What's your idea of tomorrow?

2012-01-17T13:28:00.002+01:00

Tizen and Bad to merge - January 17th

By Markus Gausling

According to Forbes [1] Samsung will merge its Bada OS with Tizen. Only few details are known but this is supposed to bring the Bada interfaces to Tizen and should include backwards compatibility with already existing Bada applications.

Such a move would have a few advantages from Samsung's point of view. First it would immediately provide thousands of existing applications for coming Tizen devices. Those devices could gain immediate access to the Bada applications available in Samsung's application store.

It would also allow Bada developers to develop for Tizen as well and as such increase the base of potential application developers.

Additionally this might be a move for Samsung to reduce the number of platforms they currently support (e.g. Bada, Window Phone 7, Android).

So this looks like a reasonable direction for Samsung to go.

References
[1] Forbes

hthttp://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2012/01/13/samsung-merging-its-bada-os-with-intel-backed-tizen-project/

2012-01-13T15:26:00.000+01:00

Tizen is here - January 13th

By Markus Gausling

On 7th of January a preview version of the Tizen SDK for Ubuntu was released ([1]). The official 1.0 release is scheduled later this quarter and shall also support versions for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac.
Tizen is maintained by the Linux Foundation with strong contribution from companies such as Intel and Samsung. It is designed to run on different systems such a smartphones, smart TVs, netbooks, tablets or in-vehicle infotainment systems. The released alpha version however is targeting smartphones and tablets primarily.
Tizen is planned to run on x86 and ARM architectures in the future.

Tizen’s architecture
Tizen is a Linux system which also uses a number of open source components. It provides an application environment which is based on HTML5 and Wholesale Application Community (WAC) standards, see [4].

The list of supported interfaces in the Tizen Web API layer can be grouped into the following three categories:

W3C - Contains interfaces for W3C-defined standards. This includes interfaces for standards such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG or W3C Geolocation APIs.
Khronos interfaces – Interface for the Khronos-defined standards such as WebGL and the Typed Arrays API.
Tizen interfaces – Additional interfaces to access platform functionality not covered by W3C and Khronos. This includes e.g. PIM, Messaging and Call, Sensors, Bluetooth or NFC interfaces.

The Tizen SDK
The Eclipse based IDE contains a set of tools to develop Tizen applications using HTML/JavaScript/CSS. This includes an HTML WYSIWYG editor and debuggers. It also contains an x86-based QEMU emulator. Developer documentation is of course also included.
In addition to the SDK the Tizen source code is available in a preview version via Git ([3]).

Hands on experience
Setting up the environment was quite straightforward although it took some time to download the packages. Creating a sample Hello World with the application wizard went fine. As the IDE is Eclipse-based most developers should be immediately familiar with it.
The Emulator and the platform itself feels quite responsive and stable. This is probably also due to the fact that HW acceleration for the emulator is supported. Also the UI of Tizen looks reasonably designed and you feel immediately at home when you are already familiar with Android or iOS.
Developing some simple web applications with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and the WYSIWYG also was straightforward. The applications could be quickly developed and tested. All in all developing for Tizen seems to be fun.

Resume
On a first glance Tizen has all the ingredients to become a successful platform. The Web Application based approach seems to be promising and seems to support rapid application development. This might attract a lot of new developers coming from the Web development area.
I believe developing native applications or at least support for native components is required as well though. So far I have heard that this is planned however I haven’t heard any details on this yet.
With Android, iOS or Windows already a number of players in the same segments are available today. MeeGo will also be maintained although it remains to be seen to what extent. So MeeGo can be regarded as a potential competitor as well.
On top of that Intel is still struggling to enter the mobile markets. With their latest Intel Medfield platform it is expected they will enter these ARM-dominated segments though.
Last but not least device manufacturers and end customer need to support the platform as well. Let’s see where this will lead…

References
[1] An early look at Tizen - https://www.tizen.org/
[2] Tizen developer page - https://developer.tizen.org/
[3] Tizen Source Code - http://source.tizen.org/git/
[4] Wholesale Application Community (WAC) - http://www.wacapps.net/

Great UX boost brand loyalty -November 29th.

2011-11-29T10:15:00.001+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten

Consumer experiences are what make a difference, whether it’s is going to a restaurant, on holiday, driving a car, using your home media centre or your new tablet. It’s long been proven by Apple’s products and understood by also many restaurants. Steve Jobs once said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” So we cannot assume that users will look past a poor user experience to see the quality beneath. Because they will certainly not.

UX includes the whole journey. It covers everything from the new product demo, how you enjoe the feel of the box, how you open it, the user documentation, the device in your hand, sensing the keys and the ease in which you switch it on & set it up. The user interface must be easy, logical, automatically localized and personalized. The visual impact must be compelling, attractive and so much fun that you don’t want to stop playing with the device.

Why and how has this trend become the single most important competitive factor? Can we blame Apple? Since their first Macintosh debuted 1984 based on its Natural User Interface (NUI), their devices have been selling on user experience, which includes industrial design and problem-free usage. In almost every product category where Jobs led Apple he upset the status quo. Before the iMac, people accepted that computers came in beige or grey, arrived in multiple pieces and took hours to set-up. Jobs’ product integrated everything into a single device. Set-up was so simple that users only had to plug in the power cord to a single unit which people were proud to display at their homes.

The iPhone swept away design conventions by being the first to omit all but one of the physical buttons from the face of the phone, abstracting the interface elements into a software UI. Crucially, Jobs team emphasized on delivering the best user experience for music, video, web browsing and email, allowing them to scrap the legacy rulebook created for standard voice phones. Yes, it was such a revoulution that the market for other MP3 players/media players was instantly gone. Almost.

And since 2008 there has been a 100% increase on Google Trends for "the User experience industry."

This has been fully recognised since a few years by us at Teleca and we can help you by applying creativity, experience, consumer behaviour and full execution of UX and UI projects. Anything on your mind? Our UX design teams will take on your challenge.

Qt Developer Days in Munich -Nov.15

2011-11-15T15:15:00.001+01:00

By Toni Nikkanen

Qt Developer Days, hosted by Nokia Qt Development Frameworks 24.-26th of October 2011 in Munich, Germany, was an event packed with developers, exhibitors and expectations.

The Tuesday morning keynote session was hosted by Alexandra Leisse, Qt's Web Community Manager. The first keynote speaker was Marco Argenti, Nokia's SVP of Developer Experience. His main message was that despite the strategic shift to Windows Phone, Qt continues to be important for Nokia and Nokia developers: over 100 million Qt phones have been shipped (Symbian, N9) with millions more still going to ship, and 90M apps are downloaded from the Nokia Store every day. What I would have liked to hear is how much money developers are making with Qt apps on Nokia Store right now.

"Qt for the next billion" was given as the reason why Qt will continue to matter for Nokia in the future: Nokia will make affordable phones that will have apps, and Qt is at the centre of this plan. Unfortunately this was not further elaborated. For the credibility of Qt, Nokia should communicate their future Qt plans more clearly. With Qt 4.8 being the last version of Qt for Symbian, some people even asked does this mean Qt 5 will be irrelevant for the mobile device sector? The answer was that Qt 5 will be very important for Nokia's mobile device plans, but they simply can't speak openly about it for now. My guess is that the planned release schedule (first half of 2012) for Qt 5 will coincide with product releases from Nokia.

Argenti also said Nokia has finally addressed the lack of Qt on Windows Phones, having released porting guides both from Qt to Windows Phone, but also from Windows Phone to Qt.

The major next steps for Qt will be the 1H 2012 release of Qt 5, and the move to Open Governance. Qt 5 will introduce several new features and improvements, such as increased modularity, small footprint, major upgrade of Qt Quick to version 2.0 with 10 major new features, an all-new graphics stack, and moving all platforms to use the QPA (Qt Platform Abstraction) system. On platforms with OpenGL (ES) support, the new graphics stack will perform about 2.5x fast as Qt 4.x, which could enable apps written using Qt to perform well on less powerful devices than currently possible. Open Governance means Qt is now developed entirely in the open, with collaboration and contributions welcomed.

Picture: Jari Saarhelo at Teleca being interviewed on NFC solutions.

After the keynotes it was time to head for the technical sessions. I gained lots of useful information on topics such as optimizing Qt Quick apps, Qt Quick 3D, persistent object storage for Qt Quick, and Qt on Android. It was intriguing to see how far the Qt for Android project has gotten to and that it is actually quite easy to make and sell a Qt app on the Android Market. And I was glad to find out how little rocket science or college math you need to remember in order to take advantage of 3D graphics using Qt Quick 3D.

I also browsed through the exhibitions and noted that while a lot of the exhibitors were Nokia subcontractors or partners, there were also many companies that have no other tie to Nokia other than that they use Qt, or offer services related to Qt. Qt wasn't an all-Nokia show before Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech in 2008, and today it still isn't. Qt always was, and still is, first and foremost a high-quality cross-platform application development framework with Nokia platforms being just one out of many possible platforms you can target with it.

Automotive - IVI, a focus item at Frankfurt motor show, September 19th

2011-09-19T15:08:00.005+02:00

By Roger Hampel

The automotive industry presents itself in good mood at this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show. More than 1000 exhibitors from 32 different countries are displaying their latest developments. The number of visitors after just two days of public opening is 10% above reference figures from 2009 and a total of 800.000 visitors are expected this year. As our visit was limited to one day, we didn’t embark on a test ride with one of the 200+ models available for driving, though for sure it would have been a lot of fun to race along one of the short and narrow tracks that numerous manufacturers had prepared at the show.

Notably, a big topic at this year’s show is electromobility. As consumers are more and more looking for fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars, all major brands are showing either hybrid or electric models. Telematics services are considered to be of particular interest to owners of electric vehicles.

Next generation In-vehicle infotainment is also a big topic at the show and solutions range from fully integrated infotainment modules featuring internet access, maps, streaming media and innovative ways of interaction such as gesture control and head-up displays for the premium segment down to innovative solutions of using a tablet PC as center stack touch control and display, especially targeting the cost-sensitive IVI market for electric vehicles. Android is widely considered for aftermarket IVI solutions due to its superior functionality, but only plays a minor role for in-dash solutions.

Within our newly established Automotive Business Unit, Teleca is already engaged in building next generation In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems. Expect to see some of the products that have been enabled by Teleca at Frankfurt Motor Show 2013. See you there!

We get our great articles in the press -September 7th

2011-09-07T14:35:00.008+02:00

By Krishna Kumar

It is great to proudly announce that two of my articles have appeared today in The Economic Times, and Deccan Herald;

Article 1 - The new Telecom Policy lags practice [The Economic Times, Editorial page, page 16, Co-authored with Dr Sridhar]. The article discusses about issues of roaming in 3G and Broadband Wireless Access services for data services; benchmark initiatives in the European Union on data roaming regulation; recent market developments in this area; initiatives on spectrum re- farming and spectrum sharing without appropriate policies; hence the need to legitimize these initiatives. Link to article»

Article 2 - Take charge & go-ahead! It is your career [Deccan Herald, Avenues supplement]. This article tries to look at some of the beliefs and practical aspects of career planning. Organizations can only play a supportive role. Among other things, longevity in an organization and focusing on soft skills would certainly provide the right impetus for growth. Link to article»

I hope you enjoy reading!

Will mobile apps sing new tune? July 28th

2011-07-28T19:57:00.008+02:00

By G Krishna Kumar

Not too far in the future, HTML5 could share platform space in the mobile apps market.

Remember the frenzy created by the mobile phone game “Angry Birds”, which was first launched on Apple's mobile operating system, iOS? Not only is the game available on leading mobile platforms now, thanks to its popularity, but also, the usage of words “Angry” or “Birds” in other application names has increased manifold over the past one year, states Distimo, a company that studies the mobile applications market.

In general, every time ‘a cool application' is available on Apple's application store, the immediate response from a non-Apple smartphone or tablet user is to check whether the same application is available with the Android Market Place, OVI store or Windows Market Place.

Wouldn't it be great to see an application on all platforms at once? But before we look for answers, let's first take a quick look at the global business opportunity for mobile applications.

Is the market Big enough?

According to Gartner, globally, mobile application store revenue is projected to surpass $15.1 billion in 2011, both from end-users buying applications, and applications themselves generating advertising revenue for their developers. By 2014, the revenue is expected to touch over $58 billion.

Worldwide, mobile application store downloads are forecast to reach 17.7 billion downloads in 2011 and by the end of 2014, Gartner forecasts that over 185 billion applications will have been downloaded from mobile application stores. Free downloads are forecast to account for 81 per cent of total mobile application store downloads in 2011.

A study by Zokem, provider of mobile analytics, reveals that in smartphones, the share of application usage is overwhelming — it achieves almost six times more face time than web browsing.

In tablets, however, the difference is not so significant with 39 per cent of face time allocated to web browser and 61 per cent to applications. Studies have revealed that two-thirds of smartphone usage go into non-voice call-related activities.

With tablets gaining momentum and device users willing to pay for high-quality applications, the applications market will remain upbeat over the foreseeable future. Due to the opportunity size, developers and application stores are under pressure to create the best user experience and to provide quickest time-to-market.

Native Applications route

As of now, the traditional approach to application development for smartphones and tablet devices is to use the native Application Development route. This means applications are developed separately for iPhone, or on Google's Android platform.

Such custom-built applications utilise all the functionalities and capabilities of the device and provide excellent user experience. However, the biggest drawback is the cost involved due to extremely low reusability of software code.

Just imagine trying to develop the same application from scratch for four different platforms.

Zokem's March 2011 report indicates that email, gaming and music content are consumed more using native applications.

There are quite a few cloud-based application builders or application-creators that enable developers to create applications on multiple platforms/devices at once.

However, these app-creators don't exploit the platform-specific functionalities and are unable to match the rich user experience as compared with the native applications.

The app creator/builder market is nascent with many more trying to tap this space. This generic ‘create-once and run anywhere' is not hugely successful as yet. Is this going to change dramatically with the advent of HTML5?

HTML5

HTML5 is the fifth generation of Hyper Text Markup Language, the popular web standard. Technology industry leaders such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and hardware manufacturers support it. There is expectation that HTML5 will be the “true” multi-platform application development technology.

HTML5 would enable browser-based applications and also stand-alone applications, including off-line applications. It supports multimedia content through video and audio tag, location-based information using Geo Location APIs (application program interface) and can also access the native platform.

With browser being the core of HTML5, applications can work on “any” platform or device, including PC, smartphone or tablet, with minimal device-specific changes for stand-alone applications. That would mean a huge cost saving, compared with the native applications.

Currently, Flash is the undisputed leader for multimedia support on browsers. However, the HTML5 ecosystem is gaining momentum.

For example, WebM, an open source project, has been created to provide rich multimedia user experience on the Web. YouTube supports WebM in addition to its existing formats as part of its HTML5 experiment. Among other aspects, WebM is aimed at supporting low computational footprint to enable playback on hand-held devices.

HTML5 would be welcomed by publishing companies. Financial Times, for instance, recently announced an HTML5-based application to attract digital subscribers.

Though, there are not many mobile applications based on it as yet, HTML5 is an evolving technology. McKinsey estimates that more than 50 per cent of all mobile applications will switch to HTML5 within three to five years.

HTML5 would be a clear winner in the web/cloud intensive mobile application space, while native applications would lead the computation-intensive contexts. Essentially, HTML5 and native applications are poised to co-exist over the foreseeable future!

(The author is Director – Engineering, Teleca Software Solutions India. Views are personal.)

Mobile commerce awaits a rural destiny in India July 21st

2011-07-21T01:24:00.004+02:00

By G Krishna Kumar

How do you like the idea of paying bus fare by just flashing your mobile phone before the Conductor? The mobile phone, using a technology called Near field communication (NFC), communicates with a device in the bus and the amount is debited from your bank account.

NFC is gaining popularity across the world and is set to revolutionise mobile commerce. Though NFC is in nascent stages in India, it may hold the key to make mobile commerce popular in the country.

Early this year Bharti Airtel launched prepaid cash cards in India, the Airtel Money service. The service, which allows customers to use their mobile phones to make payments, is now available in Gurgaon and Airtel plans to launch it across the country.

Mobile commerce is quite popular in the West and research shows that 91 per cent of UK consumers use it. But in India it is yet to take off. Debit cards, which the mobile money can potentially replace, are easier to carry and help you draw cash. Mobile money providers typically charge transaction and subscription fee and face the challenging task of ensuring universal acceptability of their ‘money’. The law also limits the amount of money which can be transacted through mobiles.

A recent Forrester report expects global m-commerce to reach $31 billion by 2016. For that to happen rural areas may have to step in, in a big way.

Approximately 72 per cent of the world’s population is estimated to be “unbanked”. The mobile phone, which is becoming ubiquitous even in the developing countries, offers an excellent platform to take banking to them. Studies suggest that an increase in the banked population has a direct correlation to increased GDP and reduced poverty.

Kenya has emerged as a leader in mobile banking system with M-PESA, which was launched in 2007 by Safaricom, a mobile Operator. M-PESA is an SMS based, branch-less system that allows individuals to deposit, send and withdraw money using their mobile phone. M-PESA has over 14 Million customers, representing 60 per cent of the adult population.

Pakistan’s Easy Paisa, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank’s Mobile money are among other initiatives trying to replicate M-PESA’s success.

In India, regulators like RBI and TRAI, several banks, mobile service providers and phone makers are joining hands to take m-commerce to the “unbanked” population.

Eko, a mobile banking technology provider, has tied up with SBI and ICICI banks. It helps people create a bank account and perform basic transactions at local Kirana shops.

Idea Cellular has a similar partnership with Axis Bank. Subscribers would be able to open ‘No-frills savings bank accounts’ at Idea’s retail outlets and avail basic banking services such as cash deposit, withdrawal and transfer. Idea is currently offering the remittance facility in the Dharavi-Allahabad corridor. There have been similar initiatives from Vodafone and Bharti Airtel as well.

Fifty-two per cent of India’s adult population does not have access to any form of formal financial services. With the rising tele-density there is good potential for business.

According to the latest BCG report, the projected fee-based revenue from mobile commerce could exceed $4.5 billion by 2015 in India. This revenue would be shared by banks, mobile service providers and device manufacturers.

A major bottle-neck in mobile commerce in rural areas lies in meeting the Know-your-customer (KYC) norms. Kenya’s National ID system, eliminated the need for KYC norms and played a key role in M-PESA’s success. That is precisely the role India’s Aadhar project is planning to play. If it succeeds, mobile commerce would get a big boost. But to really make it happen banks and telcos have to build awareness among people by promoting it aggressively.

(The writer is Director-Engineering at Teleca Software Solutions India. Views expressed are personal)

Microsoft Partner conf -Is cloud the answer? July 14th

2011-07-14T12:19:00.002+02:00

By Jari Saarhelo

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Los Angeles – July 10th – 14th

The conference this year gathered a huge audience of 15 000 visitors to listen to the latest and greatest developments from Microsoft. A great line-up of executives from Microsoft, their partners and customers was present. It was all about cloud computing with Azure and succeeding together with the partners.

Migrating to cloud can bring huge productivity gains, whether it is Microsoft’s Azure or Amazon cloud or something else. Some of the key benefits are:

Instant access to a worldwide back-end infrastructure. Cloud computing removes the lead time required to setup a back-end system. The infrastructure is there and you can start leveraging that as soon as your software is ready to do that. A traditional up-front investment is replaced with operating costs, which occur only when you are already running a billable service.

Pay only for capacity used. There is no need to commit to a certain amount of back-end capacity in advance. Instead, you can instantly expand the capacity, if the need should occur, which means that you can respond much better to the real needs of your customers. The whole capacity planning problem of the traditional back-end systems is removed – before cloud if you reserved too much capacity you had an extra cost, if you reserved too little, you had dissatisfied customers.

Availability and scalability. You don’t need to organize and manage hosting and worry about availability and scalability of your system – it is there and works.

Cloud services reduce the barrier of entry and the cost for offering a global service, which means that there will be lots of new cloud enabled applications coming to the market. The small and medium sized enterprises will be able to enter a market, which was practically closed for them before.

And you? If you are not using cloud right now, I bet you are in a year from now.

Inside to tablets and new technologies; QNX and more -July 1st

2011-07-01T09:31:00.006+02:00

By Sergey Priporov

There was a “silent” event in Q1 2011 which was almost missed in press releases.

RIM announced the start of shipment of the Tablet device based on new Tablet OS (based on QNX). You can say that there are many new tablet devices are coming from different manufactures each quarter and this device is small part of this world. Of course in terms of numbers it's a small part. However I would like you to pay much more attention on this event.

The reason is that this tablet device introduces completely new technologies on mobile devices horizon. The new technologies are not new in IT domain in embedded systems but they are new for mobile devices. New staff is derived from QNX core OS components which can change mobile devices capabilities dramatically. It will not be applied to Tablet devices only. As we can guess RIM will move all mobile devices portfolio to this new core OS since RIM acquired QNX.

The key new QNX technologies for mobile devices are as follows:

- Micro-kernel design targeted for hard real-time execution environment support

- Transparent task to task communications based on universal SW messaging bus

- Fault tolerance support, embedded into the system based on address space isolation on threads level

- Real Time multitasking

- Incredible Scalability (from simple controllers to entire Airport Control system (London Heathrow Airport LHR)

- Transparent embedded SMP support for multi-core solutions

- Certified POSIX PSE52 Real-time Controller 1003.13-2003

- Certified IEC 61508 Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL 3)

Let’s try to understand how it may impact future of mobile devices world.

- Micro kernel architecture and messaging bus provide very good scalability of core components and allow creating products in all diapasons of costs such as low-end, mid-tier cell phones, smart phones, and tablet devices.

- Hard Real-time support capabilities of QNX OS allow platform to provide real multitasking.

- Transparent task to task communications and SMP allow developers to create product for multi-core HW variants without code changes in system components

- Since QNX supports transparent task to task communications on kernel level, all devices under QNX can be considered as one cluster if devices has any type of connection into some network (cell network for example or Wi-Fi network or Ethernet)

- Transparent task to task communications allows developers to create new type of connectivity between devices when resources of one device can be shared with another one device transparently without code changes and extra protocol stacks using for communications.

- Real multitasking and resource management will allow developers to create devices with multiple displays, cameras without heroic efforts to do it (such as present in Android / Linux space)

- Any SW component in QNX can be replaced on fly, includes drivers. (No changes and rebuild for kernel procedures required). It allows simplifying SW update procedures and new components adding in production devices shipped on the market already. New external peripherals support can be added easy. It means that device capabilities can be incrementally increased during life cycle. This process can be planned by marketing teams

- QNX can execute few Applications execution environment frameworks such as Android, AIR, QT, and QNX native Apps. It means that device can be as chameleon device with dynamic UI change on fly by user demand. It can be downloadable as a UI packages.

- QNX is certified to support critical Applications in many areas such as Medicine, Automotive, and Military etc. It means that QNX allows developers to cross reuse services. For example Android Apps can work safely in car controllers. The exercises with boot time optimization are not necessary for QNX as it is for Linux.

- SW development process and H/W bring up phases for manufactories can be simplified.

Target board can be shared between few developers to work on SW debugging. QNX deployed on PC work station, and PC will communicate with QNX deployed on Target board transparently in multi – user mode. Derivers can be reloaded on Target board as necessary on fly. QNX on target board will not have crashes due to SW component failure because it’s designed this way.

- No fragmentation on platform level

The list of new capabilities of the mobile devices under QNX is not limited by bullets above.

In case if RIM makes smooth transition of SW development environment from legacy

Technology to QNX for all devices in portfolio, it gives RIM huge advantage to become a winner in long term. The process of SW Development environment transition from legacy platform to the new one is not easy and it is not quick process. Main hidden stopper here from my point of view is the mind of SW development community at RIM to understand advantages of new capabilities. The direct reuse of legacy code from old platform will not give good result.

Architect team need to apply appropriate approach to SW Architecture redesign to use advantages of new technologies.

There is one more technology acquired by RIM is new UI conception and execution environment from TAT. The size of this blog is limited to discuss this component and its advantages for new platform

No one from big players list can support the capabilities of QNX going forward. I mean Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola etc. They missed this platform when selection.

The main task for RIM is to smartly map QNX capabilities to product portfolio creation in long term. If they do, than RIM will be a winner, no doubts!

What do you think?

P. S.

a) Teleca as service company has to help in eliminating the hidden stopper (defined above) to help to deploy new powerful RIM services based on QNX. It looks that the Android framework execution optimization on top of QNX is very promising thing for a start.

b) Apple will try to keep market and grow ecosystem but the company will do it different way which is not really innovation. It’s reuse of initial innovation and attempt to make stopper for competitors. Some indication is below.

Apple picks up key smart phone patent; cleared for Nortel bid

PCMag.com reports that Apple has been granted a “long sought-after patent” which was said to be “so broad and far-reaching that the iPhone maker may be able to bully other smartphone manufacturers out of the US entirely.” While the details of the patent are complex, PCMag said that one legal source had said that it “essentially gives it ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface the company pioneered with its iPhone.” This could lead to lawsuits involving a range of smartphone vendors including HTC, Samsung, Motorola, RIM and Nokia. But it also cited Florian Mueller, an intellectual property activist, who said that an Apple action would only be successful if the alleged infringement implemented Apple’s patented technology wholesale – not if rivals are able to show demonstrable differences between user interfaces. The validity of the patent could also be challenged.

Separately, it was reported that the US Department of Justice has given approval to Apple to bid on the patent portfolio of failed networking giant Nortel Networks. The company is set to come up against tough competition for the intellectual property, which is set to take place next week, with Google, Ericsson and Intel also believed to be in the race.

c) Mobile devices core components were based on proprietary OSs. Since ~2005 Open Source conception started to change world here. But in reality Open Source conception didn’t introduce new technologies related to embedded systems such as configurability, reliability, real-time critical applications support, performance, fault tolerance. Open Source conception just introduced new technology to make money by Service companies to tailor “Free of cost” software for Manufactories to reach product quality in particular variant of (fragmented) platform.

