Posted on Fri, Jun 14, 2013
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, Android versus iOS argument persists, but developers should follow the money, please check it out. Mobile app developers can't afford the luxury of having the passion of the average Android or iOS fanboy. They follow the money. For now, Apple's App store is far ahead of Google Play in terms of developer revenue, but the trend is in Android's favor, and developers should be paying attention.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
The $200,000 software developer: We can build him, we have the technology | ITworld
If you're looking to make top money as a developer, you need top notch skills and a keen understanding of the platforms that are most in demand. This article looks at the attributes and industries that can earn you top dollar.
Security at the edge of the cloud | Cloud Pro
A lucid explanation of the security challenges facing IT in the BYOD and cloud age. The game is changing and the security model needs to change with it.
Employees circumvent IT security when it slows them down | ITworld
It should come as no secret that if you put up too many obstacles for your employees to do their job in the name of security, they will find a way to circumvent your security. That means the more you try to control it, the less actual control you have.
Is your smartphone making you stupid? | guardian.co.uk
It's only natural that as we become more reliant on our smartphones, we offload some of the tasks we used to use our brains for such as memorizing phone numbers or figuring out how to get some place, but whether that's making us stupid or giving us more room to think about other things is still open to debate.
Snowden NSA Case Points Up Security Flaws in Thumb Drives | TechTarget
It's the kind of story IT pros lie awake in bed thinking about at night. Someone walks into your building with a thumb drive and walks out with a cache of company secrets. That's exactly what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did and it makes securing your network very challenging indeed.
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, Jun 13, 2013
I don't know about you, but I don't care very much about phone operating systems. They all have their charms and operate in a similar fashion. Each platform has first class phones available, but there is the whole market share thing and it's hard to ignore.
When it comes to market share regardless of whose numbers you look at, Android wins hands down. It's not even a contest. Let's look at a couple of examples: According to comScore's Mobile Lens published earlier this month, Google has 52 percent of US market share compared with 39 percent for Apple.
If you look at IDC's worldwide numbers for the first quarter published last month, the comparison is much starker with 75 percent for Android and 17.3 percent or iOS.
So looking at it from pure market share, it's pretty clear Android is the easy winner any way you choose to slice or dice the numbers.
Developers clearly can't ignore Android, not with those kinds of numbers, and they would be foolish to, but does that mean the developers are making more money developing on the Android platform? Not necessarily.
As a small example, Mashable published some numbers from Black Friday compiled by IBM last November and found that when it came to tablets, in spite of these numbers, iPad users accounted for 88 percent of all money spent via tablets on Black Friday.
If you would prefer to compare iOS devices to Android devices, it was 18.5 percent for iOS and 5.5 percent for Android.
But it's not quite that simple. Distimo did a study recently and found that while the Apple App Store generates far more revenue for developers today than Google Play, it found that Google Play is growing steadily, while the App Store remains somewhat flat for Apple.
That could be attributed to the shear number of phones out there. If Android controls the market to the extent the numbers suggest, it makes sense that just from volume it is going to start to generate additional revenue, even while Apple continues to hold a substantial lead over Android in this area.
So what does this mean for developers? There are no easy answers. For today, it seems, you are probably going to make more money in the App Store, at least for the short term. Over the long term, it's much more difficult to call because if you want to move to where the market is most likely to be, it makes sense from a numbers standpoint, all things being equal that eventually Android would catch up and pass Apple in terms of App Store revenue.
But we are very far from that point today. A reasonable strategy would seem to be to develop for iOS first today, then follow up with Android and continue to do that untll Google Play approaches a tipping point for developers.
All the while, keeping mind that statistics can be manipulated to some extent to prove whatever bias you might have, leaving developers in a precarious postion with no clear answer on how to proceed.
What's your methodology? Do you develop for both iOS and Android? Which do you develop for first?
Photo Credit: CanStockPhoto
Posted on Fri, Jun 07, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, Infographic: More reasons for developers to pay attention to emerging markets, please check it out. New data from Sandvine reinforces the idea that mobile developers need to pay attention to the huge potential of emerging markets.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Why Developers Are Such Cheap Bastards | ReadWrite
This writer has a problem with companies offering free tools to build apps and developers accepting them. Seems logical to me that if you want a developer's business, you need to provide frictionless access. What do you think?
