Apps for Good
It was nice to go to Apps for good as it harked back to my roots in the education sector.
This is taken straight from the website:
“Once a quarter, the best teams of students who have completed the Apps for Good course will have the ability to pitch their work, ideas and prototypes to a panel of ”dragons” at our Dragons’ Den events.
The dragons assess their ideas for market focus, originality, mobile features, viral marketing effects amongst other criteria and vote if the apps should get funding for development to become fully-functioning apps that can be downloaded on Android Market.”
Although I missed the first 30 minutes of it due to train delays and the venue not having a sign, I arrived halfway through an Gaming review App. I was interested to see how hard the Dragons would push the developers (who are all high school age), would it live up to the BBC2 concept.
In friendly manner, they pulled no punches asking how they were going to differenciate themselves in a crowded market, what was their USP, how would they fill their review database with content when launching?
All very important questions.
The next App was very interesting, the concept was simple to help young people budget their monthly income. A reasonably slick presentation was prefaced by a entertaining video detailing the perils of spending pay day money on shiny hardware (obviously they knew their target audience!). The App itself took the look and feel of farmville and applied it to financing, although they were keen to stress that other UI’s could be applied if you weren’t a fan of agriculture.
This was my App of the night, simply because its such an important life skill that isn’t being taught in a way that engages its audience. It was also my pick simply beccause they had done their research, courted a range of companies to gain support and had enough facts to back up what they said (clearly they had read my previous blog post on pitching apps!)
The final App was to do with the ever present problem of cyberbulling, providing advice and guidance on what to do, although I dont think it went far enough (one suggestion that came to mind is a simple report abusive sms/call button that can be added to the Android call U).
Sadly I didnt have time for networking after the event, as I had a early am meeting, but I think I will go to the next one (and arrive on time ;))
Hook, line and sinker: My thoughts on pitching an App
I was recently a judge at the ‘Muther of All Hackathons’, a 36 hour developer event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. The concept was simple, you get 24 hours to develop an app using a variety of API’s and services and then you pitch your App to your peers and judges to get awesome prizes.
Developers had 3 minutes to sell their App and the previous 12 hours will have been for nothing if they could not get their point across. A good app can be destroyed by a poor or confusing pitch, we the judges had 3 minutes to assess the App, its purpose, innovation, marketability and overall quality. Sadly some of the teams had not heeded the advice in the previous days panel.
Pitching is not easy, especially to a room of 300 or more people, here’s some advice for the future:
- If you want to succeed, you need to set aside some time to practice your pitch in front of your team as it will help you separate the important facts from the waffle.
- If your App crashed, don’t panic about it and keep talking! Bugs happen at the worst times
- Practice your pitch some more
- In the first minute you will have the most attention, cover the important stuff first: App name, purpose.
- Under five minutes to pitch? Don’t read out your CV or give a history lesson.
- Never say “This is the most/best/revolutionary X”, if it is trust in your audience to realise it
- Although bugs happen, test every thing you will be demonstrating, then get someone 100% new to your product to test it
- You don’t have to demonstrate all features, just the ones that best showcase your App
- If you have time, offer a summary of the product, you may have have sped through your demo due to nerves, recap and help the people listening to you
- Breathe, the worst that can happen is that they say no, remember they are people just like you!
- Prepare to back up any claims stated in your pitch, judges/panels etc will more than likely test them!
- Lastly, try to enjoy yourself, thinking “I hate presenting” is a self fulfilling prophesy
There are many more tips but those are the essential I think, got something to add to the list? Get in contact!
I’m leeeeeeeeeeeeeeavvvvvvvvvingggggggggg on a Jet Plane
Tomorrow am I’m off to California for a week to meet new developers and seek out new companies
To boldly go where quite a lot of people but not me have gone before.
WiFi permitting I’ll try and post some video updates of my escapades
AfterMath: Berlin
So did I get pelted with rotten fruit?
No.
In fact I think my message about thinking beyond the initial point of purchase went down well.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15375407 (I’m about 35 mins in)
I’d love to hear what you think about it
Welcome to Berlin
I’m live in Berlin over the next few days as I’m presenting at NN4D, the navteq developer day. The day started with no sleep and a 4am start, never a good combination.
But an empty plane and not flying Ryan Air or Easyjet made life a lot better. Food including and no advertising.
