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Making Telecoms the Essential Spice of Every Business Ecosystem: The Slow, Painful Rise of APIs in Telecoms
Another good Telco API presentation from Alan Quayle. Worth a quick read.
Write up of MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5
Last night I had the pleasure of being asked to sit on the judging panel for MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5 held at EMI’s London office. This was the second music focused pitching event organised by 2Pears.
The evening was opened by Andria Vidler, CEO of EMI Music UK & Ireland. Andria linked hosting the event to EMI’s innovation history, citing unsung tech hero Alan Blumlein who invented stereo sound, and contributed to the development of radar and television, and all before he had turned 40, as he was tragically killed at 38 in a plane crash in 1942. Seeing a list of achievements like that makes you ponder what you have personally managed to achieve with your life!
Moving into the pitching section of the evening, we saw eight music related start ups present for 3 minutes, with an additional 2 – 3 minutes of questioning from the panel.
In alphabetical order:
Live concert streaming over the web. Heavy focus on in stream interactivity and monitisation of ticket and merchandise sales.
To me it felt that they had a significant business development challenge to build brand awareness of the service with labels and artists, as there are many more established video streaming services out there that can offer a ready made audience, and infrastructure at scale.
A really simple idea, but the best often are. Distribute a single song via text messaging. e.g. Text emi to 60444 – this returns a link to download an MP3 track. The track can be free or chargable. Simple, fast, and uses a ubicoictious technology. Perfect for fast response like promoting a track as people leave a gig.
By far the most intriguing demo of the night. Nu desine is a new electronic musical instrument. Seeing Adam playing the “thing” was pretty amazing, it was well described on Twitter as a techno powered disco ball!
There was some concern from the panel on the money needed to scale a hardware business, and compete head to head with companies like Yamaha and Roland. To me I think the biggest challenge is for Adam to pick a single market proposition and focus 100% on that. At the moment he seems torn between positioning it as a serious instrument targeted at artists, and as a consumer oriented gadget / you akin to Guitar Hero or DJ Hero. These are very different markets, and by trying to appeal to both simultaneously it may struggle. For example at the moment it may be dismissed by musicians as a novelty product, whilst at £250 - £500 per unit it is too expensive for the home entertainment market.
Its certainly one to watch though.
This is a gig social network on stay on top of events, and connect with friends. I think the panel struggled to see how this was any different or better than the mirrad of ways people can currently get this kind of information and social networking – Songkick, Facebook, Last.FM all spring to mind.
To compel the lack of product USP they were working on deals with music venues on a venue by venue basis, so it felt like it wouldn’t deliver on the promise of being THE live music social network as Pepper wouldn’t have 100% coverage of live music listing in the UK for some time, if at all.
The idea behind PSONAR is track sharing and play back for 1p / 1c per track. Targeted at the youth market. Tracks are streamed. The business model innovation was well received by the panel.
My feedback on PSONAR was if they are targeting a cash poor audience like teens with their cheap business model, would using mobile streaming to deliver the content be an issue? The cost of mobile streaming over 3G may be cost prohibitive, and when questioned it seemed the product did not force streaming over Wi-Fi.
This was a cloud solution to provide a DJs with a web radio station through a browser, removing all the complexity and cost associated with “traditional” radio station streaming.
This is an area I don’t have much experience with, but it seemed to be a noisy market with a lot of companies operating in the space, although Radiojar claim none of them are as feature rich as them. I guess it will boil down to their marketing plan to cut through the noise and win customers.
This was a well-presented idea, apparently first developed with the BBC. It produces alternative music charts based on social media buzz. The idea being that traditional unit sales charts are felt to be misrepresentative of what is actually hot.
It certainly ticks some big topical buttons like big data, and montitising analytical information. My only issue was a potential mismatch between the premise of the idea and the execution. If the problem that The Sound Index is trying to solve is that the traditional charts are not credible in the age of social media, it seems strange their business strategy is to partner with brands and TV broadcasters. These kinds of companies are always seeking mass market adoption, therefore will want to promote the acts that dominate the traditional charts, which seems at odds with the original idea.
Olly who was presenting did stress there were a ton of personalisation options which allow you to data mine until your heart is content, so all in all pretty impressive.