So, the race is not over, it i more dynamic than ever and we will se innovation continue to be the competitive factor in this war.

Open Mobile Summit London -June 27th

2011-06-27T09:32:00.005+02:00

By Robert Kempf

The hope for the 3rd ecosystem and partnering for success.

This year’s Open Mobile Summit in London at June 10th was an exciting event with a great line-up of executives from the mobile devices, operator, publishing, banking and content industry. It was again all about the very dynamic changes in the value chain and the implications on monetization points and strategies.

With companies who made a winning bet given the changing industry dynamics, through emerging players trying to find their spot and highly challenged established players a broad range of different perspectives were given. Some of the highlights and trends are summarized below:

Operators: success through partnering. Though there is still high focus on a branded service experience, leveraging and customizing existing solutions including the content is seen as the most promising route forward. This partnering model will allow for a better risk and reward model creating a win:win for operators and service/content providers and will at the same time increase the ability to not only act as a bit pipe for operators .

Nokia: It is all about creating the 3rd ecosystem. Stephen Elop was evangelizing that besides Apple and Android, Nokia sees space for a 3rd major ecosystem called Windows Phone. Though the presentation was excellent and all key ingredients for creating a successful ecosystem where addressed, the analyst community present at Open Mobile Summit was quite pessimistic about the success changes given the planned timing for the first phone launches and the trends in the other major ecosystems around Apple and Android. Also the rumors of Nokia being acquired by Microsoft, Samsung or other players was a discussion point again.

Mobile Payment: Mobile wallet is coming. There was no doubt about mobile wallet being now adopted on a larger scale though there were different estimations in terms of adoption rate. With major operators, financial institutions and core technology providers backing and pushing mobile payment using NFC and other technologies the year 2012 is seen as the inflection point of mass adoption.

Multiscreen: Content portability across screens. The evolution of modern user interface and application frameworks, not only limited to Flash technology or HTML5, will make multi-screen experience a commodity in the near futures. Content will not be optimized for a single screen size, but will support all types of screens and form factors. Support of different MMI methodologies for different types of devices and specifics on screen layout to adopt for the multitude of form factors will required education of developers and further invest in the operating systems.

Mobile Advertising: Going to the next level. As for private TV, advertising is and will remain one of the main monetization points in the connected devices space. The key trend is from a rather dumb placement of ads in applications and web to an increasingly tailored and customized approach of placing ads meeting end user demand. Besides preferences, behavior and position also the dimension of time will be used more and more to trigger commerce.

Operating systems: Apple, Android – that’s it? Surprisingly the discussions outside the Apple camp did focus only on Android and there was not much discussion around QNX/RIM, Symbian, WebOS or Windows Phone. OEMs seem to be quite satisfied with the freedom they have with Android based on the panel discussion with SonyEricsson, Motorola and LGE participation. There was no sense of fears in the OEM community that Google will significantly change the Android licensing model or will restrict OEMs in their freedom to differentiate. Also interesting to note that no other rising star in the mobile operating space was identified – so seems Android will be around for some time still.

Applications: Native versus WebApps again. The native versus Web application discussion will be ongoing forever, as there are many pros and cons for both which should lead to the conclusion that both are needed. Also at the Open Mobile Summit the discussions were along these lines. Though HTML5 and other technologies enrich the capabilities for Web applications and extend the number of native applications that can now be implemented as Web applications, there is still a large space for native implementations especially when it comes to performance and security critical use cases. The trend towards WebApps will continue at the cost of native applications, but there is no sign that native apps will go away soon.

Outside of these main trends the Angry Birds success story presented by their Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka was an entertaining as well as very insightful experience. Besides the very long way they had to go before coding this number one hit, their ability to monetize on Angry Birds outside the mobile games field got quite some attention. Besides t-shirts and toys we will see other gadgets, comics and animated movies for the Angry Birds fans. So it is all about building and monetizing on a brand…

NFC Technology all set for take off -June 23rd

2011-06-23T11:05:00.004+02:00

By Sonali Mishra

The Near Field Communications (NFC) market is just beginning to gain traction and is set to expand rapidly as more and more firms start to embrace this solution. Ignited by support from key wireless players, such as Nokia, Google and mobile operators, global usage of near field communication (NFC) technology in mobile devices is expected to begin an explosive growth phase.

NFC In the Real World- Moving Beyond Payments

Now the question arises what use cases can this technology provide us beyond payments? NFC , puts a chip in devices, like cell phones, that makes it possible to, not only use your phone to make purchases in a store, but ultimately replace a lot of other things you normally carry around in your wallet. NFC-enabled phones have the potential to replace the card for getting into your hotel room, your business card, your public transportation (i.e bus, train) card, concert, sports or other event tickets, your boarding pass for getting on a plane.

NFC tags have already reached a price point where it is feasible to print off batches of NFC stickers that enable users to create special ‘short cuts’ that make their lives easier. For example, when a child gets home from school, he or she could touch an NFC sticker just inside the door that sends an ‘I’m home from school’ message to a parent. Older people with poor sight or suffering from arthritis could have NFC stickers containing friends’ and family members’ phone numbers saved on them – these could be stuck to the corners of photographs of these people and, when touched with an NFC-enabled phone, would initiate a phone call to the right person, without the need to look up phone numbers or use the keypad.

Another key use case is setting up secure connections between devices. For example at Google IO there was a demonstration of using NFC for mobile gaming. When one Android device has launched a game if it touches another NFC Android device it will establish a Bluetooth link and launch the game on the second device thus removing a lot of complexity for the user.

Using a peer to peer scenario, NFC can also be used to sync devices, share mobile apps with your friends (e.g gifting the latest must have game) and transfer photos between cameras, smartphones or tablets.

Another key aspect for NFC is speed. Using NFC simplifies data exchange and for payments can significantly reduce waiting times. This aspect alone is likely to be a key driver of consumer adoption in many markets.

NFC-enabled handset shipments to boom, says IHS iSuppli

The decision by three major US wireless carriers to partner with leading credit card companies on a mobile commerce initiative will boost the market for embedded payment technology in cell phones,helping global shipments of handsets with near field communication (NFC) technology to rise to nearly 550 million units by 2015,according to IHS iSuppli. AT&T,Verizon and T-Mobile recently announced that they would work with Visa and MasterCard on their Isis joint venture,which was established to form a nationwide infrastructure for NFC-enabled mobile payments using mobile handsets in the US. The original Isis JV did not include the two largest US credit card companies.

NFC deployment will be service driven, not a technology push

NFC is a broad and complex ecosystem –new services, new opportunities, intersection of multiple industries. Google is working on both ends of the NFC ecosystem. As highlighted above it has already implemented NFc in it’s mobile OS and plans for further use cases to be developed. Payment, P2P sharing, access and ticketing via NFC phones are the first applications; others, especially for consumer electronics, will follow. Building the NFC ecosystem requires cooperation among the stakeholders and that’s the purpose of NFC forum founded by Philips,Nokia and Sony.

UK's four leading mobile networks Orange, O2, T Mobile and Vodafone have announced plans to create a joint venture company that will deliver the technology required for the speedy adoption of mobile wallet and payments. Currently people take their mobile, wallet and keys when they leave home. In the near future, it is expected that people will start leaving their wallet at home, and in the midterm their keys may also be integrated into their mobile as NFC allows the mobile to act as a digital access card. The joint venture is the next phase in realizing that ambition.

Clearly NFC is just at the beginning of a journey but it will be a journey that further enriches the consumer experience and one that will also quicken the convergence between the mobile, consumer electronics and automotive industries.

Telematics Update – An Exciting Glimpse In To the Future Of In-Car Entertainment -June 13th

2011-06-13T16:09:00.002+02:00

By Andrew Till

Last week I attended the Telematics Update Detroit event focused on the latest developments and trends in the automotive market. It was a great place to take the pulse of the market and to see just how quickly the automotive market is now evolving. Here are a few of my key highlights and takeaways from the event:

• The pace of change is accelerating rapidly as the industry moves from talking about connected services to implementing them.

• The Human Machine Interface (HMI) challenge is significant and will probably be the biggest challenge for companies bring next generation IVI systems to market. The challenge of delivering a wide range of services without overly complicating the user experience is far from trivial.

• Bringing applications in to the in car environment will be a major challenge if driver distraction is to be avoided. Expect controlled / managed “wall gardens” for application deployment certainly to the main in-dash display.

• The OS landscape will continue to evolve rapidly with GenIVI, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and Windows Auto 7 all seeking to challenge QNX. However it’s clear QNX has no intent of surrendering it’s market lead and is aggressively driving forward with the development of its OS and the implementation of many new innovations (The next generation experience being demonstrated in a very nice Corvette clearly shows that QNX is not being complacent).

• Advances in processor technology and the ability to support multiple independent displays will drive a whole new set, of as yet undefined, services in the car.

• While Infotainment is important the traditional telematics solutions for Driver Assistance remain highly important for consumers and amongst the most desired feature – certainly according to data presented in the opening keynote by GartnerGroup.

• On-Board navigation solutions are likely to experience a revival, if price points can be managed down, if they are fully integrated with other services within the car.

• Expect cloud services to also play a key role moving forwards as they will provide a bridge between in car and out of car experiences for consumers.

It was certainly an exciting show and one appears the rapid changes taking place in the industry. It’s not just the technology that is changing but also the development cycles and the structure of the value chain in order to enable greater innovation and faster times to market (for example QNX highlighted an IVI development that had taken little over a year from start to final delivery). With most of the discussion being about model years 2013 and 2014 it certainly appears that within the next 3-4 years the vast majority of cars will be enabled with both connectivity and advanced entertainment options.

So aside from keeping my children happy this should present a compelling and new market opportunity for application and content vendors to further expand their addressable market as well as ISV who will find new opportunities to leverage developments from other industries in to the automotive market especially as the market starts to embrace the concept of rear screens supporting live connected services that are independent from the main in-dash display.

Do you know bitcoin? -June 10th

2011-06-10T12:42:00.003+02:00

By Markus Gausling

Today’s blog is maybe a little bit off-topic but seems to be a quite interesting topic anyway. Have you ever heard of bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the „first decentralized digital currency“ [2]) which implements a Peer-to-Peer electronic cash system. It was proposed and initially implemented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 ([3]) and was designed as a system which is based on cryptographic proof rather than on trust. As such there is no need for intermediate trusted third parties and as such transactions are free of charge.

A bitcoin itself is a digital coin that is a created by solving complex mathematical issues. Those problems are solved by a network of computers that have the open source bitcoin software installed. You should not expect to be able to generate bitcoins with a standard PC using the bitcoin software.

Newly generated bitcoins are distributed randomly among the contributors of CPU power in the network, depending on how much CPU power and processing time a network node contributed. The amount of bitcoins that is distributed among the contributors is limited and decreases over time which should prevent inflation and furthermore lead to deflation if bitcoins become more popular. In May 2011 more than 6 million bitcoins exist and it is expected that in 2033 the maximum number of bitcoins is generated.

The process of generating bitcoins itself is called “mining”.

Transactions

Users can have their bitcoins stored on a computer in a “wallet file” or can have them stored at a “wallet service” provided by a 3rd party. The wallet contains a public and a private key which is used to sign the bitcoin and identify who owns the bitcoin. Personal user data are not stored in the bitcoins and as such transactions with bitcoin are anonymous.

A transactions with a bitcoin is executed between two peers (hence P2P) that have the bitcoin software installed. In the process of a transaction the digital signature of the new owner of the bitcoin is added to the bitcoin and the formerly store signature is removed which means that the bitcoin has changed ownership. Additionally the timestamp of the transaction is added as hash value to the bitcoin.

The transaction is validated by the network and the bitcoin is then stored in the network. Adding the transaction data to a bitcoin and storing this information in the network guarantees that bitcoins cannot be spent multiple times or by users who don’t own them.

Where can I use bitcoins?

Bitcoins are already in use today and are accepted by some organizations such as the Free Software Foundation. Also there are already shops available in the internet that accept bitcoins, e.g. to buy online games, gifts, server space or the like.

There are even web pages available today that exchange bitcoins into real money. The current market value of a bitcoin can be seen at [5].

Conclusion

So what is bitcoin then? Is it just a used nice idea used by some hackers or is this the new ideal global currency which makes transactions more secure, truly global and independent from the influence of banks and governments? Is it even dangerous and will allow anonymous, untraceable and free transactions also for illegal purposes?

Well I don’t know but maybe it is a little bit of all. A number of security experts have analyzed the bitcoin concept and have found no vulnerabilities. Googling for bitcoin results in more than 3.5 million hits and the fact that you can exchange bitcoins into real money shows that this topic has already some focus.

References

[1] bitcoin.org - http://www.bitcoin.org/

[2] weusecoins - http://www.weusecoins.com/

[3] Satoshi Nakamoto - Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[4] Wikipedia on bitcoins - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

[5] Bitcoin Charts - http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

Skype and the future of Voice Calling on Windows Phone -May 31st

2011-05-31T12:00:00.002+02:00

By Harsha Bagur

The hottest news item doing the rounds for the past couple of weeks has been the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft. There have been quite a few suitors and after a lot of speculations, Skype has finally a new home in Microsoft.

Most of the concerns raised by the users about this acquisition have been about what Microsoft is going to do with Skype in future. Skype has, for long, embodied the ethos of the free communication by allowing free voice and video calls, which has benefitted quite a few small-medium sized business setups as well. The future of Skype at the hands of Microsoft is indeed a story worth following over the next few months to come. Another concern has been the multi-platform support of Skype in the coming days to come. Skype has for long been providing regular updates for the Windows, MAC and the Linux platforms. Windows has been the preferred platform to receive the latest updates which would then be provide to the MAC and the Linux platforms. It would be interesting to see whether we would see as active a support as we were used to for the MAC and Linux platforms in the days to come.

Google has been one of the suitors vying for Skype even though it already had Google voice. Facebook was also one of the suitors but was not considered as a serious buyer. Facebook would have indeed benefitted with an integrated Voice and Video service to its more than 600 million users. A conventional approach to provide such an integrated service to such an overwhelming number of users would have incurred a huge cost and an overhead of operating infrastructure.

Microsoft has its own reasons in aggressively pursuing Skype. Starting from the Gingerbread versions of Android, Google has been supporting SIP enabled Voice and Video telephony and moreover, Google has Google Voice at its disposal which can be brought over to the Mobile OS space as well. Apple has Facetime. Microsoft desperately wanted Skype to bridge this gap in its Mobile OS Windows Phone 7. We could also see Microsoft going the Android way and announcing a minimum set of hardware specifications for the Windows Phone 7 devices. We could see the front facing cameras becoming a norm in the coming future for the Smart phones. Windows Phone 7 does definitely seem to hold the potential of pole vaulting the MS mobile OS towards the top of the heap and this deal will definitely give a firm push towards that direction.

Skype deal will also give Microsoft a more direct tie-in to the operator for both the Packet switched voice and video calls. There were early indications already last year with the operators approaching Skype for the Voice calls and we could see more of such deals with the widespread adoption of LTE in the coming future. This would definitely be a revenue generator as well as value add services for both the company as well as the operator. There can also be a flip side with Microsoft beginning to eliminate support for the other mobile platforms and target the future features and value-add services exclusively only for the Windows Phone platform.

Nevertheless, the future of Skype with Microsoft is worth following!

Can we get a Indian Huawei? - May 26

2011-05-26T15:04:00.003+02:00

By Krishna Kumar

Eight of the world’s top 10 most innovative companies of 2011 are in the ICT domain, reports a US based magazine Fast Company. Not surprisingly, all of these are product companies. While India is the largest exporter of ICT services, generating revenue of $76 billion from the IT sector, but products contribute to less than 2%. India’s contribution to technology innovation is negligible.The product companies witness non-linear growth (not proportionate to the head count)—the revenue per employee or profit per employee of Google or Microsoft is over 20 times that of India’s top services companies. Also, these technology giants serve as a beacon and are the undisputed trendsetters on the world technology road map.

Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE are the world’s leading telecom equipment providers. A report states that 45 of the world’s top 50 telecom companies use Huawei products. What more recognition is needed? These companies have full backing from the Chinese government and the government also supports R&D initiatives—for example, the TD-SCDMA technology that competes with the global wireless 3G standards. Is there an Indian company that can compete with Huawei/ZTE? India has lagged behind China and Taiwan in the capital-intensive electronics hardware manufacturing industry also. But the recent policy push from the department of IT to encourage semiconductor wafer fabrication, electronics and telecom product manufacturing is a welcome move. Also, Trai recently made a recommendation for promoting domestic manufacturing of telecom products.

The loss-making PSU Indian Telephone Industries, once the flagship telecom switch and telephone maker in the country, failed miserably during the telecom boom due to lack of vision from the government. But the case is different with ISRO, whose success could be attributed to the autonomy it enjoys. Another example of a tech-savvy initiative is the UID programme Aadhar, which, though far from fully implemented, has proved that India can implement large-scale technological projects.

Although the domestic demand for IT products is increasing, most Indian product companies are yet to penetrate the market. The only exception is the banking software industry where India has emerged as a leader in core banking solutions offered by Infosys and Oracle-India. Yet Infosys’s products business generates only about 5% of the overall revenue. In general, Indian companies are risk averse and prefer to enjoy the safety of services business, hence have not been able to succeed in creating product offerings.

But some Indian IT companies are successful in the outsourced product development (OPD) model, a pseudo ownership model, wherein the independent software vendors (ISVs) are involved in end-to-end product development for the customer but the ISV does not ‘own’ the product. Cloud computing can be a cost-effective and disruptive technology for further growth in OPD and pure-play product development companies. Nasscom indicates that delivery model innovations such as SaaS and innovative revenue models could fuel IT product adoption in future.

BERD (business expenditure on R&D) and patents/IP management are key indicators of a country’s technology innovation capability. An EU commission report on ICT 2011 indicates that India lags behind China and other emerging economies in terms of BERD/GDP. While China has seen a 10-fold increase in the number of patent applications over the past decade, India’s contribution is insignificant. Generating IPs and protecting them is just one part of the story. Realising value from the IP is a different ball game. Appropriateness of the solution is the key.

It must be said that Indian education system lacks an environment that fosters active partnerships between industry and universities. In the advanced countries, research in universities is given high priority and is supported by industry in the form of grants. As per the recent Anil Kakodkar Committee report, India lags way behind China in terms of university research in engineering and technology. The report also emphasises the need for improvement needed in research infrastructure. An OECD report indicates that India has less than one researcher per thousand employed, much below the global average.

Availability of risk capital is a key constraint for product companies to flourish but Nasscom sees an improving trend. Venture capital/angel investor ecosystem has improved significantly. There are 38 incubation centres across the country aimed at encouraging product development initiatives. India has seen 30% CAGR in start-ups over the past 10 years. The product market in India is expected to touch over $15 billion by 2015. The government’s plan to invest R25,000 crore for setting up semiconductor fabs will provide an impetus for hardware-oriented product development.

The government can play a key role in helping start-ups and other companies engaged in software or hardware product development. There are many examples of how government intervention has yielded good results. Tax benefits for software export revolutionised IT industry in India. Israel supported companies working on networking technologies that helped Israel take a leading position in security. Taiwan supported electronic hardware that resulted in the emergence of the original design manufacturer market.

India has been a ‘follower’ in the ICT space and its product development capability has been patchy. It needs to move towards full-fledged product development in order to be a dominant player in the ICT arena. India’s domestic market by itself will offer sizeable opportunities. However, for made-in-India to be a reality, it is imperative that the government aggressively drives a clear road map for technology innovation, encourages product initiatives, supports hardware and semiconductor industry and, most importantly, inculcates ‘product culture’ right at the universities.

Contributed by G Krishna Kumar, Director – Engineering, Teleca Software Solutions India. These are his personal views and published in Financial Express Thursday 26th.

Mobile Norhtwest Conf -Teleca presented on UI/UX -May 19th

2011-05-19T10:49:00.006+02:00

By Scott Muske

Yesterday's Mobile Northwest UI panel

At yesterday's Mobile Northwest conference I had the priviledge of presenting on a panel on UI/UX with experts from Frog Design, AT&T, UI Evolution, Blink Interactive and Zaaz. Combined, we touch most of the major brands and media companies deploying, building and researching mobile applictions today. Unlike many panels which meet on-stage or moments before the panel starts, we also had the opportunity to have dinner together the night before and really discuss our differing perspectives. Blink Interactive is purely research and Frog design does research and industrial as well as UI design so there was some additional information represented.

As expected, the press had an article up that afternoon quoting Frog Design and AT&T's conclusions that HTML5 "ain't all that". (Duh!!!) They seized on it because it had a big buzzword (HTML5) and it was uttered by two big names. Anyone who's worked with HTML5 knows this, yet the debate on HTML5 replacing applications rages on. I also find it humorous when customers ask me if we have "HTML5 experts." Um, did you ask web designers before if they had HTML3 "experts" or HTML4 "experts?". I think that Ted Woodburry of AT&T said it best when he said that "We'll look back and realize that HTML5 was a step and not a panacea."

There was a divided and healthy debate over whether tablets are "mobile devices". There was no consensus and my summary is that it depends on how you define a "mobile device". What I paid attention to but that most missed was that every company had its own reasons for saying a device was or was not "mobile". One of the more persistent, cross-panel ideas was that after Starbucks said that people will forget their wallet at home and not return to get it but will always return to get their mobile phone, others extrapolated that theme and said that one would not "lend" their phone to a family member or friend for several days but they would a tablet, which says that it's not a mobile device. Hmmmm... I'm not a big fan of trying to define everything into specific "buckets" unless you have a business or technical reason to do so. All of the panel's comments on the topic can be found Here:

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/ipads-mobile-devices-experts-weigh

I found Hans Gerwitz from Frog Design to be an exceptionally intelligent and insightful expert. When we were asked about "predictions," he made an interesting prediction that some major provider will fork Android (I had to replay that in my mind several times to make sure I heard him right and it made sense once he finished his thought) much in the way that IBM wrested control of Java from Sun and became the leading proponent and developer of Java. I made a more far reaching prediction. I am always perplexed at how technology companies shove technology down users' throats, when all they want is cool, easy and useful. I asked, "why do I, as a user have to know that I'm in an application, on the web or on my desktop? Why do I have to see windows spawn all over the place and "launch" applications?" I predicted that the OS will be a hybrid of "launchers". Users will, some day, be able to choose content, an address or a function or tool and the best experience will be presented to them for their device. No longer will a user have to "launch a browser" or "launch an application" and then go from there.

Some of the questions seemed non-UI related but definitely were. Should designers still consider feature phones, was one? Heck yeah!!!! Once we get out of our bubble and stop drinking our own Kool-Aide we have to realize that most of the world still uses feature phones and even here in the US, most people use feature phones. However, it depends on your target audience. Gilt Group and Blue Nile don't need to worry about feature phones. We also discussed the role that the "Cloud" will play in mobile. There were many insightful and technical analysis provided of the role cloud plays and Hans pointed out the "Cloud-Network". I pointed out that the "Cloud" has always existed and it's another example of marketing people trying to turn technical jargon or slang into a marketing term and it's yet another example of the perennial "Year's Most Over-Used, Over-Hyped Terms" that we'll be sick of next year. At the end of the day, what people care about with regards to the "Cloud" is the ability to get THEIR content and services anywhere, anytiime on any device.

As a panel, we were all in agreement that 3D, Augmented Reality and other new user experiences were coming and that there would be a market for them. However, the hardware is still not quite there and (more importantly) the system as a whole must be improved to make sure that all of the back-end components (the data, the feeds, the quantity of information) are up to speed with the device and application as it is the entire user experience and not just the device or application that determine success or irritation. More importantly, we (as designers) must take care not to shock our users and to "nudge" them into new experiences.

Unfortunately, we did not have time to reall dig deep into User Interface and so some that may have attended the panel looking for design ideas came away disappointed. Heck, initally I was hoping we'd dig into my recent design philosophy of using the "Z" axis and active screens to provide more information to users without sacraficing readability. However, in hindsight I think that this was a good thing. We in technology have a tendancy to focus on the small components. Designers will always come up with cool looking designs....but NEVER is that what makes an application successful. One must always consider the entire experience and that's what the panel focused on. Steve Jobs has a single rule, "If it requires an instruction manual, it's too complicated". Jobs and his disciples (like Guy Kawasaki) always preach simplicity and usefulness. They adhere to user paradigms and performance standards that make up an advanced, yet familiar and useful product. Analyze all of their business and complex, moving parts and you can boil Apple's success to that. Above all, successful UI and UX achieves those same goals.

Goggle I/O day 2 - Chrome is in the air! May 13

2011-05-13T21:30:00.002+02:00

By Robert Kempf

Today is the second day of the 4^th annual Google I/O developer event which opened with another fact filled keynote focusing on the progress of Chrome and HTML5.

With more than 100% YoY growth, new releases every 6 weeks, a user base exceeding 160M worldwide, 70M+ installed apps, Chrome Web store availability globally and in 41 languages the traction for Chrome is continuously increasing bringing the possibilities of HTML5 to a fastly growing community.

At Google I/O we experienced some impressive examples of the Chrome capabilities showcasing speech support, hardware acceleration support, high performance 2D Canvas rendering for sprites as well as high performance WebGL rendering and 3D CAD modeling capabilities using HTML5 based web applications.

It was nice to hear that application purchases are now a simple one click solution, but much more important for developers was the announcement that Google will only take a flat fee of 5% transaction cost for application purchases on the web. This was a key talking point outside the keynote and certainly seems be a move that resonates well with developers and lays down a marker to industry that Google is serious about Chrome.

