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Parrot AR.Drone: Crying out for your mobile development attention!

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Whenever I’m briefing device manufacturers — you know, standing in front of 30 product managers and jumping up in down in front of a PowerPoint — I always make the point that they need to make their devices cool. If you’re Apple, this happens automatically — but if you’re anyone else, you have to work at it. Because people create really cool things for the iPhone. Here’s an example:

The Parrot AR.Drone, the darling of this year’s CES, is a super, super example of a device that will have millions of people thinking, ‘shit, I really need to get an iPhone‘.

Got an iPhone? (Or an iPod Touch?)

Good! Yes, you too can control a mini quadricopter device from your iPhone.

I kid ye not.

Have a look at this:

That there is a helicopter-style flying Drone, complete with on-board camera and super-genius computer to make the thing hover, take off, land and otherwise make every male within 20ft WANT one. Immediately.

Here’s how it works: The Drone creates a WiFi network that you connect your iPhone to. Doing so gives you control over the Drone’s movements. It’ll take off and hover at 1 metre height whilst it waits for your instructions. If someone bumps into it or pushes it away, it’s on-board gadgetry will stabilise it and keep it hovering whilst you feel like a Prince Among Men as you get your flying googles on.

To fly the device you simply move your phone about. The Drone’s app (that you’re running on the iPhone) interprets your movements and translates them into flying instructions. On the app, you get a real-time video feed from the on-board camera that you can use to guide the device when you can’t see it. So you could theoretically use this at the office to really wind up your colleagues in the next room without leaving your desk. Genius!

You get 15 minutes flying time from one charge.

And now let’s talk about augmented reality.

Yes, I shit ye not. Because you’re being fed back a live video image of what the Drone is seeing, the iPhone app can overlay that with all manner of different games. For example, the supplied app will allow you to fight and blow up other virtual Drones.

Or if you’d like to get sexy, you can actually do a multiplayer mode — you can recreate an aerial fight between two Drones, by using your virtual canon and missiles to (virtually) shoot down your friend’s Drone. Love it. Those are just some sample applications. You can sign-up and develop some iPhone/iPod Touch applications to interface with the Drone. I can’t begin to imagine the possibilities!

So if you’re an iPhone developer, you should immediately go and get a Drone prototype (there are going to be a limited number available from Feb 15th) and start developing super-shit-hot augmented reality apps.

Fantastic. I will be buying one of these. Will you?

Here’s a video of the Drone in action…

And the Parrot/Drone site? It’s here.

Posted in Apple, Devices, Mobile Development | Comments

Help: Mobile app developers needed for project

Monday, November 30th, 2009

I got this marketplace enquiry in today from a regular reader who’s hunting for assistance in the mobile applications space. Can you help? If so drop me an email and I’ll introduce you:

Ewan,

I have a client looking to build out mobile applications that would work on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WinMo, and poss Symbian when possible.

Do you have a developer/development company you like that can work well within a budget? I am to get a proposal to someone today with prices and the company I was working with here in the US can’t seem to get it together…

If you know someone — or if this is you, I’m on ewan@mobileindustryreview.com. Drop me a quick overview and I’ll forward your mail directly to the chap.

Posted in Mobile Development | Comments

Help: Mobile Developer Sentiment Survey

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Are you a mobile developer? I’d like you to take 120 seconds to click a few options on this Mobile Industry Review survey aimed at documenting the current state of the mobile development marketplace.

I’ll publish the results shortly!

Ewan

Posted in Mobile Development | Comments

Vodafone’s hiring an Apps Business Developer: Oh dear

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I’ve got a ton of keywords that Google hunts for me — and this morning, this page showed up.

It might be useful for some Mobile Industry Review readers looking for a new role. I thought it was rather insightful too.

Have a read:

One of the world’s leading telecommunications companies are currently looking for an Apps Business Developer

This project is aimed at the development and initial implementation of an outreach programme engaging with well known brands and persuading them to invest time and other resources to develop our apps. Also we will be mobilising the small developer’s cottage industry to contribute to the growing apps pipeline.

The successful candidate will be delivering a strategy for the generation of new apps business which aligns with the wider Global approach, and takes in all potential apps developers from the big high street brands to individual programmers working in their bedrooms.

Knowledge:
Deep knowledge of Internet, telecommunications and Hi-tech industries, with established relationships across these sectors.
Exposure to the software development benefits/barriers of mobile widgets & applications, across handset technologies and international markets
Awareness of roles of relevant industry bodies and standardisation initiatives
Strong grasp of developer management tools and widget SDKs Skills
Strong stakeholder management ability

It’s a 6-month contract with one of the ‘world’s leading telecommunications companies’ based in Newbury. It can only be Vodafone.

