Droidcon London 2010 –The Report Day Two -November 20th

By Bhavya Siddappa, Technology Evangelist, Teleca Bangalore

Droidcon London 2010 – Day Two 29th Oct 2010
It was more of traditional conference the second day. Main topics were App´s, User Experience, Android development in general and a little about marketing. A great day too, read on!

Excellence in the Android User Experience: Romain Nurik from Google
Presented on how to create applications with great UX and great UI and extended his talk with Android design tips with some additional info on giving users great first impressions, and some new prototyping and asset generation tools that have become available.
Android User views: Ilicco Elia from Reuters Mobile
The App Store is not about the app, it’s about people, it’s about the edge that people believe they will get from the app. In-app purchasing is seriously lacking.
Growing the value of the application network: Christophe Francois form Orange
It was great to see Orange committing so many people and so much time to Android. Orange focusing apps: Orange TV with premium events, Connectivity & customer care, News, radio, Orange Map.
Creating Killer Location apps: Alex Housley from Rummble
Location is not a feature, it’s one element of context. Friend finders have been done to death, similarly, there will be opportunities working with existing big players in location “Where there’s a number there’s a game…”.
Android & CouchDB: Aaron Miller from CouchOne
CouchDB is a non-relational database (NoSQL) that stores JSON documents. Instead of queries, create “views” that allow fast lookup by keys. DB is highly durable. Good at multi-master replication and can easily write to any server. Its really powerful on a phone as it can sync with a server or with another phone and can have multiple DBs on net syncd to a single DB on phone.
Monetize your apps in emerging markets: by Chua Zi Yong from MoVend
He discussed the concept of marketing your apps to emerging markets. For a lot of people in emerging markets the phone is the only access to the internet, social networking, and gaming/entertainment device. He had some interesting statistics on mobile phone payments. Asia Pacific accounts for $62.8 million in mobile phone payments and the rest of the world only accounts for $45.8 million. The market for mobile app revenue is estimated at $135million for 2009 and at $4 billion for 2010.
Market is extremely fragmented; An Android market does not exist in certain countries. Tip: Try to get your application pre-loaded onto a phone and target what specific users like.
Android has a “dude” problem: by Belinda Parmar from Lady Geek TV
When surveyed only 5% of women said Android for their next phone, 57% said an iPhone. BUT… more women than men bought smartphones in the last 6 months. Forrester did some market segmentation on women gadget owners:
37% self sufficient, tech savvy
35% neutral, little engagement, low willingness
28% opportunity
Women feel overwhelmed and confused by choice of Android devices. They are twice as likely to have never downloaded a single app as it don’t see most of the apps as relevant to their lives. They want apps to solve a problem, to answer a question.
Recommendation: solve a problem, entertain, don’t educate
Turn good ideas into great apps: by Reto Meier
Shared more details on deadly sins & glorious virtues for android applications. Same Google IO 2010 talk & slides were repeated.
Android beyond the phone; Tablets, eReaders, and more: by Karl- Johan
Dell Streak uses mDPI resources but has much bigger screen. Android dual screen displays and e-Ink displays behave completely differently. Custom device manufacturers are really keen to have apps on their devices. They’ll expect a 20-50% markdown, but no need to pay app store fees. ViewSonic ViewPad 7 now available in the UK for £399: Having 800x400px display and runs Android 2.2 and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS & 3G.
The Snapdragon Mobile Development Platform: by Qualcomm
Qualcomm is taking on a new role of being the link in the ecosystem, ensuring that there are great apps for the ecosystem. They want to make sure that apps work well. Snapdragon is a system on a chip for ARM-based CPU, GPU, rich multimedia, GPS, 3G, Camera, power management.
Android reuse models: by Mark Murphey
He discussed some of the ways in which we can reduce lots of android developers reinventing the wheel everytime we need something. There are a few methods that a developer can use for distributional: Souce Code, As an Application, as a jar or Library.
Libraries can be used to solve problems for people who want free and paid versions of the app, and don’t want to maintain two versions of the code. He went on to discuss that we need a place to collect code to reuse and mentioned building a community website for this purpose, also saying “I can’t write a website to save my soul, I ain’t doing it!”

Future of Android panel
Ewan MacLeod moderated the panel:
Questions faced by the panel:
We’re still on the dream phase for Android: consumers “only buy one Android device”… Will consumers retreat to “something familiar”?
Nokia is still a big player but no longer biggest in all mobile developed countries
Android has challenges with fragmentation
One challenge for Android is capturing lower end, but high end phones will trickle down
Breadth of Google’s web services provides a very strong disincentive to leave
Google is encouraging OEMs & operators to fight amongst themselves to get great user experience
If I was your fairy godmother, what would you wish to change in Android?
-A decent automated testing framework on a range of devices
-A working billing infrastructure
-Developers making sure that their app manifests include clearly defined API access and permission
-Google to be a little more open about what they’re aiming at and what they’re not, to provide some reassurance
-Better way of getting hardware acceleration support

Teleca Stand:
We had lots of android developers coming to our stand and wanting to know more about Teleca offerings. The following demos just didn’t fail to amaze them:
-TI Dual Display on Android
-Android ported on Freescale Imax 53 board
-MeeGo phone
-AIM app totally based on Open Source.

We got people to our stand interested in joining Teleca as developers as we are globally looking into hiring many hundreds.
And, our presentation: We had proposed a Talk on “Dual Display” but due to the board overheating the demos for the presentation did not perform thus we couldn’t deliver the talk. Delegates approached the stand to know why the talk was cancelled, as we explained they were fine in just understanding the architecture for Dual Display.
The best compliment was when one of our partner companies with a booth next to ours, also dedicated appreciations of Teleca’s work to the bunch of attendees. It’s was indeed a proud movement.

Finally lots of interesting questions we got from the attendees:
- What can we expect from Teleca in MWC 2011?
- What kind of work are we doing in Automotive space?
- When are the dual display android devices coming in the market?
- Which will be the number one platform by the end of 2011?
- Is Teleca planning to get into products ?
- Are we working on CRM, ERP modules for mobile devices?

It will be an interesting next 3 months to show what we actually are doing on the above.