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Nov
2011


   Sustainable mobile
   strategy for a
   fragmented
   ecosystem




                                  Nikhil K Menon
         http://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkmenon
Page 2 of 17



                                  Executive Summary

The disruptive nature of the mobile apps ecosystem and the ubiquity of smartphone are forcing
many organizations that offer web based services to implement a Mobile Strategy as part of their
Enterprise IT Strategy and Vision. Furthermore, several startups are sprouting grounds for great
ideas that have mobile use cases. Inclusion of a practical mobile strategy as an integral part of
one’s product development strategy will help realize the idea more effectively.

Regardless of the scale of your immediate mobile objective, one needs to consider the diverse
and fragmented state of the current mobile ecosystem and analyze all aspects of it and then
derive a road map best suited for the organization.

The task of developing a mobile strategy poses unique challenges that need to be solved in order
to efficiently deliver your offerings to the customers, regardless of the type of mobile device they
own.

This paper will focus primarily on the challenges and opportunities presented by the fragmented
mobile space and explore the different approaches that will enable your business to serve all the
customers in the continuously evolving mobile user base.
Page 3 of 17




Table of Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 2

Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations ............................................................................ 4

Different Phases in mobile strategy development .......................................................................... 5

What services should you offer on mobile? .................................................................................... 6

   Enhance your IT infrastructure .................................................................................................. 6

Identify your customers and their mobile device platform .............................................................7

Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering ............................................................... 8

   Role of SMS ................................................................................................................................. 9

   Interactive Telephony application .............................................................................................10

   Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags ......................................................................... 11

      QR Codes ................................................................................................................................ 11

      NFC Tags ................................................................................................................................ 12

Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms ............................................................................. 12

   Portability of mobile web apps ................................................................................................... 13

   When to pick native mobile apps ............................................................................................... 13

   Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for rescue ................................. 14

      PhoneGap ............................................................................................................................... 14

      Titanium Appcelerator ........................................................................................................... 15

      Adobe AIR .............................................................................................................................. 15

      Other Frameworks.................................................................................................................. 15

   J2ME based feature phone apps ................................................................................................ 16

      Feature phones – the elephant in the room ........................................................................... 16

Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 16

References ...................................................................................................................................... 17
Page 4 of 17


                 Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations

A growing number of consumers access a variety of internet content using more than one type of
platform. They expect to receive the services whether they are in front of their computer or away
from it. Companies that does not adapt to this evolving trend in usage and expectation may end
up losing their competitive advantage.

In June 2011, mobile apps crossed a significant milestone. Consumers spent 9% more time on
mobile apps than on desktops and notebooks combined, based on the findings of the Mobile
apps analytics firm Flurry. For most users, their mobile device has become the primary source
for obtaining information and consuming services from the web.




                                                                                   1




1   Flurry Blog and State of the media/PewResearch
Page 5 of 17


           Different Phases in mobile strategy development

Approaching your mobile strategy development in the following phases will help you create an
effective strategy that can maximize the reach of your business and improve your brand
experience.

      Identify the services that you plan to offer to your mobile users.

      Study the types of mobile devices your customers own.

      Devise a plan to deliver your services to most, if not all, of your current and future
       customers on the devices they own.

      Outline a vision for improving the discovery of your mobile offerings.

      Create a plan for engaging your customers post sale and broaden your brand experience.
Page 6 of 17


                 What services should you offer on mobile?

Most businesses plan to offer a wide variety of services through online channels. In reality there
are no restrictions on the types of services that can be offered on mobile. However, it is not
practical and effective to offer every feature in your website on a mobile device.

The mobile use cases should typically have short sessions and require less user inputs.
Depending on the type of your business, the services you offer on the mobile can provide
additional context, such as location, that can help you serve the customer with more relevant
information.

Enhance your IT infrastructure

Your IT infrastructure needs to adapt to the complexity that will be brought in with the addition
of a mobile channel. Depending on the current state of your infrastructure, this can be a
seamless transition or a substantial undertaking. If your mobile offering includes an installable
mobile application, then there is a high likelihood that some of your customers might try to
access your services using older versions of your mobile application. Consequently, you will be
required to prepare your backend services to be backward compatible with prior versions of your
mobile applications. If you already follow a Service Oriented Architecture and have a
middleware or ESB in place, this would be an easy transition.

