Will WAC Unite Cellphones?

By Linda Broughton

The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) is an “open global alliance” that seeks to “unite a fragmented marketplace” through providing an open industry platform for developing applications for mobile devices. The platform would enable application developers to more easily write an application that could then be immediately distributed across a number of mobile devices, most obviously cellular phones.

In an analyst and journalist update, Tim Raby, WAC’s interim CEO, discusses how WAC will benefit the mobile device application ecosystem – made up of app developers, handset and hardware providers, users and operators. WAC aims to offer developers a common software development kit (SDK) for creating apps, along with network and device application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to “write and submit once, deploy and sell everywhere” rather than the more common “write once, debug everywhere”. Users of apps developed via the WAC platform will not only have more choices in apps, they’ll be able to access their favorite apps from different mobile devices. (At the moment users are normally limited to accessing apps according to their chosen mobile device’s current Operating System or OS – that is Google, Apple or Windows.) WAC claims that mobile device distributors using WAC-made apps will save money, benefitting from consistent operator requirements and specifications. Operators like Google, Apple and Windows will be able to offer more apps and still be able to customize apps for their customers.

Communication giants including AT&T, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Orange have already contributed their support and several resources to WAC. WAC plans to begin publishing documentation for developers and holding developer events in September and November 2010. WAC will be a non-profit, using all its revenues to cover its operational costs.

So why are some developers still skeptical?

Carl Corcoran, owner and operator of TridentLoop, LLC, a software consultation company operating in North America and the European Union, is skeptical of the initiative. He notes “Different technology platforms seem to do about the same thing, but crossing between them seems to be an enormous hurdle for developers. If you had to re-learn how to drive a car every time you switched makes, then the natural reaction is to wish for standardization.” However, Corcoran goes on to point out that while standardization of mobile device applications may increase the audience capable of accessing an app, standardization may also compromise the app’s sophistication. Standardization can limit the developer’s use of the unique features offered by the different platforms currently available. App developers select platforms in which to develop in order to create an app specifically geared towards users of that platform. Standardization would remove this customization.

Moreover, Corcoran notes that mobile devices are less powerful and less flexible than desktop computers, meaning that any extra platforms and services provided via a mobile device are thus more limited. Adding a layer of “translation” between a mobile device app and its hardware can reduce the app’s available functions.

Lastly, Corcoran calls into question the interest that mobile device developers have in standardization. Microsoft, Corcoran explains, is promoting their own platform (.NET) and would most likely prefer to highlight their platform’s special features rather than invest more in yet another standard.

At Chirp, Twitter’s Trends Emerge

By James Zipadelli

The best football players go to the Super Bowl. The best celebrities, journalists and politicians come to the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Up until this year, the best developers did not have a venue to come together. Chirp, Twitter’s first ever conference in San Francisco, was held last month.  Where else can you find Twitter’s founders, like-minded developers, and a contest that kept some of those developers up for 30 hours?

For a first-person account of Chirp, freelance developer Ed Borasky’s posts are very helpful. Representatives from Twitter did not respond to repeated emails or Tweets for comment.

In that two-day conference, Twitter discussed its financial future and new apps that would be helpful to users, according to developers present at the conference. One of the new apps is called @anywhere, which went live April 14. For an overview, click here.

“@anywhere is essentially a re-packaging of existing Twitter API services in a more turnkey solution that can be easily be embedded into existing websites without lots of custom coding,” says Eric Chang, founder of the app TweetSwell, which conducts surveys on Twitter.  “You can “embed” Twitter functionality into your web page using JavaScript, including:

• embedded tweet box - just copy-and-paste some JavaScript into your web page
• auto-linking of Twitter accounts - this is similar to how the iPhone auto-links phone numbers
• auto-hovercards - same idea, but instead of linking to Twitter, pop up the Twitter hovercard

Evan Bailyn, founder of firstpagesage.com, says Twitter has “done a nice job” with @anywhere but still prefers Facebook because of features such as the “Like” button.

