App Developer Magazine September 2017

Mobile rewarded ads help increase IAP spends shows study Benjamin Chen, Tapjoy

Rewarded videos inside games and apps can be a double edge sword. Give "something" to a user for watching a video is a gamble because it's hard to decipher how users will react. It's an obvious thought to wonder if rewarded ads take revenue away from In-App Purchases (IAPs). But new data out today from Tapjoy shows that rewarded ads actually help increase IAP spend. The study, titled “Maximum Impact Report: The Impact of Rewarded Ads on IAP, Retention & Engagement,” revealed that users who engage with rewarded ads are 4.5 times more likely to make an in-app purchase than those who do not engage with ads.

The report also found that user spend increases significantly after users interact with rewarded ads.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Rewarded advertisements also known as “opt-in” ads allow users to earn in-app currency or unlock premium content in exchange for watching videos or engaging with other types of advertising content. In a detailed analysis of eight apps with a high volume of Daily Active Users (DAU), Tapjoy found that seven of the apps showed significantly higher IAP conversion rates among users who engaged with ads versus those who did not. While the average increase was 4.5X, two of the apps experienced an increase of at least 9X meaning that users were over nine times more likely to make an in-app purchase after they engaged with a rewarded ad.

The study also showed that users are likely to spend more money in the app if they first engage with a rewarded ad. In all eight apps studied, IAP spend increased significantly after users engaged with an ad by an average of 326 percent. Across the apps studied, the boost in average spend per user ranged from just shy of 200 percent to over 500 percent.

“Some app developers fear that giving their users the option to earn currency through rewarded ads will reduce the likelihood of IAP or negatively impact user spend. Our data shows that not only do developers

have no reason tow orry about such cannibalization, but rewarded ads are actually conducive to IAP,” said Benjamin Chen, SVP & GM, Developer Relations at Tapjoy. “Our hypothesis is that rewarded ads serve as an initial introduction to an app’s in-game economy or premium content. Once users get a taste for it, they want more – and they’re willing to pay for it.”

Rewarded ads also appear to have a positive impact on user engagement, according to the study. Across all apps studied, the average number of daily sessions per user increased 34 percent among those that completed at least one rewarded ad.

Tapjoy had previously reported that engagement with rewarded advertising shows a high correlation with increase in retention rates. The company’s May 2017 Maximum Impact Report on “The Impact of Rewarded Ads on App Retention” found that app users who engage with rewarded ads during their first week demonstrate a 30-day retention rate about four times greater than the average.

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Slow apps and websites can ruin your reputation App and web users are growing more demanding and less forgiving, according to the results of a consumer survey from Apica. In a clear call to action for organizations around the world, Apica's survey found that three quarters of respondents expect websites and apps to perform faster than they did three years ago.

Apica conducted the survey among internet users in the UK, US and Sweden, to investigate changing attitudes towards a brand's digital performance. The survey of 2,250 consumers reveals that nearly 40%of us won't wait more than ten seconds for a website to respond before navigating away.

One in nine users (11%) won't even give a site five seconds before moving onto another website.

Performance affects your digital brand The survey also found that digital disappointment affects brand loyalty, with 60% of consumers likely to be less loyal towards a brand if they experience poor website or app performance. 10% of participants said they would never return to an offending brand for goods or services.

Swedes are least loyal towards a brand that lets them down online, with 73% likely to turn to competitors.

Your app brand reputation at stake

Some noteworthy findings include: Over 80% would consider telling friends about a poor website/app experience More than 1 in 3 respondents say long loading times cause them to lose patience Three quarters of users expect sites and apps to perform faster than 3 years ago Carmen Carey, CEO, Apica, said, "These results demonstrate that digital consumers have limited patience for slow performance or delays. There is clearly a general expectation that sites and apps will perform faster and better, particularly with the advent of born digital organizations. The onus is now on businesses, whether they're a leading financial company or an online retailer, to ensure peak performance at all times."

App Developer Magazine September 2017

The survey also revealed that users also have limited patience for organizations that schedule maintenance on websites and apps. Less than half (46%) of users said that several hours of downtime was acceptable, and even then, reasons for the downtime had to be properly communicated. 54% respondents had an 'upper limit' of one hour, and more than 1/10 (13%) actually expect 100% up-time.

Negative digital experiences are also likely to impact brand reputation with 83% of global respondents reporting they would consider telling colleagues about a poor website or app experience, and almost 4 in 10 would definitely share this.

"If companies wish to retain both customers and revenue, they must focus on proactive performance testing and monitoring of their digital services to ensure that, even at peak times, downtime does not occur," added Carmen.

Apica monitors ecommerce websites and publishes an annual Black Friday Web Performance Index. Last year, it revealed that whist the top ten eCommerce websites are healthy, the rest are lagging expectations. The 2017 index is due to be published late November after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

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HTML 5

Web professionals reporting client growth says GoDaddy The primary drivers of business globally are: - Selling new services to existing clients: 40% - Providing support to existing clients: 31% - Finding new clients: 21% - Reselling 3rd party products/services: 7% A survey of web developers and designers finds that the web professional industry continues to boom two decades after the emergence of the Internet. Rapid growth in clients is fueled by the retail and travel industries, according to a new global research study commissioned by GoDaddy.

The research also shows key differences between more mature markets, such as the United States, German and the United Kingdom, and other regions. For example, in more developed markets, developers and designers are more likely to work for a small firm and concentrate their work on fewer clients who provide larger retainers.

The industry study, conducted in the United That has enabled them to focus more time States, Germany, United Kingdom, India, on securing new clients and growing their Brazil and Mexico by the research firm business.

Evans Data, found that web developers and designers - many of which are relative As the industry continues to mature, the newcomers to the industry - at times study finds a strong desire for continued struggle to keep up with demand for learning and support for certification services from industries such as retail, programs. Overall, 83 percent of travel, health and fitness. developers and designers support a Seventy-nine percent of web developers and designers reported client growth of 25 percent or more a year - with more than 1 in 3 saying growth was 50 percent or more.

Nearly half reported they have been in business less than 5 years, but revenue was still high: a majority had revenue of $250,000 or more and 1 in 3 reported revenues of over $500,000.

“Two decades after general internet adoption, this research indicates that the ‘Golden Era’ of web development and design shows no sign of slowing down,” said Raghu Murthi, SVP of Hosting and Pro at GoDaddy. “But the research also provides lessons to new web professionals on the importance of continued learning and the need to manage growth and focus on looking where your next clients will come from.”

App Developer Magazine September 2017

certification program that focuses on improving the skills and expertise of web professionals.

The research found that developers and designers grapple with how to keep up with technical and business skills to serve clients - but how they do that often differs based on where they are from. While online training courses are universally used, industry publications are much more popular in the United States (60 percent) than Mexico (32 percent) or Brazil (31 percent). Conferences and meetups are popular in India, but not as popular in Mexico, Germany, or the United Kingdom.

“Web pros are clearly looking for help in managing their client base, so they can maintain quality while expanding their business,” said Raghu Murthi, SVP of Hosting and Pro at GoDaddy. “That is why integrated services that help them manage multiple clients and sites from one place,

are in such demand.”

Overall, the study provides insight into an industry that is integral to small business growth[DCR4] and the overall health of a digital economy. For example, two in five respondents said they now tailor web pages specifically for mobile devices, with the majority reporting they spend most of their time on mobile. It also shows key differences between how web professionals operate globally: - Length of time in business varied among the regions, varying between more and less mature markets. The newest web professionals are in Mexico, India and Brazil.

- Revenue per client can vary widely based on where the web professional works. In India, for example, only 1 in 3 clients provides revenue of at least $10,000, while in Mexico and the United States the majority of clients provide that amount.

- The skills needed to be a successful web developer or designer varied by region, with technical and creative skills viewed as most important in India and Brazil.

- Where web professional work can vary.

Those in India, Germany and the United Kingdom are most apt to work in an outside office. While 72 percent of U.S. developers and designers report that they work out of their home (either in a home office, at a table, or on a couch). That is also reflected in how they view their work environments: over half of German, UK and Indian web professionals called it “conventional,” while the majority of U.S. workers said it was “loose.”

- New tools such as video apps and services such as Slack are popular in the United States, with 56 percent reporting they primarily use them to stay in touch with clients. But email remains the primary source in other countries, with India and Mexico reporting only 1 in 3 use those new tools to communicate with clients.

The research project surveyed 1,500 web professionals in May 2017. The margin of error of the research is +/- 2.6 percent.

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Monetize

Apps with subscriptions should read this report about pricing that people simply don’t like to give up on things into which they’ve already sunk time and money; since low-priced apps require considerably less financial commitment, this need to persist isn’t as prominent.

Liftoff’s data indicates that subscription apps may do better to charge a higher price - but don’t overdo it: apps in the highest cost range see a drop-off in conversion rates, averaging at just 0.73 percent.

Liftoff, a mobile app marketing and retargeting company, has released a report dedicated entirely to trends around subscription apps. The surprising data shows that setting subscription costs too low might actually lose otherwise-loyal app users. Additionally, the report looks into which price group converts users fastest, and highlights untapped potential in the male subscriber base.

Liftoff draws from internal data collected from 45 subscription apps between June 2016 to June 2017. The study analyzed data across more than one billion ad impressions to find the following:

More is… More?

Liftoff divided all subscription apps into three distinct categories based on cost-per-month - low: $.99 to $7; medium: $7-$20; and high: $20-$50. They then examined the rates at which users subscribed in these three sub-groups and found, surprisingly, that apps in the medium price range ($7-$20) have the highest install-to-subscription rate of the three price groups at 7.16 percent, and the lowest cost to acquire a subscriber at $106. In fact, apps that fall in the medium price range see five times more conversions than low-cost subscription apps.

So why aren’t low-cost subscription apps seeing the most conversions? It’s possible

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Time is Money - Which Price Range Garners the Quickest Conversions?

As the saying goes, “time is money” - so it’s no surprise that the longer it takes a mobile user to get through the funnel from install to subscription, the less likely it is that they will go on to subscribe.

Predictably, apps at the low end of the pricing scale took the shortest time to convert users, with users taking all of 15 minutes to decide whether or not to open up their wallets and pay a monthly fee.

Since it’s not a huge investment, there is not a lot of thought preceding action when it comes to low-cost subscriptions. For context, apps at the high-end of the pricing scale have to wait a whole 22 hours on average before a mobile user will commit to a subscription.

However, Liftoff’s data did reveal an interesting trend when it comes to conversion times for medium-cost apps: despite the fact that users are asked to shell out more money, those in the mid-range price group are not far behind the low-cost group. Rather, medium-cost apps lag only 10 minutes behind low-cost apps, with users taking 25 minutes on average to move from install to subscription.

Mid-range apps high conversion rate

makes it clear that this group has a dedicated user base. For mobile marketers, better engagement and re-engagement tactics may have the potential to shave precious minutes off the install-to-subscription conversion time, and thus gain even more loyal subscribers.

These Women Ain’t Cheap - Get More Bang for Your Buck with Male Users In a gender breakdown, the data shows that women are more likely to install and subscribe to an app, but this increased engagement comes at a price - literally. It costs $4.43 to acquire a female who will install the app - 14.3% more than the cost to acquire a male. And the expenses don’t stop there, as the cost to acquire female users who then go on to subscribe is an additional 14.4 percent more than that of their male counterparts.

When it comes to subscription apps, male users appear to be the low-hanging fruit for mobile marketers. Men are the less expensive gender to acquire, yet convert at a rate similar to that of female users. As such, marketers should direct more efforts toward male users, a group that is less expensive to acquire, but converts at a rate similar to their fairer counterparts.

Methodology The 2017 Subscription Apps Report by Liftoff draws from Liftoff internal data from June 2016 through June 2017. This data spans 1,051,355,179 ad impressions across 14,015,738 clicks and 520,792 app installs across 45 subscription-based apps.

The report tracks the cost and conversion rates around the subscription and breaks down data by platform (iOS and Android), user demographics and app category.

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Russian mobile markets showing good signs for growth With just $1.4 billion in revenues last year, the Russian gaming market looks rather modest when compared to the $24-billion Chinese market and the nearly $4-billion British market. However, a multitude of factors make the Russian market highly attractive to international investors and game publishers, says a report published by mobile marketing agency Zorka.Mobi and business intelligence provider Adjust.

In the mobile gaming segment, Russia is No. 1 in Europe in terms of the number of downloads, with more than 1.6 billion downloads in 2016 alone - nearly two and four times as many as in the UK and Spain, respectively.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

About 120 new mobile games were released last year in Russia, up from 90 in 2015; a nearly 30% increase. Of this number, about 40% were offered by international publishers, with the most successful games generating more than$1 million per month in revenues.

Marketers will enjoy Russia’s cost-perinstall rates, slightly higher than $1, which is almost half the cost in the U.S. market, and significantly less than in Western Europe and China.

Another reason why international game publishers should keep an eye on Russia is that its market is still in a very early stage.

With 80 million smartphone users in 2017, Russia is Europe’s largest mobile Internet market, the Zorka report emphasizes, and it’s inevitable that current revenues account for just a fraction of this market’s mid- and long-term potential.

“This is just the beginning of a promising trend. The future is bright for game publishers in Russia,” said Zorka.Mobi CEO Dmitry Hudoy.

