Rapidsoft Technologies

The iPhone’s applications or “apps” have held out a slim lifeline for small and mid-range software firms in India, at a time when other outsourced projects have succumbed to the slowdown

New Delhi: Last July, when Apple Inc. threw open the doors of its iPhone App Store to third-party developers, a Silicon Valley start-up immediately contacted Net Solutions India, a Chandigarh-based software shop. “This was one of our regular clients, and he was very excited,” says Maninder Bains, chief technology officer of Net Solutions. “But even if he hadn’t said so himself, we’d already realized that iPhone applications would be big.”

Bains was right. The iPhone’s applications ”or “apps”, essentially small programs of utilitarian or novelty value designed for the iPhone ”have spread with epidemic efficiency in the US. But they have also held out a slim lifeline for small and mid-range software firms in India, at a time when other outsourced projects have succumbed to the slowdown.

“The recession has had its effect, and we’ve all seen some decline,” Bains admits. “But as I told my boss just the other day, there are three things that are making money for us. The first is iPhone apps. The second is also iPhone apps. The third is Facebook apps.”

This month, Apple’s App Store turns a healthy one year old. The store has now grown to include at least 65,000 apps, which have collectively been downloaded 1.5 billion times. Its growth has been meteoric; as recently as April, the Store listed 25,000 apps. Many of these apps are free, but of the paid apps, Apple stands to earn $150 million (Rs726 crore) a year via its 30% commission, according to an analyst recently quoted in The Wall Street Journal.

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As if the iPhone’s cult status were insufficient, the apps have given Apple an even keener competitive edge over other smart-phone brands. Research in Motion’s catalogue of apps for its BlackBerry phones includes just over 2,000 programs; Google’s Android Market offers around 6,300. So, not surprisingly, advertisements for the iPhone now regularly pitch its gigantic app factory as part of ”or even all of ” their hard sell.

That first product Bains developed was, in fact, not an app; named Mobclix, it was a product that helped monetize and analyse traffic for other apps. Since then, Net Solutions has created Landmark Locator ”which, in locating landmarks around iPhone users, does precisely what its name suggests. Another app, promisingly titled Hook Up, scours the immediate vicinity for other people to “connect” with; a sample screenshot on the Net Solutions website, for instance, introduces us to the intriguing “Angela, 21 ¦ Love to have fun and play with my cat”.

Other Indian firms have been more fertile. An Ahmedabad-based company named IndiaNIC claims to have developed at least 600 iPhone apps. “Even when the store was in beta, we thought this would be a good market to jump into,” says Shalin Shukla, a senior business development executive who focuses exclusively on the iPhone market. Nearly one-fifth of IndiaNIC’s workforce of 250 is engaged in app projects for clients in the US, priced “anywhere from a few hundred dollars to around $10,000, depending on the complexity”, says Shukla.

These firms’ customers are often companies looking to move their Web applications onto a mobile platform, but just as often they are individual entrepreneurs, looking to milk the cash cow that the App Store can be. Famously, a developer named Steve Demeter made $250,000 within two months of thinking up a game app called Trism, involving alignments of coloured triangles. Another developer, Ethan Nicholas, earned $800,000 in five months ”as well as a profile in The New York Times ”with a simple shooting game.

But for every Demeter or Nicholas, there are dozens of developers who can only watch their apps sputter and die. In that sense, the iPhone app is, for its owner, no sure bet. “I guess people are taking the risk because, if you compare it to the huge potential pay-off, it appears to be win-win,” says Palak Biswas, head of business development at the Gurgaon-based Rapidsoft Technologies.

Even as “big-revenue projects” were being postponed or cancelled, Rapidsoft Technologies developed and released nine iPhone apps for customers overseas; the most expensive was priced at roughly $25,000. “Utility apps, such as our planner-scheduler, will always do well,” Biswas says. “For three of our apps, instead of selling them outright, we’ve even entered a revenue-share model, because we thought the idea was a good one.” Rapidsoft Technologies thus makes a percentage of each download fee.

Jumping into this market last July, when it was still mint-new, came with benefits as well as difficulties, Biswas observes. “Leaving aside the iPhone, when you develop a mobile app, you need to think about three or four platforms, because none of them individually has the market reach of the iPhone,” he says. “Developing just for the iPhone alone, with its user base of close to 15 million in the US, is easier and cheaper.”

