Category Archives: Mobility

Facebook buys Parse :-/

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Interesting — Facebook Buys Parse To Offer Mobile Development Tools As Its First Paid B2B Service (via TC).

First congrats to Parse, for the monetization event.

I have been a Parse.com fan for a while and even wrote a few months ago an article on using Parse on Android that was published at IBM DeveloperWorks.

Indeed, the Parse API is pretty cool — a very well thought out/organized API with platform/OS-specific bindings, and a very cool “cloud code”.

One of the things I liked about Parse was its independence from the “rest”. But this independence is now gone.

From the developer’s perspective, I have mix feelings about this acquisition — the only apps I want to run against or have dependencies to the Facebook back-end are Facebook apps, and nothing else. As a consequence, my use of Parse will not be limited mainly to such.

There is an alternative to Parse: Apigee, another back-end as a service/cloud API company I am a fan of. They have an API similar to Parse; not as sophisticated, but I believe it will get there. Apigee was a speaker at Android Dev Austin a few months back and I can see how Apigee will continue to evolve. As a matter of fact, this acquisition of Parse by Facebook is probably a good thing for Apigee. (Note to self: write an article on Apigee’s APIs).

ceo

Dell to exit global smartphone business

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Dell_Logo.svg

Deja-vu?

Today I read “Dell to exit global smartphone business” (Austin Business Journal).

From the ABJ article:

“It needs a lot of investments to really be successful,” Clarke told Forbes.

Translation: “…we don’t know how to make it happen”.

I say this because Dell has invested, a lot — but have not done it right. Dell already have the tech and ops resources to make this happen, but it keeps failing on the Go-to-Market (business-side) of the equation; in other words the problem is not the tech side but the business side.

A very sad part of this story is that many people didn’t know Dell had a smartphone business, less a global one!

What Dell should do?

  1. Find the right people, especially business people that understand Mobile,
  2. Quit the politics that again and again have prevented Dell from successfully going to market,
  3. Invest on true innovation, and,
  4. Really invest on Mobile and mobile people.

From the ABJ article:

The Round Rock-based company pulled the plug on selling its mobile devices in the United States earlier this year.

R.I.P.

Perhaps it is the right call, for Dell to just focus on server, cloud and services.

Will Dell quit the Tablet market as well?

The future of Personal Computing is Mobile!

ceo

Article: Parse cloud-based services for Android apps

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My latest article on Mobile & Cloud computing…

Summary: Explore the advantages of storing mobile application data in a private cloud with this introduction to the Parse SDK for Android. Mobilist C. Enrique Ortiz introduces the Parse API classes for cloud-storing and manipulating users, data objects, and files for your mobile applications.

See Parse cloud-based services for Android apps (IBM developerWorks).

Total Time Spend Using Mobile Web vs. Apps (October 2012)

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Saw this today at BI website…

Source: Business Intelligence (BI)

Source: Apps More And More Important Than The Mobile Web (Business Intelligence). Original report by Nielsen.

The above is self-explanatory…

What I find ‘funny’ is that over time I have noticed that Business Intelligence’s opinion on “native vs. web on mobile” swings back-and-forth (based on the top news of the day). In this particular case, all the recent attention to “native vs. mobile web” is thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg.

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The Eternal Debate — MoMo London Event on HTML5 v.s. Native (Sept 2012)

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Native vs. Web
Image Source: Mobile App Testing Blog

Seems that I missed a very good debate. I just read a blog on MoMo London event on HTML5 v.s. Native.

Seems like an eternal debate.

Today in 2012, I am still amazed we still are debating this and have not been able to address this. This is really a ~10 year old debate, still driven by the exact same issues and pros/cons as before — centralized vs. not, cross-platform vs. not, maintainability and fragmentation, code-reusability or not, better user experience vs. not, performance, security, access to device APIs vs. not, thin vs. thick, app discovery, etc. etc. etc.

We can argue the basics are here (HTML5, CSS3 and JS-and-related frameworks), but creating great mobile webapps with great user experiences is today only possible by a few; in other words, is a niche area. (Not even Facebook was able to pull it off, right?).

The day the “common mobile developer” is able to create great mobile webapps with ease, is the day this debate will end.

Today still, “user experience” (driven by network latency, app richness, toolsets, adoption by big brands) is best maximized on mobile native. Today still we have to talk about classes of mobile applications (again driven by network, richness, performance, storage, toolsets, maintainability, security, cost of one vs. other, etc) — then decide what is better suited — native vs. web on mobile.

How much longer will it take settle out this debate? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? Right now I say around five years — I wish I am wrong. But does it really matter?

In the meantime, successful mobile developers redefine the meaning of “full stack developers”; successful mobile developers must be “End-to-end, Cross-platform, Full Stack Developers” — this is a lot of complex ground to cover.

Related to this see “The biggest mistake we made as a company was not investing enough on native.” — Zuckerberg (2012).

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“The biggest mistake we made as a company was not investing enough on native.” — Zuckerberg (2012)

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The title of this blog is not what Zuckerberg actually said, but is what he really meant.

From TechCrunch Disrupt – Zuckerberg Shows He’s The Right Man For The Job:

“The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.” While building native apps that were bacially just a wrapper for the mobile web standard let it experiment quickly, it made the apps run way too slow. “We burnt two years.”

This validates what I have been saying for years… Don’t take me wrong, I’m a fan, user and developer of webapps. Web on mobile is big and the mobile browsers and frameworks are getting so advanced, and the mobile webapps so kickass, but for certain kinds of apps, especially rich consumer-based applications, native is the way to go today.

Consumers are about great user experiences and great quality. The “mistake” Zuckerberg refers to is not really that they bet “too much” on HTML5, but that they didn’t invest enough on native.

But that said, FB has nailed it down; recognizing the need to invest on the native apps and related infrastructure, and focusing on mobile first.

Any company going global must have a mobile first strategy — we know that for many around the world, their online experience will be on mobile.

ceo

Starbucks App == Mobile + Convenience

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The Starbucks App for Android 2.0 is out on Google Play (see announcement on VentureBeat).

Good to see…

(I was one of the people who contributed design & dev to this product, specifically the Card Management tab/functionality, plus some other.)

Starbucks have proven, starting with their iOS app, that consumers are ready for mobile payments — as of April 2012, Starbucks apps have done over 42M mobile payment transactions (see announcement on VentureBeat).

Awesome…

Convenience is always a big winner. In the case of Starbucks it is about payments, rewards and store information right on the palm of your hands.

There is another important aspect here. It also shows that stores must have the whole infrastructure in place to be successful:

  1. The POS that are enabled with the appropriate readers and software,
  2. The devices/smartphones with the SW and functions (the apps), and,
  3. The scalable service infrastructure with the appropriate back-end integrations, and the right kind of services-and content — in the case of Starbucks, authentication, payments, rewards, store information and related-integrations.

It is then that users will adopt this in masses; and, yes, it is about convenience.


(Card management tab with Pay Now, and embedded PayPal Integration for Card Reload)

Digital cards are at the center of the app. The app, which is global-ready, allows smartphone-users to load the digital cards (dollars, pounds, etc, depending on country) via credit cards and/or PayPal — all within the app, thus maximizing the user experience. The digital cards are then scanned at the stores. For this, the app uses 2D-barcodes that are scanned/read by the POS using regular barcode scanners, consummating the transaction.

Looking forward, this app is a good candidate for NFC and/or other proximity-based technologies. If the NFC infrastructure was in place, that is, the readers and the NFC-capable smartphones, I will bet that it would also be a winner. But full, pervasive NFC deployments are still are a few years away, delaying its adoption. As a result, today, 2D-barcodes is the way to go.


(This is not real, just a concept scenario that I put together for the Starbucks app with NFC support)

As mobile app designers, the important thing is to design your application in a way that 2D-barcodes or NFC or other are just interaction channels — the key is keeping the rest of the app- and related supporting infrastructure (servers, authentication, exposed services, payment infrastructure and so on) properly abstracted. As a side note, this is a reason why Square is ready for the future — it has all the infrastructure in place, and today their reader is the Square-reader, and tomorrow it can be something else. Starbucks is ready too.

ceo