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Palash Bharadwaj CORE WAREZ

HERE'S TO NEXT GEN


APP TECHNOLOGIES

M
obile technology is as a growing mobile workforce and its
the "in" thing with need for productivity even when not
Business Environment and
new trends and “connected” and an explosive growth of Customer Challenges
demands for the new devices such as Smart Phones, per-
consumer market. sonal digital assistants (PDA’s), porta- Evolving business and consumer needs
Mobile-based tech- ble music players, and gaming consoles, are placing new demands on the next
nology is one of the fastest growing creating exciting possibilities for new generation of applications. In the busi-
technologies, which is in demand by the applications. These new applications ness sphere, more and more employees
people. This powers a mobile web appli- place new demands on the data platform or information workers are mobile and
cation technology including portals that on which they are developed. are seeing the need to run their tradi-
lets small and mid-sized businesses and
tional desktop applications on mobile
consumers make use of mobile technol- To meet the needs of this changing ap-
devices like PDA’s and Tablet PC’s. For
ogy to the fullest. plication landscape, service companies
provides services to all it’s newest tech- example, sales personnel require Cus-
This is driven by market changes such nology of the available product line for tomer Relationship Management (CRM)
all mobile web ap- applications on their mobile devices;
plication develop- field service employees need to check
ment, because the product specifications and perform on-
need of the time line ordering from mobile devices, and
is a maintenance- so on. In addition, these mobile infor-
free, compact, em- mation workers cannot rely on being
bedded database connected to the corporate network at
for single-user cli-
all times, but need to have the same rich
ent applications
and complete application experience
for all Platforms,
including Tablet in the “disconnected” or “occasionally
PC’s, Pocket PC’s, connected” state, as they would have
Smart Phones and in the “connected” state. A classic ex-
Desktops. The ap- ample of this is the offline e-mail expe-
plications should rience, where users can work on their
be on the Go. locally stored e-mails in a disconnected
state and synchronize with the server
The current busi- when connectivity is available. Infor-
ness and the con- mation workers also expect a seamless
sumer environ- integrated experience between multiple
ment are the key devices. For example, one may start
factors that influ-
entering data into an expense report-
ence the need for
ing application on a PDA and continue
this new genera-
working on the same application from
tion of applica-
a desktop at a later point, starting from
tions. The dia-
where he or she left off on the PDA.
grams on the side
can show the op-
portunity of the Another growing trend in businesses
market and trend. today is to gain competitive advantage
by gaining insights from a plethora of

VOL-2 l No-10 l October 2009 36


CORE WAREZ

data that is collected every day. This offer services to consumers to securely l Embedded application - which pro-
data is being gathered at the “edges” of store their year-end data online for any vides better application security,
the enterprise. For example, inventory future need. Similarly, vendors can of- performance and ease of distribu-
information gathered through scanning fer enhanced end-user experiences with tion and deployment.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) their client applications using this ser-
tags at a warehouse. This needs to be ag- vice model, like, say, Online streaming. l Lightweight and compact - pre-
gregated with data from other edge loca- serves system resources, especially
tions at a central site for analysis. Simi- Audio/video service and social net- in devices where processor and
larly, the mobile workforce that works working communities that automati- memory is premium.
at the edges of the enterprise needs rel- cally downloads images of the album or
evant and current business information video cover can enhance the end-user l Componentizable - allows applica-
from the central data repository. experience. Staying in touch with the tion vendors to choose essential
customer through an Internet service
functionality only, this keeps appli-
Meanwhile, Information Technology can also help vendor’s track user pref-
cation size to a minimum.
(IT) departments that develop and de- erences and better target their software
ploy these Line-Of-Business (LOB) ap- offerings.
l Supportability - on multiple devices
plications in their businesses continue so the same application code can be
to grapple with the challenge of provid- Rich consumer applications also con-
tinue to grow rapidly in mobile phones used to build applications on mul-
ing robust IT services that are secure
and in the convergent devices arena. tiple devices and platforms.
and reliable in spite of constantly fall-
ing budgets. Applications such as calendaring that
were in the business realm are now also l Capable of providing automatic
increasingly being required in personal synchronization - allows end-users
For consumers, rich personal applica-
tions continue to proliferate and evolve devices. to work with most recent data in an
on desktops and home devices, such as offline application experience and
gaming consoles and Digital Video Re- As application paradigms change, ap- to push updates to a central loca-
corders (DVR’s). These applications are plication developers have new require- tion.
becoming more and more connected as ments for the platform on which these
vendors sell additional personalized ser- applications are built. In particular, l Built with advanced security - to
vices through the Internet. For example, there is a growing need for local-store protect against threats such as sto-
a vendor that sells a tax application can application and databases that are: len mobile devices.

Recall of Mobile Advertising by Age (USA) US Mobile Content Users and Penetration, by Category
Q2 2008 (thousands and % of total mobile subscribers)
Users % of Total
SMS 137.759 53%
MMS 67.783 26%
Preinstalled games 54.756 21%
Ringtone downloads 48.768 19%
Mobile internet 43.339 17%
Mobile e-mail 38.951 15%
Text alerts 33.082 13%
Picture downloads 32.077 12%
Mobile internet messaging 31.938 12%
Wallpaper/ screen saver downloads 28.930 11%
Software/ application downloads 28.219 11%
Game downloads 24.128 9%
Uploads 21.339 8%
Our Survey said - Video Messaging 18.064 7%
Market segments that consumers are most interested in receiving messages
Location-based services/ GPS 17.173 7%
from on their mobile phone include:
Full-track music downloads 14.202 5%
Food and beverage - 51% Mobile TV & Video 11.468 4%
Entertainment/media - 40% Streaming online music/radio 11.064 4%
Online games 10.454 4%
Retail - 24%
Vo/P 4.053 2%
Apparel - 23%
Mobile carriers - 21% Source: Melson mobile, "Mobile insights", as cited in press elease, September 8, 2008

37 VOL-2 l No-10 l October 2009

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