But firms also had to scramble to get acquainted with Apple’s software development kit, as well as the Objective-C programming language used for the iPhone.

“Initially it was a little tough, because there wasn’t much help or support available with the kit,” says Rajish Nambiar, CEO of the Bangalore-based SeQ Softech, which is fabricating its first app, a supply chain widget.

Nambiar is optimistic about the app, and he thinks SeQ will develop more iPhone apps in the future ””perhaps in the medical line, personal healthcare, something like that”. But he isn’t thrilled with Apple’s commission model. “It’s funny, because you do all the hard work, you promote the app, and they then take 30%,” he says.

Source:http://www.livemint.com/2009/07/27004917/IPhone-a-lifeline-for-small-I.html?h=B

The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become “as big as the internet”, peaking at 10 million apps in 2020, a leading online store says.

However, GetJar say, the developer community will decline drastically as each developer makes less money.

According to the Symbian Foundation, newly in the developer market, apps will become more personal and practical as their numbers grow.

The comments were made at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.

“Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet,” according to Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store.

“They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development.

“The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers,” Mr Laurs told BBC News.

˜Economics’

While developers rush headlong to create applications for this burgeoning marketplace, Mr Laurs warned that many are simply doomed to fail.

“The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple's] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool.

“But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this,” said Mr Laurs.

He said that will result in developers taking their talent elsewhere and also slow down the rate of growth in applications.

GetJar acts as an application intermediary, distributing apps and helping its community of 350,000 developers make money from their work.

˜Hit-driven environment’

To date, Apple runs the most popular application store with over 65,000 applications. Last week it notched up another milestone with 1.5 billion downloads.

Its success was a shock both to Apple and the industry. However, every smartphone company is trying to replicate it, from BlackBerry makers Research in Motion to the world’s biggest mobile phone business, Nokia.

Many at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco felt that the popularity of Apple’s App store is also its Achilles heel because it caters to the “one hit wonder” model.

It is something social gaming company Playfish is well aware of with its iPhone app, “Who Has the Biggest Brain?”.

“It has been played on the web by 15 million people and when it launched on the iPhone it went to the top of the iTunes chart. But it quickly fell away and I think that’s an experience many people are going through, no matter the quality or originality of the content,” Playfish co-founder Sebastien de Halleux told the BBC.

“You are competing for the top slot in a catalogue and you cannot, no matter who you are, hold onto that slot for an indefinite period of time. Many developers are realising that its hard to reach a sustainable business in a catalogue environment because it’s a hit-driven environment.”

Mr de Halleux said heated conversations are going on within the industry to solve this problem. He also said he believed Apple wanted to find a way to help developers make money making apps that consumers want to use and pay for.

Meanwhile Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was not sure the consumer or the industry needed any more application stores.

“The App Store is flawed  “ right now [it] is just a bucket of apps. You need to get beyond that bucket and give the consumer the opportunity to wander down a really relevant aisle of content and applications that they can get access to.

“When this problem is solved, the type of application you will see will be about more than an iBeer drinking app or a candle that flickers in different colours.

“The type of application you will see will help enrich your life in some way. It will let you do your image sharing, your social networking and establish presence with your friends, colleagues and family in completely new ways  “ which is really what mobile applications are all about,” said Mr Williams.

‘Fad’

At MobileBeat, organised by the blog VentureBeat, the issue of application stores seemed to dominate with conversations and panels on marketing techniques, turning apps into a real business and looking beyond apps.

But Google’s engineering vice president Vic Gundotra told the conference that the application store trend is just a fad and that the focus will shift to powerful browsers as the main mechanism for delivering services.

“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning.

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing,” Mr Gundotra told the conference.

But referring to technical problems at the conference, MobileBeat organiser Matt Marshall told BBC News that scenario could be some time away.

“You saw at this conference that the web went down once or twice and that shows you that even the main web has problems so what about mobile?

“When you talk about mobile browsers, that is the biggest change in the last year. You have networks like AT&T, Sprint and Verizon all building out to the fourth generation and that’s going to allow much more power in delivering those web browsers pages on your mobile phone. But it’s not here yet,” said Mr Marshall.

BBC

Source: http://rightnreal.com/mobile-apps-to-be-bigger-than-internet/

Nowadays software testing is a rapidly growing up sphere. And software testing engineers may be found employed in different sectors. Lots of methodologies are widely known:
-Agile testing;
-Extreme testing;
-Scrum testing;
-White Box testing;
-Traditional Black Box testing and others.

