Posted: June 23rd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Cloud Computing, Mobile, Technology, Technology Outsourcing |
As Jittr’s focus are Smartphone applications , primarily Android but eventually and soon iphone, we are caught in the dilemna of how to test on a cross section of the handset devices we are targeting.
Test Engineering is one of those technical areas that we wish to outsource to a team in a far away place where supply of engineers is high, competence equally high but costs are way low. India is one such place, though not the only one but since my principals and myself have years of experience with teams in India, that is the out-source geography we are most familiar and comfortable with.
So far so good but we are not talking about testing on an emulator running on Windows or Mac workstation. That is good for development testing. Real test engineering has to test on the actual devices running the actual variant of the Android OS possibly customized by the Wireless Carrier.
Device Anywhere to the rescue!
I just completed the live webinar on DeviceAnyWhere Test Center application. Quite impressive! As an aside, I signed up for a free open trial prior to signing up for and viewing the howTo seminars and put the product (both the Test Center and Test Automation Facility) through it’s paces but the Web based live walkthrough was still worth the hour of investment of my time. This is a profitable (or so they say) startup in Cloud Services with about 2,000 clients and their main claim to fame is making handsets available via the cloud to engineering teams that need to test their mobile applications on as well rounded set of different handsets as possible. They have multiple data centers including one in Europe, the USA of course and a new one opening in Brazil shortly. The data centers are centers where the actual physical devices are located. All testing is done on real handsets which a tester acquires via the Test Center/Automation application prior to running through the test cases.
All activity performed on the physical unit is streamed in a pixel perfect manor to the testers’ workstation which renders in an image which resembles the physical device.
Also, those pixels are captured to form a basis of screenshots that show the visual state of the device as the testing proceeds.
The Test Center also includes it’s own feature to define and manage test cases in a centralized manor. No more having to use Excel or something similar for the same purpose.
The probable use case would be for someone in Jittr, let’s assume myself for the moment, would define the testcases within the test center and then outsource the actual testing to a remote team in India. The Test Center makes this easier to accomplish. The Test Case Manager has the functionality to assign pass or fail to the test, attach screenshots of what was observed on the handset for each particular test
Another useful feature is the ability to share an acquired handset to someone to put the application through it’s paces.This feature I have not exercised yet so I am not sure if the invitee has to download the testcenter application to actually avail oneself of this feature. I find this a potentially useful way to let someone , say one of my principal none technical colleagues, someone like a Product Manager who is remote, run the current state of the application through a real device even if the real device is somewhere hidden out in the clouds. A lot simpler I hope and will confirm then having them install Eclipse and the Android development kit to have the use of an emulator to simulate the functioning of the Android Application.
Overall, appears quite impressive from my kicking the tires and the Webinars and as the world moves quickly in the mobile market, this company as well as others should form the bedrock of the way mobile testing is done except for the absolutely largest companies.
I am in the process of converting from a free trial account to a paid account. They have flexible plans for startups like Jittr where breaking the bank is not an option. I will come back to this post with information as I put it through it’s most important paces which is for real and with a virtual team using it as the foundation for test engineering.
Posted: May 4th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology, xcode |
Xcode
This is not necessarily an Xcode versus Android post, if it were , it would be a long post. I actually use both (though am more familiar with the Android java centric model based on past experience) and I am enamored to the extent one can be enamored of integrated development frameworks of both platforms
Being a normally fickle person when it comes to these type of things, my “enamored” meter is recently leaning towards Xcode. The reason is simple. Even though my familiarity with Objective-C needs a lot of addressing vis a vis java, Xcode’s InterfaceBuilder draws me in as a convert. I am not prone to wanting to deal with layout issues of any sort. Just not in my dna. Mostly result of a lack of patience of working through the grunt level but critically important aspects of having a well tailored, crisp UI where things line up , the colors make sense and appeal to the user even on an unconscious level and the application’s interface holds together following explicitly documented and promoted style guides. Of course, InterfaceBuilder doesn’t have any magical charms that takes a poorly thought through design and make it work aesthetically. That would be asking too much. Nevertheless I can take something produced by someone expert in design for mobile devices and quickly translate it to an artifact that closely resembles what has been provided.