Why your users hate Agile development (and what you can do about it) | ITworld
Why is it that developers like Agile and users don't? This article looks at the reasons why users are uncomfortable with Agile and yes, how you can resolve this conflict.
Tips for Bringing Novice Developers Up To Speed | Mendix Blog
Baseball executives have two ways of building their team. They can pay for top talent in free agency or they can develop it themselves in the Minors and teach them the team way. Developers are really the same. If you want to develop new talent, you have to nurture it and teach them your ways of doing things --and this article looks at ways to help youngsters hone their craft.
Windows 8 continues to fail | ZDNet
This article compares the growth of Windows 8 desktop and the dreaded Vista and finds that in spite of the nearly ubiquitous hatred for Vista, Windows 8 is doing far worse in terms of sales to this point.
How smart developers generate lousy code | ITworld
Even good development teams generate lousy code for any number of reasons including bad communications between team members. If you want to avoid shipping lousy code you need to pay attention to the social as well as the technical aspects of development.
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, Jun 06, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
Last week, we wrote about analyst Mary Meeker's view of China and why developers need to be paying attention to it as a market. This week, we have an infographic that shows the growth of smartphones as the chief means of accessing the Internet in Latin America.
Both of these reports indicate that emerging markets are a key area of potential growth for developers. In Latin America for instance, according to Sandvine, LTE is fundamentally changing how people access the internet, and for the most part people are using smartphones as the onramp to the internet.
What does this and other data in this infographic mean for developers? It means you need to be paying attention to other markets outside of the US and the EU because the potential for growth in these areas is huge as more people have access to smartphones.
If you want proof of this trend, at Mobile World Congress this past February I saw a couple of phones aimed squarely at this market, including the Nokia 520 (which has been doing great in India) and the ZTE Open, which runs the open source Firefox OS and is aimed at the youth market in Latin America.
Posted on Fri, May 31, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, Mary Meeker's Charts show China's explosive mobile market potential, please check it out. Mary Meeker's State of the Internet report had a whole section on China this year. The Chinese market potential is staggering and mobile developers would be foolish to ignore it.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Everything I Know About Project Management, I Learned from Game of Thrones | Smartbear
Always a fun exercise to compare a bit of popular culture to life in the corporate IT shop and this one takes the famous HBO show, Game of Thrones, based on the books by George R.R. Martin and applies lessons to IT project management. You might be suprised how much you recognize.
BYOD is not about saving a few pennies | CITEworld
Most companies look at BYOD and see a way to save money, but if that's how you're looking at it you're really missing the point. It's about empowering employees and making them more productive --and when they like their phones that's a much more likely outcome.
The need for cross-platform app parity | ZDNet
As iOS and Android fight it out for markeshare on smartphones and tablets, users are left wondering when they will get particular apps on their platform. Often when an app starts on one platform, it gets ported to the other, but with less functionality. This writer argues it's time for parity across both -- but getting there will be a challenge.
Ethernet Invention Revealed the Origins of Innovation | eWeek
40 years ago, a group of very smart people came together and through brains and a bit of happenstance developed Ethernet networking. What these folks did was remarkable and had a profound impact on enterprise computing. Veteran IT journalist, Wayne Rash had the privilege of sitting down with members of the team 40 years after the fact and learning about the origins of innovation.
Hogwarts for Hackers: Inside the Science and Tech School of Tomorrow | Wired.com
In a world that demands new approaches to education beyond sitting in rows in classrooms and spouting back facts and figures, there is a shining example in Ilinois that encourages exploration and creative learning and has become for all intents and purposes a Hogwarts (the school that trained wizards in the Harry Potter series) for hackers (in the good sense).
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, May 30, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
One of the many things that jumped out at me in Mary Meeker's always excellent State of the Internet report, released earlier this week, was the explosive mobile growth in China. That China with its huge population and growing middle class is a fertile market is hardly surprising, but just how far along it is might be.
And if you're a mobile developer with ambition, you may want to include China in your business plans.
Let's start with smartphone ownership. As you can see from the chart below, China surpassed the US in total number of iOS and Android phones owned some time in the first quarter of this year. That's fairly remarkable in itself, but it doesn't tell the whole story of course.
As TechCrunch reported in April, the US remains the biggest market for the iPhone, but China is the fastest growing and demand in the EU (and US) are beginning to plateau, which might be a good time to show another of Meeker's charts comparing Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
As you can see, the EU's GDP is now on par with China's and the US is only marginally ahead. That means the biggest markets moving forward are likely to be US, China and EU in that order (until perhaps China passes the US). That literally turns your business world view on its head.
