We’re proud to present our latest infographic, The Mobile Platform Race, showcasing some of the most important findings and insights from our Developer Economics 2011 report (free download here).

Developer Economics is the definitive report on mobile developers, apps and brands going mobile. Developer Economics was created by VisionMobile and sponsored by BlueVia. We hope you enjoy the infographic – and feel free to embed it in your own website. Comments welcome, as always.

This is from Visionmobile.com

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) legal representation has stated the company turned down an offer to pay $100 million in royalties in exchange for using elements of the Java programming language in the development of its Android mobile operating system. Google attorney Robert Van Nest said during a federal court hearing Thursday that the 2006 offer from Sun Microsystems outlined a three-year, “all-in” deal to jointly build Android, not a patent licensing agreement.

“There wasn’t any specific discussion of patents,” Van Nest said after U.S. District Judge William Alsup requested an explanation for why Google and Sun entered talks. Van Nest stated that while a few lines of code in Android are “identical” to Java, the code likely came from a third party, adding “We are investigating that.”

Oracle, which acquired Sun in April 2009, is now seeking as much as $6.1 billion in damages over claims that Android “directly copied” elements of Java. According to court filings submitted late last month, Oracle wants Google to pay $0.9 billion to $1.4 billion upfront for infringing on its patents. Oracle also wants 15 percent of mobile advertising revenues generated across the Android platform. Late last year, Google said its mobile ad business operates at a run rate of $1 billion annually.

On Thursday, Oracle separately won permission to question Google CEO Larry Page to determine his knowledge of the situation. Oracle seeks to depose Page about Google’s discussions with Sun over licensing Java as well as Android’s strategic value, according to a court filing. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu ruled that Oracle may depose Page for two hours “solely on topics relevant to the willfulness of defendant’s alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android.”

Oracle states that “approximately one-third of Android’s Application Programmer Interface (API) packages” are “derivative of Oracle’s copyrighted Java API packages” and related documents. “The infringed elements of Oracle America’s copyrighted work include Java method and class names, definitions, organization, and parameters; the structure, organization and content of Java class libraries; and the content and organization of Java’s documentation,” the Oracle suit alleges. “In at least several instances, Android computer program code also was directly copied from copyrighted Oracle America code.”

Intellectual property activist Florian Mueller believes the Oracle lawsuit could force Google to restructure its Android business in both economic and technical terms. “It could very well be that a defeat in court would require Google to make fundamental changes to its Dalvik virtual machine–changes that would likely affect many if not all existing Dalvik-based (.DEX) applications,”

Mueller writes on his blog.

Open-source software development initiative Mozilla has launched an effort to develop a complete, standalone open web-based operating system optimized for mobile devices. In a post to the mozilla.dev.platform wiki page, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal explains that the initiative, dubbed Boot to Gecko, will “find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are–in every way–the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android and [Windows Phone 7].”

[Developers are currently the hottest property in the mobile industry. Tens of developer programs have sprung up, aiming to woo developers.  However, besides Apple, Google and perhaps Microsoft, other developer programs have had at best a lukewarm response. Guest author Gyanee Dewnarain investigates what makes developers tick and the faux-pas to avoid.]

Have you been ramping up your developer marketing efforts lately with a view to attracting more developers to your programme? How are your efforts faring? Let’s have a look at what works and what does not.

First and foremost – who to target?

Before you set out on your quest, it is important to know who you are targeting. We have all come across the perennial cliché of a developer as being the unshaven geeky guy with long hair and sandals. This image is outdated: developers nowadays are a rapidly expanding community that includes software engineers (architects, implementers, discoverers, thinkers, inventors) within small, medium and large enterprises, hobbyists or indie developers (working on open source or proprietary software), high school kids aspiring to go to MIT, commissioned developers, brands developing  B2C apps, system integrators targeting B2B apps, investors funding mobile development and 100s of start-ups.

Each developer segment has varying goals and incentives and the ways of engaging with them vary too. It pays to do your research first and understand who you are targeting and how to do so. However, irrespective of the segment you are targeting, there are a few key ingredients (so-called hygiene factors) that need to be in place in your developer program for the greatest chances of success. These hygiene factors are covered extensively in VisionMobile’s Developer Economics 2010 and 2011 reports. This post focuses more on developer marketing strategies and tactics.

First Impressions Matter

The first step in a developer marketing program is to create a solid first impression. Developers expect you to invest considerable effort in the way you present your tools, APIs and documentation to them as well as the way you present their applications to your customers. This is a competitive marketplace and if you want to stand any chance of getting noticed, your offering needs to stand out from the other developer programs which are vying for developers’ attention.