“I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near what Facebook’s social graph is,” Bailyn says. “I think it’s going to be for people that Tweet the most. I don’t know that it’s going to bring tons of new people… most of the people that use @anywhere a lot will already tweet a lot and it will just make their tweeting easier.”

“The Like concept is very natural to online browsing and socializing. It’s a lot easier than typing something,” Bailyn adds. “Personalized stories are an idea that might have been good for Twitter to employ.  Points of Interest, a new Twitter function, makes it easier to associate your location with whatever you’re tweeting. You can tweet about a location you’re at, and find a restaurant.  This could provide a lot of personalized information about travel, nightlife, restaurants. @anywhere isn’t as exciting as Points of Interest.”

Peoplebrowsr CEO Jodee Rich says the key to Twitter’s success is that their stream is open and available to third parties developers. A cloud has already been developed that has enough space to support 20 terabytes of data, Rich says. For those that are interested, here is Rich’s slideshow on the metadata cloud.

“Developers have taken the stream and put it up in the cloud,” Rich says. “What we’re really doing is extending the half life of the tweet. You can look in the cloud and find data from six months ago or more. Twitter data is open, third parties developers can store it for a long time - it then becomes a cloud that extends metadata coming from third parties developers, adding to Twitter profiles information about gender, influence, fields of expertise and more. Both Private and public data can be added to Twitter profiles and posts.

“Now Facebook is allowing people to store the stream for an unlimited amount of time; another reaction to Twitter,” Rich says.

Some developers were worried about Twitter’s recent acquisition of Atebits to acquire the iPhone client Tweetie. Borasky says, “Twitter made a business decision. Using phrases like ’stabbed in the back’ or sexual references, despite the way one might feel about it, isn’t either appropriate or particularly relevant or useful.”

“I’m on the StatusNet developers’ list,” Borasky adds. “In some ways, it’s complementary to Twitter rather than direct competition. But I’m guessing that those who truly intend to

compete with Twitter via StatusNet are still working at it. I was never formally invited to join the ‘rebels’ and didn’t see much point in doing so anyhow.” Andrew Stone, who developed the iPhone app Twittelator, says the worry is “way overblown.”

“My twitter client, Twittelator, shows that 3rd party developers run circles around Twitter with new interesting features,” Stone says. “I got up at Chirp and said, “Thank you for buying Tweetie! I now have one less competitor. Don’t worry, just do some cool stuff and you can compete with Twitter and Tweetie.”

Borasky says the future for Twitter is very promising if they partner with other media organizations.

“They’ve got Oxygen, MSNBC, the NY Times and Huffington Post already,” Borasky says. “I’d expect to see some name movie studios join that list for the summer blockbuster season.”

“The Promoted Tweets and analytics capabilities are still evolving,” Borasky adds. The kinds of questions their developers were asking me indicate that they’re looking to hire experts in this area. That’s a fiercely competitive arena, and their only real advantage is their huge raw data collection and real-time acquisition. The analytics, visualization, and natural language processing technologies are well-developed elsewhere.”

Stone calls Twitter “a beautiful meeting of media and personality.”

“It’s not a walled garden, like Facebook,” Stone says. “The degrees of separation between people on Twitter are very small. You can get some serious resonance with an interesting tweet. It’s fun to come up with content that’s small, easy and tight. It’s just this totally new experience.”

“We’re writing cool code that’s changing the world,” Stone adds. “Chirp was fundamentally about the team building and for that, it was truly successful.”

Peoplebrowsr’s Rich, like other developers DigitalMediaBuzz.com interviewed for this story, says he enjoyed the “openness and authenticity” of the Chirp conference.

“We truly felt like we were part of the Twitter family,” Rich says. “I’ve never been to a conference where they exposed the non-executive board members as openly as they did. I’ve never seen a management team go up on stage and explain how they are running their business. It’s very exciting to be part of that.”

New Web site WhatApp? tests apps for safety and security

By Rebecca Henely

As the number of mobile-based and Internet browser-based applications increases, many app review web sites have sprung up, trying to separate the good apps from the bad.

