For larger enterprises we typically see them getting buried in the technology issues and rapidly forgetting why they need to do this in the first place. Your customers now expect it. What’s more, their expectations are scaling up at an escalating rate – with iOS users perched at the top of the pyramid of expectation.

Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and similar applications are the ones most used by your customers – and their designers have trained your own users to expect increasing beauty and sophistication in the design and form factor of any mobile application they use. Using these apps is now more than a functional exercise, it is a brand experience reflecting your customer service and care. Apple has ensured a focus on quality design by encouraging a forum of open feedback by consumers. A grotty user experience and bad design will be attacked smartly and in public.

ASB customer feedback in the App Store.

Poor ASB Bank discovered this (I imagine to their shock) when they launched their iPhone app a few months ago. The very functional application bears a remarkable similarity to their mobile browser service. It has been slammed by their disappointed customers. What’s worse is that customers have helpfully pointed out to ASB what they really expect: one like ANZ’s goMoney app. And once BNZ launched their app, ASB’s envious customers suggested ASB take a look at that competitor app as well.

To be fair to ASB, their iPhone customers actually have access to more functionality than ANZ’s goMoney users. ANZ’s mobile offering does not yet support bill payments however ANZ’s customers remain delighted with the service. Their bank spent a huge amount of time and effort in creating simplicity and making it gorgeous.

Bearing this in mind: why would any large organisation with a lot of customers risk their brand by taking a lack of care in user interface?

It generally boils down to technology decisions. Fraught internal teams eyeball the nightmare of a plethora of mobile devices and operating systems and mentally contemplate years of angst-ridden support. This leads to a optimistic waiting period for apps to ‘go away’. And mobile browsers to prevail.

This has lead to an air of collective relief as the HTML5 frameworks hit the market from providers like Sencha Touch, Phonegap and JQueryMobile. These platforms allow developers to produce a form of hybridised mobile browser service with some native application attributes. And more importantly they promise to support a multitude of smart phones rather than just the iPhone.

The ginormous warning is that these frameworks are NOT a silver bullet. They are an excellent inclusion in your mobile technology roadmap, however the ability to support many devices at once is achieved via a compromise on control of design and an individual device’s form factor.

Putting it bluntly: you can roll out and support a very functional mobile service over a lot of devices. You can even make it nice looking – with some effort into design. You cannot deliver fabulousness. This is much less of an issue for users of low end smart-phones including the cheaper Androids. We have seen that iOS users are left disappointed.

I will flag an exception here. Xero recently launched their iPhone app. This has been developed using the Sencha Touch framework and is in fact a browser (HTML5) service with an application wrapper. They obviously put effort into the UI which while functional is clean and fresh looking, in line with their online brand. It leverages a couple of phone functions such as the camera for receipt capture but does not provide the sophisticated navigation controls enabled by a fully native iPhone app. Such as the swooping and sliding and dropping up and down of design containers on the application. However it doesn’t need to. Xero customers are business customers completing accounting tasks. The expectation of a business application is quite different from a consumer one. Even uf the consumer app is a practical one and despite any practical duplication of functions.

LinkedIn's new app has particularly lovely use of sliders, transparent overlays and drop-downs.

So what should you offer your customers?

1. It is not as simple as HTML5 versus native app. Our view is you should use both. For large consumer brands: please give your iPhone customers (and ideally your top-end Android users) a beautifully designed native app. Showcase your brand. Offer this alongside an HTML5 browser based offering – implemented using Sencha Touch, Phonegap or similar. This will enable you to capture the breadth of user. BNZ has taken the app plus site approach and their gamble has paid off. Their team report that their iOS users have moved in droves towards the native app rather than the equally available browser offering.
2. Look at your competitors to understand the benchmark. Whatever you deliver has to offer at least as good a user experience as the best offering in the market. Consumers are expecting more and more gorgeousness.
3. Get your real inspiration for design from the most popular applications in the App Store. Look at the social apps used every day by your customers. Download and try games and other services. See how they implement navigation, custom controls and smooth design elements. These are the applications that are setting the expectations of your customers. Learn from them.

What applications do we like?

