The Domain Name Game Goes Mobile

By Sheila Shayon

dotMobi, a global leader in mobile content and the company behind the .mobi domain, announced today the launch of goMobi, a new service enabling small-to-medium businesses (SMB’s) to create and publish mobile websites in minutes. Their proprietary product levels the playing field and gives SMB’s tools for a state-of-the-art mobile presence that works on any mobile device, across multiple carriers and platforms and with no need for development or coding skills…and all at a reasonable price.

The biggest difference in their service according to Pinkard (Pinky) Brand, Director of Global Sales for dotMobi, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, “We’ve built this from the ground-up suitable for the mobile experience for business. We didn’t take existing PC sites and squeeze them down to a 2-3 inch screen. That doesn’t work and the customers don’t come back.”

There are currently 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide — four times more than PC’s. Projections are 1 billion mobile web users by 2013. (Quantcast) Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile Web traffic will surpass PC web traffic by 2015. There’s an urgency for SMB’s to create an efficient mobile presence - or risk having no presence at all.

Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, VISA, Vodafone and T-Mobile are among the founding companies working with dotMobi for several years to create this category of scalable service with no technical barriers.

According to usability research commissioned by dotMobi from Human Factors International, 43% of consumers use mobile phone browsers to access the Web versus 14% who use custom apps to access a website; and 68% would rather visit a ‘made-for-mobile’ website vs. a ‘designed-for-desktop’ version when using a mobile phone or portable device.

“goMobi is a new model for mobile websites. The mobile experience has changed end user’s expectations. Transcoding in the past resulted in squeezed-down, unsatisfactory mobile interactions and there was little or no repeat business or usage,” continues Brand. “People are used to speed, rich media, video, and reasonable rates. goMobi provides all that and is break-through, one-stop-shopping for any business that wants to be global mobile.”

goMobi websites are hosted ‘in the cloud’ by dotMobi, so SMB’s have no ‘overhead’ hosting costs. Changes to a site can be rendered virtually in seconds, and existing customer contacts leveraged via calls, texts, location-based services and lead conversion.

All sites use a friendly, icon-based design as seen in these two samples from the Beta test:

Web developers and designers have a robust suite of tools at their disposal for the automated transformation of website content to mobile-friendly content including accessing HTML meta tags for site key items, mobile/desktop switchers and sophisticated device detection capabilities. goMobi sites recognize any handset in use making every phone work like a smartphone and are deployable on all mobiles - not just iPhones and Androids.

name.com, based in Denver, Colorado was the exclusive partner for goMobi’s Beta trials and is now first to market with the service. Soon to follow will be Tucows, Network Solutions, InterNetX and EuroDNS.

“We’ve been testing in Beta but expect thousands of sign-ups after today’s launch,” says Brand. “Our proprietary technologies ‘Device Atlas,’ and ‘Instant Mobilizer,’ make it easy and efficient to go mobile. The software finds an existing site and converts it. It’s a pre-populated, click-to-call set-up. The service will probably retail somewhere between $30 - $100 a year.”

Included in the goMobi package: hosting of the site; unlimited Setup Assistance for modifications; fair use policy to traffic volumes of 2000 page views/daily. Full details on setting up a goMobi mobile website are available at http://goMobi.info (for desktops) and http://go.mobi (for mobile devices).

As for what’s coming next in the mobile space, Brand says they’re working on payments direct from mobile devices and the ability to upload third party apps. Asked how he got into the ‘domain name game, Brand said it happened in the 1990’s when he and a college fraternity brother purchased their first registered name, ‘business.com’ for $150,000 - a large sum in those days as most were free or available for a $35 fee. The ‘business.com’ name subsequently sold for $7.5 million.

“The power of identity and name presence hit me like a ton of bricks,” adds Brand. “In 1996-1997, there were 1 million names registered. By 2000 that jumped to 10 million. Today, we’ve topped 200 million.”

So what’s in a name? In the domain name game - millions of dollars, millions of customers, and one more step forward in the digital evolution of enriched end-user capabilities and experience.

ChaCha Announces Developer Challenge Winners

Image courtesy of ChaCha

By Barbara Gengler

A man from New York and a man from Florida walked away with the top prizes, totaling more than $15,000, in a developer challenge backed by human-powered search company ChaCha.

The challenge consisted of a Grand Prize of $10,000; 2nd prize of $5,000 and 3rd prize of $2,000. Apps were judged on the creativity of the idea, the quality of its implementation and how many people interact with it.

Hong Wu, (Brooklyn, New York), was awarded the grand prize of $10,000 for his ChaCha Android Application, which lets you ask questions and get ChaCha answers in conversational English instantly on the Android.