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Analysis reveals app push notifications increase spending by 16 percent Leanplum, has announced a new Mobile Marketing Trends report, “In-App Purchases Now: Insights to Driving Mobile Revenue,” which uncovers key drivers for increasing in-app purchases. Previous Leanplum data identified that 90% of mobile shopping carts are abandoned

App Developer Magazine September 2017

without completing a purchase. Leanplum’s latest report, based on data captured by Leanplum from more than 56 million mobile marketing activities, studied push notifications that include promotion-related words like buy, purchase, pay, sale, and reserve. The findings offer significant insights into how push notifications can deliver increased conversions and higher monetization opportunities.

“The data validates that push notifications are essential to growing mobile app revenue,” said Momchil Kyurkchiev, Leanplum Co-Founder and CEO. “When mobile brands run multi-channel campaigns, including push notifications, email, and in-app messaging, they see even greater levels of engagement. This Mobile Marketing Trends report drives home the importance of adopting push to increase your brand’s bottom line.”

The report found that: - Promotional push notifications drive 9.6x as many users to make a purchase, compared to customers who did not receive a message.

- Promotional push notifications increase in-app spend by 16%, proving an effective tool for upselling and cross-selling in-app purchases.

- Promotional push notifications sent on a Saturday result in 2.2x more purchases than notifications sent on Thursday.

- Promotional push notifications sent during late afternoon lead to 2.7x more purchases.

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IBM announces blockchain integration with bigbox food supply chains

A group of companies across the global food supply chain have announced a major blockchain collaboration with IBM intended to further strengthen consumer confidence in the global food system. The consortium includes Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever and Walmart, who will work with IBM to identify new areas where the global supply chain can benefit from blockchain.

The group of retailers and food companies are working with IBM to explore how blockchain technology can be used to make the food supply chain safer.

Blockchain technology can be used to improve food traceability by providing trusted information on the origin and state of food. Pictured is a crate of oranges being scanned as part of a food safety blockchain.

Every year, one-in-ten people fall ill - and 400,000 die - due to contaminated food.

Many of the critical issues impacting food safety such as cross-contamination, the spread of food-borne illness, unnecessary waste and the economic burden of recalls are magnified by lack of access to information and traceability. It can take

App Developer Magazine September 2017

weeks to identify the precise point of contamination, causing further illness, lost revenue and wasted product. For example, it took more than two months to identify the farm source of contamination in a recent incidence of salmonella in papayas.

Beyond food supply chain applications, blockchains are now being used to transform processes and streamline transactions for everything from flowers, real estate and trade finance, to education, insurance and medical services.

Blockchain is ideally suited to help address these challenges because it establishes a trusted environment for all transactions. In the case of the global food supply chain, all participants -growers, suppliers, processors, distributors, retailers, regulators and consumers - can gain permissioned access to known and trusted information regarding the origin and state of food for their transactions. This can enable food providers and other members of the ecosystem to use a blockchain network to trace contaminated product to its source in a short amount of time to ensure safe removal from store shelves and stem the spread of illnesses.

To accelerate this adoption, IBM is introducing the first fully integrated, enterprise-grade production blockchain platform, as well as consulting services, that will allow more organizations to quickly activate their own business networks and access the vital capabilities needed to successfully develop, operate, govern and secure these networks. The IBM Blockchain Platform is available via the IBM Cloud.

“Unlike any technology before it, blockchain is transforming the way like-minded organizations come together and enabling a new level of trust based on a single view of the truth,” said Marie Wieck, general manager, IBM Blockchain.

“Our work with organizations across the food ecosystem, as well as IBM’s new platform, will further unleash the vast potential of this exciting technology, making it faster for organizations of all sizes and in all industries to move from concept to production to improve the way business gets done.”

New IBM Blockchain Platform

The platform builds off of the successful blockchain work IBM has delivered to more than 400 organizations, incorporating insights gained as IBM has built blockchain networks across industries including financial services, supply chain and logistics, retail, government and health care.

Extensively tested and piloted, the platform addresses a wide range of enterprise pain points, including both business and technical requirements around security, performance, collaboration and privacy that no other blockchain platform delivers today.

It includes innovation developed through open source collaboration in the Hyperledger community, including the newest Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 framework and Hyperledger Composer blockchain tool, both hosted by the Linux Foundation.

The integrated platform allows multiple parties to jointly develop, govern, operate and secure blockchain networks to help enterprises accelerate blockchain adoption.

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Human assisted AI analytics updates by Pramata in Summer '17 version Pramata, a commercial relationship operations company, has announced its Summer ‘17 Release which features a new suite of applications that leverage machine learning and built-in analytics to gain new insights from customer, partner and supplier data. By combining a software platform and human-assisted artificial intelligence (AI), Pramata customers can now quickly operationalize commercial relationship data and deliver it to sales, legal, and finance teams to maximize revenue. In addition, new visualization capabilities and dashboards bring the data to life in a way that highlights new revenue moments, and is easily shared and pushed

across teams and business functions.

“Most software products give you tools and then ask you and your teams to do all the work populating the tools with your data,” said Justin Schweisberger, Pramata’s Chief Product Officer. “Pramata is the only business application that combines the software platform, analytics and normalized customer data to make an immediate business impact and capture each revenue moment. The addition of human-assisted AI ensures customer data is always complete, accurate and up-to-date, and our new applications solve targeted business problems resulting from gaps in the customer lifecycle.”

New Suite of Analytic Applications

- Renewal Manager: proactively manages renewals and expirations to drive revenue retention and expansion.

- Revenue Opportunity Manager: enables customers to maximize revenue and profit, and align pricing strategy based on financial terms in contracts.

- M&A Integration Manager: enables customers to leverage contract and transactional information to accelerate merger and acquisition integration.

- Risk Scoring Manager: allows customers to quantify, measure and minimize risk in trading-partner relationships.

- Commitment & Entitlement Tracker: allows customers to track performance of trading partners against operational metrics defined in contracts.

Pramata was designed to help large enterprises grow their most valuable commercial relationships by unlocking critical information in existing contracts and combining it with data from business systems such as CRM, CPQ, CLM and billing. Deployed in dashboards targeted toward specific business problems, the new application suite allows for better management of commercial relationships data and more focused decision-making.

The first set of applications available are:

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$40 million genomics accelerator introduced by Helix and Illumina products for everyday life," said Robin Thurston, Chief Executive Officer at Helix.

"Through our collaboration with Illumina Accelerator, we hope to provide breakthrough startups with the resources, infrastructure and support to transform their ideas into compelling consumer applications and services that make genomics relevant and accessible to every person based on their unique interests.”

Last month, Helix launched the first online marketplace for DNA-powered products that offer insights on ancestry, Helix, a personal genomics company, has entertainment, family, fitness, health and announced a collaboration with Illumina nutrition. Helix developed the marketplace Accelerator, a business accelerator by partnering with a wide variety of focused solely on creating an innovation companies, ranging from established ecosystem for the genomics industry. healthcare institutions to innovative app Together, the organizations will partner with developers, to build or enhance their entrepreneurs to foster and accelerate products or services using DNA. innovation and development of DNA-driven products and insights for consumers.

Select Illumina Accelerator startups Interested startups must submit an developing DNA-powered products for application by September 1, 2017 and will consumers will now have access to Helix’s compete against a pool of highly-qualified team of experts in next-generation companies who will be evaluated by the sequencing and bioinformatics, applied Illumina Accelerator team. genomics, software and product development, regulatory affairs, quality “From an entrepreneur’s perspective, cost assurance, consumer marketing, and pressures, stringent regulatory and data business development. security requirements, and continuallyevolving sequencing technologies are “Illumina Accelerator is focused on driving barriers to designing, developing, scaling value for genomics startups by providing up and commercializing DNA-powered access to vital resources such as capital,

App Developer Magazine September 2017

sequencing and genomics expertise, coaching, and local lab and office space,” said Mostafa Ronaghi, Ph.D., Illumina’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Illumina Accelerator. “By working with Helix during our seventh funding cycle, select startups will have unparalleled access to Helix’s commercial market expertise and sequencing platform for their consumer applications.”

“Helix’s mission is to empower every person to improve their life through DNA, and a core component of building our diverse marketplace is to enable innovative developers to integrate DNA insights into their products and services,” said Justin Kao, Co-Founder and SVP of Helix. “We are proud to collaborate with Illumina Accelerator to stimulate innovation in personal genomics by helping selected startups harness their creativity and build best-in-class DNA-powered products for everyday use.”

Illumina Accelerator operates on a six-month funding cycle, during which selected startups receive business guidance, seed investment, and access to Illumina’s software, fully operational lab space in the San Francisco Bay Area, sequencing systems and reagents, and match funding through the $40 million Illumina Accelerator Boost Capital.

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Enterprise

IT pros think their job will get harder in next 3 years - New technology: Cloud technology continues to enjoy positive feedback from ITSM professionals in spite of a major outage. Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't seen as a major job disruptor yet, with only 16 percent of respondents saying it will affect IT jobs.

The Relevance of ITIL in a Changing ITSM Landscape

- Best practices: Only 24 percent of ITSM While only 5 percent of respondents feel professionals show confidence in the that ITIL and other published ITM practices existing ITSM best practices, including are irrelevant, roughly 66 percent believe ITIL, making a strong case for their ITIL and other ITSM best practices have revamp. failed to keep up with the changing ITSM ManageEngine, a real-time IT - Meeting service expectations: With an landscape. These findings reinforce the management company and creators of need for ITIL to reinvent itself to keep pace incoming millennial workforce, 77 percent ServiceDesk Plus has announced the with the changing trends in IT. of ITSM professionals believe that IT results of its IT Service Management teams will have to do more to manage the Future Readiness survey. The report, expectation gap between younger and older "The ITSM industry is continually evolving which was conducted in collaboration with in response to its micro and macro employees.

ITSM.tools, consisted of ten questions that influencers, like technology, people, focused on the opportunities and practices and government regulations," challenges ITSM will see in the future. It said Rajesh Ganesan, director of product ITSM Is Getting Shaped by management at ManageEngine. "Being was presented to ITSM professionals and garnered over 300 responses, yielding key the Cloud, AI, and a aware of potential future challenges and findings in five distinct areas. opportunities helps ITSM professionals Millennial Workforce stay relevant and responsive to changing landscapes in IT and business, giving their organizations a competitive edge."

Key Findings: Strong Interestingly, while a majority of ITSM Affinity for the Cloud; AI professionals (57 percent) feel that their IT "It's interesting - and worrying - that 82 percent of survey respondents believe that teams deliver equal or better service than Not a Threat to Jobs working in IT will get harder over the next consumer-facing companies, 77 percent three years," said Stephen Mann, principal also believe that they need to do better to analyst and content director at ITSM.tools. match the expectations of the incoming - Working in IT: Eighty-two percent of workforce of millennials. The timing of this "There are multiple root causes, including: ITSM professionals believe that the IT roles survey - almost coinciding with the nearly two-thirds of respondents think that of tomorrow will be more challenging, and the current local and global political climate widespread outage of a cloud service the majority of the workforce currently feels provider in February 2017 - also brings to is adversely affecting IT recruitment; only undervalued by management.

24 percent of respondents think that the surface a strong affinity for cloud existing ITSM best practices have kept up technology. Even with this incident, only 8 - Impact of politics on IT staffing: More with the changing IT and business percent of respondents had a negative than 60 percent of respondents feel that landscapes; and 77 percent of respondents opinion about cloud. Also revealed in the current global and local political scenarios - survey, only 16 percent of respondents think that there is still more to be done to like Brexit, the recent U.S. election and meet the expectations of millennial said that they view the development of AI Australian immigration policies - will employees. Ultimately, as an industry, we as a threat to IT jobs, contradicting what's adversely affect recruitment for IT roles. still need to invest more in getting modern seen as a popular notion.

IT support right."

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Xojo 2017 cross platform tool updates are now available Xojo, Inc., a company helping developers create native cross-platform applications, has announced the availability of Xojo 2017 Release 2. Xojo is a rapid application development tool for making apps for the desktop (macOS, Windows and Linux), web, iOS, and Raspberry Pi. In addition to over 250 improvements, this release focuses on enhancements to 64-bit support, Linux GTK 3 and HiDPI, and iOS Launch Screen support.

Xojo applications compile to machine code for greater performance and security. It uses native controls so apps look and feel right on each platform. Since one set of source code can be used to support multiple platforms, development is "ten times faster." The platform has a drag and drop user interface builder and one straightforward programming language for development.

"Our goal has always been to let you focus your energy on what makes your app unique. When there are significant shifts in technology whether it's new versions of a particular OS, changes to display technology, new processors, etc., our job at Xojo is to shield you as much as possible from work that developers using other tools face," commented Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of Xojo, Inc. "We have focused on finalizing our transition to 64-bit and it's really gratifying to us when we hear how simple we have made these transitions."

"I wasn't too sure what to expect from the 64-bit transition, but knowing that Apple is planning to cut off 32-bit support next year made me want to move our macOS app over," said Tom Catchesides of Light Blue Software. "I selected 64-bit, crossed my fingers and pressed the Xojo's Build button.

Despite the size of my app, it compiled without error for 64-bit and works fine more than fine in fact. The 64-bit debug build certainly feels snappy and responsive."

Key features: - 64-bit improvements, including 64-bit XojoScript, faster and more consistent string handling and Windows icons and version information - GTK+ 3 and HiDPI on Linux - iOS Launch Screen support - IDE, web-platform and iOS-layout improvements

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Game developers can now use StratusCore's Virtual Studio platform framework that enables a milestone-based content review, approval, delivery and payment system between artists and content buyers.

StratusCore, a content production technology company, has announced significant enhancements to its cloud-based Virtual Studio platform that allows digital artists and creative studios to create content in a more cost-effective way with on-demand access to an expanded range of software tools, compute and collaboration.