Take a look at the new LinkedIn app. This has been completely overhauled and manages to organise and streamline navigation through an astonishing amount of content via a lovely user experience. It has been beautifully designed. We also like elements of other apps such as the handling of tabs on Jamie Oliver’s cooking apps. Sliders and drop downs on Nike’s training app.

And as a final plea directly to Kiwibank and Westpac – as the two major NZ banks that have not currently got a full-featured mobile banking app in the market – you may be last but you have an opportunity to differentiate through great design.

The landscape is shifting mightily fast as yesterday’s bleeding edge becomes today’s everyday – and tomorrow’s landfill. Major corporates in key industries like retail, distribution, telecommunications and media are finding their decades-proven business models are turning their toes up in today’s world. Most have an awareness on a sliding scale from minor need to extreme urgency that that they will need to transform their business. But what does this mean?

The classic approach for transformation can involve: sending staff around the world to industry peer events to see what is being done in other countries; workshops and brainstorming sessions with staff to discuss ways of leveraging current assets in the evolving market; bolting on a Facebook site or mobile app.

The problem is that overlaying market trends over your existing business model doesn’t necessarily change anything. It is like having an a 22 year old Ford Escort and adding a large exhaust. It is still an old car but is now a noisier one. Talking to industry peers can be useful but not necessarily transformational: they are dealing with the same challenges you are.

The brave move is to literally consider your current business as being inside the square and take a seriously close look out into the blue sky. Rather than saying: how will social media or cloud impact my business? Put your own business to one side and ask the question: how will social media or cloud or mobility impact my customers or their customers? What are the ripple-through implications of changes in customer behaviour? Break things down by individual consumer and business segments and consider at the specific level rather than the broad market generic. Consider the fundamental evolutions going on in the market and in different industries. Look along the value-chain, how are changes in consumer behaviour impacting different sectors? How are technology shifts like cloud impacting SMEs or retailers or exporters? Which industries look like they are in trouble because they need to transform too? Go outside your industry and comfort zone for ideas.

Have a go at actually quantifying some of these opportunities - I always get a bit fascinated about how decisions are often made via hunches, a few articles forwarded around – and in the absence of solid market forward data.

By looking forward and outwards, and focusing on new market challenges and opportunities, you can then start to identify new opportunities for your organisation. These may include servicing new sectors, filling future market needs, solving problems that don’t exist yet. It may also involve making some very hard decisions about your current assets and product offerings. It also means being realistic about your competitors and new market entrants. Just because they are not a threat today does not mean they won’t be planning a giant leap forwards or sideways too.

To conclude with some questioning examples:

• if the SME of the future is delivering all their business applications out of the cloud – what does this mean for their data consumption? How are they handling distribution, stock management, manufacturing and outsourcing? What are the implications for self-service?
• if the over 50s and 60s are the fastest growing group for social networking – how does this change your strategy for customer communication?
• if the primary method for internet access (and communications) will be a smartphone for lower socio economic groups – how will these be serviced by major public and private sector service providers?
• if consumers are increasingly moving to shop online (from anywhere) – how do niche retailers go Glocal? What are their implications for stock management and logistics?

This post is targeted at people who want to know how Objective-C’s memory management features work, particularly the autorelease feature…

Memory management

Objective-C is a great language but it does have its limitations, one of which is the fact it still uses reference counting for memory management, rather than garbage collecting. This can be the source of many issues to the un-initiated, resulting in application crashes and memory leaks. I’m not going to rehash the details found on the Apple developer website, as they provide some very useful guidance on memory management.

I do want to cover some of the lesser-known things about using autorelease for memory management. At first glance it seems like using autorelease is the way to go, as it removes the need for the developer to worry about releasing the object themeselves. There are a few hidden issues with using autorelease. Don’t get me wrong, autorelease has its place and is useful in many circumstances, but it needs to be used wisely.