Employing an API manager layer on top of your middleware will simplify the mobile application
integration and maintenance. If you wish not to build this capability in house, API managers
such as Apigee or Mashery can provide the supporting infrastructure around existing enterprise
APIs. Each enterprise can either use their existing cloud based infrastructure or On-premise
appliance to expose these APIs.
Page 7 of 17



       Identify your customers and their mobile device platform

Having answers to the following questions will greatly help you in narrowing down the
platforms you need to deliver your mobile service offering.

       Who are your target customers?

       Where they are geographically located?

       What are the demographics?

Geographical location of your customers will impact your strategy and will put spotlight on
certain types of mobile platforms. For example, based on the chart given below, if majority of
your customers are located in US, UK or Singapore, then you have almost equal or more number
of internet users accessing your content on Tablets as compared to Mobile phones.




Knowing your customer demographics is also equally important. Based on the analytics from
Flurry, it is evident that the majority of smartphone users are less than 45 years of age and for
the age group 25-34 and above, majority of smartphone users are female.
Page 8 of 17


       Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering

Chances are you have a diverse customer base. Due to the fragmented nature of the mobile
ecosystem, in order to provide your services to most, if not all, of your customers, you will have
to develop different types of mobile applications on multiple platforms.

A mobile application is not just limited to a native application or a mobile web site. The
following are the types of applications that can be made available on a mobile device.

      Native Mobile Application

      Mobile Web Browser based application

      SMS

      Telephony Application

      QR codes

      NFC tags

Without a doubt, native mobile app or mobile web browser based
services must be a significant part of your mobile strategy.
However, this will still leave a significant number of customers
who does not own a smartphone or have a data plan on their
mobile phone, out of reach.
Page 9 of 17


Role of SMS

It is a common mistake to underestimate the reach of SMS based services, especially in engaging
the customers. The SMS based services can be consumed by the user without the need to
download an application. Based on an article published by Financial Newsline, "over 90 percent
of all SMS text messages are read usually within three minutes of being received. In total, close
to 98 percent of all SMS text messages are indeed read by the consumer within hours of
receiving it."

                                               Regardless of the type of the target mobile device,
                                               SMS based alerts and notifications can be a value
                                               added service to your customers. This use case is
                                               widely employed in the banking industry. What
                                               about other industries? Imagine if you are able to
                                               receive a text message when your flight is delayed,
                                               or if you are able to receive a reminder that your
                                               appointment with the doctor is tomorrow. Unlike
                                               traditional applications, which cannot send you
                                               notifications unless it is running in the background,
                                               SMS service is always available. Even if your device
is switched off, as soon as it comes back on, you receive any backlogged messages. It is simple to
use and does not need a tech savvy user to take full advantage of this.

SMS also plays an important role in mobile fund raising initiatives and marketing. The
substantial number of donations received through SMS text donations in the aftermath of Haiti
earthquake validates this. SMS can serve as a verification mechanism during a signup process
and can also be used for interactive polling. There are countless use cases that can be realized
using SMS.

Your application can be built to interact with the user via text messages. Twilio and Tropo are
the leading Webservice API providers in this domain.

The following diagram is from Twilio website. As depicted in the diagram, the text from the SMS
will be sent to your application which in turn will allow the application to respond with the
appropriate information. This type of approach is relatively easy to implement and eliminates
the hurdles associated with setting up a SMS based service.
Page 10 of 17




                                                                   2



Interactive Telephony application

This is one of the oldest types of application available via any type of phone. There will not be
anyone who hasn’t used this type of application at least once. A common example for this is the
service that is made available when we call the 1-800 number that prompts for user inputs. The
user interface can be voice driven or based on a numeric dial pad.

Google attempted to broaden their local search services by making it available as a telephony
application. GOOG-411, voice automated directory assistance service, a part of Google labs
products, proved that you can provide valuable local search results while a customer is on the
road. However, Google shut down most of their Google labs products earlier this year of which
GOOG-411 was one of them.

Just like the SMS Webservices APIs, companies like Twilio, Tropo and several others provide
telephony APIs that can interface with your existing web applications relatively easily.

Interactive Telephony application should be given a good consideration in your mobile strategy
especially if your customers do not own smartphones.