It is equally very important that your messaging and your branding are consistent across all your digital assets – website, blog, storefront etc. If your branding and messaging is confused, developers’ confidence in your developer program will erode rapidly.

Developers also have an aversion to long, convoluted, legal terminologies; don’t make them read and sign long T&C’s before they can access any of the exciting stuff (code, APIs, tools and documentation). Second opportunities come seldom in this market.

The “coolness” factor

Developers like cool companies (think slide, smoothie bar, collectable pins) and cool brands and if you appear stuck-up, they will run a mile. If you want to engage with them, you have to think about the image you and your company project – you have to speak their language and dress like them. The language on your website should be simple and straightforward (cut back the marketing blurb).

While more technically inclined, developers still like devices which have mass market appeal (both from the perspective of personal interest and also from the perspective of user reach and revenue generation). Engage with other brands and channels to increase the desirability of your device, your storefront or your cloud platform.

In addition, make sure that your products are able to get developers excited (from the development tools, emulators and documentation through the storefront to the actual devices that you are selling in the market).

Encourage openness and interaction

Do not bind your developers into contracts and NDAs that forbid them from sharing useful hints and tips. Even Apple realised the mistake it was making by preventing discussions amongst its developers and had to retract its NDA three months after the launch of its iPhone developer program. You should encourage your developers to share their experiences, best practices and code snippets by creating places and opportunities for them to meet and interact with each other.

Online forums, blogs, mailing lists (both on your own website and on popular 3^rd party fan websites) are must-haves. Such communication amongst developers helps build a sense of community.   Developer events are equally de rigueur in any developer program. Your events should ideally favour hands-on code oriented tutorials and workshops as opposed to marketing presentations.

Learn the art of listening

Building communities means extending bridges. The mantra is – communicate, communicate, communicate; whether it’s through one to one e-mails, social media, developer forums or third party developer events. Keep in touch with your most loyal developers, as much as you can, and in a personalised manner. Formulate your message in such a way that you make them feel important; the focus should not be on your company but on them.

The worst thing you can do is have a big developer bash and disappear off the radar for a while. That might have worked a few years back but in the current market, with everyone competing for your developers’ attention, if you do not constantly keep in touch, someone else will snatch your developers away in the blink of an eye.

Honesty is the best policy

Changes to existing APIs and introduction of new APIs are a natural part of software development. However, be as transparent as you can with your developer community. Inform them about the changes that you have made to your APIs and try to have a sensible upgrade path so that there are no rude awakenings. Ensure compatibility with previous versions; this would show that you are respectful of the time and effort that developers are committing to your program.  Despite facing a lot of criticism with regards to fragmentation risks across its multiple releases, Google has gone to great lengths toexplain API updates to new Android releases.

Share your vision of the future

Sharing your vision for the future is a critical part of engaging with developers. It is therefore essential that you communicate the rationale behind your business strategies, technology decisions (e.g. moving from native to web) and the future direction of your program very clearly to your developer following.  Endeavour to provide your developers with the opportunity to provide their feedback, comments and suggestions. Arguably, developer programs such as BONDI and JIL failed due to their inability to communicate any tangible vision to developers. Unfortunately, WAC seems to be following a similar path.

Favour substance over style

If your platform does not ship; if your tools look good but do not deliver;  if your code samples are too difficult to learn and use, your developers will churn to greener pastures. This means:

• If you are going down the route of having your own platform, then you have to ensure that the tools that you provide are easy to learn and your programming paradigms enable quick coding and prototyping.
• Provide APIs that are rich and that offer developers the opportunity to go the extra mile in creating truly innovative applications. These could include select hardware APIs (that are normally hidden) and in some cases network APIs such as billing, location, user profile etc.
• Provide debuggers and emulators that are fast and provide accurate target device mirroring.
• Make sure that your development environment includes an app porting framework and solid emulator integration.
• Choice is good – provide options for advanced use cases for example both a basic command line text editor and a web based IDE.

Moreover, if you get lethargic and do not constantly look at ways of evolving your tools, being innovative with your business models, and seeking newer markets, boredom is likely to set in and your developers may start looking at other alternatives. Therefore, continuously check how your program is faring against competition. Several operators dismissed Apple and Google for more than 2 years until it was too late to figure out a positioning strategy.

