How do you choose what mobile platform to support? Putting aside personal bias towards mobile devices is difficult. Most people are preferential to the mobile platform they use and enjoy every day, but that doesn’t mean that’s the right one for your application. While there are many factors in deciding what mobile platforms to support, one of the most important, that impacts every product and company is how many potential customers are there for your product? Never has that been better illustrated than with the BlackBerry PlayBook.

For all of 2011, there was virtually no interest from anyone we spoke to in supporting the PlayBook. It was easy to understand why. The market penetration of the PlayBook was low, the sales were underwhelming and no one was touting how amazing the downloads of their applications were on the platform. When there is no customer demand, a low volume of devices in the market, and few widely known case studies of successful applications on the platform, there was no reason to put it high on any company’s agenda.

2012 has been a much different story. When RIM discounted the price of the PlayBook in November 2011, they experienced a sales increase that massively changed the potential market and brought the visibility of the PlayBook to new heights. RIM recently announced that there were “over one million PlayBook customers” which implies that  there have been over one million PlayBook’s sold — 500,000 of which happened in the early part of 2012. Instead of just seeing ads on TV but no one actually using one, now people were seeing PlayBooks used in “real life”. Gartner actually projects the PlayBook to rise to 10% of the overall Tablet market by 2015. That has changed the mindset of many companies that were outright dismissing PlayBook as a potential platform. In the last few months, almost weekly bitHeads has an existing or potential customer ask us about building them a PlayBook application. Do all of these expressions of interest pan out? Of course not, but last Fall there was virtually zero interest and no customers were starting conversations with us about the PlayBook, it was us asking them if they were interested.

Related articles

• It’s not about perception or idealism, it’s about customers (bitheads.com)

(Image Source)

I’m not sure on which side of the fence I fall on the net neutrality debate. There’s been trillions of dollars of value generated in sales and companies over the last two decades of the internet’s life. Most of that value has been with the companies developing products and services that are primarily delivered on the internet. The dream of starting a company with sweat equity and low cash and building it online into a hugely profitable enterprise has been largely dependent on the availability of a relatively free service delivery medium (i.e. the Internet or mobile web).

On the other hand, the carriers and network infrastructure providers have spent many billions of dollars to build out their networks — and must continue to spend billions of dollars to maintain and upgrade them to provide the service level required for all the internet businesses to operate. They are hamstrung by having to charge real money for consumer access to their services while the businesses that run on top of their network can deliver services to consumers for free.

Read more as our Dir. Mobile Strategy guest posts on untether.tv…

If you’re choosing which mobile platforms and devices to support based on what you think is “cool” or what devices are used in your office, you’ve taken the first step down the path of failure for your mobile project. But you can take comfort in that fact that the support group for people who have taken the wrong path on their mobile projects, is well attended. Whether you’re building the “next big thing” or extending your successful business into mobile, the most important consideration is not what device you have, or what the cost is, it’s what devices your customers have. Spending less money on the wrong mobile platform is not the way to have success.

To choose the right mobile platform for your app or service, you first have to ask some tough questions:

Who will be using it? Who are your target customers in the mobile space — and are they different from your non-mobile customers?

If you have an existing service or retail business you are adding mobile to, then you should have a good idea of who your current customers are. It’s then important to cross-reference that set of profiles with the profiles of mobile users — and of mobile users on different platforms. iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and other mobile users don’t all have the same demographic profiles. If you are trying to retain your existing customers whiel they are mobile, you need to pick a platform that matches your current demographics. If, on the other hand, you are looking to expand your existing customer base, or create a new one, it’s best to decide on a few customer profiles of people you’d like to target and then match that against the profiels of people using the different mobile devices. Don’t forget that the mobiel platforms vary geographically in their marketshare and customer base so make sure you’re looking at mobile users in the market you want to target.

How will people be finding out about your mobile product? And what’s the best way to maximise that discoverability?