2   Twilio SMS
Page 11 of 17


Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags

QR Codes
Based on the press release from comScore, “14 million Americans Scanned QR Codes on their
Mobile Phones in June 2011”.

QR (Quick Response) codes attempts to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds.
These can be spotted in publications, products, store fronts, direct mail and countless other
locations. Upon scanning a QR code using a pre-existing QR code reader application, it can
direct the user to a mobile application, make a phone call, send a text message, download a
coupon, open a mobile website or a product manual. There are numerous other ways to make
use of QR Code.

QR codes can help you market your brand and accelerate the customer sign-up process beyond
your store, website or mobile app. It can improve the discovery of your mobile app which
otherwise may be buried deep inside the App store search results. QR code is undoubtedly a
valuable tool when it comes to empowering your marketing.




                                                                                    3




3   QR Codes information from comScore
Page 12 of 17


NFC Tags
NFC tags (Near Field Communication) have use cases beyond mobile payments and as a
magnetic card alternative. Like QR codes, NFC tags allow the user to interact with physical
objects. They can be used in almost all of the areas where QR codes can be employed and more.

NFC tags can offer innovative ways for allowing the users to check-in to stores or restaurants,
get more information on a product or add reviews. Imagine if you have the opportunity to touch
the movie poster with your smartphone in a theater after watching the movie to add instant
reviews. Offering such medium to engage your customers even after the sale has been completed
improve their experience with your brand and will increase participation.

Once you have a narrowed down on the types of mobile applications you will be including in
your mobile service offering, a scalable development platform needs to be selected for
developing your mobile applications. In order to deliver mobile applications to your target
customers, you may be required to develop it for multiple platforms as explained below.


              Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms

This is one of the biggest challenges in realizing any mobile objective. There are numerous
mobile operating systems that run on multitude of devices with a wide range of form factors.

Fragmentation is costly
Developing a native app on several platforms will require you to employ multiple mobile
development teams and will require maintenance of multiple code bases. Nevertheless, ignoring
certain archaic mobile platforms is not a wise move either. The mobile strategy must incorporate
a plan to create applications that is accessible from multiple platforms with less operating costs
and maintenance overhead.
Page 13 of 17




                                                                                4




Portability of mobile web apps

Most of the mobile use cases do not require development of a native application for each mobile
use-case. A considerable number of applications are best served as mobile web based
experiences. The mobile web app ensures that each user always uses the latest version of the app
and can be accessed from multiple devices.

A rich user experience can be achieved by efficient use of HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript
technologies. Several popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and others use
these technologies to create mobile web apps that provides near native look and feel on iOS,
Android and BlackBerry devices.

That being said, there are certain situations that can only be satisfied by native mobile apps as
described below.

When to pick native mobile apps

Native applications are inherently faster and can be seamlessly integrated with the device
hardware. If your mobile app needs to be available offline or needs to run in the background,
then you must consider developing a native application. If your application contains
sophisticated animations, then it is best rendered using native mobile app. Native applications
are also able to leverage the full hardware capabilities of a mobile device and can take advantage
of App Stores for distribution and discovery.

Besides serving as a distribution platform for native apps, App Stores also provide a convenient
payment mechanism for application providers and its users. However, App Stores policies
enforce a revenue sharing model for paid apps which may not be suitable for your business
model. But what if a third option was possible that marries both the uniformity of experience


4   comScore Mobile market share
Page 14 of 17


along with the portability of mobile web and the sophisticated capabilities of a native mobile
application?

Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for
rescue

What if you need the portability of a mobile web application and the deployment and
distribution features of app stores that are offered to only native applications? Imagine being
able to create single code base and take advantage of the several years of web development skills
of your existing web team in developing the mobile application. This is possible, thanks to the
emergence of the cross platform application tools that uses the popular web development
technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript.

PhoneGap
PhoneGap is one of the open source mobile development platforms that allows creation of native
applications using web technologies. It provides access to phone features hitherto unavailable to
mobile web apps such as file system, camera, GPS etc using JavaScript API. PhoneGap can be
combined with Sencha Touch, jQuery to simplify development and reduce time to market
requirements.




