Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2013 Santa Clara -Agenda overview and discounted tickets

Computing is changing inside out. The world is now the platform. ARE is now AWE. Welcome to the Augmented World!

Augmented World Expo (AWE), is the world’s largest gathering of designers, engineers and business leaders dedicated to solving real world problems in the Augmented World.

The way we experience the world will never be the same. We no longer interact with computers. We interact with the world. A set of emerging interrelated technologies such as augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, smart things, cloud computing, big data, and 3D printing are completely changing the way we interact with people, places and things. These technologies create a digital layer that empowers humans to experience the world in a more advanced, engaging, and productive way.

Augmented World Expo will showcase the best in augmented experiences covering all aspects of life: health, education, emergency response, art, media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, brand engagement, travel, automotive, and urban design. It will be the largest ever exposition to bring together technologies that will change our lives and the world.

In 2012, the third annual ARE event, over 600 buyers and builders of AR in entertainment, media, education, healthcare, government, tourism, automotive, sports and other vertical markets, united in the 2 day must-attend event in Silicon Valley.

Augmented Reality.ORG, the producer of AWE is proud to announce the maturing of an edgy conference about augmented reality into the world’s first expo about the augmented world.  If you loved ARE you are going to find Augmented World Expo the most important event of 2013.

AWE 2013 invites today’s technology leaders to learn, network, and share their expertise in technologies that change the way we interact with the world.  Presentations should cover a range of emerging technologies such as augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, smart things, cloud computing, big data, and 3D printing. Presenters can choose from a set of topics and industries that address the latest trends, strategies and business growth opportunities of the augmented world.

AWE 2013 will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California, on June 4-5, 2013 and is expected to draw 1,000 attendees. In addition to the presentation tracks, AWE 2013 will include mind-blowing keynotes by industry leaders on the main stage including my own talk (together with Catchoom CTO Tomasz Adamek) on the Mobile-Cloud Continuum a.k.a. how to get the most out of the cloud from your mobile device.

With the proven track record and the tremendous momentum in the Augmented Reality industry and interrelated technologies, AWE 2013 will set a new record and expected to draw 1000 attendees that seek to leverage augmented reality into a productive, sustainable and entertaining new medium. AWE 2013 will spotlight inspiring keynotes by industry luminaries, and feature more than a 100 speakers from leading Augmented World companies in more than 30 hours. Organized into business, technology and production tracks, the conference program is designed to address topics such as:

• current augmented world market scope and what’s expected in the next 5 years
• latest augmented world innovations, engines and tools
• showcases and postmortems of landmark augmented world projects
• how to leverage AW to advance your brand, attract and keep your customers
• how to build successful campaigns and products that will delight users.

The exhibition floor will unite all the leading providers of Augmented World services and products, and offer a fantastic opportunity to witness demonstrations, speak with the architects of these experiences and network all participants in this exciting industry. Last year’s successful activities such as the ARt Gala, AR Start up launch pad, and The Auggies (best AR demo awards) will return to delight attendees. The new Augmented Future plenary session will feature ground breaking ideas that will change the augmented world.

You can get a discounted ticket here by using the following discount code AWE3CATCHOOM for a saving of $200 USD before May 17!

Lessons from GDC San Francisco -Game Developers Conference 2013 Wrap Up

SAN FRANCISCO - I had the privilege of joining a throng of 20,000 attendees at the GDC in San Francisco this March for one full week and it gave me an opportunity for a first "deep dive" into gaming. Despite having skirted around gaming in mobile before (on a conceptual level or looking at gamification of commercial apps), this was the first opportunity to see at first hand what was making the gaming world quiver with excitement.

Overall, I was surprised that it was not quite as wacky an event as some had led me to believe. Mobile gaming is big business today, a $6bn business to be precise, and there was more of a corporate flavour to GDC than I expected. The most interesting talks however (with the exception of the very cool Mars Rover simulator talk by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab) were by the non-corporate game studios.

