July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Simon Dawlat is the CEO and founder of AppGratis, whose app discovery app was pulled from the app store by Apple.

Allow me to jump right into this by saying that yes, we have created a business while solving a problem.

And that last time we checked, it was still OK to do that.

Source: AppGratis

Retraction letter

I will also use this post to clarify once and for all the delusional accusations about AppGratis allegedly running a “bot network.” These accusations came from one single person. This person went to TechCrunch. TechCrunch bought the story and published it. It started spreading. Our lawyers acted rapidly and obtained a formal and written apology letter that you can find here. As stated before, we have never done anything shady in order to grow. And we will always be able to bring proof of that.

But back to the important part: our business model. And why it is fair and rock-solid.

To understand where we come from, it’s important to remember that we started in this industry years before there actually was an app advertising market.

Back in 2008, I started coding apps with some friends in San Francisco. That was right after the App Store was released. Quickly, our apps started failing. Not because they sucked (or maybe because of that — but back in those days, any app with a cool icon was a potential hit). But because App Discovery was already a nasty problem.

After toying with different ideas, I set out to launch a daily newsletter where I would send my daily app picks to friends. AppGratis was born. On the side, I was also running an app-focused blog where I was reviewing apps on the web, so I was in contact with a lot of fellow app developers. I started reaching out to these guys, and offering to highlight their apps. In return, all they had to do was either set their app free for one day, or at a discounted price. I’d take their app, review it, write up a quirky little copy about it, and push the send button.

As for today, thorough reviews by our app-curators combined with editorial excellence remains a heavy component in the amazing App Discovery experience that AppGratis brings to the market. The only difference now is that we operate in 12 languages, and in more than 30 countries.

And this is how we helped and are still helping — for free — hundreds of indie devs with great apps to get well-deserved visibility. In the past few days, many of them have stood up for us … and many haven’t, probably in fear that Apple will stop featuring their app if they speak. I make no judgement of this. I thank the former, and fully understand what motivates (or doesn’t) the later.

We operated as a fast-growing newsletter for more than 1.5 years.

Then, in the Fall of 2010, Apple approved the very first version of AppGratis. At that point, we started growing even faster.

Over 2011, we grew AppGratis as a company from only 2 people to one with 30, all with no external funding.

In 2012, we saw our first clone appear on our radar. We accelerated global expansion while talking to potential VCs. By Q1 of 2013, we had closed our $13.5M Series A and had secured 5% marketshare in the US market. And as I said before, we’re just getting started.

So. Where’s the money coming from?

The money comes from advertisers with freemium apps.

In the Spring of 2010 — as a direct consequence of Apple introducing the In-App Purchase API a few months earlier — we started getting the first serious requests from leading industry players. Discussions went like this: “Hey guys, we have this cool app. It’s already free though. Can you feature it? We have a big budget to promote it.”

We scratched our heads.

How could we bring these cool new apps to the AppGratis community by

1. creating more value to our users
2. connecting advertisers with the right users among our core audience, and
3. making a decent living in the process?

We went back to the clients saying: “Look, your app is great, but already free – what can you add extra, that still fulfills the deal we have with our users?”

At that point, we started experimenting with offering in-app deals to our users where the client would unlock an in-app purchase for a set time, and we’d then feature it. We’d label these deals “Sponsored,” we’d enforce our internal policy to make sure that we were only working with the best advertisers, and — as people tend to forget — we’d only feature apps that Apple had approved for its App Store in the first place.

We then surveyed our community: “Folks, happy with this new type of deals?” Answer: Yes. Status: OK. Carry on, AppGratis.

Then, the whole incentivized-downloads controversy kicked in, resulting in Apple declaring that developers should not pay for guaranteed Top 25 placements. We introduced a new pricing structure based on performance. Media buyers could buy traffic with us on a “CPI” basis (which stands for “Cost-Per-Install.” This is now the industry standard). And to guide them through their complicated media buying, we’d send them — with no guarantees whatsoever — a spreadsheet that indicates the forecasts of installs we thought we’d be to able to drive for their app in each country. Since the App Store algorithm relies mostly on download velocity, it’s simple math to buy your way to the top of the charts by purchasing the numbers of installs you need combining multiple vendors. It’s the most common marketing strategy in the market today, and at the end of the day, it’s just regular advertising.

People have accused us of gaming the top. But the reality is that with or without the “rankings,” our community will still drive millions of installs for the apps we feature. Independently from the App Store. We have never based our business on ranking exposure, because we’ve always expected Apple to chime in at some point, and change that.

We have always based our business on solving the App Discovery needs that consumers have.

As entrepreneur Aziz Ali commented last week:

You have to realize that the 12 million users are willingly using AppGratis to find apps, download new apps and write their personal reviews of the apps they like. If the users HATE the promoted app, it will get more bad reviews than good ones. So in a way AppGratis is magnifying and speedifying the purification of the Apple AppStore since more and more people will discover and rate apps in the Apple AppStore faster.”

Exactly.

Some people seem to have a very moral approach to this. But at the end of the day, all we do is simplify discovery for our users. Simplify attracting new valuable users for developers. And send the App Store around 300 million visits per year.

And we also made a business in the process.

Yep.

A business.

Sue us now!

Yesterday, Business Insider accused us of gaming the system and “leaked” one of our spreadsheets under the title: “Leaked Document Shows AppGratis Used Lure Of App Store Rankings To Attract Cash From Developers”. But as Jason Calacanis responded to this after reading it and other accusations of AppGratis gaming the system — “it’s not gaming, it’s forecasting.”

Now, I’m happy to report that we made more than $9M of revenue last year by helping users discover new apps, and by helping developers forecast their marketing actions. And we are on track for doing $25M this year — even though, in a forecasted $25 billion (with a ‘b’) App market by 2015, that’s still a mere 0.1% marketshare.

Today, whether or not Apple reinstalls AppGratis in the App Store, we have a vibrant 12-million-user community behind us. And in less than two days, close to one million of them reiterated their commitment to our service by signing our petition. We have a killer team. We have cash in the bank that we raised mostly in case of a rough patch (not such a dumb move after all). And we have faith because we know that our work matters to the most important people that we know: our USERS — the people who are actually buying the devices, who are actually *choosing* to download the apps we feature. And Developers, who make the apps, and can eventually make or break a platform.

And even more exciting, we’re back to our roots. A crazy cool daily newsletter with millions of subscribers, that will very soon be complemented by the newest and nicest HTML5 WebApp you’ll ever see. Two things we fully own, and that no one can take away from us. So when I stated a week ago that the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, I wasn’t kidding. Not kidding at all. AppGratis is just getting started.

Because from the bottom of our hearts, we know we add value to this whole ecosystem.

And we intend to keep doing just that.

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices have reached a level of ubiquity like no other technology in history. We use them for everything: from booking a hotel room, to playing games, catching up with friends, checking our bank accounts and more. Today, there are over 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide. And the number will only grow as mobile networks improve and developing nations find it cheaper to build a mobile infrastructure instead of traditional transmission lines. Each day, there are more Android devices being activated then there are babies being born – a staggering statistic that shows just how fast the market is growing.

If you’re a mobile developer, you also know the challenges of getting your app into market. There are many decisions you need to make before you even get started: should you go native, embrace HTML5 or some hybrid; which devices and operating systems will you support; how can you provide the level of personalization your customers expect, etc. The list goes on and on.

But the challenges for mobile developers don’t stop there. Once you’ve gotten your app to market, the race for user adoption is fierce. With more than 1.5 million mobile apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play alone, customer ratings can be the difference between an app that succeeds and one that fails.

As the mobile app market matures, these trends only become more complicated. With more and more apps on the market, app stores can be selective about which ones they accept and promote.

Such decisions will be based on the numbers of downloads an app has, its user ratings and even the speed at which an app performs. And potential users will have a harder and harder time finding the apps that best suit their needs. According to a recent survey, today one in four apps is abandoned after its initial use and more than 60 percent of apps in the Apple App Store have never been downloaded at all.

So, what is a mobile developer to do? Your users expect you apps to work as promised. They expect them to perform like applications on their traditional desktops and web browsers regardless of the fact that the apps are running on networks and hardware with the specs of an eight-year old computer.

If it doesn’t respond or takes longer than three seconds to respond, you have a problem. There’s little room for error in the mobile app market and the chances are your users won’t give you a second chance. This means meeting or exceeding your users’ expectations is paramount.

With multiple points of possible failure – whether deep within the application code, in the device hardware or calls to third party APIs such as Facebook, PayPal and Twitter – you need to understand the quality of your user experience and find potential performance bottlenecks before they’re spotted by your customers. A crash is simply not acceptable, and a crash is not the only failure an app can face. Critical features of your app, a friends list for example, that fail to render because of any number of issues can result in damaging reviews just as easily as a crash.

To combat this, you need to build robustness into your apps from the start. Define your development requirements early and take a systematic approach to your development process. Use the best tools to test your application during each step of the process and be prepared to make iterative, incremental changes as you move along. Gather as much production data about your users experience as possible –  there is no substitute for real user metrics.

The mobile app market isn’t going anywhere, but the considerations and potential pitfalls will only becoming more complicated as the market matures. Planning ahead and providing the highest quality user experience will keep your apps competitive in these challenging times.

Chris Kelly is New Relic’s developer evangelist. New Relic launched a performance management and metrics tool for native iOS and Android applications. The company already has won points in the developer community for its analytics tools for web apps.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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So you want to take your website or service into the busy, profitable world of mobile. Great! But be careful.

My own company has had the pleasure of analyzing thousands of mobile usability studies, and we’ve identified four traps that companies fall victim to when transitioning their websites and apps to mobile.

Ultimately, it all comes down to usability — and what’s usable on a desktop website isn’t always as user-friendly on a smaller mobile screen.

So you can’t just “port” your desktop site or expect users to “get” the navigational controls you set up. Testing your specific ideas is key, but here are some general recommendations if you’re new to mobile interfaces and usability.

Trap 0: “Porting” to mobile

It seems so obvious: you have a successful computer app or website, the users are asking for mobile access to it, so you simply rewrite your current offering for mobile. You remove Flash, rearrange interface elements, change the font sizes, and you’re done. Unfortunately, our tests show that this sort of “porting” approach rarely works.

Tips to avoid Trap 0

• Rethink your offering for mobile. Don’t just transfer, or port, your computer app or website to mobile. Instead, rethink what problems people have when they’re mobile and how you can best solve them on a mobile device. This may mean creating a new service, delivering only a subset of your computer functionality, or creating several separate mobile apps.
• Design for the mainstream 80% of your users, not the technophile top 20%. The technophiles can lead you to add too many features and make your app and site too complex.
• It’s better to start with an app or site that does a few things well. Only add more functionality once you’ve nailed the basics.

Trap 1: Unclear controls

When testers get confused by a mobile app or site, it’s usually because of confusing controls or unclear paths to success.

