Mobile Developers Get Their Very Own Professional Association. Mobile application developers unite! That is the theme for a new professional association that will launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. that intends to bring organizational support to mobile developers. According to InfoWorld, the association is to be led by Jon Potter, the former executive director of the Digital Media Association. It is intended to promote mobile developer interests, collaboration, education, cloud hosting and governmental lobbying. Do mobile developers need their own guild? The specific duties of the of the new industry association will be to offer a collaborative network based on an online database, offer product testing facilities with multiple platforms supported, offer discounted and free tutorials and certification programs as well as discounted cloud services through Rackspace. The Rackspace collaboration is the interesting part of the proposed association.
"Usually we support startups wherever they are. Top image: Jon Potter. Mobile Minute: Data Created By 60 Seconds of Smartphone Use. We swim in a world full of data. Every time we play a mobile game and swipe a piece of fruit, shoot a bad guy, fling a furious fowl at a pen of swine or tap an ad, data is being created. Over the days and weeks that data adds up to the point where we can break it down into larger trends and take a full look at the landscape that has been created. That is the macrocosm view. What about the microcosm? How much data are we producing per minute? We found an old infographic from mobile advertising company Mobclix that shows just just how much data we are creating each minute when using our mobile devices. Check it out below. I have a friend that is obsessed with Fruit Ninja. In that minute, 4,111 ads were clicked in Mobclix's network. App downloads have been growing exponentially in the last few months.
Check out the infographic below. Top 9 Questions Asked By New Mobile App Developers. The Mobile App Trends Series is supported by Sourcebits, a leading product developer for mobile platforms. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iOS, Android, Mobile and Web platforms. Follow Sourcebits on Twitter for recent news and updates. Mobile developers the world over have released more than half a million iPhone apps, nearly 200,000 iPad apps, and a little more than 300,000 apps for Android. With that volume, it's clear there are literally hundreds of thousands of developers out there. And yet, it seems the market is hardly saturated with mobile developers. For all you fresh faces joining the ranks of mobile developers, welcome. 1.
The phraseology of that question might seem like it’s a bit prejudice against Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 or RIM’s BlackBerry. Earlier this spring, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and Instapaper’s Marco Armet got in a bit of a spat over the merits of developing first for one platform or the other. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Submitting Your App. 6 Simple Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Website. The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including lead generation tools.
What makes for an amazing mobile site and an amazing desktop site are two different things. In fact, you've probably never marveled at how wonderful a mobile site looked. Instead, you likely just felt satisfied that you were able to do whatever you wanted to do quickly and without much fuss. That's because on the mobile web, utility trumps style. Fancy visuals and a great motif may look terrific on your desktop, but on mobile, all they're likely to do is slow things down.
And on that small screen, you're not going to see much anyway. Nevertheless, as more and more of the population experiences the web via mobile, creating a mobile website is essential. Indeed, even with the spread of 3G and 4G, Mink doesn't expect that to change. 1. 2. Nothing slows a page down like a few large images. 3. 4. Google: Businesses Are Going Mobile First, Ad Landscape Begins to Shift.
Smart devices have fundamentally changed how people interact with the world. Users now have information on tap, everywhere at any time. That has correlated into a shift in how consumers react with brands online, in retail stores, what products to buy and when to buy them. When consumers' brand interaction change, it is a sign that advertising is going to change as well. According to Google, that shift has started to take place. Google posted five trends to watch in mobile advertising that evolved in 2011 and will continue in the next couple of years.
Google notes through its research that: 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer. 70% use their smartphones while in a store. 77% have contacted a business via mobile, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business. Google says that users are now expecting to engage with local businesses though their mobile devices.
8 Big Trends That Shaped the Mobile Phone Industry in 2011. Three Out of Four Mobile Developers Writing for iOS First. Android is making some big news at the end of the year. The platform is seeing a billion app downloads a month, it controls nearly 50% of the smartphone market, new devices are being released every week and Ice Cream Sandwich is starting to make its way into the hands of consumers. With everything Android has going for it, you would think it was the No. 1 choice of app developers, right? Not so fast. Mobile analytics company Flurry shows that new projects by developers are still dominated by iOS.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt said last week that developers would be making apps for Android first by the middle of 2012. If that is going to be the case, the platform has a lot of catching up to do. In the last quarter of 2011, 73% of developers using Flurry's analytics platform are starting new projects for iOS first. Flurry's methodology: "At Flurry, we track developer support across the platforms that compete for their commitment. Developers make more money from iOS. Mobile Passes Print In Time Spent, But Doesn’t Get The Ad Dollars. The web passed print a long time ago in terms of time spent by consumers, but 2011 will be the first year that mobile passes print, according to new estimates by market research firm eMarketer. Time spent on mobile devices is now an average of 65 minutes a day, compared to 44 minutes a day for print (magazines and newspapers combined).
Last year mobile and print were neck and neck at 50 minutes each. Time on the internet was 2 hours and 47 minutes (an increase of 12 minutes from 2010), but TV still dominates with an average of 4 hours and 34 minutes. TV was also able to increase its share of people’s time by 10 minutes. So much for the cord-cutting theory. Mobile, however, saw both the biggest absolute and percentage jumps in time spent. Meanwhile, print still commands an outsized share of ad budgets, taking 25 percent of ad spending, despite dwindling to only 7 percent of time spent with media. Africa Mobile Market Now Second Only to Asia. The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market.
The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions. The report "integrates data from a wide range of existing sources to provide a comprehensive picture of the African mobile industry. These include public sources such as the ITU, World Bank and research by National Regulatory Authorities as well as commercial providers such as Wireless Intelligence, Informa, Gartner, Buddecomm and ID.
" The report's authors conclude in part: "As governments consider policy levers to develop their economies and societies, they must consider the mobile industry as an enabler of development beyond its immediate means. You can download the report here (PDF). Network Effects: How Google & Apple Dominate Mobile. The mobile platform wars are in full swing. Android and Apple dominate the landscape but a new report from VisionMobile says that there will be no clear winner in the battle for supremacy over the mobile market. Android controls the numbers, Apple controls the profits and everybody else is fighting for scraps and third place in the ecosystem. Developers are the front line soldiers of the platform wars. "iOS and Android are winning not only by virtue of technological sophistication, but primarily by the strength of their application ecosystems," the VisionMobile report states.
The "network effect" drives the ecosystem, more sales equals more developers and more applications which in turn drives more developers. We take a close look at the platform wars through VisionMobile's report below. First Is Relative The VisionMobile report is one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of the entire mobile ecosystem that has been published this year.
Applications drive ecosystems.