A Market to not ignore

Mobile has been an attractive technology because of its small size and great contribution in evolving the communication paradigms. Its small size has been a hurdle to understand its huge potential.

We are all aware of Mobile Phone’s market size and its growth but we must not be ignorant about the other business territories defined by this small device.

Just have a look at one of the business market that is growing exponentially. It is Mobile Applications/Contents

This market was officially adopted by Apple, almost 3 years ago with launch of iPhone app store, and its one of the today’s fastest growing markets. According to the stats provided by Gartner Group, its estimated to reach US$29.5bn till 2013.

When we see the trend and momentum of Mobile apps market, we can’t just ignore it.

Steve jobs has provided it as a trend for the other companies and now Mobile application market is just ready to show the strength of a small device and human brain behind it.

iPhone is not going to stand for long as the only key player in app development, other key players have also set the grounds to compete it like,

• Google with Android
• Nokia’s Symbian OS and Java platform
• RIM with its Black Berry
• Palm Web OS
• Windows Mobile
• Linux etc…

There are many different Mobile platforms and each of them has their standards as we have talked earlier. This trend of app development in emergence with cloud computing is going to provide new trends to online application and solution development.

There is a heavy need to provide a common standard so that developers can cut their cost and effort to reach maximum audience with development of Mobile based solutions.

So far, there is not standard provided by the industry to cater problems caused by so many different standards.  As there are,

• Different screen sizes
• Different Key pad standards
• Various User Interaction standards
• Processing and memory limitations
• Different API supports and changes in their implementation

and its a long list…

Our purpose here is to list down different options available and choose the best fit available for the developers to get best out of huge potential in Mobile application development. So stay tuned and you will find a very interesting stuff ahead.

I am moving all these posts to My New Blog and you would find all new contents also there.

Future of Mobile Applications Development

Since the very first day of iPhone launch, It has concentrated to put forward the trend of application development for iPhone through its marketing campaigns and by providing a complete development to distribution path to its users.

This trend has developed an environment where we have different mobile technologies and almost each of them has a totally different development environment and its own standards. With all this, we have got some app stores and much more are coming up in near future.

To encourage the developer and Business community for providing more and more quality contents, subscription, selling and Ad driven  earning models have also been introduced.
Question for application developers is “Why to choose a particular platform for development“. But they are most of the time guided by the clients who want their applications to be developed for a particular target market.

Now, why it has been a significantly high trend of Application download in iPhone users than any other smart phone of similar capabilities for similar kind of applications?

1. It is up to the Mobile Manufacturer to attract a user group who have more interest in using application.
2. It is all about how do you place your product.
3. Then providing the contents for the end users.
4. Guiding the content developers for the development to distribution path to be followed in order to have a win-win situation.

Last day, I had gone through a research result for the trends of Mobile Application development.

Developers Trends for Choosing Platforms

Above stats depict a picture of iPhone rule in the world of mobile applications till 2015 while the other platforms are placing themselves at the appropriate position.

What this graph does not show is the opportunity that is their for the J2ME and Symbian market. Nokia and other players having Java enabled Mobiles are working on the path to cash their potential in the field of Mobile applications and other related contents.

Nokia, being the industry leader, with largest market share of mobile phones and having better re-sale value of their mobile phones are in better position to lead in this race as well.  Recently the shipment of Nokia Smart phones and Motorola’s Android enabled handset have clearly showed the path of great opportunities to content developers in near future.

Mobile application developers have been having very tough time to port their applications on different platforms at the same time.

So far, choosing a mobile platform for application development mostly been based on what you have to pay in order to get your result of investment over providing contents.

Following are the trends to create an environment of huge applications development focus for not only the iPhone but for other mobiles phones as well.

• iPhone is no-doubt in good position to provide return over investment,  But with huge increase in number of application and decrease in qualitative and useful contents are going to cause a  gradual decrease in return over investment.

• J2ME and Symbian phones have huge potential and gap in terms of market share and penetration.
• Android has already set the stage to be in a position to take the lead in mobile contents.

• App stores are offering deals for 70/30 percentage of revenue by providing better distribution model.

• MNOs are intended to increase data usage by offering different packages to end users.