However, there were more important things to announce – at least for the Angry Birds fans amongst us: Angry Birds is now available as a Web App!

Though it is not the game with the richest and most demanding graphical experience it shows nonetheless the new possibilities enabled with HTML5. The experience showcased was very smooth and I’m looking forward to trying out the Chrome specific levels soon…

That’s it about the Chrome browser and HTML5, but wasn’t there something else planned beyond the browser? Yes, there was and in fact the Chrome OS was the next big topic of the keynote. Finally the first commercial Chromebooks a ready to launch offering an web centric, instant on, automatically updated and all day battery life experience. It was nice to see what improvements were made in terms of file browser support, media player and web services but the big wow effect was missing. With the first Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung being priced in the range of $350-$450 there was not a real unique selling point presented that would motivate people to go with Chromebooks instead of a standard Netbook that are equally priced. Moreover the ability of Android to support Notebooks as depicted in the day one keynote leaves a big question mark on the Chrome OS future. Having said that I’m very keen to try them out and I hope that the actual hands-on experience will provide that spark of excitement.

Talking about Chrome OS I was surprised to see that Google will enter a new business area by offering an enterprise and educational use managed service for $28 and $20 per month and user respectively which covers hardware, software support and device replacement services. Google stated that their research indicated that up to 75% of existing enterprise users could be switched to Chromebooks without reducing their productivity. Given that more and more of the enterprise applications are cloud based and knowing about the still horrendous IT cost for enterprises this might turn into a successful business moving forward. In announcing this Google stated that the average PC support cost is $3,000-5,000 per year so this is clearly a very aggressive move and one that could for many companies provide significant cost savings.

Some interesting technical sessions also took place after the keynote covering the comparison of HTML5 and native applications, game development, Android for enterprise use, updates on Android market, … But as one might expect, no further groundbreaking news were presented in these – though I’m still a bit disappointed that I did not know about the game development session after which every participant got a Xperia Play for free. Better luck next time ;-)

Overall Google I/O was again a great conference to be at and when I’m looking back it is incredible to see what happened in the last 2 years – the evolution of HTML5, the global success of Android and its shiny future, new Google services like movie and music and many more make this an very exciting journey to be part of. Will be back in 2012….

Google I/O reflections from day 1 -May 11

2011-05-11T18:00:00.003+02:00

By Andrew Till

Yesterday was the first day of the 4th annual Google I/O developer event and what a day it was. Google opened the event with a fact filled keynote showing the progress of Android such as:

· 36 OEMs

· 312 device models

· 100M devices activated

· 200,000 apps now available

· 4.5 b apps downloads

· 500m apps downloaded per month

· 112 countries shipping Android devices

And when they had let us pause for breath they hit us with news of the new upcoming releases. The first was the announcement of Honeycomb 3.1 which will be shipping in a few weeks time and includes a number of much sought after features such as a more advanced task switcher, USB Host support so that you will be able to connect standard USB peripherals to you Android device, Scalable widgets and support for GoogleTV (2.0) with a free upgrade for existing Google TV subscribers. And just to be clear Google also confirmed that Honeycomb will not be open sourced but this is not standard policy for future releases.

Following this was the formal announcement of IceCream Sandwich (ICS) which included, to loud applause, the unveiling of a new logo and confirmation of key features such as new apps framework APIs, significant improvements to the video and camera functionality including face tracking and speaker recognition for video conferencing. But perhaps the most significant announcement was that ICS will be used as the single OS and UI platform for all Android device form factors moving forwards.

This was followed up by two key service announcements the availability of Google Movies for Movie Rentals and Music Beta. Both are full cloud based solutions and underline the importance of the GMS services as a platform differentiator for Android. With a similar announcement expected from Apple on cloud based Music services in June Google was clearly laying down a marker that it fully intends to take on Apple and iOS head to head (which was also clear from much of the artwork used in the keynote).

While much of the above had been expected the next announcement was much more of a surprise. This was the news that ICS will support a new set of APIs for supporting HW accessories what can be controlled by your Android device or can interact intelligently with your Android device. Thus this brings in to the Android community a whole new development community that is much more familiar with building HW than SW. Google is also providing an open source reference HW design for developers and for those of us who went to the breakout sessions we were able to get our hands on the first version. Full Android source and firmware for the reference HW will be made available from Android.accessories.com from today.

Google demonstrated a couple of interesting use cases the first being intelligent control of the home lighting system while playing a game to really enhance the mood and the second being a smart exercise bike that when you connect your Android phone was able to control a game on the phone (the speed of the rider controlled the higher of a character in the game). This is certainly an exciting development especially when combined with the USB Host support and will open up a lot of new use cases and vertical markets to the benefit of Android. It also has the potential to position Google strong in the home and work environments in a much broader way with your device able to fully interact with its surroundings.

Of course there were then many more updates and announcements in the break out groups but for the ask of brevity I will focus on just one here NFC. NFC was pushed as a key enabling technology that further builds on theme of interacting with your surrounds (via NFC tags) as well as enabling new consumer use cases around content sharing. Of particular focus was using NFC to set up Bluetooth connectivity between devices by just touching them together and thus removing the need for complex BT pairing sessions. Google also disclosed that ICS will focus strongly on leveraging NFC to deliver Zero Click sharing of contact information, URLs and Youtube/web videos with some very nice features such as call back support (so when you share a web video you can also share the play point) and ground dispatch to enable an application to capture all incoming NFC tags.

And perhaps the most important question that was answered during the day was “will Google still provide us with great giveaways” which was the source of much debate before the show opened. The simple answer is YES and I think Samsung for my pre-release Galaxy Tab 10.1 and am eagerly looking forward to the 3.1 upgrade due in a couple of weeks.

That’s all for day one. Come back tomorrow for another update.

The Future of Automotive From the Motor City -April 19th

2011-04-19T14:44:00.004+02:00

By James Salter

Teleca wrapped up an interesting week in Detroit for the annual SAE 2011 World Congress (Society of Automotive Engineers) conference April 12-14. While the automotive industry and the Detroit area have both taken their lumps in the past few years, there is renewed optimism on all fronts. SAE 2011 was better attended than last year and most of the big automakers were present with large booths.

The main focus of the event was on new technologies: hybrid and electric vehicles and new dashboard displays dominated many of the booths. Most of the big automakers will be releasing pure electric cars in the next year or so if they already don’t offer one. A good number of engineers who visited the Teleca booth were very interested in our talents with the Android platform as proprietary closed systems are getting replaced. This will pose some interesting opportunities for the industry as it demands a set of standards for in-vehicle technologies.

How will start-up times be met with increasing functionalities added over time for these dashboard systems? Will the OEMs allow for mobile applications onto their own infotainment units or set up their own Android storefronts? Whatever the answers, it is clear that the industry requires partnering with new players that understand the industry, the hardware to software connectivity issues and the different open source or standardized platforms to choose from.

A final thanks to the GENIVI Alliance. Teleca team members had a great time at the dinner networking event hosted by GENIVI on April 13^th. The event allowed members to showcase their demos and discuss the alliance's achievements and membership benefits. Teleca was able to demonstrate Meego on a Freescale unit with touchscreen functionality. Look for more exciting demonstrations of Teleca’s expertise in automotive at the upcoming GENIVI all members meeting in Dublin, Ireland on May 4-6 and at the Telematics Update 2011 on June 8-9 in Novi, MI.

IST, Incremental Scenario Testing, story continues -April 18th

2011-04-18T12:00:00.002+02:00

By Matthias Ratert

In October 2010 I have announced within this blog that the Incremental Scenario Testing Tool (ISTT) will be published as Open Source.

Since November the IST tool can be downloaded on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/istt.

To advertise this great methodology I have published an article in the Testing Experience magazine (http://www.testingexperience.com) in the December issue about Open Source projects. Listing IST on opensourcetesting.org pushed the public interest even more. And the results are amazing: Almost 500 downloads from 57 countries so far! Almost every day ISTT is downloaded. India seems to be most interested in the tool – 113 downloads until now means rank #1. US (52 downloads), Germany (46 downloads) and UK (24 downloads) are following. Even some people from New Zealand, South Africa and Panama have tried it!

However the feedback could be more verbose: 9 users on SourceForge like the project, but unfortunately nobody has written a review so far.

On the other hand the recognition of IST in Teleca is increasing. Couple of projects are investigating the usage or are already testing with the IST approach.

And the community is growing, I’m not the only one anymore developing ISTT further. Some colleagues from Lodz are implementing features needed in their project!

As you see, the methodology and the tool are continuously improved, we have published already 6 updates and the 7^th including cool new features is in preparation.

So just stay tuned or try it, use it, love it ;-)

for Flash digital creators -did you visit FITC? April 4th

2011-04-05T13:22:00.005+02:00

by Peter Buth (UI Architect)

What started out as Canada’s Flash event about 9 years ago has become a world-wide event around Flash and related design technologies with around 50 events so far.

For the 4th time FITC (abbreviation comes from its origin title “Flash In The Canada”) is also held in Europe, namely Amsterdam. All kinds of Digital Creators meet here to learn about new technologies and to get inspired. This year’s FITC Amsterdam took place March 8th and 9th plus option for an additional full day workshop on March 7th. About 350 participants took the chance to meet each other - some maybe merely came for the 2 evening parties...

Flash Developer Evangelist Paul Trani and Flash Senior Product Manager Tom Barclay (both Adobe) presented a lot of hot stuff around what's up and coming to the Flash Platform. "Flash on devices" was the name of the ~6 h workshop showing how to design for multiple screens - meaning for different screen resolutions and even different platforms.

One part of it was Adobe AIR 2.6 for Android, which was just recently released for Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Besides some performance improvements related to scrolling, H.264 video and GPU accelerated animations also additional Android gestures, Bitmap Capture for StageWebView and support for iOS/iPad have been added, just to name a few enhancements. [Now even AIR 2.7 beta is available]

The second FITC day started with "HTMLArraaagh!" presentation by Doug Winnie (Principle Product Manager, Interactive Design, Adobe).

Recognizing that there is a shift in mobile technology towards HTML 5 & CSS3 he recently started to experiment with HTML5 which is often used as an acronym for using a bunch of new technologies like HTML5 Canvas (originally from Apple for dashboard widgets), CSS3 (especially Transitions, Transforms, Animations) and JavaScript. As mobile browsers already now quite well support them "they will be an important part of tablet and mobile web design today and in the future."

Adobe is also investing in new HTML5-related tools – see e.g. the Wallyby tool on Adobe Labs.

When talking about games Flash technology is a key player: Many know Flash based games like Farmville by Zynga. More than 65 million daily users on the Zynga gaming platform - with 14 million Farmville users per day - that's really impressive!

With 3D in Flash games it's getting even more impressive - currently many developed using Papervision3D. But there is more: Away3D (recently 4.0 alpha announced), Sophie 3D, CopperCube, Flare3D - just to name a few tools and engines.

Just recently Adobe also made a preview of "Molehill" available on Adobe Labs which is a bunch of low-level 3D APIs for Flash and AIR that use GPU-acceleration. Molehill shall be released within this year!

A separate session with Andrew Shorten (Senior Product Manager for Flash Builder) and Deepa Subramaniam (Senior Product Manager for the Flex SDK) was dedicated to the new and upcoming features in the Flex framework, the Flash Builder as well as the Flash Catalyst tool also enhancing the designer-developer workflow. Now also rapidly building RIAs for mobile devices – either using Flash Player or AIR runtime – will be better supported e.g. by offering special templates for mobile. Same as with the latest AIR release also Flash Player 10.3 comes with a lot of performance optimizations for iOS and Android platform.

Another device that Flash tools can be used to develop for is the BlackBerry Playbook - the 7" tablet device RIM announced last fall. As it's not yet available I chose to get first hand information by attend the session about "Building BlackBerry PlayBook Applications with Adobe AIR" by Sanyu Kiruluta (Team Lead for Developer Relations, EMEA at Research In Motion).

Taking into account the BlackBerry community with more than 55 million global subscribers and 300.000 registered developers (as of October 2010; mainly Java, some for web development) it seem sensible to also take BlackBerry devices into account when developing mobile applications.

The PlayBook uses a Webkit browser and fully supports Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.5. Besides HTML5 Audio and Video also Adobe Flash Stage Video as well as SQLite can be used.

RIM offers the BlackBerry® Tablet OS SDK for Adobe® AIR® as well as the Playbook Simulator and a lot of documentation for free.

Interested in developing for the PlayBook? Then go ahead and download the tools. I already did.

If you like to read even more – e.g. about multiscreen development – the entire report can be found here: http://www.teleca.com/FITC

More on FITC http://www.fitc.ca/ and http://www.fitc.ca/events/about/?event=115

CTIA , March 2011, Teleca findings -March 28th

2011-03-28T10:32:00.003+02:00

By Frank Bisono, Teleca North America

Hello from CTIA 2011 in sunny Orlando, FL! As the Teleca team wraps up yet another successful industry event, we wanted to take the time to recap some of the best parts of the show. First, we had a number of great meetings at our suite across from the convention center at the Peabody Hotel. It was a great opportunity to meet up with some of our valued clients, new and old. We are feeling some great energy and excitement about what’s?coming in 2011…stay tuned for more success stories throughout the year. The show floor was also buzzing with excitement. Although a smaller?footprint than in previous years, there were a number of vendors showcasing their latest warez and plenty of industry announcements?of interest. If there was one theme for the show (aside from wireless andmobile), it was tablets, tablets, tablets and yes, 3D(again). Apparently 3D on the TV is not enough, it’s now coming to your mobile devices in a big way. The industry is absolutely obsessed with tablets and 3D at the moment and the pace of new releases doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Google’s Android Honeycomb OS made a big splash on several new tablets at the show. Big announcements came from Samsung, with new form factors in 8.9 and 10.1 inch offerings, in addition to the 7 inch tablet currently on the market. The final hardware wasn’t available for us to touch, but they had it on display and let me tell you, they are sexy. Even the pre-production test units (although chunky) felt quite nice. At just a hair thinner than the new iPad 2, the Samsung 8.9 and 10.1 inch tabs are a thing of beauty. In an unusual move, Samsung announced pricing for these new tablets starting with the 10.1 (16GB WiFi only) model weighing in at $499, exactly where the iPad 2 starts. The 32GB WiFi only model will run $599. The 8.9 inch (16GB) Tab will start at $469 and the 32GB model will come in at $569. LG hit the market with their T-Mobile ready G-Slate,offering the latest HD & 3D stereoscopic onboard cameras. Yes folks, 3D Cameras on a TABLET! Not to be left out of the tablet wars, Sprint surprised everyone with their new HTC Evo View 4G tablet on Tuesday, as well as their new HTC Evo 3D smartphone. For myself, the hottest release of the show was Verizon’s 4G (LTE) HTC Thunderbolt mobile phone. It’s a fantastic display of hardware running on Android 2.2 with LTE blazing fast data connectivity, 1GHz Processor, 4.3″ display, 8MP rear camera, 1.5MP front-facing camera, dual flash, 720p HD video, HTC Sense technology and even it’s own DLNA stack. Keep your eye on this phone; it’s going to be a scorcher! Last, but not least, there were plenty of examples of the latest emerging technologies. Everything from VMware’s entry into the mobile virtualization world, Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality to immersion haptics, which provide a more lifelike experience when using applications on mobile devices. The User Experience world is about to get incredibly interesting with so much capability in our design war chest. The mobile future is looking incredibly bright and Teleca is well positioned at the center of the mobile universe to take advantage of all these new technologies and experiences. Keep your eye on our blog throughout the year for more exciting news and innovations coming from Teleca’s world class Design and Engineering teams.

More pictures at http://www.bisonium.com/ctia-2011-orlando-its-a-wrap

LTE route to 4G migration

2011-03-21T13:00:00.002+01:00

An article by G Krishna Kumar, "LTE route to 4G migration" has been published in the Hindu Business Line.

Read the entire article here >>>

Automotive goes open source - March 18th

2011-03-18T09:29:00.009+01:00

By Thomas Buchner, a Solution Architect and Technology Manager for Automotive at Teleca

Automotive Industry finally looking at open platforms

With apps and open platforms used everywhere from mobile phones to tablets and set top boxes, the automotive industry finally is also considering open platforms as a basis of their infotainment products.

Traditionally infotainment systems were built on closed source systems like Windows Automotive or QNX. More and more of Teleca's automotive customers ask explicitly in their RFQs for Linux based alternatives like Android or MeeGo.

The reasons are many-fold:

Reduced royalties for licenses
Chance to source from multiple vendors
Last but not least the need to have a platform with a large developer base.

While these reasons are perfectly valid, some lessons learned in the mobile industry need to be applied to the automotive industry as well:

Open Source software comes not for free. To build a successful product, a strong partner that is capable to create a solid baseline from public available sources is required. More so for automotive products with their increased demands on safety and reliability.

To make full use of the open platform, a dedicated SDK needs to be created that unleashes the functionality of the platform to developers.

The platform, be it Android or MeeGo must be adapted to the underlying hardware to provide a compelling user experience for scenarios like multi screen multimedia content viewing, e.g. viewing HD video on the rear seats while the driver is guided by the voice controlled navigation system.

Teleca heads these developments together with partners and customers. Are you interested in more info see us at next automotive event, SAE2011»

Contextual Computing – The next big thing in Mobile Computing?

2011-03-11T10:59:00.003+01:00

By Tilman Bollmann

Location Based Services have come over us. Have they? LBS is certainly one of the most hyped buzzwords in the industry right now, and for sure combining location data with other personal information offers a huge potential for services and marketing. And also a huge potential for paranoia. But has LBS turned into a business already? In 2009 analysts were forecasting LBS revenues to exceed 12B USD in 2014, but little has been said about such forecasts recently. And in fact, in my personal surroundings no one is actively using LBS beyond navigation and geocaching. Why?

The last cold winter in Germany revealed one special drawback of modern smartphones: the capacitive touch screens simply don’t work with gloves. And this get’s us to the major weakness of LBS nowadays: I need to become active to make use of LBS where in fact it wouldn’t be necessary. My mobile phone knows a whole lot of things about me. It knows where I’m working, it knows where I’m living, it knows my appointments, so why do I actively need to look up the best train connection when I’m leaving the office in the evening?

Taking just the location information leaves out a lot of relevant information from the context of a user, which includes calendar information, time, weather conditions, mood, social network, physical activity and wellbeing, and so much more. Combining this information with the history, my phone should be very well able to predict what I want to do next and provide me with the necessary information, without me asking.

So I’m dreaming of an active idle screen on my phone that tells me my train is leaving from track 6 in 4 minutes, that the Chinese restaurant around the corner has a special lunch offer today, remind me that I have parmesan cheese on my shopping list when I pass the supermarket and tell me that a friend which I haven’t seen in years is coming to town tomorrow. And all this without me having to press any button on a tiny 3 inch touch screen with winter gloves.
Of course this doesn’t work right out of the box. My phone and me would need some time to get to know each other. It needs to learn my habits, my favorites, my routines. But once it knows this, it could literally become my “personal digital assistant”.

And a “connected context” could even take this further! My phone knows I need to be in Bochum by 9:00 am. So does my neighbor, who’s usually taking the car. Our phones could tell us and he could give me a ride. Of course, connecting contexts requires a lot of trust and shouldn’t be opened up to everyone. But on the other hand it offers huge potential for increased efficiency and a more sustainable conduct of life.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”, Mark Weiser, father of the term “ubiquitous computing”, said in his article “The computer for the 21st century”. Well, the computer for the 21st century appears to be the mobile phone, and it’s pretty ubiquitous already, but it’s still a dumb device that I even need to tell not to ring when I’m sitting in the opera. To weave into the fabric of my everyday life, smartphones still need to become so much smarter, and I’m going to work on it now. Will you too?

Let’s see who gets there first.

Apple iPad Launch Event Summary - March 2011

2011-03-07T12:06:00.000+01:00

By Dmitry Shapiro

SURPRISE! Steve Jobs appeared onstage. I guess the rumors of his demise just lost some legs. He started off by re-capping the year:

· iBooks: 100M books downloaded in less than a year

· iTues, App Store and iBooks over 200M accounts created.

· 100M iPhones shipped

· 15M iPads sold in 2010 (9 months) garnering over $9.5B in revenue for Apple

· 65,000 iPad specific applications in the app store vs. 100 Android Tablet specific apps.

He is saying that the iPad is not a computer. It’s a Post-Pc device. For those of you who read my posts, that’s called a “PARADIGM SHIFT”. Educators are calling it the future of education and doctors are calling it the future of medicine. One thing I like about Jobs is that he highlights that DEVELOPERS (Not Apple) are taking the device to places they could have never imagined.

Now he’s introducing the iPad2……Yes, they’re ACTUALLY calling it the iPad2:

As I expected, it has the new, 1GHz A5 chip inside, which is a dual-core chip. The CPU is 2x faster and the graphics are 9x faster. However, it consumes about the same power as the A4 which means that the battery will last just as long (10 hours). Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t announce RAM. It’s got front and rear cameras. We all suspected the front camera, but he rear one is a surprise. It’s also got a gyroscope and is about 1/3 THINNER! It’s down from 13.4mm to 8.8mm. It’s actually thinner than the iPhone 4 and the weight is down from 1.5 lbs. to 1.3 lbs.

Most importantly (don’t know why this is such a big deal to everyone) IT COMES IN WHITE!!! It will support both AT&T and Verizon (without an external antenna). The price will also stay the same. What’s disappointing is that the memory units will still be the same: 16, 32 and 64GB. I was hoping for more on-device memory. It will start shipping on March 11 in the US and March 25^th in a bunch of other countries! Accessories include: HDMI video out and HDMI Mirrored Video Output. You will be able to output EVERYTHING YOU SEE ON THE iPad to your TV at 1080. (Just like Steve Jobs presents!! YAY for Demo’s!!!!). Unfortunately, there is no mention of USB or SD ports. It has VGA video recording up to 30 fps on the front camera, VGA-quality still camera and a rear camera with HD (720p) video recording up to 30 fps with audio and a still camera with 5x digital zoom and geotagging over Wi-Fi. You can tap to control exposure for video or stills. It also has a much larger speaker on the back. There is also an ambient light sensor. They’re also coming out with what they’re calling “Smart Covers”. This is a cover for the screen that will fold back for viewing and auto-wake or auto-sleep based on whether it’s open. It will be held in place by magnets. The micro-fiber screen cover will clean the screen every time you close it. When you see the photos, you’ll be amazed at how thin it is. It’s made of polyurethane.

Now for iOS 4.3……

It has dramatically improved Safari performance with Nitro Javascript Engine (2x faster). I also will include iTunes home sharing. Airplay will allow you to send everything to Apple TV. You’ll also be able to lock the orientation. It also will include Photo Booth. Also, as expected, it will include Facetime. They also introduced iMovie for iPad which will allow you to edit movies on your iPad and will sell as a $4.99 app. It’s very similar to iMovie for OS X. It will also include Garage Band as an app for $4.99.

So, my conclusion? If you need to output your iPad or want to capture photos and video with it (which is really hard if you haven’t tried it with a tablet before just based on trying to hold it up for the photo) then you definitely need one. If you want to run very high end graphics and edit video then you definitely need one. Will you feel completely left out with your iPad 1? No. You’ll be fine and if you don’t fit into one of the above categories, I’d wait for the iPad 3 which is rumored to be due out in the fall along with the iPhone 5 and OS X Lion.

User Experience @ Teleca

2011-03-04T13:54:00.005+01:00

By Frank Bisono
Many of you have been seeing the term “User Experience” surfacing with increased frequency on many of our projects. Some of you may be wondering, “…just exactly what IS this thing called User Experience?” My goal is to shed some light into this mysterious yet essential role in today’s software development.

What Is User Experience?
"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

*Definition by Nielsen Norman Group

User Experience (also known as UX) encompasses several disciplines: interaction design, information architecture, human computer interaction, human factors engineering, usability and user interface (UI)/visual design.

These roles can be broken down into two competencies:

UX Research:
A UX Researcher will typically come from a cognitive psychology or human factors background. A UX Researcher formulates research plans, conducts studies (both in a lab and in the users environments, also known as ethnographic studies), gathers the data, analyzes it and recommends follow-up actions. This is done working closely with a UX Designer.

UX Design:
The UX Designer is typically involved at the earliest stages of product development. Everything from the product strategy, business goals and aesthetic aspects are taken into consideration. The UX Designer will look at many factors in a products design including but not limited to: ease of use, aesthetics, efficiency, processes, and performance.

What User Experience is Not
There are a lot of misconceptions about what UX is, but here are some things that we can definitely say it’s not:

UX Design is NOT the same as UI Design. UI Design is focusing on one element of the overall experience.
UX is NOT a simple checkbox in a process. The user experience process is an ongoing and integral part of any product. It’s something that we need to keep iterating on and improving. It’s never done, even after we ship.
UX is NOT just about usability. Usability is but one aspect of the overall experience. We want to make products that users embrace and find desirable, but is not our only goal.
UX is NOT one size fits all. Every project and situation will be unique and have it’s own special problems to solve. You can’t take a canned approach that can be priced the same across all projects.
UX is NOT a choice, it’s an imperative. In order for a product to be successful, you must factor the overall experience your users will have in the end. We can write the best code and solve the most complex problems in the world, but if in the end the users can’t use it, don’t like it or don’t perceive the value then we have ALL failed. It takes EVERYONE on the team to create a solid user experience.

How can UX help you at Teleca?
There are many ways in which you can engage with UX at Teleca.

Sales: From initial bid proposals where we can partner with you to help tell the Teleca UX story and what we can offer our potential clients, to helping forge a solution and wireframe concepts to use in a proposal. Please feel free to engage us as part of your pre-sales business development and strategy efforts.