However, while sites like AppVee and AndroidTapp look at the quality of an app or how fun it is to use, Ryan Calo, one of the two creators of WhatApp? said those review sites do not look at whether an App is secure or protects a user’s privacy.

“We wanted to have one place where experts, users, and developers could discuss these aspects of the online and mobile apps we increasingly rely upon,” Calo stated.

Calo and Lauren Gelman, both of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, began the beta for WhatApp? in mid-March. Since then, Calo stated 250 apps for a myriad of different platforms – from the smart phone iPhone and the social networking-site Twitter to the web browser Firefox and web application Google Docs – have been submitted to WhatApp? for review.

Of those, one-third have been reviewed. Calo stated reviews come from a panel of 26 registered and approved experts. These experts use a survey of questions to rate the apps on a sliding scale of how each app protects the privacy of its users, its security and the openness of its source.

“Some joined at my invitation; others signed up and were approved,” he stated. “They have different expertise – there are computer scientists, lawyers and other privacy and security specialists.”

In judging how each app protects its users’ privacy, the experts judge whether the app makes it clear to the user what information it will collect and how it will use that information, if the information it collects is necessary for the app to function or if it is in excess, and if the users can control the data they provide to the app after it has been submitted.

“The most common [privacy] issues are apps that gather more information than they need to perform the service they offer,” Calo stated.

He stated the most common security issues are app creators neglecting to encrypt user data and anticipate well-known security problems. Thus, the experts look for potential security vulnerabilities, whether or not the app encrypts or protects its user data and if the app could perform with fewer security risks to the user when judging the security of an app.

The experts also judge if the app’s source code is closed or open, if the data can be migrated away from the application and if the app uses open standards and data formats.

“Some believe that if you can see and experiment with the source code, it is easier to anticipate and therefore combat security vulnerabilities,” Calo stated. “Also, the idea is that open source projects catch errors (for instance, around memory) that can lead to security problems.”

Calo stated these rating standards were formulated from consultations with various experts and WhatApp? is still taking experts’ comments on their survey questions.

He stated his advice for developers entering the marketplace is to make security and user privacy a priority from the beginning. “This is ‘good for business,’ as our friends at the ACLU of Northern California have written, because if users discover that an app is insecure or that a developer is abusing their information, they will not use the product,” Calo stated.

API Tricks and Tips: APIs Deliver Profits

By John Greaves

Application Programming Interfaces(API) used to be a means to market products, they were often free and served to drive traffic to a site or increase buzz around a company’s offering.  Now we’ve begun to see increasing numbers of companies built around monetizing APIs  rather than relegating them to marketing tools status.

While OneRiot’s success with Riotwise is well documented and DMB recently unpacked the potential behind geodata APIs in a March 2010 article, there are other areas from telecom to financial data management where API companies are pushing the boundaries of how APIs can be profitable.

Twilio
Twilio CEO and co founder Jeff Lawson describes their service as “Amazon Web Services meets telecom.”  Simply put Lawson says Twilio lets developers build applications that can make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages.  Lawson says Twilio aimed to combine infrastructure web services with telecom in a new way.  “In the enterprise there have been application development platforms in the past. What we were trying to do is to change and bring the capabilities that enterprises have had for a while and really bring that to every developer.  And so making technology simpler was a major goal of ours but the good thing was that there was precedent people paying for not just telecom on a per use basis but also paying for infrastructure web services, so people were accustomed to if you want servers on demand paying Amazon for them.”  According to a Crunchbase company profile, “Before Twilio, you would have had to learn some foreign telecom programming languages, or set up an entire stack of PBX software … Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve problems quickly and reliably.”

Twilio“s list of customers includes web development shop 37signals which uses Twilio in their Campfire product and they also uses theme based contests to inspire aspiring developers.  “We have a developer contest every week and for over a year we’ve given away a Netbook every week to the developer who writes the best application with a certain theme.  We give developers a week, sometimes two to build something along the lines of the theme.  We’re getting developers involved in the brand and the company and also giving developers an extra incentive to build something that they’re thinking about building,” Lawson said.