One of the places you should not use autorelease is in tight loops with many iterations. Autorelease objects are automatically released but only at the end of the system run loop. If you have a tight loop using autorelease objects these will build up in memory whilst the loop is executing and wont be released until the tight loop finishes and the system run-loop completes. For example the following code sample isn’t the best, due to its use of autorelease:

for (int j=0; j < 1000; j++) {

NSString *myString = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@”output %@”,data] autorelease];

//rest of loop code

}

You might choose to add your own autorelease pool within the loop to better manage the release of objects built up during the loop, but this then adds overhead to the loop and can cause performance degradation. So when creating objects within a loop, it is almost always best to manage the memory yourself, to avoid the autorelease pool, and make better use of the limited memory a device has available. Within a loop it is usually easy to allocate and release your own objects, as the objects are generally only alive for each iteration of the loop. Where this gets murky is if you make use of the Class helper methods for creating objects, like:

[NSString stringWithFormat:@”output %@”,data];

These style of constructors make use of the autorelease feature under the hood to manage memory. So if you make use of lots of these functions within a tight loop you can end up using a lot of memory and causing memory spikes, before the loop completed and the autorelease pool is drained at the end of the system run loop. So in these situations you should consider moving to manually allocating and releasing the objects yourself. Yes, this results in slightly more code, but it also results in more even memory management. For instance you should modify your code to read:

for (int j=0; j < 1000; j++) {

NSString *myString = [NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@”output %@”, data];

//rest of loop code

[myString release];

}

Another area where large amounts of memory can be temporarily leaked is in using [UIImage imageNamed:] style methods, if used within a tight loop. UIImage can consume a large amount of memory, for high-resolution images. So this is another target for manual memory management if possible within tight loops.

Your application has a global autorelease pool in place (look to main.m to see how this is created), but when you spawn a new thread, it does not have an associated autorelease pool.  If you use an autoreleased object within your thread, you will see warnings like this appearing all over your console:

_NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0xf20a80 of class NSCFNumber autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

To prevent these objects from being leaked, you’ll need to create a new autorelease pool at the start of your thread:

NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

and drain it at the end:

[pool drain];

General memory troubleshooting advice

When dealing with memory management issue always make sure that you utilise the tools provided within XCode. Make use of the static analyser, to identify memory leaks. Also make sure to run the Performance tools to measure the memory utilisation on an actual device, whilst it is running. This will generally identify any leaked memory or memory that is held for too long.

Another useful thing to implement is the following method in the AppDelegate:

(void)applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning:(UIApplication *)application

This allows your application to act as a good citizen and free up memory when the device starts running low on memory. You should remove any cached data, that can be easily reloaded when you application needs it at a later point. Now with iOS4.0 and multitasking your application is not normally exited, so continues to use memory even when running in the background.

• Auckland: 23 May, (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Christchurch: 7 June 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Dunedin: 8 June 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Wellington: 1 July 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Hamilton: 13 July 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Auckland: 14 November 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm)
• Wellington: 16 November 2011 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm).

We’ve built something. Now what?

The need to innovate to stay ahead is a theme across government and businesses of all sizes in New Zealand. Large organisations often struggle with the chasm between coming up with an idea and getting it into delivery mode. Smaller companies are generally more nimble with getting their ideas from concept to concrete – but stall at the point of go to market.

There are a wide range of reasons many of our innovations don’t make it as far as the global stage.

In some cases they don’t pass the Google test: has it been done before? In other cases the market speaks: “we don’t need it or we cannot buy it if you haven’t told us about it”.

In general it usually boils down to a clear view of your product’s value proposition, market opportunity, target customer and market segment, and path to market.

The seminar is intended to give you an idea of what areas you need to focus on in your business planning and capability development, and it’s likely not what you think.

Objectives

By the end of this interactive seminar you’ll have a level understanding of some of the key considerations and pitfalls when getting your product to market.

The session will cover the top level lifecycle from idea to market and outline key considerations for each stage. Key discussion areas will include how to qualify an idea, the importance of a clear value proposition, how to understand the realistic size of a market opportunity, ways a New Zealand company can market and sell internationally, when and how to protect IP and much more.

Target Audience

• Leaders within technology start-ups and mid stage businesses who are looking to take their product to the international market
• People in any organization who have been given responsibility for taking an idea from concept to a market proposition
• Founders and leaders of early to mid stage businesses that feel their businesses are stuck at a certain stage and need to do something differently to move forward – or that don’t want it to be
• Anyone considering taking a tech-related concept to market

Workshop Presenter

Caroline Dewe, Director at Alphero, is highly experienced in innovation both within New Zealand and internationally.