My way to describe this is a browser based music creation app, that aims to compete head to head with more established desktop software music creation.
Assuming it has all the features to compete head to head with shrink wrapped competitors (in 3 minutes its hard to get into the nitty gritty) then Soundation looks to have potential to disrupt the market by offering easy distribution and a freemuim business model.
Like a couple of the ideas, I think success will be predicated on the commercial and business developer execution.
Results
The winner of the audience vote was Sound Index, and the judges voted for Text2Music. Congratulations to all the pitching companies, and the winners.
For the record my top three were:
1. Text2Music
2. Sound Index
3. Psonar
Options to monetise Mobile Apps
On Thursday I participated in openMIC13, which was part of the awesome Bath Digital Festival. Congrats to Mike Ellis and the team for pulling together such a comprehensive and successful series of events.
A highlight from the morning session was a talk by Kieran Gutteridge of Intohand who provided a whole bunch of great tips and tricks on how to increase visibility and revenue for your mobile apps.
Kieran’s slides are embedded below, along with a few notes from me.
Kieran made a great point about doing your homework to ensure you are up to speed on the regulatory conditions around mobile subscription services (slide 4) PhonepayPlus is the best place to start for the UK market. You should avoid looking like a “shady” rip off service at all costs. No one wants another Crazy Frog. Check out Payforit as a potential solution.
App metrics were covered in detail (slide 9) AppAnnie is an awesome free service that aggregates all of your App Store data and your user reviews so you can stay on top of everything from one place. Flurry gives you deep statistical Google Analytics style reports.
A great tip is to ensure you localise your App Store catalogue meta data. Prospective international customers may be able to understand an English language App UI, but they typically search their App Store in their native language, even if they can understand English. You can get translation services from the companies listed on slide 10 of Kieran’s deck.
Advertising was covered, and a few alternatives to the “big boys” are provided on slide 11. The advice was integrate a few of them to ensure you boost your fill rates. Also keep an eye out for new entrants who offer higher pay outs to gain market share. Again the point was made – advertising only provides a viable revenue stream for high traffic apps, so don't expect to get rich off Ads.
The top seller lists in the various App Stores drive a disproportional amount of downloads. App Stores are becoming so congested, developers are coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of getting into the recommended or top seller lists to drive eyeballs to their apps.
Kieran covers off a few of those tricks. Incentivised download services can boost your numbers to make those top seller charts. Look to have a cost of acquisition of around $1.50 per install. There are also a few services that offer a free app of the day. These are listed on slide 15.
Buddy up with friends and cross promote each others apps. You can also move your pricing up and down to “game” the system. Another tactic is to use in app purchase to buy big ticket items to game the top grossing charts. Kieran wisely advised to treat these tactics with caution, as there is a grey area around acceptable practice – you don't want to be delisted from the App Store in question.
All in all a really insightful talk, you can follow Kieran here.
Episode 5 of HashBang.TV is live "The Picture Perfect StartUp"
The latest episode features Oded Ran from Touchnote. Watch the video version below, and check out the Podcast for extended content.
TIOBE Software: Tiobe Index
TIOBE Programming Community Index for March 2012
March Headline: JavaScript surpasses Perl and Python
JavaScript is now at position 8 in the TIOBE index. Since websites depend more and more on JavaScript, it is expected that JavaScript's popularity will rise further in the near future. Another interesting observation is that while big software-related companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and Apple all have one of their programming languages in the top 10, Google seems to be incapable to achieve the same. Google's Go language dropped out of the top 50 this month, while the other major Google language Dart is also not successful yet. It is at position 78.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
Position
Mar 2012Position
Mar 2011Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Mar 2012Delta
Mar 2011Status 1 1 Java 17.110% -2.60% A 2 2 C 17.087% +1.82% A 3 4 
C# 8.244% +1.03% A 4 3 
C++ 8.047% -0.71% A 5 8 Objective-C 7.737% +4.22% A 6 5 PHP 5.555% -1.01% A 7 7 (Visual) Basic 4.369% -0.34% A 8 10 JavaScript 3.386% +1.52% A 9 6 Python 3.291% -2.45% A 10 9 Perl 2.703% +0.73% A 11 13 Delphi/Object Pascal 1.727% +0.73% A 12 30 PL/SQL 1.418% +1.01% A 13 11 Ruby 1.413% -0.09% A 14 23 Transact-SQL 0.925% +0.38% A 15 15 Lisp 0.922% -0.01% A 16 22 Visual Basic .NET 0.784% +0.22% A- 17 18 Pascal 0.771% +0.07% A 18 32 Logo 0.717% +0.31% A-- 19 17 Ada 0.633% -0.09% B 20 19 NXT-G 0.604% -0.04% B
Long term trends
The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.
Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com.
Position Programming Language Ratings 21 Lua 0.525% 22 R 0.502% 23 Fortran 0.495% 24 MATLAB 0.456% 25 Scheme 0.448% 26 Assembly 0.428% 27 Prolog 0.426% 28 RPG (OS/400) 0.424% 29 SAS 0.412% 30 cg 0.410% 31 Groovy 0.359% 32 COBOL 0.358% 33 ActionScript 0.352% 34 Erlang 0.339% 35 D 0.334% 36 Scratch 0.328% 37 ABAP 0.319% 38 F# 0.302% 39 C shell 0.293% 40 Haskell 0.288% 41 Awk 0.278% 42 Smalltalk 0.269% 43 CFML 0.265% 44 APL 0.260% 45 ML 0.257% 46 Forth 0.254% 47 Eiffel 0.251% 48 Bash 0.227% 49 Tcl 0.226% 50 PL/I 0.224%
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
- (Visual) FoxPro, ABC, Algol, Alice, Apex, bc, BlitzMax, Boo, CL (OS/400), Clean, Clojure, Dart, Dylan, Euphoria, Factor, Go, Icon, IDL, Informix-4GL, J, JavaFX Script, JScript.NET, Korn shell, LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Ladder Logic, Lingo, LPC, Mathematica, Modula-2, MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PowerShell, Q, REALbasic, REXX, S, S-PLUS, Scala, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, X10, xBase
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10 programming languages from 5, 15 and 25 years ago in the table below.
Programming Language Position
Mar 2012Position
Mar 2007Position
Mar 1997Position
Mar 1987Java 1 1 6 - C 2 2 1 1 C# 3 9 - - C++ 4 3 2 8 Objective-C 5 42 - - PHP 6 4 - - (Visual) Basic 7 5 3 5 JavaScript 8 8 20 - Python 9 7 27 - Perl 10 6 5 - Lisp 15 16 16 3 Ada 19 17 11 2 Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
Year Winner 2011 Objective-C 2010 Python 2009 Go 2008 C 2007 Python 2006 Ruby 2005 Java 2004 PHP 2003 C++ Categories of Programming Languages
In the tables below some long term trends are shown about categories of languages. Object-oriented statically typed languages have been most popular for more than 5 years now.
Category Ratings Mar 2012 Delta Mar 2011 Object-Oriented Languages 57.5% -0.7% Procedural Languages 35.9% -0.9% Functional Languages 4.2% +0.3% Logical Languages 2.4% +1.3%
Category Ratings Mar 2012 Delta Mar 2011 Statically Typed Languages 71.2% +1.2% Dynamically Typed Languages 28.8% -1.2%
This Month's Changes in the Index
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- David Hodder suggested to add "JS" to the "JavaScript" grouping.
- The programming language "Pure Data" has been added to the TIOBE index. It enters the chart at position 147.
- The confidence of "C Shell" hits has been set to 90% based on feedback from Georg Wrede.
- There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.
Bugs & Change Requests
This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don't hesitate to send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
- Apart from "<language> programming", also other queries such as "programming with <language>", "<language> development" and "<language> coding" should be tried out.
- Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.
- Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.
- Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.
- Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Q: Why is the maximum taken to calculate the ranking for a grouping, why not the sum?
A: Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That's why we decided to take the max.
The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either... If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.
- Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?
A: Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source "www.tiobe.com".
- Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?
A: We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are availabe in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.
- Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.
- Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?
