Macadamian Blog

Finally, the iPad has a real challenger - Amazon’s Kindle Fire

Since April 2010, the industry has been waiting for a genuine competitor to the iPad. While there are dozens of Android tablets on the market, none have made a serious dent in Apple's market share, which is hovering at a healthy 80% of tablet sales 

Enter the Kindle Fire.

How can Amazon, an online retailer and a relative latecomer, stand to steal market share away from Apple and be a real contender in the tablet space, when seasoned consumer electronics companies like Samsung and Motorola have yet to make a serious dent? 

Successful Mobile Apps – Release Quickly

Key element 2 of 5

Recently I shared with you on of the key elements to creating a successful mobile app that we’ve discovered while developing new mobile products for our customers (it was ‘offering real value’ if your missed it.) Today I’m going to share with you another key element – Fast turnaround.

Make no mistake, there’s a race to get the best solution to your customers before your competitors do. You have a great idea, a great differentiator, a stunning UI. The blueprint is all there. But two weeks before shipping, how close is the near-finished product to the original design? With the extra burden of ramping up on new platforms like iOS and Android, something has to give, and usually it's the timeline. The product manager is forced to ship late or cut features.

While there are often a number of reasons for getting in this situation, the root cause is most often a lack of streamlined product creation process.

Does your company do a "hand off" from product management to engineering, with you left crossing your fingers that the team will get the design right and on time? Do you get pressure to "sign off" on requirements that you know will change over the course of the project? If you answered “yes” to one or both of these questions the odds are likely you’re not going to be able to check the ‘fast turnaround time’ on the list of key elements to a successful mobile app.

The solution? An integrated process that has the product managers, UI designers, and engineering team all working together on a daily basis. This will ensure the team stays flexible, communicates, builds momentum, moves quickly, and meets tough deadlines.

Not sure how to get there? We’d love to share our process with you. Send us a message and we’d be happy to discuss!

Successful Mobile Apps - Offer Real Value

Unless you’re recently back from a long stay on a deserted island, you’ve been bombarded with news reports, market forecasts and customer input about mobility.

But for every monumental success like Angry Birds, there are thousands of apps that fail. iTunes alone boasts 330,000 mobile apps, and this number is in the millions when you consider other app stores, direct downloads, and mobile web applications.

We’re constantly developing new mobile products for our customers, and we’ve distilled some of key elements that make the difference between a mobile product that becomes part of your customer’s daily lifestyle, and a product that is lost in the shuffle, 'collecting dust'.

Choosing a Cross-Platform Mobile Framework: Analysis and Advice

Engineering your mobile application for only one mobile platform can be a risky endeavor, given the tight race between iOS, Android, Blackberry and even Windows Phone 7. Managers are feeling pressure to release their product on as many of these platforms and form factors and possible.

To meet this challenge, does it make sense for your team to adopt one of the emerging cross-platform mobile frameworks like PhoneGap or Sencha Touch? And if so, which is the best and least risky choice? In our new whitepaper, we’ve done some homework to help you sort out the options and make an informed decision.

Twitter and R8it, our own social rating experiment, Part 2

You can read up on the background of the experiment in my previous post titled Twitter and R8it, our own social rating experiment Part 1. In short, we wanted to experiment with twitter to see how we could help raise Macadamian's visibility at conferences using twitter and its infrastructure. I encourage you to view the app at r8it.macadamian.com to put the information below in context.