- Virtual Workstation Anywhere Program: Enables digital artists to create using a variety of creative software applications, including game engines and 3D modeling programs such as Maya, Nuke and C4D through their Virtual Workstation platform, via just a computer, browser and at least an 8Mbps connection.

Virtual Workstations run without the overhead or expense of a thin or zero client hardware, resulting in significant cost savings.

- Game Development Virtual Workstation: StratusCore now enables game developers to leverage its Virtual Studio platform to access and use Unity 2017 and Unreal Engine 4 game creation tools. Support for additional gaming StratusCore’s Virtual Studio is a pre- to post- platforms such as CRYENGINE is in production platform that includes a development. centralized, secure workflow, allowing artists to create, store, share, render and The new offering provides game transfer their work easily, and enable developers the ability to genuinely geographically dispersed teams to collaborate remotely with any number of collaborate on content at a moment’s notice. users and effectively “pass the baton” to

New features: - Digital Escrow service: Provides the content creation industry a business

App Developer Magazine September 2017

switch between viewer and editor seamlessly.

"It is the first virtual workstation that provides developers with the ability to create and review content at 1080p at 60 frames per second over a 32 Mbps connection, which ensures high image

quality and smooth motion for graphicintensive gaming content," according to StratusCore.

- LaunchPad: Gives digital artists the option to access cloud rendering directly from StratusCore’s 3D Virtual Workstation.

LaunchPad will also be available this summer as a downloadable application that enables cloud-based rendering via a dropdown menu directly from the user’s desktop applications.

- New Pricing Models for Rendering Software: In addition to these product enhancements, the company will be introducing a new subscription-based pricing model for its rendering software and plug-ins that allow customers to get steep volume discounts without high up-front package prices. A subscription promotional offer is available today as a precursor to this new pricing that will be available in mid-August. StratusCore expects to expand its new pricing model to the full suite of products that make up its Virtual Studio platform soon.

“There’s a massive opportunity to unleash significant efficiencies in digital content creation with the flexibility, intelligence and collaboration that only the cloud can impart, ” said Denise Muyco, co-founder and CEO of StratusCore. “We are staying ahead of the pack by closely working with our artist community and partners to build a potent set of connected services that allow digital artists and studios to better compete in the digital content creation workplace.”

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SDK

Fillr reaches 100 million monthly active users autofill technology to help not only mobile and social businesses, but also digital organizations as a whole to realize digital commerce opportunities. Our live, side-by-side research, shows that when using Fillr, mobile commerce conversions increase at a rate that is 2.2 greater than shoppers who are not using Fillr.”

Fillr has announced that its mobile Autofill as a Service platform now reaches 100 million monthly active users worldwide.

Providing one-click, accurate, and secure autofill for checkout forms, the Fillr Autofill as a Service (FAaaS) platform helps mobile digital commerce businesses take advantage of the exploding growth in mobile commerce, which claims 90 percent of mobile app usage worldwide. The FAaaS platform delivers seamless user checkout experiences, effectively preventing revenue lost from cart abandonment, estimated at $4.6 trillion in 2016 and increasing conversion rates.

Fillr’s Intelligent Autofill utilizes more than two thousand form-mapping expressions, resulting in accuracy that is almost twice that of Google and Apple’s autofill. The company’s Advanced Textual Heuristics reads forms as close to human representation as possible, drawn from algorithms developed from analyzing hundreds of thousands of forms.

Fillr works on all forms, from shopping purchase transactions to forms that do not involve payments, including contest submissions, job applications, and subscriptions. In the coming months, the company expects to extend the FAaaS platform to support targeted advertising and transactions on in-message apps. It also is developing new features for voice search and Internet of Things devices, very few of which will have a fully functional qwerty “Conversion rates, especially on mobile, are keyboard, making data entry extremely terrible,” said Chris Koch, CEO and codifficult. founder, Fillr. “The industry is striving to quickly catch up with consumers’ mobile-first approach to shopping and demand for a better transaction experience. Key features: Fillr built the most intelligent

App Developer Magazine September 2017

- Speed and accuracy: Fillr delivers "95 percent accuracy" across top e-retailers, compared with Chrome and Safari’s 53 percent accuracy - Data analytics: provides aggregated data on user gender, age, geography and payment platform, and on form specifics such as number of fields on the form and number of fields entered/edited by the user - Security: User data is encrypted on the user’s device using 256-bit AES encryption - Multi-lingual autofill: supports a growing list of languages, including English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese Mandarin, Korean and Japanese - Customizable UI & UX: The platform can be customized to integrate seamlessly with existing UX of applications. The default UI is based on Android and iOS native design standards and can be easily adapted to house styles and brand guidelines - Cross-platform compatibility: The Fillr SDK is embedded into browsers, in-app browsers of mobile social apps, metasearch engines and comparison shopping engines. The fully compiled SDK can be as small as 1.2 Mb and up to 2.4Mb, and can be integrated into a WebView within Android or iOS apps for both mobile and tablet

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Google ARCore SDK releases Unreal Engine support Google has announced ARCore, bringing augmented reality (AR) functionality to Android smartphones. Developers can immediately get started with Google’s developer preview of ARCore, which also includes Unreal Engine support. ARCore enables AR development across Android ecosystem, giving developers the ability to make compelling AR experiences without the need for any additional hardware.

access Unreal Engine 4 support for ARCore on GitHub as well as the preview coming in Unreal Engine 4.18.” - Mark Rein, Co-Founder and Vice President, Epic Games In a blog post by Nick Whiting, Technical Director of VR and AR, Epic Games, he described the new features as follows:

The ARCore SDK supports the Google Motion Tracking Pixel, Pixel XL, and the Samsung Galaxy S8 running Android 7.0 Nougat and above.

As the developer preview is refined, Google "As your mobile device moves through the is adding new devices, with a target of 100 world, ARCore combines visual data from million devices at launch. the device's camera and inertial measurements from the device's IMU to “Augmented reality is the next step in the estimate the pose (position and orientation) evolution of the smartphone, and Unreal of the camera relative to the world over Engine developers are already hard at work time. This process, called visual inertial on great AR experiences. ARCore will help odometry (VIO), lets ARCore know where further drive AR adoption by empowering the device is relative to the world around it. developers to build and ship cross-platform By aligning the pose of the virtual camera AR experiences. We encourage the Unreal that renders your 3D content with the pose community to check out today’s early of the device's camera provided by ARCore, virtual content is rendered from

the correct perspective. Rendered virtual images are then overlayed on top of the image obtained from the device's camera, making it appear as if the virtual content is part of the real world."

Environmental Understanding "ARCore is constantly improving its understanding of the real world environment by detecting feature points and planes. Feature points are visually distinct features in the captured camera image that ARCore can recognize even when the camera's position changes slightly. ARCore estimates pose changes by triangulating on these feature points between successive frames."

"ARCore looks for clusters of feature points that appear to lie on common horizontal surfaces, like tables and desks, and makes these surfaces available to your app as planes. ARCore can also determine each plane's boundary and make that information available to your app. You can use this information to place virtual objects resting on flat surfaces, such as a character running around on the floor or a table."

Light Estimation "Finally, through light estimation ARCore can detect information about the lighting of its environment and provide you with the average intensity of a given camera image.

This information enables you to light your virtual objects under the same conditions as the environment around them, increasing the sense of realism."

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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App Developer Magazine September 2017

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How mobile app testing has changed Technologies are rapidly evolving and ways of testing them are changing too. But one thing remains true - product quality must be high. Therefore, it is important to have a clear vision on how you will guarantee that your product is working as planned.

Depending on the project, you can build your own testing team, hire professional consultants or do a combination of both.

But you should always remind yourself Think Quality First. That's why we sat down with Andrejs Frisfelds, co-founder of TestDevLab, to learn more about how developers can skip the headache of testing and still ensure a consistent, high-quality product.

the best framework for automation as well as how to distribute the application to our crowd or beta testers, how will we collect all the data and which data is actually meaningful. Today tooling allows you to collect so much information that it can become difficult to sift through it all.

ADM: What is the difference between testing apps on real devices and emulators?

Frisfelds: Testing on emulators - either cloud (Amazon, Genymotion etc.) or local, ADM: How has mobile can speed up verification in development testing changed in years? phase as developers do not need to purchase a lot of real devices. Automation can also be triggered and test execution is faster than on real devices. Emulators are Frisfelds: I would not say that testing has also good for customer support teams if become harder or easier than it was 10 there are some reported UI glitches. More years ago. Back then we could test an engaged support representatives can application by just running it on one device check UI themselves by using emulators model (as binaries were even built for one without involving the technical team to particular device model with Symbian or validate if indeed there is some global with Brew platforms) and rather quickly go issue or user has some local/specific through the critical use cases manually. issue. In regards to real devices Now we have to consider more device applications requiring networking (even if it models, screen resolutions, OEM's, can be emulated), hardware acceleration network conditions etc. However, now we and any other hardware support, can can also automate majority of the critical reliably be tested only on real devices. cases and conditions as we have great Besides hardware, many mobile operators tooling support for automation, professional are deploying custom OS versions on crowd testing, beta testing or even UI/UX devices which means that you need a real testing. device with this customized OS to test your application's behavior on. Furthermore, a real device, even if the test device has a lot of applications and specific setups, is not a ADM: What are biggest “sterile” environment, which most probably challenges in this field will represent majority of your user base.

Emulators provide an ideal environment, today? but it is a hard environment in which to tackle end user issues and try to achieve the level of their experiences on your end.

Frisfelds: Nowadays it is hard to pick the right amount of tests to execute and the right number and the correct device models to test on. It's also difficult to ADM: Which platform understand what are the priorities for (Android or iOS) is harder issues and how likely real users will face them. From tooling and technology from testing perspective? perspective biggest challenge is choosing

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Frisfelds: Both have their features that sometimes “help” in testing, debugging and development of applications. Everybody knows that if you talk about Android, you talk about many screen resolutions, OEM's, OS versions etc. Basically if you want to validate your application, it is not enough to just take one or two devices with the latest OS version and test it. On the other hand, Android is quite open as a platform that for testing/debugging purposes allows you to dig quite deep and understand the nature of the issues and you can figure out workarounds for majority of cases. iOS, however, is not so diverse in terms of OS and screen variety, because mainly the latest two iOS versions are supported and majority of iPhone users are using the newest or the second newest device model. However, there are issues you can not solve in your application as the environment is quite closed and if the platform does not allow you to, for example, pick up native dialer app, you are not left with many options (at least legal ones).

ADM: Which tools do you use for testing?

Frisfelds: Since our company specializes in testing and test automation, we use a variety of tools.

If our clients are already using certain solutions that works well, we do not push them to use something else. Instead we adapt tooling they are using currently. For example, for mobile UI automation we use Appium, Robotium and Calaba.sh frameworks. For backend test automation and load testing we use jMeter, Apimation.com, Postman as well as develop custom solutions. For professional crowd testing you can use our test service Test48.com as well as some other players in this field with a bit different approach such as Testbirds, Applause etc.

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ADM: How can Test48.com help developers and businesses?

ADM: Is it possible to automate all your product's feature tests?

Frisfelds: It is. A more suitable question is - do you have all the necessary resources Frisfelds: We take off the burden of hiring to maintain all that automation you have set professional testers from our clients. We up and developed to test all your features? position ourselves as a “Test team in the Probably not. Automation requires deep cloud�. Our main goal is to point to as many understanding on how far you will go with issues in your applications as possible in feature/code coverage of your automation just 48 hours. This allows our customers to either for UI or integration/unit tests. There submit release candidates or work-inis no ideal decision or only one right progress applications to answer. You have to find a solution that Test48.com. In a relatively short time wetest works in your case and commit to it. the application and provide a report with issues and potential improvements. If we compare the results you get from our service to hiring a professional in-house test team or standard crowd test solution, Test48 can save a lot of time andresources.

ADM: What makes Test48 different from other crowd testing platforms?

Frisfelds: We do it in 48 hours (client can see the countdown on the dashboard) and focus on the project to provide feasible and rich reporting. All our testers are experienced ISTQB Certified professionals that will dig into your application to find bugs and issues. Bug and improvement reports are professionally formatted with all the necessary attachments and information for the development team to be able to reproduce, tackle and fix the issues.

ADM: Why should one confide testing to someone else than your own development team?

Andrejs Frisfelds, co-founder of TestDevLab

ADM: Why demand for testing is growing so rapidly?

Frisfelds: There are several reasons. For example, one of our clients needed their Android application's release candidate tested before publishing it on Google Play store. Even though the client does their own integration and unit testing and they have generally good testers, we still found 25 total bugs of which 2 were critical and 10 were major issues. If they had published the application without us testing it first they would have had to:

Frisfelds: When a developer tests their own code they do it so to prove that it works. If you give your solution for - Fix the 2 critical issues, which would someone else to test they will do it so to require another round of testing and prove that it does NOT work. Additionally, releasing a hotfix and pulling two an external team does not know or care about your internal policies, personnel or the sacrifices you've made on quality; they will point out issues. Your team has to make a decision on the received facts, issues and potential improvements.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

developers to work on it outside next release development; - Fix the 10 major issues, which would require additional two developers working on them for four days and testers validating fixes and releases; - Deal with growing user churn and users not upgrading to the newest version, which would hinder company’s reliability to deploy a stable product.

This extra work could have cost them a lot of money in engineering hours as well as their reputation as a good quality product.

However, our service cost was $350 USD and, besides the bug list, they received a few quite interesting points on improvements.

This example highlights that companies despite their current development stage (startup, mature company etc.) realize the importance of getting information about issues early enough to fix them and save money and reputation in the long run.

Another reason is that testing services are becoming more available and anyone can get a reliable, good quality service very fast because SAAS/PAAS markets are growing in the testing sector as well. If a company/product team is not interested in the service, they can develop their own test solutions by using many different open source as well as paid platforms and solutions and make sure they reach acceptable quality levels of their application/solution before launching to market.

About Andrejs Before co-founding TestDevLab he worked in quality assurance field at Skype for Mobile thin client deployment in co-operation with mobile operators and then consultancy for Libon product built by Orange S.A. Had pleasure and honor to teach Software Testing and Cybersecurity class for Master's degree students at Ventspils University College.

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A discussion with Oracle on chatbots With recent advancements in machine learning and the convergence of compute power and big data bringing artificial intelligence into the mainstream, intelligent bots will transform every facet of every industry and dramatically improve the customer experience. We recently had a discussion with Mr. Suhas Uliyar from Oracle to chat about how Oracle is using this transformative technology to help their customers succeed, including the aspects of its chatbot service.

ADM: What chatbots interfaces are starting to pick up steam and what has Oracle done to help integrate these chatbot services into products?

Uliyar: There are several channels with different integration interfaces and developers have to spend a lot of time to understand these interfaces and also what is supported and not supported. FB Messenger, WeChat, Skype, Line, Telegram etc, VPAs like Alexa, GoogleHome, HomePod etc, Voice interfaces like Siri, Cortana etc. We are also seeing Chat interface extensions to existing mobile apps and web pages for users to engage with customer service via BOT. What we have done to help developers is abstract this integration and provide this out of the box for developers to integrate their Bot into these channels.

This not only reduces the speed at which they can deploy but also their total cost of ownership as this world is changing very fast.

ADM: What kind of technology does Oracle provide to help developers jump the hurdle of Natural Language Processing?

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Uliyar: We have made it easy for developers to focus on building their BOT with a UI to set up their intents, dialog, entities without having to worry about the algorithms to process and understand the natural language and classify these inputs.

We use a series of technologies based on neural networks and spectral embedding that uses language incident and linguistic modeling to increase the accuracy of processing natural language from the end user. This leaves the Bot developer to focus on setting up the Bot instead of fine tuning these algorithms

ADM: How do you see the evolution of Oracle in the chatbot industry going forward?

Uliyar: We are continuously adding additional algorithms to simplify Bot development. We are adding algorithms to understand user sentiment, image analysis, language translation, self learning, behavioral analysis etc. Bot developers can decide which additional algorithms they want to add to their Bot by just including these algorithms in their pipeline without having to worry about the research, development and fine tuning of all these algorithms.

ADM: Does Oracle have any enterprise integrations?

Uliyar: The value of the Bot is to surface up data intelligently to the end users.

Oracle is the leader in integration to enterprise and cloud data sources and this is also provided out of the box reducing the effort, time and cost to expose data to the Bot.

Suhas Uliyar, VP Mobile Strategy Product Management at Oracle

ADM: What are some of the advantages of having a chatbot service ran in the cloud?

Uliyar: Delivered as a complete solution in Oracle cloud, it reduces the cost, effort and complexity of managing patching, upgrades and provides a reliable and secure cloud that handles backups, high availability, and fail over.

ADM: How does an Oracle bot handle dialog and how hard is it to develop?

Uliyar: We provide an easy way for developer to construct a dialog - a conversation with the end user. End users by human nature could potentially branch into different states / context in course of a conversations for e.g. Lets say I want to transfer funds from Account A to someone. Lets say I start by asking the Bot - Pay Tom for dinner. The bot responds with - from which account. Lets say the user picks checking but realizes he is not sure of how much he has in the account, he switches context to ask for balance and further ask what were the transactions etc - in other words change the state from transferring money to someone to checking balance and transactions. At some point he decided to Pay Tom which he comes back to. The Oracle Bot platform makes it very easy to model this with built in state management so the developer does not have code and maintain the solution.

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App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Tizen app developer growth is exploding says Hokyu Choi from Samsung Ever since Samsung released their own operating system, Tizen OS, into the market back at the beginning of 2012, Samsung has been continuously pushing for the adoption of the mobile OS on their devices. But although Android still dominates a majority share of Samsung devices in many regions, the growth of the Tizen OS is not to be overlooked and still has the potential to become a common fixture in device markets in the future.

We had a talk with Hokyu Choi, Head of Tizen Business, Samsung, all about Tizen to gain some insight into their emerging platform.

ADM: Where does Tizen stand in the mobile landscape today?

Choi: Following successful launches with the Samsung Z1 and Z3 in India in 2015, Samsung expanded Z2 in other regions such as Africa and South East Asia in 2016.

We saw a lot of great interest and success with the Z series, and therefore we recently introduced Samsung Z4, a smartphone that packs powerful performance with a simple user experience.

With the Z Series, Samsung is committed to providing the best mobile experience to entry level smartphone users. Through Samsung’s continuous efforts on Tizen OS, we are expanding the Tizen ecosystem globally.

ADM: How many apps are currently in the Tizen Store, and how fast is it growing?

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Choi: Tizen Store offers thousands of apps currently in service, including localized essential apps including IM, SNS, shopping, banks, games, etc. High-quality apps are growing rapidly through partnership and developer programs such as Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program.

In particular, we are providing strong benefits to our customers by offering popular apps specifically tailored to local areas where Tizen phones are available.

App developer engagement is exploding in this year and app growth is four times faster than last year.

ADM: What are some of the most popular categories for Tizen apps so far?

Choi: Game categories are the most popular, followed by utilities, entertainment and photo among 20 categories. Games account for 40% of Tizen Store's Top 100 and especially customers prefer Racing and Puzzle games.

ADM: How many developers are registered to publish in the new Tizen app store, and what region are most developers based?

Choi: There are thousands of developers who serve Tizen apps in the Tizen Store Seller Office, and the top 3 countries with Tizen developers are India, Indonesia, and the United States.

Hokyu Choi Head of Tizen Business, Samsung

ADM: How successful has the Tizen Mobile App Incentive program been, and what are the plans for future programs like this?

Choi: We have launched the incentive program from February to October this year.

Through this program, the developers of the top 100 most downloaded apps on the Tizen Store at the end of each month receive $10,000 each.

During the last five months, over 3,000 new Tizen apps have been registered through the Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program. Through the program, global developers have become interested in the Tizen mobile app, and the ecosystem is being activated. Based on this achievement, we plan to launch a Tizen ecosystem activation program continuously.

ADM: Tizen devices are not easy to find in the US, what do you suggest as an outlet for developers to get a Tizen device to test their apps on?

Choi: Tizen mobile phones are currently spreading across the market at a fast pace in South-West Asia and Africa, and will continue to expand in the future. At present, we support SAMSUNG's Remote Test Lab for developers who don't have a Tizen mobile device. Developers can install or run their app through RTL without Tizen phones.

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iOS 11 developer tips to maximize your opportunities

BY MARK PRICE

One decade after the launch of the first iPhone, Apple is set to introduce the latest iOS. Deemed by the tech behemoth as the world's most advanced mobile operating system, iOS 11, still in public beta test, is packed with capabilities designed to help developers create cohesive and immersive user experiences.

Following are new features and long-anticipated upgrades included in iOS 11 that offer numerous opportunities for developers to build improved app experiences for their customers.

Open Your Access to AR iOS 11 introduces ARKit, a new framework that elevates app experiences beyond the screen by placing objects in real world environments and allowing developers to apply their creativity in new and exciting ways. The smartphone will be the go-to consumer platform to bring AR features to the masses so in order for developers to position themselves at the forefront of immersive technology, they will need to prioritize learning how to build with the ARKit.

Leverage Core Machine Learning App Developer Magazine September 2017

IOS 11 also introduces Core ML, a general-purpose machine learning framework that developers can use to integrate machine learning into their apps.

Intended to spare developers from having to build all the platform-level plumbing themselves, Core ML harnesses machine learning to do the thinking for them. For example, in just a few lines of code, Core ML can use an advanced machine learning model to identify objects in an image, which will allow image recognition within apps to track users' faces more effectively than Snapchat and Facebook. If used to its full potential, it will likely prove extremely useful in helping developers create more advanced applications by automating complicated tasks.

Strengthen Voice as an Interface SiriKit debuted last year, allowing third-party app developers to integrate their products with Siri. iOS 11 will expand SiriKit with more domains (built-in apps of notes and lists) and support for payments, QR codes and ride booking. While conversing with technology isn't exactly a new idea, this iteration of iOS addresses a

key area where there is room for improvement: apps can now, for the first time ever, offer transactional features through voice control. As the desire and feasibility for voice increases in popularity among consumers due to our increasing desire for real-time communication, supporting SiriKit should be a high priority for app developers.

Build Apps from A-Z...and Don't Stop The key to success as a developer, especially with all of iOS 11's new features, is a full immersion into the coding process.

Developers learn what works by doing, so they will get the best possible learning experience out of going through the motions in the new operating system start to finish: planning, designing, coding, and finally, publicizing a finished product. With iOS 11, this has never been easier.

In programming though, technology changes at a breakneck speed.

Considering the frequency with which new operating systems and development tools are released, there's no limit to a developer's learning potential. Plus, with 49% of developers reporting they spend at least 2 hours per week coding outside of work, if you're not upskilling in your spare time, you're going to get left behind.

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How in-memory computing is driving digital transformation technologies

BY NIKITA IVANOV

It increasingly seems that every business wants to become a data-driven software company. The success of Airbnb, Alibaba, Netflix and many others has CEOs, CIOs, and CDOs jumping on the digital transformation bandwagon and imagining all the possible ways they can leverage their intellectual property and unique data to deliver a service instead of just shipping products. A builder of engine parts can deliver real-time monitoring of the health of installed parts. A manufacturer of computer printers can monitor ink levels and automatically ship refills. A maker of sprinkler system timers can monitor weather and soil conditions in order to optimize water usage.

No matter how great the idea, however, executing it often involves significant challenges. This can especially be the case when customer growth leads to ever-growing amounts of data that needs to be collected and analyzed in real time.

The failure to plan ahead for cost-effectively scalability can be a critical threat to the business model, leading inevitably to customer frustration and churn. The best way to avoid this dilemma is to deploy a scalable, next generation architecture which can grow seamlessly to meet expanding need. And a smart way to cost-effectively deploy a scalable architecture is by building an infrastructure that uses open source software and commodity hardware.

The strategy that many companies have found to achieve this may surprise you. It’s in-memory computing. Many system designers still believe that in-memory computing is too expensive for most use cases, but this is no longer true. With the steady decline in costs, memory is now only slightly more expensive than disk-based storage. And next generation, memory-centric platforms can future proof today’s solutions against tomorrow’ challenges. By eliminating latency and dramatically improving application performance, today’s leading open source in-memory computing platforms offer an exceptional value proposition and can be considered for almost any type of digital

transformation initiative. And industry leading, tiered-memory solutions can ensure that the scale as well as the performance of the system can be easily controlled far into the future while allowing users to take advantage of any of a number of storage technologies including spinning disks, solid state drives (SSDs), Flash, or 3D XPoint.

Inserted between the application and data layers, in-memory computing platforms support massive parallel processing across a highly available, distributed computing cluster with ACID transaction support. This enables simultaneously transacting and analyzing huge amounts of data in real-time - a key requirement of most digital transformation projects.

In a typical application deployment, the underlying RDBMS, NoSQL or Apache Hadoop database is kept in the RAM of the distributed cluster built with commodity hardware. Keeping the data in RAM provides a significant performance boost.

Further, leading in-memory computing platforms make it easy to scale - another requirement of digital transformation projects - by automatically utilizing the RAM of new nodes added to the cluster and rebalancing the dataset across the nodes, which also ensures high availability.

The latest generation of open source in-memory computing platforms has introduced new memory-centric architectures that provide the optional ability to leverage additional data management capabilities. In new persistent storage architectures, the full dataset can be maintained on disk while a subset of the data is kept in various tiered memory layers which trade off cost and performance.

Transaction processing and analytics can be performed across the entire dataset, no matter whether the relevant data is in-memory or only on disk. This new strategy enables organizations to establish the exact balance they want between performance and cost while obtaining all the benefits of a distributed, transactional SQL database that can be scaled out across thousands of servers.

In-memory computing platforms can also

App Developer Magazine September 2017

support hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) use cases. HTAP can be especially relevant for Internet of Things (IoT) applications requiring real-time analysis of sensor and other external data sources. HTAP provides the ability to perform analytics in real-time on the operational dataset in a single unified OLTP and OLAP environment without impacting system performance.

In-Memory Computing in Action Today’s in-memory computing platforms are typically able to deliver an increase of 1,000x or more in OLTP and OLAP processing speeds compared to legacy applications built on disk-based databases.

In many cases, these in-memory computing platforms can support hundreds of millions of transactions per second.

Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe, is taking it even further.

As part of its digital transformation initiative, which is being driven by a 10-100x increase in concurrent transactions due to rapidly increasing mobile banking volumes, the bank is migrating to an open source in-memory computing architecture that can lower costs while providing higher levels of performance, reliability and scalability than previous generations of infrastructure.

Misys, a financial technology software provider with over 2,000 clients, including 48 of the world’s 50 largest banks, wanted to ensure its ability to manage huge amounts of trading and accounting data, high-speed transactions and real-time reporting. The firm also wanted to launch a new SaaS-based service, FusionFabric Connect, which includes a collection of modules that integrate many trading systems. Misys built an in-memory computing platform using commodity servers, each with 256GB RAM, and deployed the parallel processing cluster between its application and database layers. The open source in-memory

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computing platform eliminated all processing bottlenecks, enabling Misys to move forward with its digital transformation initiatives with confidence.