Buttons and icons can be especially tricky in the mobile space because there is no single standard for them. The competing mobile platforms use button and icon designs as part of their differentiation, deliberately making them incompatible with each other. Although a few images are standard across most platforms (a magnifying glass means search everywhere), many other buttons and images are conflicting.

And then, there’s conflicting icon designs in Apple iOS and Android. This makes life difficult for app developers, who have to choose between standardizing their apps across platforms or creating different versions for every OS. Many developers choose to design their own controls, which makes the confusion even worse.

Tips to avoid Trap 1

• The highest form of beauty is functionality. Make sure your mobile property works well and is easy to navigate, then make it pretty.
• Avoid cryptic icons. Don’t assume that icons are self-explanatory. When in doubt, use text instead of – or in addition to – a picture.
• Great help is essential. A great help system is to mobile what tooltips are to traditional computing: the first line of defense against user confusion. Mobile help must be easily found, always available, and context-sensitive.

Trap 2: Not reassuring privacy

In our usability tests, it’s common for users to hesitate at some tasks because they’re afraid their smartphone might do things they don’t want it to.

One common fear is that personal data may be stolen over the wireless network. Oftentimes users say they’ll wait until they can perform a transaction on their computer because they’re not sure it’s safe on mobile. Others fear a loss of privacy from apps or sites that tout social options without clearly indicating what will be posted to a user’s social accounts.

Tips to Avoid Trap 2

• Make users feel safe. Reassure users that your system is secure, especially when conducting mobile transactions or collecting personal data.
• Avoid social anxiety. Always notify people clearly before you share information from a mobile device to a social network. Never make them guess about the social consequences of pressing a button.

Trap 3: Failure to engage the user

Mobile users have incredibly short attention spans. They’re on the go and have many other things they can do with their mobile devices. An app or website needs to instantly provide value to users to win their loyalty.

It’s fascinating to identify user engagement (or rather, lack thereof) by listening to vocal inflections, sighs, and pauses. Analytics will tell you whether the user finished a game level and how long it took; a think-aloud test will tell you whether they were bored.

Tip to avoid Trap 3

• Test for engagement, not just usability. Don’t rely solely on analytics to evaluate a mobile app or website. Instead, supplement your analytics with usability tests. Find out WHY your users get confused, lose interest, or get scared and you’ll be able to increase retention and engagement.

How Evernote Avoids Mobile Traps

Evernote recognizes the limitations of solely relying on quantitative metrics. “With analytics, I can’t tell if someone is spending time on something because they’re frustrated or because they love it,” said VP of Product at Evernote, Phil Constantinou. To discover why users might grow confused, bored, or annoyed, Evernote relies on think-aloud testing. Since enlisting the help of web, desktop and mobile app testers, Evernote has increased user retention by more than 15 percent, as well as seen dramatic increases in user engagement.

The transition to mobile is an even bigger challenge than most companies realize. It changes the rules of good development, makes users reconsider their default choices in apps and websites, and increases the importance of user engagement. By avoiding these four mobile traps, you can set your company apart and gain a competitive advantage over the upcoming years.

Darrell Benatar, CEO of UserTesting.com. UserTesting.com is a video usability testing company; it has a panel of participants who record their screen and voice as they use a website. Customers can use the data to figure out where customers get stuck and why they’re not buying.

Image credit: stephangeyer/Flickr

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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There’s a pervasive myth that traditional web development is dead and that it’s all about mobile, but this simply isn’t true. Web development is not dead, and mobile holds no smoking gun.

Mobile is not that different or special. It is part of an overall trend where we have access to any app we want, whenever we want it, on whatever device we’re in front of.

In fact, “mobile” is just another way of saying “how apps should work” whether they are on my laptop, my tablet, my phone—or for that matter, on my thermostat, my car dashboard, or my refrigerator.

Head in the clouds

If I were to remove all my iPhone apps requiring an Internet connection, I’d be left with a camera, a clock, and a phone. Suddenly I no longer own a smartphone. That’s because when we talk about mobile applications, what we’re actually talking about are cloud apps.

When you start to build cloud apps that reach out to any device, the platform needs of mobile developers are really no different from those of web developers. All of my apps, whether mobile or web, require a reliable, scalable and secure platform that allows developers to iterate. While depending on the device, we may be serving up different content and rendering it in different ways, mobile and web are not different — everything requires a client, a server and an API.

The UI is everywhere

Buttons, swiping, and touch are not interactions exclusive to mobile. As developers, we know pressing is like clicking a mouse, swiping is like scrolling, and that touch screens have been on ATMs for ten years. Designing for a cursorless, hoverless or Flash-less device is simply part of a natural evolution.

There’s no doubt that mobile interfaces are changing, but changing interfaces are nothing new. Mobile is part of an overall trajectory that began long ago and will continue long into the future. We will soon see innovations in mobile user interface become part of non-mobile devices: Swiping to control your microwave is surely not that far off. Other features that we consider the unique to mobile — built-in GPS, touch screens, and inertia detectors — are really just capabilities that will find their way into many devices. Mobile may be the flash point, but it isn’t any different.

The Internet of everything

The Khazoom Brookes postulate assumes that the more efficiently we consume a commodity, the more of it we will consume. This is true with oil, technology, and information. In as early as 2008, we were already concerned that we would literally run out of IP addresses. Over the last decade, we’ve consumed the Internet at such a rate that we’ve literally run out of IP addresses. Back then, my experience as a Gowalla engineer taught me that the internet was everywhere. With the creation of the IPv6 protocol, I believe that the Internet will be not just things, but everything. Not only will every person have an Internet address, but every device will also have one.

We are already seeing signs of an emerging world where mobile is just one of many types of devices that comprise a larger world of the “Internet of things.” From Kickstarter connected watches, to power outlets controlled by APIs, to Lockitron devices, to self-driving cars and 3D printers. There is an emerging singularity in how we interact with everything around us. In this world, mobile isn’t different; it’s just a continuation of what is already happening.

Mobile and the consumer

There is this great XKCD comic where a smartphone’s browser screen reads, “Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you can’t zoom? Download our app.” It’s a poignant reminder of how when mobile is treated differently, consumer experience suffers for it.

My point in dispelling the myth of “mobile as different” isn’t to be contrarian. It’s to advocate for the user, namely, me and you.

From immersive gaming to quantified self to the Internet of things, companies are being challenged to build new apps in unfamiliar and sometimes bizarre territory. Our jobs are to offer consistent apps and experiences to the user, across all devices. And in this world, mobile is no different. We can squabble about code and protocols as much as we want, but at the end of the day it’s about offering users an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations. As a consumer myself, I think the best experiences are when everything just works.

Mattt Thompson is the Mobile Lead at Heroku, and the creator & maintainer of AFNetworking and other popular open-source projects, including Postgres.app & Induction. He also writes about obscure & overlooked parts of Cocoa on NSHipster.

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That’s not the goal of Jimu, a new rapid development tool for Android apps that’s currently fundraising via Kickstarter.

“We want to make it possible for a lot more people to create apps,” Jimu founder Linkton Ye told me yesterday via Skype. “Everyone should be able to play with the software that surrounds us.”

But Ye doesn’t want to just build a framework for the n00bs: those of us who can’t program in Java and build our own apps. That’s part of the goal, but not all of it. The rest of it is all about those software developers who are already building Android apps today and dealing with the surprisingly repetitive and challenging tasks for each and every app they build.

The challenge lies in the fact that while there are many great tools and frameworks to help non-developers build apps — Andromo, AppyPie, AppsGeyser, and TheAppBuilder come to mind   —  they tend to be a little cookie cutter. Pick a style, select some features, choose a content feed, subscribe to Twitter updates, import a photo stream.

“We want to give everyone a jumpstart to create apps, but still leave room for developers to customize however they want,” Ye says. “There’s a lot of frameworks to let non-developers create apps, but it’s just a form to fill in. All their apps look pretty much the same, and you can’t customize very much.”

Source: Jimu

One app already built in Jimu that integrates Flickr, Google Maps, other web services, and local caching.

So Jimu not only enables drag-and-drop creation of app functionality, it also creates clean, commented source code for all your apps … which those with a technical bent can then take and customize or extend even more. At a minimum, then, it’s a rapid prototyping tool that actually works, rather than being a clickable model, a wireframe, or a set of screenshots.

Jimu does this by via what Ye calls “blocks:” chunks of code that insert objects like pictures, text, buttons, and actions. The framework is extensible, and the team is building new blocks continuously. Besides the basic necessities of an app, some of the higher-level ones include the ability to take a picture with the phone’s camera and use the image, the ability to connect to other devices via NFC, and the ability to take over a phone’s Bluetooth connection.

But it’s still early days in the project — hence the Kickstarter campaign.

“We wanted to see how many people are actually excited about this idea,” Ye told me. “Right now it’s a prototype, and we want to build a minimum viable product, so this is this is basically marketing research, and it will provide some capital to fund the project.”

The team is trying to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter. With 23 days to go, 54 backers have contributed $1,707, so there’s a significant way to go.

Assuming the Kickstarter works, Ye thinks they’ll have enough capital to finish the product. And having a successful fundraiser in his back pocket will help Jimu find additional funding. The ultimate goal is a subscription-based service by which developers who want to use Jimu pay for one or more tiers of service … and a programming blocks marketplace where developers who create a useful block can re-sell it to other mobile programmers.

Will the project get funded? Ye is optimistic.

“There are a lot of hardware and game companies doing well on Kickstarter,” he said. “For software it’s harder … but we still think it’s possible.”

Image credits: Jimu

Disclosure: one of the members of the Jimu team, Aras Balali, is a member in my coworking space.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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What about native-only solutions?

Only 15 percent of developers would go native-only when building an app for multiple platforms, a stat that might be a little shocking to those witnessed Facebook famously and loudly abandoning HTML5 development last year in favor of a faster, smoother, better native app experience.

See the infographic: What developers do with HTML5

“Most developers were not impacted by that Facebook decision,” Kendo UI EVP Todd Anglin told me yesterday. “One thing that gets overlooked often in the Facebook news is that Facebook hasn’t abandoned HTML5 at all … just changed their use of it.”

In fact, the new Facebook app includes a lot of HTML5, Anglin said, adding that Facebook has said that HTML5 makes it faster to develop and maintain multiple apps.

Source: KendoUI

Developers who are actively using HTML5

HTML5 on the desktop

HTML5 on mobile is nothing new. But what about HTML5 on the desktop?

It turns out that HTML5 could be huge on the desktop, with 66 percent of developers interested in developing HTML5 apps for Windows 8, almost half interesting in building apps for Google’s Chrome OS, and another third thinking about developing apps for the emerging Firefox OS.

“It’s the final frontier for where HTML5 should go,” Anglin said. “And it begs the question … why don’t we think of this as an equal option for a PC?”

On a desktop PC, HTML5 would not be limited by a relatively puny mobile processor, either, meaning that developers could do even more with HTML5 video and interactivity. What that means, Anglin said, is that you could have a complete unified strategy for all mobile operating systems and desktop systems at one time … that uses the same codebase and the same developer skill set.