I feel quite at home with Android’s version of an InterfaceBuilder, defining a layout via XML
and with it’s rudimentary drag and drop of UI artifacts unto a Window canvas but I generally spend most of my time dealing directly with XML to flesh out the UI and then tinkering with the directives to make it look right. The layout view helps of course and I find myself in it often enough. Nevertheless it does not compare to the power of Xcode’s Interface Builder with it tight coupling of device style guides, frames and arrows that show how well centered visual objects are to each other and to the container itself and that visually guide you to get it just right without guess work. Additionally , connecting the visual components to the actual code objects that express the purpose and functionality of the visual components has a much more natural feel within Xcode’s InterfaceBuilder. All of the class objects are defined in header files ie *.h and then through drag and drop operations those objects can be connected with their visual counterparts including events that flow between exercising the UI artifacts and the class methods that implement the behavior.
From a personal perspective and therefore less meaningful , going for the Android development environment is my greater familiarity with java. Once becoming familiar with the pattern of typical Android development which had a relatively steep but short lived curve, becoming conversant with Intents and Pacelable and how they wire the application together, the language never got in the way. Objective-C is in the way not because of any inherent deficiencies but solely because of the less familiarity with it’s syntax then anything else. Once I become comfortable with the syntax, I expect to be more fully drawn to the Cocoa/Xcode
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, New York City Startup |
Well, back from our sponsors -
What does Foursquare have going for it
- Engagement! The apparent leader in the Location based checkin realm. Being the leader here is still about relatively small numbers. I heard they may be around 1 million registered users but equally if not more important is how many of them are actually truly engaged on a regular basis checking in their whereabouts.
Notwithstanding the normal privacy concerns that surround things of this nature that are new, as the capabilities to do more accurate location targeting and the spreading of smartphones that can take advantage of that capability and the utility becomes real, people will adopt it. To stretch an analogy , using E-Z Pass for automated toll collection provides a government entity with your presumed location assuming you are driving your own car for the benefit of passing through a toll without the normal wait at the manned toll booths. Not quite apples to apples comparison but there was a hesitancy at it’s outset related to the Big Brother aspect.
- Tendency for more limited network. Though there is nothing that stops one from having a Foursquare network as vast as the typical Facebook Friends network, the tendency of users to limit the number of friends that know where they may be at a moment in time acts as a braking factor on the size of an individual network of friends. You can assume that could make a individual’s Foursquare social network a more valuable artifact.
- Budding commercial relationships With the likes of Starbucks, NYTimes and others. I can imagine the behavioral targeting if the location specific data could/would be merged with business establishments, Can imagine Gevalia increasing their upsell to me seeing I am the mayor of various Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. Of course I would not agree to a syndication of my distinct detailed personalized whereabouts but perhaps there is a way to make utility of the aggregated view including Badges and Mayorships.
- Simple Web Service APIs. A must for 3rd parties using the platform to integrate with Foursquare. The more 3rd parties integrate and provide twists and functionality to the inherent proposition of Foursquare, the greater the likelihood of Foursquare becoming the de-facto standard for a a location specific Social Network.
Of course we can see a replay of the situation with Twitter and 3rd parties where after 3rd party developers move the ubiquity along for Twitter as a platform, the business needs of Twitter itself force the cannibalization of much of what the 3rd parties developed.
What’s Going against Foursquare
- Low Barriers to entry. Location services are baked into the smartphone devices themselves with well defined interfaces. The Venue data can be and is licensed from aggregators. Search indexes that provide proximity searches are relatively simple to setup using Open Source packages like Local Solr based on Lucene.
- Utility for the user. Yes, the Gaming aspect is fun especially if your network of friends gets vicarious thrill of winning mayorships and badges. Medium-term for an individual the fun wears out without a commensurate return of some value. This is where the budding relationship with businesses may accrue benefits for the users as inducements and true rewards for loyalty to an establishment become the norm. Perhaps Foursquare can become the de-facto standard for loyalty programs especially for the large number of small and mid sized establishments that currently do not have the capability to have one of their own. Of course there is still a lot to do technically to prevent gaming of location and visits.