She has come from the school of hard knocks and brings real experience in the joys of marketing and selling New Zealand technology into European and SE Asian markets. Alphero is currently providing advice to businesses from start-up to corporate in how to accelerate their ideas and their businesses.

The workshop will include many practical examples and war stories of the good the bad and the truly unexpected.

Registration Details

Visit the NZ Computer Society website to register or for further information on seminar dates and locations.

I started my mobile career in the late 1990s when today’s smartphones were science fiction.

At that time SMS was it. The earliest text services were greeted with the kind of global fanfare now reserved for the launch of the-next-best-social-network-thang. Or Visa and Mastercard and AMEX and PayPal and Google and Apple partnering for the all singing all dancing P2P payment service.

The thing is. Text services are no longer sexy.

You cannot sling an angry bird with it, or use it to insert an image of a sofa into your living room. Media and advertising agencies have abandoned the ubiquitous text to win service in droves in favour of a prancy iPhone app that does anything or nothing at all.

What I find interesting though is that SMS is STILL one of the most popular means of communication in the world.

It is still the primary reason why a 15-24 year old buys a phone. It is still used a staggering 5000 to 10000 times a month by some individuals to chat with their mates. (This volume is feasible by “text bombing” all your friends at once. Mine would disown me.)

Telcos are handling mind-boggling message volumes from consumers choosing to receive their Facebook and Twitter updates via SMS.

My Mum uses it to chat with her friends around the world. During the last earthquake in Christchurch she got so overwhelmed by the flood of texts from her over-70 friends she nearly had a meltdown. Her fingers don’t work that fast.

I book meetings with CEOs of major enterprises via SMS.

Major enterprises are integrating SMS capability into their nastiest and most hard core enterprise systems as standard. It is becoming particularly crucial in the emerging trend towards social CRM. SMS is a cost effective way to communicate instantly and non-intrusively with your customers.

It is still the most useful way to reach large bases of people in a natural disaster, to inform them that their plane is running late, to deliver a voucher, or inform that a bill needs to be paid urgently.

There was a good article posted yesterday in mobilecommercedaily about the integration of SMS within your broader mRetail and smartphone strategy.  It made me think of all the large private and public sector organisations that are quietly cracking on with plugging SMS services into the core of their customer relationship management strategies and processes.

I love the possibilities opened up by smartphones but even more I love seeing yesterday’s frivolous mobile technology become business as usual today. I don’t mourn the slow down in text to win campaigns. I welcome the evolution of SMS towards everyday normal use by today’s enterprises to extend their communications reach.

I also take my hat off to telcos in some markets who have sweated blood and endured a lot of grief in their endeavours to protect customers from spam. Those years of effort have paid off and say much about the willingness of those customers (now) to openly engage with public and private sector organisations via SMS and the mobile.

So how do you ensure your carefully crafted HTML5  reaches the targeted device sets – and users?

Todays post relates to delivering an app you have carefully crafted using HTML5. Once again there are multiple approaches and frameworks for delivering your applications to your targeted device set.

Via web

The simplest option is to just distribute your HTML5 application as is via the web. It is then up to the end user to add a hyperlink to their mobile desktop. This approach is great because it avoids the approval process of something like the Apple App Store, as HTML applications are not vetted by Apple first.

Custom application wrapper for HTML5

The next option is to consider rolling your own application wrapper for your HTML5 application. With this approach you can take your HTML5 app and deliver it inside a native application. In particular both iOS and Android allow this approach through the use of the UIWebView and WebView components. These views allow you to add your own hooks and even execute arbitrary Javascript to interact between your native application wrapper and your website displayed inside your webview. In order to handle this approach you will need to read up on the appropriate WebView you intend to use for each of the mobile platforms.

Third party product wrappers for greater device reach

If you want to provide a native application experience to an even broader range of devices, then you are probably better off considering something like PhoneGap, which provides a common approach to wrapping your HTML5 application for a much larger range of devices. Under the hood it uses the devices WebView component, but provides a much richer set of hooks and Javascript API’s so that your HTML5 application can take advantage of native phone features, like GPS, Storage, Camera etc.  PhoneGap allows you to target your HTML5 app at 6 different mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone and Symbian. The PhoneGap approach allows you to use the same PhoneGap JavaScript API in your HTML and it will work across the entire device range (some device capabilities, may vary slightly).