Supercell was a great example, with a brilliantly delivered and informative session on winning formulas developed for "Hay Day" and "Clash of Clans" games. A key lesson from this session was "don't release your game early". Other points from other sessions were to disguise the freemium nature of the game with lots of easy purchases, something King.com has taken to heart with their very successful CandyCrush saga. Tommy Palm from King gave an impressive talk and it was clear that Candy Crush has earned plenty of kudos amongst the gaming community.

One lesson I learnt for the future is how the (now separate) Game Connection event can be a much better forum to meet and do business with many of the companies at GDC. The problem with GDC is that, like many MMEs (Massive Multi-attendee Events), it is very dispersive and the seminars, while interesting, did not foster networking.

The gaming industry knows how to throw a good networking event, so a special shout out goes to GMIC and Kabam for organising some great post-GDC conference day events!

Mobile World Congress 2013 -Agenda of Side Events

BARCELONA -There is a staggering number of side events at the Mobile World Congress this year, and you can expect as much life outside the congress walls as within.

Some events I have signed up for to date are:

1. Innovation on the Fringe (part of the Mobile Fringe Festival) where startups will be demo-ing their wares in a fast pitch environment

2. Mobile Sunday Barcelona taking place at the Moritz Brewhouse, now in its 3rd edition and promising to be a great pre-event hangout for a very mixed crowd of delegates

3. TechCrunch Mobile Meetup on Wednesday 27th at the Telefonica Auditorium should feature a select group of local and international mobile startups

4. WipJam Party also on Wednesday at La Fianna Bar (expect this one to be heaving and definitely the place to be to connect with savvy developers)

5. MLove Party on Thursday 28th at Ocaña in Plaza Real (great venue, so promises to be a great party)

I'll keep this blog post up-to-date with news and links up until the MWC dates.

Mobile World Congress 2013 Agenda -MWC Plan & Expectations

BARCELONA- With the MWC only a few weeks away, the questions that are on the minds of those following the congress are:

-Who will be at the MWC?

-Who will not be there?

-What will be the buzz of the show this year?

This year I will be attending the congress for the fifth (or is it sixth?) time and the biggest insight I get of what is happening in mobile is to see the variations at the MWC year on year.

Last year, I summarised the show and stated how innovation was not top of the agenda. This year, I can see that expectations are pretty high about new device releases. These miss the point. MWC is NOT a gadget show. Until 3 years ago, it really was all about operators and infrastructure (and the penning of mega-size deals at the show). 

Then content became king, and what used to be a minnow within the mobile ecosystem came to have a voice. This year, developers and content owners really will rule the show -just one developer conference, WipJam, had over 3000 attendees registering. 

So, who will be at the MWC?

-Most big names you'd expect -Samsung is expected to have a giant stand again this year, Microsoft will be touting its wares prominently as well and ZTE and Huawei are expected to be present en masse as well.

Who will not be there?

-Blackberry is rumoured to not have a stand this year, Apple will be absent again and Google´s Eric Schmidt will not be there either (though presumably Android will still have a large exhibition space like last year).

What will be the buzz be?

-Overall tablets should draw more attention than smartphones (but this is not a gadget show!), Mozilla will launch its own Firefox OS and Windows 8 will get the corporate market excited if some good devices are on show (consumers may not drool over Windows 8 just yet due to the lack of appealing apps in Marketplace). 

Apart from all this, I am really hoping that cool apps and services will get lots of attention at the show by showcasing inspirational innovation -I'd like to see more about contextual search (visual search and voice search) and hybrid solutions (for example, car apps that connect, M2M style, to the car´s onboard computer).

RIP QR Codes –why code-based scanning will give way to image recognition for mobile apps

Two quicks facts to kick things off: QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) were not designed for mobile advertising. They were created by the automotive industry to track vehicles as they flowed through the logistics chain.

While a significant advance at the time (1994) because they improved the scanning effectiveness (compared to barcodes) and could hold 100 times more data, today QR codes draw mixed reactions from consumers and developers alike.

According to Comscore’s survey of December 2011, only 20% of Americans use QR codes (this drops to 12% in Spain). The bottom line is that QR codes are not practical for average consumers to use and they are not the best way  for advertisers to connect with their customers.