The Black Box testing is the most popular and called for in many companies around the world. For years experts had been developing different costly commercial tools to lessen testing efforts and to increase the efficiency and quality of software testing, but lots of them were nonviable in practice. Later in 2001, some testing experts offered to create the software utilities for their manual-and tool-automated testing efforts.

And today at every seminar or training there are courses and lectures teaching testers more technical topics, including programming, networking, and databases. In the past and certainly today quick, efficient and profitable testing is in great demand. One of the ways to reach these goals is using .NET application software for testing projects. Although .NET languages are powerful enough to accomplish some useful testing tasks, testers and developers must have enough knowledge to write the code.

But first of all let’s discuss the automated software testing in general. At the beginning let’s look at some of the important management issues involved when starting automated testing, like guidelines for when and when not to automate testing, what kind of personnel requirements are needed to address and how to build an automated testing team. In later articles we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using two .NET languages, Visual Basic (VB) .NET and C#, for test projects and utilities.

Unfortunately there isn’t enough information out there yet to help test experts to use programming for testing purposes. Most of the publications are geared for software developers, not testers. Using .NET languages for testing requires a shift in the future. A tester may go to different courses, trainings (for example, standard Visual Basic course) to wonder how it could ever be used on a test project. These trainings and a lot of articles, books explain just how to use the controls and the ways to create a great application with user friendly interface. But the tester doesn’t care about that so much ” actually he wants to know how to get to the system information and other testing-related data using code or how quickly develop a utility. But the reality is the following – a tester must know how to use .NET languages as soon as possible on a test project:
“ How to get access to the DB easily and quickly;
“ How to get access to the Windows Registry to return distinctive application data;
“ How to create a front end with basic controls to view test information and results as soon as possible
“ How to get access to the appropriate .NET Framework library functions that return relevant information about the platform, files, registry, operating system, and so on.

These questions are just the beginning, but they reflect some of the things the testers have used to accomplish their testing tasks.

Why are.Net languages a good choice for testing? Actually .NET languages are not testing tools. They are a set of languages used for developing software. And it’s required to answer why it is better to use C#, Visual basic to reach testing goals instead of C, Java, Perl and PHP.

Scripting languages (for example Python, Perl, Rexx, VBScript and others) have a large group of supporters. Why not use those? As an actual fact none of those scripting languages were invented with testing in mind. These languages can be a good advantage for testing software, particularly if they are already installed and a tester has quite good experience. But if there are testing engineers with skills in .NET languages, so they will be a great choice. Also if the application is being written in any of .NET programming languages, in that case it may be a reason for the testing engineers to use it for automation software testing. But it’s not absolutely required to use .Net languages for automation of .NET applications. It’s a delusion.
But for Windows platform it’s a perfect choice that will give the power to do whatever you need. The Framework libraries have a lot of things to provide the successful automation testing. For example, .NET programming can be used for a lot of hidden applications’ operations testing. Scripts can be developed to get access to the system environmental variables and performance counters. Automated scripts can check the correct loading and retrieval of the data from files. It’s obvious that the .NET programming languages are powerful development tools makes them showing promise of future success and able tools for software testing. So it’s very important for test engineers to study .NET languages and to begin use them in everyday working practice.

Source:http://blog.oxagile.com/2007/12/23/using-net-for-software-testing-automation/

Dot Net has been one of the technologies which will definitely be remembered as far as this millennium is concerned. The invention of java really made the life difficult for the Microsoft. It was required for them to come up with some real new thing in order to move neck to neck as far as the market was concerned. I must say that they really did the justice by coming up with the dot net technology. They really find their product visual basic lagging behind in the race. This really revolutionized their effort and they finally were able to implement the concept of the object oriented programming language and come up with the .net technology.
You will really find lots of advantages .net technology is concerned. I would like to list some of them. They are as follows:

1. Interoperability support
You can easily migrate from any programming language to the.net with an ease. You will find it really easy to migrate if you are from COM or java. In fact the Microsoft has the migration utility to automatically migrate existing java code into that of C#.