A: First of all, YouTube counts only for 10% of all ratings, so it has hardly any influence on the index. YouTube has been added as an experiment. It qualified for the TIOBE index because of its high ranking on Alexa. YouTube is a young platform (so an indicator for popularity) and there are quite some lectures, presentations, programming tips and language introductions available on YouTube.
Interesting league table ranking for programming languages...where is your favourite?
Popcorn Horror App Aims To Change Way Movies Are Made
The idea of short form video content on mobile has been around for about a decade, but the secret to success content business is always the quality of the content, an audience, and a business model.
A new start up from Glasgow may have cracked the model.
Popcorn Horror is the brainchild of Felix Gilfedder. Felix is a life long filmmaker himself. With 10 independent short films and a few film awards under his belt he has blended his love of films, the horror genre, and technology to create Popcorn Horror.
Available on Android, iPhone and iPad, the app delivers a bite sized horror cinema experience in the palm of your hand, through a beautifully crafted UI.
The secret sauce of Popcorn Horror is the fact that it is much more than just a consumer facing content delivery platform, Felix has created a two-sided ecosystem. He has independent filmmakers from all over the world sending him films every week for distribution on the platform. This is where Felix's filmmaker credentials and contacts give him the edge.
I sat down with Felix to ask him a few questions:
1. When did Popcorn Horror launch, and can you share any details on how things are going?
Popcorn Horror launched Halloween 2011. With zero marketing budget, we got around 100 downloads and around 800 sessions a day. By the end of this month we expect to double downloads and reach 1,000 sessions a day. Our goal for the first six months is 400 -500 downloads a day with between 4,000 - 8,000 sessions a day. Once we hit that milestone we will look to translate our app for a foreign market, ble these figures and grow from there.
Needless to say there have been plenty of bumps in the road and we decided to launch the app as a Beta and debug as we go. Only now are we starting to get a more settled and rounded experience between loading times, user interface and content.
2. How many films are you receiving each day?
We receive around 4 -6 films a day.
3. What is the business model?
The business model works in two stages. First I want to grow the app while we cover our costs. At the moment all the content is free but you can become a premium user and life member for a one off fee of £3.99.
We will experiment with the model by locking the back catalogue (when the archive becomes big enough). People will be able to watch a selection of films and all new films moving forward, but if they want to watch something from the back catalogue they can unlock it by buying a premium pass. We also sell merchandise.
4. What's next for Popcorn Horror?
I would like to explore foreign markets and we have big plans for our web channel, but I can't say anything more about that at the moment.
For more information visit http://www.popcornhorror.com/
My latest piece for IT Pro Portal.
HashBang.TV Episode 4 - "Size isn't important, a wake up call for bloated agencies"
You can listen to the extended Episode 4 Podcast here.
The Application Developers Alliance - 2,300 sign ups in first 3 weeks
Yesterday I had a call with Jake Ward to understand the detail behind the recent announcement of the Application Developers Alliance which I covered in this blog post.
Jake clarified the purpose and mission of the organisation, and answered a few of the questions I posed.
Firstly, and importantly, it is a not for profit organisation. The idea came from the lack of representation of developers in the industry. Research was conducted before setting it up, “We have talked to a lot of developers” Jake confirmed.
Individual membership is free at the moment, and when fees are introduced it will be a nominal amount ~$25 > $50.
They are looking to attract developers of all platforms, and Jake told me they have already signed up 2,300 members in the first three weeks, with 500 – 700 of these being outside of the USA. Reporting a really positive reaction, largely due to being a not for profit, it is clear they are not trying to make money off developers.
These interest levels have promoted the Application Developers Alliance to undertake international activity sooner than planned. Their first non-US foray will be at the upcoming Blackberry DevCon in Amsterdam.
Clearly this answers one of the key questions from my original post - this will be an international organisation, and the discounts on services (like Rackspace hosting) will apply to any member regardless of location.
Jake seemed especially excited by the networking tool within the Alliance, describing it as “a LinkedIn for Developers” This will allow members to find skills to hire into their projects, and connect them with clients.
We discussed at length the “herding cats” metaphor, and Jake agreed that there is no one size fits all solution to address the developer community, emphasising they want the organisation to be open and collaborative to ensure it serves member needs.