Ever tried scanning a QR Code? You will need both a steady hand and some trial and error in finding the best angle for scanning. You will also need to find a Code Scanner app and download it to your phone, as well as to know how to use it! The barriers are significant. Not to mention the fact that QR codes can be hacked for malicious purposes, as happened in Russia.

The new way of recognizing images within adverts (in posters, magazine ads or on packaged goods) is by Image Recognition. Catchoom (based in Spain) is leading the way in this, using a Cloud-based recognition system to achieve image matching in under 0.5 seconds. The user simply points their smartphone’s camera at the image (for example, a logo), Catchoom processes the information with its patented image recognition algorithms, and hey presto! In less than a second, you get a weblink, an image or a video appearing on the phone screen. Compared to QR Codes, the technology really kicks ass, because what are known as “false positives” are vastly reduced. This means, around 99% of users pointing at an image to be recognized will get a perfect match and see the information the publisher has created.

The future has arrived...RIP QR codes.

Augmented Reality –5 Reasons why AR will triumph in 2013 and beyond

According to the Chinese calendar, 2013 is the Year of the Snake, a year where “all things are possible”.

It should come as no surprise that 2013 is also tipped to be a big year for Augmented Reality (AR), where the range of possibilities for this technology should truly come to life. AR is already going beyond the traditional gimmicky gaming use cases and has started to transform how we consume printed media, interact with museum exhibits and advertise via smartphones and tablets.

Here are five reasons why AR will grow even more in 2013:

1. Smartphones’ processing power has increased dramatically, with quad core 1.5GHz+ processors becoming more commonplace and tipped to represent 15%-20% of the market in 2013

2. Growth of the market share of tablets (and the high degree of user engagement with them). There are an estimated 240m tablets in use (according to NPD DisplaySearch). AR works beautifully on tablets thanks to the large display area and will help to "cross-sell" AR to smartphones as well.

3.The majority of readers consume news and media content in digital format today but still enjoy interacting with printed news and magazines via their smartphone. The easiest way to do so today is through AR. Esquire magazine already tried this in 2009. Ikea Germany's 2013 catalogue allows readers to view 3D animations of furniture items and so bring flat-pack to life.

4.We have just only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities for augmented reality-type innovations. From advertising to property management and the healthcare sector, the use cases for AR are infinite. In healthcare, for example, being able to recognize skin diseases by simply pointing the smartphone’s camera at the affected skin area would by itself save millions in public healthcare costs (not to mention, save lives).

5. Mobile gaming is huge. So huge in fact, that the traditional console-based gaming sector will soon be overtaken by mobile-based gaming. We are no longer talking gimmicks. We are talking of a USD 20bn$ industry. Augmented reality gaming is carving out a good chunk of this revenue –even Angry Birds has its own AR-based mobile game. More will follow.

NFC Payments Trial in London -some experiences

NFC is yet to become a mainstream technology option for payments, though interest remains high and, slowly but surely, an increasing number of points of sale are becoming NFC-compliant.

NFC chipmaker Gemalto recently conducted an NFC challenge, where they let loose two bloggers with a set of NFC challenges in London.

Here are their main conclusions/experiences:

• Contactless is taking off! Both bloggers were able to survive for whole days at a time using only NFC, which would have been impossible even a year ago.

• NFC has a strong urban bias: Contactless coffees and Coca-Colas are easy to come by in Central London, but the further from the city you get, the more difficult it is to use the technology. However, this is to be expected of any technology in its infancy.

• Some vendors need educating on contactless as much as their customers. Occasionally, staff in stores that accepted NFC weren’t even aware of it.

• There’s a real lack of signage around NFC. This means consumers may be missing out on the option to pay by contactless simply because they’re unaware their local sandwich shop accepts it, and a lot of people confuse the NFC logo with the symbol for WiFi.

• There’s a lot of enthusiasm for NFC out there – the bloggers  saw thousands of tweets and plenty of challenges and advice from the Twittersphere.

