Why Mobile Marketing is important for your business!

This Video is having some interesting statistic content on Mobile Marketing with Smartphones. The animation, music, and the style of presentation is awesome for the content. It explains about why mobile marketing and mobile websites are important for your business. 

6 success tips for business from your websites

[caption id="attachment_813" align="aligncenter" width="432"] 6 success tips for business from your websites[/caption]

The first thing is – a happy birthday to Internet. Yes, today is the 30^th birthday for Internet.

Internet Websites are an essential element for modern business days. It can be a personal, organization, product specific or sometimes service specific. A website is not just HTML information on internet, but it is a brand value of you / your company or your product / service. Many websites even act as online sales points through its e-commerce channels. A strategic report from investornews, pcworld and hubspot says that approx 571 new websites are created every minute throughout the world around us.

Well, do you have your website for personal brand promotion or to promote the brand value of your organization?  How do you reach international customers to create an awareness of your product /service? In my study, many non-IT Smallbiz and enterprises are having websites but those are just HTML pages. I see this scenario in many IT startups too.  The point is the website is live, but it is not active to its audience. It always provides some static information from their business catalogs, and images from their photo gallery.

4^th Week of Dec 2012 - I participated in a group discussion with Smallbiz owners. Some of them are from IT startups too. I presented a strategy model for them to create / improve their websites and active information management. The goal of the strategy is to increase the brand value and improve the business transactions through their website. I would like to share some of the important points from our discussion here.

#1: Simple Website: The website should be simple. It means it should be understandable to any kind of visitor. Simple navigations, and easily understandable icons / photos / information diagrams can increase the readability of content. Use Color wheel theories to understand the minimal usage of colors, and site-map model to build navigations. The content should be updated regularly.

#2: Fast Loading: The fast loading website gets more attention from users. I always suggest avoiding flash and shockwave content in business websites. It is required only in specific sections for example:  a workflow demo of your ERP product. JQuery is good for simple web slideshows, photo galleries and UI designs. JQuery loads fast, provides impressive results with its new versions now days. Similarly HTML5, AJAX and other JavaScript frameworks helps improving performance of websites.

#3: Understand your visitors: Analytics is the best way, to do a reach on visitors and their actions. Google Analytics is the free one available, but there are many paid analytics systems to help us – some of them are not costly. Every website should be connected with an analytics engine to capture visitor activities. It required very less programming knowledge to integrate an analytics engine, but to evaluate the results from analytics engine, you need a strategist. A strategist can guide you about content planning, goal setting, bounce rate management and visitor count management.

#4: Connect with World: Social Media is an active marketing space in India from 2010 – but very fewer companies are utilizing it for business brand promotions. Facebook, YouTube and Blogs should be connected with your website to create more visibility. The URL of the website should be promoted though Social Media channels with every post and campaign.  Create engagement programs through social media and guide the users to website for more details: for example – to download an eBook or watch a video. Search Engine Promotions are also required – you can use free plug-ins available to download. A strategist can help you to build promotion strategies and insights analytics.

#5: Think about Mobile: Approx 30%* of visitors use their mobile devices/smartphone to browse internet now days. If your website is not responsive, it may not show content in expected way. Make sure, the website works for all required mobile device resolutions, and changes its shape accordingly. There are many free validation tools available to test the website with various resolutions. The alternative idea is to create a sub-domain for mobile users [m.yoursite.com] and redirect them to it via a small code script. Mobile website development needs some frameworks to build fast loading and content delivery – for example Wordpress for Mobile-sites. A strategist can help you to build technically qualified mobile version of website.

#6: Build a small web-store: E-commerce is for selling products / services online. But a web store can provide something even for free [for example: EBooks, PPT, PDF files etc]. Let the content be relevant to your products / services [example: manuals, learning books etc]. It creates a reason for visitors to increase their frequency every time. Talk about your updates in social channels to improve awareness. Take the suggestions from a strategist for more ideas.

I hope the above mentioned points are useful to you too. If you have questions and suggestions – please communicate with me.

UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions

[caption id="attachment_804" align="aligncenter" width="432"] UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions[/caption]

“Mobile is the new face of Engagement” says Ted Schadler and John McCarthy, in their White Paper on ‘How enterprise mobile systems are going to empower customers and employees with context-aware apps’.  They estimate, by 2016, Smartphones and tablets will put power in the pockets of a billion global consumers. I am seeing wide range of articles and discussions on Enterprise mobility management, Enterprise Content access and collaboration solutions, and also on mobilizing UCC (Unified Communications and Collaborations) with Mobile Office Development.

It clearly shows the extensive range of opportunities for Mobile solutions development, and numerous start-up companies already started to work on cutting edge technologies to provide solutions.

As a part of my strategist profession, I also do reviews of many beta versions of such solutions; and I found a surprising gap between the requirement and solutions. It is nothing but End-User-Experience. The majority of the Mobile solutions are developed to solve the functional requirements of a business cases, but unfortunately they are missing the User Experience part of it.

[caption id="attachment_805" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The User Experience wheel [Image Courtesy: Diego Lago][/caption]Well, what is User Experience? Wikipedia says “User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.”

Being a mentor to many mobile development teams, I strongly suggest developers to use basic standards of User Experience in their solutions. Most of developers do ‘Coding’- and they think that’s all their job is. In my cases, I involve the developers in UI design phase too. They should understand at least the basics of clickable parts of the app, the application navigation from the end-user point of view, searchable content design, styling the UI components and visual feedbacks. In one of the recent discussion with an android app development team, I explained how they can design apps with multi-device compatibility using UI factors – which is an important strategy to reach more users.

The best User Experience makes the application user friendly, and it improves the usage of the application compare to other similar apps for same purposes. The User Experience is a business strategy too for impressing many users.  The organizations should focus to train their developers on User Experience through their designers or though a design expert. This cross functional training will definitely help in improving quality standards of mobile solutions.

Well, share your thoughts friends.

How foursquare can help branding?

[caption id="attachment_798" align="aligncenter" width="432"] How foursquare can help branding?[/caption]

I am using foursquare. I use it in every important place I check-in. It may be offices, client places, public meeting places, vacation sports, restaurants, shopping spots, business seminars and sometimes even on the way to a relaxing location in weekends. One of my business clients noted and followed all my check-ins in foursquare [Thanks to Facebook Activities] and showed interest about it. He wanted to understand how this tiny app can be used for his Smallbiz brand promotion. Well, it’s an opportunity for me too – by explaining about personal branding and Smallbiz branding strategies.

Let me share few key points I discussed, and I am sure this will be useful for any personal branding and Smallbiz branding practices.

I am using the status message of foursquare check-in to mention about my business services mostly. For example: if I am in a client place for UI design assignment, I ‘Check-in’ and put status as “Working on UI Design of a brand new mobile application here”  - that messages helps me to advertise my services in all foursquare connected social networks too (mainly Facebook). Friends & Friend of Friends notice it, and through that I get more business connections.

I create places in foursquare, and I frequently check-in to those places. I post photos of that place, advertise information about that place (well, free of cost) – and that makes me the “MAYOR”. The Mayor badge is not having any special benefit from foursquare (looking for some impressive offers J), but It helps me to access the management of that place and introduce myself, mention about how I am promoting their place and services. Many times, I received positive feedbacks – and this improves my connection strength high. Of course I get official discounts too along with business opportunities.

Promoting “YOU” as a brand is very important in social media – for various purposes. What is your life-style, what you do, what you like, what you say – everything is having a meaning in social media. It improves followers and friends. It improves your personal and business value [For ex: Robin Sharma – my Guru]. Foursquare is a way to track our business / personal activities and share a thought though it. Remember – your brand value is your value in business and now days, it is also your personal value.

So, that’s about it. The recent good news is, today morning I got a new opportunity to build a personal branding website for the client and that will be used to display his social activities too.

Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps

[caption id="attachment_794" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps[/caption]

Mobile WEB Apps – the next big business word for Start-up Smallbiz communities. Well, everyone is talking about these web apps, accessible through mobile devices for quite long time – but how many Indian start-ups really made business out of it. There are few mini social networks and shopping sites showing good growth but very less in other areas for example: productivity, travel, etc.