                                                          5


HTML5 pages are wrapped inside native components and make use of JavaScript to provide
access to device APIs. Adobe realized the substantial opportunities this platform presents to the
future of mobile application development and acquired Nitobi, creators of the PhoneGap
platform.

Applications developed using PhoneGap can be deployed to the following mobile operating
systems using their respective app stores.

         iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian and bada

Real World Applications: PhoneGap Apps
Several cross-platform apps have been successfully created using PhoneGap framework. Two
such popular apps are METAR Reader and Logitech Squeezebox™ Controller. You can get the
full list of popular applications that are developed using PhoneGap on the featured apps page of
their website.



5   PhoneGap
Page 15 of 17


Titanium Appcelerator
Titanium allows developers to use the web skills to develop apps that will run on iOS, Android
and BlackBerry platforms. Applications developed using Titanium SDK have real native look
and feel. Titanium uses a JavaScript interpreter to execute the JavaScript in the application.
The pluggable architecture of Titanium also allows the addition of native code (Objective-C or
Java) to the application.

When compared to PhoneGap, Titanium offers access to more device APIs and the ability to add
custom native code allows you to extend the capabilities. However, inclusion of platform specific
native code has a disadvantage of limiting its portability.

Real World Examples: Appcelerator Apps
NBC, PayPal and eBay created rich native applications for IPAD using Titanium Appcelerator.
You can find other popular applications that used Appcelerator framework on the Titanium
Applications Showcase page.

Adobe AIR
Adobe Air lets you develop cross platform mobile applications using Flex, ActionScript, HTML,
JavaScript and Flash. Adobe AIR applications will run on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices
and delivers rich user experiences. Native extensions included in Adobe AIR allow you to
seamlessly integrate with the device APIs thereby extending the capabilities of the AIR
applications.

Real World Applications: AIR Apps
Politifact Mobile application from Times Publishing Company is developed using Adobe AIR for
Android platform. Hacker News, and Slashdot are two other popular applications based on
Adobe AIR. You can find the full list of popular Adobe AIR application on AppBrain.

Other Frameworks
In addition to the frameworks discussed here, there are several other promising frameworks
that allow cross platform application development. Some of these frameworks are listed below.
Each of these has its advantages and one must evaluate all of the active frameworks that
supports portability of the mobile application before deciding on the framework that is best
suited for your application development.

      RhoMobile

      MoSync

      J2ME Polish

      Ramp

      Grapple
Page 16 of 17


J2ME based feature phone apps

Feature phones – the elephant in the room
Even though the number of smartphone users overtook the feature phone users in US this year,
there are still 36% users who uses feature phones. In the developing countries, the feature phone
users outnumber smartphone users by a substantial margin. Including a Java enabled feature
phone app to your mobile portfolio will increase the accessibility of your services to more
customers, especially in emerging markets.

This fact is reinforced with the release of the Facebook mobile app for Java enabled feature
phones there by expanding the reach of Facebook apps to 2500+ devices. This app is built on
Snaptu - a java enabled feature phone app platform.




                                         Summary

The rate of adoption and usage of mobile device as a means for accessing content and services
over the internet is only going to rise further. The addition of a mobile service offering to your
business is an inevitable transition that needs to be considered imminently if you must stay
ahead of the curve. Given the current fragmented state of the mobile space, especially among
mobile operating systems, the mobile strategy you pick for your business needs to be sustainable
and effective without affecting the business bottom line.

There is no one size fit all approach when it comes to the mobile development strategy. There
are several good solutions that address the problem of the diverse platforms; and each has its
own advantages. Based on your business goals, target mobile platforms need to be prioritized
and a scalable mobile development technology needs to be adopted to accelerate deployment.

In this rapidly emerging mobile technology era, businesses need to take a bullish approach to
reducing the time to market. In order to maximize the return on investment, adequate
investment needs to be made in creation of a continuous and sustainable mobile strategy.
Page 17 of 17



                                  References

   Digital Omnivores whitepaper from comScore:
    http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Digital_O
    mnivores

   Flurry Blog: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/71285/Mobile-App-Inventory-Hungry-Enough-
    to-Eat-Internet-Display-Ad-Spend
    http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear-view-
    Mirror

   QR Codes information from comScore:
    http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/8/14_Million_America
    ns_Scanned_QR_or_Bar_Codes_on_their_Mobile_Phones_in_June_2011

