How To Do It All: Meeting the Mobile Needs of Clients and the Enterprise

Mobile has rocketed past many other initiatives in the enterprise. And looking at the data, that’s no surprise.

• Pew Research reports that 68% of Americans have smartphones, with the percentage for ages 30-49 being closer to 83%
• According to a recent KPCB Internet Trends report, mobile search (at 51%) has superseded web searches from the desktop
• One-third of respondents on a Vanson Bourne survey indicated they would completely abandon a brand after a single poor mobile experience
• A recent report by Computerworld cited mobile in the top 5 initiatives that CIOs would give more dollars to in their budgets in 2016

And the stakes are too high for an enterprise to fall short in this critical area. In fact, in a recent Forrester post, Mobile was identified as a key success imperative for CIOs. They go so far as to identify not just company revenue, but even a CIO’s job security, as potential risks to ignoring the enterprise’s mobile needs.

 

Challenges for Mobile in the Enterprise

The needs of mobile audiences have evolved as quickly as the number of devices. Making your site responsive or replicating an entire application are not options in a mobile first world.

The smart company recognizes that not only do their customers demand a solid mobile solution, but that their workforce needs the flexibility of mobile access. An enterprise’s internal mobile solutions increase productivity and create consistency in the information accessed and shared. Moreover, younger and tech savvy employees will judge the company on the quality of its mobile access and applications. Your internal apps can make or break your place as an employer of choice.

The challenge, of course, is the multiple demands on both your teams and your budget. Building apps for customers, porting internal tools for mobile use, and addressing the inevitable concerns regarding management, support and security can be a drain on your available resources. But with planning and some strategic choices, you can execute a successful mobile strategy.

 

Planning for the Differences

It’s true that the needs of your customer will be different than the needs of the organization’s internal teams. Even your different business units will have needs that may drive you to the creation of multiple internal apps. But where there is divergence, there is also commonality.

All of your apps will have some functionality that can be shared across your mobile landscape. Identity management, access control and even similarity of look and feel can be common elements that can be developed once and extended to each application.

Understanding the common elements and the differences aren’t enough, though. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your development dollars, you need to make sure you understand what the end user needs. It’s important to take the time to understand the user experience for your apps before you build to prevent missteps and costly directional changes down the line.

 

Options for Balance

Once you understand the user’s needs, it’s time to balance the development work. The traditional path of iterative releases with added functionality, though, is only one tool in your cost savings tool chest.

Your customers are looking for a great mobile experience. Bringing in a partner to create a custom mobile experience can create the app your customers demand without derailing your development projects or taxing your development resources.

But what about internal users? They are looking for apps that are quick and easy to use, that let them get their jobs done efficiently. Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) tools, like those in the Salesforce Lightning App Builder, can quickly get your internal resources up and running, saving you time and money.

 

Doing it All

The importance of your mobile strategy cannot be understated. The demand for mobile apps will only increase from within your organization and from without, and each quarter without mobile solutions can put your organization further behind in profits and in the competitive landscape. But you can get it all done once you understand your user’s needs and marry the build outs to the right tools for the job.

Think about your mobile strategy as it stands today. What really needs to be custom? Do you have tools that can be built quickly using an RMAD? And how much value can the right partner bring to your mobile strategy?

The post How To Do It All: Meeting the Mobile Needs of Clients and the Enterprise originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

Pokémon Go users, gotta catch em all

We see them in the streets and in our shopping malls. Frantically swiping their phones and battling each another’s Pokémon for points and bragging rights. These are the app users of Pokémon Go, a new augmented reality(AR) or virtual reality(VR) mobile app which has seen over ten million downloads in less than one week.

Like it or not, there are some major learning lessons we can take away from the Pokémon Go epidemic. I am calling it an epidemic because it is by far one of the most viral apps we have seen in quite a while. Let’s examine what Niantic, makers of Pokémon Go, did so well in their development and execution of the app.

The game takes place in the real world

When most people think of playing video games, they think of sitting on the couch and staring at a screen while exerting the minimum amount of physical energy possible. Nintendo Wii changed that way of thinking to a certain degree by introducing games that required physical movement to interact, however, they still took place from the comfort of your own living room.

With games using AR technology, the entire physical world is now the playing arena. This means users must walk, run, bike and move around the physical world in order to complete tasks required to advance in the game.

This guy now has people pulling up in front of his house like stalkers tapping on their smartphones all hours of the day and night because his house is a Pokémon gym. By looking at his Twitter feed he seems to be mostly a good sport about it though.

This is what I’m a little leery of. People pulled up, blocking my drive way as they sit on their phones. pic.twitter.com/WpRbilk6g6

— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 10, 2016

The game blurs the lines between what is real and what is virtual. A major feature of the application includes the virtual creatures showing up in your camera view embedded into the real world around you. This taps into a fantasy many of the app users have to experience what it would be like to live in a world where the creatures actually exist among us. AR makes it easier than ever to be fully immersed in the game’s plot and live the true role of your character.

