A report released by The Nielsen Company shows 29.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers own smartphones that run full operating systems.

The stats indicate that iPhone and Blackberry are neck in neck at 27% and Android comes in second at 22%.

Article link:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/us-smartphone-battle-heats-up/

Steve Wozniak reveals Apple’s pre-iPhone smartphone development and makes a prediction about the future of the mobile industry.

Updated 10/18/2010: It seems something was lost in the English-Dutch translation. Wozniak has now claimed that he was misquoted in the interview with De Telegraaf and that he never said that Android’s OS was superior to the iPhone’s. Wozniak clarified his thoughts on Android and the iPhone in a conversation with Engadget earlier today.

Apparently, you don’t become an Apple co-founder by being shy and reserved. This time, it’s Steve Wozniak – the other of Apple’s co-founding “two Steves” – making waves with candid comments about the tech industry, specifically targeting the company he helped to launch nearly 35 years ago.

In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Steve Wozniak reveals that Apple had collaborated in developing a smartphone with an unnamed Japanese company in 2004. While Apple had been satisfied with the product, the project was eventually dropped. Here’s what he had to say:

“Apple was satisfied with the quality but wanted something that could surprise the world. If Apple comes with a new product it must have a real breakthrough.  Companies need to wait to capture a market until they have something extremely strong.  A new product was separated from the rest of the group should be developed. In addition, developers must depart from beaten paths.”

Apple, of course, would eventually go on to release the iPhone in Jan. of 2007.

Wozniak also made a prediction that’s sure to irk Steve Jobs: Android will become the dominant smartphone platform and not the iPhone. Wozniak compared the Android operating system to Windows saying that it would succeed in winning over a larger demographic of people in spite of its flaws and inconsistencies. Wonziak indicated Android’s more expansive features and openness as being its primary advantages over the iPhone.

“The iPhone has very few weak points,” he said “There are no serious complaints or issues. When it comes to quality, the iPhone leads the way. Apple has shown the world what direction we’re going. Android phones do come with more options, though.”

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-co-founder-says-android-will-beat-the-iphone/?news=123

Tools to help you build and publish a competitive app, with no programming knowledge required.

You want your business to get in on the hot iPhone app trend.

Problem: You can’t shell out thousands of dollars for a developer, and you don’t want to learn Cocoa, the iPhone’s programming system.

Solution: Have an online service build one for you!

There are now some great tools available to help you build and publish a competitive app, with no programming knowledge required — and at a fraction of the cost of hiring a developer.

From coding to submitting to updating, these services do the technical work for you — all you need is a creative vision.

Many of these services do the same thing: they take your online content and integrate it into an app. The packaging and style all vary, so visit their sites to find which one suits your tastes and budget.

AppMakr
AppMakr is a good option for a Web site or blog looking to create a basic app, according to Guy Kawasaki. This website takes your online feeds and turns them into an app for you.

All you need to provide is your chosen feed (blog, RSS, Twitter stream, etc.), a few graphics, and some design choices, and they take control of the developing and submission process from there. You can even make the decision to "monetize" your app by selecting advertisers or choosing to charge for the download.

Cost: $199 for AppMakr to publish your app, $499 for you to publish it under your own brand. Phone-based support is also available during the creation phase of your app development, at $120 an hour.

Swebapps
Create an app in seven steps with Swebapps. What could be easier than "drag and drop"?

From their website:

Step 1. Select 4, 6, or 8 buttons
Step 2. Drag and Drop buttons on to phone.
Step 3. Customize button images if needed.
Step 4. Click on button and enter content.
Step 5. Submit for development.
Step 6. Create account.
Step 7. Finalize.

Swebapps also provides tools to track your analytics and update your app after its been published to the App Store.

Cost: Creating an app through Swebapps costs a one-time fee of $50 per button (minimum $200), and a $25/month hosting fee.

My App Builder
My App Builder is a tool that takes your content and turns it into an app for you for a low monthly hosting fee. Bonus: that monthly membership cost gives you the freedom to create as many apps as you want, with only a small publishing fee each time.

Whether you want to use your blog posts, RSS feed, videos, or Twitter stream, My App Builder will turn your information into an app. All you have to provide are your images, content, and a vision of how you want it to flow.

Cost: $29 per month, and $20 per app submission.

iSites
iSites, which just launched, is another app builder that integrates your social feeds seamlessly into an app. And, according to their website, you can do it in 10 minutes.