Twistage
According to Twistage founder and CEO David Wadler, the company has “a rather extensive footprint in enterprise.”  Since 2007, they have gone from what blogger Liz Gannes referred to as “a stealthy newly funded video startup” to an industry leader that can boast partnerships with Jive Social Business Software.

The secret behind this rise is an easy to understand metering monetization model that allows their customers to purchase allocations in blocks of API components.  “It’s much easier for non technical people, and oftentimes those are the people who have control of the budget or have to make the case for the logistical spend.”  When overages occur, Wadler says Twistage works with the customer to address it.  “In general as a model we don’t like to penalize people for being successful so where possible we volume discount them,” Wadler said.

Twistage’s approach has led to a customer base which includes Mochila, PerezHilton.com, The New York Observer, Kidzbop, and Fast Company, is a technology partner with Jive, a Social Business Software leader and targets companies who already have an existing IT budget and infrastructure who need and want to use video for education and product marketing.

X Ignite
Pete Soderling, founder of Stratus Security Technologies an API monetization consultancy, calls XIgnite “one of the forerunners of this industry” for its use of APIs in financial information delivery and distribution.

X Ignite bills itself as the leading provider of financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications.  In fact, it claims XIgnite web services are used to power hundreds of mission-critical applications from proprietary systems handling hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate loans to applications trading gold, crude oil, or currencies around the clock and around the world.

“They have relationships with all of the major stock exchanges and they pull and suck in data from the exchanges, normalize it, sort of make it uniform and then basically act as a distribution channel and resell that data to other financial institutions, developers, investment banks, research firms what have you, so they’re like sort of a middle man in taking in that valuable data from the exchanges and then blasting it out,” Soderling said.

What Does It Mean?

As businesses try to ride out the economic storm, they are bailing unnecessary costs over the side and attempting to reef the sails with tech solutions that do the same things better, faster and cheaper.  API developers who can add value without overloading the bottom line may find that the recession cloud is lined with success.

Distimo Provides Insight & Analysis Across Top App Stores

By Ron Callari

Less than a week after Apple introduced its iPad, its app store was offering approximately 2,400 applications optimized for the tablet device and “games” represented 35 percent of all iPad titles. This analysis, coupled with comparison pricing, number of apps sold and the specific app store breakdowns by source is a small snapshot of the work that is done by Distimo, an innovative app store analytics company that addresses the widely fragmented app store marketplace.

Distimo, a privately held company based in the Netherlands provides in-depth reports and analytical monitoring for companies interested in how their apps are doing across the mobile application ecosystem. While the company competes with the traditional market analysis companies such as comScore, Forrester and Gartner, in stead of basing findings on panels and surveys, “Distimo Reports,” according to co-founder and VP of development Remco van del Elzen, “are more timely and accurate, covering the whole app store market based on factual information.”

Jan-Joost Rueb, CEO and co-founder of eBuddy, a Web based instant messaging service uses Distimo’s reports and monitoring analytics for his firm. Differing from some of the other research companies, he finds most useful, Distimo’s ability to not only track popularity of his app in other countries, but also to “compare the performance of competing applications with our own apps.”  The total cumulative download (to date) breakdown per source for eBuddy is shown here.

Interesting to note, eBuddy app is #2 most downloaded app on GetJar (behind Facebook).

Both Distimo Reports and Distimo Monitor are free to companies. The Monitor service offers mobile developers a free analytics tool to track their own and competitive applications across all app stores, without any adjustments needed to their application’s code. The company is monetized by selling their reports to device manufacturers, operators and large developers, with the future goal of “introducing premium features,” notes van del Elzen.

Companies can view daily downloads and revenue figures of all their applications and analyze their rankings, worldwide and compare these findings to how the competition is doing in terms of publicly available data, such as popularity, rankings and price changes.

