Mobile games going social

Mobile games going Social

View more presentations from Bhavya Siddappa

Thanks to Silicon India for inviting me to talk at Gaming Conference India 2011.

My talk was categorized into 3 parts:

Started off with the market app statistics and prediction for mobile gaming. Listed down few of the mobile games developer’s challenges.

Then shared the mantra of how adding social element in mobile gaming apps can help overcome few of the challenges. Moved on by giving few of the social ingredients need to be included to make a great mobile social game.

Finally few words about the company I work for and few tips from our experiences being in this mobile industry for more than 10 years. What amazed me was audience getting excited after sharing Teleca’s E2E mobile gaming solution. As I promised on the stage here’s the link for the entire White paper. http://www.teleca.com/Home/solutions/end-to-end_solutions.aspx

My key message was “build apps which either saves time or kills time, and what could be best then the combination of social with gaming”

Talk at MSRIT on Android being Open Source

I was invited by VRGLINUG the GNU/Linux Users from M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology (MSRIT). Annually, Mukthi a premier, student focused, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)event. It serves as a forum for promoting FOSS among the student community, and spreading an awareness of how FOSS can be a good alternative to proprietary software.

Mukthi 11.04 was hosted on April 23rd and 24th 2011, featured a host of talks by FOSS luminaries.
My talk was about: “Android is open, but let’s do it right”.
- Android overview
- Why Android?
- Open platform and Open source
- Android is Open, what does it mean for a developer ?
- Abiding to OSS policies

Some interesting questions I faced from the OSS enthusiast students:
- Why is honeycomb not open sourced by google ?
- How should we get over the fragmentation issues ?
- Can we integrate QT on android ?
- Can we program C/C++ on android ?
- Why new version builds on devices like Motorola etc take time ?

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Android is Open, so lets do it right

View more presentations from Bhavya Siddappa.

Some interesting comments from the audience:
“Android is not truly OSS”
“Android innovation speed is amazing”
“It would be great to see less prices android phones coming soon in the market”
There were some interesting talks by well recognized experts from the FOSS world, as well as professionals from the software industry. It was very well received by all.
I had fun interacting with the knowledgeable audience. One more memorable event for me :)

The message is very clear "OSS will never die and all thanks to the great community support and believers "

Celebration of the power of Womeness at Office

Pink, Green, Red, Purple, Orange colors all around… well the office looked very much like heaven, with the presence of the beautiful lovely ladies dressed up in ethnic wear “Saree”. It was all for the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day being celebrated at Teleca office on March 8, 2011.
The event kicked off with the inauguration of “Femme De Teleca” a networking forum for all the Teleca India Women’s. The main objective was to create a platform where women’s could share information, new ideas, and latest trends in business, fashion, lifestyle etc, a podium to express concerns, issues and suggestions.

But engineering business is basically a men’s world and Teleca India head Santosh Xavier begged to differ. He shared his thoughts on all his attempts to change this myth and encourage more women contribution in Teleca’s growth. Later followed a quiz making everyone recognize all women – past heroines, today's leaders and tomorrow's champions for what they have achieved and what is to come.

Women at times gets compliments for her beauty, looks, intelligence and always for here humbles and scarifies she makes, but this time it was awards given away to women’s for being well dressed, congenial, bold and gracious. Other set of awards were given to the ladies for exemplary performers at Teleca. Health, skin care and weight are major concerns for any women and thus a doctor was invited to talk on women related health issues and share key mantras to stay happy and gorges forever.

Later games, music, dance, song performance filled the atmosphere with lots of fun, joy and gave everyone a moment where she felt proud of being “A Women”. The message was “Bring in the difference, believe in yourself and the gift of being women!! Make everyday Women's Day. Do your bit to ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.”

Mobile World Congress 2011 as expected with less surprises

It happened to be my first MWC and thus you could guess how excited I was. I was sharing the space with the 60,000 people from 200 countries gathered in Barcelona from MWC.

It was a week –long parade of technology, gadgets, networking, parties, celebrations of awards and also the fun of witnessing some innovation and opportunity that mobile brings to business.

I have captured all the announcements, launches of gadgets, introduction of new technology and company’s strategies in this presentation with some pics. Hope you enjoy going thorough them.

However following were the key strong highlights and message that I took back from the event:
Android is everywhere and is getting larger day by day: Google mobile OS stole the show. More than 200,000 ppl a day buying an android phone, confirms how serious is Google about Mobile and how good then can be in marketing too

Games on the move: Sony Ericsson launched its much-anticipated Xperia play handset, which will forever change the way people think about Smartphone’s and mobile gaming. Angry birds with 3D on Windows Mobile phone, will be worth a wait.