Daniel Goodwin, (Eustis, Florida), took away $5,000 and 2nd place with his ChaCha Lookup Application. The 35-year old created a script that allows anyone to put it onto their website and watch what people select they want more information on. It also provides them answers, allowing them to stay on that website.

For example, you could pick “twitter” on a site, hit a little “?” icon that pops up and you get a ChaCha explanation or answer back. Goodwin also supplied a “how to” video with his entry.

Third place, ($2,000), went to Daphne Soe, for the ChaCha Instant Messenger Application. The app makes the ChaCha service now available by your Instant Messenger, including AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber and Yahoo!

First prize winner Wu pointed out how his ChaCha Droid app utilizes ChaCha’s programming API to provide quick answers to Android device users.

“You can type or speak your question in the input field and ChaCha will provide a few closely matched answers back,” he said. “The app integrates with the Android system Quick Search Box so the user can ask ChaCha from the main search box. It supports Voice to Text translation so users don’t have to type out the question. The app also has a home screen widget which shows the latest ChaCha trends.”

Wu came across ChallengePost.com’s ChaCha challenge about a month ago, looked at ChaCha’s API and decided it would be a nice fit for Android platform.

According to Wu, there are many types of search algorithms and techniques and  conversational English is probably the most natural form a typical user would use on search engines like Google and Bing.

“ChaCha’s platform has a smart way to figure out what the user actually means from their questions, and consequently provides best match answers,” Wu said. “Conversational English also fits nicely into the voice to text recognition feature of the app.”

Wu revealed it took a few nights to finish the first version of the app and then he gradually added more features into each app update. At this moment, the app is feature complete with home screen widget, global Quick Search Box integration, speech recognition, and ChaCha trends lookup.

The 2nd grand prize winner, Daniel Goodwin, said the app he created for ChaCha’s challenge is a script that web site owners can add to their site.

“When a visitor arrives at the site, the script loads and begins to watch for any text that is selected,” he said. “The script assumes that if the user selects text, they want to know more about what’s highlighted and will copy/paste that into a search. With that assumption, the script kicks in and looks up the selection on ChaCha, removing the need for the user to perform a search or be diverted from their current page.”

Goodwin said the script took about 20 hours total to develop. He explained ChaCha gave developers plenty of time in the challenge and he took about three weeks to think about ideas.

“Once I settled on an idea, I used Firefox/Firebug to proof the concept. The whole thing could run from Firebug using sample data,” he said. “Then one Sunday afternoon I put all the pieces together into a deliverable product, which took about eight hours.”

According to Goodwin, the script uses jQuery to ease development and Google App Engine to handle communication between the web page and ChaCha’s API.

Goodwin said ChaCha’s service is interesting as an API as it’s not quite search, but in a way, it’s much better than search.

“The potential, even after this challenge, is still undiscovered. I believe some really cool things can be done with their service,” he said. “Search results are a blog post, long and time consuming. ChaCha results are tweets, short and to the point, easily consumable.”

He said he did not think he would win this competition as “I thought this would bring out tons of much more talented developers than I to create solutions.”

ChaCha’s free, revolutionary mobile answers service, which launched in 2007, allows users to ask any question by way of text, voice or online 24/7. The service is powered by more than 50,000 Human Guides who respond to the user, typically within less than 30 seconds.

The ChaCha API provides free access to the company’s database with more than 400 million Questions and Answers.

iPushback: Are Apple Developers Getting Restless?

By Ned Smith

When Apple released iPhone SDK 4, its new software development kit for mobile devices, in early April, three lines of legalese in the license that mandated developers only use Apple’s programming tools to create applications sent seismic shock waves through the software community. The reverberations are still being felt.  And Flash functionality is still on the outside looking in.

Lots of sound and fury followed, coupled with rampant speculation that this latest instance of Apple’s control-freak habits would finally send software developers fleeing in droves.  Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, told The New York Times that “the risk Apple runs is ticking off developers and causing them to want to develop on other platforms.”

Though some prickly proponents of total developer freedom still grumble and mutter anti-Apple sentiments, it appears that the anticipated backlash has been pretty much confined to bluster and bombast. “Developers don’t like anyone telling them to do,” says Judy Shapiro, chief brand strategist for CloudLinux. “There will be a backlash, no question about it. But I think they’ll get over it.”

They have a good reason to get over it. “We have to build the stuff people want,” says Joe DeSetto, a principal in reallyMedia, a mobile applications development firm that creates games and utilities for the iPhone. And consumers clearly like what Apple offers.

Many believe that the developers themselves are just collateral damage in the Apple/Adobe wars. To parse the latest rules from Apple, you have to look at them from several perspectives, says Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing for Appcelerator, a platform and services company whose conversion tools help Web developers build content-rich applications for desktop and mobile platforms such as iPhone.

