Recently I was working on one of our products, scribe2go, which is being addressed at businesses and features a BlackBerry edition as well. My job was to organize the mobile application testing process, and identify the automation tools to be used. Which in the BlackBerry case was a simple and straightforward job – we decided to go mainstream with Fledge.

Below is a short summary of my experience with Fledge, which you might find useful if you plan to test BlackBerry applications.

Fledge introduction

The BlackBerry device simulator called Fledge enables you to run and test BlackBerry applications on your computer.

Fledge includes the BlackBerry applications that are typically available on BlackBerry devices and enables you to load and test your own applications. You can simulate and test various connectivity and state changes using the simulator. When you use Fledge to perform testing, you might need to simulate additional BlackBerry services. The BlackBerry MDS Simulator and the BlackBerry email server simulator are available for this purpose.

By default, after you specify the BlackBerry device model, the simulator runs using the configuration options that are typical for the chosen BlackBerry device. However, you can manually set or change many of the configuration options, such as the screen size, the communication port numbers, and the locale.

Fledge is available either as a part of the BlackBerry Java Development Environment or as a standalone installation of the BlackBerry simulator package. You could download the simulator from www.blackberry.com/developers.

Fledge features

To get a grasp of Fledge’s capabilities, here is a sample list of events you could simulate in your tests:

• Adding an address book contact
• Adding a calendar entry
• Composing an email
• Receiving an incoming call
• Initiating an outgoing call
• Sending an SMS text message
• Changing device GPS coordinates
• Changing battery level
• Removing a SIM card
• Changing network coverage / signal strength

A number of supplementary services, such as call forwarding or call waiting, might be available on a BlackBerry device. You can simulate the availability of these services as well.

Disadvantages

Fledge could leverage “controller” commands only. Controller commands can be used to instruct the simulator to perform certain operations from a script, like those described above. Nevertheless, Fledge is just a simulator – you cannot run tests written for the simulator on real devices, and you cannot record/playback test scenarios – all tests should be scripted manually.

Further, the lack of verification points means that the result of every operation should be manually checked by a tester, which makes it impossible to run tests in a batch. Thus Fledge cannot be considered universal automation testing tool for BlackBerry applications, but as far as I know it is the best tool out there.

Summary

Despite the disadvantages mentioned above, we are still using Fledge for our scribe2go automation test scenarios. Automatic execution of scripted test actions is very useful for ensuring good test coverage with each built and for decreasing the manual work necessary to achieve this.

If your company’s policy is to automate application testing when possible, I suggest you give Fledge a try.

Every year is being labeled as the year of the Mobile breakthrough, unfortunately a real mainstream adoption has yet to occur. Let’s examine the three parts which define the Mobile uniqueness and value-adding aspects, which in a broader and ubiquitous scope has a central place within marketing and concepts.

Before we start, the conditions are becoming more and more favorable for a mainstream adoption of Mobile strategies. Morgan Stanley concluded in their Economy + Internet trends report that Mobile Internet outpaces the adoption of Desktop Internet, on the one hand this doesn’t surprise me due to the high volume of sold mobile phones, on the other hand, the need for being online anywhere is concrete and present.

Another condition which favors the adoption of Mobile strategies is Location and the (becoming) real-time Social Web. In essence, our digitalized society is hyperconnective and increasingly omnipresent, people constant in -close- contact with their networks. The mobile device is the designated medium to be the hub between other devices and take the central place.

Mobile Marketeer defined the Mobile Triple Play as following:

Location x Relevancy x Immediacy

Location is key. This creates opportunities that did not exist before and it’s the enabler for Relevancy and Immediacy. It’s also the “Secret Sauce” that makes Mobile powerful and unique.

Relevancy can be created and enhanced by location-based Augmented Reality and filtering technologies which serve the user a better information supply based on interests and networks.

Immediacy perfectly fits the trend of ubiquity and the opportunities that will be created to take action upon. mCommerce (Mobile Commerce is said to really take off in a few years).

External, societal, conditions which obstruct mCommerce and overall usage of the mobile device in many more ways then the conventional ones, are disappearing slowly.

South East Asia is much further with the diffusion of mobile in daily lives and commercial applications, whereas North America and Europe are not there yet. Habituation is a condition for further market- and product development.

From the supplier point of view, market blurring challenges not only the core-suppliers but also new entrants who want to obtain a share of the large pie. Think Google with its Android platform for instance.

Smartphones like the iPhone and Android enabled phones plus technologies like Augmented Reality have opened up the eyes of companies and consumers. From a more operational point of view, the adaptation of content for the Mobile device is one of the short term actions to boost a friendly user experience and further usage.