Bliss.
Anyhow im in the Park Inn Alexander Platz, its a chain I used frequently in Belfast and ticks the does the job category. I’m due to talk about BlueVia and its the first test of my Beyond 0.x series, it will be interesting to see how people respond.
Hopefully they wont throw their freebies at me.
iMessage: A Clarion call for Operators
So WWDC (Apples developer conference) has come and gone and it did not disappoint.
We get iOS that fixes a whole bunch of issues like finally getting rid of Apples hugely annoying modal notification system but that’s not what i’m talking about tonight.
No, whilst that feature is long overdue, the one that really grabbed my attention was iMessage.
iMessage, shit just got real
Now the concept of iMessage is simple, it enables all devices capable of running iOS5 can send SMS style messages.
So a iPod Touch 3G, 4G, iPad WiFi, iPad 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 can now communicate to each other with an SMS message, except that they aren’t SMS messages as they run over data.
And that after I processed that announcement, I had two thoughts:
- As a consumer, its a great idea
- Operators are going to lose a lot of SMS revenue
One small step for a man…..
It would appear that I left this earthly realm after posting my Pre 2 review, while rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated…. I have been monumentally busy.
I left the education sector last month to join BlueVia, Telefonica’s new developer platform and I thought I would take five minutes to discuss the reasons why. To say I was spinning my wheels in my previous job would be an understatement, the company under delivered for both clients and myself personally and I am very glad to no longer be associated with them. I had signed up to drive the use of technology within education (and I still believe that it can be the difference maker to students lives), what I got was a well paying helpdesk job for an under utilised product.
My personal idea of hell.
So I poured my energy into Twitter, read a lot of websites, followed interesting people and Tweeted like a madman. 2010 turns into 2011 and I had decided that my musing about changing jobs had to become reality as that job was killing me. However I knew that if I wanted to get into mobile as a profession I would always be at a disadvantage, my then CV experience for mobile was slim at best. I also knew that if I could get talking face to face with anyone that my lack of on paper experience wouldn’t mean anything. Because I love to talk about technology and I know its a marketable skill.
The trouble was getting to that interview……
So There I was, ready to pull the cord and leave education but with nothing a fist full of nothing and a pocket full of dreams.
I noticed that BlueVia was looking for new people, I had followed James for a while but I knew the traditional approach would not work. So I took a chance and DM’d him on twitter and asked straight up who was good to talk to about what I thought I would be good at, namely product evangilsation.
Thankfully he didn’t tell me to piss off, but invited me down for a chat about life, the universe and mobile technology.
The rest they say was history, save a second interview with Jose Valles where, when asked to sell BlueVia to an imaginary company, came up with the most random whatthehellwasithinking idea of,
“People surf the internet a lot at work which you can monitor on workstations, but what about when they use their company phone away from their desk? Using our user context API you can find out if they are a high use user and separate whos working and who is having fun on the internet on company time”
I know, there isn’t a big enough facepalm.
However I must have done something right as he gave me the nod and a couple of months later I was joining the team as Marketing Manager.
I can safely say that I’ve learnt, seen and done more in the last month than in the last year.
I believe that BlueVia is the only way that operators can stay relevant in the next 5 years; Orange, Vodafone, 3UK need to follow our example of opening up API’s and providing the incentives for developers to use it, without interfering.
I’ve never been in mobile or in marketing, so I will make mistakes, but you can be damn sure that I’ll be enjoying myself all the same.
Preamble: INNTW reviews the Pre 2
I had an rough relationship with the Palm Pre last year, I loved the platform but in the end swapped it for an iPhone 4. The reasons were simple, poor quality hardware and sub par performance.
Pre 2
As highlighted in my earlier posts, I dont tend to use many apps, sure on my iPhone I have plenty installed but my core are twitter, facebook and safari. Secondary Apps are lightbike and kindle. Shocking I know, but those are my main uses of both my iPhone and my iPad.
Kindle is coming to webos but sadly I think light bike is but a dream…
Still I had the Pre – for around two weeks and it went from being a techno joy to being just plain annoying, I suspect that the fact that although my app need were satisfied, ‘this was as good as it gets’ put a dampner on things. Combine this with the dissapointing build quality and sluggish performance (I did overclock it but I feel it should be optional rather than mandatory) meant that the Pre and I were doomed.