• Mobile manufacturers are providing more smart phones
• Business personals are also intended to invest more on porting their web solutions to mobiles

Apart from above,  work is being done to provide standards in Mobile content development and developers are being equipped with tools to Develop Once, Run Anywhere.

In our next post, we would be having a look at currently available and upcoming tools and technologies to lower the development costs and set standards for mobile applications/contents development.

Mobile Development Challenges

I had been away from writing any thing since more than a year. All the things happened during this time span have been great learning experience to me.

So, Now I am thinking to write in focused manners and intended to complete my pending posts as well.

Today I thought of sharing this interview by Robert LeRoy, director of Sogeti USA’s IBM to share what are the core issues in working for Mobile Phones and Personal Devices.

In this interview, he discusses some do’s and don’ts, current trends and talks about two primary challenges: cross-platform development and building context-aware apps.
There seems to be an increasing amount of embedded software. Have the skills and resources kept up with development demand?
Robert LeRoy: It depends on the platform. If you look at an embedded platform like smartphones, some use the Java programming language, so it’s easy to take a Java programmer who knows the classic Web development environment and move to Android. The same is true for Microsoft. When you get into iPhone development, the learning curve is steeper. But there’s much interest there, and developers are investing their own time and money and learning on their own.

One place there might be a technology/skills gap is when you get into embedded systems like in an automobile or exercise equipment or home appliances. Those are more real-time systems, and the programming skills involved are significantly different than a smartphone. If you’re building an application that’s going into a hospital, failure rate has to be zero. It has to be real time, and react at moment’s notice. That’s a different programming model than what many are used to.

Does the lifecycle for a mobile app get managed in the same way as desktop and Web apps?
LeRoy: It’s slightly different. The software development lifecycle is very similar, but you might spend more time focusing on the user experience to make sure it’s easy for a consumer audience. But the product lifecycle is definitely different when talking about consumers; they’re looking for added features and updates. The smartphone applications we work with [in enterprise organizations] typically come out of the marketing group, unless they’re for the internal organization, say a bank with folks who do appraisals on houses. What we’re seeing a lot of today are applications very much geared toward consumers, so I can build a tighter intimacy with my customers. The analogy is like the early ’90s when people were building web pages, but they weren’t sure why. Now we’re seeing that more with embedded systems—they’re not sure why they have to have one. For example, a medical supply company gets a new application where you can order medical supplies right from the smartphone; competitors see that and they have to build one for their people.

What are some do’s and don’ts for developing smartphone apps?
LeRoy: There are two simple do’s: First, you have to find where the business value is. You don’t want to build it because you can, but to have an impact on the business, or to make products easier to use, or to increase revenue. Focus on the business value. If that means the best way to create an application is as a smartphone application, then that’s when to do it. If SMS is a better approach for your business, you should do SMS. The other [do] is common sense—how to architect them. Start small is a best practice. You likely have these enterprise applications in-house, and you’ve taken a subset of them and exposed them to the Internet. Now you’re going to take a subset again and move that out to an embedded device. Perhaps it’s a document management system. You don’t want the full capability on the device.

what are some don’ts, or common mistakes?
LeRoy: One is the expectations of the device weren’t clearly understood. There are certain assumptions during development about how things could be done, and you have to be sure of the capability of the device before you start. For example, the BlackBerry doesn’t store data on external storage, and we designed a system to do that, so we had more data than would stay in core memory and we couldn’t put it in an external source, so we had to change the design to fit the device. Another one people forget is security. Think about smartphones. If you lose it, someone can break into it pretty easily, so secure data and secure access to the application.

Is the methodology for developing mobile apps similar to developing desktop or web apps?
LeRoy: It’s closer to a Web app, because a lot of time is spent on branding and user experience. The projects typically are shorter and tend to recur more often—you do version, release it, and your back into another [release]. A trick we have used is embedding analytics into the application, so you can measure usability remotely; for example, if you use Web services, if each service is tied to a function on the device you can put analytics against the services so you know which features and functions are most used, and you can focus on that behavior and add more value in those areas.

What are the trends with mobile app development?
LeRoy: There’s a big push to identify how to get cross platform with a single code base; everyone is trying to get to a single code base, while trying to minimize how much code is on the device and push as much as possible up to the server. Another trend is [the use of] frameworks; they do coding for a mobile device.