In-Memory Computing Platform Best-Practice Capabilities - In-memory data grid: Inserted between the application and database layers to cache disk-based data from RDBMS, NoSQL and Hadoop databases. For reliability and easy scalability, ensure new nodes can be added to the cluster and data caches are automatically replicated and partitioned across multiple nodes. For maximum flexibility, look for a data grid that offers ACID-compliance and support for all popular databases.

- Distributed SQL: Supplements or even helps replace a disk-based RDBMS. For ease of use, the system should use ODBC and JDBC APIs for communication and should require minimal custom coding. The solution should also be horizontallyscalable, fault-tolerant and ANSI SQL-99 compliant. For maximum utility, it should support all DDL and DML commands.

Support for geospatial data may also be useful.

- In-memory compute grid: Enables distributed parallel processing of resourceintensive compute tasks. Look for adaptive load balancing, automatic fault tolerance, linear scalability and custom scheduling.

For maximum flexibility, look for a grid built around a pluggable service provider interface (SPI) to offer a direct API for Fork-Join and MapReduce processing.

- In-memory service grid: Provides control over the services deployed on the cluster nodes and guarantees continuous availability of the services when a node fails. The service grid should be able to automatically deploy services on node startup, deploy multiple instances of a service, and terminate a deployed service.

- In-memory streaming and continuous event processing: Establishes windows for processing and runs one-time or continuous queries against these windows.

For flexibility, ensure customizable workflows and the ability to index data as it is being streamed to enable extremely fast distributed SQL queries against the streaming data.

- In-memory Apache Hadoop

acceleration: Offers easy-to-use extensions to the disk-based Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and traditional MapReduce. These enable the in-memory computing platform to be used as a caching layer for HDFS, offering read-through and write-through, while the compute grid runs MapReduce in memory.

These extensions can deliver up to 10 times faster performance.

Conclusion Digital transformation initiatives are changing the way companies do business and interact with their customers. But without a high performance computing environment, companies won’t be able to deliver the required service quality at scale, sabotaging the vision of the new business model. Today’s top open source in-memory computing platforms can deliver the required high performance and cost-effective scalability, supporting faster growth and driving greater innovation. By deploying the newest generation of in-memory computing platforms, companies can future proof their infrastructure and allow themselves to leverage upcoming memory and data storage innovations.

Nikita is founder and CTO of GridGain Systems, where he has led the development of advanced and distributed in-memory data processing technologies. He has more than 20 years of experience in software application development, building HPC and middleware platforms, and contributing to the efforts of companies including Adaptec, Visa, and BEA Systems.

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5 Agile practices to keep pace with digital transformation

BY RONIT ELIAV

Disruptive, continuous change is now the norm. Online companies like Uber, Airbnb and Netflix have transformed the transportation, hospitality and entertainment industries with disruptive technologies and services that couldn’t have been conceived just ten years ago.

However, enterprise organizations have been slower to respond. While customer facing web and mobile applications in retail, financial services and healthcare industries have been developed using continuous delivery methods, examples of enterprises adopting similar methodologies are few and far between. The culprit is typically a traditional top down, structured approach to application change delivery that isn’t flexible or fast enough. In addition continuous delivery tools are designed for software development organizations and don’t meet enterprises’ needs.

Here are five tips for enterprises to achieve agile delivery with rapid and safe changes:

1.) Break down the silos Large enterprises, especially those maintaining legacy solutions, are accustomed to various teams working independently. Development and QA are treated as separate organizations where developers "complete" their tasks, then pass them onto QA for testing. In reality, developers’ tasks aren’t finished until testing is completed and the system is accepted. To reap the rewards of agile programming, development and testing teams need to practice shift left methodology, where testing is moved up earlier in the delivery cycle enabling them to respond to more quickly to continuous feedback.

2.) Increase business owners’ involvement Users are the center of gravity for all software development. Although business owners, should be involved at every stage, they often don’t have adequate visibility into the project as a whole - status reports, project delays, bugs, - and getting this data is often cumbersome and requires many emails and meetings. On the other hand, it is also important that business owners provide detailed feedback frequently to ensure the requirements are met, reduce the likelihood of defects, and increase that chances that the final product will meet their needs.

3.) Automate everywhere Automation is the key to an agile workflow, and manual processes cannot keep up with the pace of agile software development. Here are just a few examples of processes that can be automated; pinpointing a system-wide problem that needs special handling, reassigning tests to more available or dedicated teams, identifying entry points that are impacted by multiple requirements, running a security scan on adapted code and identifying any vulnerabilities, analyzing the impact of change requests, analyzing performance in real time, and preparing optimized test plans. And there are many others.

4.) Use agile tools designed for enterprises There are excellent agile tools available but often they don’t meet the needs of enterprise application delivery. These

capabilities were designed to be used by professional software engineers and not business users who shouldn’t be required to go to training to learn how to provide feedback. In addition, these systems can also be expensive to purchase and maintain having too many features that requiring excessive computing power.

5.) Incorporate machine learning and AI There are tools today that utilize machine learning to analyze business processes and automatically generate test scripts for you. Scripts break often, and are expensive to create and maintain. Instead of creating specific transactions, you can start with a high-level scenario and track what the business user does. Then you can listen to a production system, track all of the different routes though the business processes, and apply machine learning to extract representative business process flows. Instead of interviewing key people in the business to see how they use the system, in a few hours you can see the transactions step by step. You can then use this data to create testing scripts that can be executed autonomously. This ensures that you are not only testing right but that you are truly testing the right things.

By increasing visibility into the change delivery process, improving collaboration with business users are scattered throughout the globe, and automating wherever possible you can significantly speed up development time. We have witnessed quarterly development cycles successfully transformed into bi-weekly releases in organizations who have implemented changes like these. With shorter development cycles, systems are more flexible, more quickly deployed, and most importantly IT becomes a true enabler of digital transformation.

An experienced thought leader in IT digital transformation topics such as agile and continuous delivery, DevOps, and business process optimization, and project leader for IT modernization, mobilization and system integration projects. Marketing professional proficient in product and content marketing, lead generation, media relations, marcom and brand management with strong communications and project management skills. Successful in developing, managing and executing creative and strategic marketing campaigns andcommunications for B2B and B2C channels.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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App Developer Magazine September 2017

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The mobile printing six best practices for developers

BY PATRICK CHEN

When creating apps, a developer works hard to ensure optimal functionality and a great user experience - so it's critical that an app is truly the best it can be for its audience. These days, ensuring functionality and engagement means adding mobile print to an app. Mobile printing is an unmet need in many apps: According to an InfoTrends study, 95 percent of consumers and 67 percent of business users want the ability to print from their mobile devices.

Mobile printing boosts user engagement by moving content from the digital realm to the physical; for content like tickets or coupons - or even with apps where people might want both a digital and physical copy of their content, like a recipe or a boarding pass - a consumer is more likely to download and use an app that lets her print directly from its interface.

Printability also creates a higher retention level for the app - a consumer is 20 percent more likely to stay longer within an app if he doesn't have to exit it to print from a different source, and two times as likely to come back to the app if it offers print, according to InfoTrends.

This higher engagement can help boost revenue sources; based on HP and partner analytics, users are twice as likely to click an ad and share content with other sources, including on social media, and three times as likely to make an in-app purchase. Users are more likely to pay, or pay a little extra, for an app with the ability to print because of the value they see in it; according to InfoTrends, 75 percent of users say mobile printing has a business value equal to PC printing, and 15 percent say the value is actually greater.

If you're still debating whether to add print, consider benefits specific to your user base, such as the ways your app audience would be able to integrate paper with the digital app. For example, being able to draw or take notes on app content, hang a picture on a wall, or show a friend some content when a user is not in the app are few ways that mobile print elevates an app's value. Many apps can benefit from

App Developer Magazine September 2017

being print-enabled - or enabling print might even open up new features developers can build in.

How to enable print Since the introduction of KitKat, Android users, which comprise 80.7 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, have the option to print natively from the operating system (OS), but only after a user downloads an app that can print. Google has embedded print functionalities directly within its OS, but many apps still are not print enabled.

It's easy for Android developers to add print functionality to their apps, either as the app is being built or as an update: Simply add the print coding to the app's back end, and add a print button to the app interface.

When a user hits the print button, the app hands the print request to the system, which handles the rest: choosing a printer, setting print options (like page size), and delivering the job using any print service installed on the mobile device. Because it's all handled by the OS, app developers don't need to worry about writing the print code themselves; all apps need to do is supply printable content.

Best practices: 6 tips for developers Although it's easy to add mobile print on the dev side, you may still have questions on other logistics, such as colors and page sizes.

Some tips for developers include: 1) Design printable content around common page sizes, such as A4/letter and 4x6 photo media.

2) Use color to create fun and interesting experiences. Users can always choose black-and-white output if that is their preference.

3) Unless your app is photo-centric, think

in terms of delivering PDF pages instead of screens of data.

4) Test your print function on different printers to ensure consistency and quality.

5) Consider including your app logo/icon in your printed output to reinforce your brand.

6) Consider how this new feature will help you market your app, and be sure to highlight it in app store/marketplace descriptions.

For more suggestions and tips, the Android Developer Website on Print, the Google Print Team and GitHub's mobile printing SDK (which supports both Android and iOS) are all great resources.

Applications in Action Dental Manager, an application that helps dentists manage their list of patients and details on their dental work, recently added mobile printing. A dentist can add multiple patients, store information about them, make pictures and add them to a gallery, add/edit notes in dentition view, create appointments, track payments, and import/export data - and now they also can print patient files, notes or payments history as well as manage this info within the app.

According to George Rosca, software engineer at Dental Manager, adding print to the application now enables end user to create physical evidence of their work in the application, making the app usage "real" and taking it beyond the mobile device's screens.

"Adding printing to the application had a positive impact, not only in making it look more professional, but also giving it a more serious look over the entire user experience, which impressed end-users," Rosca said.

Andrew Hughes, founder of Steadfast Innovation, agreed that enabling mobile print adds not just a new feature, but also improves user experience. His company's app, Squid, a handwritten note-taking app targeted at students, professionals and

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general note-takers, now has mobile print functionality.

"While Squid allows you to eliminate paper waste by taking notes electronically, sometimes it is necessary to print notes," Hughes said. "This could be a signed document, a filled out contract, a marked-up essay or notes for studying. It was important to enable our users to easily print their notes when they need to."

Rosca said some challenges a developer might face include choosing the right paper format; choosing the right information to be printed (i.e., deciding what info is

meaningful to the overall experience); and handling the API versions or the content placed into the page itself and its design.

These challenges are simple enough to overcome, he added.

Your App, Amplified

The greater the user engagement with an app, the better chances an app will succeed in terms of downloads, retention "With the right experience, people can and revenue generation - and mobile easily integrate printing into their printing is one way to boost this application, especially with so many engagement and ensure developers' work examples on the Internet," Rosca said.

"For the design of the document, I chose to does not go to waste. Developers can utilize the available resources on how to print the whole page as presented in the enable mobile print to add a new application, removing actionable UI functionality to their apps, amplifying their elements." success rates and ensuring their apps stand out from the crowd.

Patrick has served as the Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Samsung Research in America since December of 2015. He is a current Mopria Alliance member. Before he got on with Samsung, Patrick also worked as a Project Manager for Mobile Connectivity at Epson America Inc. for many years.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Everything you need to know about DBaaS With any business, there comes a constant string of decisions a start-up founder, CTO, or small business owner must make to assure that the technologies they manage are being utilized to their fullest potential.

Managing such technologies may have been difficult in the past, but in today's cloud environments, which provide virtually limitless capabilities, the burden is being increasingly outsourced to a cloud provider.

The shear power and ease of use that a cloud infrastructure can deliver makes hosting your own in-house infrastructure seem unattractive - especially for those at the beginning stages of a company.

Peter Nichol is the CEO of Instaclustr, an Open Source-as-a-Service company that includes managed Apache Cassandra database hosting. We sat down with him to talk about the DBaaS industry and why it makes sense for developers to make the transformation.

ADM: When does - and when doesn't - a Database-as-a-Service strategy make sense for an app developer?

testing, developers using a DBaaS solution can take then advantage of the ability to easily spin-up and decommission servers of all types and sizes. Being able to test a different range of infrastructure components quickly and in a controlled configuration offers a variety of benefits during this phase of the development lifecycle.

Having a third-party continually monitor the health and performance of this data-layer infrastructure really provides developers and operational teams with the freedom to concentrate on the application and on customer-related priorities.

ADM: Speaking to the underlying database, what makes Cassandra well suited for app development versus other NoSQL alternatives?

ADM: Walk us through a use case - how has a customer implemented Instaclustr's solutions?

Nichol: In the early days, the majority of our customers were well-funded startups.

They selected Instaclustr so that they could concentrate their limited technical resources on developing their applications.

We now have a pretty wide variety of customers, across industries, using our solutions to deploy their applications into production.

One of our most memorable early startup customers literally went viral overnight, with a messaging application garnering over 100,000 new users per day. The scale and performance requirements of this growth were both significant and technically challenging. We learned a lot during those early days and have been able to engineer the teachings of that experience into our platform, in the form of improvements to automation, configurations and features that better support performance, scale, and high availability.