Mobile Web App is not just porting the existing Web app into mobile device for flexible access. I see many products are not considering about benefit able UI for mobile device, performance issues, etc. When I discussed in forums, many companies accepted that they are using the same web development strategy for their mobile web apps development too.

Recently I met a small team of developers at Coimbatore. They are in .NET programming for past 3 years – pretty fresher community, and I discussed with them on best practices in mobile web apps development through ASP.NET / SQL Server as technical background.  They invested for a Windows Web Server hosting and their products are mostly on LBS + M-Commerce.

Microsoft ASP.net for Mobile is an excellent platform - you can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express or Microsoft Web Matrix for Development and start developing apps. Build you knowledge in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript / Jquery for advance Mobile Web Forms Development and rest all with ASP.net & SQL server programming  [of course you have to do a little study on mobile web controls too]. I used Microsoft visual web developer 2010 express for my practices. MSDN support is always available and developer community meetings provide great help.

The UI and performance strategies should be improved and there, I am supporting the Smallbiz teams. They take care of development of a product and my job is to make it perfect for users. For more information on using Microsoft ASP.NET Mobile WEB development – send me an email and follow me on twitter.

Mobile Marketing – The Analysis for Strategy

[caption id="attachment_787" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Mobile Marketing - The Analysis for Strategy[/caption]

Couple of weeks before, I was invited by a team of well-known marketing management company in Coimbatore, for a discussion on Mobile marketing strategies. The mobile marketing is not a new buzz word anymore, because there are many business teams started to build success stories in metro markets.

We discussed about all available opportunities to reach the target crowd through mobile marketing – based on various constraints, and content styles. I suggested them a strategy which was cost effective – at the same time, can produce a measurable response. I would like to share some points; we came across in the discussion – to give an idea about how mobile marketing can help you in business marketing services.

The important understanding required about Mobile Marketing is ‘understanding the attitude’ of Mobile Users. We referred some study reports before finalizing the strategy, and we found some interesting facts. Almost 65% of smartphone owners are interested in receiving offers, deals in their phone. 15% of users are interested in upgrade plans, top-up discounts etc from their mobile operator. Nearly 50% of users are fine to receive mobile advertisements and offers from third parties [shopping, entertainment, education and life style].

The next question is – the advertisement should be in Mobile Internet or in Mobile Apps? You are right – Mobile Internet is the preferred choice for many users whereas SMS is still dominating the mobile marketing business, along with email, twitter DM etc.

My suggestion to mobile marketing professionals is understand the attitude before you build content. Plan the frequency of advertisement delivery and track the responses every time. Build different channels to track responses, it can be the number of replies, hit-rate of a website, number of purchases in e-commerce or even visitor count with token number from advertisement.

Let’s discuss more about this in coming days – meantime, share your points and questions with me.

Top 12 Knowledge Requirements for 2012

[caption id="attachment_728" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Top 12 Knowledge Requirements for 2012"][/caption]

2011 gave a very powerful positive impact on specialized business life for Social Media and Smart Phone Professionals - many new Gadgets, Applications, Job Profiles, Start-ups and Success Stories.

2012 – Definitely, is coming with lot more new opportunities for IT communities.

Well, what is essential for your success in 2012 – Let’s take a quick look on top knowledge requirements.

• Mobile Application Programming – It is not just Android, Windows Phone and IOS Programming. Look into HTML5, CSS3, Advance Java-script, JSON, JQuery and PHP. Mobile WEB Frameworks are going to be an excellent option for “Develop Once-Deploy to All” Concept.


• Customized Agile Project Management – Agile is still not professionally implemented in many organizations. Most of the Small and Medium size companies are using it as simplified version of traditional project management – but in the name of Agile. Certified Scrum Master and Agile Scrum Trainings for your Project Team are essential for a success with quality.


• Location Based Services – There are very few applications with Location based Content Identification as a feature and most of them are just social and Infotainment. There are lot more requirements which can be fulfilled with LBS – for Example: Tourism, Education etc.


• Data Center / Networking Technologies- The demand for networking professionals is high with virtualization and cloud computing projects. Virtualization and the Cloud could also be behind the increased need for IT professionals with backgrounds in data center operations and systems integration.