Applications are also getting more sophisticated, trying to get to the context-aware app, which is the driving force for all these mobile apps. If you can get them to [be context aware] it’s easier for the user, but from the developer point of view it’s far more complex. A context-aware application knows who I am, where I am, when it is, and should change itself automatically and know what data or function I need. That’s where we should be going with embedded devices like iPads and smartphones. If I’m a service guy at a customer site for a call, it should automatically show me the data; or if I’m in calendar it’s showing what I’m doing now, but behind it and getting larger is directions to my next meeting. That’s what we’re working toward; Sogeti is building frameworks to support that model now.

Machine, Man and behavior

Machine and Man ? some one would rather say, there is no comparison,  man has a variety of behavior, every one on earth behaves differently in a certain situation.

But I think its just our perception, we all do behave same to one thing in a certain circumstances, exactly what we want from machines, e.g. when we touch to a hot iron(unconsciously),  we all do one thing to get our hand away from that iron with as much speed as possible…

Looking in a broder term, a person who is considered to be criminal, was not same since his birth, environment had be created for him to behave like this even before he came to this earth.

when we write a programming function for machine to define its behavior, we use same thing to behave differently based on what environment has been prepared for. similarly, man has only one nature and is born with that,

Of person X behaves in a way in a certain environment(considering all environment variables changing his behavior are known), then person Y must always do the same thing in similar environment.

Inventory is Evil

In business, either it is cutting edge technology, a shoe manufacturing company or what ever, business man has to pay the cost for keeping inventory.

As Tim Cook, the Corporate Operating Officer of Apple said, “Inventory, is fundamentally evil,”. “You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business,” he has said. “If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”

Rule is simple, one should know customer’s expectation or (if possible) drive customer’s expectation. Let us have example of Cook’s apple,

The company torpedoed an entire quarter’s performance by announcing a new version of its PDA, which helped dry up sales of the old version, then failing to deliver the new product when the company said it would. We have exaples for appearance of  the iPhone, the iPod, any number of iMacs and MacBooks in stores under Cook’s team.

Private Browsing Mode

Firefox 3.1 will be having private browsing mode as per yahoo News.

This functionality is required in some case like when we are going to use a public computer for some reason.
In presence of Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, this open source browser should have some thing to maintain its good market share
what should be the next thing a user may need with a browser ????

The Child Genius

Karl Friedrich Gauss displayed immense mathematical talent from a very early age. Stories tell of him being able to maintain his father’s business accounts at age three. In elementary school, he confounded his teacher by observing a pattern that enabled him to avoid a decidedly tedious calculation.

Gauss’s teacher had asked the class to add together all the numbers from 1 to 100.

You write down the sum twice, once in ascending order, then in descending order, like this:
1 + 2 + 3 + . . . + 98 + 99 + 100
100 + 99 + 98 + . . . + 3 + 2 + 1
Now you add the two sums, column by column, to give
101 + 101 + 101 + . . . + 101 + 101 + 101
There are exactly 100 copies of the number 101 in this sum, so its value is 100 × 101 = 10,100. Since this
product represents twice the answer.

So generic pattern found is as

1 + 2 + 3 + . . . + n = n(n + 1)/2

Methematical behaviors

Reference from “The Language of mathematics“

Prime Numbers primes seem to be in great abundance among the first hundred or so natural numbers, they start to thin out as you proceed up through the numbers, and it is not at all clear from
the observational evidence whether or not they eventually peter out altogether. For instance, there are eight
primes between 2 and 20, but only four between 102 and 120. Going further, of the hundred numbers
between 2,101 and 2,200, only ten are prime, and of the hundred between 10,000,001 and 10,000,100, only
two are prime. Do they really end up at some point…???

It can be checked by Euclid’s equation for next prime number,

P = p1 × p2 × . . . × pn + 1;

Artificial Neural Networks

Here is a very useful archive for newbies to Neural Networks and also for those who want to have a bird eye view about neural networks and related applications.

and this book is particularly for Unsupervised Learning in neural Networks.

An Archive providing many other resources about AI along with above specified link.