Throwing an app up on iTunes and hoping people will find it is a receipe for failure. Getting your app visible in front of a lot of people is one of THE critical considerations for the success of your product. If all your marketing is about digitial, then maybe review sites are a good place to look for visibility. If you’re focusing on local markets, then local media or retail signage might be a good plan. There’s no “one right way” to market your mobile product or service, there’s a variety of tactics that may or may not apply and picking the right ones is important. Don’t discount the need to have some of that work take place within the application itself which must be decided upon during the design phase of your mobile app not when it’s ready for release.

When will your customers be using your mobile product?

On the go? While sitting at home? While at work? Many people have multiple mobile devices these days and use them for different purposes. Maybe that business professional has a BlackBerry they use during the day and an iPad they use at home at night. Knowing when someone is expected to use your product will help scope in or out some platforms that may or may not make sense.

Having a million random people see your app is far less valuable than having the right 100,000 people see it. If you can target the right mobile platforms fromt he start, you can increase the chances of getting right to your target customers from day 1, and keep your costs of development managable.

Related posts:

• Mobile Multitasking is all about Planning and Design
• Mobile Software isn’t Designed on Paper
• Mobile isn’t a gold mine, it requires work and planning

• A Sideways Glance: Playbrains has a new take on a platformer (bacononthego.com)
• Hands-On: Living Graffiti Slides Through the City Of Sideway (wired.com)
• Sideway: New York shows off new mechanics and a spray-on look (joystiq.com)
• ‘Sideway: New York’ Review (gamerant.com)
• Sideway: New York is Maybe Super Paper Mario on the Ceiling, and Floor, And Wall [Video] (kotaku.com)

When building a mobile application, there are many considerations that either don’t apply, or work quite differently than on a PC. One of those is how multitasking (or the mobile equivalent) is handled.

From the perspective of a designer, multitasking in its current form has been around on PCs “forever” — which means at least long enough for everyone to have a common understanding of what it means to multi-task on a PC. When you say “multitasking” to a PC person, the general concept envisioned is having many applications running that are either minimized or sharing screen space. It’s easy to switch back and forth (alt+tab on windows) between them and they are all running all the time so each is instantly available as soon as you switch back to it. This works well and is practical because of a number of key factors that separate PCs from mobile devices:

1) Large Screens – PCs have always had large enough screens such that it has been practical for multiple applications to be shown on-screen at the same time. Half (or less) of the average PC screen is plenty of space for most applications to display their content comfortably, leaving lots of room for other applications to run in the periphery.

2) Lots of Memory – the average PC today has more runtime memory (RAM) than the entire storage space available on the typical smartphone had until the last couple of years — and even then it was mostly the iPhone shipping with a small hard drive inside, other mobile phones didn’t tend to have the same available space. More memory allows more applications to keep their data available in real-time.

3) Power – when active, each running application is using a little bit of the CPU. Since mobile processors are much more limited in their performance than their desktop counterparts, less applications can share the CPU and run effectively. Power also refers to electrical power. For years smartphones COULD have included super fast and super powerful processors which would make multitasking a breeze… but you’d end up having to keep your device plugged in due to the battery technology not keeping up (kinda takes the ‘mobile’ part of mobile phone away).

4) Real-time reactions - most people would not be happy if their mobile phone periodically, and silently went into a state where the phone application could not be loaded in time to take a phone call and therefore they missed the call. Traditionally, PCs have not had these real-time responsibilities. We’ve all experienced our PC suddenly start chugging away on something and be unresponsive for a period of time. If our phones do this, we miss calls. The primary responsibility of mobile phones has always been to make and receive calls and the entire phone architecture is built around making sure that ability is not compromised — at the expense of decreased multitasking abilities.