• Smartphone Security – Smartphones are becoming part of corporate network elements now days and security for official and personal data becomes major question. Data Security Applications, Anti-virus Tools, Remote Content Management, Policies for using Smartphones are high in requirement.


• User Interface Design – UI Design and Development is an important presentation layer element, which decides the success of many Smartphone and Tablets apps, and also PC and WEB Apps. There are certification course available to educate you about best practices and standards and it is a hot item in job market too.


• Mobile Commerce / Payment – Smartphones and Feature phones are fully capable for Money Management now days with Applications from various vendors. There were few banking apps, mobile malls and payment apps showed success stories last year, and I am expecting more to come in 2012.


•  Context Aware Applications – A new technology provides improved user experiences by using the information about a person's interests, intentions, history, environment, activities, schedule, priorities, connections and preferences to anticipate their needs and proactively serve up the most appropriate content, product or service.


• Gaming Smartphones, Devices – estimated to $800 million business, it provides numerous opportunities for business owners and technical professionals.


• Help Desk/Technical Support–Mobile operating systems have added a new dimension to help desk and tech support community and this will improve a lot in future.


• Business Intelligence – from Cost saving to investing in Technology, I am expecting many new prospects with BI.  There are certifications, Business Analysis best practices to improve it.


• Life with Open Source – Open source is not just limited to PHP and MYSQL, but there are more useful, free to use, efficient platforms for developers, designers, project managers, analysts, testers, business owners and general IT end-users.

I wish you all the best in this New Year 2012 for many new success stories, career improvements and business values.

Best Indian Android Mobile Devices – a Study

[caption id="attachment_691" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Indian Android Device - Study"][/caption]

Android – the Mobile Operating System is surprisingly becoming more popular in India – not just because of its variety of applications availability, but also for the Hardware devices from Samsung, HTC and others. Many users prefer to use Samsung, LG and HTC – the stylish look and feel makes them decide.  On the downside of it – these devices are costly and not suitable for rough industry level implementations. What you need is a cost effective device, which is fine for rough usage and of course for custom developed application implementations.

Android OS based Indian devices are best choice for this standard.  I met a client last month for a business discussion on enterprise level mobile applications for manufacturing industries. The client was already having a software package for manufacturing industry MIS. The idea is to extend it to mobile devices so that the usage of Computers can be minimized and instead their clients can go for more Smartphones. The advantage of mobility, instant status reports and communication can be achieved. We worked on an analysis report based on the available suitable Indian android devices for this business idea – so that we can offer these devices with pre-installed configured apps for quick startup.

I am just sharing few points from our analysis – to show how Indian android devices are valuable, and why you can consider them for your next purchase.

• We reviewed 4 affordable mobile brands for our analysis – iball, Micromax, Karbonn, and Videocon


• Micromax is based in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. The mobile devices are in good quality. We reviewed 3 devices from this brand – A60, A70 and A85.


• A60 is with Android OS, v2.1 (Eclair), and the Processor is 600 MHz. J2ME apps are not performing well, but Android 2.1 Business apps are fine. Network [GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth, WI-Fi, USB] connectivity is good. Display is fine for Business apps [240 x 320 pixels, 2.8 inches]


• A70 is an improved version with 320 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches (~180 ppi pixel density) and Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo). The processor is again 600 MHz ARM. There is GPU [Graphics Processing Unit] with Adreno 200. This is a preferred device for business users and professional purposes.


• A85 was announced 2011, Q3 – with 480 x 800 pixels, 3.8 inches (~246 ppi pixel density) and Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo). It comes with Nvidia Tegra 2 AP20H Chipset and Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 Processor with ULP GeForce GPU. 8 GB internal storage is also available. This device is little costly compare to other devices in same range.


• Micromax A60 is around INR.4000, Micromax A70 is around INR.8000 and Micromax A85 is around INR.17000


• IBall - is a privately-held computer hardware company headquartered in Mumbai, India that develops and manufactures peripherals related to computer.


• We received and reviewed IBall ANDI – an Android 2.2 based Device with DUAL SIM capacity. It comes with a 416 MHz processor and network connectivity features are good. It is a slow device for business applications but good for common android users. The price is just – INR 6500.