Project Management: From the moment you have a potential project, please bring us in to discuss how we can help with requirements gathering, defining business objectives and proposing design solutions for our clients. We can help you get clearer timelines and milestone dates for your project based on current projects in the pipeline and estimated deliverables for the client.

Developers: We are here to work with you in an iterative way throughout the lifecycle of the project. If you have a question, or something just doesn’t feel right and you need a sanity check on some element of the experience, please feel free to ping us.

While this article certainly doesn’t cover the gamut of services we can provide as part of the user experience, I hope it sheds some light on how we can help make every project at Teleca a resounding success for our clients and us.

Mobile World Congress 2011 Review

2011-02-23T13:51:00.005+01:00

By Andrew Till

OK so now I’ve had a few days to recover from this year’s MWC it’s time to reflect on the key takeaway’s from 4 (wet) days in Barcelona. You’ll also see that I have again failed to meet my objectives of keeping blogs to less than 200 words – I hope you enjoy and happy reading.

Android, Android Everywhere

So let’s get this out of the way first. Abig well done to Google for s

tealing the show. No I’m not referring to the overwhelming number of devices powered by the small green robot but of course to the 86 unique and collectable badges available from the stands of key partners such as Teleca. It was a truly masterful stroke of marketing innovation and managed to turn MWC in to one of the largest treasure hunts I’ve ever seen.Of course on a more serious note there was a major show of force by the Android community with a host of Gingerbread based handsets and Honeycomb based tablets being shown off by all the key players and also by many brands that I had not heard of before.

And of course we at Teleca we showing off the work we have been doing on GoogleTV and for Sirius XM on their new Android platform as well as a host of other innovations such as Dual Display support, 3D UIs and a world of cool applications.

MeeGo, MeeGone, MeeStay
Staying on operating systems then MeeGo turned out to be a real surprise package at MWC 2011. Heading in to the show I wondered if it was a case of here today and MeeGone tomorrow. However there was a strong show of force, at least behind the scenes if not publically, around MeeGo and it’s clear that in the words of Mark Twain “rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”.

Yes Nokia’s announcements around MeeGo cast a shadow but it’s clear that operators, devices vendors and automotive companies as well as Intel have big plans for MeeGo and the investment in the platform will continue with Meego 1.2 devices expected to start shipping later this year.

Tablets, Tablets, Tablets
Perhaps the least surprising observation of MWC was that everyone is jumping on the Tablet bandwagon. All the major players come out fighting in this segment showing off their tablet devices including Samsung, HTC, LGE, HP, RIM, Motorola etc. The good thing to see is that after the initial wave of vanilla Android tablets launched earlier this year at CES we are now starting to see some real innovation in this space. For example LGE showed off a Tablet with 3D video capture, HTC shown an impressive implementation of their Sense UI, while Samsung was pushing on Multimedia and imaging with their Galaxy Tab 10.1 supporting 8MP camera. I also got the chance to play with the latest version of the MeeGo based WeTab which is a very impressive device with a very simple and compelling UI for first time users

With so many tablets launching it’s great to see device vendors really pushing their own take on the tablet and just falling in to the trap of launching pale imitations of the iPad. This bodes well for the future and suggests that the Tablet market is here to stay.

3D
Another key theme of the show was 3D with a number of vendors showing some impressive, and some not so impressive, 3D enabled devices including handsets and tablets. Thankfully for the most part this does not involve revisiting the 1970’s for a red and blue overload but instead the mobile market is jumping straight to Stereoscopic displays thus removing the need for glasses. It was not only device vendors showing 3D but scattered around the halls were a number of innovative start up’s showing some very impressive next generation 3D display technologies that if bought to market will really make 3D a viable mass market solution.

The initial applications being shown off focused on UI enhancements, especially carousel UIs, 3D Movies and mobile gaming. While this will help to establish the category we will need to see a rapid expansion in terms of general application support and ultimately browser support for 3D to firmly establish itself as something more than the next marketing slogan but for now I am sure that it will play a key role in all the big summer marketing campaigns.

The Dawn of Dual Core
A very hot topic was dual core support in new devices. Just about everyone had a Tegra 2 based device and was busy promoting the MHz’s packed in to their latest products. It looks clear that for the next couple of years there will be an intense level of competition around who has the largest number of cores and the highest MHz number which will likely drive many wild and wonderful applications and services. The use or dual and quad core chipsets holds a lot of promise for enabling both the next generation of WOW UIs (most likely 3D) and a wide range of new applications and services as well as improving overall device responsiveness. However for this year’s MWC there was little evidence of new applications or services really taking strong advantage of the dual core capabilities but I for one expect the focus to have moved significantly by MWC 2012 from just having a dual core device to really showing off the benefits and targeted applications support this.

NFC gains momentum
Near Field Communications was another hot area of discussion following the inclusion of NFC in the Android 2.3 release and the Nexus S. It certainly appears that NFC is now being taken very serious by both handset and Tablet vendors but also within the Automotive community with use cases moving beyond mobile payment in to a much wider range of applications and services around content management and device interaction.

After many years of promise it’s great to see NFC finally gaining real traction, outside of Japan and Korea, as it’s a technology that has the potential to significantly reduce transaction times for a wide range of services as well as bring a strong security framework to support mobile financial services.

Chipset ecosystems
Another aspect of the show was the continued evolution of the Silicon vendors to build ecosystems as they seek to deliver more value to customers in order to gain design wins. For example STEricsson launched their Igloo community play to support their new application and baseband chipsets and Intel continued to make a strong play around its Atom platform and MeeGo with a dedicated booth focused exclusively on this.

Conclusions
So in summary for me perhaps not major surprises are MWC, aside from the Android badges, but more a confirmation that the industry is moving forwards with a wider range of experiences and form factors. It was also further confirmation that the excitement from momentum that started to return last year has really built through the year and the industry in general is feeling a lot more positive about growth and profitability. It’s also great to see that people are now really starting to bring strong differentiation to their Android devices and are exploring many new user experiences which again underlines the renewed level of confidence that is building within the industry.

3D - The wave of future smartphones at MWC 2011 - February 15th, 2011

2011-02-15T10:56:00.007+01:00

By Sonali Mishra
The first day of MWC 2011 marked the inception of devices with new multimedia features with world’s first 3D recording, seamless multitasking, advanced GMS and jet speed internet browsing features. LG launched its Optimus Pad – manifestation of tablet it was meant to be. The tablet comes with a one hand grip,8.9”dispay well crafted for work and play with new 3D experience, powerful performance, enabled by dual core and a whole new android 3.0 honeycomb platform experience.LG claims it to be lightning fast on account of tri dual architecture-dual core/dual channel/dual memory.

With the launch of its high performance smartphone offering the world’s first full 3D experience with world’s first tri dual architecture, you tube 3D collaboration and HD video play, LG send a key note to the public that 3D technology is going to be the wave of the future.

NTT Docomo launched the touchable 3D display where you can feel the sensation of touching a 3D image. By combining a glass 3d display and force feedback junction using magnetic force, a natural 3D image and the feeling of touching it can be realized without glasses.

With 3D technology being one of the undeniable themes this year in MWC and being pushed to the mobile devices opens up a lot of opportunities for developers. Starting from Implementation of 3D UIs and presentation layers, development of applications and services using 3D, advanced location based services using 3D buildings and surfaces to 3D modeling such as displaying a 3D model of a car it provides a range of growth opportunities. The development of the 3D technology will move quickly and leverage many of the innovations from other parts of the mobile industry. While taking advantage of our experience, Teleca recognizes the uniqueness of the 3D ecosystem and our mission is to keep our customers on the path to success as they navigate this journey.

MWC and the OS fire -February 4th

2011-02-04T13:28:00.002+01:00

By Martin Wilde

Heading into Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain later this month (14-17 Feb), numerous questions around mobile operating systems continue to emerge. The next release of Android, Honeycomb 3.0, is coming this week. It will not be fully compatible with previous Android versions, mostly in the UI, and will result in more fragmentation headaches for Google.

Adding fuel to the OS fire, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said recently that, "Nokia must compete on an ecosystem-to-ecosystem basis. In addition to great devices, we must build, catalyze, and/or join a competitive ecosystem." Are we witnessing a new, multiplatform smartphone strategy from the cellphone giant? What does this mean for Symbian and MeeGo, which both lack a coherent ecosystem? Will Nokia will adopt a 3^rd-party OS? Since Elop came from the great US Northwest, will we see a renewed push into WP7 ?

Some tried, and not so true, OS decisions are just around the corner. What do you think will happen?

Looking forward to 2011 -January 31st

2011-01-31T18:09:00.004+01:00

By James Salter

Mobile apps, connected devices, telematics…and an improved economy? As we welcome 2011, I am excited about the advancements of mobile technologies that I am seeing in my initial time in the industry. Combined with what some economists are predicting could be some okay economic growth and you get a potential recipe for lots of great news for consumers and businesses. And this optimism is coming from someone in Seattle right in the middle of our dreary rainy season J.

Fresh from the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there is a buzz that comes with dozens of new tablets entering the market, many high-end 3D televisions ready to grace living rooms, new mobile phones, fantastic advancements for in-car infotainment systems and more gadgets than you think would be possible for consumers to consume. But all of these advancements won’t mean much without an improved economy. I mean, who’s going to buy these devices if the economy continues to move backwards or sideways, right? There’s lots of evidence that point to a “stagnant” economy in 2011 but I liked what I read recently from Kiplinger (www.kiplinger.com) , a long-standing U.S. publisher of business and economic forecasts (yes, my glasses are a little rose-colored if you read the whole report). Here’s my summary of the positives:

- Business spending will experience a 10% growth in 2011

- Retail sales will resume their modest growth off a solid holiday season

- People will buy lots of mobile gadgets

Okay, so I made up the last point but I still bet that people find room to buy the latest in tech toys for office, home and car. In any event, as a marketing executive in this industry, I’m pumped about 2011. What are your thoughts and hopes for 2011?

Summing up Android for 2010 -January 17th

2011-01-17T11:27:00.008+01:00

By Bhavya Siddappa

So how was the year 2010 for Android ? Here is my summary for the key ingredients.

January:
Year started off with the release of Android SDK 2.1.
Google launched its first phone Nexus One on 2.1 running Flash 10.1.
Motorola Backflip with Yahoo as a default search page, LG GT450 Android Phones got launched.
20,000 units of Nexus1 were sold out in the opening week.

February:
With the introduction of live wallpapers in Éclair version, users started enjoying richer, animated, interactive backgrounds on their home screen.
There were many edge cases in the service lifecycle that made it very easy to accidentally leave a service running; new APIs in 2.0 make this much easier to deal with.
Android SDK introduced a new UI for end users to monitor and manage the running services on their device.

March;
With the help of Voice-enabled keyboard feature in 2.1, one could dictate message instead of typing it.
Android NDK r3 version released .
Google Labs released Gesture Search App for Android.

April:
Google started working on Android Tablet.
Google confirmed Android 2.1 downgrades Image Quality 2.0.
Android twitter app from Google was made available in the app store, this app brought in an evolving Android UI design patterns.

May:
Google Developers day – Google I/O was hosted and it got an awesome response and support, for the first time the keynotes were live streamed.
Android 2.2 (Froyo) was introduced with features: Cloud to Device Messaging, Dalvik JIT etc.
Through the new app market feature, users could report bug and developers were able to receive crash and freeze reports from their users.
Google Latitude API were made public.

June:
Android 2.2 SDK and NDK R4 both were available for download.
An application which violations Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy or any malicious application that poses a threat, Google developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices.
Logitech brought Android iPhone apps for Google TV.
This was beyond imagination, but it came true: iPhone 3G was running Android 2.2.
French, German, Italian and Spanish speakers started enjoying using Google Voice Searchl

July:
As android 2.2 supports application installation on SD card, this gave users room for many more apps, and benefits to apps from games categories.
Swype came to Android virtual keyboard.
Android Market welcomed Korea.
Google announced the release simple and free service provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android Market paid applications. At run time, application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users. It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.

August:
It was interesting to see new players like Spice Mobility, Dell, Micromax launching Android devices
Samsung Galaxy S got launched, which till today is sold like hot cake.
Google Android overtook Windows Mobile.

September:
Android 2.2 started to see wide adoption.
2007 when Google announced Android, Andy Rubin said “We hope thousands of different phones will be powered by Android.” But at this stage was growing beyond phones to new kinds of devices.
Samsung Galaxy Tab was announced and it was said to be a wake-up call for Android developers. It was scary for the developers as they had never seen a screen like this on an Android device before.
Launched Voice-Action in the new Google Voice Search for Android — an awesome new way to search faster.
Developers from 20 more countries were now able to sell paid apps on Android Market.
18 additional countries were now able to purchase paid apps from Android Market.

October:
There was lot of buzz happening around about Google TV and Galaxy Tab.
Android was quickly moving to hardware that are increasingly different from the smartphone devices, having lack of features like GPS, accelerometers, and video cameras
Google announced the mobile editing capabilities for Google docs on Android and iPad
Adobe AIR 2.5 cross platform runtime environment for android released.

November:
Showing content ratings for all applications on Android Market. This provided users with additional information to help them select the best applications for them.
U.S Military people favored Android and they all owned an Android phone.
Google Map 4.6 with new features in its Location Based Services was released for Android.

December:
Google with partnership of Samsung launched Nexus S with 2.3 android sdk with support for NFC.
Google Map 5.0 was released which was faster, supported offline & in 3D look.
Android Market Client Update; more payment options in Android market.
Skyfire the popular mobile browser released 3.0.1 for Android.
Google launched a new eBook store to read digital books optimized for Android devices running 2.1. Andy Rubin confirms Google activating 300,000 Android devices per day

Conclusion:
When Google launched the Nexus One, they thought this would be the flagship mobile device for their new Android operating system. The Nexus One served as the blueprint for Android devices, which exploded across most major mobile carriers. With their open approach and flexibility in what carriers and manufacturers can do with the OS, Android’s numbers grew. Android began to surpass the iPhone
As android became more popular, there was talk of fragmentation of the app ecosystem and the operating system itself. With frequent updates from Google, but carriers dragging their feet on sending updates to their customers, the problem seemed serious for developers and Android fans. Fragmentation may soon become less of an issue as more handsets are updated to the latest Android OS, but it’s still wait and watch.

Back from CES in Las Vegas -January 10th

2011-01-10T15:23:00.004+01:00

By Andrew Till
Well another CES has now closed and it’s time to reflect on the key themes and trends from the show. So here are my initial observations though I reserve the right to update these after a good night’s sleep – something I have never mastered in Vegas !

BIG BIG BIG
Attendance at this year’s CES was significantly up over last year as could be observed from my favourite barometer the size of the queue at the taxi rank. Estimates for attendance put the total at between 120-130k people which would equate to a 40-50% increase over 2010. There were also some sizeable standards at the show with Sony, Samsung and LGE all seeming to be in competition for the largest stand.
What this really underlines is a renewed sense of optimism in the market and the prospects for growth with everyone expecting to enjoy a strong year in both the consumer and business segments.

Tablets
Without doubt the main talking point of the show was the volume of new tablets being launched. During my walk around I counted in excess of 70 new models being shown off. The undisputed OS winner was Android although many of the tablets leveraging Android were using a basic Froyo release with lightweight customisation to support a 7 or 10 inch display.

The coming 12 months will be an interesting time for the Android tablet market given the latest market forecasts for tablet sales it’s hard to see how the market will be able to sustain 60-70 tablet vendors through 2011. The Android Tablet getting the most attention was the Motorola Xoom which was announced just before the show and features Android 3.0 (though it was slightly disappointing that the units on the show floor were only running videos as opposed as a pre-release Honeycomb release).

Although Android dominated there were both Windows 7 and MeeGo tablets were on display but you had to invest some time and effort to find them. It’s probably too early to judge MeeGo for the tablet space at this point in time while the Windows 7 tablets I was able to see delivered what you would expect but failed to bring real differentiation to the segment.
RIMs Playbook as the other major Tablet offering at the show and was receiving significant attention and a lot of positive feedback with the RIM stand being constantly busy throughout the show. Based on, the limited, time I was able to get my hands on it the Playbook should be able to gain a respectable level of market share. The only concern amongst potential users seems to be the lack of local mail storage which may limit adoption outside existing RIM users.

Would you like 3D
The overwhelming focus of the show was 3D and not just for TVs (and there were some BIG TVs on show in the 65-70- inch range) but also in Phones (SEMC), Cameras (all leading vendors), BlueRay players. It’s clear that the consumer electronics industry is making some significant bets on the success of 3D. Both active and passive systems were on display with some genuinely impressive offerings and some quite uninspiring ones as well. It’s also clear that 3D will not be limited to just the delivery of HD playback but will also be applied to UIs and applications being developed for the next generation of TVs and which are likely to be a key focus at next year’s show.

Web & TV convergence picks up pace
Another key themes was Web meets TV with all leading TV vendors using CES to show off their offerings. In addition this was also a major theme of Set Top Box vendors and Over The Top box providers at the show. As expected GoogleTV was a major discussion point with Logitech and Sony both pushing their initial GoogleTV solutions. Teleca also took the opportunity to demonstrate the solutions we have been developing for customers around GoogleTV. Another key platform is Adobe’s AIR 2.5 which is being widely integrated by many TV and STB providers. Samsung was also showing off it’s in house development called “Smart TV” which was a key part of its 3D TV range. An MIPs was showing it’s Android Smart TV solution offerings in conjunction with a number of silicon vendors such as Broadcom, Reneses, Sigma etc.
The focus was not just on providing access to streaming on line services, such as YouTube and Hulu, and browser support but also on delivering a compelling applications platform and enabling your Tablet or Phone to be both a content source and smart remote. While some of the usability issues have not been ironed out its clear that it will be challenging to buy a mid to high end TV without a connected platform built in.

The Car is getting “Really” Smart
Car manufacturers were out in force at this year’s CES either showing of their latest prototypes, such as GMs 4G concept car, or roaming the halls to see the latest advancements in in-car entertainment. It’s clear that the in-car entertainment experience is set to evolve rapidly over the next 2-3 years with everyone looking to move to a fully connected experience enabling access to real time services, applications and content stores and providing a fully integrated Human Machine Interface that delivers a consistent user paradigm across the range of services being delivered to the driver or passengers. However it’s not just about being connected in the car but a lot of focus is also being placed on how the in-car experience connects and interacts with the in-home experience especially around the portability of multimedia content.

Phone Plus
With differentiation in industrial design becoming ever more challenging for handset vendors this year’s CES gave an insight in to one approach that is likely to develop in to a significant area of competition. A number of vendors where leveraging intelligent docking solutions to enable a phone to deliver an enhanced set of user experiences and capabilities. Most notable of these was Motorola’s Atrix4 handset which takes the intelligent docking solution of the Driod X to the next level and is capable of docking with a Laptop Dock enabling a much wider set of capabilities.

The key enabler of this trend appears to be the introduction of 1GHz processors with Symmetrical Multi-core Processing such as TIs OMAP 4 and the nVidia Integra2 offerings. Of course it is also worth noting that there were many 3rd party peripheral vendors offering similar solutions for the iPod and IPad platforms. One that caught my eye was Connect 4’s solution that enables an iPad to be docking in a wall and to become an intelligent home automation controller.
I expect this trend to be a key feature of CES 2012.

LTE a key competitive play from operators
After last year’s CES I commented that LTE would be key for 2011 and so it has proved to be with Verizon, Sprint and AT&T all pushing their 4G services. There was also a wealth of 4G handsets on offer at the show with HTC (backed by a very significant marketing investment around CES), Samsung, Motorola and Dell all launching 4G devices at the show.

Other notable items
• Microsoft confirm support for ARM with Windows 8
• Connected appliances are coming back into the play – and Windows CE is still a strong player in this space
• There’s an app for everything but based on the thousands of companies selling iPhone/iPad peripherals there is also an accessory for everything.
• After the success of the Kinect a log of companies are stepping up their focus on montion control solutions
• Home automation is becoming a key focus for next generation home entertainment systems

So that’s it. Another CES is finished and I am probably 4-5 pounds lighter thanks to all the walking but very excited about the year ahead.

Content is king - December 29th

2010-12-29T09:41:00.007+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten

Just having experienced X-mas celebrations the Scandinavian way with Santa Claus coming on 24th, (this year it was me again dressing up, please do not tell my daughters younger cousins..) with the kids unwrapping their presents, eyes filled with surprise, astonishment, true happiness or slight disappointment for what content the gifts had under wraps. For us this year, we did not follow the trend to privately purchase tablets and slates, as we at Teleca bought both a Samsung Galaxy tab and an Ipad for our demo applications to show at upcoming Mobile world congress next year. So, I had now the opportunity to try them before my own private buying.

So a basic comparison, here it comes. The Galaxy was better prepared with applications and not much needed to be downloaded. Both devices however need you to register with either App-store/Itunes or Google to enable apps an app market to support. Because these devices are nothing without content. And content there are , more than anybody needs. And, that is why Android and Apple are so superior compared to anything else. Their app-stores are filled with all you can want, although an advantage to Itunes for it´s music etc.

Sizewise the Galaxy tab is half the size of the Ipad (yes actually and physically), and thus Ipad is a bit heavy.

For the purpose of using at home, the Ipad is a better choice since it´s larger screen, the Galaxy tab is my friend on the road, actually the only thing I need, works both as my phone, computer and as the great tablet/e-reader it is. And here at office, the Ipad´s browser was faster to download content over wifi. Screen/image resolution also a bit better. Still, however the Flash support lacking on Ipad is irritating.

Opinions on that?

Tablet war -December 13th

2010-12-13T15:23:00.008+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten

The Christmas present of 2010 could be a slate/tablet pc. See the new Teleca Talk Newsletter and the Mobile Trends article . ( http://www.teleca.com/Home/news_room/newsletters.aspx ) The worldwide sales of media tablets are expected close to 20 million units for 2010 and increasing to 55 million in 2011, continuing to >100 million 2012. (Gartner)

Does this mean that this gadget will replace or complement something else? Would we still carry also our phone and notebook and would we also have a 3rd gizmo? ..I think it will certainly complement. I know of a family just having bought their 3rd Ipad, and they still have phones and PC´s...

Gartner predicts that Ipad will have 80% market share this year. But according to Arete Analyst firm (article in our new Teleca Talk newsletter) Android is on a bender, and shows very high growth with many tablets coming out from Samsung , Motorola etc. So, would Googles invasion into the TV space with its Google-TV, make Android the perfect companion in the living room sofa with the tablet acting remote control, media centre and perfect on the go bringing TV shows and what else? Well, the choice is not easy, would it be Googles technology such as 3D maps etc and web domination or Apple´s compelling user experience and coolest design that will get the consumers blessing? Additionally Apples brand image, is 5x stronger than any other tablet brand.
See http://www.technobolt.com/2010/11/20/tablet-wars-which-tablet-you-want-infographic/ for more. (picture above from Technobolt)

The combat is interestingly supported by the fact Apple’s iPhone and iPad were top searches on (newfound) arch-rival Google during 2010. Google released its annual “Zeitgest” report for 2010 Thursday, a report that presents the top searches from around the world for the year.
Remember, Apple have the longest experience in tablets. You have not forgot about Apple´s Newton ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKHelCE9QAg&feature=related first presented in 1992 and on shelves in fall of 1993. Find data here: http://oldcomputers.net/apple-newton.html , 20MHz processor and 640 kB internal RAM. Hmmm, I think I go for the Ipad.

And our Teleca role in all this is that we bring outsourced innovation and highly skilled competencies and experiences to the table. On both iOS and Android, we support you to create differentiation, systems integration and compelling end-to-end applications enabling both OEMs and enterprises to benefit from this exploding market opportunity.

MeeGo Conference 2010, Dublin part 3 -December 2nd

2010-12-02T12:27:00.003+01:00

By Toni Nikkanen

Last day; Wednesday, November 17th

On Wednesday morning some people were already leaving, missing some good sessions. I concentrated on three.
The first was libquill, or the MeeGo image editing library. Libquill is part of MeeGo, and holds a lot of promise: It is able to edit large image files in limited memory and enables fast response times for user applications by way of multi-threading, performing the editing operations in the background while the user is already seeing the edit operation as if it was completed.
The libquill editing operations are provided as plug-ins, enabling developers to add their own if needed. Also there was discussion on supporting the use of libquill as a step in gstreamer, thus enabling any libquill edit operation to be performed on the gstreamer pipeline – in video playback or capture from a camera, for example.

The second was tracker. Now I feel many don’t realize the importance of tracker in MeeGo: It is the core of the content management framework, and therefore almost any developer should be at least aware of it. While tracker only indexes content such as images, video and e-mail, it acts as the primary storage for content like contacts and feeds.
The power of tracker becomes apparent when you consider that it can link everything it has indexed together, enabling whole new ideas for both user interfaces and for the social web. Also demonstrated was the ability to make tracker-using apps both from Qt and QML apps using the QtSparql module. While you do need to learn a new query language and understand the concepts behind NEPOMUK ontologies, it is very powerful in what can be done with it.

Perhaps one of the most engaging sessions was the lightning talk session at the end of the conference program. I heard many hearted 5-minute presentations ranging from using MeeGo for education, to how to make a successful mobile version of your web site, to how to successfully build and publish your own app. And about the Marble Desktop Globe application, which is a powerful, versatile open source map and navigation application for both desktop, and now also mobile devices. Also available as a Qt widget you can use in your own applications, with a fully documented API available.

Wednesday evening we were treated with premium tickets to the Ireland-Norway soccer game at the same Aviva Stadium we had spent the last 3 days in. We were well catered for, including given green Ireland-MeeGo soccer scarves. I wonder what the Norwegian participants thought about that? I even spotted a MeeGo ad in the soccer game.

It was clear from the amount of people and companies present, that a lot of product development based on MeeGo is happening now.

Thanks for some great days and experiences in Dublin.

I expect many exciting product launches at or before the next MeeGo Conference in San Francisco, May 2011!