Let's explore one more chart on mobile usage. So we are seeing a huge rise in the number of smart phones bought with a corresponding rise in GDP. The Chinese spend more time on the internet in general than their counterparts in the US and they are using their mobile phones to access the internet almost twice as much.
That Chinese users are accessing the Internet more from the mobile devices or using the Internet more than other forms of media is probably not surprising either since mobile phones provide easy access to the internet for a relatively low price point.
Finally let's look at how much money Chinese are spending on the internet and as you can see it's considerable. Alibaba/Taoboa has surpassed Amazon and eBay in total merchandise volume.
This chart is harder to interpret, but it's likely if the volume is there, the sales are too because we certainly know they are with Amazon and eBay.
All of this data suggests that as a mobile developer you have to be paying attention to this.
You have a fertile and growing market full of people who are mobile savvy, use their phones a lot and are gaining disposable income.
You might not be in China now, but if you're smart, you'll be thinking about it on your mobile product road map because the market potential is staggering and you would be foolish to ignore it.
Posted on Fri, May 24, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, The Kirk and Spock Approach to Big Data, please check it out. In the Star Trek Book of Management, there are two approaches to big data decision making: The Kirk way and the Spock way. Which type are you?
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
7 open source projects to cut your teeth on (and the ones to avoid) | ITworld
If you want to get involved in an open source project, it may seem intimidating like you're trying to get into an exclusive club, but it doesn't have to be that way. This article looks at 7 projects that are friendly and welcoming to newbies (and as the title implies, the ones that aren't).
A bad mobile app is worse than no app at all | CITEworld
After using a particularly bad mobile app, this writer learned that if you don't make a good one, maybe you shouldn't try at all. That's because a bad app leave a bad taste that could up damaging your brand and doing more harm than good.
IBM’s Watson Tries to Learn…Everything | IEEE Spectrum
Apparently beating the two greatest Jeopardy champions was enough for Watson. Now researchers want to give Watson access to all of the open data sets in the world and see what happens. Who knows where this ends up, but they have a three year mission to test it out and see.
Which programming languages should you skip | Dice.com
You want to know which programming languages you need to know and which to avoid. Well, industry veteran David Strom took a look at the data and what he found might surprise you.
What Big-Data Stories & Barbie Have in Common | All Analytics
There are an increasing number of big data success stories out there, but can they apply to you and your organization or are they more of a Barbie idealized fantasy?
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, May 23, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
There's a pivotal scene in the latest Star Trek movie. Without giving anything away, in a moment of crisis Kirk says he's going with his gut because it's all he has at the moment. In other words, he has no data on which to base a sound decision.
As a manager, you very likely have data -- lots and lots of data, but for whatever reason you might not be willing to make the transition from a Kirk company driven by emotion and your gut to a Spock one driven by information.
MIT professor and author Erik Brynjolfsson speaking this week at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, MA called that decision-driven model which itself is being driven by the Big Data phenomenon, a management revolution. And he didn't use the term revolution lightly either.
"Great revolutions in science begin with revolutions in management. New tools make it possible to change the way we think about the world," he said. Brynjolfsson said until Amazon came along, book publishing was a culture of conversations and lunches and gut feelings about which books would hit and which would fail. Then Amazon brought data into the equation and turned the industry upside down.
And typically the management of disrupted companies are the last to know. He says management has to shift from this idea of HiPPO driven decision making, which stands for the highest paid person's opinion drives the decision to one based on logic and data. Think about how Mr. Spock would come to a decision. The data tells a story and you should be listening, but also be aware it's not necessarily the whole story.
He told the audience, it's important to understand that correlation does not necessarily equal causality. MIT Professor Andrew Lo speaking on a Big Data panel yesterday said, there is no better example than this: Data has found that people with lung cancer most often have ashtrays in their homes. Therefore if you take away ashtrays, you'll reduce lung cancer. That logic is obviously flawed because the correlation is not the cause.
That said, there are many powerful examples of using data to get at information or even to affect behavior just because the information exists.
MIT professor Andrew McAfee speaking later in the day at MIT told the story of a restaurant chain where he applied data analysis to Point of Sale data and identified massive stealing going on by employees. Management took the report McAfee wrote and presented it to employees without comment or threats. They got the message. Just by understanding the process was being monitored and data analyzed, the employees cleaned up their act.