Nichol: It really comes down to the trifecta of must-haves when building web-scale applications: scale, availability, and performance. If a developer thinks their Some of our customers come to us after application could really go viral, or could they have had a significant outage, or truly achieve global reach, then it's when they realize their cluster performance Nichol: Implementing a DBaaS strategy important to have built for scale from day can really provide value at every stage for a one. And both performance and availability is suboptimal and is causing them developer, from initial development to absolutely have to be maintained while that concerns. In such cases, we undertake a health check and work towards stabilizing deployment and onward as applications scale is achieved. Apache Cassandra is their clusters and production environment, scale. During prototyping and early without peer when it comes to deploying a then plan a controlled migration to our development, the last thing that a high availability infrastructure. Its platform, which we can complete with zero developer wants to do is build (or rebuild) decentralized architecture ensures that downtime (where the technologies and the underlying infrastructure, including there are no single points of failure. environments permit). database software and related services. By going the hosted database route, engineers This is also true when it comes to the scale working on a project gain the advantage of of the largest production deployments developer nodes that include all the cloud using Cassandra, including Apple with over ADM: What other provider and infrastructure solutions they 100,000 nodes storing over 10 PB of data, need, including software that's already technologies does and Netflix with 2,500 nodes, 420 TB and installed and preconfigured. Spinning these over 1 trillion requests per day. Even at Instaclustr manage that nodes up takes literally minutes, whereas these scales, performance can be otherwise it could take days to have measured in sub milliseconds. are relevant to app everything installed and configured developers? correctly if you were starting from scratch. Bottom line: Cassandra is a great choice when you don't want to be limited in your During the transition to production and ability to scale, and when you need the Nichol: At Instaclustr we are focused on highest possible levels of data availability. delivering the leading data-related open

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ADM: What's next for Instaclustr?

Nichol: We're working on further development of our platform to include the most relevant open source technologies that solve real data problems for our customers. Soon we'll be adding a managed solution for Apache Kafka to complement our database, search, and analytics capabilities.

Peter Nichol is the CEO of Instaclustr source technologies for our customers.

Our DBaaS platform and managed solutions environment includes integrated data-related technologies that interact directly with production Apache Cassandra databases.

Additional technologies and software components include Apache Spark for deploying a co-located analytics engine with production data, and other core data-related technologies for search, including both Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

ADM: How do you see the DBaaS industry changing over the next couple years?

Nichol: As per our strategy and focus over the next 12 months, we see a continued movement towards management of additional components of the data layer, including integrated data-related software and infrastructure components. We are We are also working on the development of also seeing continued adoption of cloud services by more traditional enterprises, as specific core technology stacks related to they undertake digital transformation specific use cases. For example, our strategies. Many of these strategies include customers will be able to select and managed solutions as a key priority. provision a cluster-type that includes the core technologies for an IoT application, There's also a rapidly growing push towards with relevant deployed architecture and open source technologies, and a rejection infrastructure components, and suitable of proprietary solutions. Many enterprises security settings and configurations. now prefer to deploy open source solutions, in order to avoid the risks associated with Our focus is on providing continuous care for our customers' back-end infrastructure, vendor and technology lock in. with automation, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance so that they have a highly reliable and scalable platform from which to grow their business seamlessly.

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Developers playing nice with the platform approach to making apps

BY CHAITANYA GUPTA

Kumar manages travel and logistics for a large banking company. He handles the mammoth task of arranging transport for employees who work beyond regular hours, and this takes up considerable time and effort, with back-and-forth messaging and calls. His problem is compounded by the fact that many employees are restricted from carrying personal computing devices (such as mobiles) and cannot install any extra apps on company devices.

Until one day, the company’s IT team came up with an innovative solution for this everyday problem. As the entire company was on one team messenger, they decided to integrate a popular cab aggregator app into the messenger. In this way, the employees could make their own cab bookings through the team messenger. As a next step, they built an applet on top of the team messenger, enabling employees to not only book cabs on their own, but also immediately claim reimbursement through the team messenger itself.

This is just one example of how a commonly used application - such as a team messenger - can help an enterprise enhance productivity with smart integrations and some custom development.

From just software to an ecosystem Traditionally, software companies have not been customization-friendly. If ready-made software did not meet your requirements or not fit into your environment, you almost always had to build one from scratch. Even if the customer possessed the know-how of customizing the software, or building applets, it was not allowed by licensing, and the technical inability to edit code (the exception is, of course, open source software).

market will reveal that a smartphone is only team messengers and other applications are putting developers in the driving seat. as useful as the apps you can install on it.

The success of the Windows OS too, over decades, has been attributed, in part, to the availability of the applications that run Integration - nearly on it. Why limit this concept to just OS and consumer IT? Enterprise or business endless possibilities software too can immensely benefit from a developer ecosystem.

New age software companies are leaning towards approaching their software more as a platform, than as a product in the conventional sense. What this means is, instead of guarding their code with end-to-end proprietorship, they are happy to let others build apps on top of their own, and even customize their software. It is no longer a software, but a platform, an ecosystem.

The developer is the hero With the platform approach, the software maker is no longer the bottleneck for the evolution of the software. The growth of a platform is in the collective hands of independent developers. Take the case of team communication apps, which have the potential to be the single app to replace most, if not all other collaboration applications. By virtue of being the productivity tool that is ‘on’ most of the time, a team management application that allows integration with other tools can be the ‘one app to do them all’.

Small businesses that didn’t have resources to custom build a team messenger (or any other productivity tool, for that matter) can now harness the potential of the platform. For instance, the team messenger, Flock, allows developers to build custom bots and integrations on top of the platform, FlockOS. Apart from this, developers can integrate other applications into Flock by using the APIs of those apps and customizable widgets in Flock.

Even a cursory look at the smartphone By opening up APIs and allowing customizable elements in the UI, such

Integration can range from simple notifications being sent from one application to another, to action buttons that control tasks in another application.

Even the simplest integration can boost productivity and visibility immensely among teams. For instance, a B2C business can integrate its social media accounts within its team messenger. This way, its communications and PR team is always notified of any posts on the company’s accounts. Any discontent from a customer can be handled quickly and collaboratively.

Integration goes beyond notifications.

Deeper integration makes for a seamless user experience, by enabling one app to be a front-end for many. For example, a file sharing service such as Google Drive can be integrated into a team messenger so that a team member can easily share files from within the team communication app itself. This makes project collaboration a lot more efficient and effective.

Open community is in A community-driven open approach to building applications is a win-win arrangement for all stakeholders. With customers having the choice and ability to pick and choose add-ons (from an app store), or create one themselves, the feature set grows organically. Of course, this approach pivots around the developer community.

In an age where IT agility is dictated by ever-changing business needs, a developer-centric platform approach is the optimal way in which IT can deliver value to business.

He brings with him over 11 years of experience. Prior to Flock, he has worked for different business units at Directi and Cleartrip. At Flock, he previously led development on the iOS app. He has played a pivotal role in launching FlockOS, and currently spearheads all initiatives to strengthen developer relations.

He is an engineering graduate from the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. When not writing code, Chaitanya likes to spend time with his family, enjoy the outdoors and study astronomy.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Monetize

A guide to monetizing apps using mobile native advertising The pace of innovation in mobile advertising has never been greater. While we have seen significant gains over the last few years, today, the industry is benefiting from the convergence of three areas - native ads, programmatic buying and enhanced targeting. This powerful fusion is essential to ensure a future in mobile advertising which provides users with a relevant and valuable experience, and delivers high-quality users to advertisers.

Qualities of great native mobile ads The term native in advertising, generally refers to ads that blend into their environment and appear to the user as being part of the app’s own content. This blending in goes well beyond the ad’s format, which is important, to address how and when the ad is presented to the user.

Native ads are on the rise in mobile, due in part to click through rates (CTRs) almost 5 times higher than traditional display ads.

However, these ads are more successful when smart app design enables them to be shown to users without obstructing their flow within the app. When ads feel unobtrusive (in terms of design and timing) as well as relevant to users (through advanced targeting), they click on them more often. This results in better CTRs, fueling demand from advertisers for the format and the need for scale.

An approach to scale One way to deal with growing demand for

native formats is through automation. This is already the norm with banner ads, video, and more, and now native is making its programmatic debut. As a way to automate the buying and selling of ad space, programmatic is consistently improving as challenges of transparency and control are addressed. Advertisers have greater insights into how and where they are buying ad slots through access to direct inventory. This offers a unique measure of brand safety by letting advertisers select the apps in which to show their ad, guaranteeing them the right audience.

Additionally, programmatic provides direct insights into which apps have available inventory and gives advertisers the ability either to optimize automatically based on preset KPIs or to manually set the traffic sources they consider best.

Targeting a mobile audience for greater relevance Targeting possibilities are also becoming more sophisticated, paving the way to reach and engage higher-quality users.

This can be seen particularly on mobile as marketers harness the power of data management platforms (DMPs), which store vast amounts of anonymized mobile data, to find the users they want. This audience-centric approach, which targets campaigns towards specific groups of users, represents a pivotal shift in the way advertisers seek the right users for their apps. For example, advertisers want to ensure that their soccer app is being shown to a male audience in countries where soccer is played as a national sport.

Programmatic buying helps them get their ad in front of the right people, and it’s clearly working for mobile: next year,

BY ASHWIN SHEKHAR

according to eMarketer, as many as 75 percent of programmatic display ads will be sold for mobile, rather than desktop platforms.

Bringing them together The journey to native programmatic has not been without its hiccups. Up to now, the primary concern when it came to selling native ads programmatically was that their varied formats made standardization difficult, but the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) OpenRTB 2.3 standard made it a priority to establish standards that are now relatively well-adopted within the industry. More than $10B US is expected to be bought and sold using the OpenRTB protocol in 2017, and with more and more publishers signing up to display native ads which adhere to these standards in their apps, it has never been easier for advertisers to place native ads at scale.

The standardization of native ad formats has made it much easier to create ads than most think; typically in a matter of minutes.

In order to fit into the IAB’s OpenRTB 2.5 format, native ads simply need to incorporate elements of traditional, alreadycreated banner ads, which are then added modularly to the native format used by the publisher app.

Moving forward, we expect that advertisers who were once wary of the format due to uncertainties such as scale and design requirements will become increasingly comfortable with using native ads. As marketers, we will be seeing the emergence of programmatic native as the only scalable way in which to convert, engage and retain high-quality users across the mobile spectrum.

Ashwin Shekhar is Glispa Global Group’s Senior Director of Business Development for its native monetization solution, Avocarrot. His focus is on helping app developers monetize ad inventory with full transparency and control.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Mobile SDKs: What they really do to your mobile app

BY ROHITH RAMESH

ads, or it could have something to do with the frequency that the ad content is refreshed or the size of the individual ads.

What you do get is greater insight into what the SDKs in your app are actually doing. You should think about this as you consider which SDKs to include in your app. Mobile data is expensive (and frequently slow) for users, especially in developing countries. As app developers, it makes sense to to keep an eye on data usage metrics to accommodate a global user base.

Mobile SDKs; love them or hate them, they're here to stay. They provide our apps with all sorts of functionality that would be incredibly time consuming to build, and they give us another means to monetize our apps. Third party SDKs are in fact, quite popular. According to a study done by SafeDK, on average each Android app uses nearly 18 third party SDKs. That number is even higher for mobile games.

While it would be difficult to argue that SDKs aren't useful, it's also hard for developers to get a good idea of the amount of resources used by each SDK once the app is in production.

What makes a good SDK? Some of the common factors to consider while judging the quality of an SDK are functionality, ease of use, and documentation. Some other attributes to consider are CPU usage, effect on battery, playing nice with other SDKs, and even network data usage.

As we mentioned, each Android app uses 18 third party SDKs on average. It therefore is very important for all SDKs to function in harmony. The effect on CPU, battery and data consumed per session are all also important for apps because each of these could lead to users uninstalling the app. Let’s discuss data consumed per session. This is an important factor when you consider users who have limited data plans.

So how does one know which SDK is consuming the most data per session?

What are the number of transfers per session? There are a number of ways you can look at the traffic requests made by various SDKs. You could route the app traffic through a proxy, run the app on your

App Developer Magazine September 2017

test device and see what’s happening, but unfortunately this will only show you the results of your own individual tests, giving you an idea of performance, but likely a statistically insignificant answer. Another way is to use a Mobile Application Monitoring tool such as New Relic or Apteligent. This gives you a whole suite of tools and the results would be from real productions users. The downside here is that it can get very pricey.

We often hear from mobile app developers about the need for an analytics product that would provide all the statistics for third party data transfers and would be able to capture the specific domains and URLs that are causing the largest amount of data consumption.

In conclusion, there’s a real need for app developers to collect detailed network performance statistics about their apps. To be efficient, that solution would need to be: 1.) Designed from the ground up for mobile applications with Real User Monitoring (RUM) 2.) Lightweight in its metrics collection (i.e SDK uses just one UDP packet).

But that’s not all! This smart SDK should be FREE and also allow developers to compare their app performance with industry references (benchmarks) and automatically optimize their code at run-time based on thousands of different network types, locations and times faced by their apps.

The chart below is from a gaming app with traffic mostly in the US and Canada with ~10K DAU (Daily Active Users). Like many mobile games, this app also relies on ads for a large portion of its revenue. Hence the preponderance of ad SDK’s in its list of data consumers.

In the chart, both ‘vid.applovin’ and ‘edge.adcolony’ are ad SDKs, but each one has different data size per session (~13Kb and ~10Kb respectively). This simply could be because ‘vid.applovin’ is serving more ads compared ‘edge.adcolony’ because that is how the developer prioritized their Rohith holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Santa Clara University and BE degree from R.V College of Engineering, India. Other than working with mobile app developers and hacking mobile apps he spends time playing the Mridangam (an Indian classical drum) and watching Movies.

