Date:
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 from 6:30pm to 9pm

Topic:
Managing Products in the Mobile App World

Speaker:
Etay Gafni, Owner of BrightAct LLC

Meeting Summary:
What if you could validate your ideas, design, and value proposition before coding your application?   Do you have an idea for a mobile application and would like to demonstrate it on a mobile device, but your technical team is overloaded with other projects and cannot help you?   Would you like feedback on a new module in your enterprise application, but the back-end API is not ready yet, but the UI is?
 
Ask yourself, do I want to:

• Complete user acceptance testing in days rather than months?
• Get faster customer feedback on applications without writing a single line of code?
• Rapidly update UI based on that feedback ensuring the latest version is always on display?
• Go beyond slide-ware for user feedback without expending costly development resources?
• Showcase the application securely to internal stakeholders and selected customers?

You can achieve all this by creating, sharing, and collecting feedback and analytics from web and mobile prototypes.   Join us for a lively discussion about tools, techniques, best practices, and lots of common sense. See how others have done it and what benefits it provides.  Bring your iPhone, iPad, or Android to the event and let's do it together.

Speaker Bio:
Etay Gafni is the owner of BrightAct LLC, which specializes in product, mobile, and user experience services.  Etay has spent more then fourteen years mastering multiple disciplines, including software development, user-experience design, multi-media and eLearning production, community development, and management.
 
Recently, Etay worked with SAP to define, design, prototype, demonstrate, and educate internal development teams and customers on their new mobile experience. At Model-N, Etay worked with product and development teams to define the user-experience of client-server products, next generation mobile, and other offerings. Etay also worked with companies such as Baynote, B2Lead, and Badgeville, by supporting the creation of their online offerings.  http://www.linkedin.com/in/etaygafni

Location:
Network Meeting Center at the TechMart [Map]
5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, California 95054
www.networkmeetingcenter.com/location

Agenda:
5:30pm - Job fair
7:30pm - Presentation
9pm - Wrap-up/networking

Registration:
SVPMA Members: Free
Non-SVPMA Members: $30 pre-registered, $40 at the door
**Cash/check only if paying at the door

Note: Event fees are non-refundable and non-transferable. Please register before the event date to receive the $10 discount.

Registration is free with the $99 annual membership covering 12 events. Enroll or Renew your annual membership now! Check out the benefits of membership.

We are pushing an important update to the DemoRight service now... Should be up again shortly. Good times.

Which Apps Are Threatened by Apple’s Upgrades?

By SAM GROBART and JENNA WORTHAM

Beck Diefenbach/ReutersAmong the updates to Apple’s OS X operating system was a Safari reading list that works much like Instapaper.

How do you know if you’ve created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business.

That may be overstating it, but a number of new features for Apple’s operating systems that it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference have been available through existing apps and services for some time. Some of those apps are quite popular, and have been lucrative for the people who developed them. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the services and applications that will be living in a changed world thanks to Apple’s new operating systems for Macs and iPhones:

Instapaper and Read It Later: Safari’s new Read Later feature allows you to access Web pages that you have saved for later across multiple iOS devices. You know, like Instapaper. (Update: The creator of Instapaper comments on the announcement.)

Readability: The new Reader mode in Apple’s Safari browser strips down online articles to images and a rolling column of text. Readability basically did the same thing.

Boxcar: This nifty app lets people manage their notifications in a single place, instead of having them pop up on their iPhone’s screen willy-nilly. The new Notifications panel in iOS 5.0 centralizes notifications in the same way.

To-do apps like Remember the Milk: Apple’s new Reminders feature can alert you to do something you’ve written down either based on time or location (pass by a grocery store you’ve marked in the app and you will be reminded to, um, remember the milk).

Camera+, QuickPix: One of the complaints about the iPhone’s camera is that it can take a while to get to when you want to take a picture in a hurry. Some apps used their faster start-up time as a selling point. The upgrade to the iPhone’s software includes the ability to place a camera button on the lock screen, for quick access. Users can also use a volume button as a shutter release, something Apple denied an app, Camera+, in December 2010.

Photo editing tools: While the popular filters of Hipstamatic and OldCamera do not seem to be in jeopardy, new features in the Photo app include cropping, red-eye reduction and one-touch auto-enhance, which may be enough for some picture takers.

Dropbox and other cloud storage services: iCloud, Apple’s free solution for storing documents and photographs in the cloud, may eradicate the need for independent services that let users do the same thing.

GroupMe and other messaging apps: iMessage will let Apple customers send messages to groups of friends — something that start-ups like GroupMe, Kik, TextPlus, FastSociety, Pinger and their ilk have been doing for months.

Better Touch Tool – A Mac OS X application that let you use multitouch gestures on a touchpad, which OS 10.7 has built in.

DropCopy – Drag and drop files to other users on your network. Just like AirDrop, which Apple announced was part of OS X today.

Zinio – A service that billed itself as “The World’s Largest Newsstand.” And it may be. For now. But what about after all iOS users have Apple’s Newsstand preloaded in their devices?

Apple clearly values their developers. They are a source of innovation and development. The company was proud to announce during the keynote that it had paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers. But there is another message to developers too: If you are really good at what you do, you will be assimilated.

New data from comScore on the U.S. smartphone market shows Android share is still surging, while Apple is just barely growing share.
Research in Motion and Microsoft, on the other hand are being destroyed. Google's Android had 36.4% of the smartphone subscriber share for the average of the three month period ending in April versus 31.2% for the average of three months ended in January.
Apple had 26% for the April period versus 24.7% for January. RIM was 25.7% for the April period versus 30.4% for January. Microsoft was down to 6.7% in April from 8% in January. This set of data is particularly interesting because it includes all but 10 days worth of the iPhone being on Verizon. Even with Apple on Verizon, Android managed to produce massive growth. At this point, we don't see how Apple manages to slow down the Google juggernaut.