Mobile
The mobile commerce market will exceed $1T by 2015. The top 5 industries accounting for this are Retail (22%), Transportation (20%), Food & Beverage (18%) Technology (14%), Personal Bill Pay (11%) and Entertainment (6%). Whichever industry you are in, if your company is looking to drive mobile revenues, your firm will need to make a significant investment of time and resources, which will have ultimately involve enterprise business, IT and financial processes and systems. Over the next few years, improving the convenience of mobile services will depend on improving the use of context in delivering mobile experiences. Your business will need to predict what your customers want when they launch a mobile application. Consider the following before you talk functional requirements.
Context - Our customer's mobile context consists of:
Preferences - The history and personal decisions the customer has shared with you or with social networks.
Situation - The current location, of course, but other relevant factors could include the altitude, environmental conditions and even speed the customer is experiencing.
Attitude - The feelings or emotions implied by the customer's actions and logistics.Delivering a good contextual experience will require aggregating information from many sources.
Sample projects
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- Device Proliferation
Another challenge facing mobile developers is device proliferation. It might seem like today's mobile app development process is pretty well defined: Build your app, make sure it looks pretty on a 4-inch smartphone and a 10-inch tablet, then submit it to an app store. It's not quite that easy now, and it'll be much tougher in the near future.
- Voice, Prioritized Over Touch.
Mobile developers are clamoring for API access to Apple's Siri and Google Now. There are a lot of scenarios where you would want to build voice input into your app today. For a running or fitness app, a phone is likely to be strapped to a person's sweaty arm, and looking at your screen while running can be a fast track into a lamp post.
- Heads-Up Interfaces.
Expect to see heads-up displays such as Google Glass go mainstream in the next five years as Moore's law pushes processors to the point where such gadgets can be made powerful, lightweight and perhaps even stylish. Augmented-reality apps that don't work well on a phone or tablet could be transformative when ported to a device like Google Glass.
- Bigger -- And Smaller -- Touch Devices, And Adaptive UIs.
Today, most app developers prioritize a few popular devices, such as the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S III and the iPad. But cherry picking the most popular devices will become more of a challenge as device types and platforms proliferate.
- Mobile Apps Become Pluggable Mobile Services.
Platform vendors such as Apple and Google are offering more platform-specific services that developers can leverage. Apple Passbook and Google Wallet are already established, but other examples such as Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 hubs and the Blackberry 10 "Peek" and "Flow" user interface further erode the distinction between a mobile platform and the apps that run on it.
- Wearables, Connectables And Local Networks.
Simple, first-generation wearables such as the Nike+ FuelBand and Fitbit will give way to something much more practical: internal biomedical instruments like pacemakers or insulin pumps.
- Hybrid Application Model.
With each release, popular mobile operating systems get better at supporting HTML5 and its attendant APIs. That capability will let companies reuse more code across multiple devices, which will be important in keeping app development costs down amid the proliferation of connected devices and form factors.
- Cloud-Powered Development.
The construction of modern applications will move onto the public cloud and public devices, because the elasticity of services such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform mesh nicely with the unpredictable demand that mobile apps exact on server-side infrastructure. With the move to a public cloud, the traditional organizational model that separates development from IT operations will break down.