Mobile Stats, Studies and Trends
Here’s a couple of interesting related to the mobile field.
157 Mobile App Stats You Should Know About
Mobile Megatrends 2010 (VisionMobile)
Mobile Trends 2020
Business magazines are shouting “the roles of leadership should be changing!”
Self-development consultants and coaches: “You should have clear goals and know your strengths and weaknesses if you want to find a better balance in your life and succeed.”
Education “Lifelong learning is inevitable.”
100+ professors, researches and consultants world wide [actually started decades ago]: “Knowledge and getting it to efficient use is the key resource of any organization.”
Social Media Today: “Everyone, get into social media: Wikis and social intranets will save your day!”
There are a lot of people in many different sectors sensing things happening, but many in the same time miss the big picture which is that these things are entwined together in a total paradigm shift.
None of the things above alone, but everyone of these together.
Leadership [personal and group] + career and self-development skills + media skills = mycelium of now
…and we’re back!
Some really neat new things are [again] taking place due to the summer happenings in Dar es Salaam and what is growing now after them. Also other interesting things are happening in Tampere because of some re-organizing of things. More about these all when there’s something more concrete to tell.
Some interesting events related to Africa are also taking place during this Fall, links to a couple of those below to all interested in the topic.
Events:
Afrikka – mahdollisuuksien maanosa – Helsinki, September 1st
First Trip to Africa – Tanzania, Here I Come
Next Sunday I’m off to Tanzania to participate in a collaborative ICT support project with the students and teachers of University of Dar es Salaam.
We have a team of five people going there, skills ranging from e-Learning development to entrepreneurship and content management.
I’m working with web design and usability training, but hopefully I also have time to participate in our entrepreneurship training as we also have a sub project concerning entrepreneurship and incubator.
Another Finnish team from the project went to Dar in last March and I heard from them that there are many passionate and skillful students in the University. Hope to see you guys soon!
I’m writing this post sitting on my couch, the temperature is something like 12 degrees Celsius and it’s raining. This should be summer, even in Finland. Somehow I’m not feeling too sorry of going to someplace sunny and warm. 
Social Media Monitoring Tools
People keep asking me how you can know what happens in the social web? Well, with listening it. Here’s some monitoring tools you may want to check out. Some of them are free, some chargeable. I haven’t tried them all, so don’t sue me, if they suck. And post your own favorite here if you have one.
The Chargeables
http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html
The Free Side
For my current needs I basically use a combination of a couple of tools like Hootsuite, Google Alerts, co.mments and Google Reader (although I use NetNewsWire for RSS as it is quicker to fly through them if you’re in a hurry) + a couple of other gimmicks as well, for example sucking RSS searches from some of the services mentioned in the Free Side above.
Currently I just haven’t found it meaningful to get those chargeable ones because with an inventive mind and with a support of great services like Hootsuite you can manage pretty far.
But if you’re interested in seeing what the world has to offer, at least check out these in the post and here’s a basic post of the topic on Mashable: Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation and if you’re interested to learn more about these issues you may want to check out an artice about Social Media Monitoring: Critical for Business Success.
Is This Really Civilized?
Drunk people littering, vomiting and making noise everwhere, old kitchen appliances thrown into a creek, “foreigners should handle their own problems and starve to their war torn countries but not come here”, “I don’t care, life sucks, everything and everyone is bullshit: let’s drink until we’re sick enough for the society to support us”.
Are these really the characteristics of a civilized western country?
Once Again, It’s Not Who’s the First…
…but who’s the first, with style and with “WOW!”.
Everyone’s now enjoying [well, not everyone; those with Android and iPhone] and praising Layar, the Augmented Mobile App. I haven’t actually tried it, but have followed its development history for a while and it looks neat. Check out the video on AppJudgement below:
For some reason I bumped into one blog post about Nokia Augmented Reality App. So what, you may ask? Well, the post is from 2006.
I dug a little deeper and also found this MARA Overview and I have to ask, what’s wrong with this picture? Why haven’t anyone raised even a small hype of this when this was written – or maybe someone did, but in a more sustainable manner that could perhaps still resonate in people’s ears?
There’s even a sentence in the bottom “MARA was featured by MIT Technology review here, and listed as one of their 10 emerging technologies for 2007″. Maybe I’m a bit simple, but if MIT tells you that something’s going to be big soon, aren’t you kinda in a hurry?
So once again, do I have to even ask why Layar has gotten so big and is reviewed and talked about everywhere?
Here’s one promo vid of a possible AR concept from Nokia. Would be nice to know if is this actually just a video of an idea, or a real concept under development.
And if it’s just a vid, what’s the reason to put out something clearly as expensive production as this, if it isn’t real and only got about 26 000 views versus 767 000 of Layar’s real concept?