What I found interesting in the text was this paragraph:

This project is aimed at the development and initial implementation of an outreach programme engaging with well known brands and persuading them to invest time and other resources to develop our apps

Doesn’t this highlight everything that’s wrong in the mobile operator approach?

If there’s a market, companies will gravitate to it, provided you make the tools easily available. Apple has demonstrated this. Apple don’t have to walk about persuading companies to invest time and ‘other resources’ to make applications.

It’s patently obvious to companies whether they should or should not do it. All you should need to do is facilitate.

I wonder if this points to a future catastrophic failure at Vodafone, in the context of applications and application development.

If you have to PERSUADE companies, I think you’ve got a problem. A big problem.

And if you’re describing the applications that companies develop as ‘our apps’ — i.e. ‘Vodafone’s apps’… no, that’s entirely the wrong attitude.

It’ll be interesting to see the results in 6 months.

The Job Serve role is here.

Posted in Applications, Mobile Development, Vodafone | Comments

Are you a Vodafone App Star? A million EURO says yes, you are

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

It’s all getting exciting over at Vodafone.

If you’re a mobile developer, definitely take a look. There’s a million EURO worth of prizes to get stuck into for the best widgets.

You can find everything you need to know here: http://widget.developer.vodafone.com/, including a really, really straight-forward how-to-make-a-widget guide.

I’ll get a load of caffeine and try making a MIR widget later on.

Posted in Mobile Developer TV, Mobile Development, Vodafone | Comments

James Parton of o2 Litmus responds to App Showdown developer concerns

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

This morning I published a note from mobile developer, Simon Maddox. Simon was concerned about certain terms of the o2 Litmus App Showdown.

Proving that o2 Litmus is a very responsive organisation, their top chap, James Parton, sent this answer to publish.

Over to James:

- – - – -

This week, we launched the O2 Litmus App Showdown, with a prize of £10,000. Whilst we’ve had a very positive response from the community, we’ve also received some constructive feedback on how to make the competition better.

The App Showdown is a test case and if it goes well then we will be doing more of them in the future, which can only be good news for the developer community. We admit that we don’t have all the answers, and that we were bound to make mistakes first time around. That’s why we are keen to listen to the developer community to ensure that competitions such as the App Showdown are valuable to them.

In terms of the specific observations from Simon on the competition;

There was an error in the copy about the need to submit an iTunes url to enter the competition, we fixed this yesterday, fingers crossed! Re the available test slots for developers to use themselves – we were keen to ensure we could involve as many O2 customers in the judging process as possible, any guidance on the optimum number of slots reserved for the developer would be welcome. We did speak to a number of developers in preparing the competition, but I guess everyone has a different opinion at the end of the day!

As for the third problem – bias towards O2 apps – there’s no surprise there: we are after all the exclusive supplier of iPhone in the UK and the aims of the App Showdown fits in with trying to provide the best service possible to our customers. As Simon points out in the closing sentence, the key to making this successful is involving the community, e.g. real O2 customers.

As Simon’s final comments describe, there are other ways that the competition might have run. We’ve started up a forum thread on the O2 Litmus site so that these ideas and any others that people have can be discussed. We’ll then take the best ideas and roll them out, much like Litmus does with mobile apps themselves.

If you want to hear more, see the relevant forum on O2 Litmus or get in touch with me via Twitter – @jamesparton.

- – - – -

Thank you for taking the time to respond James.

Posted in Applications, Mobile Development, o2 | Comments

o2 Litmus App Showdown competition: A developer’s concerns

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

I published a post on Monday about the o2 Litmus App Showdown competition offering £10k for iPhone developers interested in participating. It seemed like a pretty good idea to me and I reckoned quite a lot of developers would be tempted.

I then heard from regular reader, Simon Maddox. By day, Simon is a developer at GoSpoken.com. By night he’s a freelance mobile developer, writing apps for as many platforms as he can get his hands on. He’s also developer of the popular 0870 app for Android and iPhone, which has currently saved UK consumer, by my reckoning, at least £100,000. His views below are entirely his own.

Here’s what Simon has to say:

- – - – -

The App Showdown from o2 Litmus is, on the surface, a pretty cool idea. Submit an iPhone app that their customers like, and you could win ten grand.

But, as a developer, it looks to me as if it’s been thought out by a bunch of Marketing guys who thought “Yeah, this’ll work“, without actually running it by someone that actually knows about iPhone development first.

For example, the submission guidelines state that you should submit the app to Apple for Beta testing (their T&C’s clarify this as being able to create an Ad-Hoc Provisioning Profile), and then provide them with the iTunes URL to the app.