Mobile gets social: Foursquare, twitter and Facebook SNS are now a major part of the mobile dictionary. Phones are sensors connected to the network, when we use them, they can help us understand the intent we’re giving to our loved ones.

Noika and Microsoft Friendship: Can estimate the level of commitment as the announcement was on the Valentine Day. As they wished to create a challenger now its goanna be three-horse race. Whose betting on what ?

Mobile Payment: NFC (Near Field Communications) are changing the way mobile devices will be used in future. It provides consumers with a convenient way of buying goods. So the question would be when someone leaves from home” Did u carry your Mobile Wallet?”

World of Tablets: Every device manufacture understands the power of a tablet and thus we see Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Blackberry and Apple all in the game. With features like Enterprise, video conferencing tablets will soon become commonplace in offices and homes.

Mobile Web the future: Consumers want to view or access the same content across a number of devices and not to be restricted by any OS, device or network.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Mobile World Congress 2011 Overview

View more presentations from Bhavya Siddappa.

I have lots of stories to share, some funny and some very interesting. So why don’t ull test your patience meter, till I post them on my blog.

In the mean while enjoy watching my MWC http://bit.ly/h83wjS
and Barcelona pics http://bit.ly/g6TS8S
don’t make an attenp to search me in the pics.
*(For those u don’t know I am suffering from cameraphobia).

2010 came to an end …I take a break and reflect on the year gone by.

Jan – House warming of my newly bought house. My family, relatives, friends and colleagues attended the function and made it memorable. I could say my dad was the happiest person that day :)

Feb – At IBM we completed our first Android project and I was lucky to be given the opportunity to do the presentation in front of Global Delivery Team. That was an unforgettable day for my team when each of us received an appreciation mail from the GD leaders.

March – Got an opportunity to work with Mobile Monday Bangalore team to host the first of its kind, Mobile Developer Conference. The event turned out to be a big success, so much that people ask me when we are planning to have MODC part 2 in 2011.

At the end of the month I was officially married to Android: P, as I was honored as an “Android Evangelist at GBS”.

April – As I believed in giving blind person vision by donating your eyes, I donated my eye to Eye Bank Association of India.
The question is "How would u continue to live after u are gone"
"I will live my eyes to an eye bank and help someone see this beautiful world through my eyes."

May – Got busy with my passion, conducted Android trainings at IBM. If my math is right, trained around 50 + Java professional on Android Application development.

We had our All Hands Meet (AHM) for O2 Uk at Royal Orchid. After this event, I was known as Miss Entertainer and it made me realized that I am more than a bathroom singer. It feels nice when (now) my X-colleagues call me and mention they liked the way I sang my favorite song “Words” at the event.

June – I was enjoying my life at IBM and I was very proud of being an IBMer.
IBM is always been an innovator, and it gave me an opportunity to prove myself.
My idea got a business approval, did the coding & when it went live the feeling was just out of the world. I could say it were those 5.5 million customers, who inspired me :)

I was playing all my dream roles: Programmer + Team Lead + Trainer + Evangelist, + Anchor + Singer & also a News Letter editor all at a time.

July – Time for celebration as I completed a year in Bangalore. Like to thank all my friends and relatives for welcoming me with open arms and making my stay so lovely.

Life was just too good and perfect, but then I decided to take up new challenges and move from a service company to a product based company – Motorola. My fascination towards Moto devices tempted me to be a Motorolan.

Aug – Joined dance classes, where on weekends I was learning Hip-Hop and Jazz on weekdays I was learning contemporary dance form. Dance is my all time passion, and I just dance for myself.
On the other side, I was having fun developing enterprise application for Motorola most talked and most wanted android phones.

Sep – People called me fool when I rejected my x-Company Oracle's amazing job offer;

and most of them called me insane when I did not took up the Google India job opportunity.

I never thought that I would be offered a documentary film to act in (it was based on a classical dancers life), I rejected it saying "I am suffering from camera phobia".

I knew that I hurted most of the people at this time (specially my google friends); but it was the time where I was trying to understand what exactly I wanted to do out of my life and career.

I was bided an emotional farewell from the company where my stay was the shortest. Till then had no idea how much I was wanted, adored and popular at Motorola… that was the most emotional movement of the year and I will cherish it forever.