This is re-enforced by the decision that the board will have developers sitting directly on it.
So, things look to be off to a fast start. I’ll keep you updated on further developments.
Herding Cats. The Application Developers Alliance – a trade body for an amorphous blob!
Interesting news ahead of CES. The concept of a trade association for app developers has surfaced again.
Jon Potter, formerly of the Digital Media Association, will launch the Application Developers Alliance at the CES trade show. He references the lack of organization within the developer community, and the need to bring it together.
It seems the Application Developers Alliance will aim to offer members the pretty standard array of trade association benefits – member networking, business match making, discounted services and industry lobbying.
The announcement has got pretty good pick up in the tech blogosphere, and there is speculation that RIM and Google may be involved. A positive start.
Frustratingly there is scant further information. It looks like its in stealth mode at the moment, the Application Developers Alliance website link was broken when I tried it,but there is an operational Twitter account @AppsAlliance. I have messaged Jon via Linked In, so I will report back.
I’m assuming the concept has been heavily researched with developers to get this far, so the thing I’m most interested in is the insight behind the need for a trade association, the reaction from developers, and their willingness to pay.
The concept of a single addressable “developer community” is an urban myth. Developers hang in tribes around particular languages, platforms, operating systems, or beliefs. Rather than being singularly addressable, they are by definition completely fragmented. Each individual tribe requires specific attention, knowledge and understanding of its particular needs. So far I've not come across a one size fits all solution. Trying to figure all this out, is both the challenge and appeal of working in developer marketing.
During the first year of BlueVia I have been open that our goal was primarily to raise awareness. Therefore the team attended over 100 events in 2011 and we spoke to pretty much everyone that would listen. The pure marketer in me wasn’t comfortable with this less than precise method, but it worked. We were also in startup mode, and there was not the time to attempt to develop a sophisticated segmentation model of the community ahead of launch. We did kinda try, but quickly discovered there was nothing out there we could use as a framework, it would all have to be from scratch.
That changed into the second half of 2011. Since then we have been working hard on creating our own segmentation of the community, which will allow us to identify much more precisely who would benefit the most from BlueVia.
However, it hasn’t been an easy piece of work to deliver. This is why I’m so keen to hear from Jon on the approach for the Application Developers Alliance.
If you accept that generic messages to the developer community will not work, then you have to be much more targeted in the way you tailor your proposition to individual developers.
Below is just a small sample of the categorisation attributes we identified and considered during our segmentation work
- Technology – perhaps the simplest approach is clustering around the developers preferred development platform – iOS, HTML5, Android, Ruby, .Net, Java, etc. This is relatively easy but risks missing the nuances of their actual needs and drivers.
- Organization type – is the developer an independent, a startup, in academia, an agency, a charity, an enterprise? Each situation brings its own set of needs and approaches
- Business Model – is the developer seeking to generate direct revenue from app sales, advertising, text messaging, in app billing or are they seeking to grow audience and market share, are they an open source developer, or a little of everything?
- Geography – another myth is apps are global. There are very few Facebook’s and FourSquare’s out there. Understanding the regional dynamics of technology, business, and competitive conditions is vital. I hope the Application Developers Alliance is intending to be an international body, and not just focused on the USA.
- Industry Vertical – is the developing producing apps or services for a particular vertical like games, financial services, energy, health, retail, etc
As you can see, the number of possibilities can quickly multiply, especially if you look to combine these to create a rich persona.
Patrick Mork floated the idea of an app trade body back in August 2011. I will have to reach out to him to see where that went, and if he is aware of Application Developers Alliance. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (disclaimer: I’m a board member) has also spent considerable time trying to figure out how it can become more relevant to independent developers, recognizing the huge contribution they collectively make to the mobile content and commerce industry.
So news of the Application Developers Alliance is welcome, but it faces some interesting hurdles. I’d love to analyze the detail, and understand exactly what kinds of developer Jon is intending to sign up. Its well documented that many developers are very negative towards marketing activities, even if its pushing something that directly benefits them. It will be fascinating to see how the Application Developers Alliance is pitched to them.
What do you think? Do developers need a trade body and will they sign up?