Provide your chosen feeds, customize your app with some design choices, and iSites does the rest for you. They promise to "take care of the app store submission in less than 24 hours."

In addition, iSites offers the ability to easily make changes to your app and see the results in real-time, and the apps work on both the iPhone and Android platforms.

Cost: $25 per app; $99 (per year) if you choose to monetize by integrating with AdMob.

TapLynx
TapLynx is another aggregator for your online feeds. The platform used by such online news sources as All Things D and Variety, TapLynx is elegantly designed and offers more versatility than other simple aggregators, and it comes with the ability to embed video.

According to MacWorld, "if your goal is to create a content-centric app with text, photos, and videos, the framework might just provide a smart shortcut. And since TapLynx supports sponsorship, display ads, and video pre-roll ads, monetizing your app should be pretty doable, too."

Cost: $599 for the ‘Enterprise Package’ — with 16 customizable tabs, search features, video, etc.

AppBreeder
AppBreeder offers you a little more complexity than other app builders, as well as an app that can be used on the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android platforms.

If you just want something basic, you can pick from 11 App Kits, ranging from templates like "Business" to "Restaurant" to "Tour." AppBreeder personalizes and builds it for your purposes, then publishes it to the App Store for $99.99, if you allow ads.

Creating a custom app or adding a customized gadget ups the price significantly, but it is still likely to be cheaper than hiring a developer, and you get a better app.

Cost: Nothing to build, $99.99 to publish a basic app, and starting at $1,499 for a custom app with gadgets.

GameSalad
If you think an iPhone game would be a good option for your business, GameSalad is a great platform to easily develop your very own game, with no coding required.

According to their website, "GameSalad is the world’s most advanced tool for non-programmers… Build games visually using a drag-and-drop interface along with a robust behavior system."

Cost: For $99 per year, you get unlimited access to their game creation tool and publishing options.

AppIncubator
AppIncubator is slightly different from standard app builders: It’s a mobile app that allows you to submit ideas for apps.

You download the app, then submit your idea. If you want to get more detailed, you can use the storyboard tool on the website to describe exactly how you want the app to look and function.

If the people at MEDL Mobile like your idea, they’ll develop and market it, and share a portion of the profits with you.

Granted, this isn’t a great way to create your business’s main app — but if you have a unique idea for an app and want to see it come to fruition with little effort on your part, this is the way to go.

Cost: Free, with potential profit.

For those who are familiar with Flash
For those who are familiar with coding in Adobe ActionScript 3: You can now develop an iPhone app.

In October, Adobe announced that its to-be-released Flash Professional CS5 will come with an iPhone app packager, which will let users publish projects to run as native apps on the iPhone, according to Adobe’s Developer website.

This will be ideal for people who are not familiar with the Mac Cocoa development platform but have Flash-development experience.

Cost: TBD

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217545

IN3 – Inspect, Innovate, Integrate

The presentation we made for Digital Now 2010 can be found here. Below is further detail and links to products and services mentioned in the presentation.

Backing up in the CLOUD

Amazon S3 Services

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. To help ensure durability, Amazon S3 PUT and COPY operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once stored, Amazon S3 helps maintain the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If corruption is detected, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.

Amazon S3 US – only $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
First 5 GB Storage FREE

FREE data uploaded until June 30, 2010! $0.10 per GB of data uploaded thereafter
$0.15 per GB of data downloaded

Jungle Disk for Business – Various Pricing Options
http://www.jungledisk.com/business/

Jungle Disk for Personal- Various Pricing Options
http://www.jungledisk.com/personal/

CloudBerryLab Backup – $29.99
http://cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?id=39

DropBox – $99/year for 50gb
Essential tips for every Dropbox user

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/backup_and_collaboration/

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html

Are you taking advantage of the new NCOA USPS regulations?

If not, read Johns post from last year’s Digital Now presentation.

Business Intelligence

This year we demonstrated and mentioned a couple of technologies:

• Oracle’s OBIEE platform which is an enterprise solution, more information can be found here
• Microsoft’s ProClarity which we use as a front end to our Data Warehouse, download an evaluation version here
• Microsoft’s free Data Mining Add-in for Excel. Last year we did a presentation on Microsoft’s Data Mining Add-in for Excel and the links for that post are here