In terms of concepts, Mobile will play an important influence and role in transmedia/crossmedia concepts due to its unique aspects.

In conclusion, I’m not convinced 2010 is the year of the Mobile. External conditions prohibit this, adoption is found amongst the Innovators and Early Adopters, but the Majority has to follow in a critical mass (unless defined differently in the strategy). The simple application of current content to the Mobile device is not appealing and relevant enough, new concepts where the Mobile has its special place, need to arise.

What do you think, are the three aspects of the Triple Play already in place and occurring on a critical mass?

About the guest author

Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP is a co-founder of Appmarket.tv and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Agora Media Group LLC and a consultant for Traffic4u, one of Europe’s largest Online Marketing companies. He is recognized as a Senior Marketing Professional (SMP) titled by the European Marketing Confederation (EMC) quality label for experienced and qualified international Marketers. His area’s of specialty include Marketing Management, E-Business, Business Development, Internet Marketing, Corporate Blogging/ePublishing, Web 2.0/Social Media, Media Convergence, Augmented Reality and Social TV. Hook up with him at LinkedIn.

Maybe you have a successful online business and you’re looking to extend your reach to mobile customers? Serve them whenever they need you, wherever they are…

And unless you have the know-how in-house, you start looking around for external mobile application developer to bring your app to life. I’m obviously biased here, so I’ll not discuss how you should choose your vendor I’d rather try to answer the question I receive at almost every first call with a customer: “What are the next steps?”

While my answer is more or less based of Bianor’s mobile application development processes, you should probably expect something similar from every professional app developer.

So, the commercial and legal part aside, a typical process goes like this:

1. You talk with a sales person to discuss your app concept. Use each opportunity to get some valuable feedback and hopefully good ideas from them.
2. Based on the information you’ve shared, your app developer sends you a preliminary estimate regarding the duration of the project and its price.
3. Together with your app developer (represented usually by a sales person and a lead engineer at this stage) you start to outline the app requirements in more details. This could happen over the phone/email or in person, depending on the size of the project.
4. If your app requires integration with your existing IT infrastructure and services, you would have to provide the necessary specifications to your app developer. If your app requires integration with third-party systems – SMS gateways, online content services, hosting environments, etc. – you would have to inform your app develop for the chosen systems or let them choose.
5. Based on their understanding of the app-to-be and hopefully their industry experience, your mobile app developer develops and sends you a set of materials describing in details the future app. Such material could be a live prototype of the application which demonstrates all app screens and GUI elements. This is probably the best way to communicate and agree upon the app functionality, and also an excellent way to evaluate your developer’s understanding of what they have to build. For larger projects you should also expect a functional specification, typically in the form of use-cases, as well as UI design sketches demonstrating the graph design on your app-to-be. Sometimes also a supplementary specification, outlining non-functional requirements such as performance and traffic requirements.
6. Typically you would have a couple of additional iterations back and forth – reviewing the materials received, providing feedback, getting new versions of the specifications until you’re confident you are building a killer app.
7. At this stage, your app developer should be in the position to commit to fixed delivery dates and fixed project price.
8. Throughout the development phase, your app developer would typically demonstrate you intermediate results at predefined milestones. Intermediate results could be a working app with some (but not all) functionality implemented. Do provide your feedback as early as possible to make sure it’s incorporated into the results demonstrated at the next milestone. Might be a good idea to ask your developer for their test protocols – gives you some idea about what’s working and what not (yet), and how extensive the app has been tested so far.
9. Towards the end of project, there is an acceptance phase during which you are expected to test the ready app yourself and provide your feedback. If there are things that need to be fixed, your app developer does it and then you do the acceptance testing again.
10. Once you have your ready app in your hands (version 1.0) and you’re satisfied with the results, it’s time to focus on marketing and distribution, including getting your app listed in the relevant app stores and letting know your existing customers.

Now that I wrote it, the whole process probably looks more simplified on the developer-side than it is

There’s plenty of data available on the net for the smartphone platforms – market shares, user profiles, usage statistics, etc. The problem is we are all too busy to go through a lot of text…

That’s why I though it’d be actually nice to list the key facts only in a head-to-head comparison chart.

So here’s the first post from the series – no surprise, its Android vs iPhone/iOS:

Sources:

• The State of Mobile Apps, Nielsen Wire
• Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 17 Per Cent in Q1 2010, Gartner
• Mobile Web OS Share, Quantcast
• App Store Metrics, 148Apps.biz
• Android Market Statistics, Androlib
• AdMob Metrics

Sofia, June 17, 2010 – Bianor’s scribe2go won Most Promising Product Award during MOBIP 2010 – Partnership and Investment for Mobile Services event, which was held in Valencia on June 10th & 11th, 2010.