If you’re interested in reading more about the project you can do so over at the Gemalto Blog or check out the video over on Mobile Industry Review. And who knows – next year the Contactless Challenge could be coming to a city near you!

Mobile Offers for Retail & Restaurants -Infographic

Mobile is omnipresent. It also fits in very nicely with retailers and restaurants as a driver of footfall. Who hasn't booked a restaurant from their smartphone? Combine the practicality of making reservations "on-the-go" with benefiting from special promotions and discounts, and it is no wonder that apps like OpenTable, BookaTable and La Fourchette are taking the world by storm.

The Infographic below (courtesy of those good chaps at Milennial Media) gives some more facts around this. One key statistic is that over 60% of retails and restaurants brands are now using mobile location-based targeting for their campaigns. Food for thought...

Barcelona Mobile World Capital -the New silicon Valley of Europe?

BARCELONA -I recently gave an interview to Michael Tangeman from Media Mindshare and creator of the Barcelona Tech Talk blog about the up-and-coming tech scene in Barcelona, recently named Mobile World Capital by the GSMA (creators of the Mobile World Congress).

Here below is the full interview:

Barcelona has changed dramatically in recent years. What do you see as the key elements in that transformation?

There’s been a lot of improvement in Barcelona to facilitate the startup environment, a lot of support from public institutions and there’s now a fairly decent network of incubators on university campuses.

It’s also a good place to attract talent for a startup. When I interview people from outside, they already want to live and work in Barcelona. They’re attracted to the lifestyle here. It’s a more desirable location than other European cities. On that basis, I’d say if you were to choose where to set up a startup, Barcelona is the place.

Barcelona is now a major tech events hub. What kind of impact has that had on the tech scene here?

When I talk to people from elsewhere, they associate Barcelona most with Mobile World Congress. They know it’s based in Barcelona and is having a positive impact especially for the startup culture. More entrepreneurs are looking at Barcelona and increasingly startups are setting up here, especially mobile startups.

As head of Biz Dev for a global content publisher, you deal with developers of apps and content a lot … is there a strong and sizeable native developer talent pool here?

There’s a local talent shortage, but you’ll find good talent here if you look hard. One of the challenges is to get developers who speak good English. There’d be a big improvement if the school curriculum made English compulsory. At the university level, there are some good business schools and engineering programs, but there’s a long way to go to getting the overall educational infrastructure in place.

Barcelona is competing with other European cities as a tech and innovation hub … how does it stack up?

In terms of location, Barcelona is a great hub for European transport. We have the port and airport connections are great, but internationally we need to get better air connections to the U.S., that’s more challenging.

London, for example, has great energy and scale which Barcelona still doesn’t have. One of the things that could help change that would be more VC investors. Once we get local VC funds focused on mobile pure plays we’ll begin to see a rapid transformation.

Among VCs here, there’s still a perception that mobile is very risky. VC funds will invest in PC-based startups relatively easily — they’re more familiar, more comfortable with desktop-based technologies. But in London, as recently as 2008 they were also still wary of investing in mobile pure plays. That changed in London and it will change in Spain.

What’s lacking? What’s missing in the value chain or the tech culture here?

There are a lot of challenges. One is the bureaucracy, it’s very out-dated and there are still obstacles to creating an LLC, the process still tends to be very long. That’s why there’s this whole system of “gestores” in place, to deal with the bureaucracy.

The entire attitude to risk needs to change, as well. It’s a risk-averse culture and if you fail at something you can be branded as a failure. Entrepreneurs thrive on risk-taking and intelligent gambles and they need to know that when they fail they won’t be singled out as ‘black sheep’ for the rest of their lives.

In terms of talent, there’s a relatively low level of mobility of people, gaining experience by moving from one job to another or one city to another. People tend to stay put here. One way to change that might be for people to get experience in large companies outside of Spain and bring that knowledge and experience back here. But, getting them to return once they have that experience is another story …

How do you see Barcelona’s tech scene going forward, what kinds of changes do you see as necessary?

To help stimulate innovation and growth here, there’s a lot that could be done in terms of e-Government initiatives, digitalization of government services, an area in which local government seems to be hanging back. I’d like to see government take a leap straight to mobile — most people have smartphones and there’s a relatively high smartphone penetration here. So, it would make sense to focus on that area.