2. Common Language Runtime (CLR)
Microsoft has come up with this engine which is shared by all the programming language like C Sharp, VB, Visual C++, JavaScript, VB Script etc and the language supported by .net. With the help of CLR you can make base classes in C#, child class vb.net and aggregate in visual C++. This is really the idea which not only you but all of us have experienced to be very handy. This is really the most important achievement as far as the Microsoft is concerned.

3. Base Class Library
Can you guess why java appears to be so versatile and cross platform independent? Yes if you have guessed the class library then you are absolutely right. However you will find it really great how it is implemented in the .net technology. It has moved a step further by making them available for all the languages. With them you are now capable of using features like string manipulation, exception handling, remoting, collection management construct in the same way for all the languages that are supported by the CLI.

4. Common type system( CTS)
You will really be amazed when you will come to know that the data types remain the same as far as all the languages supported by the ClI is concerned.

5. Easy deployment technique
The applications can now be deployed easily with just the help of XCOPY of the assemblies, asp.net files and configuration file. There is no more the need of the DLL.

6. Improved web services
With the implementation of Web technologies like ASP.NET you will definitely find that you can now develop more advance and powerful web application.

These are some of the advantages of the dot net technology and I must say that you will definitely find it to be very good and easy to code no matter which language you are using.

Source:http://www.datagrid.org/important-features-of-dot-net/

In such a short span, since it was launched more than 50 applications have already been available in the Android market today. We as an offshore software mobile application development house empowers the capabilities of the Android application development and promise to provide fast, high quality and cost effective solution to our customers willing to add essence to their business or personal need. Rapidsoft Technologies have years of experience in developing number of applications on different mobile technologies and since the launch of Android we have took the challenge of fulfilling your dreams. There are few of the instances where our team of android developers  can assist you in developing applications for multimedia, location based tools, barcode scanners, travel guides, games, and others to follow. Android SDK supports the tools and the API necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the java programming language and our developers are very much capable of implementing them as we have started understand the Android SDK very well. We have been following Android religiously since in the news and are now set to provide you the quality deliverables as we are working on couple of Android development on board.

Some Features of Android
•    Application Framework
•    Dalvik Virtual Machine
•    Integrated Browser
•    Optimized Graphics
•    SQLite
•    GSM Telephony
•    Bluetooth, EDGE,3G and WiFi
•    Camera, GPS, Compass and accelerometer
•    Rich Development Environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE.
•    Media Support for common audio, video and still image formats  (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
Some of the areas that we are targeting at present in our in-house development of Android application are as follows:
•    Multimedia
•    Location Based tools
•    Barcode Scanners
•    Travel Guides
•    Games

iPhone is a revolutionary hi-tech device that has changed the face of the mobile phone technology. The device is designed and marketed by Apple Inc., one of the leading manufacturers of computer electronics and software products. Named as the “Invention of the year” by the Time magazine, iPhone is an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a flush multi-touch screen. The device has minimal hardware interface. iPhone has a virtual keyboard on the touch screen that works just like as a camera phone. Anyone can perform desired tasks such as sending messages and voicemails, listening to favorite music via portable media player and interacting with business client through internet connectivity. With an iPhone, it is possible to send quick emails, do web browsing via Wi-Fi connectivity.Being the smartest of all smartphones, iPhone provides lower level access to third party applications. Hence, software developers can explore their technical abilities and create user-friendly and advanced level software to your iPhone. Developers can enjoy developing applications on iPhone for different categories, including

* Multimedia Application
* Games
* Office/Business application
* Utility application
* Internet application
* Fun application

iPhone Application Development is meant for improving and transforming the advantage of this hi-tech device by programming it for specific need/function. The packaged software is designed for general users. So, if you have any specific requirement or application concepts, iPhone mobile application development is the right choice for you. With better and customized applications, you can enjoy improved facilities on your iPhone and save a great deal of time and money as well.

Why iPhone Application Development?

Adding better applications on iPhone Website is definitely a smarter way to make your site look unique with valuable features. With proper planning and designing, iphone open application evelopment can get you the desired results right away! iPhone Mobile Application Development Companies:

iPhone application development is quickly growing and maturing in terms of technical feasibility for any development companies. Many companies offer valuable services to give a competitive edge to your website by using latest mobile technology. They offer affordable solutions for satisfying the demands of both industry leaders and companies looking for minimizing costs in order to improve services.

Source:http://iphone-websites.blogspot.com/2009/06/iphone-application-development-smart_22.html