HTML5/Javascript app converted to native app

If you want to go a different route altogether and you are starting from scratch you could consider a framework like Titanium’s Appcelerator. This framework lets you build an HTML5/Javascript based application that then gets converted via the framework into a native application for each of the platforms supported. At the time of writing Appcelerator supports the iOS and Android platforms. Appcelerators focus is on building native Application from underlying HTML and JavaScript code base. This results in a faster end app, as it is running native code, but does mean you need to learn the Titanium Javascript API’s for constructing your application.

Pros and cons

Once again each of these approaches has its pro’s and con’s and it really depends on what you are trying to achieve with your HTML5 app, and what platforms you intend targeting. If you end up wrapping your HTML5 app as a native application, you will still need to go through whatever app store approval processes that are required for each of the platforms. There has been discussion that Apple don’t support the new and improved Nitro Javascript engine for the UIWebView component currently.  This means that products like PhoneGap on iOS will also miss out on the improvements made to Javascript engine by Apple (at least in the current iOS version). But if you are running your HTML5 app directly in Safari, then you will see the speed advantages of the new Nitro Javascript engine.

These were themes for my session with at the NZ Retailers Association conference last week in Auckland.

“I certainly have the very distinct feeling that there are a number of major retailers out there who are now thinking ‘ what strategic options do we need to agree on in the social media / mobile phone space.’ Your message was absolutely clear – ‘strategy before implementation’. This is common sense but we have seen too many examples of businesses rushing into having a presence before they decide on what they are trying to achieve.” John Albertson, CEO NZRA.

I would be delighted to see a lot more innovation in New Zealand businesses in general, and from NZ retailers in particular. (I have a background in mCommerce and love innovation in this area). The problem is that most organisations will not get a lot of practical benefit from innovation-at-random, bar some good PR if they are lucky.

The great thing about the collision between mobile, location, social media, commerce and more is that a lot of these technologies can be remarkably cost effective to roll-out.  And can be truly transformational for customer reach and engagement.

There is only one teeny requirement: new services require a modicum of strategic consideration first.

People who know me know that I don’t like mucking around. If I am suggesting alignment of your new service with your strategy I am not suggesting a 12 month delay of kicking off your project and aeons of circular debates. Sometimes a half day workshop will do it.

Interestingly enough when I made this point at the conference last week I was bailed up by a substantial bunch of rather shifty retailers. Quotes below:

“We are actually rather embarrassed. We put up a Facebook site last week because we thought we should have one. And we don’t know why!”

“We were just saying that we should probably get an iPhone app. We hadn’t thought of making it useful or even considered what it should do.”

My suggestion is that if you are thinking about rolling out a mobile app for your customers, or launching a Facebook site, or adding a twitter account – consider the following for starters:

• what are some key customer goals for my business (e.g. “we want to upsell skateboarders from a beginner board to an intermediate one”)
• are there any specific demographics you would like to reach
• are there any problems you want to solve (“if there is a queue, people go to the shop next door. I want to reduce queuing”)
• how do your customers deal with that problem right now? At the most simple you can map a storyboard or journey flow on the whiteboard. Substitute or add your mobile or social idea and qualify how it fits in context with your other channels.

It all sounds pretty obvious.

One of the things people forget about mobile, social media and other increasingly mainstream innovations: you now have the ability to reach out to an individual.

What this means is that you can now deliver niche services that directly target a particular problem or small group of customers. Providing these services are considered within the broader context of your market strategy you can get very real results from very niche services. You can still get the PR. You can still tick the innovation box. But you will avoid burning money and effort on something that is little more than throwaway digital brochureware.

Ignoring the culpabilty angle (she was effectively stealing copper even if she was unaware of the potential consequences, this sort of theft is common in developing markets), this brings to mind a key point from my two speaking engagements last week.

Our world is moving astonishingly fast. For those of us who have been immersed at the pointy end of the shifting landscape of technology, jargon and rapid change – we take a lot for granted these days. Our tweeting and sharing and blogging audience of tech-savvy peers gives us a warm fuzzy feeling of inclusion.

We assume what we do, and what we know is ubiquitous and widespread.