So why am I posting about the Pre 2? Well as said I’m a big fan of the WebOS platform and when Palm announced it was setting up a developer device program, I signed up immediately. A couple of months later (due to the overwhelming popularity of the program) and I recieved my Pre 2.
So what’s it like? Pretty impressive.
It corrects many of the Pre’s deficiencies, the touchstone coating over the entire surface of the Pre makes it much nicer to hold, I suspect it will pick up less scratches that the hard plastic of the Pre -. Further enhancing the Pre 2 is the redesign of the front of the phone. These consist of two changes, first (and arguably most importantly) a change to a Gorilla Glass screen. The plastic screen of the Pre – was a real let down for me, it just made it feel cheap and it scratched incredibly easily. The other major change is recessing the ear piece, it’s a simple change but it creates a very iPhone like appearence and brings the Pre 2 closer to a premium device.
The keyboard is much improved, I had found myself getting more and more frustrated with the onscreen keyboard of the iPhone 4, so the transition was welcome. The key action is more satisfying and I find myself making far less mistakes, the cheese grater edge is still present. However, the slider seems to be the same sadly and there is ‘Oreo shimmy’ present, which jars slightly with the rest of the improvements, I don’t have great confidence that the Pre 2 will handle a short fall any better than the original.
Performance is a strange combination of improved and sluggish, launching apps is much improved and TMC has not reared it head just yet. The touchscreen seems to be far less accurate than that of the iPhone 4, I’m not sure of the reason but I find that in some instances, multiple presses are required to make the phone recognise the button press. There are also noticeable pauses when using the gesture area, especially if you switch on ‘advance gestures’.
Now lets get on to the important bit, software.
The changes in WebOS are stunning, I love just type.
Just Type
It enables me to quickly and easily find/search both locally and on the internet. For example If I wanted to find out where Pecroino Sardo came for, I simply swipe up and start typing and I can choose to search for it using twitter, wikipedia and the internet. I can also instantly see how many emails and messages contain that term. You can also add custom search engines (e.g. WordPress), if a website supports just type a notification will pop up at the bottom of the screen and you can install it.
Stacks
Stacks, are a simple but very well thought out idea. As we know WebOS is a true multitasking OS but having multiple cards open can make linked information hard to track. Stacks solve this by stacking (shocking I know!) related items on top of each other. So if I have an email with a hyperlink in it, if I choose to open that link it will stay with that email rather than go to the end of the card list. Both are brilliant ideas and available no where else, these are the features that HP need to be screaming from billboards, but that’s a different subject for another time.
Overall the Pre 2 is an improvement, its not perfect but I am making it my main phone, which is as close to a ringing endorsement as you can get.
HP TouchPad in Education, an opportunity?
State of the Union:
HP TouchPad
- #1: The iPad is the only tablet around in the mind of the consumer, that 90% market share that Apple cited during the iPad 2 launch is no joke.
- #2: The iPad is not perfect
The iPad has driven tablet prices to a hitherto impossible level (see the multitude websites stating the iPad 1 would launch for £999 or similar) and most if not all tablet manufacturers are a year later still scrabbling to catch up. I don’t think that Apple will cede the number one position anytime soon, the total ecosystem it offers is difficult for individual suppliers to combat.
As we all know the UK Education market has been ravaged by cuts and tightening of ICT budgets, institutions nationwide (and globally for that matter) are having to do more with less. At the same time mobile devices are becoming more prevalent both in and outside of education. The iPad has achieved two things, first its created the mindshare for what tablets can do and secondly its raised the bar for what is acceptable for a tablet.
This is a doubled edged sword as its created demand for the device but at a time where investing £399 in a mobile device is difficult to justify.
This become all the more difficult when you try to integrate the iPad into your existing education environment:
- iPads offer no access to the file system so do not work with VLE’s (i.e. you can’t upload into areas)
- Schools can’t use systems like drop box due to third party data protection issues
- You cannot bulk specify a proxy, even with the iPhone configuration meaning that a tech will have to manually enter it on each iOS device (fine for one class, not for an entire school)
- A iPad can only sync with a total of five machines, yet does not offer any out of the box cloud/wireless ways of transmitting content
- iPads are poor content distributors i.e. give a student a task that requires them to create and then share content with the teacher and it will in most cases require 3rd party work arounds
In short the iPad creates fundamental barriers to integrating it into education and Apple is unwilling to help ‘We’re not looking to go in that direction’ is a response I’ve received from an Apple engineer when discussing the above issues. In spite of this, they are the number one requested item by teachers and because of this I think that HP has a distinct opportunity to flourish in the education sector as the only credible alternative to the iPad.