MeeGo Conference 2010, Dublin part 2 -November 29th

2010-12-01T09:53:00.003+01:00

By Toni Nikkanen

Tuesday, November 16th

For many, Tuesday started with queuing for the free netbooks and I was no exception. Waiting in line was a good way to get some conversation with fellow aMeegos. Also, something funny happened. It was announced that Intel and Nokia employees would not get free netbooks, however the people in line front of me were from AMD, and they could get free Intel-powered netbooks.
Installing MeeGo on the netbook was a breeze and only took 10-15 minutes. Some functionality was missing, but already now some of them have been fixed by eager members of the community.
After I finished securing myself a netbook, it was time to grab a quick lunch and head on to the two security-related sessions, first one was with Ryan Ware (Intel).

Ryan’s presentation was mostly on motivation: Why are security features needed in MeeGo? The staggering concepts of Botnets for Hire ($8-90 per 1000 machines, which includes support by telephone!) and Malware-As-a-Service were presented among other good points. One: If you use your mobile as a wallet, what happens when someone steals it or breaks into it remotely? Or what if an attacker gains control of your battery charging function and makes it explode, all remotely? Or makes it call expensive service phone numbers? And the more powerful mobile devices become, the more it will be likely that they will contain your sensitive data like e-mail, documents or photos.

Security was clearly something lots of people in the audience shared interest in. Several questions were made related to DRM, for example.

Next was Nokia’s Elena Reshetova and Casey Schaufler, on MSSF (Mobile Simplified Security Framework). I saw the Maemo 6 Platform Security presentation by Elena Reshetova a year earlier at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, and was eager to see where they have gone from there. I soon found out that some things have changed, for example the introduction of SMACK, described by Casey Schaufler as “the simplest access control system that still works”. If we compare it to for example the complexity of SELinux, this sounds like a promising new development.
From “Writing Applications for multiple Meego devices” by Eduardo Fleury and Caio Oliveira, I picked up a good take-home message: Implement your UI with QML. If you are going to make your app available on different device categories, such as smart phone and tablet, don’t try to make a one size fits all solution. Instead implement common application logic, and then implement separate UI’s optimized for each device category using QML. You can of course re-use some QML UI components by being smart about what can be shared and what cannot.

The day ended as generously as it started. Hundreds of conference participants were smoothly transported to the Guinness Storehouse using a fleet of buses. There, we got to learn about the history of Ireland’s most famous beer, how it is made, and how it tastes. We also learned more about our fellow aMeegos as the evening went by.

MeeGo Conference 2010, Dublin part 1 -Nov 29th

2010-11-30T08:57:00.004+01:00

By Toni Nikkanen

The MeeGo Conference, hosted by Intel and Nokia 15.-17th of November 2010 in Dublin, Ireland, was a developer event packed with people, technical information, energy, and surprise announcements.

Sunday
The conference started on Monday, but on Sunday a lot of people had already arrived, and were catered for by various pre-conference sessions – both technical and fun. I already got a taste of the big talent present at the conference, for example I got to see an impressively fast map application for the N900 called CloudGPS made by one developer, Damian Waradzyn. If you have the N900, I suggest you try it out!

Monday
Monday was the day of the keynotes, and of the surprise announcements.
The key point in Doug Fisher’s (Intel) keynote, in my opinion, was the MeeGo way of working: Inclusion, Meritocracy, Transparency & Upstream First. To drive home the point of Inclusion, Carsten Munk, the lead developer of MeeGo ARM, was invited as a co-presenter on stage. This was a bit exceptional, you rarely see Intel and ARM standing side by side on stage.
Upstream First deserves special attention. It is a point all projects utilizing open source software should take note of, because it can provide benefits for everyone involved. The idea is that if you are using open source software made by others, and if you make improvements to it, you should submit your changes to the original project. The benefit to you is that you don’t need to maintain your own fork of the software, saving you a lot of work when you want to keep up to date with the latest updates to that software. And as a good side-effect, the whole ecosystem benefits too!
Alberto Torres from Nokia reinforced the developer story with a sure grip. The message: Write MeeGo apps with Qt and QML. That’s it, it’s that simple. And, your apps will work also on Symbian and numerous other platforms, too.

The first surprise was that everyone attending the conference will get a free Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet (powered by an Intel CPU and running MeeGo, of course) on Tuesday. The audience cheered!

After the break, Dominique Le Foll from Amino gave his reasons why going with MeeGo was the right choice for the digital set-top box maker. For them, MeeGo was like a turbo on their software team – thanks to it, they were able to start working on their software already when their hardware was still being designed. Traditionally they have had to wait until finalized hardware, before starting work on the software. This alone cut their turn-around time from 18 to 6 months. Le Foll also underlined the benefits of the Upstream First principle in their work.

The real surprise announcement came during the Q&A session with the MeeGo Technical Steering Group: Valtteri Halla (Nokia) and Imad Sousou (Intel), chaired by Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation. In the middle of the Q&A session, Jim Zemlin called AMD VP of software development Ben Bar-Haim on stage. They announced that AMD is joining the MeeGo project, providing MeeGo support for AMD chips and products. If it was exceptional to see Intel and ARM on stage, seeing Intel and AMD on stage working on the same project was even more so.
Ben Bar-Haim also explained how the Upstream First principle was a major factor in deciding to put their support behind MeeGo.

The day continued with interesting technical and community-related sessions. Of those, I would summarize some interesting points: Wayland is going to become the display server of MeeGo in the future, replacing the aging X11 system. Qt is going to gain Qt Quick Components, which are reusable QML UI components, and also Qt3D, making it easy to create 3D applications with Qt and/or QML. The QML developer story is going to be completed by Qt Quick support in the Qt Designer and with QML Observer (a “QML debugger”).

I also found Dr. Till Harbaum’s session on MeeGo on the Beagleboard inspiring: -"with cheap hardware and powerful software, your imagination is now your only limit!"

Planet of Apps conference -November 24th

2010-11-24T21:36:00.005+01:00

By Bhavya Siddappa on Planet-of-the-Apps Conference in London, November 2nd-4th.

Teleca recently attended the Planet of the Apps conference in London taking the opportunity to meet with developers, potential customers and to discuss the latest trends in the European applications market.

Some of the key takeaways form the conference were
- The mobile phone is the one device that most people don't leave home without and this will not change any time soon. Everyone across the value chain is starting to realize that the power is in hands and there is a huge revenue and market waiting to be concurred
- Mobile advertising is now starting to deliver on the promise it has held for many years. Retailers are starting to take mobile advertising much more seriously and the platforms are providing better services to support them.
- Applications are taking many forms, Free, Paid, Widgets, “Super apps” etc
o Super Apps are always on proactive notification, integration with native apps, contextualized, social, connected, efficient and that change user behavior.
- It’s not a two horse race - the market is very regional with Apple and Android strong in Western markets and Nokia remaining very strong in emerging markets.
- Retailers are now taking their mobile strategies very seriously. Everyone is doing something in mobile even if they don’t have a detailed strategy.
- The more advanced retailers are pulling their mobile teams back in to their main line business functions in order to make mobile a core part of their business.
- Monetisation options are increasing with a strong focus on in app payments and operator billing to enable great market reach.
- Community, Community, Community, building stand alone apps is unlikely to be enough. Users now expect great social networking and community services.
- RIM and Palm are trying to fight back by offering better developer services. RIM is trying to make a play on “Super Apps” around RIM OS 6.
- MasterCard may be first with a focused mobile payments strategy

Keynote talk on Delivering Differentiated Apps and Maximizing Revenue with BlackBerry: by Tyler Lessard
Starts by saying, ”Super apps” are applications that people use every day, as opposed to disposable ones. They are launching “InApp” payment, but believe that the future is most likely free apps with added features purchased within the app. They are connected with operators to open operator billing, enabling customers without credit card to access the services.
Advertising is become a big part of their offering and analytics are becoming a full part of the platform. BBM will be soon open to developers in order to support building a social platform. RIM will have right device to support Adobe technology. BlackBerry PlayBook is delivering a high end internet experience. They didn’t want to take phone platform to make a tablet so they went for a full fledge high end computing OS – That was the move of buying QNX.

Building applications that utilize location-based services: by Raimo Van from Layar
“We’re adding experience on top of your world”. The Layar ecosystem is composed of 3 parts: Publishing on your computer, a Discovery Browser and a Player Browser. Just as Youtube, they decided that the player should be available for developers to integrate it in their apps. Challenges are on the side of sensors, integration and testing, android porting. They have 1m + users worldwide. Concluded by saying, “don’t be an app, be a platform/browser don’t do it alone!”
Powering Communities to create an index of the real world: by Jan-Joost Kraal from eBuddy
eBuddy apps are on iPhone and Android. While discussion their case study they shared that they use in app ads. The click through rate is higher on a native app than on a browser version”. For mobile advertising funding model, a lot of traffic is needed. Discoverability/Findability is an issue, so they changed their name to ‘eBuddy messenger’ because people search for ‘messenger. HTML5 looks like a good opportunity but they are lacking the distribution channel.

Partnering with social media to achieve profitability: by Romain Ehrhard from Tellmewhere
“Use the social network to kickstart your community, Make sure that you still remain independent from the social networks, you never know what happens”. Branding is important so the tip was “Don’t have localized name, fails to work for internationals.”

Build vs Buy? – What will lead to long term commercial success?: by Dave Addey from Agant
Do you really need an app, or do you just want one? Apps are there to kill time. If you have a great idea and you know it makes sense, go for an app, but just do it well. They think that iOS is the best platform: stable, appstore, being long time in the business and are established platform.

Apps vs Browser: by Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic
Currently it is very hard to make browser compete with app because; Touchscreen UI brings expectations of Sideswipe, Pinch and expand and Access to key functionality like camera, gallery, GPS but Google has an answer “HTML 5”.

Both need to capture attention in noisy market and advertising works but hard to sustain. Viral on mobile not yet as effective as web. Browser search becoming very cost effective, but the question is where is app search and not to forget Mobile App Security is still a concern.

Planet of Apps Europe 2010, Day 2 , 3rd Nov 2010 “Conference Day 1”
This conference had a look at how apps have changed our lives, meet some of the creators behind them, and figure out just how big a business they really are.
Rory Jones, from BBC News opening remarks focused heavily on Google's smartphone operating system, with references to Adobe's Flash player and bit of favoritism towards Apple's strategy galore.
Russ Shaw from Skype delivered a keynote on “App or Die - How to be a success in the growing pps market”: Started off with good news, mobile video calling is coming to wide variety of platforms. By the end of 2014 mobile apps market will be worth more than $70 billion. The statistic shown by him was impressive, 4.6 mobile subscribers worldwide vs 1.5B PC users, so why make apps for netbooks if we have such huge mobile customer base? Skype is connecting the eco-system but their major challenge is moniterising. By partnering with Verizone they prove that they are not competitors for Networks but plan to bring in more innovation in network.
Tom Daly from Coca-Cola “Creating the business models of the future”: Gave an impressive answer to all those who want to know “Why bands should step into mobile apps space and how it would benefit them”. It was very clear that Coca-Cola pays attention to culture and market trends and they use mass media to connect to their fans. Key words of their business model were “Sharing, Connecting, Distributing and Amplifying” and they could make all this possible with mobile applications. Apps must empower storytelling so brands win the hearts & minds of consumers. Concluded by saying the revolution is just started, jump in & play well before it’s too late.
Derek McManus from Telefonica 02 UK was on the stage to answer the question, “Why and What carriers need to do to attract developers”. Stated that developers mindshare is become the hottest commodity in the mobile business. As he proceeded unlocking about developer mindshare he predicts that in US half of the market will be smartphones by 2014 and Android will be winning on.
Rethinking on developers perceptions he suggests that beauracy needs to in control, market must be transparent, complimentary to needs & is fundamentally fair. They wish to empower developers to do things differently, to lead decision making and give what they wish. Developers basically need connectivity to market, money for their efforts and community support for which they established 02 Litmus in 2009. Summed it up by saying “We have lots to do and we have started on our journey by forming new relationships, engaging and building learning, supporting monetization and encouraging collaboration.”

Panel debate: Establishing the future of mobile advertising: No more a debate where everyone agreed that Mobile advertising has emerged as an integral part of any brand’s marketing campaign today.

Current trends:
- Brands have started fan club communities and sponsoring sections of mobile Internet portals
- In-game advertising is increasing
- Pre–call ad inserts, ad caller ring-back tones (CRBT) as well as video ads on the mobile phone are gaining traction
- LPA – Location Point Advertising that’s what user expect on their mobile

Mobile advertising is a win-win proposition for all the stakeholders including consumers, brands and telcos. Customers can avail of some great opportunities, discounts, prizes and much more. The panel summarized by saying - Although the market seems relatively small now, the potential for growth is inarguably huge.

Panel Discussion: How brands can use apps to distinguish themselves in the marketplace
This panel session was made up of a number of enterprise companies such as British Airways, Last Minute.com, Deutche Post, Trader Media Group, Virgin Atlantic, and explored how they are currently addressing the mobility challenging. While all the companies are deploying mobile services, mainly to consumers, and view it as a key part of their future strategy, it was clear that they are facing significant challenges in dealing with the number of platforms they need to deploy on in order to achieve a high level of market reach.
Several key themes came out during the panel session.
· iPhone, Symbian and Android are the key platforms that these companies are focusing on first.
· Some are using HMTL/web services in order to try and achieve wider market reach.
· Mobility is being folded back in to the core marketing / web strategy instead of being a small separate team doing its own thing – a clear sign that the importance of mobility is growing.
· Companies are using a mix of internal and external resources today but most believe that as mobility becomes more important that will make greater use of outsourcing.
The panel was chaired by our own Andrew Till.

Henri from Facebook was interviewed by Jemima Kiss from the Guardian: It was a very interesting presentation. Facebook is said to be the “3rd largest country” and its popularity is touching the sky. As per statistics 60% traffic is on m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com and they have 150 million monthly active mobile users of Facebook. People were comparing Google with Facebook, but the question was why as we haven't seen any search features on Facebook. Features like tag your friend, virtual currency, create events and check out has taken them to be on the top of the Social Networking sites. The most Retweeted tweet on twitter for this talk was
“When I'm opening fridge I can see Facebook. #planetapps. One day Facebook will be everywhere. I don't know if it's OK for everyone”.
Will Apple continue to remain the dominant platform that developers choose?: The panel seemed very much biased toward Apple platform. They forgot to take the statistic for 3Q 2010, Symbian had 37% of the smartphone market, Android was second with 25% (it was at 2% 18 months ago), and iOS in third place with 16%. RIM (Blackberry) was next. Windows was losing.
iPhone is higher quality, the Android has more features and is more open, which allows it to appeal to a greater number of people. Andrew Till took over the show by saying, the idea question “Android/iphone/BlackBerry/WinMobile7/Nokia – Which platforms should developers target?” was never discussed.

Key take away by the end of the day was:
- Google TV, an android adaptation that puts regular television and the Web in one user interface--stole the show, complete with support from some of the consumer electronics industry's biggest players.
- Smartphones market is very fragmented, HTML5 is the best answer to this issue.
- Cool Meego Devices: Set Top Box, Netbook, Tablet interacting together by Intel. Intel SDK looks like was made for crash reports and AppUp Center integration on Atom devices.
- The best way to promote your app is to build a good app
- Metro UI is amazing and hopes apps will be as good as on iOS

Planet of Apps Europe 2010 Day 3 ; 4th Nov 2010 “Conference Day 2”

Our lives are increasingly relying on mobile phones not only as phones but also as devices for obtaining information and conducting transactions—be that buying movie tickets or checking flight times. Apps have brought in a new revolution in the world. Thus this was one another day where all the delegates were trying to explode the opportunities in this space.

Opening remarks by Dr Windsor Holden from Juniper Research: The explosion in the number of mobile phones and associated services is here to stay. In fact, innovations in this piping hot field are taking everyone by storm. Powerful and innovative applications in this handy device have resulted in an all new ball game.

Using apps to get consumers to consume content on their mobile by Emma Lloyd from BskyB: Great Sky presentation. Lots of cool announcements for Sky users. Sky Sport News looks promising on iOS for both iPhone and iPad. It will be available soon on android and BlackBerry. Sky Sports have 2 million downloads so far. Driving mobile content consumption is the key lesson to be learnt from their success story.

Panel Debate: Is the music industry prepared? Android music app “Shazam” success actually put an end to the debate. In today's mobile world, it's all about music thanks to falling mobile Web access prices and new music download services. Mobile music is not just the next big thing. It brings together the digital home with the mobile data revolution. Those who enjoy music on their home computer will be able to enjoy this content anywhere, anytime on mobile handsets, smartphones and converged devices.
Challenges in terms of user interfaces, ease of operation, open file formats and sound quality. The panel summarized by asking operators to offer a wide range of the best music phones and unlimited data plans that give subscribers a full range of choices for accessing their music. Low-cost access and choice will bring the power of the mobile Web and music phones to their full revenue and lifestyle potential.

Mobile and the future of publishing by Juon from Pearson: They are facing an explosive growth in eBooks % of consumers, that means there is a lot of opportunity, challenge and a call to work with developers closely. Today there is a transformation from newspapers to multiplatform news. Happy with the grand success of US pilot; first-ever complete social studies curriculum on ipad. Says “It’s not the end of Books, Papers or reading, this is a challenge/opportunity for; new devices, new content experiences and new business models. Very soon it’s gonna be an era of e-reader, tablets with dual displays. Concludes wit an interesting line “There is no OLD Media vs NEW Media, There is the BUSINESS of digital media”.

“Paid vs free apps” by Ilja Laurs from Getjar: Shares his thoughts on the most effective method of monetising the apps market by giving an example of most successful app ‘Angry Birds”. It’s a free app on Apple market and for android it’s free with Ad support. Shared few Monetization Models; Advertising, subscription, pay as you use, free to use – pay to service, freemium and eCommerce i.e Virtual goods.

Debating how best to promote your app: The quick tip from the panel was when advertising app, you want to be where your potential customers are – online. Internet marketing offers you many ways to spread the word and boost your sales, even on a small budget. Few key mantras to promote apps in the market ;

– Make a Youtube video, choose app name and price app wisely, create some outstanding app icon, integrate social networking APIs and finally advertise and market the app via Facebook, twitter and blogs.

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

2010-11-19T13:05:00.003+01:00

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.

Droidcon London 2010 –The Report Day One -November 19th

2010-11-19T11:12:00.004+01:00

By Bhavya Siddappa, Technology Evangelist , Teleca

Droidcon, a series of great events for the Android developer community. It is big , open, interesting and very encouraging and Teleca participated with our own Droidbooth and a planned presentation.

Droidcon, London, Day One 28th Oct 2010, First day, with unplanned, unprepared bar camp-style presentations had a nice range and quantity of low level programming tips and higher level business tips in such a short space of time. It was fun to see Android fans carrying Android Tattoos with a smile.

Sony Ericsson gave few tricks on Android UI: Advising developers not to do long running tasks in the UI thread, to use Handler & Service classes for longer lasting processes and to use Toasts to show quick popup status.
Location Services by Cloudmade, they will support Android later this year with a Maps SDK, based on OpenStreetMaps. Map data comes as you need it and is stored locally on device. Location-based advertising is related to a network that finds highest value ads from other networks. No one in the audience was able to say they were making money from LBS. A device centric comment was that GPS on Android is still seen as a battery hungry.
Another Interesting thing was to know that Motorola went to use Skyhook instead of Google location API on Android, the way they would get data for their customers WiFi location. Google forced them to switch back to Google location and Skyhook now suing Google!
RESTProvider : Carl from Novoda spoke on how to make a RESTful API available as a Content Provider. He also demonstrated Unit testing of android classes without emulator.
App Analytics from Capptain: Demonstrated combining in-app analytics with CRM. SDK is available in Android and iOS. It has new analytics capabilities like how long users are spending in each screen of your app, real-time analytics — can monitor where people are in your app right now, crash logs with device, firmware, etc details.
Git on android ; A guy from who works at the guardian walked through all the problems he came across when trying to use git on android and how using open source goodness he could simplify a lot of trouble by simply extending pre-written code and even create work arounds for troublesome bugs.
Meta-Market Model; Mark Murphey´s talk tied in very nicely with problems regarding using alternative markets. He created a brain storming session on the market problems and what can we do as a community to help improve this. Some of the good problems highlighted were: Comment spam, Not enough screenshots, Analytics, Refund policy too lenient, Downloads don’t work.
Market is a closed club, OEM’s who don’t agree to the rule book don’t have access. And simply creating an app store for each carrier/OEM etc. isn’t a viable solution which Mark summarized with a brilliant quote: “those who complain about fragmentation you ain’t seen nothing yet”.
So he came up with an idea about having a single open feed of android applications that all the market applications can hook into. So this would work as some sort of extended atom/rss feed (just add namespace) with open access which could benefit from the standards introduced and the maturity of the software already written. This sounds like a great idea but will obviously need a large amount of momentum to succeed. Mark said that instead of us complaining at Google to fix the market we should fix the market problems ourselves.

Day ended with a nice Tip from Tech hub:
“Devs aren’t always design focused, should assume users are complete idiots and don’t understand anything.”

So a great flow of insider tips to keep the hard core Android community abreast. More on day two next.

App´s top tipps from OsiM London -October 27

2010-10-27T13:15:00.001+02:00

By Andrew Till

Last week I and several colleagues attended the latest OSiM London event. I had the pleasure of presenting Teleca’s take on the evolving applications landscape and some of the challenges for developers in maximising their success in bringing compelling and profitable applications to market. At the end of the presentation I shared our “Top Tips” for success with applications based on our experience of developing applications for customers across multiple platforms. I thought it would be interesting to share these recommendations on our blog – enjoy and hopefully you will find these insight and useful.

1. Take a position, solve a utility or entertainment problem

It’s absolutely critical to be clear about the purpose of the application you’re developing and to also ensure that it solves a real problem. For example it’s not clear that we need any more calculator applications in the Android Market place given the number already available. Being clear about the problem being solved will help all the way through the development process and when it comes to loading you application on to an application store and the supporting messages you include with it.

2. Focus on User Acquisition, Engagement AND Retention

We see many developers and companies who only focus on the initial acquisition of users for their application but in our experience continued focus on regular engagement and retention is also key not only to the success of the current application but also for future application releases as well.

One interesting way of managing this is to measure how new features or feature removals drives key metrics such as application downloads, uninstalls and user rating.

3. Use the Metrics and know your competition

Many application stores now provide a wealth of data on how your application is performing, where it is ranked, who is downloading it and which market they are in. Using this information on a daily basis significantly improves your chances of success as it enables you to respond quickly to changing market demands, optimize pricing, assuming you are charging for the application, based on what is happing with your application and those it competes with and to critically identify when you hit the sweet spot with different demographics.

Using such metrics can also help you understand who you are really competing with and to plan accordingly. Most people assume they are competing with other applications in the same category but this may not always be the case as you may simply be competing for share of wallet and hence in reality your competition with many different types of application.

Put simply if you’re not using the tools provided by the store vendor they you cannot expect to have a killer app on your hands.

4. Release early and often

Trying to build the perfect application often leads to long overruns and being beaten to market by competitors. Increasing we are seeing that it is much more effective to release early and provide frequent updates to users. This has a number of benefits such as enabling you to “land grab” in new areas, helping to build a regular dialogue with consumers and critically building customer delight each time you provide an enhanced set of features. Typically apps can see > 80% of active users upgrade to the latest version within 30 days of release especially on platforms that provide notification services.

Using this approach can also enable one to identify if a feature is really worthwhile fully developing or if it is only going to resonate with a small number of users thus saving time, money and effort. Another benefit can be to help user re-engage with an application when they see that new features are available and thus helping to maintain a healthy active user base.

5. Integrate Facebook, Twitter and other social engagement channels

Leveraging social networking sites can bring many advantages. The most obvious is that it helps to increase visibility of your application and can stimulate a level of viral growth that is hard to achieve with other mediums. Today most social networks have standard APIs to enable seamless login and posting of a users account and make these available for integration via standard SDKs.

6. Build communication channels with your users to foster a community

Creating an on-going dialogue with your users is often the key to sustained success. Typical App store ratings are very binary (love/hate) and provide limited insights. Increasingly developers are now moving to utilise platforms such as GetSatisfaction, Twitter and other which enable a much richer level of communication and also provide detailed insights as to why users really love or hate what you have done. It also enables you to grow your voice in the market place, provide you engage and respond to users posts and build to app missionaries from your user base.

7. Show focus by Platform and Devices

With such a proliferation of platforms and device types it can be a killer trying to release on everything everywhere. Increasing we are seeing customer decided to focus on getting one platform right before moving to multi-platform deployment. While this may mean that you yield some time to market on a particular platform is also means that when you do move to multi-platform support you have a robust codebase to port and an growing user base, and hopefully evangelists, to support your expansion.

Of course there are many other tips and learning’s we’d like to share but in the interest of keeping this post to a reasonable size I will finish here. However do feel free to come find me at Droidcon in London later this week or Planet of the Apps next week.

CTIA, tablets and app stores for whom? -October 14th

2010-10-14T14:05:00.003+02:00

By Scott Yoneyama

So now that I’m back from CTIA and I’ve sent out my follow-up e-mails, entered my new contacts into Outlook, “Linked-In” with several of them and dug out of the hole created by being out of the office for a week, it’s time to reflect on what I saw and learned. What I learned was that what I saw generated more questions than ever.

As a dedicated owner of a Droid X, I was impressed by Nokia’s presentation. They make a very compelling case to developers to build for Ovi. The new QT platform is impressive and the N8 is a nice device. However, Nokia faces an uphill, “chicken and egg” struggle. They can offer worldwide distribution, but US developers want US customers and glory. To “help” them along, not only did Nokia lock the doors and give everyone in the room a brand new N8, but they also announced $10M in contest money for developers. Will it work? Stay tuned for that.