Last week I presented similar sets of material within two days to the NZ Retailers Association members, and to attendees of TEL.CON 2011. The general reflections on the  pace of change, the future customer landscape, and collision between mobile, social, geodata, digital and more were received quite differently by two groups.

For some of the retailers it was a rather overwhelming dump of info. While some Kiwi businesses like Air New Zealand are leading the world with the sophistication of their digital, mobile and social strategies; others are debating the set-up of a twitter account and contemplating sending an informative SMS to selected customers.

Many concepts were new and the collective scale of newness was daunting (if exciting) for a few.  The retailers conference was followed by the leaders of New Zealand’s ICT community discussing the weighty theme of the future of broadband in New Zealand. Standards, regulations, spectrum auctions and allocations were all key topics.

The “woohoo – new ways of doing things” blurb was received by many of the TEL.CON folks with a bit of a blink.  I felt rather like I had turned up to an art exhibition with crayons and a colouring book. The stuff is everyday for this crowd. Surely everyone knows …

When I mentioned to the TEL.CON folks that some of the more glam trends came as a bit of surprise to a few retailers (see the IKEA augmented reality catalogue), someone asked why I thought this was a surprise. My on-the-hoof answer at the time was not particularly pithy. On further reflection I think it is really simple.

The two sets of attendees could have been on different continents, not the same city. There was certainly little indication of overlap between the two worlds – from attendees to exhibitors to speakers. My question at the Retailers event was: where are the ICT vendors? In particular the ones innovating in customer service and channels. Intergen gets a wee brownie point for being one of a handful of tech exhibitors.

In our techno-savvy micro-universe I think we assume broader-than-reality embedded knowledge from our daily immersion; and our interactions with the tech-aware. In our rush to share, it feels a bit like everyone knows everything, instead of a lot of people knowing something.

Meanwhile a lot of Kiwis are off doing everyday business and making hard calls on whether to invest in new point of sale kit, or a Facebook site. But cannot afford both.

In global markets some of the most interesting uses for mobile broadband, payments, location, and social media are being delivered out of the retail sector. This group is usually a major target of ICT vendors. Vendors in these markets are actively educating this key sector as they are at the absolute pointy end of offering things to mass market consumers that mass market consumers want.

Worryingly for New Zealand business: overseas retailers are also at the pointy end of offering compelling products and services to Kiwi consumers.

The collision of innovative technologies and channels can and should be used to change the game for local companies both in terms of local business differentiation, and global opportunities. Globalisation brings new ways to reach customers, and new revenue opportunities. I’d like to see our tech-savvy community (me included) divert a % of our time away from our peer group, and focus it on bringing our business ecosystem on the journey with us.

Final notes: The airline industry was singled out several times by one of the international speakers at that event for its complete lack of understanding on how to compete – the death-knell generated by constant price dropping. The speaker was obviously not familiar with Air NZ and their multi-layered, world class self service and customer communications programme leveraging innovation across their business in a highly integrated approach. Bluntly: Air NZ is now (sometimes significantly) more expensive than its local competitor yet people choose to fly them anyway, and are glad to pay the difference.

I also extend kudos to one of the attendees at the Retailers Association Conference. It is a small mixed martial arts shop in Palmerston North that has managed to build up over 10,000 fans on their Facebook page. I would be happy to give you a couple of hours of my time to discuss how you can better leverage that community to get sales.

Keeping your apps up to date with the plethora of new smartphones entering the market is an increasing headache for a lot of businesses.

The rapid evolution of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 in the mobile space is allowing native application functions to be supported using HTML5 and CSS3 alone. However this area is undergoing rapid change and growth as different vendors provide frameworks for this emerging space. I’m going to discuss just two of these frameworks that focus on the HTML5 delivery of mobile web applications.

Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch was the very first HTML5/CSS3 focused mobile framework. But it is based off the back of some very solid JavaScript libraries that have been around in the desktop world for much longer. Like ExtJS and jQTouch.
Sencha Touch focuses on providing an optimised experience for the mobile webkit browser. This is the browser used by iOS and Android and also the new Blackberry 6 range of devices. The SenchaTouch approach is to focus heavily on iOS, Android and Blackberry webkit browser.