Last month the company announced the public availability of its sales management tool, scribe2go, that integrates corporate mobile communication with Salesforce.com.

scribe2go, extracts and organizes the information contained within your calls with customers, stores it in Salesforce.com, and makes it easily accessible and searchable. The solution targets the mobile salesperson offering the promise of better productivity, complete customer interaction history, and improved call follow-up tracking.

More information for the awarded product is available at the scribe2go web site.

The aim of the MOBIP Partnership and Investment Forum organized by Europe Unlimited is to foster the competitiveness of high-growth ventures in the mobile services sector and to strengthen their opportunities for market access both within Europe and in wider international markets.

The consortium responsible for the event consists of enterprises with an exceptional record of innovation support activities, building on existing initiatives combining expertise and spanning regional, national and European wide innovation support and investment readiness. The focus of these projects is on access to finance, internationalization and business to business collaboration.

About Europe Unlimited

Founded in 1998, privately-owned Europe Unlimited S.A. provides critical business resources to innovative technology entrepreneurs, corporations, investors and researchers, allowing them to successfully build and maintain a healthy economy. The company’s mission is to help Europe’s dynamic technology innovators become world leaders in their field through networking entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, researchers and advisors.

We’ve just released iMediaShare Premium for Android which makes all this possible. We’ve tested it extensively and I’m happy to report video works great (including positioning) with Samsung Series 6 DLNA TVs and Xbox 360. PS3 unfortunately doesn’t play the video captured with the Android camera, but photos and audio still work great!

You could download iMediaShare Premium for Android from the Android Market, or visit iMediaShare website for more information.

Would love to hear your feedback and future feature requests. We are here to make the latter come true

Sofia, June 16, 2010 – Bianor’s application for sharing of mobile multimedia – iMediaShare is amongst the 10 AppCircus @ Mobile 2.0 Europe finalists which will compete for the prestigious Mobile Premier Awards 2011 during the Mobile World Congress.

The nominated application iMediaShare is dedicated to simplify sharing of mobile multimedia content and to help millions of mobile users access phone video, photos and music through their internet-enabled TVs and game consoles.

iMediaShare has seen over 300,000 downloads and won the Long Island Software Awards earlier this year amongst companies such as Verizon, Motorola, Microsoft, and IBM.

In addition to sharing local mobile content, Bianor’s patent pending technology allows users to access multimedia content from social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa directly from TV sets using their smartphones as media proxies.

A free version of iMediaShare is available for download from http://www.bianor.com/ims/

About AppCircus

AppCircus is a unique global traveling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators during some of the most influential international events in mobile/web. AppCircus is open to developers, startups and any other organization and offers each participant a chance to get a nomination to the Mobile Premier Awards.

About Mobile 2.0 Europe

The Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Conference brings together thought leaders and experts from different aspects of the mobile ecosystem. Tailored specifically for mobile/web application developers and technologists this conference will at the same time help startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers to better understand the latest technologies that will define the mobile market of tomorrow.

This year’s event is sponsored by Nokia Ovi, PayPal, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, Microsoft, and others. The event’s media partners include TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and MIT Technology Review.

Although the question whether to choose web or native approach towards mobile applications still holds ground, using the native platform is definitely my preferable line of choice. Simply because it gives more freedom to do cool stuff.

Here’s a quick overview of the most popular mobile application development platforms from a developer’s perspective:

Android application development

Android is developer’s dream – it is free, open sourced, and it is developed and endorsed by one of the most capable software development companies of our times, Google. In order to create applications for Android, one would typically use the currently most popular development language, Java, and the tooling includes first class plug-in and emulator for the popular integrated development environment Eclipse.

Utilizing mature and popular technologies and tools gives one big benefit – a gentle learning curve. And although the Android environment uses familiar technologies, that have been around for awhile, the architecture and the platform itself are new and modern, built from scratch with mobile devices in mind.

BlackBerry app development

RIM also use Java for their application platform. They’ve been pushing their own application development environment, the BlackBerry JDE for quite some time, and their current plug-in for Eclipse is not very mature, yet. Another drawback is, that sometimes the same version of the BlackBerry OS does not seem to behave consistently on different devices. Not a major thing, but still a hitch requiring you to spend more time testing with different devices.

