Design, Design, Design

Well we've completed our review of Virgins new Project.app e-zine reader for the iPad. Overall not a bad app but lacking in some design considerations that would make it stand out in the crowd. As magazine and newspaper publishers deepen their investments in the digital medium (ahem it's about time) app design appears to have it's priorities a bit askew. Yes, beautiful text and animated page turns are important, so is the overall UI. Elegance is important, however along with that so is simplicity. What the Project.app and it's somewhat competitors have overlooked is this need to hide from the consumer the technical working of what's going on behind the scenes. Sure some of us old-timers love to see download status bars and bytes per second in transfer rates but the market as a whole has little interest in this as a design feature.


As a design component this is akin to adding an abrasive seam where your consumer will use the product the most (and reminding them your making them wait)? Not smart in our opinion and something that should be considered in the app design process. Project.app isn't the only app of it's kind to do this so it's hard to call it out just on that component. The industry as a whole will have to grapple with the concept if mass consumer adoption rate is important to them.

That's it for now, we'll be back with more in the coming months in the reader app space. We have high hopes for the reported "The Daily" app that sounds like the next big reader to be coming to the market

- ZuCom

Where you add Mobility and Content you often generate success

The saying "life goes by within the blink of an eye" is a reference to how time passes in our lives. Mobile devices today enable communications and delivery of content in places that have never before been available. Having this "feasibility of venue" opens up new experiences and challenges for business and consumers. While consumers struggle with how to manage time, businesses struggle with how to deliver content to the varying platforms that are available. Whether its iPhone, iPad, Droid, or anyone of the other numerous platforms out there the impact of not having usable content in this medium is palpable, and it is constantly shifting. APP vs. WEB While many businesses have been started solely as a result of the mobile revolution, there are many (even Fortune 500's) who have waited to get into the game. In 2006 when Apple and AT&T introduced the iPhone the game changed, but even that event was clouded with options. Having been at that WWDC, it was clear that the future would include some mixture of local App and Mobile Web solutions, but which one would win was far from certain. Four years later App based solutions have clearly taken the lead, but the battle is far from over and many are realizing it may not end anytime soon. With the Android, Windows Mobile (grin), and now Palm(double grin) splintering the app market, and mobile networks improving at a steady pace is their trouble ahead for investments in app solutions? CONTENT If your looking for an answer to that last rhetorical (albeit positional) question it lies in content. In the mobile space there are some amazing applications that solve business problems, provide a competitive edge, and still more that simply deliver a new more desirable mobile experience. On the other hand there are some stinkers out there the world would be better off without. The difference between most of the stinkers and the must haves lies in the content that is delivered. Think about this, if you had the option to download Thunderbird or Eudora for the iPad, iPhone, or Droid would your really (quiet Gruber). The answer is most likely, you would not, and that's because it's e-mail and as a piece of content, it's value in these new mobile venues really hasn't changed much over the years. Conversely, if you have an app that can capture audio, send its wave form to the web, returning a song title and artist, now you have a solution that delivers content in a new way to a new venue. As the app market starts to get competitive, "what" you deliver will be as important as how you deliver it. ADVICE As a business, not addressing the mobile world at this point is a mistake and even a poor attempt is better than nothing at all. Think of mobile like the drive-thru window for your business, without it those in a hurry probably won't stop. Mobility has moved what was once on our desks to something that is in our pockets and usually at the end of our arm and given this paradigm shift, the market must react. For the mobile consumer it's s little easier. As this evolution continues the richness of content and experiences will continue. Your choices of which device, carrier or app to go with will undoubtedly continue to get harder. Expect to be challenged by those overarching levers of content and experience that companies can provide. Apple somewhat redefined this model and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. The true challenge in a mobile world for the consumer will be how best to use these capabilities to slow down life, enjoy it a bit more and use that increased productivity and rich media experiences to make more free time. Robert Zullo ZuCom Twitter @ZuCom_Com

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Where you find Mobility and Content you find success

The saying "life goes by within the blink of an eye" is a reference to how time passes in our lives. Mobile devices today enable communications and delivery of content in places that have never before been available. Having this "feasibility of venue" opens up new experiences and challenges for business and consumers. While consumers struggle with how to manage time, businesses struggle with how to deliver content to the varying platforms that are available. Whether its iPhone, iPad, Droid, or anyone of the other numerous platforms out there the impact of not having usable content in this medium is palpable, and it is constantly shifting.