That’s fairly mind-blowing, considering where we’ve come from.

Source: KendoUI

HTML5 for the desktop

The ‘one + HTML5′ strategy

A growing strategic solution to the challenge of multiple platforms seems to be the “one + HTML5″ plan, in which developers build one app for a key target platform in native code — although it may also contain some HTML5 — and one app for all the other desired-but-not-core platforms in HTML5.

Typically, the “one” is iOS, although it could also be Android, and the HTML5 solution is for BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and any other desired platforms.

Still, given a choice, most developers would either do a pure HTML5 app for all platforms, or a hybrid app: HTML5 core, with native wrapping on each targeted platform.

Source: Kendo UI

Native vs HTML5 vs Hybrid apps

The hype cycle — HTML5 isn’t overhyped anymore

Only a quarter of developers now believe that HTML5 is overhyped, while almost half strongly believe it is not.

“Developers are now beyond the hype curve,” Anglin said. “Even though some developers think that  HTML5 is overhyped, that doesn’t mean they don’t think it’s a platform that is both usable and important.”

78 percent of developers now say HTML5 is appropriate for building mobile apps, and 68 percent say it’s appropriate for all developers building any kind of app.

iOS and BlackBerry: both hard to develop for

While iOS is a top platform, developers say it’s difficult to develop for. In fact, iOS ranked just under the notoriously challenging BlackBerry for development difficulty. Sixty-four percent of developers said that BlackBerry was challenging — and having developed two apps for the platform myself, I agree — while 69 percent said that iOS was difficult.

Objective-C is not the newest or widest-known language in the world, of course, and Apple does put a few hurdles in developers’ paths as well.

In contrast, half of developers thought that Windows 8 was easy to develop for, and Windows Phone 8 was not far behind. Android, meanwhile, was split: 26 percent said it was very easy, while 29 percent said it was very hard.

“What’s surprising to us is not that it’s difficult, but that’s it almost twice as difficult to work with as Android,” Anglin said. “We would have thought developers would rank Android equal to iOS or even harder, since there are so many more devices in the Android ecosystem.”

Source: Kendo UI

Mobile platforms: how difficult?

photo credit: brucelawson via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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But some still feel the technology is over-hyped.

So Kendo UI — which makes an HTML5-based mobile development toolkit — surveyed 5,000 developers to see what they’re doing with the technology.

Get the full story: 5,000 developers on HTML5

It turns out that 70 percent of North American developers are already using HTML5, as are roughly 60 percent of South American, European, and Chinese developers. And they’re using them to build productivity tools, utilities, and more.

Here’s the data in visual form:

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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For several years, Ford has been thinking ahead on how to get mobile apps to better interact with its vehicles. Today, the American car company went one step further in its initiatives with the Ford Developer Program, which will help mobile developers directly interface with cars.

Sync was developed by Ford and Microsoft and introduced in 2007. It uses Bluetooth connectivity to connect smartphones and a car’s dashboard. With AppLink, drivers can use their voice to control any smartphone app that has been built with AppLink and Sync in mind. Sync is inside more than five million cars.

The Ford Developer Program, announced today at CES 2013, specifically aims to create apps that will utilize the Sync system and Ford’s AppLink API. Ultimately, Ford hopes the program will enhance driver experiences and give mobile devs the tools they need to do more with vehicle interactions.

“The Ford Developer Program marks a dramatic shift in how we will innovate new features and add value to our vehicles throughout the ownership period,” Ford engineering VP Hau Thai-Tang said in a statement. “Opening the car to developers gives consumers a direct voice and hand in the creation of apps that can help our products remain relevant, up to date and valuable to our customers.”

Another incentive to open up the developer program is to get more apps added faster. With about 40 AppLink-compatible apps available for iOS and Android, Ford felt it was worth opening up its SDK to let more developers get in.

On top of the developer program, Ford also announced several new apps that have joined the AppLink ecosystem:

• Amazon Cloud Player: Drivers can listen to their music collection being streamed from Amazon.
• Rhapsody: Listen to streaming music from Rhapsody.
• Aha Radio: Voice control radio, news, podcasts, music, audiobooks, and more.
• Greater Media: Listen to live streams from radio stations all over the U.S.
• Glympse: Give your location to friends, family, and businesses to give them an ETA on when you’ll arrive and a map of where you are.
• BeCouply: Get suggestions for where to go on dates.
• Wall Street Journal: Listen to live and on-demand radio content from the WSJ.
• USA Today: Listen to top news headlines from USA Today.
• Kaliki: Listen to stories read from a variety of magazines and newspapers including TV Guide, Men’s Fitness, OK!, and Shape Magazine.

Top and middle photos via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Ford logo via JD Hancock/Flickr

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I started my user experience education in a very different way than most.

Long before smartphones, apps, and mobile advertising, I worked for The Walt Disney Company … but not as a technologist. I was a costumed martial arts performer and my manner of ‘user-engagement’ was as Leonardo – the blue bandana-wearing, katana-wielding, pizza-eating member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – who performed together with his turtle brothers on stage at the Disney MGM Studios in the early 90s.

As strange as it might sound, many of the lessons that I learned about Walt Disney’s philosophy for crafting a deep, engaging guest experience have inspired my core principles around breakthrough mobile user experience.

Now, more than ever, the mobile app landscape is seeing an increased focus on the importance of a deep, engaging user experience.  Not only must the app itself be handcrafted to surprise and delight the user, but integrated advertising units must do the same. Publishers and brands are both starting to appreciate the importance of crafting deep brand experiences, instead of just slapping a banner onto the bottom of the screen.

2012 made a half-step in this direction with the adoption of rich media advertising.  Rich media ad units are still typically screen-edge banners, but they offer more resolution, higher-quality animation, and more varied tap actions.  Although rich media was a much-needed upgrade to previous mobile banners, the next phase will be much more dramatic.

2013 is shaping-up to be the year of native mobile advertising, much to the benefit of publishers, brands, and users.

Native ads are different from conventional ads in three specific ways:

1. They are more organically integrated with the app itself (think beyond the banner)
2. They expose more of the phone’s internal features (photo roll, advanced social media, etc.)
3. They provide for much more engaging ad creatives and branded content

While the shift to create a native ad experience on mobile might seem revolutionary to some in the industry, it’s at the core of what I’ve been working on at Zumobi for years and reflects many of Walt Disney’s principles that I learned from my experiences as a Turtle. With this in mind, here are a few Ninja lessons that I see reflected across the dynamic landscape of mobile advertising and user experience…

We should all strive to surprise, delight and engage our guests

At Disney, you’re not an employee, you’re a Cast Member. You’re not at work, you’re On Stage.

With mobile advertising, we are challenged every day to move beyond the 320 x 50 cage, and truly express a client’s brand in a way that is native to their unique values. While banner advertising is an important aspect of advertising, it is not a style that surprises, delights, and engages the user. Tomorrow’s native app-within-an-app experiences will let users make purchases, share user-generated content photos and media, and engage deeply with social media.

As designers, we should strive to channel Walt’s philosophy to create tomorrow’s breakthrough native mobile experiences.

They can’t see your face; they CAN see your expression

When you’re in costume as a Ninja Turtle, people can’t see your face directly.

However, every emotion, smile, and expression is channeled through the character, and consequently felt by the guests.  I believe that the same metaphor applies to software, apps, and mobile brand experiences. While the user cannot see the designer, they can sense the expression that they wore when they handcrafted a given user experience.

In this way, it is always essential to remember that the passion seeps beyond the confines of an app or campaign, and directly drives engagement.

Zen and the art of mobile advertising

There is a yin and a yang to all things, including mobile advertising.  In the same way that soft-style kung fu blurs the lines between striking and blocking, good native advertising blurs the lines between content and sponsorship.  Have a lifestyle app targeted to mothers? Offer recipe content as part of your campaign. Want to reach potential auto buyers?  Offer compelling automotive content in mobile enthusiast sources.

This is an incredibly exciting time for apps, mobile, and advertising – the most dramatic opportunities are still untapped.

While the last five years has proven to be thrilling in the landscape of mobile, I foresee the next five years to be even more exciting.

John SanGiovanni is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Design at Zumobi where he coordinates the product design strategy and manages Zumobi’s in-house creative studio. A former Microsoft Technical Evangelist, John has more than 13 years of experience as a wireless strategist and mobile user interface designer and has authored or co-authored more than 12 patents in the areas of mobile advertising, hardware interfaces, and interaction techniques for next-generation mobile devices. John recently spoke at the Seattle Interactive Conference where he presented his case for the future of mobile advertising. View his complete session here: or the highlights here

photo credit: Jenn and Tony Bot via photopin cc

Launch This Year opened up today, and VentureBeat has 2,000 special invite codes to give away. More on that at the bottom of this post.

Ooomf is an online app discovery platform that also helps app developers make and find users for their apps. Now the company is taking the next logical step: a social step-by-step guide to helping budding entrepreneurs make their mobile development dreams a reality.

“There’s a big problem in mobile,” Ooomf CEO Mikael Cho told me last week. “4,000 new apps are launched every single day. Our goal is to empower the next generation of creators who are interested in building mobile apps … and help them make a sustainable mobile business.”

So Ooomf, which graduated from the FounderFuel accelerator in May 2012 and raised $500,000 in seed funding last year, is planning on providing all the tools developers need not just to build their apps, but also to make money from them.

Launch This Year is a guide and resource kit that includes a launch website, a sign-up page, a press kit, and tools to manage your first users and testers. The site will also put you in a cohort of developers, so you’ve got a virtual team to turn to for help and encouragement. And the site will help with the app store submission process and give you analytics for your app.

“It’s like a personal trainer for the app store,” Cho says. “You pick a day that you want to launch, and we’ll give you a guaranteed step-by-step guide to launching. And if you’re falling behind, we’ll let you know.

In a way, it’s like Codecademy, except that instead of learning to code, you’re learning to build a mobile business. Cho says there are many developers who have built three to four apps that can then sustain a living for them, but there are many more who are capable of building apps and have not yet.

In addition, Launch This Year allows developers to build a community of users who participate in the development of the app — a core Ooomf competency. Not sure which icon to use? Ask the user community you’ve built with Ooomf’s tools. Wondering if the user interface should include custom gestures? See what actual users think.

Perhaps the best part is positive peer pressure:

“You’ll see other people moving along and see things that they’ve achieved,” Cho says. “Which will make you think that other people are doing this and that and oh, I should catch up!”

Invite code for early access:

The site is open for initial users right now, but you’ll need an invite code. Use “venturebeat” to get immediate access.

Image credit: Ooomf

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Doug Renert is a co-founding partner of Silicon Valley’s Tandem Capital.

Canada has many reasons to be proud.

For starters, the country has mostly dodged the economic crisis that continues to rattle the rest of North America. Canadian businesses enjoy lower corporate tax rates, plus plenty of government subsidy programs. Not to mention the fact that the populace enjoys universal healthcare coverage and the ability to travel without being labeled “loud Americans.”

