TECHNOLOGY

How to Conduct Mobile App Research for Your App Idea

Published

1 year ago

March 8, 2023

How to Conduct Mobile App Research for Your App Idea

It’s amazing to have an idea. Ideas make the world run and make it a better and smarter place.

Predictions are that electric cars will be an everyday story by 2050. Can cars need applications too? Who knows? But does having an idea for a mobile application mean it will blow up and create a revolution?

If yes is your answer, you may want to hold your horses. The destiny of a product depends on the needs of the market. Therefore, the most fundamental step, even before the funding of your project, is to understand the market condition through comprehensive market research. Is there a demand in the market? Is there a possibility of creating a demand? There are many questions to answer; some might even be a sign to head back and introspect.

Let’s proceed to understand the steps of the market research regime with some examples and how it’ll help a mobile app development dynamic.

Primary Research

We know what a primary research process is. But how does it help? Let’s say you are developing an application to unify the operations of real estate brokers and offer them a platform that will create better accessibility, authentication, cost reduction, and more. You know your application is a solution to many problems, but have you really lived the problems? Perhaps not.

Here, your primary research is the key. This data is your key to accessing first-hand information on the nature of the market, what it wants, what are its likes and dislikes, and what the loopholes are that you can fix. Primary research is also a great way to define your eventual target audience.

Secondary Research

A lot of air is cleared after the conclusion of the primary research. So now is the time for secondary research. The mobile application market is enormous. A few years ago, the number of applications afloat the market was approximately 9 million. It’s safe to say that the internet has tons of information on the same niche as yours.

Secondary research will help in the planning, strategizing, observing, executing, and evaluating parts of the process. The available information is a definitive source to unearth the mistakes made already to learn from. And, of course, avoid the same. It also helps with marketing and sourcing strategies. How? The existing data in your field is an excellent source of free guidance to efficient solutions that would have been difficult to find otherwise.

Competitor Analysis

In 2011, more than a decade ago, Apple Inc. spent nearly £447 million as a cost for developers to spike their applications’ sales. The message is direct and straightforward; there are participants in this race of technology. Keep your friends close and enemies closer.

Monitor the steps taken by your direct competitors, dig through the history and anticipate the mistakes they made and avoid them. Find inefficiency in their product, fix it, and offer the same to your market. Understand what works for your competition and what doesn’t.

Discover the ways they developed the framework of their application and explore the scope of improvisation. Knowing your competition and observing them will reveal a lot about where you stand and where you can go.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT is a very crucial step in the research process of mobile application development. Considering the technology and app development advancements, SWOT would depict vital information on the real-time status of where your product stands.

Strengths: One of the biggest strengths of an application is a solid back-end team. Do you have that? SWOT is a great way of asking and answering questions.

What operational area has been working the best for you so far?
What are the best resources you have that the competitors don’t?
What is that unique skill set that your team exhibits?

Weaknesses: Everyone falls short in some of the other areas, and it is very necessary to identify yours and make efforts to fill in the gaps as soon as possible.

What is that one element that you haven’t been able to crack lately? Are there many more of them?
Which areas are the ones that have a taxing process for you and your users?
What are the three things that you lack in your organization that you can witness in successful competitors?

Opportunities: Opportunities are everywhere, but if everyone could see them, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be standing out.

What everyday situations can be made better with mobile applications?
Is the existing technology available in geography, especially where you could reach?
What is the one element that is lacking in the mobile application that you can fix?

Threats: A smooth functioning of a business has many prospect hindrances that are not always in the form of competition.

Is the market opinion favorable for your product idea?
Could the government roll out unfavorable policies for your business?
How could you mark your territory to restrict competition?

Target Audience

Know your user. This is a sentence from the bible of business strategy. Create personas of the people who will be directly or indirectly associated with your application.

Demographics: Age, gender, occupation, cultural background, and family status.
Geographics: Country, state, district, town, suburb, locality, neighborhood, apartment.
Psychographics: Values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices.

These are the most prominent characteristics of the person who will actively use your application. This is your target audience.

Social Media Listening

Where could you find out the opinions of strangers? Social media. This is where you could find market opportunities, problems to fix within your organization, and ideas for SWOT too. Apart from that, social media will talk to you about recent trends, reviews on peer products, opinions, ideas, thoughts, and, most importantly, the word about your product because the things that are never spoken in person are spoken on social media.

Wrapping Up

The concluding part would be the compilation of your market research into strategic points that become the trigger points for the decision-making process. Also, remember market research is a consistent process as the market is dynamic. Understand what their customers require and adjust your actions in accordance with the demand slope.

Author Bio

Piyush Jain is the founder and CEO of Simpalm, Startup app development company. Piyush founded Simpalm in 2009 and has grown it to be a leading mobile and web development company in the DMV area. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and a strong background in technology and entrepreneurship, he understands how to solve problems using technology. Under his leadership, Simpalm has delivered 300+ mobile apps and web solutions to clients in startups, enterprises and the federal sector. He leads the business and engineering team to build the mobile and web product solution for clients

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud