Even though Nokia has the volume, its Symbian platform and S60 user interface are not as versatile as other systems, while its huge range of handsets can become a monstrous task for developers to manage."