The app stores currently analyzes findings from the six largest applications stores in existence today: the Apple App Store, Blackberry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.  According to an aggregate report of the number of applications available in the market for the month of March, it is clear that Apple’s App Store is by far the clear front-runner.

Book apps are proven to be lucrative for the eReader market. One of Distimo’s studies indicates that the highest percentage of apps in the Apple App Store is now paid book applications. For example, there are 27,0000 books in the store, and of those 92 percent are paid apps, according to Distimo’s data. When questioning van del Elzen why Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes and Noble’s Nook were not included in their reports and monitoring, he indicated that Distimo currently focuses on the stores that provide applications. “The line between applications and books however is blurring and we will provide analytics on some of the eReader market as well,” he notes.

The different ratios of free apps versus paid were one of the findings that Distimo presented during MWC 2010. In the chart below you can see the percentage breakdowns per store. While Android has the most free applications, Nokia has the most paid.

Developers can use Distimo’s data-mining to adjust pricing and distribution channels to maximize growth and revenue streams of their apps.

Rueb finds Distimo’s analysis invaluable because of the changing competitive market his firm has to deal with on a daily basis.  Tracking eBuddy’s performance on a worldwide level with Distimo, Rueb sums up Distimo as a service that which “allows us to act fast, based on country level analyses, popularity of competing apps and competitor’s actions.”

Beyond the Smartphone: Widgets For Everyday Mobile Devices

By Sarah Jaferi

In order to comprehend what a mobile widget is, we first must understand the definition of a widget. A widget is a small application that does a single task, but does it well. A widget can be embedded anywhere on the web by copying and pasting a simple piece of html code. There are widgets to serve all sorts of purposes from receiving content, sharing media, playing games, getting information and more.

Mobile widgets are applications that can be installed on your cellular phone or mobile device that add functionality to the device. Each mobile widget provides a single function that is designed to make your life easier, bring information to you or just give you another opportunity to play.

Mobile widgets can easily be downloaded to your phone via the Internet or oftentimes from the web directly from your mobile device. Many cell phones even come with widgets already installed, ready for you to customize and begin using them.

Many large companies offer mobile widgets to help you bring all of your social networks and web actions with you on the go. For instance, eBay offers a mobile widget ticker for all of your bids; MySpace offers a version of the social network for mobile. News sites and RSS feeds can also be viewed on your mobile. Mobile widgets are a popular method of promotion for these types of companies.

There are also a lot of mobile widgets that are designed to simplify your life. For instance you can put a widget on your mobile device to help you find directions. You can also look up maps, look for restaurants, find movie times and more, all from your mobile device.

As you can see, widgets can be a great way to bring new functionality to your mobile device that can make your life simpler and more fun.

Because widgets are small and oftentimes simplify everyday tasks, they fit perfectly into the mobile world. A mobile widget is a widget that is designed for use on a mobile device. There are all sorts of different mobile widget types. You can download a mobile widget to your cell phone to receive RSS feeds or news; you can download a widget to check and send emails. There are mobile game widgets, communication widgets, information widgets and more. People all over the world are simplifying their lives by installing widgets to their mobile devices for movie times, restaurant searches and reviews, maps, directions and more.

Additionally, the world of the mobile widget is constantly growing to include new and exciting opportunities to simplify your life by way of your mobile device. Many mobile carriers offer mobile widgets that you can easily download to start simplifying your life today.

There are so many different widgets that you can choose from to post on your blog or website. How can you narrow the selection down to the best widgets? Well, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the best widgets are the widgets that add something to your site. Good widgets make your site more interesting and stickier and they make your visitors want to return again and again.

If you work in social media then for you the best widgets would be your social networking badges. As a social media expert you would want visitors to reach you at all your social network sites directly from your blog or website.

If, on the other hand, you are a Flash game programmer then the best widgets for you may be Flash games as well as a news feed about new updates in the gaming industry.

Basically, the idea is to choose widgets that are related to your site. Widgets add to your content so that your visitors will have more to read and more to do when they visit your site or blog. The best widgets, like RSS and news feeds, add content to your site constantly without you even doing any work at all.

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