There’s also room for startups linked to industry verticals and e-government initiatives and incubator programs could help to stimulate that. There are extensive medical centers and infrastructure and large conferences associated with health care and medicine take place here. There’s a lot of health knowledge and there really is room for a health care incubator.

Another sector could be textiles and clothing, even room for a tourism and travel-related incubator – mobile is perfect for travel and tourism, the hospitality sector. Getting these industry sectors to understand how they can mobilize their services through mobile apps is the challenge. An e-government push to mobilize e-government services could lead the way and show how that can be done.

Mobile Payments -the mobile payments jackpot

Mobile Payments Today (web here) produced a great Infographic that summarizes nicely the current mobile payments ecosystem. From PayPal to Square, to iZettle, most of the current players are represented here. 

As I have covered in previous posts, this area of mobile is heating up and the stakes are very high. As Mobile Payments Today states "...the expectation is that a large percentage of the $6.2 trillion in credit card transactions is going to migrate to mobile".

Expect a new start-up to join the fray every week...

Responsive Design for Mobile-Tools, Techniques, Future Trends

(Guest post from Magnus Jern, CEO of Golden Gekko).

Next to the Mobile First philosophy (see previous article) Responsive Design (according to Wikipedia) also referred to as Liquid Design is probably the most talked about trend in mobile and web user experience design. The term was coined by Ethan Marcotte in 2010 and the principle is simply that you design one web site that adapts to any device using modern web development methods including CSS3 and image scaling.

Examples of Responsive Design

Although there are thousands of examples of web sites based on responsive design today there is only a limited number of big companies that have adopted it and usually more as an experience or only partially. The most mentioned being the Boston Globe which displays beautifully on devices ranging from a big screen TV to a Blackberry Curve. Other examples include Starbucks and Google News (partial). Ethan also has a list of other great sites here. To get a basic understanding of how it works simply open up one of these sites in a browser and reduce and increase the browser window and see how the page changes and try accessing it from your mobile. Then compare it to a traditional site such as NYTimes.com (the owner of Boston Globe).

So is responsive design a hype or solution?

Opinions vary. At the moment the main proponents of responsive design are web front-end developers as it puts them in a powerful position and potentially removes the need for separate sites and teams and they can claim to support all channels. On the other hand only a few major websites have fully embraced the methodology and some like Linkedin simply believe that it delivers a bad user experience for their users according to an article in Venture Beat. So what are the pros and cons?

Pros 

• Easier and quicker to manage one project and web site than multiple
• Reduces cost of development and maintenance by only maintaining one infrastructure and one team
• Typically will work automatically on new devices, e.g. tablet without customisation
• Simple technical solution to a common issue
• Could improve SEO as all traffic will be directed to one URL rather than multipe, e.g. www.website.com, m.website.com and touch.website.com
• No need for device recognition
• Read more pros in this article in Society of Digital Agencies

 Cons 

• Complex to plan and design which may actually lead to a higher cost and longer time to market than separate channel
• Data size of pages become very big for a mobile device both in terms of download time and memory used (see article about Mobile First)
• Rescaling for mobile devices typically generates very long pages requiring lots of scrolling which is a bad mobile user experience
• Difficult to generate revenue from ads Images are typically optimised for the device with the highest resolution
• Use cases for mobile and a PC web can be very different
• Most common denominator between browsers means you typically end up doing trade-offs to support all channels
• User interaction between different devices is very different on a touch screen device from a screen controlled by a mouse or remote control (TV)
• Requires the same amount of testing but needs to be done across a lot more devices every when you make an update.