That's just one business example of how a business used data to affect employee behavior and improve the bottom line of the restaurants in the chain.
In another example Brynjolfsson, said without any background or understanding of the market, he studied publically available search data on the housing market and was able to develop a model for predicting housing sales shifts 3-6 months before they happened --whch was more accurate than the more popular ones used by the industry -- and he did this with data.
Brynjolfsson said, "We need to change from hunches and opinions to go with facts and data." And that he says requires cultural shift. Are you ready to make that shift from the Kirk gut-driven approach to the Spock data one? Successful companies are going to be making that shift.
Photo Credit: Star Trek: Into Darkness
Posted on Fri, May 17, 2013
By Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, Reducing Complexity: The Next Software Development Imperative, please check it out. As we move from monolithic enterprise software packages to smaller more discrete apps, your job as a software developer is shifting and reducing complexity has suddenly become Job One.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Simply renaming "IT" won't fix the core problem | Waxing Laconic
Netflix CIO Mike Kail has some ideas on how to transform IT and he describes how he does it at his company. Walking the walk, folks. Walking the walk.
Maybe it's time to get rid of your IT department | CITEworld
Provocative title for sure, but it's really not about scrapping IT. It's about getting rid of the old IT command and control mindset, or perhaps even a centralized, entrenched IT. Intriguing read.
Promoting Agile in a Waterfall Culture | Mendix Blog
It's all well and good to say you need to move to Agile, but when Waterfall is baked into your development methodology, it poses a unique challenge. This article explains how to get the ship moving in a new direction.
The Twisted Personality of the Software Tester | Smartbear
Even though software testing and QA is clearly a key part of the software development process, people probably don't aspire to be software testers when they're kids. The question is how do you get there and what makes a good one? This article answers some of those questions.
The Top Five SaaS Risks and How to Mitigate Them | Cloud Computing Journal
Sure, the cloud offers you utility style computing, but this writer argues there's a dark side to it, and you need to know what you're up against. He offers a listing of some these risks.
Photo by Ron Miller Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Wed, May 15, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
For a long time software development was about complexity, making applications that did a big job, but as we enter the age of tablets, smartphones and apps, we are moving away from these complex applications, and your job is increasingly about reducing complexity.
Earlier this month, at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit, Gartner analyst Whit Andrews talked about complexity as it related to search tools (but which really applies to any software development project). He referred to the Conservation of Complexity, which he likened to conservation of matter --it doesn't go away. "We always face complexity in a given system, but we might push complexity like toothpaste in a tube," he explained.
From a software development perspective, you might introduce complexity to your user as a way of reducing the complexity you face as a developer, or you might sacrifice your time in order that the user not face that complexity.
In a truly great post this week with a terrible title, Tail Wagging the Dog, Matt Gemmell talks about simplicity from a design context, but he could be talking about software development too when he wrote, "For [Apple's Jony Ive], simplicity is about immersion: becoming so engaged with the task or experience that the device disappears. The iPad becomes a stack of photos, or a novel, or a calendar. A noble and sensible goal," Gemmell wrote. (I encourage you to click through and read the whole article.)
And that should be the goal of all developers to make an app so elegant, so well designed; you forget you're using it --or even the device on which it's installed. The reason people gravitate toward apps at work is because mobile devices often offer the most elegant solutions to long-standing problems. Instead of fighting with clunky enterprise software, users find software that does what they need it to do and nothing more --and more importantly that just works.
As 451 Research anyalyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe said in his talk at AIIM 2013 in New Orleans in March, we don't want a website with 57 options. Instead, we want to little apps that do little jobs and we want them to do those discrete jobs very well.
Mobile has clearly changed the mindset and expectations of users and it's up to developers to deal with that new expectation, even in the enterprise where traditionally you have been more concerned with function than with form. Now you have to worry about both, and you have to look for ways to simplify and distill every process and take advantage of the fact you're using a touch device. Sometimes that will take imagination and a change in mindset to get past the models and ways of doing things you've done in the past.
But if you want to reach your users you need to make reducing complexity your biggest priority. Like it or not, your users and customers have been spoiled by their smartphones and tablets they use in and out of work, and they expect nothing less from their enterprise applications. It's up to you to deliver it.
Photo Credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino on Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 Share Alike/Attribution License.