However, when it comes to mobile apps, Canadians may not be so lucky.

The nation’s app store can be likened to the state of Nevada in 1951, when nuclear weapons testing sprouted a continuous stream of mushroom clouds throughout the flatland.

Canada’s role as the “guinea pig for mobile apps” was first brought to my attention when Peter Relan, CEO of Crowdstar, told me they always launched their apps in Canada first to work out the kinks and bugs before releasing in the U.S. and elsewhere. This approach makes perfect sense since Canadians resemble their southern neighbors so closely, though on average the “Canucks” may like beer and hockey a lot more and guns and frozen yogurt much less.

Doug Renert

With 10 percent of America’s population, Canada provides a risk-free test market.  Competitors and the media likely won’t get wind of failed launches or top performers in the mobile app stores of the Great (but relatively quiet) White North. And developers and marketers can tune apps to their hearts’ content until everything is primed for a successful launch in the “Promised Land” of red, white and blue.

This was the case for Bash Gaming (formerly BitRhymes), one of our portfolio companies that soft-launched its hit mobile social casino game Bingo Bash in the Canadian Apple App Store before hitting the U.S. They launched the game on each platform within Canada first, and only after several weeks of optimization for that market did they launch in the U.S. — where it eventually became a No. 1 grossing game.

That being said, this same strategy backfired on the Android side.

Bingo Bash had become such a hit on iOS that when the studio launched its Android version just a couple of months ago, word spread like wildfire. American Android users quickly caught wind of the leaked Canadian version — and cried foul! So Bash Gaming immediately made the Android launch effective worldwide.

Larger companies have been pursuing this tactic, as well. Nintendo recently launched its new Wii Mini on December 7 – for Canadians only. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before all this activity results in a rash of protests across Canada; a generation of activists shined a spotlight on Nevada decades ago and successfully won a ban on nuclear testing. Who will be the crusaders when it comes to Canada’s role as the world’s mobile guinea pig?

Or perhaps Canadians are darn proud of their role in the mobile app ecosystem as they involuntarily test-drive their way through buggy, early versions of every app imaginable. I, for one, am envious of this not-so-glorified breed of users who get first dibs on the fun games and cool apps that go on to become the top hits in the rest of the world.

Doug Renert is a co-founding partner of Tandem Capital, Silicon Valley’s first and largest mobile accelerator fund, currently at $32M. Tandem backs 12 early stage mobile startups each year with its brand of “muscle capital,” a powerful combination of funding and hands-on support. Some of Tandem’s biggest successes include PlayHaven and Bash Gaming, formerly known as BitRhymes. Prior to Tandem, Doug built businesses as an operating executive at Oracle and as CEO of telecommunications startup Tello.

photo credit: BFLV via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s App Store is still the king of mobile apps stores, with four times the revenue of Google Play, but Google Play is growing much, much faster than the App Store.

Those are just a few of the insights from app analytics company App Annie’s new report on global app store download trends.

“While iOS took home more of the global revenue pie in October, the rising adoption of Google Play in developing markets, including South Korea, India, and Japan is already driving major revenue growth opportunities,” App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt said in a statement.

UPDATES: Apple disputes the App Annie report and  App Annie clarifies its numbers

While the iOS app store revenues grew 12.9 percent in 2012, Google Play grew an astonishing 313 percent. That’s something I wondered about in July when Apple’s third quarter sales results showed a $100 million drop in iTunes store revenues, but I lacked data at the time to make a full case. The same trend was visible in free downloads, where even though iOS users download 10 apps for every 9 apps Android users download, Google Play grew 47 percent to iOS’s 4.5 percent.

Interestingly, Japan’s Google Play store outsold all others in October 2012 — the first time a non-U.S. country has led in revenues on a major app store. That’s particularly amazing since Japanese users download at a rate that’s one-fourth the rate of U.S. user downloads.

“This represents a major tectonic shift in the international app store economy and one that I’m sure publishers will be looking to take advantage of,” said Schmitt.

In addition to the global data, App Annie was able to determine the top publishers by revenue. For October the top 10 iOS publishers, 80 percent of which are from the U.S. or Japan, were:

1. Electronic Arts
2. Supercell
3. Zynga
4. Gameloft
5. Apple
6. Applibot Inc.
7. SQUARE ENIX
8. GungHo Online Entertainment, Inc.,
9. Kabam
10. GREE, Inc.

There’s a very different set of publishers leading Google Play in revenue, partially because Android is very strong in Korea — now there’s a shocker — as well as Japan and India. Eight of the top 10 publishers by revenue on Google Play are from Korea or Japan:

1. DeNA Co., Ltd.
2. COLOPL, Inc.
3. GungHoOnlineEntertainment
4. WeMade Entertainment CO., LTD
5. Zynga
6. GAMEVIL Inc.
7. GREE, Inc.
8. NAVER
9. Gameloft
10. NextFloor

photo credit: coreythrace via photopin cc, stitchohana via photopin cc

Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a platform for mobile game developers.

The stage was set with an expected one billion HTML5 phones sold by 2013. Facebook was ready to pave the way. I could repeat many other reasons why HTML5 should have taken off in 2012, but as we’ve seen over the last year, it just didn’t. Mark Zuckerberg said it best, “The biggest mistake we did as a company was bet too much on HTML5.”

Here’s an explanation for why HTML5 did not meet the high expectations set last year.

1. Cross-Platform HTML5 Development Hasn’t Taken Off

There is a massive split between desktop and mobile HTML5. Just because the technology exists across desktop and mobile, doesn’t mean the design issues have changed:

1) Keyboard compared to keypad
2) Screen size of the platform
3) Mouse compared to touchscreen.

It’s optimal to develop products for a specific platform. This allows developers to personalize the look, feel, and functionality of an app, which is extremely important from a user experience standpoint. The assumption held by many who were looking to HTML5, was that users would access apps across devices, from desktop to mobile. In reality, users will pick the one with the best functionality and naturally gravitate to the platform on which an app works best.

When it comes to mobile, an app has to be developed with the mobile user in mind. Nothing is more frustrating for a developer than devoting time across multiple platforms, only to discover later that your users prefer one device over another. No matter what, developing across multiple platforms takes time, energy, and thoughtfulness.

2. App Stores Deliver Discoverability, HTML5-Only Sites Are Out in the Woods

It’s easy to create a browser link with a homescreen icon for a mobile device, but much harder to change cultural practices. The challenge HTML5 publishers experience is creating an easy and positive experience to access hybrid apps. Mobile users now expect to be told to download an app and, instinctively, users search for apps in stores. Google and Apple dominate these stores and have thus far not made steps towards including HTML5 sites.

Facebook created the most publicized “universal store,” listing both native and sites in HTML5 — some believe as a way to circumvent Apple and Google’s app stores. With the hopes of coaxing them to include HTML5 apps, Facebook assembled a network of developers under the W3C but so far that strategy has not shown traction.

3. Hybrid Apps Can’t Depend on Mobile Browsers

I thought that at least one major console game would be released or re-released using WebGL. It may have happened, but in lieu of the previous point, the big mobile browser players like Chrome and Safari have shown no intention to grow their browsers to fully support HTML5 technologies. For example, WebGL, a central tool for 3D game development has been incompatible with the aforementioned mobile browsers.

Compatibility is one issue, but there’s also speed on the mobile browser. Findings from a study we conducted earlier this year showed that HTML5 running on mobile browsers was ten to seven hundred times slower than when running on a desktop. In fact, on average mobile browsers were 889 times slower. Implicit within this data is that a large percentage of mobile users have a poor experience when accessing web apps that are graphical in nature.

4. Fragmentation, Fragmentation, Fragmentation

Is the name of the game when it comes to hybrid apps. Anyone who has built a website has experienced browser compatibility issues. Double these across platforms and you have a headache. For example, Sean Soria, an engineer for Gamzee described some of the issues they faced building Skyscraper City in a guest post for Facebook’s HTML5 blog.

In the post Soria describes a hack to increase speed on the DOM “is fake 3D transforms on your CSS. That triggers hardware acceleration on most mobile devices, resulting in better performance than Canvas, for example.” This is awesome — except the workaround doesn’t work on Android phones. There are many issues like this, where both problems and solutions are distinct on each device.

5. HTML5 Isn’t Robust Enough

From what I’ve seen, the hype has led to many people overestimating how much developers like using JavaScript. Is JavaScript great for cross platform development? Yes. Do developer prefer it over possible alternatives? Not quite yet. For more complicated apps, especially games, object-oriented and more strongly typed languages are still preferred by developers.

So, HTML5 didn’t pan quite how we thought it was going to. It turned into a scapegoat for Facebook and possibly one of the most overhyped advancements of the mobile generation. If HTML5 truly is the future, than we’re much farther from that future then we thought. That’s not to say that HTML5 won’t get it right some day – just not any time soon.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Google’s hands-off, democratic vision of mobile application development is both a blessing and curse for developers. While the open-source nature of Android serves as a low-barrier of entry, it also necessitates giving due diligence to every development quirk that could snowball into an underwhelming user experience.

Producing intuitive, beautiful and functional apps means anticipating the difficulties posed by the Android operating system—and planning around them before they lead to poor ratings and sadness all around.

After building more than 30 Android apps, I’ve seen a lot of bugs and errors. To save you the time and effort, I’m sharing five of the most common Android development blunders and what can be done to prevent them.

1. Looking like an iOS app

A lot of dev shop clients want to port existing iOS apps to the Android platform and recycle the same design. That’s a horrible taboo to break. Android applications have their own look and feel that is distinct from iOS and other platforms. What makes sense on iOS doesn’t always make sense on Android. Plus, users are smart and will call out and give poor ratings to Android applications that look like iOS applications.

Google has written extensive Design Guidelines elaborating on how Android applications should look. Read it! Learn it! Some design rules are made to be broken and you can distinguish your application by bending the rules in shrewd ways—but you should learn the rules before you play ball.

2. Poor support for multiple device formats

Android device fragmentation is real. There are lots of versions of the operating system, lots of screen sizes, and lots of keyboard layouts in the ecosystem. Many applications do a poor job of supporting the vast diversity of devices in the world.

It doesn’t have to be so hard. Android gives developers an array of tools to combat this bewildering space. Here are some things to remember:

• Use dp (density-independent pixels) or layout_weights to layout your UI. Density-independent pixels are scaled automatically by the layout system to be approximately the same size regardless of screen size and density. layout_weights are useful if you want to device the screen into regions that are proportionally the same regardless of the screen size (e.g.: when you want the left pane to be one-third of the screen-width on all devices). Note that layout_weights force the layout routines to repeatedly measure your Views on screen and can be slow.
• Use XML resources as much as possible to layout your screens. You can provide alternate layouts for different screen sizes to be automatically used at run-time.
• Be careful if you decide to lock the screen orientation to portrait-only. Many Android devices with slide-out keyboards will switch to landscape orientation when the keyboard is pulled out. If your application is locked to a portrait screen-orientation then you may infuriate your users.