• Karbonn Mobiles is a Telecommunication firm which was founded in March 2009. It is a joint venture Mobile manufacturing company between the Bangalore based United Telelinks Limited (A group of Telecom Major, United Telecoms Limited) and Noida based Jaina Marketing & Associates.


• Karbonn A1 was the suggested mobile device for our review. It is a 3G enabled device and comes with Android 2.2. The processor is 600 MHz and Screen Size is 2.8 inch (240 x 320 pixels) 256k TFT touch screen display. 150MB internal memory and expandable memory up to 32GB with MicroSD is provided. Karbonn new article says – there are more new phones to come in Android series. Karbonn A1 is around INR 7000. We also recommended this phone for business purposes.


• Videocon is a very popular company in India. Their Android Mobile devices – Zeus V7500 [Android 2.1] and V7400 [Android 2.1] are relatively costly compared to other all devices – Price around INR. 12000 each. The features are limited and we felt it is not for core business users.

Finally we recorded, Karbonn and Micromax are best phones – based on the reviews in multiple scenarios, and we suggested the same in our reports. Now, based on your experience – what is your opinion? Are you using any Indian Brand? How about your experience?

HTML5 Frameworks for Mobile Apps – What you need?

[caption id="attachment_684" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Mobile HTML5 Frameworks"][/caption]

HTML5 is definitely a winner for Mobile Apps Development. It gives you the power of simple App programming and efficient device compatible app standards. Recently I started to explore few HTML5 Frameworks for Mobile apps developments, because we wanted to try something more efficient then native apps. Unlike Native apps, HTML5 gives an extraordinary advantage of ‘Create once and Deploy for all devices” and that’s the important reason for our search for a suitable framework. Here, I am sharing few experiences of the explored HTML5 mobile frameworks with my readers.

When I checked with Google, the first HTML5 Mobile framework captured me is ‘JO’. It is a very simple application framework for HTML5 and it supports almost all the mobile device browsers. iOS, Android, WebOS (Surprise..!! It is still working) and Blackberry. Yes, we didn’t tested it with Symbian – coz now days, the primary crowd is with Android and iOS only. JavaScript plays a major role here, and a little knowledge in CSS3 makes things perfect.

‘JQuery’ Mobile is the next option suggested by many friends – it is a touch-optimized Web Framework for Smartphones and Tablets. It is a unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. [I am learning JQuery UI with UX standards for few client works] - Its lightweight code, built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily theme able design [It makes life easy with colors].

I explored ‘The-M-Project’ last weekend with one of my friends – he is a HTML5 Guru. It is another JavaScript based mobile framework for writing cross-platform mobile apps. Ok – this M-Project contains all UI and Core files to build jQuery Mobile based mobile HTML5 Apps – so If you know JQuery – you’ve got another weapon to hit.

Yes, Of course, we tested the basics only for Proof of concept development – but still working on it for more new things. I am sure, this HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery, UI and CSS3 will be an excellent combo against Native apps – but for people like us – It is another way to make new business. Happy… !!

Project Management for .Mobi Website Development

Project Management for mobile websites is a special kind of approach based on its various requirements and limitations. In my experience I handled Mobile websites for Social Media, Business Functional Applications, Online Product Purchase, News and Media presentations, Entertainment Content downloads, and Travel and location based services. For every single project, we faced a small change in our process, basically learned from experiences. We followed agile approach for almost all our projects in simple way to make the project management painless.

I am planning to write more about project management for this platform, but as a start, let me share some key points.

• Organize a basic requirements analysis meeting with all stakeholders and document the requirements in easy functional stories


• Build a product Backlog from the requirement analysis and consider it as first level defined scope


• Present the overall project goals – the overall solution model , as a guide for priority setting


• Build a team & assign key roles – the team should include stakeholders, quality assurance and implementation team members. Key roles and responsibilities should be assigned for scrum master, product owner, designers, developers, quality assurance and stakeholders. Document it for future benefits


• Define and publish a communication plan for the community of stakeholders


• Define backlog stories derived from basic analysis and user stories


• Prioritize backlog and communicate sprint release goals with stakeholders


• Plan your sprint – a scrum master is responsible for ensuring tasks are completed
  
  
  
  • Define sprint length – we plan for 10 days
  
  
  • The product owner should present stories to lead the team through the project proposal document, and define acceptance test criteria
  
  
  • Scrum master and QA should sit with the developer to confirm scope, expectations, and technical implementation details – including the QA level and documentation details.
  