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Application performance monitoring and cloud migration

BY NIK KOUTSOUKOS

The IT organization is becoming more and more strategic in helping companies reach their business goals. Companies are using technology as a means to not just expose new opportunities and tap into new markets but find ways to relate to their customer base and drive loyalty. As most of us are well aware, the primary choice for businesses today is to move as much of their IT infrastructure to the cloud as the cost benefits and resource elasticity are very well understood as drivers of cloud adoption. An additional benefit of this shift has been the rise of DevOps as a standard practice for IT. Adoption of DevOps (the "marriage" of software development and IT operations) is almost tailor made for businesses that are moving to the cloud. The reason being is that a large number of the applications that are either migrated to the cloud, or developed there natively, are typically customer facing and have varying - but direct - degrees of impact on revenue.

Because of the customer facing nature of these apps, their performance is critical and resolving any issues within the application needs to be done immediately while ensuring quality of service. A DevOps oriented organization that more closely aligns development and operations fosters stronger communication and collaboration between these functional groups. This allows for greater speed and agility to rapidly deploy applications and respond to application issues. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) comes into play.

APM has become an absolute necessity for a successful move to the cloud and for DevOps to be effective. The application user experience must be positive, therefore being able to identify, diagnose and resolve performance issues in real time is critical, and APM has become essential for maintaining service levels and ensuring user satisfaction. In fact, a 2017 study commissioned by ESG revealed that 91 percent of companies need improvement when it comes to performance management. How does APM enable a successful move to the cloud? There are

App Developer Magazine September 2017

three primary areas where APM has an impact across the organization: support for DevOps, enabling continuous delivery of application releases, and establishes clear communication and feedback to all stakeholders in IT.

Supporting Each "Side" of DevOps Traditionally, the development and operations groups seem diametrically opposed to each other. Moving to the cloud can easily exacerbate this challenge when they need to be on same page, and more importantly, need to respect each other's challenges and expertise.

Development wants to move fast and deliver releases and patches that the business requires as quickly as possible, and the cloud enables this speed of development. All the while operations wants stability and a more measured approach to the application release cycle as well as support because the behavior the application in the cloud affects characteristics such as performance, cost, reliability, and scalability. Deploying an APM solution supports DevOps by empowering operations to quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks and the root causes of application slowdowns or failures and provides all of the detail necessary for development to address them. With APM, DevOps has the tools needed to rapidly resolve - and even proactively prevent issues that can adversely impact the user/customer experience.

Getting to Continuous Delivery Continuous delivery essentially means that you're releasing application updates or modifications on a continuous timeline so that new features and functionality arrive at end-users as quickly and efficiently as possible. Continuous delivery is a perfect fit for a cloud environment thanks to the

elastic nature of the infrastructure available to develop and deploy cloud apps. The amount of infrastructure needed can vary depending on the phase of development and deployment - applications need to function as expected even at massive scale without interrupting the end user experience. APM supports a continuous delivery strategy by allowing for faster reaction to application issues, regardless of scale, by immediately pinpointing any performance issues, reducing the impact that potential bugs may have on the user experience and allowing for a QA process that can keep up with the speed of development.

Cross-functional Communication and Collaboration APM can be the "glue" that binds the IT organization together. Again, a move to the cloud can be challenging if all functional roles are not on the same page, or are not acting on the same performance data.

Throughout the development lifecycle APM delivers a clear view into application performance and issues. The application owner, business analysts, developers and operational support teams can rely on the visibility APM provides as well as the feedback loops at each stage in this process to ensure the best version of an application is available to users at all times.

In order for the developers to build applications that are battle tested, they need to have APM insights to show errors, bugs, code test results, and make sure functions are performed within performance SLA's. If an aspect of the application must perform in under a second, then it needs to behave this way.

APM helps developers to write code that performs optimally.

Once in production, operations can leverage APM to make sure applications work according to real world conditions and can make sure benchmarks are satisfied.

Performance expectations can be met and

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green-lighted before moving to production and accessed by users. Then in production, APM can constantly monitor applications that are live and zero in on problems so that operations can triage the problem, know what happened and collected diagnostics to help resolve them in real-time. Moreover, the application

owner and business analysts gain invaluable information through APM by monitoring the end user experience and seeing what aspects of the application provide value, quantify these interactions, and then help to drive development focus on where users are spending their time and just as important where they're not - in

order to drive product direction and keep users engaged.

It cannot be understated how important APM's role is in enabling a successful move to the cloud. It enables IT to be more productive while also ensuring that an optimal and meaningful user experience.

Nik Koutsoukos is Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Technology, covering the SteelCentral suite of solutions.

Koutsoukos is a result oriented, product marketing and product management executive with broad experience in all aspects of IT technology marketing management. He has deep hands-on experience in building and launching commercially successful product lines and leading successful product organizations. Over the past 20 years, he has built businesses and teams from the ground up and has managed $250+ Million product lines. He has extensive experience in life cycle management, roadmap and product strategy planning and development, market opportunity assessment, business and market segment analysis, demand generation, outbound and inbound marketing and product market introduction.

He has held senior product management and marketing and business roles in European and US based organizations ranging from start-ups to multinational companies.

App Developer Magazine September 2017

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Making the DevOps DNS Connection

BY KIMBERLY LACERTE

What is DevOps and why has the DevOps model become so popular? It is an approach to development that saves money and increases efficiency. It results in faster development cycles, fewer errors, and not as many pricy code fixes post-deployment. In contrast to the previous Waterfall model, DevOps aims for continuous development and deployment.

To achieve this, organizations need the ability to automatically create or remove networks and to automate deployment to production.

DevOps wants to be both fast and accurate. Automation is a necessity here because the fewer the number of manual steps involved, the less likely that human error will disrupt the process. Intelligent DNS improves DevOps project lifecycles by integrating with your software development and automation tools. Let's take a look at intelligent DNS and the advantages and upgrades it offers to the DevOps project lifecycle.

DNS Then and Now The internet is tested and taxed in ways that were not even conceived of when it was originally designed. Yet it has become a mission-critical entity for the world's commerce. One of these early elements, DNS, is now a potential bottleneck for network performance in general and DevOps teams in particular.

One of the benefits of cloud computing is that it enabled DevOps teams to automatically create and remove servers as needed for development and testing.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables cloud computing to automatically build infrastructure using robust APIs that build servers and add applications as needed.

Traditional DNS, with its mostly manual management, becomes a bottleneck for this automated rapid configuration of infrastructure.

Organizations today need an intelligent DNS solution to avoid such bottlenecks.

Because servers and applications can be created or removed in near-real time, the

App Developer Magazine September 2017

solution must provide high performance standards with low-propagation turn-around times, a robust API for integration and automation with IaC, and service discovery.

Moving Quickly The rapid delivery of applications and services is one goal of DevOps continuous release. As previously mentioned, another is removing bottlenecks to the development, testing and deployment cycles. The intent is to create an environment where the work isn't hampered with computer delays and frustrations.

Today, developers can simply click a mouse and can generate (or remove) 100 virtual servers by using Infrastructure as Code. Intelligent DNS with rapid change propagation is essential. Waiting for 30 minutes to see DNS changes appear at the edge servers delays your project.

IaC software and service discovery processes move quickly; so must your DNS. An essential piece in choosing DNS vendors to support your DevOps environment should include speed testing for the network's propagation of changes.

How DevOps and Infrastructure as Code Are Connected To achieve the goals of DevOps, teams need to build and maintain its server environments to closely resemble the way that software developers build and maintain application source code.

There are three primary components of IaC: - Version Control: Allows the method track and rollback changes to your infrastructure as needed.

- Unit/Integration Testing: Allows validation of your infrastructure code within various phases of the DevOps pipeline and

gives you confidence about what you are pushing to production.

- Infrastructure Blueprints: Empowers the reusable, consistent, and rapid deployment part of Infrastructure as Code.

Another recent element, Configuration as Code (CaC), provides a method of creating infrastructure blueprints. Tools like Terraform and Ansible enable CaC. These configuration management tools, or platforms, enable a declarative way of handling infrastructure configuration.

Infrastructure blueprints should always go hand in hand with unit/integration testing.

Having a robust, API-driven, DNS network to couple the full automation of DNS changes alongside the infrastructure and configuration changes ensures a smoother process.

IaC is a next-generation capability for DevOps environments. When it is combined with CaC products, it changes the way software is built and delivered.

Continuous integration and continuous deployment are a large part of the DevOps world that all still depends on DNS technology to connect everything on the network.

Service Discovery in the Age of DevOps DevOps requires support for service discovery. This involves allowing your apps or servers to identify which services are available on the network and which IP addresses and ports are associated with them. Previous methods of tracking this information no longer work in the DevOps age.

The high scalability and rate of change of modern infrastructure mean that keeping track of service information inside a periodically updated database doesn't work anymore. Instead, you have to be able to discover services in real time and update your service information continually. Three common service discovery tools are: Consul, Apache Zookeeper and Etcd (with Registrator and confd).

If you are closely knit together with your

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managed DNS provider as part of your overall strategy, the advantage is that service discovery can work hand in hand with the DNS configuration so both systems remain in sync.

with a vendor who can provide the flexibility, agility and reliability you require to deliver your applications.

Continuous Delivery Requirements

- Zone Transfers allowed and easily facilitated.

- An SLA that meets your needs for reliability and performance.

- A robust API to support automation, IaC, service discovery and other architecture and tool needs.

These features should be part of a provider's offerings:

- An anycast DNS network.

DevOps demands the same types of robust - Native integration with common DevOps features you would have for internet traffic: tools such as Terraform and Ansible. end user-facing DNS. You should align

In light of several recent high-profile outages, an additional best practice is to add redundancy to DNS. Because no single provider is invincible, use at least two authoritative DNS providers. Using the above recommendations will help DNS do the job it needs to in support of the DevOps model.

Kimberly has 14 years of experience in computer and technical writing. She is currently the Content Marketing Manager at NS1 in Bedford, NH. Previously, she has written for Veritas, Symantec, Health Dialog, and Dyn. Kimberly holds an English BA from UNH and an MBA from Southern NH University. She lives in NH with her husband and her pug dogs, Daisy and Doug.

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Kony introduces us to AppPlatform V8 Businesses big and small are feeling the mounting pressure of increasing demand by their clients, employees and partners for mobile apps. Many of them struggle to meet this demand. Especially with limited budgets and lack of in-house developer skills, which seem to be the biggest hurdles.

To help solve this mobile app dilemma, Kony recently launched its Kony AppPlatform V8, which aims to equip both professional and citizen developers alike with advanced tools they can use to design user-friendly enterprise-grade apps. We sat down with Kony’s executive vice president of Products Burley Kawasaki to discuss how the company’s latest offering is empowering businesses to deliver exceptional app experiences.

ADM: What are the end user benefits of an omni-channel app strategy?

Kawasaki: In a recent survey Kony conducted with Wakefield Research, we discovered that many executives do not trust in-house development teams to develop their apps. Some of the major concerns business leaders expressed were lack of skilled staff, limited IT budgets and security vulnerabilities. With lack of skills Kawasaki: The idea of one computer or and limited budgets, current IT one phone per person is an outdated departments cannot manage new and concept. End users usually have several emerging technologies. Businesses must devices and expect applications to work on rethink their mobile app strategies and any device, instantly, with a consistent user seek more efficient and cost-effective experience. By implementing an approaches to addressing the ever omni-channel app strategy organizations increasing demands of their businesses. can ensure that each user receives an That’s essentially what we aimed to optimized, outstanding experience accomplish with our new Kony AppVantage everytime.

- providing extendable, pre-built apps and components along with custom-designed apps, backed by company experts.

ADM: How does the Kony ADM: What improvements AppPlatform V8 benefit citizen developers? and features can we expect to see in the new Kawasaki: As you know, many companies version of the Kony struggle with having enough professional AppPlatform? developers in-house to meet demand for Kawasaki: The new version of the Kony AppPlatform V8 is all about making it easier for developers to design, develop and deliver omni-channel apps fast by simplifying the app design, development and deployment process. Key new features of Kony AppPlatform V8 include an updated version of the Kony marketplace.

It also offers several key benefits that we know users will love. For example: - Faster development and deployment speed - Richer interaction design and native UX - Quicker backend integration - Fuller omni-channel support for phone, tablet, responsive web and desktop with security and analytics enabled across the entire application - A patented cross-platform API - Guaranteed Service Level Agreement

App Developer Magazine September 2017

apps. That’s why it’s critical that they enlist the support of citizen developers by giving them the tools they need to develop and deliver omni-channel apps fast. This means significantly simplifying the app development and deployment process. The aim of our Kony AppPlatform V8 platform is to make it super easy for developers to have access to more than 100 pre-built components. Having access to these pre-built components makes the process so much faster and easier by just dragging and dropping what they need to the app template. They can also import app designs directly from Photoshop and leverage prebuilt integrations, data connectors and packaged apps to develop apps that deliver outstanding user experiences.

ADM: What are some of the challenges to IT organizations bringing app development in-house?

ADM: How does the Kony AppPlatform V8 leverage open-source technologies?

Kawasaki: The Kony AppPlatform V8 leverages open-source technologies by giving designers and developers the abilty to integrate 100 percent of the native OS or any available open-source and third-party framework for a stunning user experience without sacrificing speed.

ADM: What are the new trends in enterprise mobile application development and how is Kony incorporating these in the Kony AppPlatform V8?