3. Loading too many big images

Handling large bitmap images on Android is hard. We still haven’t found the silver bullet that helps us load as many images as we want without running out of memory.

The main problem is that the amount of RAM available to individual processes in Android applications is disappointingly small. The maximum heap size keeps getting bigger and bigger with successive OS releases and fancier devices, but it’s hard to believe that we’ll ever have the luxury to load as many huge images as we could in desktop environments.

What can you do? First, make sure that you are not leaking references to your images when you’re done. You want to get that image off of your heap as soon as possible. And if you’re really serious about freeing up much needed RAM, here are some other things to consider:

• Make sure to set the callback on your Drawable objects to null when you’re done with them.
• Don’t leak references to Activities or Contexts that could reference your images, or any views that could reference your images.
• Don’t build full screens using images. Be clever and change your screen to use combinations of smaller images and XML-drawables, if possible.

4. No visual indication when touching buttons

This problem is simple to solve, but I’ve seen it done poorly so many times. Your application needs to give positive feedback when the user interacts with the application’s display. If you touch a button, it should be highlighted.

Android makes it easy to provide different graphical states for on-screen elements based on their current selection or pressed states. You need to assign a StateListDrawable to your custom screen elements. The easiest way to do this is to create a drawable XML file with a state selector (see the above link for an example).

5. Blocking requests on the UI-thread

Have you ever seen an application hang and stop responding to your input? Did you see the dreaded Application Not Responding dialog box? These little emergencies can occur if you block your application’s UI-thread for too long.

If anything running on that thread takes too long (for example, network or database requests) then the user can experience a jarring episode of jankiness. A lot of users can’t tell the difference between these kinds of hangs and mundane crashes and will think your application is buggy (which, for all intents and purposes, it is).

This sin is so grievous that applications targetting the Honeycomb API, or greater, will experience NetworkOnMainThreadException if the application makes a network request using the UI-thread.

How do you guard against these misdeeds? Use AsyncTasks and ThreadPoolExecutors to toss your blocking calls onto worker threads. When your background tasks complete you can use callbacks or post messages to your UI-thread’s message loop to process the results.

Overall, there are myriad challenges to overcome when designing Android apps. As a developer, working around these common blunders means you’ll have a better shot at creating smooth functionality and an elegant interface that will be critical for keeping your users happy.

Rob Szumlakowski is an engineer at Xtreme Labs with extensive experience in Android and iOS software development and has been involved with the creation of several popular Android applications, including Dictionary.com, Fandango, and the Globe and Mail. When not building amazing mobile apps, Szumlakowski is travelling (34 countries so far), cycling, snowboarding, practicing photography, or cooking up a storm.

Top image courtesy of ostill, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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In fact, according to the recent survey by mobile app tools vendor Kendo UI, 94 percent of developers are either using HTML5, or plan to start using it this year, leaving only a minuscule six percent who have no plans to develop with HTML5 before 2013 rolls around in just two short months.

That’s the kind of stat that is sometimes easy to manipulate when there’s a larger percentage in the wishy-washier “planning” segment, but not in this case, with a full 63 percent of developers using HTML5 today.

That’s impressive.

HTML5 is an updated version of the old-school hyper-text markup language that makes up much of the web today. It enables developers to build on their existing knowledge of web technologies such as HTML, Javascript, and cascading style sheets to create mobile apps through frameworks such as Adobe’s PhoneGap rather than having to learn Objective-C to write full-native iPhone/iPad apps, or Java to write Android apps. Probably even more importantly, by using cross-platform technologies like PhoneGap, HTML5 enables developers to write their apps once and deploy on all major mobile platforms.

Given the numbers who are already using HTML5, it’s no shock that 82 percent of developers also say that the technology will be important to their jobs in the next year, and a further 12 percent believe it will be become important within the next two years.

Developers’ rationale for using and preferring HTML5 is no shock to anyone who’s ever developed native apps for multiple mobile platforms. Sixty-two percent said that HTML5′s ability to enable cross-platform support was an important factor in choosing the technology, with another third saying that the availability of tools and code libraries make it appealing.

But the biggest reason developers like HTML5?

Familiarity. Almost three-quarters of developers said that HTML, Javascript, and CSS were familiar languages which enabled easy access to mobile app markets.

And what about Facebook’s move away from HTML5. Apparently, that hasn’t shaken developers’ belief in the technology — half of them weren’t even aware of the move. Of those who did, however, while 17 percent had less faith in HTML5 after the news, 18 percent had more faith.

The survey is obviously from a company with a vested interest in HTML5 adoption, but it jibes with what I’ve heard from people like Andi Gutmans, key developer of the PHP programming language and current CEO of Zend, who is pushing what he calls cloud-connected mobile apps and just released a version of Zend Studio that enables developers to build native mobile apps with familiar web technologies.

Which, frankly, just makes sense if you don’t want to build the same app three times for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone … and if your app is not the most computationally intensive app in the world and absolutely needs to be fully native for performance reasons.

photo credit: codepo8 via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Yesterday, Zend announced that the new version of Zend Studio will lead to what Gutmans calls ‘cloud-connected mobile’ apps.

In the updated development environment, you can simultaneously create server-side code, integrate web services, communicate with legacy infrastructure … and design and build native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, all in the same project.

I chatted with him today at ZendCon.

VentureBeat: How many years have you been working on PHP?

Andi Gutmans: Since 1997. I guess that’s about 15 years. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I realized that, yes, I am actually older now.

VentureBeat: You’re now the CEO of Zend, of course. Do you still contribute any source code?

Gutmans: Not too much … not actively. My main contribution is that I still do review source code. We’re still the key maintainers of PHP to this day. So my only real engineering meeting is on the Zend engine.

VentureBeat: You’re one of the still fairly rare developers who became and is still his company’s CEO. Talk to me about that transition.

Source: John Koetsier

Zend Studio, creating a mobile app.

Gutmans: It actually happened about three and a half years ago, fairly recently. Originally, we [Gutmans and co-founder Zeev Suraski] had no aspirations to run the business. So we brought in a CEO.

When he left, I was the number two, and still had no aspirations, so we recruited another one. But then I moved to Silicon Valley. I became a more outgoing CTO and started meeting partners much more frequently. I basically transitioned to biz dev, and between 2004 and 2009, I was almost a member of the marketing team.

I won’t tell you what they used to call me!

It sort of happened naturally, between 2004 and 2009. I think it’s important to really understand where the market is — this is a very technically driven filed — and over time I built a business sense and become more effective at making deals.

Then in 2009 the board reached out to me and asked me to take the leadership role. It still wasn’t my plan, but they wanted a founder focus and a strong focus on product – we had started to do too much services. So what I’ve done over the past three years is move the company from 20 percent of revenue on runtime (software sales) to 70 percent today.

And we’re profitable today — it was a big step up for the company.

The one skill I benefited from from being an engineer was my Excel ability. We have a volume business, and the ability to analyze the business becomes more and more important. Sure, it’s 50 percent data and 50 percent gut, but the data is important.

It’s a tough job — there are always moments of regret – but it’s been great. Being a CEO is not easy. I really liked Ben Horowitz’ article on making yourself a CEO.

Source: Cal Evans - http://www.flickr.com/photos/calevans/2071724366/

The PHP elephant

VentureBeat: PHP 5 was released in 2004, now we’re on 5.4. Is development slowing down, do you have less to do, or are point releases actually incorporating more functionality?

Gutmans: It’s a balancing act. There are constantly new versions coming out as we see some of the best practices around frameworks, for example in 5.3 support for closures.

On the one hand, you have to be careful you don’t add too many new features. PHP is such a huge community you want it to be stable, but you need to find a balance between being stable and not bloated, but also bringing in new features.

One area that we’re always working on is performance: There’s always more work being done on the engine to find speed improvement.

VentureBeat: When can we expect 6.0? What’s on the road map for that?

Gutmans: There isn’t a road map right now – the PHP community doesn’t always have timetables. 5.5 is being worked on, but the decision on when it’s 6 or 5.5 is based on number of features we’re adding.

And our preference is to keep backward compatibility, too.

VentureBeat: You’ve talked a lot about “cloud-connected mobile apps.” What do you mean by that, and what does that mean for the apps of the future?

Gutmans: We all see how user interaction is moving to mobile first, and by that we mean phones, tablets, and touch, which demand a new interaction paradigm. What’s changing is that the use cases for how you consume services and how you interact change, and that has implications for how you build not only your client side but also your server side.

That’s why I say “cloud-connected-mobile” and not just mobile.

It’s not just about the client, it’s about the services that the client consumes. Business logic runs on the server side, and now the cloud services … they need to tailor to this new interaction paradigm.

VentureBeat: Fast-forward five years. Where is PHP, and where is Zend?

Gutmans: We think PHP has a unique opportunity to be the enterprise standard for web development and mobile.

With the agility and the speed and the interoperability that you need when developing … that is where PHP has a sweet spot. The incumbents like Java and .Net have a tough road. Java, in my opinion, is too heavy a solution and too slow, and .Net has issues because cloud is less Windows-centric.

And the new players, Ruby for example, don’t have the enterprise support that we’ve built over the years for PHP.

So there’s a really great opportunity for PHP to capture those new apps that are being built. You’re still going to have Java forever on the backend.

On the client side … I believe web technologies will ultimately win. As we see mobile take over … you’ll see increased fragmentation, so the web will increasingly be the platform. I think that will happen within 3-5 years.

The main barrier today is probably Apple.

I don’t think it’s going to be a sustaining strategy for them – over time they will have to open up to the web. Right now, Apple is not enabling us today to do mobile apps in the most high performance way … they’re not giving us access to APIs that you can get on Android.

They state security is the reason, but I think they’re trying to create some roadblocks to having an optimized web experience and to protect the objective-C ecosystem.

I’m still a big fan of their devices, though. [He pulls out a iPhone 4S.]

VentureBeat: Are you planning to get an iPhone 5?

Gutmans: I don’t know. Probably not. I do intend to get an iPad mini, however, to replace my first-generation iPad.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Yesterday at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans unveiled new capability in Zend Studio to build “cloud-connected mobile apps.” The latest version of Zend Studio helps developers create web services, intelligent mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and even your app’s user interface, all in one connected, simplified development environment. In fact, I watched Zend’s Kent Mitchell do it in about 10 minutes.

“It’s pretty cool,” IBMs’ Ryan Watkins told me last night at a ZendCon reception. “It definitely makes it look easy.”

Princeton University’s Henry Umansky, who builds internal web applications for the university’s staff and students, was even more effusive.

“It looks impressive! I think it will be a complete paradigm shift in the way people develop for mobile first,” he said. “And it’s excellent for rapid prototyping. The stakeholders for our projects are generally very visual people.”

The new Zend Studio integrates Cordova, the open-source project better known as PhoneGap, to help developers launch native apps for multiple mobile platforms from a single codebase. That’s what was attractive to Quicken Loan‘s Jim Starr.