Oct – I started my career again as an Evangelist and I was happy being a part of Teleca.

To bring ADL in India was a dream of me and few of my android passionate friends and we finally made it happen.

London was calling me at the end of this month and I started off for my first international visit.

Nov – I had some of my best time in London
Participated at Droidcon and Planet of Apps Europe, meet some amazing people and leant a bit more about life.

Conducted a workshop at Mobile Developer Summit, Bangalore and spoke at Bangalore Android Meetup about Dual Display for Android

Dec – I was now officially a part of Teleca Global Solutions and marketing team, and my job profile got carved well. I was happy of what I would be doing henceforth.

When you win a proposal you feel good and I was floating in this feeling.

As the year gave me lots of success, joys, happiness, fame, money and a goal, I planned to celebrate it in my home town with my family and friends.
Visited Pune after a long gap of 1 year and the traditional + rich with culture city again hugged me with lots of warmth and love. Visited my school and met school friends, took a walk around my collage campus. As it took me to a flash-back, I said to God:

“Give me some sunshine
Give me some rain
Give me another chance
I wanna grow up once again”

Droidcon London 2010 – Day Two 29th Oct 2010

It was more of traditional conference the second day. Main topics were User Experience, Android development in general and a little about marketing.

Excellence in the Android User Experience: Romain Nurik from Google

Presented on how to create applications with great UX and great UI, Extended his talk with Android Design Tips with some additional info on giving users great first impressions, and some new prototyping and asset generation tools that have become available.

Android User views: Ilicco Elia from Reuters Mobile

The App Store is not about the app, it’s about people, it’s about the edge that people believe they will get from the app. In-app purchasing is seriously lacking.

Growing the value of the application network: Christophe Francois form Orange

It was great to see Orange committing so many people and so much time to Android. Orange focusing apps: Orange TV with premium events, Connectivity & customer care, News, radio, Orange Map.

Creating Killer Location apps: Alex Housley from Rummble

Location is not a feature: it’s now one element of context. Friend finders have been done to death, similarly, there will be opportunities working with existing big players in location “Where there’s a number

there’s a game…”. Rummble API are available for finding people, places, reviews, check-ins.

Android & CouchDB: Aaron Miller from CouchOne

CouchDB is a non-relational database (NoSQL) that stores JSON documents. Instead of queries, create “views” that allow fast lookup by keys. DB is highly durable. Good at multi-master replication and can easily write to any server. Its really powerful on a phone as it can sync with a server or with another phone and can have multiple DBs on net syncd to a single DB on phone.

Monetize your apps in emerging markets: by Chua Zi Yong from MoVend

He discussed the concept of marketing your apps to emerging markets. For a lot of people in emerging markets the phone is the only access to the internet, social networking, and gaming/entertainment device.

He had some interesting statistics on mobile phone payments. Asia Pacific accounts for $62.8 million in mobile phone payments and the rest of the world only accounts for $45.8 million. The market for mobile app revenue is estimated at $135million for 2009 and at $4 billion for 2010.

Market is extremely fragmented; android market does not exist in certain countries. Tip: Try to get your application pre-loaded onto a phone and target what specific users like.

Android has a “dude” problem: by Belinda Parmar from Lady Geek TV

When surveyed only 5% of women said Android for their next phone, 57% said an iPhon

e. BUT… more women than men bought smartphone in the last 6 months and more female gamers 25-35 than men. Forrester did some market segmentation on women gadget owners:

• 37% self sufficient, tech savvy
• 35% neutral, little engagement, low willingness
• 28% opportunity

Women feel overwhelmed and confused by choice of Android devices. They are twice as likely to have never downloaded a single app as it don’t see most of the apps as relevant to their lives. They want apps to solve a problem, to answer a question. Recommendations: solve a problem, entertain, don’t educate.

Turn good ideas into great apps: by Reto Meier

Shared more details on deadly sins & glorious virtues for android applications. Same Goog

le IO 2010 talk

& slides were repeated.

Android beyond the phone; Tablets, eReaders, and more: by Karl- Johan

Dell Streak uses

mDPI resources but has much bigger screen. Android dual scr

een displays and e-Ink displays behave completely differently. Custom device manufacturers are really keen to have apps on their devices. They’ll expect a 20-50% markdown, but no need to pay app store fees. ViewSonic ViewPad 7 now available in the UK for £399: Having 800x400px display and runs Android 2.2 and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS & 3G.