Everyone has an App store. Even I saw some I didn’t know about before. Carriers, device manufacturers….heck, Amazon.com is launching an Android store. Where will all of the applications come from? How will the customers find the stores? Do the costs of supporting an App store really make sense (for say, Samsung) when that device is going to be distributed by Verizon and shipped with the Android OS, both of whom have their own App stores??

The iPad is changing the game for publishers and we saw some impressive statistics and revenue numbers. In response, there are no less than 22 “tablets” coming to market before Christmas and they are all 7” varieties. This is a brand new, unproven and undefined market. Who’s going to use these devices? I played with one and I found it clunky and hard to manage. As a user, I struggle with the value proposition for a device that’s bigger than my already large smartphone and smaller than my iPad. Moreover, who’s going to build apps for these devices? The 7” screen requires a brand new UI vs. the 10” and smartphone UI’s. Without any users, will publishers take a chance on these un-proven devices?

What I found noticeably absent from the conference was any discussion about HTML5 and the mobile web. Aside from a brief, poorly attended presentation from a member of W3C there was almost no mention of this protocol and its potential to revolutionize the online and mobile web. Are we all simply so drunk on application Kool-Aid that we’re forgetting the foundation of it all and what can be done with these new upgrades to the protocol? Hmmm…..

iPhone, Droid, N8; Ovi, iTunes, Shop4Apps,; iPad, 7” Galaxy, 10” Stingray; Lions and Tigers and Bears….Oh MY!!! Where does one place their bets?

I flew home from the conference thinking about the movie, City Slickers. Jack Palance says to Billy Crystal, “You city folk, you fill your head with a lot of useless nonsense. The secret to life is this…..one thing” (I paraphrase a bit) Great applications do one thing very well. One can’t be all things to all people and those that try, fail. All of these devices, OS’s, stores…..they enable us to do one thing. They allow us to find something, buy something, communicate or be entertained. The “cloud” allows the information to be accessible anytime, anywhere on any device. So don’t get lost in the tidal wave. Just pick one and in the immoral words of M.A.S.H.’s Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, “Do one thing, do it VERY well and THEN move on!”

Beyond Exploratory Testing-IST as open source -October 1st

2010-10-01T10:01:00.002+02:00

By Matthias Ratert

In all projects we test SW by executing automated test scripts and/or running many test cases stored in a Test Management Tool such as HP Quality Center. We check whether all requirements are implemented correctly. By performing Regression Testing we ensure they are working as expected when shipping a new software version to the customer.

To find new issues not discovered by Regression Testing, Exploratory Testing (ET) is one of the largest hypes within the testing community in recent years. The tester has to uncover situations that could negatively impact the end user in terms of reliability, stability and usability.
Trying ET was also helpful for us: We discovered new issues and it was fun to test. However it became increasingly difficult to come up with new and creative test ideas and too many areas of our complex system remained untested.

IST (incremental Scenario Testing), a Teleca methodology

In order to provide a testing alternative better suited to our needs, we developed Incremental Scenario Testing (IST). IST and its implementation, the IST Tool, were developed over several iterations. Soon we called it the creative director of our Exploratory Test sessions.
Testers are guided through a session by scenarios which are composed of test items such as preconditions, states and events. These test items provide the scenario framework; how to reach each specific test item is up to the tester. The expected result is not specified and has to be judged by the tester – as in ET.
The test scenarios are generated based on the occurrence probabilities of each test item. Scenarios evolve over time as previous test results are an important factor when generating new test scenarios:
• Failed test scenarios are re-tested whereas passed test scenarios are not re-tested regularly.
• Failed test items are used more often and passed test items are used less.
• The probability of unexecuted test scenarios being run increases over time.
This guarantees that each test session will identify new issues, independent of the SW development phase. The issues are validated by the IST Tool based on the tester’s experience. Reported issues are re-tested within the same test session and fixes are verified with a new SW build.
IST involves SW developers in the testing process. Modified or new functionality can be prioritized for testing. As the test subject can be exchanged easily and whenever needed, these SW changes are tested directly when integrated.
IST allows for flexible, adaptable and efficient test sessions that are suited perfectly for agile software development.

IST as open source
Finally our latest announcement: we decided that the IST Tool should be published as Open Source to provide this great methodology to the testing community. To be 100% sure that the implementation of IST is on the right level we first want to execute a pilot project. I’m looking for a partner right now – I hope I will find him on the Agile Testing Days in Berlin beginning of October. I will keep you informed ;-)

Will the iPad be a toy or tool? September 26th

2010-09-27T10:51:00.003+02:00

By Andrew Till

Will the iPad be the Blackberry of Enterprise Apps or just an executive play thing?

While at a conference of global CIOs this week I had what I like to call a “blinding glimpse of the obvious”. While as expected every other person walking through the door was proudly showing of their shiny new iPads (well not so shiny as they were all lovingly carried in a case) once the conversation started it soon became obvious that iPads are having an unexpected impact. Despite all the concerns around enterprise security and lack of true multitasking the iPad is being widely embraced in corporate board rooms and the expectations about how they can be used are high. Time and again it was commented that application development was focused on the iPad due to demand from executives to be able to have access to traditional enterprise applications.

So this set me thinking. 10 years ago I used to hear all the time that executives were bring blackberries in to organisations and expecting the CIOs to “just support it”. While many said it would die due to lack of support from IT departments the opposite happened and RIM became the defacto owner of the mobile market.

So will the iPad force the enterprise mobile application agenda. Will corporate executives force a change in behaviour and the much anticipated wide spread adoption of enterprise mobility ? Will such applications filter down to a broader uptake of enterprise applications for smartphones in general ? Only time will tell but for now I am off to polish my shiny new toy.

Nokia World 2010 experience -September 16th

2010-09-16T22:26:00.000+02:00

By Markku Hollström

I've been in numerous Nokia World's and it was good to see that Nokia is back and fighting. Nokia strategy has been always making sense, the execution has not always been as good as it could have been. Therefore it was so good to see that the new product launches and OVI application store are looking very good indeed. We can take part of accomplishment with us as well.

The star of the show was Anssi vanjoki and N8. The amazing image quality was lifted as the key selling point in Anssi's energetic and passionate key note speech, that was streamed in to Internet as well. I wish all of Telecan's had seen it. Surely Anssi will be missed by our community should he choose to retire from this business altogether.

If I would be selecting a device for my business use, the E7 would be my choice amongst all devices I know of. Large qwerty keyboard with a good feel, large display with a very high quality resolution and polarizer for helping to keep away reflections all combined with excellent support for office tools, including office communicator, are to me the most important factors. The overall User Experience was also convincing. New C models were very competitive with any Android devices in their price points and let’s face it, the C6 & C7 will launch in to a segment that Nokia still dominates and around which there is a very loyal following.

In numerous discussions I got the feeling that Nokia is now very much supported by operators. iPhone and Android are seen by operator a bit of a threat as they are potentially marginalizing operators own service offering and as they are not integrated to Operator app stores in a way Nokia is. Nokia has already agreement with 91 operators for operator billing while no other store can offer this option to developers. Why is this important? In practice download rates with payment are 13 times higher with operator billing compared to credit card/pay pal. This alone is very strong motivator for developers to put their apps in to OVI store. I heard from developers that Nokia has by far the best support for them what comes to revenue sharing and technical help.

Another realization from the show is that while industry debate tends to focus on Western Markets the emerging markets are also key. Here Nokia is clearly planning big things be it with already announcement initiatives such as Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Money or with new strategies they are planning. And again bring applications and services to these markets combined with extensive operator billing looks to be a winning combination.

While we focus a lot on Symbian and MeeGo let’s not forget Series 40 and there were a 1M reasons every day not to forget S40. As Nokia shared it currently ships 1M S40 handsets per day globally which is more than any other single SW platform in any type of device. As part of Nokia’s turn around it is also clearly focusing on bringing innovation to S40 as well. At the Show the C3 was announced a S40 handset combining a traditional keypad with touch screen support and 3G. Overall the C3 looks to be a compelling proposition especially when combined with the new S40 Touch and Type SDK which was announced at the show and will give developers a wide range of new APIs to leverage.

How can they not win in this situation?

50 Million Reasons to Develop OVI Store apps -September 16th

2010-09-16T15:45:00.000+02:00

By Jari Saarhelo

Just came back from Nokia World… It seems to me that OVI Store is gaining momentum big time:

- OVI store is the only high profile app store offering operator billing which is key to opening up apps to many new consumer groups and markets
- Symbian^3 devices offer potentially a huge installed base with limited competition
- Many new enhancements around payment options (such as in app) are being launched

I had a chat with a mobile games developer I know very well from the past. They’ve written quite a few successful high-end titles for iPhone, however it is becoming more and more difficult to get publicity in Apple’s App Store. There are 150 new iPhone games launched every day – do you want to invest significant money in a title that might go unnoticed?

OVI Store is the only high profile application store supporting operator billing. So what? Based on Nokia’s usage data, customers select operator billing 13 times more often than credit card billing, if both options are presented. This is pretty logical considering that there are a lot of customers having no access or difficult access (Read: teenager needing to get parent’s credit card) to credit card payment. Offering the preferred purchase option on a high volume mobile platform is bound to increase the user base dramatically. Add the new try and buy feature to that and you have a pretty compelling purchase experience.

Nokia announced a big push on Symbian^3 with the launch of N8, E7, C6 and C7. They are expecting the devices to sell 50 million copies world-wide. This is a large installed base of compatible devices to deploy the mobile applications especially considering that OVI Store has currently a much smaller application portfolio than iPhone App Store or Android Marketplace has – there is a lot of room for great apps selling great numbers!

There are 50 million reasons to write apps for Symbian^3 right now.

The Search for the Killer Mobile Convergence App -September 8th

2010-09-08T13:21:00.002+02:00

By Craig Turner
We’ve heard all about Mobile Convergence. It’s actually happening right in front of our eyes – netbooks and tablet PCs with SIM cards, mobile phones with more processing power than a mainframe from the 90s and devices that aren’t really either one or the other, but excite us with the endless possibilities of convergent functionality. However, while everybody is eager to cash in on the hype and seem all certain that this is not just a trend, but the way of the future, the number of truly successful convergent applications remain limited.

Location Based Services is a good example of a convergent area that has seen some success.

In particular, navigation has proven quite lucrative an application for several suppliers – as a stand-alone application. As navigation moves from a specialized device solution to a convergent application available on various devices, we see turn-by-turn navigation becoming a free service, with Google Maps and Ovi Maps leading the way. Premium services based on turn-by-turn hold the promise of further revenues. Beyond navigation, there are plenty of free LBS applications out there to identify the nearest ATM or fast-food joint. There is certainly an argument to be made for the value of such services in retaining customers, but they aren’t going to be the next big revenue drivers.
As with navigation and LBS applications, it seems likely that other applications dependent on convergent technologies, if successful, will rapidly pass through a brief existence as premium services to becoming commodity services expected from any smartphone platform worth its salt.

Maybe it’s mobile TV. Google TV and AppleTV might enable mobile TV, but they’re clearly looking to move successes with Android and iOS. Even then I suspect it’s not happening as a mainstream feature until we have widespread 4G access. And a killer app? I’ve seen travelers of all ages in airports or on the plane watching movies on their laptops and portable DVD players, but not very many squinting at their iPhone for 2 hours.

Other possibilities are Mobile Banking or Mobile Payment. Several authors have extolled the virtues of mobile banking lately and that it is the application of the future. However, before we get there, banks are going to have to rapidly embrace a new technology and the public as a whole is going to have to build their confidence in mobile technology as a safe medium for banking. It’ll be interesting to see if the traditional banks are able to keep up with the speed of development in the mobile industry or if they are passed by newcomers, similar to Egg (Citigroup´s online bank) showing up the British banks with their online banking offering.

Mobile Payment is a more competitive market, as the service can be provided by anybody with customer access, including examples such as Nokia Money or the well-cited M-PESA project. In fact, pre-paid cards can even be seen as small bank accounts supporting micro-savings. To reach the masses, technologies such as NFC (Near Field Communications radio protocol for very short distance and ultra fast set up time) will need to be rolled out en masse and consumers will need to be guided down a gradual transition path from inserting their credit or debit card into a machine to waving their mobile device in front of a reader. They’ll also have to grow to trust that the person behind them in the checkout line can’t scan their back pocket while they are waiting.

However, you can’t rule out that all of these apps will develop moderately, but never really take off. Instead, a social trend might drive a surprising growth of an otherwise unlikely application will suddenly find itself installed on every second smartphone as the world’s next Facebook.

Who will win? -I don’t know. But whoever it is, they will first have to understand all the wide-reaching implications of Mobile Convergence and listen very carefully to what their customers really want – no easy task and certainly not something everybody in our industry is very good at!

Open source driving -August 27th

2010-08-27T09:24:00.001+02:00

By Martin Wilde

The momentum around the adoption of Open Source for the automotive In-Vehicle-Infortainment (IVI) environment got another couple boosts recently. The Genivi Alliance announced in late July that it chose the Linux Foundation's Intel- and Nokia-backed MeeGo operating system as the basis of its next "Apollo" reference release for open source Linux-based IVI systems, followed less than a week later by the 1.0 release of the MeeGo for IVI platform. Running Linux on an Intel Atom processor, MeeGo for IVI ships with a sample Qt-based IVI Home Screen and taskbar featuring a scroll-wheel, as well as automotive-specific middleware components and sample applications.

This new spirit of openness and willingness to share and expand technology among historically rival manufacturers is a marked turnaround in the corporate car culture. Whether it's simply a marriage of convenience or a sign of the truly difficult times facing the industry, it's no less remarkable for its magnitude.

Automotive companies are concerned about driver distraction caused by IVI systems and Teleca believes that existing OS platforms like MeeGo and Android need to be enhanced to be able to certify which apps are safe for driving, with some kind of software or physical silicon partitioning to make sure that dangerous apps are locked out while the car is being driven.

But given that multiple car manufacturers are considering whether to go open source or to keep seeking proprietary solutions is evidence that the scalability and speed of innovation are virtually impossible to match in a proprietary software environment.

Let the war begin.. -August 18th

2010-08-18T11:47:00.003+02:00

By Magnus Ingelsten

In the UK TV series Robot Wars, a competition between amateur teams building mechanical war robots equipped with hack axes, chain saws and powered by fierce electric motors, that are aiming to destroy or at least be the last of the fighting robots to survive the competition. And at every start of a battle the show host exclaims “Let the war begin!”
Now, can we draw a parallel between the little green robot (read Android) and the rest of the pack and the Robot Wars show? Is there a fierce competition and someone will eventually stand alone on the top, or will we see a fragmented market both in terms of segments, device types and OS adapted to different needs and industry segments?
If we embrace a variation of OS:s, is it good for competition and does it speed up the development pace?

I vote for that choice is good! And I dare say that the end-user do not care.? They care about choice. And to chose a device with no limitations and a lot of possibilities and freedom. Open is good! And they care about the total package with look, feel and a brand that deliver.

Because it is in line with the experience with other consumer goods My TV set, HiFi (do these exist anymore..?) TV surround equipment, washing machines, cars, GPS etc. Do we care what OS they run? I´d say not really. How about computers and e-readers and slates? It still comes down to possibilities and limitations. What can you do or not do.

My friend bough a new Android device the other day and we compared our two Android phones of different brands. He hated his device, and I loved mine. Technical differences? Not really. More features? Not really. Nicer device? Not really. But performance? Not really.... So what? Execution is the answer. One device lost usability and simplicity so the user experience got lost. He felt limited and without the right possibilities. It was all about expectations.

So, select the right OS for an implementation dependent on the user expectations. Ensure that the execution correspond to required possibilities and not limit them and correspond to expectations. Ensure the (user) experience is maximized to manage and address the use cases and features as logical and simple relevant for the user group.

-Expectations, Execution and Experience. Are these the 3 E´s for success?
What are your thoughts? (comments are welcome)

Is the little green robot all set to rule? -August 11th

2010-08-11T09:55:00.005+02:00

By Sonali Mishra

The Android OS has continued to shake up the mobile world in terms of smartphone market share. According to research firm Gartner Android has now surpassed Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS in terms of global smartphone market share.

Android's share stood at 9.6 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Apple's iOS also grew, from 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 to 15.4 percent, but Android is now clearly increasing the pace of its momentum.

In a further sign of its growth North American operator AT&T has announced that it is launching the Samsung Captivate, its version of Samsung's flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S. This will be AT&T's fourth smartphone running on Google's Android platform. Sony Ericsson has also unveiled its fourth smartphone based on Google's Android platform, the Xperia X8, and positioned it as a mass market alternative to its flagship X10 model. The company, which in the first quarter had its first quarterly profit since 2008, is back on the strength of its Android phones and its custom UX user interface.

So what has led to this a surge in Android phones? Openness, user customisation, longterm outlook, multiple OEMS and carrier partners, have all contributed to the growth of Android as an OS. Android’s openness isn't just limited to the core software platform: but is extended to a wide range of services and OEM device specifications. The latest release of Android (2.2 or more commonly known as Froyo) is now open sourced and starting to reach consumer devices. Froyo, bring a number of significant improvements including improved content discovery, as you’ll finally get a suggestion if you misspell an app name, substantial improvements in browser performance, both when launching and parsing content, and the inclusion of support for Flash 10.1. There are also new services supported by Froyo including support for Googles Simplify Media acquisition which will enable users to stream music from your home library and push apps from your desktop to the handset.

Following a slow start Android is now really hitting it’s stride with a wide range of OEMs supporting it, 10K+ new applications being launched every month, growing operator support and increasing market share gains. Wrap all of this inside Google’s massive marketing machine and it’s push in to new market segments such as Google TV and Tablets and you have very a true contender for the future smartphone market leader.

In-Vehicle Infotainment touched by Teleca -July 5th

2010-07-05T08:32:00.002+02:00

By Dr. Roger Hampel

As the automotive industry is recovering from one of its worst crises ever, also the suppliers of automotive electronics and multi-media software are regaining strength.

For suppliers of in-vehicle infotainment systems, however, the world has changed dramatically over the last 3 years. Typical head unit functions like navigation or media player have become standard applications on Smartphones, thus consumers are no longer willing to pay a huge premium for built-in infotainment systems that are already outdated at the time they hit the market and which cannot be updated with new functionality in the field.

Leveraging smartphone platform ecosystems drives time to market
To bridge this gap, the automotive infotainment industry has started to embrace smartphone platforms. The GENIVI alliance of automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers and service companies is developing an open source Linux based infotainment SW platform. The first platform release was based on Intel’s Moblin stack and it is anticipated that future platform releases will be based on the MeeGo platform, see Andrew Till’s blog entry from February 18th).
Google’s Android platform has also made its way into the automotive infotainment arena, e.g. in Continental’s AutoLinQ system. Furthermore, the recently announced acquisition of QNX, provider of OS and Middleware for automotive telematics, by Smartphone manufacturer RIM can be interpreted as a move to close this gap from the other end and Microsoft’s Auto platform is based on Windows Embedded CE

Cars go smart(phone)
Consumers will be able to experience connected services in the car such as downloading and installing apps from an application store, consuming audio and video stored locally and amended by online data such as album art or streaming online media. Media can be transferred seamlessly between the home network, smartphone and the IVI system. Car diagnostics such as battery level for electric vehicles, fuel gauge, door/window lock status can be accessed via Internet from any PC or the mobile phone. Actuators in the car can be triggered remotely, e.g. unlocking the car, closing the windows, activating stolen vehicle tracking. Emergency calls are automatically initiated by a triggering airbag.

The adoption of smartphone platforms for in-vehicle infotainment goes along with the change from device centric scope to ecosystem scope. Leveraging the ecosystem around open source platforms such as Android and GENIVI allows the providers of IVI systems to offer product development based on a sustainable roadmap for software platform evolution while reducing overall cost of ownership.

We are engaged
Teleca is a member of both the Open Handset Alliance governing the Android platform and the GENIVI alliance driving the development of the GENIVI platform. Moreover, we have been a Microsoft Gold Systems Integration Partner since 2002.

Expect breathtaking IVI systems to hit the market that have been touched by Teleca!

Mobile Apps or Mobile Web or both? -June 28th

2010-06-28T10:06:00.003+02:00

By Andrew Frost

There’ve been some discussions recently about the relative benefits of applications that are created as native mobile apps (e.g. for iTunes, Ovi Store, Android Market etc) or applications that are deployed via the mobile web. Andrew Till commented on this discussion recently on our blog following the Open Mobile Summit conference at the end of May.

The obvious benefit to a web-based deployment is that anyone with an internet-connected device can access it. No longer are you bound to application stores or particular brands of device, you can create something that anyone (maybe even desktop users) can access. The downside though is that you’re unlikely to be able to leverage the full power and integration of each individual device, due to a number of factors such as the underlying browser engine (i.e. Webkit or something else), the data models implemented by the device vendor and any unique interaction models implemented on the device that you need to consider in order to deliver a consistent user experience. So while web-deployment will certainly remove a lot of challenges it will not, as yet, be able to address all the challenges and hence your application will be inherently limited.

A new development in this area (on mobile devices at least) is the release of Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) 2 which is going to be available on a number of different platforms, initially on Google Android. AIR 2 brings a number of benefits:

Includes the Flash Player 10.1 with the new developer features and enhancements, so it is simpler to create an application that runs both as a web-based application and as a native application on a disconnected mobile phone

Applications appear as native – so despite being created using Flash/MXML, they can be deployed from application portals and installed on a device as a native application.

Potential for extended integration. AIR 2 has APIs for accessing a device accelerometer as well as supporting gestures and multi-touch, and the likely integration is going to expand further.

This last area is one in which Teleca has a great deal of experience, extending the capability of the Flash Lite player on mobile and embedded devices to allow OEMs to use Flash content for much more than just games and utilities – enabling tight device integration and using Flash content for the whole device UI, for example. Using Flash and AIR 2 capabilities to provide home screens and UIs on platforms such as Android may help companies to quickly and easily differentiate their products.
Teleca are heavily involved in projects using Adobe’s new Flash Platform run-times including Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Lite 4 and have also created some demos using AIR 2. This is an area we are seeing a growing level of interest in from developers and we can expect more growth over the coming quarters.

bada - Application interface, Part 3 (3) - June 17th

2010-06-17T10:22:00.005+02:00

by Markus Gausling

The bada application interface
The interfaces for the native C++ applications are provided by the Framework Layer. Most of the interfaces provide quite standard functionality that you would expect on a modern platform. This includes support for messaging, 2D and 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL) or media playback and media capturing. Additionally UI controls to embed flash content, web content and maps are available. Those are based on the integrated Adobe Flash player and the WebKit browser.
Common device sensors are supported as well.

The interesting thing here is maybe that weather information is also provided as a special kind of sensor. The actual data is retrieved from an online weather service.Additionally bada provides build in face detection support for still images and movies.

One interesting group of interfaces is defined by the Social APIs which provides interfaces for social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Flickr which are seamlessly integrated with the platforms PIM implementation.

The bada platform doesn’t directly communicate with those social networks but through an SNS gateway hosted by Samsung. This ensures that the client-side interface doesn’t depend on the actual interfaces provided by the Social Networks and that new services can be easily integrated. On the other hand this introduces Samsung as an additional intermediate entity.

Publishing application
Samsung bada applications are sold through the "Samsung Apps" store. Applications for bada devices can only be downloaded from the Samsung application store. They need to be approved by Samsung before. Application developers need to register at the Samsung App Seller Office. The App Seller Office verifies and validates the application prior to certification. Once the application was certified it can be sold through the Samsung Store.
Summary
According to Gartner ( http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1306513) Samsung is currently the number two mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Samsung claims to have sold 40,000,000 mobile phones with touch support and that a number of new models in 2010 will be shipped with bada. Based on these numbers it is clear that bada will gain a reasonable market share in the near future even with strong competitors such as Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry OS and not to forget Window Mobile and Symbian.

Summary
From a technical point of view bada seems to be a quite stable and mature platform with powerful and well designed interfaces for application developers. Especially the tight integration with social networks makes application development for such applications quite comfortable.

References
- Samsung Bada - http://www.bada.com/
- Bada Developers pages http://developer.bada.com/ http://innovator.samsungmobile.com/ http://www.badadev.com/
- Samsung S8500Wave - http://wave.samsungmobile.com/

bada - The new kid on the block, Part 2 (3) - June 14th

2010-06-14T09:34:00.003+02:00

By Markus Gausling

Developing native C++ bada applications
An application is described by an application profile. The application profile is an XML manifest file that describes the application, the system requirements the application has towards the platform (like display resolution, memory etc.) and the API groups the applications uses.
Developers are divided into two levels of membership (Basic and Partner) and based on this level the access to platform interfaces will be granted. Developers of the category Basic e.g. cannot access interfaces which require system privileges.

Samsung provides an online tool, the Application Manager, to fill in the information about the application. The Application Manager will then generate a manifest file based on the given information. The manifest will also contain a unique ID for the application. Using the Application Manager requires a registration which is free.
Once the manifest file is available the actual application development can start. Native C++ applications can be developed using the SDK which was recently released as a beta version (1.0.0b2).

The SDK is based on Eclipse with the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT).
It contains an emulator, sample applications and tutorials and also a UI builder.
The SDK is only available for Microsoft Windows and can be downloaded at http://developer.bada.com/.

bada – The new kid on the block, part1(3) -June 10th

2010-06-10T10:31:00.004+02:00

By Markus Gausling

On the World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this year Samsung has announced the Samsung Wave (also known as Samsung S8500). The device is a new smartphone with a 3.3 inch Super AMOLED WVGA capacitive touch display that has a 5 megapixel camera. It can playback and record HD video with 1280x720 pixels and it supports the latest WLAN-n and Bluetooth 3.0 standards. The device is about to be available in stores any time now.