So what’s lies ahead in the future?
The reason that most major companies have not embraced responsive design is that although it’s technically straight forward, it really complicates the layout of pages and information architecture a lot. Designers have to plan for most common denominator between different devices which will usually lead to a compromise. At the same time any website should be as responsive as possible without compromising the user experience for bigger screens. Both Amazon and Facebook are examples of partially responsive design that scales certain elements but not all. One of the reasons to separate mobile and web is also that the use cases are very different. If you are standing in a clothing store accessing their website then you are most likely to want to find out about something related to the customer touch points in the store such as price comparison, offers, where your size of a product is available, etc. If you are sitting at home browsing then you’re primary use case is more likely to be browsing through the products. I believe that the Mobile First methodology is a more important principle than Responsive Design as it forces you to focus on the core use cases and enhance over time.

 (Image courtesy of white-fire.co.uk)

Mobile Media -Portable Speaker Solutions for Smartphones

Spotify's Premium service extended the possibility (and popularity) of having all of your music available when and how you want it via your smartphone. For avid travellers (more and more of us) having a decent speaker solution to listen to your media (whether from your iPad, smartphone or laptop) when you are away from home is more and more important.

I had the pleasure of testing Vibe-Tribe's Troll and Troll 2.0 (pictured above) products recently and was impressed with the step forward portable speakers have made. But, first things first. 

The Troll (pictured below and priced EUR 59) is a portable speaker that connects via a USB cable to your media device and can be operated with a remote control. It includes a FM radio (ingeniously, the USB cable acts as antenna). 

The speaker weighs 330g and the output power is 3W. This is where the clever part comes. The Troll range uses patented vibration resonance technology (initially developed for the US Navy) that dramatically boosts the sound output from the speakers. The base of the speaker transmits the vibration emitted to the surface and object below, effectively converting the object below it into its own sub-woofer. Place the Troll on wood, and you get the bass sounds. Place it on glass, and you get the crisp high tones. I tried different surfaces, and what worked best was a wooden cupboard. The hollow interior created a rounded stereo effect to the sound. One word of warning: the Troll works using vibration. This means the speaker moves little by little. Watch out, or it can drop from the surface if placed on the edge.

The Troll 2.0 (priced EUR 89) has greater power output (10W) and comes with Bluetooth. I found the Troll 2.0 to be my favourite- connecting my iPhone via Bluetooth was very convenient, as the phone acted as a better remote than an infra-red since the Bluetooth doesn't need line-of-sight. But what about the sound you ask? The Troll speakers have a circumference of 5cm and a height of 5 cm. This is small. However, given the size, the speakers do a great job. Sure, you get sound distortion at high volumes but at medium volumes this is barely perceptible. Playback on movies works great and really helps convert your movie/viewing experience on your tablet or laptop.

Plenty of attention to detail has gone into Vibe-Tribe's speakers, and the quality of the packaging helps create a great first impression (see photo below).

 You can see a demo video at this link to see the products in action and hear their sound (Note: Video is in Italian): Vibe-Tribe Video. All in all, a recommended buy if you are looking for a mobile media speaker solution with a great price to quality ratio.

Mobile Money and Mobile Commerce -is now the inflection point? PART 2

In the second part of this post, you can find the rest of the Infographics on Mobile Money produced by Sapient.

The first in the series (below) highlights how the world's "unbanked" are acting as a key driver globally for the rise of mobile banking services in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The trend is for more mobile banking services to be launched, providing key facilities like cash transfer and Point-Of-Sale payments, with big corporate players getting in on the act.

The final Infographic shows a dramatic increase in m-payment users in the year from 2010 to 2011 and the likely increase in NFC-enabled devices and m-payment purchases.Privacy remains a key blocker in adoption today, though as the generation gap shortens (eventually) between the digital-natives and the analog-natives, this is likely to change.

Mobile Money and Mobile Commerce -is now the inflection point?

Back in 2008, I posted my very first entry related to mobile money by blogging about the rise of the mobile wallet here .

Progress has been painfully slow since then, both because of squabbling between the key stakeholders over who owns which part of the ecosytem and also because of the failure to address consumer concern over payment security.

It is inevitable though that mobile money will grow, both because of the increasing convenience of this payment payment (especially for the "unbanked population") and also because of changing consumer attitudes (electronic payment, even on mobile, is safer than carrying cash in your pocket).