Sencha Touch generates its own DOM based on objects created in JavaScript. As such, working with Sencha feels more like building apps in technologies like Java, with its extensive object model, and use of common design patterns like MVC and a Data Persistence layer. It takes a more Object Oriented approach to constructing UI components.

Performance of the Sencha Touch library is also very impressive, most likely due to the deep integration with the webkit rendering engine.It is also worth noting that SenchaTouch provides a wrapper for local storage, SQL lite and GPS functionality on the device. Providing access to some of the devices native functionailty.As I write this blog entry I see that Sencha has just released Sencha Touch v1.1 which now includes support for BlackBerry 6 and the upcoming BlackBerry Playbook tablet device.

jQueryMobile

jQueryMobile is aiming at a far more open and inclusive model for delivering HTML5 content to a wide range of mobile browsers. It has no dependency on a particular browser rendering engine, but aims to work across all modern mobile browsers, like iOS, Android, Blackberry, WindowsPhone, Palm OS, Symbian and MeeGo.However jQueryMobile was only announced in August 2010 and is still currently in Beta.

jQueryMobile is based on the tried and true jQuery and jQueryUI javascript libraries. It makes heavy use of progressive enhancement to provide the richest experience to those browsers that support the newest features, but degrades gracefully for older style browsers. As a result the UI components provided by jQueryMobile are not as rich as the Sencha Touch UI components, but will work across a broader range of devices.jQueryMobile is probably the cleanest implementation of a HTML5 progressive enhancement framework, as it has no dependency on a particular web rendering engine. However the experience is still best on the modern webkit browsers like iOS, Android, Blackberry and PalmOS.

In a future post I will discuss other mobile frameworks, like PhoneGap and Appcelerator, which provide a native wrapper for HTML5 delivered content.

Many businesses around the world must feel like they are wading through quicksand while their customers whizz past them on travelators.

The rapid evolution of technology, combined with social networks and globalisation has created landscape shifts in customer purchasing behaviour and expectations. How they purchase, where they purchase, what they purchase – and how they pay.

On a positive note the world is improving for consumers. They don’t think in terms of geographies and buying local. They think about what they need and the internet now makes it easy to get it.

There is a rather fabulous YouTube clip showing baffled French schoolchildren examining and trying to identify such technology relics as floppy discs and Gameboys. The timeframes for evolution from leading edge and world-changing, to dinosaur, are getting shorter every year.

• I had coffee with someone yesterday who commented that in his last year in London he wasn’t sure that he bought a single item from a physical store.
• One of my team mentioned that a significant proportion of internet banking customers hit the site now from Facebook – and leave to go back to Facebook.
• People tweet the world with any customer service problems. And expect an immediate response.
• Consumers visit stores to choose an item – then use their phone to scan the barcode to find where it can be bought more cheaply online.

Including upfront thinking and planning – new initiatives, channels and core technology platforms can take a couple of elapsed years to get to market. The traditional aim was to generate ROI out of years of use … So how do businesses keep pace with their customers? Knee-jerk launches of brochureware websites, iPhone apps and Facebook sites don’t necessarily address landscape shifts. And cannot be considered in silos.

Smaller purchases may be inspected instore then purchased online. Larger purchases may be evaluated online and via mobile, with the final transaction completed in-store. Customers expect a coherent customer journey where every channel meets their needs at the right point.

How do you keep pace, innovate fast, and ensure a coherent customer journey and experience?

We are starting to see some well-considered trial niche initiatives from the retail sector that are intended to align multiple channels and technologies with customer and business goals. For example, some more creative approaches to loyalty programmes. A number off bricks and mortar retailers are moving away from traditional incentives for purchase, and considering a broader set of behavioral goals. Solutions such as Shopkick leverage the mobile phone and focus on the bricks and mortar experience:

• entering a store (points)
• walking around the store (more points)
• entering the changing room (points)
• trying things on (etc).

Conversely, airlines like Air New Zealand are using a smart combination of integrated self service tools including kiosks, online and mobile applications to both reduce the cost of service and improve the experience for their customers.

Our view is that niche initiatives can be delivered quickly, and will work if they are well considered in terms of customer goals, business drivers, and context within the customer journey. Interesting times!