  
  • Estimate the time – Scrum master, Developer and Product owner should decide based on discussions
  
  
  • Scrum master prepares a Scrum Board for tracking project activities
  
  
  • Daily scrum meetings should be planned – everyone should attend without fail
  
  
  • In Daily Scrum meetings – we normally take one story for the development, and design its solution. We also get updates of stories in progress, and identify-track-resolve blockers. We review the burn down chart and calculate time still required
  
  
  •  In sprint presentation stage – we review sprint status – basically health, discuss about areas need improvement, and changes required. We come to a agreement on how the next sprint will be run
  
  
  • The Demo normally goes through product owner – and we review the feedbacks received. The comments – improvement suggestions – and additional requirements will be added in backlog after an impact analysis
  
  
  
  

As you can see, the agile way of project management is almost same as website or any web application development – but the best thing is … it keeps us happy in developing … some kind of good professional way.

Share your experiences with Android Platform...

You recently moved from Blackberry / Symbian / Windows Phone (6 or 6.5) to Android Mobile Device? Please share your experience..![caption id="attachment_589" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="android"][/caption]

Mobile Website Testing – the strategy

Testing is an essential part of any software / website development. Testing is not just to fix and improve the functional quality, but also helps to improve the performance and non-functional values too.

Mobile website testing is little different from traditional website testing procedures. We normally use different browsers for traditional website testing - [Ex: Internet Explorer (all recent versions), Firefox(all recent versions), Opera (all recent versions), and Apple Safari – now days Google Chrome also added in the list. But for Mobile websites we follow a different strategy.

• Test cases should be based on different devices and its functional capacity – Ex: processing speed, battery level etc.


• Test cases should be executed in different real devices and different browsers in same device.  Sometime, a same device will do different things with different browsers. The screen size and the network also matters in performance.


• Emulators and Online Standard verifications should be used for DotMobi Compliance Tests – Ex: ready.modi – The result should be atleast 4/5 for quality.


• Data Access, external application access should be verified – Ex: Video Play, Upload Picture etc.


• The Testing should happen from the early stages of development itself to avoid major issues in final stages. The Testers should have awareness about devices, Device specifications, Mobile internet browser specifications, settings and knowledge about other mobi websites too.


• A quality standard document should be prepared and published with all design and development guidelines, and it should be followed strictly. If the developers are using Wordpress Templates or Joomla Templates, the same verification strategy should be applied – if required the customization should be done.


• The performance [download image & media], and non-functional [clear view] should be verified before certification.

Testing is basically a common sense activity with little knowledge on usability. Mobile website testing, and mobile application testing varies with little differences, but a Skillful tester can easily manage both the areas.

Mobi Social Websites – a quick introduction

Mobile devices are becoming unavoidable for now days lifestyle. Mobile phones are used not only for voice calls and SMS, but the power of internet [GPRS, Wi-Fi etc] brings world as compact in hand. Feature phones and Smart Phones are playing major role in Social lifestyle improvements. People use it for Internet browsing, Emails and Media content sharing and management on the way. How many of you are using these tools?

Snaptu: It is a Mobile application available for verity of Mobile Operating System platforms, enables the users to share media content through Facebook, Twitter and Emails. Users can utilize the available device capabilities such as Mobile camera for capturing photos and upload in Flickr, Play videos and visit linked websites. The RSS news feeds can be captured and shared in Facebook and Twitter with single click.

Qeep: Qeep a mobile social network for Java based phone owned by Germany based private network, has officially launched it app for the Indian markets. Qeep is a freely downloadable application and offers features like Private messaging, photo-blogging and live multi-player gaming.

Mocospace: allows you to share text, pictures, videos and location information between PCs and mobile phones. It’s based on chatrooms, with different levels of privacy and a “Circle of Trust” to determine who you can send and receive from.