   Twilio SMS: http://www.twilio.com/api/sms

   comScore Mobile market share:
    http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Reports_
    September_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

   PhoneGap: http://phonegap.com/

   State of the media/PewResearch: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey

   Financial Newsline: http://www.financialnewsline.com/mortgage/business-owners-
    shocked-at-99-percent-read-rate-with-mobile-advertising-and-sms-marketing

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Sustainable mobilestrategy

  • 1. Nov 2011 Sustainable mobile strategy for a fragmented ecosystem Nikhil K Menon http://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkmenon
  • 2. Page 2 of 17 Executive Summary The disruptive nature of the mobile apps ecosystem and the ubiquity of smartphone are forcing many organizations that offer web based services to implement a Mobile Strategy as part of their Enterprise IT Strategy and Vision. Furthermore, several startups are sprouting grounds for great ideas that have mobile use cases. Inclusion of a practical mobile strategy as an integral part of one’s product development strategy will help realize the idea more effectively. Regardless of the scale of your immediate mobile objective, one needs to consider the diverse and fragmented state of the current mobile ecosystem and analyze all aspects of it and then derive a road map best suited for the organization. The task of developing a mobile strategy poses unique challenges that need to be solved in order to efficiently deliver your offerings to the customers, regardless of the type of mobile device they own. This paper will focus primarily on the challenges and opportunities presented by the fragmented mobile space and explore the different approaches that will enable your business to serve all the customers in the continuously evolving mobile user base.
  • 3. Page 3 of 17 Table of Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 2 Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations ............................................................................ 4 Different Phases in mobile strategy development .......................................................................... 5 What services should you offer on mobile? .................................................................................... 6 Enhance your IT infrastructure .................................................................................................. 6 Identify your customers and their mobile device platform .............................................................7 Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering ............................................................... 8 Role of SMS ................................................................................................................................. 9 Interactive Telephony application .............................................................................................10 Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags ......................................................................... 11 QR Codes ................................................................................................................................ 11 NFC Tags ................................................................................................................................ 12 Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms ............................................................................. 12 Portability of mobile web apps ................................................................................................... 13 When to pick native mobile apps ............................................................................................... 13 Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for rescue ................................. 14 PhoneGap ............................................................................................................................... 14 Titanium Appcelerator ........................................................................................................... 15 Adobe AIR .............................................................................................................................. 15 Other Frameworks.................................................................................................................. 15 J2ME based feature phone apps ................................................................................................ 16 Feature phones – the elephant in the room ........................................................................... 16 Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 16 References ...................................................................................................................................... 17
  • 4. Page 4 of 17 Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations A growing number of consumers access a variety of internet content using more than one type of platform. They expect to receive the services whether they are in front of their computer or away from it. Companies that does not adapt to this evolving trend in usage and expectation may end up losing their competitive advantage. In June 2011, mobile apps crossed a significant milestone. Consumers spent 9% more time on mobile apps than on desktops and notebooks combined, based on the findings of the Mobile apps analytics firm Flurry. For most users, their mobile device has become the primary source for obtaining information and consuming services from the web. 1 1 Flurry Blog and State of the media/PewResearch
  • 5. Page 5 of 17 Different Phases in mobile strategy development Approaching your mobile strategy development in the following phases will help you create an effective strategy that can maximize the reach of your business and improve your brand experience.  Identify the services that you plan to offer to your mobile users.  Study the types of mobile devices your customers own.  Devise a plan to deliver your services to most, if not all, of your current and future customers on the devices they own.  Outline a vision for improving the discovery of your mobile offerings.  Create a plan for engaging your customers post sale and broaden your brand experience.