Lets not forget the elephant in the room, Android.
Android tablets fall into two catagories, cheap and nasty or prohibitively expensive. Add to this the lack of a consistant UI (although this may change with Honeycomb) and a lack of tablet formatted apps stacks the deck against wide scale adoption of the platform.
Try to convince a user:
- ‘So it’s cheaper than the iPad?’ No
- ‘Ah so that means it must be lighter!’ No
- ‘But it must have hundreds of tablet Apps!’ No
What is the incentive for the user to invest?
This is the issue that manufacturers of Non – iPads face, everything you do, all of your services are going to be compared to the iPad, whenever I talk about the Xoom, TouchPad to people the word tablet fails to have any resonance ‘Oh you mean an iPad…’. Manufacturers need to understand is that the product they are going to buy is an iPad, unless you give them a damn good reason not to. This is clearly demonstrated by the lack of interest in the Motorola Xoom despite having impressive specifications 1280 * 800 resolution screen, 1GB ram, dual core processor etc it means nothing to most users.
TLDR? In short being better wont win the war.
So is HP doomed? I’m not sure.
At WebOS Connect I saw a presentation by Ben Tattersley on his experience as a both Student learning WebOS and as Teacher showing others how to develop WebOS Apps. Ben went on to discuss the success of teaching students WebOS because of the low cost of investing in the platform due to its HTML/Javascript nature. That means a student does not need to buy a new Mac or PC , they can develop everything they need at home and in School.
And it hit me, there’s the hook, the USP for use of the TouchPad within education, it goes a little something like this:
- Offer a slight discount on the hardware, it doesn’t have to be massive but enough for the cheapest model to undercut the 16gb iPad
- Offer a training program for Teachers to learn about WebOS and how develop Apps for themselves
- Offer on site support to those Teachers when they teach these classes
Think of the PR potiential of the above:
- The School gets devices at a discount
- Students get not only access to devices but learn marketable skills for the future
It means that HP doesn’t just sell devices, it offers the those that invest in the TouchPad opportunities to enhance their Students career potential.
Apple is doing everything it can to hold itself back in the market, HP has a real chance to capitalise on it but only if it offers something different.
The day after the night before
“In short HP needs to hit the ball out of the park tonight”
So ended my previous post on my expectations of yesterdays WebOS Connect, so did it? Yes and no.
Ignoring the venue (Bar Music Hall, Shoreditch – which was great), I want to focus on what I wanted form the event, namely details of how HP is going to support developers and get its products to market.
What information we actually got was scant, I’m glad HP has heard the complaints/issues of developers:
- Lack of a universal App Catalog,
- difficulty in registering as a developer,
- Difficulty in getting devices to test applications
- Lack of Communication
These are not new issues and have been prevelent since day one.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, I understand that but what I wanted to hear was not ‘we have heard you’, I wanted ‘We’ve heard you and here are the details of how were working through the problem‘. An example is developer days, there are going to be more. Great, but when will they happen? HP wants to help with marketing, fantastic but how will it happen? For every announcement a curious lack of detail is evident. It would appear that I am not alone in these thoughts, as (anecdotal as it may be) other developers I spoke to at the event walked away with the same impression.
More concerning, was the lack of information for launch partners for the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad. It’s Stating the obvious but, the main way that people buy phones is on contract, as we know HP does not have a device that people can walk into a phone store and purchase on contract today. Specifics in this case were not required, as I’m sure that negotiations are still on going but a presence from any of the major mobile carriers would have offered some comfort.
Developing is a business, regardless of the ease of development if there are no devices available today and no details on when new products will be available, developers simply wont commit the money to build WebOS Apps.
And that’s the maddening thing, WebOS is an amazing mobile OS, it offers a clear concise ‘Apple’ like UI experience, innovative features such as Stacks and Just Type and true multitasking.
I want WebOS to succeed, I think that devices such as the TouchPad can really work in the education sector (I’ll blog about that topic later), but as a business case its still needs to prove itself.
If not now, then when? 