- Stability of the Application. By this I mean the predilection to crash especially on the iPhone where I most commonly use it. Typical of the fast moving Web space is that applications/sites are mutating so fast that a proper testing regime is not followed and buggy code is pushed out. So far it has been a minor inconvenience for me mostly because I am biased understanding the price you pay for rapid iterative development where your users are the ultimate testing ground. Most users outside of Technology won’t have such a forgiving nature.
What do I think of the valuations floating around upwards of $125 Million? I feel that at the moment, the scale of that number is obscene. Now if I knew the future with absolute clarity and could see that 1 or 2 years from now Foursquare would be the standard platform for location based services and have a user footprint in the space approaching Twitter’s 50 million users , the current floated valuation would pale in comparison. Michael Arrington has a good post in Techcrunch arguing against their selling out at the moment. Nevertheless having that sum of money dangled in front of you for what amounts to about 1 year’s worth of work of a small team with a relatively small investment of $1 .5 million, the discipline to stair it down and roll the dice on your own would be prodigious.
Posted: April 18th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup |
Of two minds when I read the press about the apparent bidding up of Foursquare , a barely 1 year old New York City startup in the Location based products arena. Of course, as a principal in my own mobile based startup Jittr , it gives me that added inducement to keep on plugging away long hours and potentially breakout in the same manor. I am a heavy user of Foursquare, being the proud mayor of 10 establishments and growing. On the other, incredulity sets in. Where is the inherent value that would drive such an inflated valuation? Given the names such as Yahoo or even Google that are apparently interested (and throw in AOL though restricted from acquisitions over $100 Million for the moment), big companies with to much money $$$ and time on their hands come to mind.
Here is the essense of Foursquare. It is a Location based gaming platform where one “checks in” to establishments one visits, say your regular early morning visit to Starbucks and score points for visits depending on varying factors such as how many in one day, how widely widely distributed over the course of the day. Enough visits to one establishment over time has the potential to reward you with the Mayorship of that establishment Badge. Of course it is not a solitary game as you are competing against all other active games who may be checking into the same places you are.
The well done integration with the large social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide the vehicle to be constantly broadcasting to a much wider audience your whereabouts and your game scores and achievements including Mayorships and “Badges” procured.
I personally use Foursquare primarily from my iPhone but from time to time from my Android powered Droid phone. It is meant to be a smartphone accessed application though it has a relatively austere Website.
From a technology point of view, it is quite simple, leveraging the GPS that all smartphones now provide to surface coordinates (latitude and Longitude) which drives a Web Service search to establishments/places nearby from which you can then choose the actual one you are visiting. If the list of nearby venues does not include the one you are at , you can add it via the application and then check it. All of the above usually can happen during the short time you are on line picking up a cup of coffee at your neighborhood Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. I strongly suspect they have licensed a feed of venues from one of the few listings aggregators ie InfoUSA, Axion plus they provide the ability of adding your own venue. This broadens the venue pool to those non retail locations such as Parks, subway stations, your own home. For instance, I am the mayor of Jittr Headquarters and I have regularly checked in at the 68th street number 6 subway station in Manhattan which is next to Hunter College in New York City.
These large companies that are ostensibly interested in Foursquare would have the wherewithal to develop their own application with identical functionality in little time measured in 2 months at most. Since they already probably license the same data (save for those individually added places) the incremental costs of licensing content would be negligible at most and since they already possess Social networking products, you can assume the right integration would bring with it the necessary pool of potential users immediately. Though Foursquare is the leader in this location based gaming at the moment and I have heard of about 1 million registered users, that still pales in comparison to Twitter’s (50 million registered users) or Facebook’s (half a billion) making the space still open as no one has a significant user base that gives it the momentum of true breakout and uncatchable leader.
Then why the inflated values being talked up in the Trade Press? I will go into that after a word from our sponsors…
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |
Maybe I am just getting older or maybe I am just a simpleton or maybe both are true but as I dive into the mobile space with concentration on the iphone and Android smartphones, I am liking the simplicity of the user interface. I have always liked it of course though before the iphone I would rarely and mostly by accident fire up a mobile browser. I was acclimated to basic uses such as using the phone of course, calendaring, sms , very simple email responses and not much else. Though those are still main uses for me as well as great majority of people, with the advent of cleaner interfaces either though native apps or mobile aware websites that adapt layout when consumed within a smartphone embedded browser, I now feel that in many instances I get the core proposition of the utility or value of the particular website without all the extraneous stuff that needs to fill the space on a normal Desktop browser environment. In fact, though at the outset I was ok with websites that didn’t adapt to the viewport of the device browser and was content to zoom and pan around to make the content accessible on the smaller screen, I know generally just bail from sites that through laziness or not “with it”, do not adapt to the device’s dimensions and thereby force me to “actively” work to consume their content on a phone’s browser.
Though I have spent most of my time with the Android Development Kit, both it and the iphone variant (no time yet for iPad) are well organized in terms of having common artifacts for most of the useful interactions one needs with a typical Smartphone application. Though there are other possibilities including just customizing the presentation for a normal Browser application for the smaller real estate on a phone using the “user_agent” string of the requesting device, the programming languages of choice for the native full featured phone processing Applications are java for Android and objective C for the iphone.
In the end, there is something attractive for me both as a developer and a user for the move back to a state of simplicity and austerity.
Of course, I mean solely for what the ultimate consumer of those applications sees. For those that must dive into the Android Development Kit to actually build those applications , it is eye-popping both the richness of what is available natively within the Java based APIs , the plugins for Integrated Development Environments like Eclipse but similarly eye-popping is the shear magnitude of the different code workflow/artifacts that are used to construct a fully functioning Android Application. Many developers and development groups have become proficient in putting it all together since the first release of the Android code base over 2 years ago as evidenced by the 10’s of thousands of Android applications in the Market. Nonetheless, even the best of development teams require a significant ramp up time to gain familiarity , for the platform to evolve into a more robust and reliable platform (Android 2.1 was just released in Late February early March 2010) and for a foundation of relevant code to serve both as tutorial material and base for further extension for new application features. Building Smartphone applications does not represent rebuilding all that has gone on the past decade in the Internet space. The richness of Web Services exposing the plethora of functionality is equally suitable in many cases unaltered to serve the data services needs of your typical Smartphone application.
One thing I hope to avoid at least for now are the sundry challenges making all of the markup and Frontend code like Javascript work across various browsers with their pesky quirks. Of course I will have to deal with perhaps more esoteric anomalies on different handsets implementation of the entire Android stack. Hopefully Google has learned something from the challenges that Microsoft has had over the decades customizing their Operating System to all the different Hardware manufacturers’ specifications. One advantage that Apple possesses in this battle is the absolute control of the both the software and hardware stacks. That makes the number of possible permutations that need testing and support appreciably more manageable.
Posted: March 22nd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup, Technology |
Trying an experiment in Product development this coming week. I spoke to my daughter about some ideas surrounding “Social Shopping” over the week to gather what she thought of the idea. Of course, anything to do with shopping will immediately get her attention no matter how crazy the actual Product Idea may be. It is enlightened self interest on her part. With no money, no source of money and little chance of that changing anytime soon, if she needs to hear a pitch and go through the observations of the shopping habits of teenage girls, all she knows is she will be in a shopping environment with someone who has money (me) and who is a sucker for any whim she may have (once again me).
So what is Social Shopping one may ask? Well , I would suspect it is the antithesis of how I shop at least when it is of the bricks and mortar variety. Of course when shopping online like on Amazon I do make liberal use of the Reviews to guide my purchase (or non purchase depending on the gist of the reviews). In the bricks and mortar variety shopping experience which is still the predominant means of shopping, the only thing social about me is making sure no one gets in my way to obtain the article I have already decided to purchase and similarly on the mad dash to the checkout line. Thankfully I am the exception instead of the rule. With the ubiquity of online social networking, the exploding smartphone engagement with all sorts of services tied together including photos, video, search, location services and the penchant to shop of teenage girls regardless of all messaging that they should deal with more outer worldly things, we are poised for the killer app that will tap into all of these forces to magnify the shopping experience so that the romp to “the mall” can take on the force of the virtual romp to the Mall.