It taps into our competitive nature

Pokémon Go requires you to spend time hunting down creatures and then powering them up at virtual gyms found in real life locations. Users can then challenge other users by taking over a rival team’s gym or battling their Pokémon for points. If a user neglects to defend their gym it can be lost. This is what makes the game so addicting. Users feel that if they don’t keep playing, they will miss out on potential Pokémon, lose their gym or simply fall behind in the game while their friends continue to advance beyond them.

What is more interesting is that the demographic is not limited to the younger crowd like the other traditional Pokémon games were. Instead, this new application is attracting people of all age demographics including people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. This shows the makers not only understood how to tap into viral sharing aspects of human psychology, but they also understood how to touch our competitive nature. In fact, Pokémon Go currently has more daily active users than Twitter! Users are also spending more time using the app than many major social networks.

Users are getting all the exercise

One reason many gamers use to finally pull themselves away from a video game is the realization that they need to get outside and do some physical activity. It can feel bad to sit on a couch all day and do nothing productive with your time. With Pokémon Go, users are already doing that while they play and it gives the users a really good feeling of accomplishment. The game takes place throughout the course of their day as they navigate their way through the physical world. There have been social posts of users complaining their feet are sore and their legs hurt, but they can’t stop walking around hunting Pokémon.

Pokemon GO might be the most exercise we’ve gotten as a nation since those Harlem Shake videos.

— Ian Simkins (@iansimkins) July 11, 2016

In addition to this, there really are gyms and Pokémon that can be found in all sorts of locations all over the world. By using the app you may find new places of interest right in your own town that you never even knew existed.

The social response and PR was very strong

Immediately after the game launched, people took to social networks and posted about it. Major publications wrote articles about it. And people talked about it with their friends. Whether or not you have an interest in playing the game or care to know how it works, you probably already have heard quite a bit about it unless you live under a rock.

One of the more interesting sharable components of the game and likely the reason it caught on so quick is largely due to the fact the game does take place in the real world. So users can snap pictures of a recognizable place with a friendly little creature hanging out. Many users would even go as far to stage the image with a person or object in the background interacting with Pokémon creature.

All this viral exposure took the internet by storm and it’s the reason the app is now the number 1 app on the app market and has tens of millions of downloads. Whats even more interesting is the numbers behind the app itself. Nintendo and Niantic spent roughly $30 million building the application. The app currently is making $1.6 million per day and growing. In less than 3 weeks the developers will fully recoup their investment and start to profit. Not to mention, Nintendo stock is going through the roof and Wall Street has been eating it up!

What we learned

Many times we think of old trends as a thing of the past, but using the right combination of technology and human psychology we can literally transform a business overnight and make a massive revolution that overtakes existing dominant social platforms in less than one week time. The world is so dynamic and trends evolve very quickly with technology, but AR is just getting started and does not appear to be going anywhere for a while. This is one of the rare cases where building a fully fleshed out application instead of a minimum viable product turned into a huge hit overnight.

The post Pokémon Go users, gotta catch em all originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

How to test market viability before you start building

So you think you are sitting on a great product idea, but need a little bit more validation before you cough up the big bucks and invest in building it out. Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or Fortune 500 enterprise, there is a large amount of risk involved with bringing a new product to market. For one, it can take months or years of research and development to fully flesh out the product concept and complete the development process. If you have a physical product you have even greater risk of potential wasted manufacturing and warehousing costs if the product launch flops. The markets are flooded with all kinds of products both virtual and physical and it is more important now more than ever to understand your market viability before you start developing your product in a black box.

We encourage anybody we talk with to do the proper market research to ensure the consumer demand is there, the timing is right and the market is not flooded. There are several aspects to this process.

Market Research

When diving into a new business model, industry market or product development initiative, the first thing you need to do before anything is learn about the market. Some of the questions you will want to answer for yourself are:

• Is there a market currently for this product
• What is the size of this market
• What types of customers purchase this product
• Are there competitors already in the space
• How many competitors am I going up against
• How established are the competitors
• What is the pricing model for the product

Competition can be a deterrent to many people, but there is another way to look at competition. In business, competition not only establishes a baseline for you and helps you set a target goal for where you need to go, but even more interesting, competition is a sign you are on the right track. When entering a market with no competition, you have to sometimes ask yourself, “Is there really a market for product”?

There is a give and take with everything though. If you feel your market is already over saturated with competition it may be time to look at a new niche. The ideal time to enter a market is when there is already one to three competitors doing what you are trying to do, so they have accepted the greatest risk and proven there is viability, but they are still infant enough that you can catch up to them and get into the market early.

Learn from the Competition

Now that we have established that competition is good and healthy for your product startup, lets see what you can learn from them. It is important to get as much information about your competitors business model, pricing model, customer base and more. There are several ways you can do this, here are a few:

• Read their website, sign up for their newsletter and follow their social feeds
• Give them a call or stop by if you are local (In some cases they may be willing to discuss their business with you, sometimes they may be threatened and potentially rude)
• If you have a common relationship with anybody who has used their product, ask them about it and why they purchased that product from that company
• Purchase their product yourself if it is affordable and makes sense for you to do so
• Some people will also call the company posing as a potential customer and listen to the company’s sales process, depending on the nature of the business and industry this could be potentially illegal or unethical, so be sure to consider that before trying this option

At the end of the day, there is only so much you can learn from your competition because lets face, they probably won’t be waiting in line to hand over everything they learned through their research and failures to the new guy/gal on the block.

