1. What your
phone says
about you?
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2. Mobile Applications:
Opportunity and Options
Tim McGovern, Director of Online Communications, The Heritage Foundation
December 1, 2010
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3. Trends - Growth
Growth of overall internet traffic, smartphone market share, internet connected mobile devices
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4. Smartphone % of overall phones
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5. Trends - Growth
Smartphone Market Share
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6. Platforms
✤ Global Market ✤ Washington Market
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7. Trends - Growth
Global Smartphone Market Share
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8. Why?
✤ Maybe because there’s so many of
these guys in Washington.
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9. Trends - Growth
Mobile Internet Data Growth
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10. Trends - Growth
Mobile Internet Data Growth
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11. Trends - Growth
Mobile, Internet-connected Devices
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12. Trends - Growth
Mobile, Internet-connected Devices
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13. Trends - Growth
Mobile, Internet-connected Devices
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14. Next trend
Can you guess what it is from the video?
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15. • Broad trend - the trend is not Windows Phone 7
Next trend
Can you guess what it is from the video?
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16. • Broad trend - the trend is not Windows Phone 7
• What is consistent about the vignettes in the video?
Next trend
Can you guess what it is from the video?
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17. Trends - Ubiquity
Devices are immediately accessible, wherever we are
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22. Trends - Ubiquity
• During a typical day:
• 84% at home
• 80% during misc. times throughout the day
• 74% while waiting in lines
• 64% at work
• Lots of brief opportunities for interaction
• speed is vital
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23. Trends - Capabilities
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24. Trends - Capabilities
• Push: real-time notifications “instant” to user
• Location detection
• Near Field Communication
• Audio: input from a microphone; output to
speaker
• Video & image: capture/input from a camera
• Application cache for local storage
• CSS3 & Canvas for performance optimization
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25. Trends - Capabilities (cont.)
• Device positioning & motion: from an
accelerometer
• Orientation: direction from a digital compass
• Device connections: through Bluetooth between
devices
• Proximity: device closeness to physical objects
• Ambient Light: light/dark environment
awareness
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26. Trends - Capabilities (cont.)
• Multi-touch sensors
• RFID reader: identify & track objects with
broadcasted identifiers digital compass
• Haptic feedback: “feel” different surfaces on a
screen
• Biometrics: retinal, fingerprint, etc.
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27. Capabilities Convergence 25

28. Platforms
✤ iPhone
✤ Android
✤ Blackberry
✤ Palm
✤ Windows Phone 7
✤ Other: Web, iPad
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29. Costs to Develop Professionally
It depends ...
✤ Factors:
✤ Number and complexity of integrations
✤ device specific integrations
✤ integrations with your own infrastructure
✤ third party integrations
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30. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors (cont.):
✤ Design
✤ Good application designers who have a strong visual design
skills and are well-versed in touch screen interaction design (a
relatively new field) are highly valued talent.
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31. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors:
✤ Cross-Platform Support and Feature Parity
✤ Feature parity - is the idea that across users can do the software
has the same capabilities across platforms.
✤ This is often seen by software purists as a holy grail of sorts, but
is not a necessity.
✤ Be prepared for user sensitivities.
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32. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors (cont.):
✤ Frameworks
✤ AppMaker
✤ TapLynx
✤ PhoneGap, Titanium
✤ Sencha Touch
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33. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Excellent online discussion of iPhone development costs
http://bit.ly/HHaLb
✤ Covers costs to develop professionally
✤ Breakdown of costs for Twitterific app from app developers
✤ Breakdown of costs for Obama app from app developers
✤ Additional experiences and costs from others
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34. Heritage’s experience
✤ 90% of product developed internally, testing and bug fixes were
outsourced.
✤ First two weeks saw over 2,500 application downloads
✤ Downloads dropped off from there as promotion ended.
✤ Currently working on upgrade to collect in-application analytics
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35. What we’ve learned
✤ Have specific user goals for your smartphone application
✤ Make your decisions based on the goals you have set
✤ Set success metrics for application downloads and in-application
actions (eg, article views, social sharing, etc.)
✤ Get high level buy-in to your approach to building applications on
multiple platforms (or not) and communicate that approach broadly
within your organization.
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36. Technical considerations
Application development practices
✤ Speed
✤ Network access can be costly
✤ HTML5 offers solutions to minimize network access
✤ Reduce requests and file sizes
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37. Technical considerations
Application development practices
✤ Touch
✤ Touch target size
✤ Touch gestures
✤ Hover is no longer an option
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38. Technical considerations
Testing and deploying applications
✤ Packaged and delivered software, not instantly delivered like the web
✤ Cross-version testing is the new cross-browser testing.
✤ Between provisioning and testing, quality assurance is significantly
more involved.
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39. Thank you
Time for Q&A?
• Tim McGovern
• @mcgovern
• tim.mcgovern@gmail.com
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/timmcgovern
• Credits
• Luke Wroblewski - Mobile First
• http://lukew.com/ff
• Morgan Stanley - The Mobile Internet Report
• http://bit.ly/5BqHuj
• Stack Overflow - iPhone development costs
• http://bit.ly/HHaLb
• The Mobile Device Is Becoming Humankind's Primary Tool (Infographics Feature)
• http://bit.ly/eR9rbW 37

40. Possible Q&A Topics
Time for Q&A?
• Specifics about Heritage’s mobile
development experiences
• Mobile Web Sites vs. Mobile Applications
• iPhone Development Frameworks
• HTML5
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