“Our developers want to write once and deploy everywhere,” he told me. “I’m intrigued by that.”

Another developer, who didn’t want to be named as he did not have permission to speak for his company, was cautiously optimistic, saying that though he didn’t develop much for mobile at the moment, “things are shifting that way.”

A number of developers I spoke to were, like him, cautiously examining the idea of being able to develop for mobile — almost like a child with a new toy that he or she has not yet determined is fun or scary. For many PHP developers, it seems, the transition from back-end server-side development to new user-interface-centric mobile development is a bit of a leap.

One thing that might be interesting from a Zend point of view: developers who use PHP but don’t use Zend might now be convinced to use Zend’s development stack: Studio, Server, and so on.

“It looks pretty cool. I haven’t used Zend Studio yet,” said Dru Spackman, who builds in the NetBeans IDE but is now considering a change.

photo credit: CalEvans via photopin cc

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Now stop imagining and just watch the video below.

I just interviewed Kent Mitchell, Zend’s senior director of product management. Zend, of course, is the company that makes the most-used PHP development environment. It’s the company started by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the primary originators of the PHP language (after founder Rasmus Lerdorf).

PHP jockies out there will be impressed, I think, to find that Mitchell is not just a marketing drone … he’s a full-on, hard-core, honest-to-goodness developer.

And given that Zend just announced the ability to create mobile apps directly within Zend Studio, I challenged him to show me how it works, from start to finish.

I think when you’ll watch that you will find he came pretty damn close:

As Mitchell says, “In just a few minutes, I’ve created a new web service, I’ve deployed it into the cloud, and I’ve created some new widgets on this mobile site. Now, we want to turn around and make this a native application.”

And he does, in just a few more clicks, create a project that is tied to the Xcode tools that iOS developers would normally use to create native apps. The same functionality, of course, is possible for Android applications.

Frankly, this is pretty amazing.

While creating apps, developers can test and view their apps right on their development machine, and integrated debugging is included. It’s an over-used expression, but this is a game-changer for developers and enterprises.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Twitter bought Clutch.io two months ago, but isn’t interested in the startup’s A/B testing technology, which helps developers add multivariate tests to their iPhone and Android apps in just a few lines of code. In a generous gesture, Clutch.io open-sourced the software to run the service … but doing so means that developers would have to run and maintain their own servers.

So Convert.com is doing that for them. Developers will be able to seamlessly transition to the same service they are currently using, except now on Convert.com servers, without making any changes to their optimization code.

And the price sounds good, too.

“In the beginning there will be no cost, at least until the end of the year,” Convert.com’s chief executive Dennis van der Heijden told me today. “Then we’ll have plans that match Clutch.io previously offered.”

Convert.com currently focuses on landing page and website optimization. This new step will allow the company to expand to mobile multivariate testing. Over time, van der Heijden told me, the services will merge, enabling optimization of web sites and mobile apps with a single tool.

“The timing was just right,” said van der Heijden, who has been considering the mobile market for some time now. “We’ve been watching Clutch.io for a while.”

He also said that Convert.com had been receiving request from its clients about similar services, and that many agencies are struggling with how to manage mobile sites and apps.

photo credit: emdot via photopin cc

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Today, that’s exactly what they’ve done, making the code available to developers in a Github repository.

We open sourced the @clutchio bits finally so you can run the service on your own engineering.twitter.com/2012/10/open-s…

—
Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) October 11, 2012

Clutch.io’s A/B testing tool allows mobile developers to add multivariate tests to their apps with just a few lines of code. They can then show different versions of their app to different users and measure the effectiveness of each variation.

The recently acquired company has also open-sourced its Clutch Framework, which enables developers to mix native code and web technology in a single app. Native code — Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android — gives the app speed and platform-standard look-and-feel. Web technologies allow developers to change parts of their apps, which now live on their own servers, quickly and easily without having to go through an app store approval process.

Source: Clutch.io

Code to integrate Clutch.io into your mobile app

As a little bonus, Clutch Framework also provides app analytics, telling developers what users are doing with their apps, which helps with future development.

Now that the open source version is available, Clutch.io’s hosted application has been end-of-lifed, and its termination is Nov. 1.

The negative of the open source code, of course, is that it is not a hosted service. It will require installation and maintenance. In addition, and perhaps worse, unless a core team adopts it and maintains it, the codebase will age while other tools improve their functionality.

Developers who don’t want to manage their own services will have to look at other options such as Leanplum or Swrv, who, incidentally, we interviewed at MobileBeat 2012.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

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There are moments in your life as a mobile developer when you actually don’t want or need your app to get super popular — for example, when you’re building an app for internal corporate use only, or when you’re testing a new version of an app among a small group of employees and friends.

For those moments — when you don’t want your apps publicly distributed — there’s now a new solution. Called Knappsack, the product is launching today with free, premium, and open-source versions.

Knappsack was built especially for testing environments within development shops or large companies, as well as government and enterprise organizations that need to run secure apps for internal eyes only.

In some ways, it’s a bit like TestFlight (a free solution for testing iOS apps) plus Ad Hoc (Apple’s limited distribution service) plus Apple’s business-to-business custom distribution for registered developers, except that it’s an all-in-one product, and it runs on all devices, not just iOS.

In a conversation with Knappsack’s makers at tech shop SPARC, we learned that while Knappsack’s competitors abound, this SaaS offering differs in a few ways. First, it’s secure enough for government use. Second, it spans all the major mobile platforms and desktops, too.

Third, it supports multiple versions of an app with granular controls over which groups of users see which version. For example, you can set up a version for field agents who need to send in reports and a separate version for managers who need to coordinate the activities of the sales force in the field. Or you could have a stable beta being tested by all 100 employees at your digital media boutique, but a less stable, newer version being tested by just the 15 employees on the mobile development team.

Finally, the SPARC folks emphasized how Knappsack speaks to a unique challenge of the enterprise. The bring-your-own-device trend has made mobile device management (MDM) a big concern for IT managers. In a recent guest post on VentureBeat, one such manager went into gory detail about the “security fun-sponge” that BYOD in general and MDM in particular represents, saying that management had to be prepared to remotely wipe an employee’s whole device in the event of a data breach, as well as continuously monitoring each employee’s apps and data. A true fun-sponge if ever there was one.

On the other hand, the Knappsack team advocates mobile application management, a more granular (and less expensive) approach that keeps company data safe while allowing employees to use whatever devices they like. “It’s a BYOD party, and your whole company is invited!” as they’d say. The team noted that not just applications but any kind of file — even PDFs — can be shared via Knappsack.

The product’s open source provenance is a nice touch, too. Knappsack is based on an eponymous open-source project, so if you’re good and comfortable with running your own software on your own stack, it’s free of charge and free to fork as you please. The paid version takes care of the stack for you.

Knappsack is available on a sliding scale of free to appropriately spendy, depending on your needs. The freemium version will let you roll out up to two app versions to up to 10 employees — perfect for a mobile app startup — and the Standard and Plus plans cost $20 and $75 per month, respectively, for larger numbers of apps, users, storage, and bandwidth. Custom pricing is available for larger internal applications with more than 1,000 users.

Top image courtesy of Robert Kneschke, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed the flurry of Facebook mobile app updates today: two new Facebook apps for Android and an upgrade for the social network’s iOS app, too.

It’s no coincidence; in fact, you can expect the same speed and quality for future updates, too.

In an engineering blog post, Facebooker Christian Legnitto, who’s responsible for pushing out mobile code for the company, says that Facebookers working on mobile have been taking the same doubled-down approach to release cycles that the rest of Facebook’s engineers use for the website code pushes.

As a result, the company has released its best apps yet, Facebook and Facebook Messenger for Android and Facebook for iOS, all within four weeks of each other. In fact, Facebook for iOS got two releases between last month and today.

Pushing out new versions “early and often” is a big part of Facebook’s hacker ethic, but Legnitto notes that this pace can present problems when applied to a mobile release cycle. Facebook.com gets thousands of test features and code pushes each week, but native mobile app architecture makes the same process impossible. For example, you can’t do a rolling release to a few thousand users at a time; mobile apps are all or nothing. And you can’t release buggy code; what would merely slow down a website might completely crash a mobile app.

But with a few tweaks, Legnitto says the release cycle for the website has been adapted for mobile with great results, including a predictable and precise schedule for updates to mobile apps.

“Today’s Facebook for Android update came just four weeks since the last version, and our goal is to deliver another in a month,” he says. “We’re now delivering on regular ship cycles for Facebook for iOS, Camera, and Messenger as well.”

Because downloading a mobile app is a bit more speedbumpy than signing into an automatically updated web page, Legnitto says, “We also wanted to balance getting improvements out to people quickly while minimizing disruptions for users. Our 4-8 week release timelines feel like a good trade-off for now.”

And as many users have noted since downloading the latest versions of Facebook’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, quality is becoming an ever-higher standard for the mobile team.

“We’ve adopted this new date-driven release process so that people get important stability, speed, and feature improvements as soon as they are ready,” says Legnitto. “This helps us drive toward higher quality — one of our top priorities on mobile.”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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AnyPic, the latest addition to the Parse gallery, is a photo-sharing app. Along with open sourcing the technology, Parse produced a tutorial that teaches users “How to Build Instagram in Just 30 Minutes.” Now anyone can create a billion dollar app in the time it takes to bake cookies. Not really, but they can at least clone one.

“A lot of people are adopting a mobile-first strategy, but mobile development is complicated,” said co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “There are connectivity issues, unpredictable iteration cycles, varying interfaces, and multiple code languages. We want to show that building a sexy, engaging, scaleable app does not have to be hard.”

Parse set out to create AnyPic after observing Instagram’s rampaging success. Using Parse’s platform, companies attempting to build photo-sharing capabilities into their own products can do it without spending thousands on an elusive (and expensive) mobile developer. Parse will handle the complicated, nitty-gritty, backend work of servers, networks, caching etc. and let businesses deal with the front-facing components like user experience and design.

For this reason, Parse has met with great success from companies inside and outside of the technology sector. Well-known companies like Hipmunk, Exec, and Band of the Day, are run with Parse, as well as clothing brands and sports teams that want a mobile presence to ramp up marketing.

Parse hit a traction milestone this week and announced that it now powers 25,000 apps and reaches tens of millions of devices. Chances are, with the popularity of mobile technology right now (and around $7 million in venture capital), Parse will only continue to grow and innovate on its quest to democratize mobile development.

The company is based in San Francisco and has 16 employees. It participated in the Y Combinator class of summer 2011. AnyPic is currently available in the AppStore.

Oh, developers, if you ever doubt that we love you, remember today, the day we gave you some free stuff.

Icenium is a nifty tool that lets you build native mobile applications for Android and iOS devices for distribution in those ecosystems’ app stores. All you have to know is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Icenium manages all the platform dependencies, so there are no SDKs for you to futz with, and it’s cloud-based, so you can code from anywhere. Also, when you make changes in Icenium, they’ll appear on your devices in real time.