Bridges to developers need constant maintenance

You’ll need to set aside a significant budget to finance various types of seed programs as well as developer competitions. Seed programs include many incentives for developing such as:

• Releasing early builds of your platform/ SDK version to developers, both to get feedback about bugs and other issues as well as to give developers lead time to test software or experiment with adding new features.
• Commissioning developers to develop apps specifically for your platform or port existing apps from other platforms.
• Fast tracking the certification of apps for a select group of your target developers (especially useful when you need to get an app ported from a competitive platform to your own)
• Distribution of free reference hardware or commercial devices to your installed base of developers in order to build loyalty.

Show me the money

Many of the developers that you want onboard (especially those with a commercial role) want to see a return on their investment. From the outset, it should be clear in your own mind how your developers are going to make money from their apps and you should communicate this in a very clear manner to them – what are the devices that you support, how many people are using those devices, how do they get their apps on those devices, how do customers find, download and pay for the apps and how, when and how much do developers get paid.

The other thing to note is that developers are smart and discerning consumers who will fact-check you before they can trust you – make sure you have the figures to back your marketing assertions.

One of the critical issues facing developers currently is “discovery” of their apps by customers. The developer programs which come up with the most original ideas to improve discovery and present new business models for increased monetisation are likely to gain traction with the largest number of developers.

Casual settings work better

When socialising with your developers, small informal events work much better than large formal conferences. Make sure that the developers and software engineers from within your company get the opportunity to interact with each and every developer, answering their questions, listening to their issues, encouraging them to interact regularly and share experiences and difficulties. So far, BlueVia has been amongst the operator developer programs that have most successfully embraced this philosophy by holding small developer events in pubs around London.

Jump onto the social bandwagon – Facebook It, Tweet It

Studies show that over 60% of people within the 15-35 age group (and that includes the vast majority of your developers) spend on average 20 hours per month on social networking websites. This is where you are likely to find them and this is the medium they will use to spread the word about you if they like you enough (viral marketing). Social media is where you need to advertise your events, inform developers about the availability of the latest release of your SDK or the latest device you are planning to launch.

Locate your Evangelists

Find out who are the people who believe in your platform – the fans, the early adopters– the people who would be willing to fly the flag for you. Check the people who write favourable blog posts about you, who comment on your blog posts, tweets, participate in your forums and Facebook or LinkedIn discussion groups. Approach them and provide them further incentives to spread the good word.

Developers listen to their fellow developers – therefore, get your early adopter developers to talk about how easy it is to create apps using your APIs and SDKs and how fast it is to certify the apps and get them published.

Reward your successful developers – promote their apps in the media, ask them to come and talk about their success stories at your events; publish their success stories on your website and in your marketing collaterals; encourage them to publish stats about number of downloads and the amount of money they’ve made.

Putting it all together

In summary – decide who you want to target, make sure the hygiene factors are in place, keep your messaging and branding consistent, keep legal blurb to a minimum, be a cool brand, encourage your developers to share experiences and best practices, value feedback from your developers, be transparent about changes to APIs and code, communicate your vision and roadmap, provide high quality tools that are on par with competitive offerings,  prepare to invest, show developers the return on their investment, interact frequently with your developers preferably via small informal events and via social networks, locate and draw upon your evangelists and last but not least, reward your successful developers.  Many have tried and many have failed over the years. Sometimes, a few decisions can make or break your program. Be quick to learn both from the failures and the success stories!

Happy Community Building!

This is from Visionmobile.com

Look at what we have here, leaking clearly out of a development factory in either China or Hong Kong (forgive us, it’s 2am), we get a nice clear look at the Nokia N9, cough, ‘Sea Ray’ for Windows Phone 7. We can finally see the buttons near the bottom, putting to rest the ”virtual button “speculation from earlier.

Watch as halfway through the video the device even boots up with a new “7″ logo screen and it pops in a build of Mango (check out the Mango lock screen, natch). The camera also boots up quickly and we get the first glimpse of what that will be like.

This has the potential, if it really happens, to create a competitive ecosystem against Android. For us in the app ecosystem business it could be very exciting.

Today there is only two viable platforms that are open and that is Android and WP. Bada remains a one horse race and Symbian, well though it has a huge installed base got lost somewhere.

Apple’s iOS and Blackberry are closed and really I can’t see them opening up. Of those two it seems that Apple will continue to do well simply because their phones are awesome and they have a viable ecosystem. Blackberry well… though having the best email system has only that. Their ecosystem is crappy and their phones are quirky.

A new open OS would make things interesting. To top it off WebOS is known to be one of the superior OSs out there if not the best. LG, Motorola or Amazon are hinted at as potential partners.