Perform a Smoke Test

Smoke tests are a great way to quickly test if there is a market and what the cost of acquiring new customers might be for your business. In the age of digital marketing it’s now extremely cheap to run a smoke test and it’s a no brainer if you are entering into a new market. One thing to consider before going in is that a failed smoke test may be an issue with your marketing approach and not the business model itself. But either way, it will give you some insightful information for a low cost. Here is how to do it:

1. Identify who will buy your product.
2. Create a compelling message for those people that explains your product and the value it offers.
3. Using a visually appealing interface, create a one page landing page with your compelling message and a signup form (simply ask for name and email).
4. Create an advertising account with Google Adwords, Facebook, Linkedin or another social ad platform that makes sense (To determine which ad platform is the best for your product relate your target demographic to the demographics using each of these platforms. Testing on multiple ad platforms is not bad either).
5. Run your ads for a few days. Usually a budget of around $500 should be enough to give you some insightful data about user response.

If you get success with your smoke test that is validation that you are headed down the right path and should continue investing time and energy into your product. If you got a failure result from your smoke test, it can mean one or several of the following:

• You didn’t identify the right demographic with your ads
• Your landing page did not compel users to take action
• The product messaging does not speak to the customer in the right way
• People don’t understand your product because they need education around it
• Your product truly is not viable and you should consider a pivot

Interview Potential Customers

Hopefully from your smoke test you have created a list of several people who would like to buy your product (If not, you at least know who you market demographic would likely be). Talk to these people and learn about their needs. Ask why they signed up on your smoke test page. Learn what value your product brings to them. Often times you can uncover some unique hidden value you didn’t even know you had. We once worked with a company that started out targeting their product to specific demographics of high school students, but ended up learning there was also a viable market for prisoners who were going to be released shortly. Sometimes the correlations can be hard to make, but are there right in front of your face.

Gut Check

So you passed all the checks above? Great!! Now we are at the final check and arguably the most important one. The gut check. You have all kinds of data and research on your product, the market and the customers in your market, but let’s throw all of that out the window for a minute. How do you feel about your product and market? Do you love it? Will it get you out of bed every morning and keep you working late into the evening? Will you be so excited to tell everybody about it? Is your motivation to build this product focused on the fact that you love the concept of the product and how it helps people much greater than the idea of benefiting financially from the product and business?

If you feel a burning passion to build your product concept and answered affirmatively to the gut check questions then it’s likely time for you to do what you know you have to do.

The post How to test market viability before you start building originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

Why We Need More Women Coding

History has a way of repeating itself. For example, the phrase, “history has a way of repeating itself” has been written before. So… case in point. But in all seriousness, as technology jobs become more and more ubiquitous and in-demand, there seems to be a familiar pattern with them, as with most maturing industries past: a lack of, and need of, more women taking part.

Many women are involved with the tech industry as it stands, but as far as the actual programming, or coding, it still seems to largely be a, “boys club.” The interesting wrinkle in this case, however, is that women aren’t so much excluded by their male counterparts, but more that fewer of them tend to think of computer programming as a viable career option. And we, as a society, need them to.

A Little Perspective

Women, in general, have a unique perspective and methodology as it relates to problem solving. And technically, that’s what coding is, a form of problem solving. Incidentally, women comprise the majority of internet users and even internet purchasers, so it only makes sense that women would have a unique insight as to what can be considered, “intuitive.” So one of the main reasons more female programmers are needed is that more end users are female, on average. And while I’m getting dangerously close to an early 90’s stand-up routine, it’s certainly not men who know best what women want.

Job Creators

Another reason the tech industry needs more female talent is because it needs more talent in general. And it makes little sense to pull from only 50% of the available talent pool (or is it 49%?). As mentioned above, the majority of people who code from an early age and see it as a potential long term career tend to be male. Not so much due to some concerted effort to keep girls out, but more due to a lack of concerted effort to get girls in. Although, with programs such as Girl Develop It in Philadelphia, the trend is shifting in a positive direction.

More women becoming coders can only benefit the economy, and therefore society, as well. The job market is a traditional barometer for how a society is thriving (or not), so as a matter of simple arithmetic, more women in programming positions = more jobs being filled in an industry that needs them filled = better overall economic standing.

Leveling the Arraying Field

As history does have this strange tendency to repeat itself, I believe it is somewhat inevitable that over time more and more women will find themselves enthralled with the creative process that is web and computer programming. While it may not be immediately apparent to the layman, coding is a technical art form. And all art benefits from diverse and unique angles of approach.

As it stands, the male to female coder ratio is still rather lopsided, but less so than in recent years past. And the technology industry has only benefited from this increase in perspective and talent. So for all of these reasons this trend needs to continue to be encouraged.

The post Why We Need More Women Coding originally appeared on the Curotec Blog