An Icenium rep sent the below pic as an example:

“Pictured are eight connected devices that update in real-time: three iOS and five Android (Gingerbread, Honeycomb & Ice Cream Sandwich variations),” the rep said.

“Changes appear in real time across different form factors and resolutions, including single density, double-density 4:3 displays (iPad 1 & iPad 3), 16:9 displays (Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9), multiple phone screen sizes, and non-standard sizes (e.g. Kindle Fire). Icenium uses responsive design and CSS, tailor-styling based on screen dimensions and pixel depth, ensuring apps look great.”

Basically, the company has acknowledged that the entire mobile universe is fragmented. Android takes a lot of heat for having a wider range of form factors in its hardware, but when you consider all mobile devices together, the fragmentation is even more obvious. So then, if Android is Marvel and iOS is DC, Icenium is the Twisted ToyFare Theatre that brings ‘em all together (and if that reference eludes you, you probably have lots of friends and are a great dancer).

“Recently, I was at a technology trade show where we were demoing Icenium non-stop for several days,” writes former Microsoftie and current Iceniumite Doug Seven on the company blog. “Every demo I did, I would ask the person I was speaking with about their interest in mobile app development and their background. My anecdotal findings are that the majority of the people I engaged with were coming from a web development background and either approaching mobile because of the opportunity it provides (reaching millions of people) or because they are being directed to by their boss (e.g. how can they mobilize their existing web assets).

“In either case, the person I was speaking with and the development team they were representing had existing skills in HTML and JavaScript and were somewhat intimidated by Objective-C and Java (or at least frustrated that they were going to have to learn anther set of skills to solve this problem).”

With the web tech, the cross-platform-ness, and the cloud-based tools, Icenium is offering y’all a perfect storm of mobile development trends, and we’re happy to say that you, yes, you, are among the elite smartiepantses being asked to take it for a test drive.

Today, Icenium is letting 1,500 VentureBeat readers sign up free for the closed beta.

Sign up while you can, and we hope you’re able to do great things with it. If not, we welcome a cranky guest post from you about how cross-platform mobile development is a pipe dream and will the damn kids please stay the heck off your lawn.

Icenium is a spin-off product from Microsoft-focused dev tools shop Telerik, which has offices in Bulgaria and Waltham, Mass.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Microsoft made a boatload of announcements today regarding Windows Phone 8, its new mobile operating system coming this fall. And it’s clear the company is making a huge push to get more developers involved with the platform.

See, if it gets the developers, it gets the awesome apps. And if it gets the apps, it can (possibly) get the audience it’s so far been sorely lacking for Windows Phone.

In a developer and press preview, the company showed off eight big platform features and two major changes in how Windows Phone will work for developers. So we reached out to a few Windows Phone developers to see how these changes will affect their experience and business.

One kernel to rule them all… ish

First things first. Microsoft is making some big claims about compatibility between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. In fact, an executive said the two platforms share a common kernel and that the same code could run on both. (The old Windows Phone OS had a kernel based on the Windows CE kernel.)

Developers are undecided about what this means in theory and in practice.

“It’s not necessarily PR fluff, but it isn’t anything new. With Windows Phone 7 and XNA, you could target PC, WP7 and Xbox 360 with the same project,” said Tyler Schacht, who develops a successful video poker app for Windows Phone and iOS.

Josh Smith, a developer who works on the Windows Phone platform at Appsmyth, further noted that regardless of operating system (theoretical) interoperability, a mobile app would still need specific development and design.

“The desktop and mobile devices are fundamentally different forms of interaction, and there is very little to be had in common. Mobile apps are about unique interfaces, utilizing interesting technology (like the mobile wallet in the Windows Phone, which provides the potential of a brand new loyalty experience), and creating an engaging experience on the go,” said Smith. “That simply does not replicate into a desktop app if you’ve designed your mobile app correctly.”

Still, Smith said, the new kernel means new benefits. “The new kernel can run native code, which means better performance. … The old CE kernel couldn’t support some hardware easily. The new kernel will make it possible to offer more hardware than was previously available.”

Native code in C++/C

Another big announcement today was that Windows Phone developers would be able to write apps and games in C++/C — a particular boon for game developers.

“Existing high-powered game engines can come across to Windows Phone with ease,” said Matt Cavanagh, another Windows Phone dev. “Lots of game companies didn’t want to rewrite their whole codebase (and in some case couldn’t because of the lack of native access).” The result was fewer Windows Phone games and a smear on Windows Phone’s image in game-dev circles.

“The problem … with WP7 was that is was lacking the big-name apps that iOS and Android users were used to,” Schacht concurred. “Sure, Microsoft supported (or ‘sponsored’, in my opinion) apps like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, but now we could see many more ‘tri-platform’ titles without direct intervention from Microsoft.”

Schacht also noted that game engines and frameworks such as Corona SDK and Unity can now be ported to Windows Phone 8. “This will make it much easier for existing apps on iOS and Android to be released on Windows Phone 8,” he said.

Smith said the new languages (not to mention the lovely Metro UI style) may also serve as iOS dev bait to lure Apple fan-devs to the dark side.

“This is generally a lot easier for developers than developing on the traditional Windows platforms,” he said. “Developing in C/C++ means people with Objective-C experience can pretty easily cross the gap, and Windows Phone can be supported by an already established iOS team that is willing to learn some new conventions.”

Fighting Apple and Google for developers’ time

Overall, we were pretty impressed with Microsoft’s bid to win developers’ time and attention. Today’s presentation was glossy as all get-out, and the executives gave us plenty to be excited about.

But can Windows Phone 8 compete with Android’s popularity (and money-making potential) or Apple’s “it just works” magic between the desktop and mobile experiences? More importantly, can it avoid pitfalls such as fragmentation and stagnation?

For many developers, even ones who have had success on Windows Phone in the recent past, WP8 is still a “wait and see” platform.

“Microsoft may be aiming to avoid the fragmentation in the future, but they badly fumbled the ball with WP7,” said Schacht. “As of this announcement, every WP7 phone sold is technically ‘last gen’.” And none of those phones will be able to run Windows Phone 8, we were told by Microsoft this morning.

“One of our biggest pain points right now is developing across all manner of different Android devices and versions,” said Smith, echoing other’s hopes that tight links between desktop and mobile operating systems would lead to Windows continuity across all devices.

“Windows 8 is a sufficient improvement on earlier variants that we will begin to develop for it shortly,” he said. “If anything, this makes it easier for us as we can use some of our iOS talent to support and don’t have to worry quite as much about the lower installed user base that Windows Mobile had to deal with.”

That small Windows Phone 7 user base is a boon according to Cavanagh as well. “They can easily discontinue all WP7 devices right now while they have around 1 percent of the market, and there will be very little backlash,” he said. “The alternative would be to waste money trying to support the old stuff. I’m all for them killing off the older hardware and think it will go a long way to avoid fragmentation.”

Overall, today’s announcements “could drastically help the app ecosystem, which is where WP7 is lacking ‘curb appeal,’” said Schacht. Getting developers on Microsoft’s side is, indeed, a huge part of making the platform a hit with consumers, but it can be a chicken-egg scenario (developers don’t want to build apps for ghost-town platforms; users don’t want to buy phones without great apps).

“It is apparent that Microsoft realizes it still needed some big changes to compete with the big two,” Schacht continued. “Some of these changes are painful (especially to those who currently use WP7), and the future will tell if they will pay dividends.”

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Appcelerator is doing more than just letting you build mobile apps with the latest version of its mobile development framework, Titanium 2.0. Now the company is also providing an easy way to implement cloud services in your mobile apps — even if you’re not building your apps with Titanium.

Appcelerator Cloud Services opens the company up to an entirely new audience, Appcelerator CTO and co-founder Nolan Wright told VentureBeat in an interview last week. It’s driven by the company’s acquisition of Cocoafish in February. The ultimate goal for the company, not surprisingly, is to build a completely new type of mobile platform — one in which Appcelerator can provide services to all devs, even if they’re not using its platform.

“As a developer, you can consume these services easily with no additional setup,” Wright said. “In one environment, you can create both the mobile and cloud aspects of your app.”

Typically for cloud services, developers have to set up, write code, and manage a cl0ud server instance on Amazon, or some other provider. While that’s easier than the days of actually managing a physical server, it’s still too complicated for smaller developers, who just want to focus on building their apps.

Appcelerator Cloud Services is the next logical step in cloud offerings, Wright says. It allows devs to plug in cloud-powered feature like user management, photo storing and sharing, check-ins and other location services, social integration, and more. Wisely, the company is offering the cloud services to developers using Objective-C, Java, HTML5, and other publishing platforms — devs who typically wouldn’t have a reason to use Titanium.

Wright tells me that the company is offering the cloud services with a freemium model, which will scale depending on how much the cloud services are accessed. He believes that the cloud platform is strong enough to power mobile apps even as they get incredibly popular. Wright points out that other companies like Stackmob offer similar cloud services, but Appcelerator is the first to start with its own app development framework.

Given just how much of a lifesaver Appcelerator Cloud Services will be to devs, I asked Wright if the company is considering opening it up to non-mobile web apps. He said that plenty of the services could easily be applicable to desktop web apps, but the company hasn’t yet made any decisions for supporting apps outside of mobile.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Appcelerator has raised around $47 million in funding from Storm Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and others.

Cloud phone photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Source: Charlie Kindel / Flickr

Just imagine if iOS, Android, and Windows Phone were as consistent as these three zebras. Boring!

Conventional wisdom says that massive diversification in the smartphone industry is a disaster for developers. How can even large development houses support three massively different mobile platforms: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone? With limited development budgets and even more limited marketing dollars, it seems impossible. More than that, even undesirable.

But convention wisdom is often dead wrong. The mobile platform wars may just be your best friend.

Here are five reasons why mobile fragmentation is good for you.

1. Big fish, small pond

So iOS has what, 50 million apps today? How are you going to stand out in that giant ocean? Even getting noticed is going to require incredibly good luck, huge marketing budgets, or a secret ally in the app store. Why even try?

Look at Amazon’s Android-based, highly customized Kindle Fire. Small platform, some might say — perhaps even a niche within a niche. But that’s actually a positive. “We’re seeing impressive uptake on Kindle Fire and Amazon’s marketplace,” said Nat Trienens, co-founder and Director of Mobile Services for Fuzz Productions in New York. “There aren’t as many apps in that market, so there’s a bigger opportunity to get better market position.”

You might not think Windows Phone is a platform worth considering. You’d be wrong. Sure, there’s been so little developer interest that Microsoft has been paying developers hundreds of thousands of dollars to port their apps over to Windows Phone. But that lack of interest can be a huge break for developers who were late to the iOS or Android parties. “We’ve talked to Microsoft about bringing our in-house apps over to Windows Phone,” said Chatow. “Windows Phone 8 is an interesting platform … there are opportunities to be early there.”

Making big ponds smaller means your app has more chance of getting noticed, installed, and used. If you can’t beat Angry Birds on iOS, maybe you can beat Gerbil Physics on Windows Phone.