APP vs. WEB
While many businesses have been started solely as a result of the mobile revolution, there are many (even Fortune 500's) who have waited to get into the game. In 2006 when Apple and AT&T introduced the iPhone the game changed, but even that event was clouded with options. Having been at that WWDC, it was clear that the future would include some mixture of local App and Mobile Web solutions, but which one would win was far from certain. Four years later App based solutions have clearly taken the lead, but the battle is far from over and many are realizing it may not end anytime soon. With the Android, Windows Mobile (grin), and now Palm(double grin) splintering the app market, and mobile networks improving at a steady pace is their trouble ahead for investments in app solutions?

CONTENT
If your looking for an answer to that last rhetorical (albeit positional) question it lies in content. In the mobile space there are some amazing applications that solve business problems, provide a competitive edge, and still more that simply deliver a new more desirable mobile experience. On the other hand there are some stinkers out there the world would be better off without. The difference between most of the stinkers and the must haves lies in the content that is delivered. Think about this, if you had the option to download Thunderbird or Eudora for the iPad, iPhone, or Droid would your really (quiet Gruber). The answer is most likely, you would not, and that's because it's e-mail and as a piece of content, it's value in these new mobile venues really hasn't changed much over the years. Conversely, if you have an app that can capture audio, send its wave form to the web, returning a song title and artist, now you have a solution that delivers content in a new way to a new venue. As the app market starts to get competitive, "what" you deliver will be as important as how you deliver it.

ADVICE
As a business, not addressing the mobile world at this point is a mistake and even a poor attempt is better than nothing at all. Think of mobile like the drive-thru window for your business, without it those in a hurry probably won't stop. Mobility has moved what was once on our desks to something that is in our pockets and usually at the end of our arm and given this paradigm shift, the market must react. For the mobile consumer it's s little easier. As this evolution continues the richness of content and experiences will continue. Your choices of which device, carrier or app to go with will undoubtedly continue to get harder. Expect to be challenged by those overarching levers of content and experience that companies can provide. Apple somewhat redefined this model and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. The true challenge in a mobile world for the consumer will be how best to use these capabilities to slow down life, enjoy it a bit more and use that increased productivity and rich media experiences to make more free time.


Robert Zullo
ZuCom
Twitter @ZuCom_Com

Two Great Quotes on Communication

"Be sophisticated. Keep it simple." - Steve Jobs

"Insecure managers create complexity. Exude confidence and security; speak simply" - Jack Welch

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Space-Time and Digital Media

Einstein developed a model for space-time and it's truly fascinating to anyone with even a casual interest. Over the past few years the media industry has been making attempts to develop it's own space-time model for content. In this space alternatives like DVR's and OnDemand have been the staple, while other "Time Shifting" alternatives have been slow to gain market share. Many will argue, factors from the Digital Media conversion such as use rights, or bandwidth considerations have been the cause, while still others will look at cable companies and wireless providers as the cause. Regardless of where you stand, there exists a strong value in media delivered without regard to the time or schedule of a media consortium.

Take the current issues at NBC with Leno and Conan. There is a demographic that wants to watch there "Tonite Show" at a 11:35pm. Today NBC decides who you will see at that time and they sell advertising for that hour knowing what demographic will be watching. This is a model that was developed in the 50's and let's face it, a model that is seriously outdated. Much media content lives under similar antiquated models.

As our media market continues to grow, finding new models that deliver value to consumers, is an area where differentiation will lead to a market edge. Being someone who has been in the Technology Industry for the past 25 years, it seems logical that whatever solutions arise they will be technical in nature. Let us not forget though, where Apple Inc. changed the face of Music with the iPod, this wouldn't have been possible without concessions from content providers, so it won't be without cooperation.

However 2010 ends up, the current state will change, as no market can ignore new models with such potential and so many clamoring for their rebirth. Watch for them! Where today we live by a time based model there will come a day when this will be little more than an outdated method.

Cloud Impact on App Development (InfoWeek)

Cloud Ready For App Development In 2010

Posted on Tuesday Jan 5th at 1:45pm *(http://tinyurl.com/yey4ojr)*

The cloud is an emerging platform that can ease the strain on application development, analysts at Forrester Research conclude in a report published Monday, "The Top Five Changes For Application Development In 2010."

Analysts Mike Gualtieri, John Rymer and Jeffrey Hammond conclude that Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud, EC2, and other public clouds, such as Salesforce.com's Force.com, AT&T Synaptic Compute cloud, Rackspace Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are offering mature operational environments that can be used to speed the development and launch of cloud applications.

"Various public cloud offerings are maturing rapidly, opening up more opportunities for developers to quickly build and delivery applications. You should start now." the authors concluded.