Each mobile platform has taken a different approach to supporting multitasking capabilities and it’s important to understand how each impacts your application’s functions and how a user’s behaviour and expectations on each platform also alter how you are designing your mobile application. read more »

How much time does it take to use a QR Code? See and recognise the QR Code (1-2s), pull out your phone (2-4s), unlock your phone (2-3s), find the camera app (2-3s), launch the camera (4-7s), line up the QR Code (2s), decode the data (1s), launch the service based on the data in the QR Code (3-5s), consume the content. That’s 15-25 seconds. Sounds like not much but sit there looking at your watch/clock for 25 seconds. That feels like a long wait. After waiting for that long, what value do you want from the QR Code? How many times will you give up that 25 seconds in the store for something useless before you simply stop bothering to scan QR Codes. Bad value for time spent could kill QR Codes before they take off — or worse, just after they take off and everyone’s already invested in them.

Essentially, a QR Code is a glorified bar code. You can see one on left there with the bitHeads’ logo in the center. If you scan it with your QR Code reader, it will take you back to our website. I’m breaking my own rule here as that’s not a very useful application for the QR Code. In time, I will have that code show up on the mobile view of the site so if you are reading the article on your mobile device and someone beside you wants to see it they can just scan the code on your phone’s screen and their browser will launch them directly to the article. That’s mildly useful as you don’t have to share any of your personal information with the other person and they can still get the link to my article.

Currently, you see QR Codes used in advertising. Often the scan of the code directs you to a website for the product you are looking for. BlackBerry App World generates QR Codes for directly launching the BlackBerry App World application to that product’s page if you scan it with a BlackBerry. Developers and publishers can use this code on their advertisement to make it easy for potential customers to directly link into the App World product catalogue rather than having to manually search.

You’re starting to see some movie or TV ads that use the QR Codes and link to trailers or clips of the show. That’s probably a worthwhile use for the codes as the user gets additional content they can see on their mobile even after leaving the ad behind (i.e. at a subway station or bus stop).

These are fairly useful uses of QR Codes but there are some examples that are not. There’s a great and humorous blog post here that talks about a case of not thinking things through when using QR Codes. In that example, scanning a code on a piece of clothing at a store linked to a video clip related to the clothing. Is that really useful information? Or is that the most useful information that you could get via a QR Code scan? What about linking to a page that identifies other similar clothing sold at the store or clothing that matches what you’re holding. “Check out this shirt that matches those pants.” That’s useful information.

When marketers are looking to incorporate new ideas and especially when they tie into leveraging the mobile device most people are carrying around, I’m fully supportive — in fact I strongly encourage it. But if QR Codes are used in ways that don’t provide value for consumers, they can easily get a bad rap as useless. This harms everyone that wants to make good use of QR Codes and could kill them before they even get a chance to take off.

(article re-published from BaconOnTheGo.com with permission)

Traditional software design process, at least using the waterfall methodology, involves a lot of up-front requirements gathering, collecting these requirements together to create a workflow, adding a user interface that makes sense and putting it all together in a structured design document. The result is that developers can reasonably estimate the time it will take to produce the software from the fixed requirements, budgets can be pretty stable, and time frames are reasonable to hit. When it comes to mobile software, a number of problems creep into this process.

1. Mobile software isn’t designed for one platform, but many. Usually targeting only one is not a recipe for success. Even iOS is not really one platform as there’s significant differences between the capabilities and expected user experience on an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S. Each mobile platform has peculiarities and caveats which are difficult to fully capture in a long requirements list.

2. You can’t design a truly accurate mobile interface for all platforms in Photoshop. Ok, so what I really mean is you can’t do that cost-effectively. For simple apps, sure, but the UI is more difficult for complex applications and when you need to cross platforms and show multiple screen sizes… well, it can be done but all that time and money you spend worrying about having accurate mockups could be invested in actually producing the software UI (given a basic framework being designed) and then making tweaks.

