Developer World

Once again it’s time to take a look around our world, the world of mobile application and content, to see what’s going on.

First of, a post that compares mobile applications to Facebook apps. You may recall how hyped Facebook applications were about a year ago. Are mobile applications going through the same phase? Even though there are many successful Facebook applications it’s fair to say they didn’t quite live up to the hype. Will the same thing happen to mobile application? What do you think?

The big talk of the past weeks has of course been the exclusion of the Google Voice application from the iPhone App Store. We’re of course following what’s happening.

Om Malik had some interesting numbers about venture capital going to mobile startups. Apparently there are “over 160 mobile companies in Silicon Valley” now according to Mobile Monday Silicon Valley. Room for more, I’d say!

I had a little Twitter chat session with Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify regarding Spotify for Java but unfortunately it doesn’t look too promising:

Oh, well, I tried.

We released a new version of the Themes Creator. Initial comments points to less lemon-ness in this version. (We really appreciate the feedback and read it all even if we don’t reply to everything, so thanks to everyone that comments.)

We have a new blogger in the community! Andreas Bexell writes from our Tokyo office. As a Swede in Japan he represents both sides of our parent companies’ heritage. Follow his blog here.

I also started blogging and wrote about… weddings! Read it here.

OK, that’s it for this week. Time for me to sign off and prepare tonight’s barbecue:

(Update: There’s supposed to be a photo of two delicious tasting fishes here.)

No, I didn’t catch them myself.

Oh, one more thing: you should of course follow us on Twitter, here.

Erik Starck
Community Manager, Developer World

This blog is about the community of people in and around Sony Ericsson Developer World. People building cool stuff for Sony Ericsson phones. People like you!

So, what’s happening in this world of mobile development? What are people talking about? In this post I’ll try to summarize a few things from the past week that caught our attention.

First off, Verizon joins the application store bandwagon. More will be revealed at a developer conference July 28:

—Response to iPhone?: Is all of this a response to Apple’s iPhone? Hughes says not really. They’ve been offering content for years—it’s more about the emergence of the smartphone. Verizon is participating in what’s called the “Joint Innovation Lab,” which is a consortium between Verizon, China Mobile, Softbank and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) to create a single global platform for developers. Hughes: “The combo of what we’ll announce on 28th combined with the Joint Innovation Lab will put ourselves at the forefront of developer friendliness.”

Another talk of the week was the Morgan Stanley report[pdf] written by a 15 year old boy in which he shared his insights on how teenagers consumes media. We especially agree with this:

99% of teenagers have a mobile phone and most are quite capable phones. The general view is that Sony Ericsson phones are superior, due to their long list of features, built in walkman capability and value (£100 will buy a mid-high range model).

You know what they say: if it’s in a report found on the net, it has to be true. (There was also another report released this week, namely this…)

Speaking of app stores, our friends over at LG are also launching a store and Symbian is becoming a publisher. A great time to be a mobile application developer, competition and choice is good for the market. But how do you sell your app once it’s finished? Here’s an interesting post about pricing of mobile apps and here’s one with good lessons from the Flash camp.

It’s a couple of weeks old but the release of Netbeans 6.7 is worth highligting. Lots of good stuff in this release.

Another talk of the week was when blogger superstar Robert Scoble declared war on Europe.

Well, not really, but he proclaimed that Europe “no longer matters to lead position in mobile” and that the continent “is stuck in a texting rut”. Is he right? What do you think? Tell us! Is all hope lost on Europe? Here’s a good Europe defence article from Volker on Mobile.

The old debate about native applications vs web apps continues. Who’s right? We’ll see. Here’s one report estimating 20 billion application downloads in 2014.

On our forums there’s been some good threads. Is Themes Creator 4 a lemon? Johan made some clarifications regarding Satio and Aino touch screen support and the user Bahamat has been tracking down an annoying game freeze. Lots more of course, here.

Unfortunately, the forum was down for about a day beginning of the week. Sorry about that!

There was of course much more than that happening in the world of mobile but you can only fit so much in to a blog post. Next week I will be offline on vacation but I’ll try and make these posts a regular from now on. Please tell me what you think by posting a comment here. Thanks!

You should also follow us on Twitter, here.

Erik Starck
Community Manager, Developer World