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Social relevant apps

I founded a start-up company called Innoprenez back in May 2012 with a vision to create mobile apps innovations that are local relevant and having the potential to make huge impact among South Africans. From that day,  we have done quite a couple of things including participating in the Vodacom Developer Programme to facilitate android technical workshops and outreach programmes both in developer communities, townships and academia. We have also worked with Sowertech contributing to the  development of Afta Robot solution for the Taxi industry.   This is one of the mobile app projects that was quite interesting during its development and the day it was launched. Today, we are working on a mobile platform that aims to revolutionalise the way in which Career guidance and counseling is offered.

I hope you have heard this phrase "social relevant apps" almost a couple of times and you might be asking yourself what apps are social relevant and what apps are not.  To share some light on this topic, Let me first begin by quoting the words of a young successful entrepreneur named Khethi Nkosi who runs a JSE Listed company called Xuma Infrastructure Group(XIG).  During our pitch, he said to us "The only way to make a success in the mobile apps space is not inventing another facebook or twitter as the next big thing,  but creating innovative  mobile solutions that address the pressing problems of your country".  These are the words that caught my attention and i always reflect on them on every business endeavor.  Solving the problems of your country is key, it is the fundamental criteria that differentiate successful solutions to those that are destined to fail.  From this what you can learn is that the first characteristic for a social relevant app, it must be a solution that address a social problem. You need to address a problem rather than copying someone else thinking you will make it.

You may be asking yourself, how do I find the problem.  How will I know that this problem is important to address or not. Which problem are likely to succeed and which are not.  If you have lived in South Africa for the past ten years.  There are certain prevailing problems you observe among people in the communities whether disadvantaged or not, with local municipalities, government sectors and so forth.  Most of these problems is what people are complaining and debating about everyday, every hour, every minute, meaning they don't have a solution yet. Remember that most problems comes from observations, if you are not convinced ask the people you believe are facing the problem, they will give you better insights regarding the problems they are facing.  Some problems come from something you think it is a problem to a specific audience but not sure, you also need to validate your thoughts with the audience that you think is facing the problem.  That is the best approach i have find to be useful through my experience.

There is a temptation among entrepreneurs to create a solution without doing consulting with the target audience because they think they best understand the problems of a specific market, than the market itself.  This is a trap. Don't be surprised when people are not interested in your app or you receive a handful of downloads. The involvement of the people whom you are creating an app or a service for,  is as important as creating the app itself. You have to keep that in mind.

There also other factors we need to take a look at,  such as Impact, Innovation, User Experience, Originality.  The impact of your solution is directly proportional to the amount of pain that the solution is addressing.  Mobile phones sold like cakes even in low-income communities not because they were highly innovative or something completely new. It was because that they were eliminating the pain that has severely constrained communication among individuals for decades. I remember the days when i had to make a call to my uncle who was in Springs, my grandmother would sent me 5 kilometres away from home to a family that had a landline. I hated traveling that path just for a simple call. Today, you just grab your mobile handset and select the contact there you go.

Corporates have a different perspective on innovation compared to startup entrepreneurs. I know we may argue for the whole day on what is innovation and what it is not,  but i am not here to define what innovation is. I will only give you my perspective on what i believe is good innovation. Good innovation is disruptive in nature, meaning it makes meaning and  wow its audience.
It is not just a minor modification of what is existing just to differentiate as  most corporates do.   An typical example companies with great innovation is Apple and Google.   Innovative apps bring something that users never thought it was possible or have though of it but the way the solution presents it is excellent to the end user.  Innovation should be exercised across all aspects of product development life cycle, even in the business model for the solution you are creating.  To be an innovator, you need some level of craziness, great passion and vision in your idea. A certain group of people will think you are mad but it is okay.  Students in academia seems to be the ones who have this character of innovation at best, believe me, i was part of the adjudication panel at end of year student symposium at Vodacom in summer 2012, the audience was blown away by the apps that the students developed. To them it was fun. Innovation solutions are created when there is fun involved.

Creating exceptional experiences that are both memorable and appealing to your users with your app or service is highly important. User experience is a process not just a once off thing. Great first impression is vital, it is what your audience will judge you with. Remember that the first bad impression is likely to doom you forever in that market.  Windows Vista is an example of crappy experience that has made users skeptic of good features in Windows 7 and also Windows 8 on a desktop is another example of a bad user experience. To create an app with good user experience you need to understand your audience very well, learn about their constraints and behaviours. Understand what are the different context will my audience use my service or app.  Interact and get feedback from them concerning what do they think will be a better experience for them. Do user research, get user experience designers, developers are bad user experience designers.

Originality, yes your idea can be completely new or an existing solution with novel ways to bring a new experience to it. PC was there but Steve Jobs has a different vision for it. Search was there but Google had a new idea of making it interesting. What these guys had was not new but something existing with a new vision for it.