App developer Bithack published an open letter criticising Amazon’s Appstore, warning that “if you are a small indie development team, or possibly even alone, don’t bother with Amazon Appstore.” According to the company, which developed a game called Apparatus, problems were encountered from submission until after the app was on sale, with Amazon being unresponsive to comments made. Bithack is now directing potential customers to Android Market, with the promise to refund customers who had already paid for the app from Amazon.

According to a post on its website, Bithack’s woes started at the submission stage, with Amazon criticised for having a “very slow review process.” It was then stated that the app was “completely hidden,” with the Amazon store not having a “just in” section, and the “new releases” category being “identical to the ‘top rated’ section.” Having spoken to Amazon to get the title promoted via a “free app of the day” listing and then an entry into the “hand-picked” popular games category, 180,000 downloads were made – but this number was achieved because Amazon does not filter-out unsuitable devices according to the Manifest file. This, in turn, led to poor reviews from customers who were unable to run the app adequately – if at all.

Unlike Android Market, Amazon Appstore does not provide an easy way to communicate with users, in order to address criticisms – “when a player from Android Market emails me about a bug on his phone, I can have a fix for him published in 30 minutes, ensuring a 4 or 5 star review and a happy customer,” the company said. In addition, there is no way to send dissatisfied customers refunds. In order to post comments or reviews, developers must first purchase the game – an option not open to international developers, due to the fact that Amazon Appstore is currently only available in the US.

Finally, Bithack said that Amazon – without consultation – cut the price of the game. Coupled with poor reviews (including one accusing the app of sending data to an ad server, which the company refuted), “just made things worse, from a psychological perspective.”

A number of observers have been optimistic about the potential of the Amazon Appstore, based largely on the company’s experience of merchandising. However, some observers have noted downsides to Amazon’s developer agreement, including the ability for Amazon to make a number of decisions related to app sales prices.

One of the biggest markets for portable TVs Japan today got an interesting addition in the form of anAndroid 2.1 aka Éclair powered Panasonic SV-ME970.

This 7 inch display TV comes with 800×480 pixel resolution, 4GB of internal memory, an SDXC slot, a USB port, DLNA support, IEEE 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and 300mW×2ch speakers.

It is not all; this portable TV is also waterproof and will cost you USD 555. It will be available from July 30 in the market.

This is from Androidos.in

Think your app is ready for prime time? In this quick tutorial you’ll work through a pre-publication checklist. Learn about the tasks you need to complete before your application is ready for the Android Market.

There are a number of hurdles—some mandatory, some optional—that developers must overcome before their apps are ready for users. Today we investigate some of the decision points that must be considered prior to uploading your application. Once you’ve addressed these issues, you’ll be ready to move on to publish at specific venues, like Android Market or the Amazon Appstore for Android.

Step 1: Start with a Solid Application

Really, if you ask any developer what their end-game is for app development, just about every mobile developer will tell you that they just want to create a killer app. But when you ask a developer what makes a killer app, you’ll get lots of different answers—awesome concept, well executed, unique, well marketed, etc.

We like to think killer apps are like fine cuisine. Lots of different techniques can be used to prepare and serve a tasty meal, just as there are many ways to achieve killer app fame. And as any good chef knows, you’ve got to start with good ingredients. With Android, this means that you’ve got to start with a solid app.

The game is on for mobile payments. Square has announced that it has picked up $100 million in a third round of funding, which now values the dongle-based payment startup, founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, at a cool $1 billion.

The funding was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mary Meeker, the former Wall Street star analyst who is now a partner is KPCB, is joining the board.

The funding news was first made by Square itself via Twitter (of course). Jack Dorsey himself then announced Mary Meeker’s appointment. But there have been rumors swirling for weeks that the company was about to get another massive investment.

This brings the total amount of money we know has been invested in the company to around $130 million. In April, Visa made an undisclosed investment in the company.

Square, according to the WSJ, is now processing $4 million in transactions per day with its smartphone-based service—currently for Android and iOS—that uses an attached dongle and an installed app to make its secure payments at points of sale. That $4 million is but a tiny drop the ocean for payments, but it’s a promising early start.

The big test of Square’s staying power will be how its network, and its core device-based service, grow as newer technologies finally start to come online. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is betting big on its smartphone NFC-based solution Google Wallet, andoperators and credit card makers (including Visa) are all also looking to stake out a claim here, too. PayPal earlier this weekannounced a 100-million user milestone fueled by its use in mobile payments. ViVOtech, a partner of Google’s, this week also announced a round of $24 million.

Sometimes Square’s growth and disruption in the market has resulted in some barbed, public exchanges with competitors, such as the scuffle it had this March with Verifone over security accusations.

The company also counts Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and Obama adviser Larry Summers on its board.

This is from Moconews.net