What are some of the characteristics of this presumed killer application.
- Doesn’t introduce yet another Social Network but leverages the existing winners in the space, Facebook, Twitter specifically and presumably FourSquare in the Location based services realm
- Doesn’t get in the way of the activity of social shopping so it has to be very easy to use and unobtrusive. Outside of quick checkin or setup.
- A tough one; has to aggressively protect privacy but still maintain flexibility allowing the user to easily define how restrictive or open to make the Social Shopping “event” . With the main demographic being teenage girls, adoption would be impaired if parents caught wind of gaps in privacy that could put their child at risk of the perverts in society.
- Is patterned after Web mashup but optimized for speed. Checkin or definition of shopping event, tying in messages/photos and all forms of communication revolving around that event. Syndication to only the chosen network of
users party to that event whether in person or virtually via the social network.
- Acts like a persistent store of the “event” after the fact. ie The pictures of posing with different outfits
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |
Not like Mobile’s wave has just recently hit us. I have had a cell phone since early 1990’s , I believe 1993 to be exact, It was a monster by today’s standard with it’s own case and not a case that would fit in one’s pocket. I forget if it was Verizon Wireless or it’s predecessor that powered the network. The pricing plan was such that you would treat each minute or part thereof as precious.
If I look at the last 17 years of cell phone usage at least in my household, talking on the phone is still one of the main activities but with kids now on my plan, I would say that text messaging has definitely risen to the top as the predominant use. In fact, I had to get the unlimited text/sms plan as not even 1,500 monthly messages was enough to satisfy my oldest child. Though I am tolerant, Mom is not when during dinner night outs he is consistently looking down on his lap where he keeps the phone reviewing and responding to an endless stream of sms messages. AS for me coming from a generation with a different set of social norms I am even more discrete and generally only take the phone out while waiting on a line usually at a Starbucks line or some other pause/waiting moment including yes long Redlights.
Where is this all going and why is 2010 now the year of mobile at least if you read and listen to the intelligentsia from the likes of Techcrunch? Perhaps most notably it’s because according to certain reports the engagement of the web via mobile has or is soon poised to surpass the conventional desktop/laptop engagement via a laptop. The referenced TechCrunch post though positive from mobile’s increase in engagement doesn’t indicate anything like half of engagement coming from mobile but I also believe engagement defined as strictly the consumption of standard browser based web pages is leaving out plenty of the modes of engagement that are optimized for mobile such as email, photo taking and uploading, managing one’s assortment of different calendars, short busts of status information such as twitter, Location services of all sorts from the useful like driving directions to the trite like checking into a business establishment via FourSquare and perhaps becoming a mayor of some random Dunkin Donuts.
As major publishers adapt their websites to provide an experience conducive to viewing and consuming on the small real estate of the typical smartphone screen real estate , more and more of my web consumption will move to the phone. Though I still usually park myself on the desktop to read the nytimes.com site every morning, their iphone application is engineered to making the consumption of news via my phone easy on the eyes and overall quite pleasing.
I believe there is still a lot outside of the normal and some would say trite uses of the Mobile device that needs investigation and development. It is something we all carry with us all the time and for those like me that use it as an alarm clock as well, it is on my person or nearby 24 hours a day. It should or at least for some can become the remote of choice for all things that can be monitored or managed via software signals including the home of the future where all gadgets and appliances will be smart at least if smart means a computer chip and set of hardware and software interfaces used for communication and management.
In fact, here is a link to Silicon Alley Insider Post that was published as I was writing that speaks about the evolving trend of the iPhone to become that centralized remote control.
Any smartphone can eventually serve the same purpose I suppose and even less then smartphones. Back in the day it was common to setup AOL Instant Messenger BOTS that could take commands streamed as IMs and respond in kind whether for Movie listings, or anything for that matter. May seem like a low technology angle but you can envision BOTs waiting at our disposal for all sorts of activities. The imagination is the limit.
