Tag Archives: mobile

Why transcoders simply don’t work for your mobile eCommerce solution any longer

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transcodingA very popular approach over the last five years was to hire a company to transcode your commerce site into a mobile experience. While this niche play was warranted five years ago it is no longer viable for a serious mobile channel presence. Today, most vendors, especially IBM and its business partners are building web applications with responsive design technology; so with a single code base you can target the different channels with the appropriate content for the specific device. This is a game changer for companies taking their mobile presence seriously. The latest WebSphere Commerce Feature Pack 6 is now compatible with Worklight. Meaning the responsive design and source code are being re-used on top of a services layer for optimal code re-use and content management.

Here are some key differentiation’s between a transcoder model and a responsive design model like Worklight.

Content

  • Responsive design model can have targeted content to a device that is optimized by the precision marketing engine on the commerce site.
  • Alternative screen layouts based on device, targeted specifically for a device and a mobile experience.
  • Precision marketing can now take into account things like device location, the person, and the device when recommending content and products.

Performance

  • Since the code is not going through a transcoder you should see a performance gain.
  • Because the code is running on the server and not being transcoded you can implement a clear caching strategy that is optimized for each device.

Management

  • Because the transcoder essentially “scrapes” the screen to create the mobile experience most eCommerce platforms do not have management tools to optimize the scraping methods. They are usually done at the JSP/Code layer – out of reach of a marketing person or business tool user.
  • Having the ability to target specific devices using business user tooling is key. A business user can define the rules behind the specific device and ultimately have total control of the mobile channel experience.

If you want to learn more about this make sure you sign up for the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville or Monaco. There will be many demonstrations about the latest mobile technologies in the Smarter Commerce space.

Developers: 4Shared offers $5000 a month in contest!

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4Shared, a Virtual drive and file storage company, is offering an integrated file management solution that allows users to access and save their content from their desktops and mobile devices.

4Shared users receive 15 GB of available space for free on their virtual drive, an amount considerably greater than any competitor. The space capacity allows personal and business users the flexibility to choose 4Shared as their secure backup drive for the storage of important data, photo, or video files. 4Shared Desktop is a browser-based user interface features a clean design that is customizable to fit user preferences. It features time-saving functions such as simple and fast drag-and-drop storage of hundreds of files at once.

4Shared is now offering a $5000 a month award to the most innovative application that uses their API’s. This sounds like a great way to get some extra money and create something cool for the web or a mobile device. The company is boasting its API’s (link here) to be used by developers to create applications for the masses. The API’s look very straightforward and their wiki has a lot of nice samples to get even the most novice developer up and running very quickly. On the main wiki page they have basic developer setup instructions for all of the major platforms (iOS, Android, Symbian, etc). My choice would be Android since you can pretty much start for free and Android is becoming more and more popular. They recommend using Eclipse and the Android SDK.

“Offering our API for use by developers allows us to give an even broader range of customers access to our secure and fast storage solution,” said Mr. Lunkov

File storage and retrieval are becoming very popular for mobile phones. While there are a lot of similar services out there today, I really think starting with the developer is a great idea – that is where innovation begins and what better way than to have a $5000 a month contest!

Fwd: IBM's mobile strategy: Anybody but HP or Microsoft

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“But the format is a potentially a substitute for the PC in many cases. I’ve talked to CIOs who think they might be able to replace 20 percent of laptops with tablets over the next few years. So the hierarchy of Windows and Office that we accept as our environment will change,” he says. – Kevin Cavanaugh

IBM’s mobile strategy: Anybody but HP or Microsoft | The Industry Standard – InfoWorld.

Mobile Web versus native Applications

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Heiko Behrens has an excellent article and a presentation (also below) he gave at Mobile Tech Conference 2010 on this subject – well worth the read!

I think it is very relevant to the Domino community, especially after the feedback from LoLA.  If you are a business partner or developer in the mobile and web space you should check this out.

Plattformübergreifende App-Entwicklung (ein Vergleich) – MobileTechCon 2010

POLL: Mobile development, native or HTML 5 based?

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A timely post on InfoWorld made me think of a poll that would be interesting to see how the general community feels on the subject.  I do have my own opinions however; after playing with the Android SDK and creating some basic applications for the device.  In short, until we get JavaScript libraries like jQTouch for all major frameworks like Dojo and JQuery or HTML supports such API’s it will be hard to completely develop with HTML 5 and JavaScript alone.  However, I do think HTML 5 + JavaScript should be the right answer in the long run but today I would have to go with option 3 – both Native and HTML 5 for the development choice. The good news is most of the development for platforms like Android use Eclipse for both web and native so you can essentially learn and develop everything for free!

What do you think?

[poll id="12"]

All web developers, please use "email", "number", and "url" types for input!

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I can’t tell you how nice the custom keyboard on the iPhone is for sites that are using type=”number”, type=”email” and type=”url” on their forms.  You can check out this article I found that explains all of the different keyboards the iPhone supports.  I also found another good article that hits on a few more nice to knows in the mobile web space.