  • 6. Page 6 of 17 What services should you offer on mobile? Most businesses plan to offer a wide variety of services through online channels. In reality there are no restrictions on the types of services that can be offered on mobile. However, it is not practical and effective to offer every feature in your website on a mobile device. The mobile use cases should typically have short sessions and require less user inputs. Depending on the type of your business, the services you offer on the mobile can provide additional context, such as location, that can help you serve the customer with more relevant information. Enhance your IT infrastructure Your IT infrastructure needs to adapt to the complexity that will be brought in with the addition of a mobile channel. Depending on the current state of your infrastructure, this can be a seamless transition or a substantial undertaking. If your mobile offering includes an installable mobile application, then there is a high likelihood that some of your customers might try to access your services using older versions of your mobile application. Consequently, you will be required to prepare your backend services to be backward compatible with prior versions of your mobile applications. If you already follow a Service Oriented Architecture and have a middleware or ESB in place, this would be an easy transition. Employing an API manager layer on top of your middleware will simplify the mobile application integration and maintenance. If you wish not to build this capability in house, API managers such as Apigee or Mashery can provide the supporting infrastructure around existing enterprise APIs. Each enterprise can either use their existing cloud based infrastructure or On-premise appliance to expose these APIs.
  • 7. Page 7 of 17 Identify your customers and their mobile device platform Having answers to the following questions will greatly help you in narrowing down the platforms you need to deliver your mobile service offering.  Who are your target customers?  Where they are geographically located?  What are the demographics? Geographical location of your customers will impact your strategy and will put spotlight on certain types of mobile platforms. For example, based on the chart given below, if majority of your customers are located in US, UK or Singapore, then you have almost equal or more number of internet users accessing your content on Tablets as compared to Mobile phones. Knowing your customer demographics is also equally important. Based on the analytics from Flurry, it is evident that the majority of smartphone users are less than 45 years of age and for the age group 25-34 and above, majority of smartphone users are female.
  • 8. Page 8 of 17 Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering Chances are you have a diverse customer base. Due to the fragmented nature of the mobile ecosystem, in order to provide your services to most, if not all, of your customers, you will have to develop different types of mobile applications on multiple platforms. A mobile application is not just limited to a native application or a mobile web site. The following are the types of applications that can be made available on a mobile device.  Native Mobile Application  Mobile Web Browser based application  SMS  Telephony Application  QR codes  NFC tags Without a doubt, native mobile app or mobile web browser based services must be a significant part of your mobile strategy. However, this will still leave a significant number of customers who does not own a smartphone or have a data plan on their mobile phone, out of reach.
  • 9. Page 9 of 17 Role of SMS It is a common mistake to underestimate the reach of SMS based services, especially in engaging the customers. The SMS based services can be consumed by the user without the need to download an application. Based on an article published by Financial Newsline, "over 90 percent of all SMS text messages are read usually within three minutes of being received. In total, close to 98 percent of all SMS text messages are indeed read by the consumer within hours of receiving it." Regardless of the type of the target mobile device, SMS based alerts and notifications can be a value added service to your customers. This use case is widely employed in the banking industry. What about other industries? Imagine if you are able to receive a text message when your flight is delayed, or if you are able to receive a reminder that your appointment with the doctor is tomorrow. Unlike traditional applications, which cannot send you notifications unless it is running in the background, SMS service is always available. Even if your device is switched off, as soon as it comes back on, you receive any backlogged messages. It is simple to use and does not need a tech savvy user to take full advantage of this. SMS also plays an important role in mobile fund raising initiatives and marketing. The substantial number of donations received through SMS text donations in the aftermath of Haiti earthquake validates this. SMS can serve as a verification mechanism during a signup process and can also be used for interactive polling. There are countless use cases that can be realized using SMS. Your application can be built to interact with the user via text messages. Twilio and Tropo are the leading Webservice API providers in this domain. The following diagram is from Twilio website. As depicted in the diagram, the text from the SMS will be sent to your application which in turn will allow the application to respond with the appropriate information. This type of approach is relatively easy to implement and eliminates the hurdles associated with setting up a SMS based service.