2. Mobile is really, really, really big

You know this. This is not a shock. But have you really thought about it?

There are currently almost 6 billion people on the globe who have a mobile phone, according to the International Telecommunications Union. 6. Billion. People. That’s a lot. And many of them have or will soon have smartphones: IDC tells us that 491 million smartphones were shipped in 2011.

That means a lot of people want apps. We all know Android is huge and iOS is gargantuan. But with Nokia starting to ship Windows Phone units, Windows Phone is going to be a major platform. And BlackBerry still has some 80 or 90 million users worldwide.

Those numbers mean that apps can have success on a variety of platforms. You don’t have to focus only on iOS and Android.

3. Ready, Fire, Aim

Choosing your target market is as important as building your game, utility, or widget. And diversity in the mobile marketplace means you have options.

Take today’s billion dollar poster child for app success: Instagram. By focusing first — and only — on iPhone users, Instagram reached a huge audience: 30 million people. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom bet heavily on Apple users’ reputation for caring a lot about design and aesthetics. Limiting your app to a specific platform (at least initially) can help you focus your target audience on those users who are the most likely to resonate with your app … which gives you the greatest possible chance to break away from the pack and earn some positive buzz.

That doesn’t mean you ignore the other platforms. After all, Instagram did finally come to Android. And as Trienens noted, “you want to be on the platform that has the most usage potential.” But perhaps not right away.

You will also want to choose your target market based on relative platform strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps the best example is built-in turn-by-turn navigation on Android. You’d better be certain that your navigation app has something significant and distinct to offer if you decide to release on Android. After all, free is a strong argument for “good enough.” But perhaps iOS or BlackBerry or Windows Phone might be a more receptive market.

Or perhaps your app is focused on government markets. “The government is still using BlackBerry more heavily than other organizations,” said Chatow. And, in cases where large amounts of data entry are required, the physical keyboard still has its devotees. “I was sitting on the plane next to someone from a major retailer the other day. She was typing on her BlackBerry literally for the entire flight. When I asked whether her organization was considering other platforms, she said she couldn’t type on anything else.”

And BlackBerry still has a reputation of being a very secure platform, which is many politicians and leaders still use it. Perhaps it is the one thing that all of Barack Obama, Hugo Chavez, Sarah Palin, and Queen Elizabeth II all agree on.

4. Money, money, money

Platform choices also provide space for easy monetization experiments. How will you make the most money with your app?

Flurry, the mobile analytics and monetization company, says that when in comes to in-app purchases, Google Play accounts for only $.23 for every $1 that the iTunes app store generates, per user. But the models are different. Paid apps are doing better on iOS. Advertising models are successful on both platforms.

One important key to successful Android revenue optimization: compatibility testing. Seriously. Because Android is a more complex platform than iOS, with more device and OS diversity, more testing is required. As surprising as it may seem, an app that actually functions is going to convert better than one which does not.

5. Think different

What can you do on one platform that is totally impossible on another? That’s a potential niche to attack.

One example is an email app on iOS. Or a music library app, or salacious content. If you choose any of these ideas, you are going to run into Apple’s app store police, who will make sometimes arbitrary-seeming decisions, and the app you invested time and money into may never see the light of day. On Android, there are fewer restrictions. Also, there are other options: if your app won’t fly in Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market), there are 80 or more other app marketplaces to choose from.

Another platform difference is one of Google Play’s advantages: try before you buy. Sure, the original 24-hour limit was radically reduced to 15 minutes in December 2010, but try returning an app on iOS — it’s impossible in any time frame. You can use this in your marketing and in your app story, and it’s potentially better than developing a free “lite” app and a paid app, which splits your downloads, splits your reviews, and could prevent your apps from climbing the top download charts.

Even a very young platform like Windows Phone has unique advantages. Small can be beautiful, as the makers of I’m a WP7 app have found. There are fewer Windows Phone users, which can help create an immediate affinity when they meet serendipitously. It’s like owning an iPhone in 2007: You have an instant connection with others in the “club.”

Summing up

Mobile fragmentation creates challenges. Out of challenges come solutions. And in solutions are opportunities.

Seize your opportunities!

Photo credit: Charlie Kindel/Flickr.

Google has a blockbuster success on its hands with its Android mobile operating system. But the company also recently launched Chrome for Android, a mobile web browser.

So we thought we’d sit down with a spokesperson for the Google Chrome team and grill him on exactly where the company stands on the mobile web versus native app debate. At South By Southwest, Chrome developer relations guy Paul Irish took some time to chat with us about exactly that.

Check out this clip, and stay tuned for lots more from SXSW.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This story originally appeared on CNET and is republished with permission.

The mobile technology landscape is incredibly confusing. There are numerous choices, ranging from new HTML5 technologies, native app development methods, and all sorts of content management systems.

At CBS Interactive, we have numerous mobile solutions, including native apps for CBS.com, CNET, and “60 Minutes,” along with mobile-optimized Web sites for GameFaqs and global properties like ZDnet.

At first blush, it seems problematic that various properties have picked completely different architectures for mobile delivery. A technologist’s initial inclination is to have everyone run a consistent architecture across all of our properties. Yet it actually makes sense to run a variety of architectures to support mobile delivery.

The biggest issue to address is the ongoing tension between HTML5 and native. Most of the debate between the two is focused on different technical features that very quickly delve into minutia. However, the actual decision between the two should be made based on the type of traffic a site has.

Where’s the traffic coming from?

If the majority of a site’s traffic is side door traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the site should embrace mobile web and HTML5. Since most of the site’s users are arriving via links, the content must quickly load in the mobile browser. Such sites include music lyrics sites such as our site MetroLyrics and other types of information look up sites.

If a majority of a site’s traffic is direct but intermittent traffic–meaning users come directly to the site, but only once in a while–the site should implement HTML5 mobile Web. These types of sites are “tourist sites” that are not visited regularly by people and therefore users are very unlikely to download an app. Such sites include corporate websites such as my company’s CBSi.com homepage.

If the majority of a site’s traffic is direct traffic where people are regularly going straight to the site’s home page from a bookmark or typing in the URL, the site should use native apps. Such sites include CBS.com, CNET Reviews, and other types of highly branded destination sites.

Sites with direct traffic that is intermittent–meaning people drop by every now and then–should still use HTML5 rather than native. For sites with a lot of direct traffic, native apps also provide useful additional features such as push notifications and offline storage, which are not relevant to sites with intermittent or side door traffic.

Sites that have an even mix of direct and side door traffic should also implement both native apps and an HTML 5 mobile view. A word of caution, however: there is always an inclination to heavily promote your native app to everyone going to your mobile Web site by forcing users to click through a native app promotion. This is a way to piss people off. Most of those visitors are clicking on a link in Google or Facebook and expect to see the content. They don’t want to download your app.

What can you spend?

Once you determine whether to build an HTML5 mobile Web site or a native app, the next big question is how much you are willing to spend. Really, there are only two choices: complete and cheap or custom and expensive.

Sites should generally start with a turnkey and cheap solution. For turnkey mobile Web HTML5, vendors like Pressly and Mobify will take your content and make it sport a sexy, Flipboard-stye tablet interface. WordPress includes mobile plugins that work great on iPhone and Android. Be sure to add a “view full site” option so that your users can opt out of the mobile experience and access functionality that the turnkey HTML5 solutions do not yet support.

To deliver turnkey native apps, services like MobileRoadie will consume your content, social feeds, and more and let you style good iPhone and Android native apps, with iPad soon to come. The apps are gorgeous and responsive and provide extensive options.

For the sites that need to support both mobile web and native apps, it is likely that the turnkey vendors will soon begin to support both distribution channels, and one vendor will be able to deliver best-of-breed solutions for both mobile HTML5 and native apps. For now, however, I suggest using a different vendor for each.

Once you have a baseline mobile presence, you can consider adding a custom experience that will support numerous features and user interface enhancements. Unfortunately, custom means expensive, both for HTML5 and native apps.

There are numerous systems integrators such as that deliver elegant, iPhone, iPad and Android native apps. Be aware that these integrators are going to need to be able to integrate with your registration, user profile, and content systems and that will likely require engineering and IT work. Some integrators such as FreeRange360 have an underlying platform that makes this type of customization relatively straightforward.

While HTML5 has come a long way, it is still not up to par with the native app experience. Some publishers, such as the Financial Times and Playboy, have come close to native app functionality by investing heavily in HTML5 in order to bypass Apple’s 30 percent app store subscription fee. However, there are no turnkey JavaScript libraries that provide functionality such as efficient swiping and offline reading.

That said, it is relatively straightforward to efficiently deliver an excellent mobile Web experience. Libraries like jQuery mobile and Sencha mobile provide excellent HTML5 iPhone-style user interface controls, and it is easy enough in modern web frameworks such as PHP and Ruby to detect what type of device is requesting content and delivering a customized page for particular screen sizes, known as the “if viewport then” technique. It is tedious and cumbersome work, but can be done, and provides an excellent level of control and flexibility.

For properties that contain primarily text and images, you could consider a hybrid HTML5-native approach, where a mobile-optimized HTML5 site is wrapped with a native wrapper like PhoneGap. While this sounds like an ideal solution, consider that this approach is quite nascent, and that it takes quite a bit of work to make HTML5 work and look like a native app.

In summary, when discussing your mobile strategy, use the type of traffic your site has to determine whether to use HTML5 mobile Web or native apps, and then use your level of budget to decide whether to go turnkey or custom. And have some fun with your apps and please let me now what’s worked for you.

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can follow him at @peteryared.

Top photo credit: Bonnie Brown/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The Facebook tab can be installed on any Page — it shows up as a green “Download app” icon in Facebook’s left-hand menu — and when clicked, features app content and download options.

A Page’s visitors can even input a phone number to receive a download link via SMS, making this a feature that could finally close the loop between Facebook fan and application user. Developers can also add a “Like-gate” to require visitors to “like” their Page before viewing the tab’s content, as well as customize the tab name and the content inside it.

Launch partners Billboard and Vevo have already installed the tab to promote their mobile applications.

In addition to the Facebook tab product, Mixed Media Labs also offers the App.net suite of tools, designed to help app makers engineer better social media- and SEO-optimized web presences.

“We’re making it easier for app developers to use web virality to get more downloads,” Mixed Media Labs CEO and founder Caldwell told VentureBeat.

App.net is Mixed Media Labs second major endeavor. The Andreessen-Horowitz-backed company’s first go-around was with photo-sharing app Picplz, an app that faded in relevance as Instagram picked up steam. Picplz was spun out as a standalone company with a new owner so Mixed Media Labs could focus solely on App.net.

App.net, said Caldwell, who is most well-known for founding former music-streaming site Imeem, came to be after he realized that the app tools the company was making to monetize Picplz could be worth more than the photo-sharing idea.

“Clearly there’s a market need for these kinds of tools,” Caldwell said.

[Image via César Poyatos/Flickr]

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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