Jaiku: shares an online log of your day as microblog, including messages, events and photos through “activity streams”. Jaiku Mobile allows you to view other user’s streams through your contacts list.

Guys, try these tools and share your comments.

Programming .Mobi – Mobile Websites

Are you a programmer? What programming languages are you using currently – C#.net, Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, SQL … don’t worry – you got some new career opportunities in mobile web site development too.

Even though all the above mentioned programming languages can be used, I strongly suggest going with PHP-MYSQL combination – because of its tremendous advantages in dynamic content design and delivery.

Also – the Wordpress, Joomla and other Content Management Engines mostly follow PHP-MYSQL as preferred programming. Personally, PHP-MYSQL programming is very easy to learn, and a average developer can do wonders in 10 days with right challenges.

• XHTML and CSS knowledge - required – Very important but can be easily handled with Dreamweaver type of Software Tools.


• Javascript knowledge - required – but can be handled with customizing available downloaded code blocks.


• SQL – required – Database Programming, Query based applications.


• XML – required – to handle simple and complex data structures


• Knowledge in using popular IDE tools for PHP – this reduces development time by instant help, and programming support.


• Preferred knowledge – HTML 5, Mobile detection using WURFL, Multimedia and Streaming, Mobile Wordpress, Location Detection, Widget Design Patterns, Mobile SEO and Social Features and MIME Types for Mobile content.

I strongly suggest having a code library for all required functionalities, so that the plug-and-execute can happen with little or no modification.

Creating Business values using .Mobi Website

LinkedIn.com is giving me lots of opportunities to meet professionals and people from various industries, of course with all different kind of business requirements. I recently met a LinkedIn contact – who works in Education Management, for one of his requirement on .Mobi websites for Educational purposes. He suggested me to give a write-up mentioning the business values of .Mobi website – so that he can present it to his higher authorities. I did a small research on it, and designed a PPT for him, but I would like to share some points which I learned through the research.

• The success of creating business value of .mobi site starts with defining the purpose of a mobile website itself


• A strategic business plan and setting realistic goals are important as first step for a successful mobile website


•  Identification of types of users – including prospects, clients, investors, job seekers. After this process is completed, now we determine at a high level what our mobile website needs to accomplish. Visitors will make decisions based on their experience and perception of the Mobile website.


• Organizations should invest in hiring a professional Mobile web consultant to assist them with designing a site that will achieve their goals and purpose of the site.


• Mobile Web Users are a unpredictable group; they have short attention spans, fly from page to page, and are highly judgmental, holding their attention takes careful planning and execution.


• A Mobile website has several aspects including design, content and functionality.


• The design of the website should be simple to browse, should use the same color theory / theme of your corporate website and should be clear with right size fonts and images.


• The content should be easy readable text in small paragraphs – mostly about services, product information and interactive transactions (ex: javascript based registration for corporate events) if any.


• The content should follow Attention, Interest, Desire and Action template – to invoke the desired visitor response.


• Mobile websites should be powered using SEO – Search Engine Optimization, a technique that allows a .mobi site to be indexed and ranked on search engines such as Google search engine for mobile websites.  Using analytics will provide us reports on SEO functionalities.

Wordpress Blogs on the go…

Are you traveling without computer access, and you want to post a blog entry? Are you using a mobile phone with internet access – here you got an interesting utility for mobile devices – “Wordpress Mobile Apps”.

Wordpress for Mobile is available for all flavors –including iOS, Windows Phone 7, Andriod, Blackberry and Nokia. You have to simply download and install using appropriate stores.

URL : http://wordpress.org/extend/mobile/

You can create blog entries, edit, delete, approve or reject comments, do some administration and also can upload and share media components from your mobile [based on your network capacity].

I downloaded and installed for Nokia platform, wordmobi – works on python + pips framework.

Try it and share your views.

Wordpress Mobile Pack – advanced .Mobi Development

Wordpress Mobile pack is another very powerful complete toolkit, to help mobilize the corporate Wordpress Site. It comes with excellent mobile switcher, to select themes based on the type of the user, that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.

Note: PHP 5.x is also highly recommended, although the plugin also works with PHP 4.3.