Damn, Radio Isn’t Dead. It Just Got Better!
Today while I was again surfing through podcasts on my iPod, something hit me: the radio isn’t dead! It’s just transformed into something better.
What myRadio doesn’t have:
- Annoying speakers who speak rather lot of BS – Although I feel that for example TwiT could sometimes be 20 minutes shorter if they just stopped babbling. But hey, it kinda creates the mood for the show, right?
- Annoying commercials. There are ads, but often they are implemented rather nicely to the show, actually sometimes even too nicely – Still thinking of that one episode of NYTimes Tech Talk if it was a paid Microsoft commercial, half of the show! Sorry, had to delete the entire program ASAP before it corrupted myPods tiny operating system with some helpful notifications.
What myRadio has:
- Me, controlling it. Recently I’ve totally fallen in love with podcasts. They are not something new to me, but in this hectic state as an entrepreneur where it seems I’m always going somewhere, they provide me a good way to be on the top of things and even do some self-developing.
- It has music and talk programs, when I want to. I don’t have to wait for some program to start or hope to get a better song after that certain “played already 100 times today”.
Just a simple expression of love for podcasts. Nothing more, nothing less.
Hack the Business System, Fast
This is based on an inspiring post Don’t talk, just execute – in 2 days, Estonia’s Garage48 produces 16 potential startups on TechCrunch Europe. This is innovation taking place through action and not just talks, and not playing with the old business rules.
Some of the old rules are as follows: get someone to believe in your idea that you have the courage to start doing it; hone that darn business plan to the end of the world; get funding; don’t tell anyone, anything, before executing these aforementioned things and before you have tested and tested and tested that the concept will absolutely work and is profitable.
But hey, the field nowadays is mixed up. There are startups out there that don’t seem to make sense – in the traditional sense, that is. But what if they will in the future? I still can hear that someone who said it’s going to be market for maybe just 5 computers in the world, not much more. And what about text messaging?
More than the shining over thought business plan, rapid development and courage is what we need, because someone else in this world will most definitely have that same idea and run with it. It has happened many times already.
When we are slow and think too much, that’s when we fail.
So don’t wait for someone to approve. Nike it.
After reading the TechCrunch post, I’m proud to see things like this happening in my old birth town. Things haven’t always been easy for this. Not too long ago.
Thanks for sharing the post @jpilomia
Presentation Notes 22.4. @Demola: Mobile Cloud Apps
Sami Inkinen – Mobile Cloud Apps
“I’ve always been doing cloud computing” Larry Ellison.
If you want to have a widely distributed app, you should think of doing it to mobile web. Browsers are already good enough, so usually it’s safe to think of doing this.
Some figures:
- Total 325 000 web sites optimized for touch mobile usage
- 200 000 mobile apps available from iPhone, Ovi, Android and Blackberry app stores (ABI Research, March 2010)
- In 2008, already 42.8 million mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide
Mobilization steps
1. Optimize usability for mobile
- New apps from scratch
- Migrating existing desktop Web apps
2. Make it behave like an app, not like Web page
- Fast response and response rates
3. Implement native look-and-feel
- Graphical elements and styling
- Effect libraries
Pros
- Fast and cost-effective development
- Seampless updates as software is entirely running on server
- support across phone models and OS
- Native application like look-and-feel possible
Cons
- Higher data transfer rewuirements
- Longer start-up time than with installed apps
- Slower execution than native software
- Limited offline usage
- Limited access to phone peripherals
- No app store marketing support (I don’t actually agree with this, because as I see it, it’s just a new affiliation model that is needed here)
Summary
Mobile apps based on cloud tech are a viable alternatives to native aps – for piloting and producing implementations alike.
Karri Huhtanen – Mobile cloud challenges
Scalability
- If you want to be born global, your service and apps must be built global.
- A good, scalable architecture and code from the start is even more important than before. My comment: If you fail to give a good experience from the start, it just may be that they won’t come back.
- From Slashdot effect to Facebook effect.
Endurance
Reliability is provided by the cloud, endurance and robustness must be built by you.
Internet is broken –> connection between mobiles and services are and will be unreliable.
Your app and service must handle the Interner problems while maintaining good user experience. My comment: The problem is that you must find a reliable service provider. And the user, he or she doesn’t really care: if your connection suck, you suck. Even if it’s not “your fault”.
Q&A:
Q: Have to market your native apps without things like OVI store or Apple AppStore?
A: One possibility is in building a good brand around your company or service.
- Possibly other cloud stores.
- Of course Social media: through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. My comment: Actually it’s like in any good marketing; you have to have imagination, courage, know where your clients are and who they are, and in the top of it all: differentiate yourself from others and make an interesting product.