Terrapinn produced this nice Infographic last month summarising the history of mobile payments from 1997 up  to today.2011 marked a significant turning point in the evolution of mobile payments with Google launching their Mobile Wallet, making payments simpler (See more in Google's video here).

There is a whole lot more to mobile money than just mobile wallets and a lot of talk is based around mobile payments, especially those using contactless or NFC technology. As Apple´s iOS6 gets set for launch and the new iPhone is tipped to be NFC-enabled, we will see a raft of new mobile payment players rushing to claim their stake in this space.

Sapient has produced a very detailed Infographic with some interesting background information about mobile payments. I have edited the graphic into readable chunks and you can see the first one below. Susbequent ones will follow in a next post.

Location Based Games poised for growth -Turf, Paparazzi and Shadow Cities lead the charge

Location-based gaming is once again being tipped as a significant area of growth opportunity, with the advances in popularity of both Foursquare and mobile games (driven by the inevitable Angry Birds) fuelling renewed interest.

I dedicate a chapter in Part 2 on my book "Location Aware Applications" on "Consumer Applications" to Location-based games and include reference to pioneers like MyTown.

San Francisco-based Turf plans to capture some new fans of the genre with a location-aware version of Monopoly set on top of Foursquare. Emily Price in Mashable.com describes the game dynamics as follows:

Purchases are made not by price and instead by chance. Buying a location involves spinning a virtual slot machine. Each spin costs a certain amount of coins. Stopping on a “Win” square will win you the location from its current owner; stopping on a “Lose” means you’ll have to try again.

The odds of winning a spin and the cost of a spin vary depending on the property in question and what its current owner has done to it.

Properties can be enhanced for instance with additional floors. Each floor makes your property more valuable, earns you more money in rent, and makes it harder for someone to steal it from you. Construction takes time though, adding a new floor to your acquisition will take at least a few hours.

According to founder Michael Tseng he plans to create a fully fledged gaming company based on the success of Turf, which he says as having a strong community element.

Shadow Cities and Paparazzi are other location-based games that are looking to cash in on the renewed interest in this area though some analysts believe that the greatest challenge for gaming companies is to build a sizeable community of their own. Success may lie in leveraging existing communities rather than recreating them from scratch.

Taking tablets into the workplace -new security paradigm required?

I previously covered the rise of enterprise tablet apps as the mobile computing solution of the future within my blog here: Tablets as the new PC.

This raises some very valid questions around data security, especially when personal tablets are brought into the workplace (a stopgap solution which is a reality today as companies gear up for the future).

Recent research by Gemalto shows that breaches of tablet security are one of the key things keeping CIOs awake at night. Other concerns include managing cost cuts as IT budgets are reduced, though lightweight mobile solutions adopting a SaaS model can provide some great value-for-money vis-a-vis traditional Pc-based over-engineered software systems.

You can see the full Infographic below with some interesting detail of regional differences in attitude to security in general and tablet usage in particular.

Post-acquisition Tuenti expands beyond Spain

MADRID - I originally blogged about Tuenti in April 2008 here. Over four years on from then, and things have evolved dramatically for the Spanish start-up (with international founders).

Tuenti now has over 13 million users and belongs to Telefonica (acquired in 2010). Far from maintaining its traditional approach of "acquire startup and shove under doormat", Telefonica has embraced the potential of Tuenti and has taken it under the umbrella of Telefonica Digital.

Make no mistake, with the new Telefonica Digital division, the European operator has big plans to drive revenue and traffic growth from its numerous digital assets (including Jajah, acquired in 2009).For example, it launched the "Tu Me" free voice and messaging app earlier this year. Now Tuenti is opening up to English,  Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Slovak, and Czech audiences.

Monetizing social networks is no simple task when a large part of the audience accesses the service via mobile instead of web (witness Facebook), but in the short term it can open up new markets for Telefonica and drive business across its digital asset. Also, Tuenti prides itself on its additional levels of privacy security, in terms of both sharing and identity, which will allow it to offer an edge compared to other social networking services.