  • 10. Page 10 of 17 2 Interactive Telephony application This is one of the oldest types of application available via any type of phone. There will not be anyone who hasn’t used this type of application at least once. A common example for this is the service that is made available when we call the 1-800 number that prompts for user inputs. The user interface can be voice driven or based on a numeric dial pad. Google attempted to broaden their local search services by making it available as a telephony application. GOOG-411, voice automated directory assistance service, a part of Google labs products, proved that you can provide valuable local search results while a customer is on the road. However, Google shut down most of their Google labs products earlier this year of which GOOG-411 was one of them. Just like the SMS Webservices APIs, companies like Twilio, Tropo and several others provide telephony APIs that can interface with your existing web applications relatively easily. Interactive Telephony application should be given a good consideration in your mobile strategy especially if your customers do not own smartphones. 2 Twilio SMS
  • 11. Page 11 of 17 Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags QR Codes Based on the press release from comScore, “14 million Americans Scanned QR Codes on their Mobile Phones in June 2011”. QR (Quick Response) codes attempts to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds. These can be spotted in publications, products, store fronts, direct mail and countless other locations. Upon scanning a QR code using a pre-existing QR code reader application, it can direct the user to a mobile application, make a phone call, send a text message, download a coupon, open a mobile website or a product manual. There are numerous other ways to make use of QR Code. QR codes can help you market your brand and accelerate the customer sign-up process beyond your store, website or mobile app. It can improve the discovery of your mobile app which otherwise may be buried deep inside the App store search results. QR code is undoubtedly a valuable tool when it comes to empowering your marketing. 3 3 QR Codes information from comScore
  • 12. Page 12 of 17 NFC Tags NFC tags (Near Field Communication) have use cases beyond mobile payments and as a magnetic card alternative. Like QR codes, NFC tags allow the user to interact with physical objects. They can be used in almost all of the areas where QR codes can be employed and more. NFC tags can offer innovative ways for allowing the users to check-in to stores or restaurants, get more information on a product or add reviews. Imagine if you have the opportunity to touch the movie poster with your smartphone in a theater after watching the movie to add instant reviews. Offering such medium to engage your customers even after the sale has been completed improve their experience with your brand and will increase participation. Once you have a narrowed down on the types of mobile applications you will be including in your mobile service offering, a scalable development platform needs to be selected for developing your mobile applications. In order to deliver mobile applications to your target customers, you may be required to develop it for multiple platforms as explained below. Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms This is one of the biggest challenges in realizing any mobile objective. There are numerous mobile operating systems that run on multitude of devices with a wide range of form factors. Fragmentation is costly Developing a native app on several platforms will require you to employ multiple mobile development teams and will require maintenance of multiple code bases. Nevertheless, ignoring certain archaic mobile platforms is not a wise move either. The mobile strategy must incorporate a plan to create applications that is accessible from multiple platforms with less operating costs and maintenance overhead.
  • 13. Page 13 of 17 4 Portability of mobile web apps Most of the mobile use cases do not require development of a native application for each mobile use-case. A considerable number of applications are best served as mobile web based experiences. The mobile web app ensures that each user always uses the latest version of the app and can be accessed from multiple devices. A rich user experience can be achieved by efficient use of HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript technologies. Several popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and others use these technologies to create mobile web apps that provides near native look and feel on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices. That being said, there are certain situations that can only be satisfied by native mobile apps as described below. When to pick native mobile apps Native applications are inherently faster and can be seamlessly integrated with the device hardware. If your mobile app needs to be available offline or needs to run in the background, then you must consider developing a native application. If your application contains sophisticated animations, then it is best rendered using native mobile app. Native applications are also able to leverage the full hardware capabilities of a mobile device and can take advantage of App Stores for distribution and discovery. Besides serving as a distribution platform for native apps, App Stores also provide a convenient payment mechanism for application providers and its users. However, App Stores policies enforce a revenue sharing model for paid apps which may not be suitable for your business model. But what if a third option was possible that marries both the uniformity of experience 4 comScore Mobile market share