“What is the language?” he says. “What is the intent behind of language? What is going to be enforced? They hold the ultimate trump card in the form of the App Store acceptance/rejection process.”

The answer to the first, Schwarzhoff believes, has been blown out of proportion. “I think it’s a classic example of looking at one clause under a microscope.”

But the answer to the question of intent, he believes, is unequivocal. ‘Our position is that the intent is 100 percent directed at Adobe. This is an Adobe/Apple thing.” He doesn’t believe coincidence accounts for Apple making its SDK 4 announcement just three days before Adobe announced Flash CS5, which includes a packager for iPhone that would give Flash developers to get into the App Store.

“It’s critical for Adobe to get into the iPhone App Store,” Schwarzhoff believes. “Their developers need to get there. That’s where the action is, that’s where the growth is.”

And once you take disgruntled developers and Adobe out of the equation, the end user benefits. “What Apple wants is applications that make the most of their platform,” says Schwarhoff.  “They want applications that show the qualities of what the Apple platform offers. The company wants to showcase applications that make it unique and special.”

Though Appcelerator has not yet received word from Apple in whether its application has passed muster, Schwarzhoff believes that their product is in compliance. But he would like to see more transparency in the process. “To be fair, there’s a lot that could be done to provide more clarity to Apple’s intentions,” he says. “When you actually have to make business and development decisions based on three lines of legal write-up, there’s no way to really give clarity and confidence to a broad developer base.”

There are also ways to end-run Cupertino. “While I don’t begrudge Apple their locked-down approach — nor take sides with those that would rally against it — it’s not the only way to build rich applications for the iPhone,” says Yury Tsukerman, cofounder of Recess Mobile, an SMS and web applications developer. “You don’t have to play in Apple’s sandbox to build rich apps for their devices.”

“We just built a pretty sophisticated cross-platform calendar and appointment scheduling tool that opens in a browser, looks like a native iPhone app, works on Android, Palm, etc. and degrades gracefully to Blackberry and WAP devices,” he says. “To me, that’s ideal for business applications. We got to build it with a flexible, transparent and common toolset — html, JavaScript — the same way we build web applications, and make it broadly accessible, all without Apple’s oversight.

Though he prefers to remain an App Store outlier, Tsukerman concedes that there is merit in Apple’s approach. “I do agree with those who argue that Apple’s vertical integration has resulted in phenomenal, consistent quality that companies like Microsoft or Dell, being all things to all people and faced with maintaining compatibility across such a breadth of hardware, can’t match.”

That consistent quality may also explain why there has been little consumer backlash because of Apple’s restrictive policies. “Microsoft was run over, not because they were a big bully, but because a lot of their products were not up to snuff,” says Shapiro at CloudLinux.

Performance is also an issue underlying Apple’s rule striking out the use of conversion tools to create applications. “At a technical level, the conversion tools are really convenient for the developers but add an intermediate layer, increasing processing load and draining battery life,” says Patrick Tan, interactive director with Famous Interactive, a web portal developer. “Apple has put a lot of effort in to ensure a smooth and reliable experience for the iPad and iPhone user, a major reason for popularity and adoption, and conversion tools pose a threat to this.”

“Finding efficient methods to version software has always been a challenge in the software development world,” he says. “Apple’s announcement has added fuel to this challenge, but they are not the first or last company to be strict with its platform. In the end, Apple cares about the reputation of its brand and products more than it cares to please developers. We don’t blame them.”

Alpha Five

Alpha Software has launched the latest iteration of its Alpha Five software used by over 1 million developers and tens of millions of users, Alpha Five V10.  It is the first programming tool that enables software developers to visually build rich Internet database applications powered by Ajax without having to write one line of code. Even better, they perform like desktop apps and run entirely in the cloud. These apps support every major SQL database, including Microsoft SQL Azure databases that reside in the Microsoft cloud. Those developers who find that getting their hands dirty makes life meaningful have the option of crafting custom code using popular SQL dialects, JavaScript, REST Services and Xbasic.

Features:

• Rich JavaScript framework
• Robust desktop capabilities
• More power for xBasic coding
• Great new Xdialog controls
• Updated Alpha Five Application ZServer

The company has created an extensive library of videos showing Alpha Five features in action.

Apple’s App Purge Provides Opportunity For Developers

By John Greaves

Apple’s crackdown on redundant and adult oriented apps in its app store has reverberated through the developer community like a 5.0 magnitude quake.  Many developers saw their livelihoods erased overnight and their business models become untenable in the new, stricter rules environment.

However while some bloggers ponder whether developers should fight back and at least one civil liberties group is racing to condemn Apple for what they see as a unilateral and unfair move to restrict developer creativity and autonomy; others are raising the caution flag against castigating Apple for what they see as a positive move.