Market for mobile apps in Spain

BARCELONA -With 51% penetration of smartphones, Spain holds the second position worldwide (after UK) according to Comscore (see chart above) in terms of smartphone share.Germany, with 37% smartphone penetration, lags behind not only Spain, but also, UK, France and Italy.

This may come as a surprise in the current period of economic uncertainty, and is certainly a reversal of the current ranking of financial strength within the European Union. However, as someone who is out in the field meeting existing and new Spanish customers for mobile app development, it comes as no surprise to me.

I have witnessed growing demand for mobile apps across the board in the last 12 months in Spain, from sectors as diverse as manufacturing, tourism and e-commerce. There is a concrete realisation that a mobile presence is essential for growth for bricks-and-mortar businesses as much as for web-based services. This was not the case merely 2 years ago, where mobile investment was questioned and often considered a "nice-to-have".

Admittedly, there is a long way to go still. Mobile Channel Manager roles within companies are extremely rare in Spain (I am yet to meet one) and few companies ring-fence mobile development spend within either their IT or marketing budgets. Additionally, there is the old chestnut of job protectionism in Spain still acting as a barrier to growth. In the case of mobile, it means that entire companies are hostage to their in-house development teams and find it difficult (due to internal politics) to use external suppliers. This is the case even where internal resources are clearly insufficient to meet the requirements of mobile development.

But change is coming fast, economic woes or not, as several companies are already making good on their investment in mobile and the debate is no longer "should we invest in mobile" but rather "when shall we invest". E-tailer Privalia is one such case, with their mobile channel growing within a short space of time from a few percentage points of overall sales to close to 15%. We are talking sales here, so the return on the investment is transparent for all to see.

Demand is strong for HTML5 mobile web development (either mobile websites or web apps) though there is still a gap  between what the customer expects and the reality. HTML5 appeals for its lower cost and across-the board availability. However, making web apps look and behave like native apps is costly and supporting a wide set of mobile browsers adds even further to this cost.

Over the last 2 years, companies' expectations of development costs have increased roughly by 100% and while we are still short of, say, UK mobile app budgets, I predict that in the next 12 months they will creep up further by 50%. Economic stagnation or not.

Mobile Cloud Services for Location Services, Notifications and other animals

If you are starting to get a sense that companies are simply rebranding everything as cloud services then you are absolutely right. E-mail is referred to as cloud communication, web hosting as cloud hosting, APIs are cloud services, etc. Whatever you want to call them, software services are relying on cloud and web services more and more. This can have great benefits for businesses as well as consumers. Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services are giving us almost unlimited scalability at a very small initial cost, Google Docs, Box.net, Dropbox, and others are making sharing of information and documents easier and dozens of start-ups are creating platforms that allow companies to launch new services faster than ever.

This goes hand in hand with the rise of BaaS (Backend as a Service) companies, which are providing easy-to-integrate cloud-based services for mobile developers. App developers have a need for such backend cloud functionality as push notifications and location services, photo and file sharing, user management, chat, ratings, and reviews (as you can see from the Infographic above, courtesy of Appcelerator).

There are at least 20 companies that now focus on BaaS in one form or another:

Stackmob, Parse, Kinvey, Apple's iCloud, RhoMobile, Appcelerator (Cocoafish), FeedHenry Astrum Space, Scotty App, Webmynd, YorAPI, CloudyRec, Applicasa, QuickBlox, mobDB, Netmera, Kumulos, CodeCloud.io, Sencha.io,Tiggzi and Zipline Games (through its Moai platform).

There are also a couple of large companies that could move into this space very easily, including Amazon with its AWS products, Microsoft with its Azure Cloud, Google with App Engine, and Rackspace.

As Dan Rowinski in ReadWriteMobile comments, there are several things to look out for when picking your BaaS: 

Foremost is REST API creation and management. REST (representational state transfer) is a software architecture for distributing media from a website (or in this case, a mobile app). Any BaaS provider worth its salt should have significant aptitude with REST APIs.


Big companies are getting in on the mobile cloud services act fast.  Nestle Water recently announced their decision  to take up China-based e-Future´s mobile cloud service, Sales Force Automation, in what is likely to be followed by other corporates soon.