The impact of mobile technology in the developing countries

Africa has been counted amongst one of the continents which has places that are still unreached by today's fascinating web technologies such as facebook, twitter,  etc.  Although it is so,  the proliferation of mobile devices is raising much awareness of such technologies on a daily basis as people begin to shift from end user phones to today's smartphones.  The biggest problem lies in the design of this new generation smartphones, they have been designed with a mindset of saying we are in the developed world not in a developing world.  Take for instance ,  the antenna reception quality of latest generation smartphones,  it does not matter whether HTC,  iPhone, Motorola or Nokia. Immediately you leave urban areas to rural areas where base stations are very far,  your phone becomes useless - no internet connection , no signal reception, it just become a dump piece of asset.  I remember when Nokia released the 5110 around 2000 if not wrong about the release date,  the device had the capability to catch signals even if taken to a rural place where base stations were very far away.

Most useful apps on today's smart phones are tailored for the western developed world either US or UK, trust me you will get that on any mobile platform whether  android , iPhone or the Windows Mobile or Symbian, there no difference. Although such issues prevails,  we cannot deny the great role that mobile technology is playing to transform our societies in terms of social interaction,  business,  education  including managing some of our daily activities. Mobile devices have become another best friend we heavily depends upon. Besides, research has shown us that if the technology pack of today's smartphones can be shifted towards addressing problems inherent in the rural sector , more transformation and improvement can be realized  especially in education,  crime prevention, business and so forth. Although such benefits can be realized but affordability and low signal receptions will still be a major obstacle for people in rural sector. However, as time advances, more deployments of new networks will surface to offer more availability and as mobile devices improves in terms of hardware capability , more and more devices will become cheaper and affordable to the larger society. This will present us with a wide range of opportunities in terms of new developments which are geared towards improving our society. 

What is your opinion of this?

Google App Inventor for educators and non-tech experts

Looks like Google means business and has devised  a strategy to promote the android platform in any way to gain more popularity . The company is now giving access to an experimental system that allows anyone without prior programming experience to create a full android application through visual components that need only dragging and dropping. Most interactions you can think of, can be modelled visually using the App Inventor. Moreover, using the App inventor,  you can visually create applications that accesses  android sensors,  such as Accelorometer, Compass, Proximity,  Pressure, and light sensor, including applications that use Camera and GPS. I know that developers like tweaking stuff in the underlying source code, but sorry for that because the App Inventor does not generate any  java code. It is primarily tailored for non-tech people who are interested in getting their hands in the creation of the technology regardless being inexperienced in technical stuff.   But that does not mean that if you are a developer,  you cannot use the App Inventor.  As a developer, you can experiment with the App Inventor on how to create applications with Rich User Experience and save the time you spend trying to tweak the code to make the app looks cool.  Although I have not yet get my hands on the App Inventor,  however, from a set of video trailers, I can confirm that the App Inventor is quite a nice tool to have as an individual who want to rapidly create  cool apps  without much hussle. You can find out more about the App Inventor at App Inventor Home at Google Labs

What is the potential of Google Android in the mobile application market

Google, as the leading internet giant, has already taken a solid stand in the mobile application market with the release of the Android platform.   Few years ago, the company was well known for its popular search engine, which managed to stand out and shine compared to other search engines such as altavista.com and yahoo.com.   However, in recent years, the company has shown its dramatic effort in exploring other areas, not limiting itself only to search.  To this end, the android platform has opened doors for developers to innovate without limits and interestingly enough, more innovative applications has already surfaced from diverse developer communities rather than google itself. This showed that the freedom and openness that Google has given to mobile application developers through the android platform, has truly brought a great benefit not only to the company but also to various developer communities who have been ambitious waiting for so long to develop ground breaking mobile applications with ease. 

Except all these benefits that android brings, one might still ask a question of what potential does Android have in the mobile application market when compared to other platforms such as iPhone and Blackberry. Although recent reviews from different sources reports that Android is dramatically catching up with the iPhone market and  moreover seems to have more potential compared to other mobile application platforms, however,  it is not quite clear as to whether will Android stay long enough in the mobile app market.   According to my perspective, Android has a great potential and these are things that I believe will make android win the game.

Openness – making the Android OS completely open, and also making the Android SDK freely available and accessible to everyone, has already invited countless innovations and will continue to invite more innovations.  Innovation is what makes some products and services to last long than others. As the platform maintains its philosophy of being open, it will be the love of most development communities.

Flexible design methodologies – android adopted clean and simple design methodologies which make writing applications in android more of a fun than a pain in the ass.  Moreover, the learning curve is shorter compared to other mobile platforms. As intuitive as it is to write applications in android, more developers will possibly find it more comfortable to stay with android than other platforms.

Unconstrained hardware access – Throughout all blog posts, social media sites, forums and developer communities I visited, the questions I came across where something like "how do I overlay so and so object on android camera, how do I use the Sensor API in android , etc.  Developers are more interested in taking advantage of the underlying device hardware to develop unthinkable applications without any constraints and that is what Android offered, which led to rising number of innovative Augmented Reality applications and other cool apps created by diverse developer communities.

Increasing support for different devices – Apple took a path to have their mobile OS support only the iPhone, while Blackberry has their software only on a variety Blackberry devices but still the same brand. The android has gone to support multiple device brands which make it more sensible.

What do you think and What is your view on this ?