One of the most challenging aspects of developing the suite is ensuring that the reporting happens in realtime. Realtime is an interesting term in analytic circles. Many companies claim to deliver realtime reporting but on closer inspection the reporting happens hours or even a day later. That’s too long for us. We’re aiming for visual operational metrics which means that the results must be viewable *seconds* later. As the feedback time between adjusting app content and monitoring user response shortens this ability to report as soon as data hits our servers is going to become critical.

There’s a lot of ingenuity gone into our technology in order to achieve this but one of the most interesting aspects of our system is the utilisation of the cloud, or specifically, the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS). Cloud computing heralds the era of flexible and dynamic server provisioning. Servers on AWS are provisioned via Amazon’s console interface or programmatically through scripting. The system allows us to scale automatically based on server capacity and it allows self-monitoring and automatic replacement of servers should they go down. The system is self healing. If we need to fire up 20 additional servers for load testing we can, and once we’re done we can tear them down again – only paying for the hourly time we used them. This kind of flexibility is a real boon for us and only a few years ago would not have been possible without considerable expense.

This provisioning flexibility is why Amazon call their computing cloud ‘EC2’, where EC is an acronym for Elastic Computing. It’s a great fit for mobile development where we need to stay agile and scalable in order to meet new data processing challenges.

As a high growth sector the App industry could be looked at as being crowded with lots of competition vying for respective niches.  To a degree this is true, there is a lot of activity in the App world because of its high growth nature.  However, it’s still early days and the years ahead are going to be full of disruption in the mobile middleware and service spaces.  There are early market leaders in BaaS, advertising and analytics but there is no de-facto standards for operation as yet.

The App is no longer a novelty in itself.  Apps need to ‘Level-Up’ in gaming terms.  An App is simply software made easy to consume – sugarcoated software.  What’s going to set quality Apps apart from the rest for 2012 and onwards is the value that they deliver.  This is also the case for the App middleware and services ecosystem and also, I dare say, has been for the rest of the software industry since it began.

The bigger picture though is that in the 12 weeks to the end of October, Apple’s market share of UK smartphones was 27.8% (compared to 25% in the same period in the previous year) while Android’s figure was 46% (compared to 34.2% in the 12 week period a year ago).  In brief, Android has more market share and is still growing faster.

Even more interesting is that 75% of the customers who bought the iPhone 4S in the period did so via upgrade.  The majority of those sales were to existing iPhone owners.  In a previous blog (http://www.firstapp.com/the-future-is-mobile) I wrote about how Android is the dominating OS in the market progression towards smartphones.  I think the explanation for this success is straightforward.  The iPhone is a single line of products produced solely by one manufacturer, namely Apple.  Android in contrast is a mobile operating system, a software platform.  Android phones are produced by many manufacturers who have clearly seen the benefits of adopting a free open platform – they don’t after all have the option of using iOS which is only available for Apple devices.

The ‘Android Phone’ is in fact a family of disparate hardware devices that run a common OS.  Given the platform’s impressive adoption figures it’s worth remembering that when comparing with the iPhone.  A truer comparison would set Android against iOS although such a comparison would beg the question: “Why pitch an OS built for a single line of devices against the rest of the market?”

There were of course stands and booths of varying sizes but almost all of the companies there had a start-up or business discovery mode feel about them.  Some of the companies there were pure start-up companies, many offering middleware solutions for app development, whilst others were representing brand new divisions within existing established businesses.  What surprised me for example is that none of the larger operators had a presence there.  The nearest to that was Intel’s stand where they were showing off Intel’s new App mobile store meant for laptops – in particular the tasty looking Ultra Laptops.

It reminded me of the computer games industry some 15 or 20 years ago – burgeoning at the seams for growth, with everyone involved literally creating the industry through innovation.  The feeling was the same here – there’s very few truly established de-facto standards for development, publishing and advertising.  Lots of companies vying to disrupt, tap undiscovered market potential and to be the next big thing.  It’s an exciting place and time for an entrepreneur.

During the train journey down I noticed that a friend of mine, Rob Wilmot (@RobWilmot) was tweeting about a presentation that he was about to give on the use of LinkedIn – at the Olympia no less!  You can read his blog here: bit.ly/s7oDut.  I didn’t know that the Olympia was also hosting an event called Online Information 2011.  A much bigger event, as it turned out – quite a contrast to the Apps World event.  After tweeting back to Rob and later catching up over a builders grade strong tea, I decided to pay the Online Information exhibition a visit.

The Online Information show was much bigger, full of more established software and information businesses.  Internationals abounded.  What was lacking there, surprisingly, was the whole smartdevice and mobile revolution that was taking place in the other hall of the Olympia at Apps World.

My takeaway from this is that when these worlds collide it’s going to be an explosion of diversity and opportunity.  We’re going to see some seriously important companies rise from this collision over the next couple of years.

The smartphone (or smartdevice – if you want to include tablets) market is set for sustained significant growth over the coming years.  Take a look at the chart.  As you can see, the non-smart device part of the US install base is still the vast majority.

Interestingly, whilst iPhone as a single device platform is holding its own, you can see the emerging trajectory of Android as most smartphones manufactured now come with Google’s mobile OS.  You can extrapolate from this graph that Android is set to consume the lion’s share of this blue ocean.

The upshot of this is that powerful, connected and mobile computing is going to find its way into the hands of most people – and soon.  A lot of software that at this point only lives on PC’s or Mac’s will migrate to these devices – particularly tablet devices – based purely on their ‘always connected’ state and, significantly, the convenience of access.  And once Apps become available on TV’s this movement is going accelerate even more.

The future isn’t necessarily Orange, but it certainly is mobile.

Devices that are continually connected to the Internet, have geo-location capabilities and access to a vast array of services, are now in the hands of everyday people.  For businesses this is significant.  While the web page provided a front-facing representation of your business and the ability to sell goods and services online, a smart-phone App provides the ability to maintain a connection with a customer on a virtually omnipresent portable device that people generally carry with them most of the time.  When a customer installs your App they are opening a direct channel of communication with you that persists wherever they go.  This channel is far more immediate and dynamic that conventional web pages and email lists.  The possibilities are endless.  Apps can incorporate loyalty schemes, digital voucher codes, special offer notifications, achievement awards, competitions, appointment systems and a whole host of other schemes that provide functional value for customers and, as a result, increase engagement and retention.

At no other point in history has there been so much opportunity for businesses to connect so directly with customers and in turn to measure their own quality of service in a way that helps direct them towards continual improvement.  The Japanese have a name for it: Kaizen, which roughly translates as “improvement” or “change for the better”.  It’s a devastatingly simple philosophy, yet it’s one that has the capability to radically improve any business that adopts it.  Because of this, our App solutions all include configuration and analytic data services.  Not only can the content of a released App be modified online, with the changes reflected to clients instantly, but you can also see up-to the minute engagement and retention metrics.  We believe that the combination of high quality client App production, data services and analytics will herald in the next generation of Apps.