While this is already quite impressive the more interesting thing –for me as a developer- is that it is based on Samsungs new bada platform which was announced in Q4 of 2009 and where an application development SDK was released these days.

So what is bada then? bada is Korean and stands for ocean. It is a closed platform in the sense that Samsung owns and controls it. bada is not an open source platform and only intended to be shipped with Samsung devices. It has open interfaces for application developers though.

According to Samsung (http://www.bada.com/whatisbada/) bada is already available for nearly 10 years and was shipped in a number of devices during that time. Designating it bada means it was enhanced with new features such as multi-touch, social APIs and a new UI.

The figure shows the four layers of the bada platform and the different types of applications that can run on bada.

The platform supports four kinds of applications:

Native C++ applications based on the interfaces provided by the Framework layer.
J2ME applications (MIPD 2.0)
Widgets based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and executed by the platforms WebKit.
Flash app´s executed by an integrated Adobe Flash player or embedded into native applications.

The bada platform was designed to run on smartphone devices as well as on cheaper feature phones. To make this possible bada has a configurable kernel architecture which can be based on Linux as underlying OS or some other RTOS.

Follow this bada educational blog. Next chapter 2(3) is about Developing bada C++ apps.

Ending of flat rate era? -June 2nd

2010-06-03T16:02:00.000+02:00

By Andrew Till
Are we seeing the end of flat rate data or a More balanced Approach to Network Congestion?

Recently AT&T announced that it was ending it’s flat rate data plan in North America. No longer will consumer be able to user mobile internet services without concern for their month end bill. As of 7th June AT&T will offer 2 new pricing schemes to replace the flat rate data plan with $15 for 200MB and $30 for 2GBs.

Could this signal a trend away from flat rate data plans with a number of global operators adding more stringent Fair usage policies to their tariff offerings.
However it’s not all bad news as AT&T also recently announced free public WiFi access in New York in what maybe the start of a broader trend.
With new tablet devices like the iPad from Apple and Dell’s Streak device launching around the world this maybe a glimpse of the future with operators offering combined cellular and WiFi packages designed to address the issue of network congestion on the traditional mobile networks. This has been driven by the growth of smartphones but with many new device formats now also launching this issue is no longer one that can be ignored.

It’s going to be interesting to see if other operators follow AT&Ts lead and if this brings in a new age of connectivity management for mobile users. After all free WiFi services provided in conjunction with cellular data services will solve many users issues as trying to surf the internet on a congested HSDPA network is not a lot of fun.

Open Mobile Summit Day 2 -May 27th

2010-05-28T00:03:00.002+02:00

By Andrew Till
Day 2 of the Open Mobile Summit continued to stimulate much industry debate. At the heart of much of the discussion was “will the web win over apps?”. For this author this was largely a mute question as the key issue is rather how does the industry help developers create, publish, and be discovered. So while the debate raged on with almost religious intensity at times the key takeaway message was give developers great tools and let them worry about what the right approach is based on the experience they want to deliver.

There was also a lot of debate about “how low can Smartphones go”. It’s clear that Smartphone are poised for rapid growth over the next 5 years not only in established Western European markets but on a global stage. There was much excitement about the prospect of true low cost mass market handsets running Android and Symbian reaching consumers hands in the second half of the year. Orange shared some interesting data such as their expectation that by the end of the year 50%, yes 50%, of new handset they buy will be running a Smartphone OS.

Nokia showed that they are far from giving up their leadership of the mobile market. During a keynote presentation they shared some compelling data about the growth of the OVI platform (now hitting 1.75m downloads of applications and content per day), the uptake of their new mobile maps strategy (11M users of Drive and Walk) and a very interesting insight to the emerging markets where they have 1.5M paying users of Nokia Life Tools. As you would expect Nokia also hit on its new handset offerings such as its first Symbian 3 handset the N8 and also announced that MeeGo release 1 is now available for download.
There was much discussion of the role of tablets moving forwards. Clearly the iPad has got off to a flying start and many, including CCS’s Ben Wood, openly stated that it was outperforming their expectations. Indeed Ben went so far as to say it would own 80% of the tablet market. Aside from agreeing that tablets are set for higher levels of success than expected there was also a lot of focus on the usage model. Clearly publishers like this new format for delivering real time content to a device where it is easy to consume print as well as new multimedia formats. However others believe that Tablets will become a “device for updating Facebook while watching TV”. Regardless of the usage model it’s now clear that Tablets will find their own niche in the market and will also force the industry to think anew about how to enable consumers to take content and experiences across the rapidly growing range of format factors.

There we also some great presentations on the role of User Experience design from companies such as Frog Design and TAT- The Astonishing Tribe. Clearly they are enjoying the new world of open platforms and have the shackles removed from their creativity. IF half of the concepts shown come to market that this is going to be one amazing industry to be part of. Interactive applications that have the intelligence to help you find and share content with friends, boundless usages of Augmented Reality, a significantly reduced number of clicks – at this point I have to give great credit to the presentor from TAT who managed to overcome IT issues saying "Click" every time he wanted to change slides while talking about reducing the number of clicks. It turned out to be a great way to deliver the message – instant recognition of people and places with the ability to immediately interact with friends around the media and as you would expect all wrapped up in mouth watering eye candy and delivered on a wide range of new device form factors.

So all in all a very insightful two days covering many of the key issues in our industry and as I look in to my crystal ball I am looking forward to
· Much faster connectivity much sooner than expected
· No limitations on creativity
· More development options with enhanced, HMTL 5 enabled, browsers
· Ever more gorgeous user experiences
· Ever increasing levels of competition – driving innovation
· A better focus on making applications and content stores work for developers

Now I think I need to go and write a new Christmas list!

Open Mobile Summit London 2010 Day 1 - May 26

2010-05-26T20:53:00.003+02:00

By Andrew Till

Today the Open Mobile Summit returned to London to serve as a platform for the Great and Good to come together to debate, evangelise and predict what will happen in the coming years in this wonderful industry we live in.

So let’s get down to details and look at the key themes that emerged from day 1

Everyone is obsessed with Apple. Despite no one from Apple being at the event the major of first half of the day was spent talking about Apple and its impact on the market. While some like to paint Apple as a villain of the peace some key data points emerged such as “the best apps live for 2-3 months in the top 25 list and sell 400-500k copies a month”. As this author pointed out in his questioning of the first panel session why not focus on learning how to replicate this as I am sure there are a lot of developers that would love to suffer this type of ill treatment! For sure all is not perfect with iTunes but Apple seems to have a strong, and from a quality perspective, self regulating model that proves you can make money in mobile apps.

There was also a discussion around the business case of the mobile Internet for network operators. With overloaded networks and the cost of deploying new high speed infrastructure has the Internet become a curse for network operators? Thankfully the conclusion was now with new air interfaces such as HSxPA+, LTE and LTE Advanced (side note to industry; please hire some better naming people!) viewed as delivering more cost effective solutions that previous platforms and hence the economics will stack up to support broad market deployments. We also, thankfully, appear to be moving beyond the concept of the “mobile internet” being some-how separate from the "Internet”. Hopefully this time next year we will only talk about the “Internet” as it becomes clear to all that for most consumers this is how they view the world.

Consumer adoption of mobile services continues apace. Orange shared an interesting data point that underlines this with 25% of their user base now regularly accessing the internet from their mobile device – up from 10% only a year ago. T-Mobile spoke about their research findings that users of Facebook on their handset use the service 2X the level of people who only access it from their PC. This is perhaps the most insight comment of the day showing that people not only use the services but it has a broader impact on their overall behaviour and interaction levels.

Interesting Qualcomm also highlight that there is still a lot of life left in voice. Something that I believe is very true indeed. This also stimulated some interesting feedback for the operators in the room from some of their higher spending customer about the quality of service currently being delivered. Another talking point was around the statement that the next 1B mobile subscribers will come from Africa, China and India. This has significant implications for developers as these consumers will bring different experiences to mobile with many have their first taste of the Internet via their mobile device. It also suggests that price points will also need to be different and so will the way that applications are purchased with many of these consumers not having traditional bank accounts. So while it will be a challenge it will also lead to many new innovations for the industry.

Richard Windsor of Nomura delivered perhaps the most challenging presentation of the day showing how the new market dynamics are playing out and cutting through much of the hype to deliver a few key home truths such as:

Today the closed systems are the ones making the real money.
Developers typically go where the money is and right now they are going to Apple and-Android.
Apple is successful because it focuses on selling the hardware and is not too worried about making money directly from iTunes and the Apps store.
Simple experiences well executed sell – poor ones executed badly do not.

Finally there was also a great discussion around content with a host of the leading publishers in mobile on a panel session. While the industry frets about fragmentation and multiple platforms it seems that if publishers can make money then, at least for now, they are not too worried about mobile being overly complex.

So key takeaway’s from day one

- Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) applies as much in mobile as it does anywhere else.

- Expect to see 3G+ / 4Grolling out in the near future as operators make the economics work.

- Still too much time spent talking about Apple rather than bring equally compelling experiences to market.

- Developers and publishers can and are making money in mobile – even if it is a little too complex in some areas.

Overall a great day – already looking forward to day 2. !!

GOOGLE I/O 2nd day of good news -May 20th

2010-05-21T10:38:00.003+02:00

By Robert Kempf

Android everywhere today (and quite some statements directed towards Apple of who is leading innovation and why being open is better)…

The Keynote announced the new Froyo release with the long expected Flash 10.1 support and an associated Flash/AIR beta release from Adobe as well as quite some very useful improvements of the Android feature set including tethering, Wifi hotspot functionality, 3x-5x application performance improvement through JIT, applications on SD card support and many more including the claim for the now worlds fastest browser.

Very exciting was one feature though which clearly shows a connected world with Android supporting over-the-air application installation. Now it is possible to browse the Android Marketplace on your PC and directly install applications to your phone or to share your music library. Quite compelling, but don’t forget to log-out at home when you leave, because someone could have fun remote controlling your phone from the PC ;-)

Also the new remote music streaming functionality is quite cool and facilitated through the acquisition of Simplify Media by Google earlier. Now you can stream your iTunes library directly to your Android phone. Although this seems quite similar to a normal uPNP music streaming service in an IP network it still is innovative. The issue will be the assumed permanent connectivity and associated demand for bandwidth though. Also need to check whether you need to have your PC permanently online now or whether the content is replicated to a streaming service in the cloud. So let’s have a closer look at usability of this feature in real life.

GoogleTV was the second big topic of the Keynote centered around the message that finally the best from both worlds – the classical TV world and the open global Web – is integrated into a new user experience. This announcement was expected given the number of articles over the last few months speculating about an Intel, Logitech and Google working together on such a concept. In fact the concept of GoogleTV is very compelling and something I long awaited. Many of you will know sitting in your living room with the laptop in your hands and the TV on – this won’t be the case in the future… Watching TV, searching related information, one click recording of streams and much more will be facilitated by GoogleTV including the support for Android and Chrome marketplace applications.

It was remarkable to see that Eric Schmidt was emphasizing the importance of partnerships to realize this and that the CEOs of Intel, Sony, Logitech, DishNetwork, BestBuy, Adobe and Google were promoting the concept. The live demo did not work well due to quite many issues with connectivity and similar and showed clearly that there is still much work to do, but I am sure that within 6 months we will see the first lead devices on market.

So much on the Keynote. My slight disappointment on missing “breaking news” has gone and I am looking forward to be one of the beta testers of Froyo and GoogleTV ;-)

Another surprise was the present every participant got today – a HTC Sprint EVO 4G device… Thank you SPRINT, HTC and Google for that, but unfortunately there is no CDMA nor WiMAX Network in Germany ;-)

I was also positively surprised about the technical sessions which were much more deep dive than on Day I. We also had many laughs at the fireside chat with the Google Android team – always something to enjoy.

If you have the chance to join Google I/O next year, you should definitely do so. This event is always inspiring, a good place to meet people and also to get some more insight into where Google is heading… Cant wait!

1st day of Google I/O -May 19th

2010-05-20T16:49:00.000+02:00

By Robert Kempf
How long have I been looking forward to Google I/O 2010, expecting a firework of new exciting announcements as during last years event. Now the time has come and today was the first day of Google I/O with a Keynote speech which was interesting but missing any groundbreaking news.
The focus was on HTML 5 which is now becoming widely adopted by all major browsers (sadly IE was not beyond them for full support) and that support is not any longer a problem but an area of innovation given that VP8 will be fully open sourced under the WebM project. Now we finally have a web video format which is optimized in terms of performance, footprint and low-bandwidth requirements. The rumours that this will happen after the On2 acquisition by Google has been circling around for a while now.
Also an update on the importance and possibilities with regards to Web applications, the launch of the Chrome App Store, news on Google WAVE and GWT/VMWare integration projects were all part of the Keynote.

All in all very interesting, but a lot of topics and nothing game changing as yet.There have been excellent technical sessions like the one on “Writing Real-Time Games for Android Redux” as well as a couple of very poor ones (won’t state which). A real highlight was seeing such a large community of enthusiastic developers and innovative presentations in the Developer Sandbox area which was MUCH larger than last year.

I really enjoyed Day 1 and met quite a few buddies though I expected a bit more in the way of “surprises”. We heard that Day 2 will be bringing some of these big surprises – looking forward to it ;-)

Where mobile meets media….the end of the beginning? -May 12th

2010-05-13T10:58:00.002+02:00

By Dan Jelfs

Dimitry Shaprio’s April 29^th blog about video being the killer app got me thinking about media and what media companies do in the mobile space. Mainstream media companies appear to be facing many challenges, with declining advertising revenues, and challenges in matching available revenues with the cost of media production. In addition the mobile space represents a whole new world of opportunity for media companies, yet mobile media remains mainly unproven even ten years after media companies first started addressing the mobile opportunity with simple text message/SMS based applications.

That mobile media remains unproven means unclear revenue models and therefore risk to media companies. Does a media company wait until the mobile business models become clearer, and in so doing miss the market opportunity? or will they take a more aggressive approach and risk destroying legacy business models?

Personally I think we are FINALLY at an inflexion point for mobile media (…the end of the beginning), that will see media companies take a more aggressive approach with respect to their mobile strategies.

Why? The mobile platform has matured in the last 12 months to a point where brand owners of high quality premium content can create user experiences which make sense, are easy-to-use, are consistent across mobile platforms and maintain or even enhance the values of the media brand at an editorial and production level.

The relevant enabling technologies have come together to create this matured platform include graphically rich touch user interfaces, (which drive 5 to 10 times more consumption of content than non-touch), increased processor speeds, graphics acceleration, increasing air interface bandwidth, and open-source software positively impacting cost and competition in the smartphone segment, to a point where the price of a smartphone suggests that they will soon be a mass market proposition.

So what’s needed to spark the revolution ? Firstly, proof of working business models must be presented and successful case stories shared combined with a strong leverage of the existing mobile ecosystem support mechanisms to help rapidly propagate developments and to review the challenge of delivering to multiple device platforms and types.

Video, the Killer App - April 29th

2010-04-29T11:15:00.001+02:00

By Dmitry Shapiro

Many tout video as the next killer app for the mobile device. But what is involved in bringing video to the phone?

It turns out there are multiple steps. First the video must be encoded (if source is analog) or trans-coded (if source is digital) into the proper format for the target mobile device.
If the video is to be viewed on multiple devices, then a separate device-specific file is required for each. At this point, metadata, which describes the video, its title, location for ads, etc, is added to the trans-coded file.
Next, the video is encoded in multiple bit rates in order to satisfy the variability of bandwidth available to the user at his location. Typically high, medium, and low bit rates are used, but more flexibility here gives a better viewing experience on the other end.
Finally, these multiple files must be stored where they can be accessed by the Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs have many, many servers in geographic locations close to the users to allow them scale delivery of the video content to 1000s of users simultaneously.

So how does all this look from user perspective? Well, when a user clicks a URL on his mobile device, the request is sent to the CDN. The CDN notes the user’s device and bandwidth, then finds the video in the appropriate format and bit rate on the storage server, then sends it the requesting device. And, voila: cats are playing the piano on your phone!

In summary, if video is indeed YOUR killer app, make sure you have all the pieces in place to deliver it to your target audience.

From Analog to 4G -April 21

2010-04-21T12:00:00.004+02:00

By Kishore Ballal
A few of us remember the first analog phone with a really long antenna and weighing as much as a brick. Then came the digital revolution, with much more modern and pretty cool phones. I still remember the first ATT plan; 19.99$ for 40 minutes of usage within the network! And that was 12 years ago.

Texting being common in other parts of the world was not available in the US back then. We saw the mega talking plans of 300 minutes usage + weekends free, followed by friends and family free. The revolution kicked off the next level when operators in the US upgraded to a 2.5G network (EDGE, or 3G voice cards). The young generation of youth/college kids replaced the landlines with cell phones.

Then the 3G upgrade happened in 2006 in the US and the now familiar “all you can eat/call” mobile plans came into existence. Thus the cellphone penetration went through the roof.

In fact, operators used to charge per MegaBit (MB) and most consumers did not know what it was, so users did not value content. No industry can survive with shrinking revenues. But the 2 biggest game changers were the iPod/iTunes and the Amazon Kindle. Now, consumers were charged not for “data” but for content: buying songs, buying books, downloading movies, playing games, etc.

The bandwidth constraint is now pushing operators into the next level of technology; 4G where LTE or WIMAX are the big standards. The idea is the ability to pay for content where the operator is no longer a pipe, but gets a share of the content revenue (movies, books, games, songs, etc).

If you think 4G is not really needed, think about it this way; every major technology step takes about 6 years: Analog in early 90s, 2G digital in 1999/2000, 3G in 2006, full 4G adoption/acceleration in 2012. Operators are already building the bandwidth beginning in 2010. Widgets and cloud services, video, mobile TV and music streaming will push the bandwidth to it´s limits.
So there will be 4G, it will be needed and we will enjoy it! The future is truly mobile and then content is finally the king.

100 years from now -April 19th

2010-04-19T12:07:00.005+02:00

By Magnus Ingelsten
What do we imagine 100 years from now? Did HG Wells, in his book "When the Sleeper walks" in 1899 imagine the I-pad for Video viewing when he writes and describes a modern media player as a “flat square with a smaller picture that was very vividly colored”? Not only where there people on the screen moving, but they were conversing with clear small voices as he continued to describe it.

And did Mark Twain envision the internet already in 1898 when writing about the "The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone that was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." He described a global communications network called the telelectroscope that allowed us to see and hear through. Spot on. ..almost.

So what do we for see 100 years from now or is everything already invented? Hardly, but surely everything becomes much more advanced and involves scientific complexity and in many cases micro chips, software ad wireless technologies and thus very far far from inventions such as the wheel or the potato peeler!

Could we in 100 years have the mobile artificial you? Perhaps we can by choice produce avatars that are incarnations of ourselves that travel through room and space electronically and virtual and perform our duties and live our lives. No more hours spend on airplanes. All good for environment. We can experience and control business meetings, holidays and new encounters by means of the chip we have in our brain and only our status in society can determine how many avatars we have in life, and thus our focus is to live for long, distanced from the real raging world outside the control tube we live in with artificial air.
Oh my god, hope not.. Instead hope we and our children can still physically sit on an exotic beach and make a call to friends. And experience through a multimedia device what happens at home, read any book, listen to any music share anything with anybody of our choice, buy and sell and by doing so experience great freedom and efficiency. The good thing is, seems we are there already.

When an apple is better than an orange -April 8th

2010-04-08T13:40:00.005+02:00

By Magnus Ingelsten

7 years ago the mobile world was completely different. It was all about telephony, SMS, MMS, PIM and business usage. You uploaded ripped MP3 music files to your mobile and it competed with MP3 players. The multinational music corporations were standing appalled to see their music got copied and stolen from various web servers.

Then Apple having introduced their I-Pods, which totally outdid the MP3 player market, launched i-Tunes. In one week (yes 1 week) Steve Jobs could simply confirm that they had become the world’s leading music distributor on the web with one million downloads (April 2003).

In February Apple gave away a grand price of 10.000 USD to the customer that got their web counter doing 11 digits (10 billion downloads). Now is´t that a success? The real boost for downloads came with the release of the I-Pod Touch and the I-Phone.

During this time the share price increased from 7 to 200 USD (2003-2010). Over the last year alone the share price has risen with 120%.

Now the I-Pad is launched, and it will be a success. First day 300.000 units sold, over one million apps were purchased, over 250,000 books downloaded. (The i-Phone sold 270.00 units on it´s introduction day three years ago). And it is a movie player and you can get movies from i-Tunes from 1.99 USD. And it’s a game player and it is a e-reader, and it can become a .... ?

Tonight, April 8th I-phone 4.0 will be presented to the assembled press in Cupertino. And what about their i-Ad, mobile advertising service? The screen on i-Pad and iPhone is a great real estate that can be sold to agencies and connected to distribution of content from i-Tunes.

Again, the mobile world has changed dramatically, and we sure know that an apple is different from an orange or a pear.

Understanding Flash and the latest innovations - March 19th

2010-03-19T08:55:00.004+01:00

By Andrew Frost
Understanding the Latest Innovations In Flash – What and Where

Recently Adobe announced a number of new product releases for mobile devices and consumer electronics devices. This has lead to some confusion amongst developers as to which platform is the right one to target for them. In this blog I attempt to give a brief overview of the 4 key platforms for leveraging Flash outside the traditional desktop PC domain

Flash 10.1
Perhaps the most eagerly awaited release in the mobile industry Flash 10.1 at long last brings the benefits of desktop flash content to the mobile work. Flash 10.1 is designed for delivering rich browsing experiences on mid to high end smart devices. Designed as browser plug-in only (i.e it must run within a web browser) it enables mobile consumers to have access to exactly the same flash based content as any desktop user. In addition Flash 10.1 also comes with support for OpenGLES 2.0 which means that it can take full advantage of the latest developments in hardware acceleration and graphics performance on the latest generation of mobile chipsets. For example this means that H.264 video content can now be decoded in hardware delivering both improved rendering performance and critically reducing power consumption. Other key features that developers will be keen to exploit include Accelerometer input, which could for example be used to enhance flash based mobile games, screen orientation handling, support for multi-touch and gestures, new commands for pause/resume to conserve battery when not the player is in use and globalization support for device-specific location information.

Flash Lite 4.0
Flash Lite 4.0 is a natural evolution of Adobe’s platform for more limited mobile devices such as mobile phones designed for the mass market or for vertical market devices that also want to leverage Flash for other application or UI development. Thus it can be used as both a browser plug-in and an application / device UI framework. Flash Lite 4.0 also brings support for Flash 10 based content but is not able to support the full rage of content as is delivered with Flash 10.1. In reality between 80-85% of web content can be supported with Flash Lite 4.0. Deltas from Flash 10.1 include the lack of support for some AIR APIs, limitations due to memory/processor constraints, and no OpenGL ES support, through OpenVG 1.1 is supported, as well as a more limited range of 3D rendering options. However Flash Lite 4 does include a number of key upgrades form the previous version (3.1) including a full ActionScript 3 implementation, and Flash Video with dynamic streaming.

Stagecraft
Stagecraft is Adobe’s platform for the digital home and is today becoming an increasingly popular platform for the development of next generation Set Top Boxes. The current release of Stagecraft 1.2 is based on the on Flash Lite 3.1 platform but future releases of Stagecraft are likely to include the full Flash 10.1 player. Amongst the key features of Stagecraft are a framework for accelerating graphics operations and video decoding and optimisations for 2D rendering accelerations (for example through DirectFB) . Typically many chipset vendors will have implemented specific Stagecraft optimisations for their specific reference platforms. Stagecraft is currently designed to be standalone application and is not integrated into a browser or the existing DVB / STB middleware.

AIR
Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is currently designed for desktop environments and Mobile Internet Devices. AIR enables rich internet apps to run natively outside the browser using the Flash runtime engine. Adobe recently demonstrated a beta of the AIR 2.0 platform running on Android handsets at MWC2010. As chipsets become ever more powerful then it is likely that we will see AIR become more widely used in the mobile world to provide a greater set of capabilities for building Flash in to traditional mobile applications outside the browser as well as providing a platform for running Flash based content when disconnected from the network.

Hopefully this blog has provided a clear overview of the different flash options and the target usages. The above can be simply summarized as:

Flash 10.1 - Delvers a rich browsing experience for Smartdevices

Flash Lite 4.0 - Bring the benefits of Flash, for browsing or application development, to lower powered mobile devices

Stagecraft - Flash for the Digital Home – primarily the STB market.

AIR - Support for Flash based applications outside the browser.

If you would like to discuss Flash for mobile in more detail please send an email to solutions@teleca.com

Bollywood goes mobile -February 16th

2010-03-16T18:02:00.002+01:00

By Anette Gregow
Just back from a trip to Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley of India”, where Teleca has its 2nd largest site, with many new impressions. There’s no doubt that India is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world. The country currently buzzes with almost 300 million mobile subscribers with over a dozen different operators spread over the country. Bangalore has the highest number of engineering colleges in India ensuring a continuous supply of fresh graduates.
These young, mobile-savvy folks have high aspirations but are underserved in everything from banking to entertainment. Getting to them via their cell phones is the best way to provide much-needed and valued services.

Why is demand for such services particularly great in India? For starters, nearly 300 million Indians now have phones - making it the No. 2 mobile market on earth - and some 8 million new subscribers sign up every month. Today the average milkman in India has a mobile phone, which was not the case ten years ago. What’s surprising is the fact that a major portion of the new mobile subscribers being added today come from the rural parts of the country.
The range of offerings is vast and includes downloads of prayers, crop prices to farmers, Bollywood movies and cricket contents. Bollywood is actually becoming a rising force in mobile. The Indian film industry produces more than 1,000 movies a year and attracts more than two billion viewers.
Combine this with India’s 300 million mobile subscriber base and the potential is self-evident!