3. You can’t replicate the experience of using mobile software in a simulator. Sure, the developers can code and testers can test in the simulators, but ultimately you need to try it out on the mobile devices you are targeting to get a true feel for how the interface behaves. Experience will allow you to get closer to what you know works and doesn’t with less iterations, but until the app is actually running and in people’s hands, there’s a good chance things will need to be tweaked. read more »

Nokia and RIM are both undergoing radical transitions that will change the core technology they have been built on for years — Nokia to Windows Phone 7 and RIM to QNX. The end goal for both companies is to have a modern, robust and attractive platform that will carry them through the next decade of mobile innovation. While their end goals are similar, and the bad press keeps piling on, the path to salvation for each is radically different.

When Stephen Elop took over at Nokia, people figured there’d be change. He was a new type of leader for the company and one with strong ties to an industry giant: Microsoft. When he announced Nokia’s intention to move to Windows Phone 7 as its primary operating system on phones, he did so by going “cold turkey” on Symbian, Meego and any other operating system Nokia may have been working with. He essentially said “we’re moving to Windows Phone 7… now. So get on-board”. It’s commendable to be so definitive and not leave any possible shadow of a doubt that this was the plan and that if you were planning on working with Nokia past 2012, you better be working with Windows Phone 7. The impact was, well, impressive. I’m not sure any other statement or direction change has pissed off so many partners of one company… ever. Resellers felt betrayed and carriers were annoyed that Nokia was saying to them that for the next year, they should be peddling phones that even Nokia was saying were shortly to be out of date and not supported by the company. The resulting (effective) boycott of Nokia phones from prominent marketing positions at carriers and resellers tanked Nokia’s marketshare about as fast as Nokia closing up shop would have.

read more »

Many business could take advantage (or better advantage) of Location Based Services (LBS) by understanding how location is or is not relevant to a customer in the context of the nature of the business with the customer. Some businesses just aren’t that suited for direct use of a person’s location in a way that adds obvious value, others should be leveraging it to the max but may not understand how or why.

To start, a brief review (in my words) of some of the facets of LBS and then we’ll delve into how and when these can apply to some business examples.

Wikipedia defines Location Based Services (LBS) as:

an information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device

I would say that’s actually a fairly narrow view of LBS. I will define a LBS as:

any service or activity that utilizes the geographical position of a person to generate or alter the service’s interactions with that person

The massive benefit of leveraging a mobile device with LBS is that the device itself can (usually) contribute the location of the person without the person having to do so manually. When you remove a manual step from a process, generally the usage of that process increases — such is the case with location discoverability and LBS.

When a service uses a person’s location, there’s a decision to be made about the scope of the person’s location that is relevant. Think about if I called you on the phone right now and asked you: “Where are you?”. What would you answer? Would you say ‘home’ or ‘work’ or ‘in my car’ or ‘Ottawa, Canada, North America’ (where I happen to be right now)? When you’re thinking about leveraging LBS for your business, you need to think about what scope of an answer you need from a person to add the value to your service/business to meet your primary goals and what kind of answer you would like from a person to add accessory value or meet secondary goals.

read more »

So you’ve got a business, a successful business, but you are always looking for ways to stand out amongst your competitors. Traditionally, your marketing department runs the standard stuff (TV ads, mails out coupons, limited time sales, seasonal promotions, etc.) but you’re hearing all about mobile these days and wondering if and how mobile can help your business. Maybe your marketing team has a ‘mobile website’ (which someone defined as a site that can be viewed on an iPhone — which pretty much all sites can) but hasn’t really seen and effect from it, maybe you even have an app that lets your customers find your closest store or you have a Twitter account with a few thousand followers. Your marketing team thinks they are getting on the mobile bandwagon but does anyone there really understand WHY you should be on the mobile bandwagon and HOW to use mobile to enhance your business? Or are they just checking off buzz-words because everyone else is and thinking they are adding value.

It’s not easy to determine how different mobile and social services can fit into your business and how that can maybe even revolutionize how you communicate with customers but there are a few things you can look at to help decide what aspects of this new world you need to move on — before your competition does. read more »