On the other hand, RIM provides software emulators for all of their devices, which are really good. This helps a lot while testing the application against a specific device. Another benefit of the BlackBerry development platform is, that the component model follows similar patterns to those Java developers know from Java SE. Meaning that most Java developers can start developing for BlackBerry pretty quickly.

iPhone app development

To develop for the iPhone (now iOS), one must utilize the free SDK (although the SDK is free, you would need a developer account, which starts at $99/year) and the public APIs Apple provides. iPhone apps are being developed in Objective-C, a language familiar to developers, who have created applications for the Mac before… and to no one else The development environment is Apple’s own XCode, and it runs on Mac OS only – which means that you would need a Mac if you want to create iPhone apps.

Despite the additional investment needed and the lack of alternatives when choosing the hardware and the OS, the tools and documentation Apple provides are excellent. One of the main reason for the success and the number of applications in the App Store is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist in order to write decent iPhone apps. It helps, though

Symbian app development

Writing for Symbian has been difficult for years. In order to write for Symbian, one must master C++. But knowledge in C++ is far from enough – the platform itself uses constructs, that differ from what the regular C++ developer would expect. For example, in Symbian C++ there is no exception handling, no STL library, no string types, to name a few differences. The modern tools include Carbide.c++, an Eclipse-based IDE for Symbian C++.

Things are getting much better, however, and do so quickly. Symbian OS is already open source in an attempt to make it more popular amongst developers. Not only that, but Nokia is moving things towards their own Qt framework as the primary platform for Symbian development, including Qt Creator as the main development environment. And since Qt is cool and widely popular, especially among C++ developers, this is nothing less than great news for anyone considering Symbian as a development platform. Not only that, but Qt can be used for developing applications for the upcoming MeeGo platform as well.

Why spend time creating a mockup? Well, there is an unwritten software law which says that the later in the development cycle you introduce major changes, the more expensive they are. Mockups try to leverage on that law to save you some time, effort, and money. How? By offering you the chance to literary see at very early stage how your mobile application looks and feels, to collect early feedback from target app users, and to rethink and improve you app before it gets too expensive.

To build the right app you need to start communicating with your target users as soon as possible, and mockups could help you out with this endeavour. They are also a good tool to help you stay focused on the needs of the end-user from the very beginning to ensure you create a killer mobile app.

Now, on the How part: There are many tools that you can use to create a mobile mockup. Find a few ideas below:

1: OmniGraffle

A good one if you are a Mac user ready to spend $99.95 after the 14-days trial is OmniGraffle. It’s actually a diagramming program, but you can easily import iPhone stencils and Android stencils, which makes it a great tool for creating your mobile app mockup. Start dragging-and-dropping items around the screen you have your app layout sketched in a few hours. Here’s an example:

2: MobiOne Studio

Another good product for creating iPhone mockups is MobiOne Studio, currently available for a free download. With MobiOne you can create your mockup using the basic iPhone elements and you can even link the mockup screens you’ve created to test the usability of the application before you actually start creating it.

3: Adobe Fireworks

If you are ready to spend more dollars, one of the best products for making an exceptional app design is Adobe Fireworks. There are many real size vector graphic templates of mobile phone elements available on the net, which you can easily modify and skin to create a custom app design.

4: Pen and paper

If you are not a big fan of UI design tools, you could always revert to good old pen and paper, and once satisfied with your ideas develop the mock-up in actual code. Advantage: The mockup is as real as it gets, and you could reuse the code. Disadvantage: Takes some more time upfront.

If you happen to need any assistance with creating mobile app mockups, please, do not hesitate to drop me an email at jivko.rusev@bianor.com. Would be happy to help you!

All those strategies could generate results – help reduce churn or increase revenues. In any case they are more short term tactics than long term strategies as they are based on the core network services or are restricted by the boundaries of the own network without much interaction with the outer environments. As such mobile service providers won’t succeed to differentiate on the long term. In order to be successful service providers shall look outside of their boundaries and move into a direction to entrench deeply within customers’ internal environment regardless consumers or businesses. It can be done by combining telecoms’ core services – voice and data transmitting, with other services which are of great value to their subscribers and would become even more valuable if integrated with mobile service providers core.

Let’s have an example. A mobile service provider could launch a value added service (VAS) that integrates business mobile communications with corporate CRM systems. Such service could prove very valuable to businesses by optimizing processes, reducing human latency within process flows, and improving business analysis capabilities in the area of customer interaction management. The service would help the service provider to start playing a significant role in the automation of the internal business processes especially those related to one of the most important aspects of each business – customer management. It empowers closer relation with the service provider’s business customer and increases dependency on provided voice services to maintain correct data processing in daily business operations.

One value added service that falls into that category is scribe2go deployed as a network-based service. On the long run it will result in a stronger partnership between service provider and business customer which will reduce churn and subsequently increase revenue.