The Snapdragon Mobile Development Platform: by Qualcomm

Qualcomm is taking on a new role of being the link in the ecosystem, ensuring that there are great apps for the ecosystem. They want to make sure that apps work well. Snapdragon is a system on a chip for ARM-based CPU, GPU, rich multimedia, GPS, 3G, Camera, power management.

Android reuse models: by Mark Murphey

He discussed some of the ways in which we can reduce lots of

android developers reinventing the wheel everytime we need something. There are a few methods that a developer can use for distributional: Souce Code, As an Application, as a jar or Library.

Libraries can be used to solve problems for people who want free and paid versions of the app, and don’t want to maintain two versions of the code. He went on to discuss that we need a place to collect code to reuse and mentioned building a community website for this purpose, also saying “I can’t write a website to save my soul, I ain’t doing it!”

Future of Android Panel

Ewan MacLeod moderated the panel:

Questions faced by the panel:

• We’re still on the dream phase for Android: consumers “only buy one Android device”… Will consumers retreat to “something familiar”?
• Nokia is still a big player but no longer in mobile developed countries
• Android has challenges with fragmentation
• One challenge for Android is capturing lower end, but high end phones will trickle down
• Breadth of Google’s web services provides a very strong disincentive to leave
• Google is encouraging OEMs & operators to fight amongst themselves to get great user experience

• If I was your fairy godmother, what would you wish to change in Android?
• A decent automated testing framework on a range of devices
• A working billing infrastructure
• Developers making sure that their app manifests include clearly defined API access and permission
• Google to be a little more open about what they’re aiming at and what they’re not, to provide some reassurance
• Better way of getting hardware acceleration support.

Droidcon London 2010 – Day One 28th Oct 2010

It was the first day, with unplanned, unprepared barcamp-style presentations! It had a nice range and quantity of low level programming tips and higher level business tips in such a short space of time. Here are just a few higher level insights, observations and thoughts…

Sony Ericsson’s gave few tricks on Android UI: Advising developers not to do long running tasks in the UI thread, to use Handler & Service classes for longer lasting processes and to use Toasts to show quick popup status.

Location Services by Cloudmade: They will support Android later this year with a Maps SDK, based on OpenStreetMaps. Map data comes as you need it and is stored locally on device. Location-based advertising is related to a network that finds highest value ads from other networks.

No one in the audience was able to say they were making money from LBS.

GPS on Android is still seen as a battery hungry.

Another Interesting thing was to know that Motorola went to use Skyhook instead of Google location API on Android, the way they would get data for their customers WiFi location. Google forced them to switch back to Google location and Skyhook now suing Google.

RESTProvider: Carl from Novoda spoke on how it makes a RESTful API available as a Content Provider. He also demonstrated Unit testing of android classes without emulator.

App Analytics from Capptain: Demonstrated combining in-app analytics with CRM. SDK is available in Android and iOS. It has new analytics capabilities like how long users are spending in each

screen of your app, real-time analytics — can monitor where people are in your app right now, crash logs with device, firmware, etc details.

Git on android: A guy from who works at the guardian walked through all the problems he came across when trying to use git on android and how using open source goodness he could simplify a lot of trouble by simply extending pre-written code and even create work arounds for troublesome bugs.

Meta Market Model: Mark Murphey talk tied in very nicely with problems regarding using alternative markets. He created a brain storming session on the market problems and what can we do as a community to help improve this. Some of the good problems highlighted were: Comment spam, Not enough screenshots, Analytics, Refund policy too leaniant, Downloads don’t work.

Market is a closed club, OEM’s who don’t agree to the rule book don’t have access. And simply creating a app store for each carrier/OEM etc. isn’t a viable solution which

Mark summarised with a brilliant quote: “those who complain about fragmentation you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

So he came up with an idea about having a single open feed of android applications that all the market applications can hook into. So this would work as some sort of extended atom/rss feed (just add namespace) with open access which could benefit from the standards introduced and the maturity of the software already written. This sounds like a great idea but will obviously need a large amount of momentum to succeed. Mark said that instead of us complaining at Google to fix the market we should fix the market problems ourselves.

Day ended with a nice Tip from Tech hub:

“Devs arn’t always design focused, should assume users are complete idiots and don’t understand anything.”

Teleca Stand: Teleca got lots of android developers coming to our stand and wanting to know as to what Teleca into. The following demos just didn’t fail to amaze them: TI Dual Display, Android ported on Freescale Imax 53 board, MeeGo phone, AIM app totally based on Open Source.