Alex Moazed, CEO of Applico, has said previously of the iTunes apps store, “For underdog developers, [the] iPhone store is also very crowded.  It’s hard to get your marketing message out there.  You can sometimes spend more on marketing than on development with the iPhone store.”  Moazed sees that as likely to change with Apple’s purge.

“It will definitely decrease the repetitive, the dumb and boring or the simple kind of mindless apps which merely just kind of waste people’s time.  If they download an app and it’s junky, it’s whatever, people are just going to be less inclined to go and get another app after that so from that advanatage it’s good for the Apple store, it’s good for us and our clients who are making the apps that take time and take thought and are innovative,” Moazed said.

Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp an iPhone development company since the early days of the store agrees with Moazed’s assessment.

“Really as the mobile development platform for these different phones has grown, the maturation has created new requirements, the challenge is every single phone has its unique intricacies, and Apple obviously holding a high standard in design amongst itself is trying to hold that high standard for its developers,” Beavers says.

According to Beavers, while high standard can be a good thing, he understands the concern of some developers who feel the world as they know it has been upended.

“The good part is hopefully that you get better quality apps that come through the store.  The bad part is rules change as you go and then you’ve got to make changes accordingly, which a lot of people don’t account for in their development process and that becomes a big challenge,” Beavers says.

This is hardly the first time Apple has angered developers with its handling of the app store.  Last November in response to a growing developer defection to the Android platform, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, defended the company’s application approval policy in an interview with Business Week.  At the time, Schiller maintained that most apps were rejected due to technical issues or because they violated either Apple’s or some other company’s trademark or were illegal.

“There have been applications submitted for approval that will steal personal data, or which are intended to help the user break the law, or which contain inappropriate content,” Schiller says.

Now with the iPad’s impending release, Apple is positioning itself as a store people, especially parents can trust.  That meant adult content had to go.

Beavers says, “Personally I’m all for the restriction of some of the requirements of mature audience type stuff, I mean the top five apps were naked women, as a developer you’re frustrated and say well I guess we should just do porn and we’ll make money.  I mean not only am I a developer but I have kids.”

As for the ban on so-called cookie cutter apps, Beavers says he doesn’t think Apple is being quite that drastic.  “I like that some of the requirements they have get through the mud of apps that shouldn’t have even been apps, they’re one page business cards because that’s a lot of white noise especially when you’re talking 200, 300,000 apps how do you weed through them?”

Of course, if one were inclined towards blame storming, it could be argued that Apple built this cookie cutter monster by making the app development process so easy.  Moazed however is quick to refute this idea.

“You don’t want the barrier to entry to be difficult programming, that’s what you see with Blackberry, it’s not necessarily more difficult but it’s got more repetition, it’s not as streamlined as it is on the iPhone, and that’s where you see all of the competition and diversity thrive,” Moazed says.  “You see a lot of cookie cutter apps on the iPhone because there’s such a high demand for iPhone applications.  You still have a lot of template apps on Blackberry and Google.  You just see less of them because the user base isn’t as strong.”

Moazed says developers unwilling or unable to adapt to Apple’s new guidelines may defect to the competition.

“If there isn’t a way for them to adapt, if the app shows nudity or there isn’t a way to get around it and they don’t want to do another app that will be approved; they want to stick with the same concept, they’d probably go to Google because the user base is somewhat similar,” Moazed says.

None of this explains moves like yanking the Wi-Fi detecting applications from the app store and developers wanting to stay with Apple say the company needs to tell them what it wants.

“Until this all gets settled down it’s an uneasy feeling.  There needs to be a best practices guideline,” Beavers says.

Absent such a guideline, Moazed has simple advice.  “Innovative applications which don’t offend people and add value to your customers will ultimately be okay and be approved by Apple.  If you do something well, you put time into it, you don’t offend people you should be accepted.”

AppMakr

You’ve got a website and you’re already publishing content to the web via RSS and Atom feeds, Twitter, iTunes podcasts, Flickr streams and more. Now you want to promote your site by creating an iPhone/iPod Touch app. That process can take months and involve hefty development fees. AppMakr, a new system from PointAbove, lets you create a mobile application in 30 seconds or less from your existing assets at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated developer.  All you need to create an app with your own branding is an RSS or Atom news feed from your web site/blog, graphics for your header and landing page and an icon for the iTunes App Store.

Features:

• Uses your website’s RSS or Atom feed
• Supports playback of MP4 video within the app
• Can create multiple tabs for multiple feeds from your site
• Two pricing options. With AppMakr as the publisher, the fee is $199 (a small AppMakr logo will appear on the splash screen). If you want to publish under your own brand, the AppMakr fee is $499
• Can embed ads from services such as DoubleClick, Google Adsense and AdMob

Watch a video of an app created with AppMakr.

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