Had they actually tried it, or if they’d even spoken to a developer, they’d know that’s just not how the Ad Hoc distribution works. To create an Ad Hoc provisioning profile you register the devices and then tell it which App ID you want to use (Apple recommend you use com.yourdomain.* so that it will work for all of your apps).

You don’t submit the app, or even tell Apple that you’re doing it. Therefore you don’t get an iTunes URL. That’s how lots of developers, myself included, distribute apps that have been rejected from the App Store.

So that’s problem one – you can’t actually submit anything using their rules.

Problem two – anyone who has actually done any iPhone development probably won’t be able to enter anyway. In their submission guidelines, O2 say that you must have 95 ad hoc spaces remaining, all of which you’ll have to assign to the o2 judges (Apple give you 100, and you can’t delete devices from the list afterwards), but it’s ok – they’ll generously leave you five. If you’ve done any distribution this way in the past, you can forget entering the App Showdown since you probably won’t have 95 left!

Problem three – bias towards o2 apps. On the website, they give a short list of what their “customers” would like to see. I’m almost willing to bet that, regardless of what you enter, the poorly developed app that just about interfaces with the o2 Joggler will somehow end up winning.

o2 might be better off getting their own developer account, register all of the “judges” devices in that (since they’ll now have 100 spaces free) and create provisioning profiles for each developer to build into their apps. That’ll solve problem two. Problem one could be solved by asking people to blog about the app they’ve created and providing the URL to that, instead of an iTunes URL. Free publicity for them too!

That said, despite the competition’s flaws, it’s a really great thing, and one that I hope will encourage developers to create apps that customers want, instead of YAFA (Yet Another Fart App).

- – - – -

Thank you for that Simon. I’ve met the o2 Litmus chaps and I’m sure they didn’t necessarily expect this response from you — further, I trust they’ll have some perspective for you shortly.

You can find Simon on Twitter at @simonmaddox, and can (rarely — come on, more, Simon?) be found blogging at simonmaddox.com.

Update: Mobile developer Kieran also raised the same issue on his blog.

Update 2: James Parton of o2 Litmus responded swiftly here.

Posted in Apple, Applications, Mobile Development | Comments

Jason from Nokia has $250,000 for you, developers

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I had a note in from Jason Black of Forum Nokia this morning. He’s got $250k to give away — as well as a heck of a lot of useful opportunities for anyone in the mobile development space — for their upcoming innovation competition.

Don’t discount this as a ‘whatever’.

These kind of events and opportunities really can take you from relative obscurity to sitting in front of one of Nokia’s Board Members at one of the events. And with that in mind, it’s not all about winning. Even though the grand prize winner will walk away with a useful $30k. It’s about getting in the door. It’s about turning up, being seen and shaking as many hands as possible and seeing where that takes you.

As the phrase goes, ’sitting at home in the dark ain’t a brilliant business development technique’…

There’s a ton of people reading this right now who’ve come up with a good idea. And about 99% of them are, sadly, going to think I’m talking bollocks when I say, it really is worth trying these sort of things out.

Let’s talk turkey.

* Grand Prize winner: $30,000 USD in cash; “Spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 4 weeks on the top page of Nokia’s newly announced Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices; and paid travel to demo the winning application at a Nokia-specified event in the Fall 2009.

* 2nd Place: $15,000 USD in cash; “Spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 3 weeks on a relevant category page in Nokia’s newly announced Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices.

* 3rd Place: $10,000 USD in cash; “Spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 2 weeks on a relevant category page in Nokia’s newly announced Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices.

So that’s what the winners can get, right?

Now, let’s look at the categories they’re looking for:

Internet Innovation – Individuals can submit either web applications known as Web Runtime widgets, or websites which are optimised for mobile browsing with Nokia devices.

Flash – Send us your best applications that expand the capabilities of Flash Lite on Nokia devices.

Emerging Markets and Mobile Necessities – Submit your most innovative application using Nokia platforms, ranging from SMS through Series 40 and S60 device platforms. All applications will be evaluated, including those developed using Java, Python, or open source.

Apps on Maps – This category seeks new ideas (Yes, just the ideas – completed Apps are not necessary at this stage) that harness the power of location-aware services using Ovi Maps on Nokia devices.

You can find a lot more details at the dedicated microsite Calling All Innovators.

You’ve got until the end of the month to submit.

And if you’re thinking of doing so and you’d like a bit of support, I’ll make this undertaking to anyone who participates — send me a 5 paragraph overview with screenshots (if appropriate) and any relevant web links and I’ll publish it as a post here for the few hundred thousand readers to peruse.

(I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.)

Posted in Mobile Development | Comments