Some extraordinary features include:

• A set of advanced themes for Nokia and WebKit devices, designed by Forum Nokia. These also look beautiful on Android, iPhone and Palm devices


• Standards adherence, ensuring that mark-up is valid XHTML-MP 1 and the site scores 5 on mobiReady.


• Device adaptation, including the rescaling of images, intelligent splitting of articles and posts into multiple pages, the simplifaction styles, and the removal of non-supported media.


• A mobile admin panel, that allows the blog managers to access the admin interface via a mobile device, with simplified access to the most common features such as editing a post or approving comments.


• Mobile analytics, allowing you to track your mobile traffic with PercentMobile, and view simple local traffic tallies


• A mobile ad widget to easily enable mobile ads with AdMob or Google's Mobile Adsense.

Project Status Reports

Regular status report is a necessary expectation from any stakeholder. A project manager is expected to decide, the frequency and format of this report. Ensure it satisfies these points

• What has been completed


• What has not been completed and why


• What is being done about the incomplete work


• What concerns, issues and risks remain  unsolved


• What needs to be done about these unsolved problems

I always suggest using a simple PPT, but few stakeholder s expect word / excel documents too. Fine, try these important elements in your reports and discuss with me, what else you usually expect.

• Slide 1: A graphical summery of overall process – Ex: Dashboard, Gantt Chart


• Slide 2: Completed Tasks, Milestones


• Slide 3: Not Completed Tasks – and Action points


• Slide 4: Issues/Concerns/Risks – and Action points


• Slide 5: List of milestones with due dates – in next reporting period

W3C Initiatives - for .Mobi Website Development

W3C had developed several number of web technologies that unequivocally take into account the specifications of mobile devices. Try the following in your .Mobi Website development, and let me know your experiences.

• CSS Mobile, a profile of the cascading style sheet language that matches the need of mobile Web authors


• SVG Tiny, a profile of the Web’s scalable vector graphics format well-suited to the capabilities of mobile devices


• XHTML For Mobile, which defines a subset of XHTML for mobile

The latest generations of mobile internet browsers are capable of using more advanced Web technologies, including features from HTML5, CSS 2.1 and 3, a number of rich JavaScript APIs, opening the way for Web-based mobile applications (including widgets).

I am working on the technical document now for some sample models, which can help the beginners to get started with .Mobi development quickly.

Quick Tips .Mobi Web Development

.Mobi is the extension for Mobile websites – websites that can be browsed in Mobile Phone Internet browser.  Just like .com, .net and .info, the .modi extension is also becoming popular based on the popularity of smart phones in market. Numerous corporate companies and news media agencies are having their Mobile website to present news and content directly into the hands of end user. Many social media websites – including facebook and twitter posts are also getting presented in this way through various mobile websites.

.Mobi websites are opening a new world of opportunities for web site designers, developers and testers. I see many small and medium size companies are also participating in these developments powerfully now days. Recently I presented a demo about .Mobi development and its standards to a client. I would like to share some points here for our friends.

Number #1: Visualize the .Mobi website based on a straightforward template, which is suitable for almost all the mobile browsers. Try to see visit the existing mobile websites and build a standards document. It will be helpful for your designers and developers, and also for estimations.

Number #2: Plan the .Mobi website with limited content. Don’t fill it with everything from your Internet website. Plan for the images, media content [videos, audio etc], and RSS feeds in design time itself. Use images with less DPI, and size reduced audio video content. Don’t use animated GIF kind of media in professional websites.

Number #3: Create a personalized CSS Template, and tailored theme for your website. It should be impressive, at the same time, it should be lite to get downloaded quickly in mobile device.

Number #4: Less usage of Javascript and Flash will be good, but these things are helping a lot in presentation and interactivity. Try using Javascript libraries and Flashlite swf files wherever you feel required, and test its performance in real time mobile devices. Don’t rely on Emulators. Emulators will not help you to find and fix real time issues.

Number #5: Use the CMS based Frameworks, if you are familiar with such architectures. I used Wordpress, and I see many are using Joomla too. The development time can be optimized, and many standards related things will be taken care by these frameworks automatically. There are Templates for Mobile Devices available for Free, and you can customize them for your requirements.