Salesforce.com is a leader in establishing its platform as a development environment and encouraging the creation of application to run alongside its standard customer relationship management applications. It offers a proprietary language, Apex, for the creation of business logic and the Visual Force graphical user interface building tool that invokes Adobe Flex components. Microsoft will soon offer Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 to give Windows developers the option of building applications to run in Azure.

Force.com's senior director of platform product marketing, Ariel Kelman, said it takes one-fifth the time to develop an application using the database-centric Force.com platform and development tools versus standard enterprise development techniques. He says that conclusion is supported by a Salesforce.com-sponsored study by Nucleus Research.

In addition to Microsoft and Force.com, the analysts cited LongJump, Caspio, Boomi, and WorkXpress as supplying online tools for cloud application development.

"Cloud platforms offer big improvements in the cost and speed of deploying applications... Embrace cloud computing as an emerging platform," they wrote. The mature cloud platforms allow development teams to skip buying servers and storage and setting up networks to connect them. Rather, development can proceed more directly, based on use of the target cloud's APIs, which speeds the launch of the application in the cloud, they said.

By developing applications for the cloud, developers avoid the doggedly perplexing issue of being able to scale out the application at will. Applications can scale up just as fast as server instance subscriptions can be added, based on the cloud's subscription process. If the application runs on open source code, then no new license charges need to be incurred as the application is scaled out across more servers, the analysts observed.

Public clouds now offer choices for application deployment. The infrastructure as a service option, such as Amazon's EC2, offers developers maximum control over the application. Platform as a service providers, such as Force.com and Microsoft Azure, offer a more integrated development environment leading to faster deployment; and software as a service vendors, such as Oracle's E-Business suite, open source SugarCRM, or Salesforce.com's CRM application, offer ready-to-use, finished applications.

Furthermore, the analysts concluded, public cloud servers are good for running Web site applications, collaboration and social networking applications, email, information services and analysis applications dealing with large data sets. They are still less desirable for running core business production systems and transaction applications.

"The cloud is here to stay," the analysts concluded. "Start learning what cloud computing holds for your development organization. .. Formulate a strategy to put this new generation of platforms to work."

Five key elements of such a strategy are:

1. Make enterprise development more nimble and adaptable -- in other words, more like a startup. "Every line of code they write has to be linked to their ability to obtain revenue." So enterprise development teams should know at a deep level what it is the company is trying to do and how it relates to its customers.

2. Startups don't build up elaborate architectures. They use "just enough business-focused process and technical tools to get them to a solution as quickly as possible," they said. Likewise, startups need to respond quickly to changing conditions and competition. "You can't just set a course and stubbornly stick to it," they warn. In other words, find your inner startup, they advise, and put it to work.

3. Don't stick with the same development platform out of misguided loyalty. The Java and .Net languages and related technologies remain the favorites of developers, but the analysts said there has been "a significant uptick" in the use of lighter weight technologies, such as the Apache Tomcat Server, Adobe Flex, the Dojo Foundation's Ajax components, open source Drupal content management, Google Web Toolkit, and the open source Joomla portal management system.

In addition, other open source code is frequently used, including the Red Hat JBoss application server and middleware, the Ruby on Rails scripting language framework,the SpringSource Framework for producing Java applications (SpringSource is now part of VMware), and the Zend Framework for PHP development from Zend Technologies. A large retail chain recently deployed open source Geronimo, an Apache Java application server to 4,000 stores, saving itself charges for 4,000 software licenses.

4. The analysts urged developers to expand their definition of performance in 2010. Performance is affected by the overall platform quality, ease of use, ease of adoption, ease of making changes and availability of a broad community of support. Open source code alternatives are often not as rich in features as their commercial counterparts, "but they often measure up just as well in other dimensions of an expanded performance matrix," they wrote.

Furthermore, the report's authors urged developers to become "passionate" about the user experience they were delivering in their software. Best practices for user experience design need to be injected into the development process, they said.

5. Finally, the analysts urged the cultivation of developers with the right talents. Many offer fine technical skills but don't have much understanding of the business. When accelerating development in the cloud, knowledge of the business may prove as crucial as technical skill.

Cloud computing is part of the "new normal" of enterprise computing, which takes the lean and mean operation during recessionary times and continues it into the return to a healthier economy. Cloud development will help enterprises do more with less, and getting cloud skills right might make the difference between success and failure. "If your competition can build an app faster than you, then your business will be destined to be no more than a fast follower," they concluded.

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2009-2010

Happy Holidays all, ...........now don't shoot your eye out!

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