  • 14. Page 14 of 17 along with the portability of mobile web and the sophisticated capabilities of a native mobile application? Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for rescue What if you need the portability of a mobile web application and the deployment and distribution features of app stores that are offered to only native applications? Imagine being able to create single code base and take advantage of the several years of web development skills of your existing web team in developing the mobile application. This is possible, thanks to the emergence of the cross platform application tools that uses the popular web development technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript. PhoneGap PhoneGap is one of the open source mobile development platforms that allows creation of native applications using web technologies. It provides access to phone features hitherto unavailable to mobile web apps such as file system, camera, GPS etc using JavaScript API. PhoneGap can be combined with Sencha Touch, jQuery to simplify development and reduce time to market requirements. 5 HTML5 pages are wrapped inside native components and make use of JavaScript to provide access to device APIs. Adobe realized the substantial opportunities this platform presents to the future of mobile application development and acquired Nitobi, creators of the PhoneGap platform. Applications developed using PhoneGap can be deployed to the following mobile operating systems using their respective app stores.  iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian and bada Real World Applications: PhoneGap Apps Several cross-platform apps have been successfully created using PhoneGap framework. Two such popular apps are METAR Reader and Logitech Squeezebox™ Controller. You can get the full list of popular applications that are developed using PhoneGap on the featured apps page of their website. 5 PhoneGap
  • 15. Page 15 of 17 Titanium Appcelerator Titanium allows developers to use the web skills to develop apps that will run on iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms. Applications developed using Titanium SDK have real native look and feel. Titanium uses a JavaScript interpreter to execute the JavaScript in the application. The pluggable architecture of Titanium also allows the addition of native code (Objective-C or Java) to the application. When compared to PhoneGap, Titanium offers access to more device APIs and the ability to add custom native code allows you to extend the capabilities. However, inclusion of platform specific native code has a disadvantage of limiting its portability. Real World Examples: Appcelerator Apps NBC, PayPal and eBay created rich native applications for IPAD using Titanium Appcelerator. You can find other popular applications that used Appcelerator framework on the Titanium Applications Showcase page. Adobe AIR Adobe Air lets you develop cross platform mobile applications using Flex, ActionScript, HTML, JavaScript and Flash. Adobe AIR applications will run on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices and delivers rich user experiences. Native extensions included in Adobe AIR allow you to seamlessly integrate with the device APIs thereby extending the capabilities of the AIR applications. Real World Applications: AIR Apps Politifact Mobile application from Times Publishing Company is developed using Adobe AIR for Android platform. Hacker News, and Slashdot are two other popular applications based on Adobe AIR. You can find the full list of popular Adobe AIR application on AppBrain. Other Frameworks In addition to the frameworks discussed here, there are several other promising frameworks that allow cross platform application development. Some of these frameworks are listed below. Each of these has its advantages and one must evaluate all of the active frameworks that supports portability of the mobile application before deciding on the framework that is best suited for your application development.  RhoMobile  MoSync  J2ME Polish  Ramp  Grapple
  • 16. Page 16 of 17 J2ME based feature phone apps Feature phones – the elephant in the room Even though the number of smartphone users overtook the feature phone users in US this year, there are still 36% users who uses feature phones. In the developing countries, the feature phone users outnumber smartphone users by a substantial margin. Including a Java enabled feature phone app to your mobile portfolio will increase the accessibility of your services to more customers, especially in emerging markets. This fact is reinforced with the release of the Facebook mobile app for Java enabled feature phones there by expanding the reach of Facebook apps to 2500+ devices. This app is built on Snaptu - a java enabled feature phone app platform. Summary The rate of adoption and usage of mobile device as a means for accessing content and services over the internet is only going to rise further. The addition of a mobile service offering to your business is an inevitable transition that needs to be considered imminently if you must stay ahead of the curve. Given the current fragmented state of the mobile space, especially among mobile operating systems, the mobile strategy you pick for your business needs to be sustainable and effective without affecting the business bottom line. There is no one size fit all approach when it comes to the mobile development strategy. There are several good solutions that address the problem of the diverse platforms; and each has its own advantages. Based on your business goals, target mobile platforms need to be prioritized and a scalable mobile development technology needs to be adopted to accelerate deployment. In this rapidly emerging mobile technology era, businesses need to take a bullish approach to reducing the time to market. In order to maximize the return on investment, adequate investment needs to be made in creation of a continuous and sustainable mobile strategy.
  • 17. Page 17 of 17 References  Digital Omnivores whitepaper from comScore: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Digital_O mnivores  Flurry Blog: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/71285/Mobile-App-Inventory-Hungry-Enough- to-Eat-Internet-Display-Ad-Spend http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear-view- Mirror  QR Codes information from comScore: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/8/14_Million_America ns_Scanned_QR_or_Bar_Codes_on_their_Mobile_Phones_in_June_2011  Twilio SMS: http://www.twilio.com/api/sms  comScore Mobile market share: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Reports_ September_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share  PhoneGap: http://phonegap.com/  State of the media/PewResearch: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey  Financial Newsline: http://www.financialnewsline.com/mortgage/business-owners- shocked-at-99-percent-read-rate-with-mobile-advertising-and-sms-marketing