... according to Jason Grigsby of CloudFour.com and mobileportland.com in Portland, Oregon. Clark College (Vancouver,Washington) was privileged to host Grigsby for a two hour mini-seminar and he caught my attention, big time. I've pasted his slides below, so you can check them out, too. Grigsby is an animated presenter and is one of the reasons I've chosen this topic for my final project was a comment he made at the end of his talk. When asked what kind of app he'd most like to see..., he said restaurants' menus. I've been interested in accessing restaurants online for years so this is one more open avenue of future interest.
As LukeW also says, "It's no secret things are different on mobile." The common theme with app designers seems to be that you can't just resize screens to fit mobile device screens... you need to build different options and connections between screens to suit a hand-held device, sometimes one-handed. Also in this link... information on how these units are used to look-up local search queries. According to this article on Search Engine Land, Microsoft says, 53 percent of mobile searches are local.Google has stated that “20% of searches on Google are related to location.” So while we're walking around, we want to see if the store around the corner is open or maybe the pub?? Comscore's annual study of local search behavior indicates that only 8.3% of desktop search engine queries are local. So this is definitely an extension of moving around... checking out which way to go, before you turn that direction?
Here's another take from Ferdz Decena a freelance photographer and writer. His Ironwulf.netGO! site is meant to be his Moblog... his mobile blogger and his link to the mobile version of his website. Check out the places his mobile goes!
Google says one in four of it's Android 2.0 requests are voice queries. This is justifying Google's pouring the funds into voice with the future holding “mini supercomputers in your pocket”. The Android platform was launched in 2007, just three years ago.
Ten years ago for Blackberry...so much has happened in ten years. Now W3C shows best practices for delivering web content to mobile devices. In 2009, Mike Visard expressed the business question of managing MobileMadness..."The potential problem mobile creates is that if an IT organization develops an application for the Apple iPhone, it’s hard to move that application over to say a Palm Pre or a Google Android phone tomorrow."
But wait...Smartphone Apps are turning citizens into scientists. Around 100 million Americans use web-connected, camera-equipped phones on a daily -- probably hourly -- basis. Which is why many developers are exploring how this extraordinary resource can be harnessed for social change. By using our phones to snap photographs of trash-filled riverbeds, for example, or geo-tag pervasive noise pollution, just about anyone can contribute to vital data treasures that can reshape the world. Such crowd-sourced data advances scientific research and improves long-term planning. Today, we feature a few of our favorite apps that are empowering everyday people to become citizen scientists.
Aaand with nearly 90 percent of Americans as wireless subscribers, software engineers are responding to the ubiquity of mobile devices by making them ever more valuable tools in the lives of consumers. A pill reminder may seem simple enough, but for patients prescribed multiple medications, or for the elderly, medication at the right time, in the right dose, can mean life or death.
In the retail world the money is flowing... 2010/11/29 It's mobile madness at Ebay and Paypal
The mobile commerce success story that is eBay Inc. became even stronger during the holiday weekend: On Black Friday, the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving, eBay sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly doubled over Black Friday 2009. Globally, eBay mobile is on track to nearly triple its sales over last year’s $600 million, the company says. But, the NYTimes says... "If the current growth patterns continue, PayPal will surpass its parent in revenue around 2014 — and even sooner if the unit is able to insinuate itself into MOBILE as successfully as it has with Web transactions. ... John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, considers PayPal’s eventual ascendance to be almost a foregone conclusion. “PayPal’s target market is all of e-commerce,” he said this month. “EBay is just one merchant.”
Things are changing so fast that MySpace is now behind in the mobile rush and is launching their new mobile site and iPhone apps. This is amazing to me... Now look at this one...
Robin Waeters writes, "Today sees the launch of Viber, a brand new, free iPhone application (iTunes link, or search for ‘viber free’) that basically functions the way pretty much every iPhone user wishes Skype’s mobile application would. My educated guess is that this will become a stunningly big hit in no time." Free? Fast? Who knew?
Take a look at Firefox's new, free app Firefox Home. It's a free cloud-based application that lets you access your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and tabs on your iPhone. Want to pull up that funny video you were watching just before you left home? Open Firefox Home and your web history is right there. Forgot to print out directions to the restaurant before leaving work? Firefox Home gives you instant access to your desktop tabs. The link will take you to Firefox's Mobile Blog for more ramblings.
Coming back to LukeW for some notes on Jonathan Brill's opening keynote at the Design for Mobile conference in Chicago IL,. Jonathan Brill discussed several future scenarios for mobile user experience and their potential. Here's some of Luke's notes from the talk: "The future of mobile isn’t on the phone. It requires being aware of environments. People are more than an eyeball and a finger..." and my favorite Bill sort-of-by-Luke quote, "When investigating, predicting, developing new technologies, laughter and delight signal a business opportunity." Hooray for Laughter.