Software platforms as a differentiator? -March 4th 2010

2010-03-04T11:57:00.002+01:00

By Sergey Priporov
Are your strategic choices challenged by the fragmentation in new mobile device platforms?
I didn’t participate in MWC event and I was watching the event remotely from California. Many experts and systems analysts did try to indicate their observations in technology and market trends such as e.g.: http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/top-10-mwc-stories and http://www.ccsinsight.com/media-coverage/?p=630

From their point of view the top important indicators are as follows
• Mobile operators unite on global apps platform
• Google embraces mobile
• Microsoft fights back in OS war
• Samsung makes waves with bada
• Industry backs voice over LTE approach
• Nokia and Intel merge Linux platforms
• HTC & SonyEricsson launched many new Android phones

We can find many other press releases but it’s almost all about the OS wars and infrastructure and there is small piece of information about the future of mobile devices itself in terms of End User future experiences and devices new capabilities. This fact reflects the situation in Product Development infrastructure associated with new Android, WinM7 and MeeGo platforms.

Each of the platforms is targeting for multiple vendors but differentiation is not clear and becomes the key area to be success on the market.

Differentiation at this point
I have seen that Microsoft and Motorola were talking about data aggregation conception on different SW levels of mobile device and its reflection in UI. Conception is similar even if we are talking about different platforms.

Possible variants of differentiation
The trend is that Smart phone market place grows and forces out featured phones. At the same time the segment of the featured phones still is significant. I would like to take a look on Mobile Device possible differentiation from this point of view.

In reality the platforms for Smart phone development cover functionality of “featured“phones with simple calling and some other dedicated features. It means that the platform can support device transformation from simple functionality to smart prone advanced functionality.

How can it be used for products differentiation? Many customers are not ready to use smart phones and are considering to keep something simple. I think that OEMs may consider to design phones with SW which can transform device capabilities from simple featured phone (Low Tier) to Mid-Tier and finally to High-End smart phone. I mean that SW on the phone can have functionality scope configurable on fly depends on customer subscriptions (enabling on demand/disabling). This approach can be used to move customers from one market segment (Low Tier) to another one (High-End).
The BOM of the HW part is coming to be lower and lower year by year so it’s possible to ship Low-Tier phone with the same H/W as for Smart phone for all products baselines. Such type of phone can be configured by SW tailoring only. As an example we can see Android phones from Quanta Computer “TWM T1” for Taiwan Mobile and Commtiva Technology “Commtiva T1”. TWM T1 without operator calling plan has cost of $280 and “Commtiva T1” cost is $311. Qualcomm, Infineon, MediaTek and others are going to use Infineon XMM 6181 chip set which is ~$150. So Software may be a phone transformer.

Another option to transform phone functionality on fly by user demand is to install drivers and SW enablers for new functionality and new peripherals from SD card (obtained as a new service subscription). Some technologies (as LTE) are not deployed yet so it will be possible to upgrade phone with LTE capabilities as an example in future (LTE external Modems). It’s not App store approach, it’s SW components upgrade from OEMs along with new subscriptions by demand.

Summary
Software allows OEMs to implement incremental functionality change on fly by user demand as additional subscriptions. It may be a differentiator for OEMs.

• Featured phone with simple UI and basic functionality
• Capabilities to upgrade SW to Smart Phone simple functionality
• Capabilities to enable SW to Smart Phone advanced functionality
• SW Add-ins installation from SD card under DRM protection
• SW Add-ins installation from Operator downloading site

I would say that new Software platform configuration capabilities are potential way to differentiate devices. I cooked-up the term “Incremental Functionality Change on Fly” (IFConF).
Is it something to differentiate products? Let´s hear your comments!

Loving smart mobile solutions...Wednesday 24th

2010-02-24T15:51:00.004+01:00

By Magnus Johannesson
Watching the Olympics as a young kid a few decades ago one would be happy to tune in the right TV channel to watch the action. Today I don’t even have to be at home… I have it all in the palm of my hand.

With my mobile I can follow the action via streaming video and radio. If I don’t catch the competitions in real time I can replay whenever I want, how often I want. Twitters, blogs, facebooks etc. gives me the latest updates provided by media, other spectators and even athletes themselves. Widgets on my mobile home screen tell me Vancouver time and whether forecast. I can download and install the iPhone Vancouver 2010 app to get real-time results, photos, schedules adjusted to my time zone and much more. If I want to increase excitement even more I log in to my online betting company and put some money that Sweden will beat the Slovaks in tomorrow mornings ice hockey quarterfinal. Between the games or if tired watching I can also play a part of the action myself with the Vancouver Olympics game for Android and compete in downhill, speed skating and snowboarding.

As a true sports fan, I can’t wait for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, if I can’t follow it live in London, I feel assured that I will have plenty of mobile apps and channels to follow the competitions and athletes even closer than today maybe with real-time match statistics to complement the TV production, interaction with arena displays, voting player of the game and much more.

But before that, Ice hockey final on Sunday and of course FIFA World Cup in South Africa this summer. My mobile will not be far away…

MWC 2010 - Big show, Final observations -February 19th

2010-02-19T09:56:00.003+01:00

By Andrew Till

Being home on safe ground after a very hectic Barcelona adventure filled with meetings around the clock, here is my final take on what stand out as the MWC 2010 observations.

Multi-screen content

A big theme of the show walking round the halls was multi-screen content and how to best solve this challenge. This ranges from simply being able to move media between devices through to devices powering more than one display. Will this challenge be made easier or harder given all that is happening with operating system platforms remains unclear but what is clear is that this is going to be a key battle ground between the major consumer electronics vendors who have a wide range of device types in their arsenal and everyone else. There are of course a number of different aspects to this challenge and a number of different solutions we on show at the event.

Adobe was pushing its latest versions of Flash for mobile with much interesting being expressed in Flash 10.1 and its ability to be used in handsets especially for the Android platform (helped by Google giving away Nexus Ones with Flash support at the show). Clearly being able to enjoy regular flash content on the web from your mobile device is a compelling proposition and one that is making many content publishers take notice.

Another company demonstrating solutions to this challenge was Antix who provide a solution to sharing games between different devices and being able to take advantage of the largest display available. Given the continued momentum and revenue generation around mobile games then a solution that further enhances the user experience should provide to be compelling.

Another take on multi screens was on show at the TI stand as then showed their OMAP 4 platform running Android powering two separate displays with a number of compelling use cases such as browsing the media gallery on one display and viewing a selected picture in full screen mode on the other. Of course we at Teleca were very excited by this demonstrator given our engagement with TI to bring it to life.

Although DLNA was perhaps less in evidence than expected there was also a lot of discussion around media streaming between handsets, STBs, TVs, PCs, in car entertainment systems, etc and how to further simplify the user experiences and interaction models.

Wherever approach wins out, if indeed it will just be one, it seems clear that the ability to seamlessly move content between devices or to leverage move than one screen for content consumption is going to be a driver of differentiation in 2010/11.

Android everywhere

Aside from the general discussion around Android releases and new handset announcements it is also clear that Android is rapidly moving beyond handsets and in to many other types of devices.

We have already some PMP devices launch with Android but it now appears to be rapidly penetrating a wide range of consumer electronics and automotive market segments. While many are interested in Android due to it being open source and highly customisable the ability to leverage the application and service ecosystem is proving to be easily as attractive. At MWC 2011 I expect to see a wide range of device types using Android and delivering advanced connected services.

Rich reference platforms

Another interesting change has been the continued move by silicon vendors to move away from just supplying chipsets to offering a much richer reference platform. Walking round the show this trend has clearly moved forwards again from demonstrating reference platforms to showing prototypes for differentiation. For example a number of companies where showing modified versions of Android running dual displays , others were showing enhanced multimedia support and others in some cases completely new UI concepts were on display (I personally really liked the TAT demonstration on the TI stand).

LTE is back

Perhaps the largest change of the whole show was the issue of network congestion due to data services. Only a few years ago operators were desperate to get their hands on compelling applications to drive data services and data revenues outside SMS. With the rapid growth of mobile browsers and application usage network congestion now seems to be the issue of the day. Hence LTE was very much back in the limelight at the show with every operator and infrastructure vendor pushing their LTE story.

Of particular concern was the roadmap for LTE handsets and how to accelerate time to market for these. Expect LTE to be a major feature of handset launches at next years show as everyone seeks to benefit from the explosion in consumer data usage and mobile browsing. Building on the point above I would not expect LTE to be confined to Smartphones but also to be a key feature of ebooks, tablets and PMPs.

Confusion

Perhaps my final comment on change is the shift from clarity to confusion about how to differentiate product offerings. With form factors increasingly looking the same and a wider use of “smartphone” platforms in product portfolio’s it appears that many vendors are now finding it harder and harder to identify differentiation opportunities that can be easily communicated to consumers. Of course modifying UIs is on option but this then runs the risk of losing easy consumer recognition of the platform especially if the vendor is seeking to leverage the platform owners marketing support. It will be interesting to see how this plays out will it result in stagnation or a new and more intensive wave of innovation. Lets hope it’s the latter.

At the start of this blog I intended to write a short summary of my thoughts. Clearly I have failed but hopefully I have been able to share a flavour of the key developments from this years show. As I stated in the first part of this blog for me it was all about change. For me this is a big positive. It shows that the industry remains highly creative and innovative and that no one can afford to stand still without running the risk of a new entrant making them obsolete.

What a great industry to be involved in.

Read first part and other blogs at http://whatsyourideaoftomorrow.blogspot.com/

MWC Summary -Thursday Feb 18th

2010-02-18T14:33:00.000+01:00

By Andrew Till

Well I’m back from another MWC, my 14 in total and don’t my feet know it, and what a show it was. Aside from the impact of the heavy rain fall during the first couple of days the mood was upbeat and shows what a difference a year can make in this industry.
If I had to summarise the show in a single word then it would have to be “change”. For me this year more than any other reflected the change and perhaps in some cases the confusion that is gripping the mobile industry. And when I say change this is not a bad thing as there are many changes that are clearly going to be of significant benefit to the industry as a whole from device vendors, through to developers and network operators. Of course change sometimes can be unsettling and cause people to worry and that is clearly happening but in most cases change results in more positives than negatives.

So what are these changes I hear you ask. Well let try and group them in to some key themes:

Collaborations
There were two major collaborations that caught my eye this year both of which were announced on the first day. Nokia and Intel confirmed that they are extending their working relationship to around Mobile Linux platforms with the creation of MeeGo from Moblin and Maemo. Clearly this is aimed at helping to bring a more competitive platform against Android but interestingly it will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and will see a tight level of integration between the platform and the underlying chipset platform, namely Atom, which should yield some significant performance benefits. It was very clear from the key messages pushed by both companies that this is about more than Nokia and Intel building smartphones as there are high expectations of other companies bring a wide range of consumer electronics devices to market utilising the MeeGo platform. And I am sure that developers will welcome the reduction in platform numbers even if it is only by one.

The other was the confirmation that 24 global operators are working together to form the “Wholesale Applications Community” to bring a common open application and content distribution model to the mobile market. Of course this will challenge the current platform specific approach that has become dominant in the past couple of years. While implementation details remain unclear it is expected to combine the efforts of both the Bondi and JIL communities in to a common standard. If this approach is successful then it will certainly be a significant leap forwards for developers who should be able to deploy applications through a single framework and gain access to a potential 3B subscribers.

OS platforms choices
Everywhere you went and in every hall it was alive with the buzz around the latest operating system releases. And no wonder given the year of change we have had with Android establishing itself as a major player, Symbian becoming open source, Microsoft unveiling Windows Phone 7 and a few other surprises.

Android: I lost count of how many handsets were announced but it was a lot. Not only were they high end large display models but there were also plenty of mid tier models from SonyEricsson, Motorola and Acer to name but a few. Much of the debate centred on when FroYo will be released and could you get in to the Google developer talks and then take your pick of a Nexus One or Droid giveaway.

Bada: Samsung launched its first Bada handset and I believe it took most people by surprise. Not only does it have a beautiful display and lost of great features but it was also simple and easy to use.

Windows Phone 7: Microsoft made a strong push and it is clear that they are not giving up on their aspirations to be a major player in Mobile. WP7 is a significant upgrade from 6.5 with much of the UE having been completely re-developed and once again I believe many people were surprised at how far the platform has come. Leveraging a lot form the Zune HD in terms of interaction models and having many nice simple usability features WP7 should prove to be a turning point for Microsoft and we can certainly expect to see a range of ODM based handsets by the end of the year.

Symbian: The major news from Symbian was that the Symbian 4 release will be a major upgrade for the platform designed to bring a new more flexible architecture and UI experience including support for the latest release of QT.

MeeGo: As highlighted earlier this is the new platform being created from the merger of Moblin, Maemo and with QT as the main runtime and UI framework. With pre-releases available now and the 1.0 release expected in late Q2 this looks like a platform that should gain some significant interest within the developer community.

That’s if for this part but check back later as I will be add more key observations from the show.

MWC –Will consumers even care? -Wednesday 17th

2010-02-17T16:45:00.002+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten
Walking around at MWC, you got to be amazed about the wider and richer array of features and choices on offer for wireless s devices. Has there ever been an industry with as much innovation and possibilities? No (I dare say). But the challenge is to translate it all into consumer benefits and then choose among the many providers of devices, apps, and services. Although choice is good and choice is freedom, and this is what we want too. But how do we know what horse to bet on. It has not been clear to consumers what segmentation the offerings are intended for and how to better benefit from one choice compared to the other.

Trying to think as a consumer and as a cool-stuff geek I am not especially interested in platforms, OS, standards, HDSPA, W-cdma or LTE, nor do a care about API, architecture, ecosystems , app store competition, codecs, 12Mpix, ADK´s or communities or almost anything else either… So, what do I care about? I care about possibilities, convenience and excitement. Here is a new word: Possiveniment. Other words like fun, easy, passion and love is widely used in the industry as well as green and eco.

That´s all good but it does not happen unless nobody is taking it to a new level to boost competition and accelerate developments.
Imagine a standardized choice-and-definition system connected to a combined vendors cloud where you respond to a number of questions and as an output you got a preconfigured handset with preinstalled personalized applications, conveniently prepared for your various wifi´s, e mail, push, sync, tweets, facebooks, blogs, weather reports, e-bay account, pay-pal and what else, and supplied in your colour of choice with the suitable bling-bling and accessories and headsets to go? Without having to care about platforms and what else.
Wouldn´t that be possiveniment?
I think that we (read Teleca) , being a technology and solutions expert need to help the world with the possiveniment -factors too. Hey, we have recently launched a new Platform Benchmarking and Analysis Solution. I think from now on there could be an additional possiveniment assessment included in that offering!

Multi-platform play at MWC -Tuesday 16th

2010-02-16T15:32:00.003+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten
So in what direction is it going? New platforms available for 2010 makes an already congested play even more thrilling.
Windows Phone 7 series with phones coming out fall 2010 is merging the interesst of X-Box live , Zune and more to become a hub for music and video. But what about the change from calling it Windows Mobile to Windows phone?.. Just when every phone has become a mobile multi media device. There are no more pure phones, are there?

Even more interesting, perhaps is the marriage between Maemo and Moblin supported by father and mother Nokia and Intel. Topped by QT userexperience and designated MeeGo. It will be supported under the wings of LiMo and at Teleca we give it thumbs up. Can this now become a global force on par with Symbian and Android, as it is now free from from the perhaps too close relathionship with it´s mother and father ?

Talking about Symbian, The Symbian 3 OS also just launched with multi pages support and advanced layering. Interesting to follow.

And new phones from Samsung on their Bada platform...

All these platforms available for mid 2010. Intersting struggle for those that must make tactical decisions on what to support in their devices.

I am sure tomorrow will bring more excitement!

MWC: Hectic as ever! Monday 15th

2010-02-15T18:56:00.004+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten
Did anybody think MWC (Mobile World Congress) was going to be quiet this year? Yes come on, admit now.. Well, I did but hear this; It is not! It is as busy as ever although some stands are smaller and some exhibitors chose to not be here with a stand.There have been news pouring over us all day. New Android phones are literally everywhere. New devices officially presented by i.e SonyEricsson and ASUS, the latter known for a steady climb up the ladder in the PC world. Will be exciting to follow their maybe controversial inroad on the global mobile handset market. And the now official marriage of Maemo and Moblin with QT on top. Oh what I love this dynamic reinventing industry.
I really look forward to tomorrow!

Out of the tunnel! -February 11th

2010-02-11T13:35:00.003+01:00

By Robert Kempf
Anybody out there? Looking for survivors of the worst economic downturn since ages…
-I have a great message for you guys: There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel and the most exciting event of the mobile industry is just around the corner – MWC 2010.
If you are still waiting to start-up again I can only recommend to hurry. A wider industry recognized the technical leadership and innovation potential of the mobile industry and is keen to leverage it to their products. Seamless connectivity, high data rates, value added services leveraging the cloud, marketplaces and the game changing user experience of some new mobile devices are only a few themes which come into my mind.

Already at CES 2010 we have seen many new devices like MIDs, Smartbooks, eBook readers and similar which leverage mobile technology and there is a clear sign of further convergence in this space in terms of the underlying technology used for all these kind of devices.
So let us exploit the full potential of our mobile industry solutions. I know it is easier saying that than making it happen, but we at Teleca can assure you that there are many ways of making this journey a success.

What are these success factors I am talking about?
I would only like to touch upon a few of them - we need to become smarter, we need to love open source solutions and we should never underestimate the power of communities.

You would like to have more details?
Just pass by our MWC booth in Hall 8, #B79 and we will explain in detail how we can help making your plans a success in this space.
We are active in one of the most exciting, and fastly transforming, industries with much undiscovered potential…
Yes, We Love Smart Solutions.

I hope we can explore this space together and looking forward to seeing you @ MWC! www.teleca.com/mwc2010

Android+Google=always true? -February 8th

2010-02-08T09:40:00.001+01:00

By Craig Turner
A very tech-savvy friend was telling me recently that he had heard of a phone that is under development with Android but not Google. He wanted to know how that could be possible. At first glance, the answer seemed obvious; of course it is possible; Android is available as OSS, you can skip getting it certified if you do not plan to include any Google services or get the Google branding on the phone.

But then I got to thinking. Can you really take the Google out of Android? The other side of the argument could be that, with Google as the original contributor of Android source code and acting as a key driver in the Open Handset Alliance which determines the contents and timelines of each Android release, it would be impossible to completely remove the influence of Google from Android. Even if you build a device purely on the OSS release of Android, the influence of Google on the core components of operating system is built in.

And what does it mean to separate Android from Google? Android is a mobile operating system with growing importance in the mobile computing sector. Google is an internet services provider and, more importantly, one of the world's strongest computing brands. The Android brand's real value comes from the association with Google. If you don’t get certified with the CTS, you are not allowed access to the online marketplace, which is called the “Android Market” not the “Google Market”. To again take the extreme case, the device owner can always claim to have built their product based on the Android OSS release – even there for the average consumer there is an automatic association with both the Android and Google brands.

So, which is more important, the operating system or the brand? Google would likely survive without Android, but the opposite is unclear. Nevertheless, the Google brand alone cannot make great mobile devices. That is the result of a combination of a high-quality operating system and Google's mobile services, certainly in concert with further software and services provided by the rest of the value chain, including ODMs, OEMs and operators. It will be an interesting case study in a few months to compare the success of the Google Nexus One with that of similar unbranded Android-based phones.

More green gadgets -February 4th

2010-02-04T12:12:00.002+01:00

By Mariappan Vaithilingam

Yesterday, I was watching a TV program about some school student’s science exhibition. One of the groups was explaining about the possible ways of going green and suggested more use of solar energy. I started thinking of that.
- How can we possibly make use of solar energy in mobile phones as well as in other portable gadgets?

I googled 'Mobile solar Power Charger' and got lots of information about the solar mobile charger. Basically this solar power charger gets power from Sun and stores it in the build-in battery which then powers the processor, display, illumination etc.

Some time back my dad used a small calculator which used solar power. During the day time it stores and uses solar power and at night time it uses a normal light bulb to power up, and that really worked well. Now I think why can’t we make use of the same technique for handheld devices? I understand that handhelds will consume more power than a calculator, but at least using solar generated power we can send an occasional SMS or execute small applications.

-Could this be the next display innovation to also have it function as a solar panel? Maybe there is something Steve did not tell us about the Ipad ?

Deploying successful services -January 25th

2010-01-25T10:05:00.001+01:00

By Jari Saarhelo
The Mobile Internet is booming and will experience double digit growth during the next few years. This growth is driven by a marked shift towards using services, such as social networking, on Smartphone and other mobile devices as well as on the Desktop. The smartphone has become a service platform, where soon 50% of user activity is not voice nor text related.

Achieving high enough service penetration is one of the key challenges in offering a service globally. Ideally, a service should:

- Be deployable on as many devices as possible
- Deliver WoW user experience
- Be easily updatable a only a couple of clicks
- Be customized to match regional tastes
- Have a low incremental cost to support new devices

In practice, there is a need to balance these factors against each other to find an affordable solution delivering maximum benefits in an acceptable timeframe. Web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML) based service for example are deployable on all the devices supporting a standard web browser, but the user experience will be limited.

Despite the growth of smartphones with webkit support most devices out there still have poor browser support. Going native will enable a huge improvement in the user experience and the ability to create unique experiences, but the development cost will typically be higher and additional skills will be needed. Which way to go will of course be dependent on the focus of the service and the user experience that needs to be delivered. However, which ever path you choose the era on of Mobile Internet services is clearly dawning.

We have recently released a white paper on Advanced Mobile Services (http://www.teleca.com/Home/solutions/end-to-end_solutions.aspx), if you want to read more on this topic.

Shameless plug –January 19th

2010-01-19T16:13:00.001+01:00

By Andrew Till

Want a cool new application? Ever wished that with a single touch you could switch between silent and vibration mode. Well now you can with the new Teleca “Ringer Mode Toggler” for Android.

This useful application allows you to toggle between ringer modes.
Now it’s possible to turn on or off silent mode or vibrate mode with just one touch.
Download, use, enjoy. From the Android Market.

What do you think – Shameless plug !

I love the smell of convergence -January 12th

2010-01-12T08:44:00.002+01:00

By Najeeb Khan

Our industry has been suffering convergence fever and tablets are now being prescribed to relieve the symptoms. The terms UMPC & MID seem to have been dumped as manufacturers prepare a plethora of tablets, slates and eReaders to launch at consumers during 2010.

Small-screen-browsing has improved immeasurably in recent years thanks to devices such as the iPhone, Android phones and Nokia’s N900 and the wide spread adoption of webkit as a common rendering engine.

This experience, whilst portable and convenient, is still not quite as rich as a full PC-based experience for a variety of reasons with screen-real-estate being the most glaringly obvious one.

But this new generation of connected appliances will spawn ecosystems beyond the internet browsing, emailing and social networking that modern smartphones have recently been praised for:

Traditional publishers of printed content such as Newscorp, TimeWarner, Hearst, Meredith and Conde Nast, seeking ways to monetise their content in the age of convergence, have formed a joint venture to publish their content called Next Issue Media aimed at creating a standard for formatting and charging for rich-media-content.
Film and TV producers and broadcasters are increasingly making their content available for the PC, and other connected devices. Services such as Hulu in the USA and BBC iPlayer in the UK are already extremely popular. Some of these services already support small-screen-devices but a plethora of new, larger screen, portable devices dedicated to media consumption will no doubt stimulate renewed activity in harnessing the portable video revenue that is undoubtedly out there.
Portable gaming could potentially begin to compete with, and will certainly enhance, the experience available in the living room, location based services could offer you that much more simultaneously and instantaneously related to your location, mobile advertising could be that much more impactful and one-to-one selling/teaching/counselling could be more personal.

The new generation of portable, instant on, easy-to-use connected appliances will take the drag of computing. Traditional PCs/laptops, will of course still have their place but will likely take a back seat to this new generation of lifestyle companions.

Perhaps 2010 will be remembered as the year that began the revolution in portable lifestyle companions.

2010-the year of passionate handsets

2010-01-05T15:57:00.001+01:00

By Magnus Ingelsten
In spring 2007 the iPhone was launched and so much has been written about its success. It have had the whole mobile industry asking itself several key questions; How to explain its success? What is the recipe? Can it be repeated?

An immense success among consumers. What makes people fall in love with it? I have tried to find a parallel. Such as buying a car? Not really… For most it is just a practical means of transportation, unless you are a petrol head like myself.

However, is it like going on a date? While for some it may be a practical means of finding someone you get on well with, for most it’s about finding someone that you’re attracted to on many levels and is a process that is driven by the heart rather than the head.

To select a handset these days, if you do not consider low cost in relation to the operator and handset as your first priority, is like being on a date! You may meet someone that is very clever, possesses good looks, the right balance of professional skills and leisure/fun time… but there are quite a few of them around. But to find someone that really speaks to you and tickles your senses, someone that you really want to get to know and who creates the feeling within you that is called lust is harder to come by.
And someone that is not pretending to be something they’re not – in essence being authentic and sincere. As well as someone being open for new ideas, impressions and develops with the relationship. See where I am going?

So what are the right keywords and ingredients for the recipe? Well here is what I think you need to materialize your own perfect handset:

1 spoon of Youthfulness
1 big cup of Brand
1 cup of Intelligence
1 large spoon Simplicity
½ spoon Quality
1 spoon Authenticity
1 cup of Freshness
1 big bowl of Looks-to-kill-for
1 gallon Lust
-Make sure it is based on an open OS, spiced with music, movies and cool apps.

This recipe is free for all to use and we hope that together with Teleca, vendors will introduce new devices, created with passion and lust, for 2010.

A happy new year to all of you!