Kawasaki: There is an increased focused in enterprise mobile app development to design apps that are easy to use and offer great user experiences on any device, at any time. Kony AppPlatform V8 offers an

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array of tools, templates and APIs to enable enhanced omni-channel app experiences that integrate new and emerging technologies like AI, VR, AR, chatbos and wearable technologies quickly and easily into any app.

Kawasaki: The Kony AppPlatform V8 provides developers with rich interaction design and native UX, plus support for phone, tablet, wearables, responsive web and desktop. Designers and developers can also choose a pre-built template for enhanced user experience. These capabilities and resources allow developers to deliver apps that are functional and offer an enhanced user experience.

ADM: What integration factors do companies need to consider with Kony AppPlatform V8?

Burley Kawasaki, Executive Vice President of Products, Kony, Inc.

ADM: How can companies deliver apps quickly without making sacrifices on UX and functionality?

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Kawasaki: Kony AppPlatform V8 was designed to make integration easy for companies. Developers can leverage pre-wired assets and pre-built data integrations to visually map apps to backend APIs, databases and legacy middleware, making backend integration quick and easy.

About Burley Kawasaki Mr. Kawasaki has over 20 years of leadership experience in product management, product marketing, software development, sales enablement and consulting within the technology industry and a specific focus on cloud and enterprise solutions. He has a direct pulse on the mobile app development space, leading Kony’s senior team of product managers and product marketers through the full lifecycle from early ideation and planning through product launch and global go-to-market strategy.

Previously Burley has served product management leadership roles at Microsoft, Accenture and various startups. While at Microsoft, Burley was responsible for the management of Microsoft’s Windows Azure PaaS services as well as middleware and app development products.

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The future of the voice enabled AI Brian Peterson Eventually everything you own will be commanded with text or voice in the future.

But specifically we may see that voice has the advantage over it's counterpart due to a more natural feel and simplicity of use.

That is why things like Amazon Alexa are starting to take off. Voice recognition has finally got on par with text, and it’s now much faster to say a command than type it.

With advanced transcription and also natural language processing, anyone can take advantage of the benefits.

We had a chat with Brian Peterson, currently the co-founder and VP of Engineering at Dialpad and previously a Senior Software Engineer at Google building the front end of Google Voice.

Here's what he had to say about the future of the technologies.

possible. When I think of AI, I mostly just think of automation. AI helps your product be more automated, but it’s not always specifically AI doing it. For example, most Alexa integrations aren’t using AI/machine learning to power their responses. The implication for developers is that they can’t just have settings and basic features anymore. They must build in something magical, such as automatic answers to questions and the data that goes along with it. Chatbots will be a key interface feature to make the magic happen.

ADM: What are some of the considerations/challenges from a technology ADM: Which chatbot trend standpoint? do you think will make the most impact?

Peterson: Nowadays there are so many Peterson: One reason texting has taken off with millennials is that they don’t like talking to people. Now that voice-bots have arrived, they can get what they want done even faster than texting, while still not having to speak to someone (especially a stranger), in real time. Another aspect of this is that millennials hate waiting. They expect instant communications. With the rise of AI and Voice, they can get immediate answers. Enterprises have to evolve with the new generations of customers, and by having dynamic and instant responses to their customers, they win.

ADM: What are the implications of these trends for developers?

Peterson: Enterprises are getting greedy with efficiency, as they should be. That means they want everything instantly, and they want everything as automated as

App Developer Magazine September 2017

services out there to help with all or parts of your automation efforts. Amazon, Google and Microsoft all offer cloud-based machine learning APIs. Also, you only pay for what you use, so you don’t have to invest a lot of money upfront to test your ideas. In addition, it’s extremely simple to develop for Alexa, Google Assistant and Cortana. You can leverage what they’ve already built and made accessible to everyone. You are getting transcription and natural language processing for free when your customers use your product through those devices.

ADM: What are the implications of these trends for enterprises?

Highly educated and smart employees shouldn’t be spending their time doing rudimentary tasks, but should instead be more creative and make better use of their time. Another way to think of what bots are doing is consolidating. Instead of having to use many different tools in your workflow, you can use one centralized interface to execute commands and get information.

Being able to access and control everything you need for work from anywhere is a part of this. It not only makes workers more productive, but also happier because they have more control of when they work. You can arrive at home and issue commands to Alexa to do work tasks. It’s very powerful and it doesn’t necessarily mean you work more, it means your life is more flexible. You can take my kids to an appointment in the middle of the day, come home and get the same experience you have at work to catch up if you need to. I think the future of the workplace is a bunch of start and stop segments throughout your week.

Anywhere communications and automation lets you do that.

ADM: How do you see the evolution of chatbots forming in the cloud communications industry?

Peterson: The cloud enables control from anywhere. Your work internet, mobile internet, and home internet all have the same power. This increases productivity and flexibility. Bots and the cloud mean you can get more things done because you don’t have to be using a specific system or be in a specific place to get the same work done.

Bots are the machines, and voice and text are just the ways of input for the machine.

Voice is taking off more than ever because it’s faster than text now, but text will always have a place. There are use cases for both in different situations. In public places or a quiet office, you might not want to use voice, so you will always have the choice of both. Even Alexa and Google now support both forms of bot input.

Peterson: Again, it’s all about efficiency and automation. Chat/Voice bots are just another way to get things done, but ideally with fewer steps and more accuracy, so it makes sense that enterprises would see the value. It frees up time for employees to do more important thinking and creating.

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ADM: How is the team at Dialpad currently leveraging these trends in its current and future roadmap?

Peterson: The vision for Dialpad is to be able to have access to your communication platform from any internet-connected device that will allow it. That’s why we have

Alexa integration, and that’s why we will always develop for devices that can enhance/improve your communications.

We already have support for some of these, and with our modern cloud platform, we plan on having all current and future integrations ready quickly: Computer, mobile phone, tablet, car (Android Auto, Apple Carplay), TV, smart locks, chatbot platforms like Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, etc.

We believe in both Voice and Text, which we feel is required to have real full Bot support. Users should be able to call into your support line and get instant answers without having to talk to a person. You should be able to determine what your

users’ common questions are and how happy they are from their conversations with your agents or system. We also support texting (SMS & MMS) to enable the same features you can get with voice.

The phone number is arguably the largest social network in the world. Everyone has one and everyone knows what to do when you give them a phone number and tell them they can call or text it. By supporting both voice and text, you are fully enabling your business. You don’t want to lose a customer or sale because you don’t support one or the other. We now have the ability to make the experience unified in one platform, with automation and business intelligence behind it.

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Building a viral app platform With the 1 year anniversary of Pokemon Go fresh in our minds, it's fair to wonder why more mobile games have not reached the same level of success. Many have made an initial splash but failed to maintain the momentum necessary to achieve viral status. One notable exception is Trivia Crack. Since it's release in 2013, the mobile gaming sensation has been downloaded more than 300 million times around the world. For 66 consecutive days from late 2014 to 2015, it was the most downloaded free app on the planet. Today, Trivia Crack continues to strike a chord with gamers, featuring 20 million daily active users and over 500 million daily impressions.

was using a certain type of key value store database (redis, an in-memory, single process database) that is usually just supposed to be used as a cache as our main data source. That allowed us to handle Trivia Crack's peak of 25 million daily active users.

ADM: Why do you think other games weren’t able to follow suit?

Dominguez: I think it's a matter of many factors: the right time, the right approach, the right technology and the right people to The question is, how was this handle the pressure. Sometimes it’s the accomplished? We sat down with Etermax fear of a lack of quality or outcry from engineer Martin Dominguez to discuss how disappointed users. I've seen a couple of Trivia Crack managed to defy the odds and games delayed for six months when build a platform that can accommodate a something went wrong in terms of viral explosion. scalability. We knew that we needed to get over that mental aspect in order to succeed. And a bit of luck, of course, always helps!

ADM: What separated

Trivia Crack from the mobile gaming pack? How ADM: What did you learn were you able to go viral from the Pokemon Go in a notoriously explosion? competitive field?

Dominguez: From the start, we visualized a more collaborative gaming experience.

We knew that we needed to differentiate ourselves from the rest, and so we gave our users the capacity to create and manage the game's content. We think that was the main feature that allowed us to go viral.

Dominguez: We saw a lot of similarities with Pokemon Go and how everyone around us was suddenly talking about Trivia Crack. It gave us a better understanding of how people wanted to use Augmented Reality (we actually made a couple of prototypes with AR in mind in one of our hackathons). I think everyone in the industry took a closer look at the technology after the Pokemon Go explosion.

ADM: How did you build a platform that could handle ADM: How has Trivia going viral?

Crack evolved over the past 5 years?

Dominguez: We took a few bold steps in terms of infrastructure. Our main success

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Dominguez: We have included many new features. The ability to collect character

cards for power ups, play tournaments with more than one friend, etc. All of these have helped improve user retention as the game has expanded.

ADM: Tell me about the team behind Trivia Crack.

Dominguez: The team is composed of many expert developers in different platforms (iOS, Android, Java). We also have a strong content curation team to help our users on content cataloguing.

They work side by side with our Product Owners in order to give the best experience to our users.

Martin Dominguez, Engineer, Etermax

ADM: What new developments are on deck for Trivia Crack?

Dominguez: We are going to release several new features, but real time is something we’re looking to develop in the long run to provide a new and improved experience to the gameplay. We also have a couple more games in the pipeline that will be released soon.

ADM: What advice do you have for young engineers?

Dominguez: That’s a great question! The most useful advice that I can give young problem solvers is to focus on the impact that you want your product to have and understand that even your best technological effort may not result in a hit.

You need to be surrounded by a team that understands the market and supports your commitment to technological advancement.

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Make better apps to get enterprise users engaged

BY NATALIE LAMBERT

Think about all the big (and little) moments that can make or break your business. Like when managers are prioritizing their spending for the coming year. Or when sales reps are pitching to your biggest client. These moments of engagement are the vital times when employees need instant access to insights that will help them make smarter decisions and perform at the top of their game.

As you make the transition from systems of record - the back-end systems you rely on to run your business - to systems of engagement (SOE) - systems used directly by employees for things like communication or collaboration, these are the moments you need to focus on.

Back in 2013, market intelligence firm IDC predicted that more than 65 percent of infrastructure investments in today’s organizations would target systems of engagement rather than maintaining existing systems of record. Yet many business leaders still struggle with how to go about it.

The key, says one writer, is to separate what you have from what you need without ripping out what you have.

What most organizations have is a patchwork system of old and new technology, cobbled together with improvised solutions. Departmental systems work in isolation, data remains siloed, and business processes are cumbersome - especially those spanning multiple departments.

Since systems of engagement must coordinate with existing enterprise systems, the best place to start is by identifying areas where current systems or processes are inhibiting business growth.

Here are some examples to help you get started:

Hard-to-use Systems

App Developer Magazine September 2017

right person at the right time.

We all know employees have a habit of rejecting enterprise software if they find the user experience intolerable. It’s not just on-the-ground laborers, either. Three in Unnecessary Workflow four managers will turn their backs on a hard-to-use system - and as many as one Complexities in three will even quit their jobs over it.

So, find out which systems employees don’t use. And find out why. The goal isn’t to get rid of these systems, it’s to make them more useful by layering on a simpler application that bypasses the clunky interface and gives employees a fast and easy way to get what they need.

Nine in 10 employees agree that simplified enterprise apps would increase efficiency and productivity while also reducing the pain points they struggle with every day.

Inefficient Processes As many as seven in 10 enterprise opportunities are directly related to deficiencies in business processes, and business leaders name dysfunctional processes as one of the top five obstacles to achieving organizational agility.

One key step in moving toward a system of engagement is to pinpoint slow-moving processes that are impeding business growth. Factors that can put the brakes on businesses processes include: - Handoffs between departments, which add ramp-up and ramp-down time, introduce errors and increase the risk of items slipping through cracks - Approvals and sign-offs - especially when the approver is consistently unavailable at the time approval is needed - Manual re-keying of data that has already been captured somewhere else The right system of engagement can help speed up slow-moving processes. For instance, instead of relying on employees to forward documents by email for approval, a system of engagement can automatically send the information to the

Antiquated legacy systems often impose complicated processes on employees, but they’re not the only culprits. As businesses grow, their workflows naturally become more complex.

Left unaddressed, these workflows can grow to monstrous proportions, hampering productivity and stifling profits. Signs of overly complex or dysfunctional workflows include relying too heavily on email, overusing spreadsheets to track work, requiring too much paper documentation, and using different processes to achieve the same task.

Take time to identify the most complicated workflows within your organization. Look at ways to simplify, automate, and break them down into smaller steps.

Multi-system Headaches The business world is overloaded with apps. The average enterprise uses nearly 500 applications, while employees log into more than 25 apps a month.

It all gets to be too much for employees to manage, especially when they have to slog through business processes that require logging into multiple systems. Sixty-five percent admit they delay completing tasks when they must pull from multiple systems.

Processes that involve multiple systems of record also affect the bottom line, as they tend to be rigid and unable to respond to analytics insights or changing business requirements. To become flexible again, businesses need to build bridges between systems to unite each business process within a single, easy-to-use interface.

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Data That’s Getting Ignored Enterprise leaders agree that data-driven decision making is vital to long-term success. Yet more than three in five employees confess they sometimes ignore

data when making decisions. Often it’s because digging up the information takes too long, or employees rely on others to help them access enterprise data and gain the insights they need.

If you want to capitalize on your biggest resource - data - you need to determine which data is being ignored within your organization. Then you can find ways to

draw it out and put it in front of the right employees at the right time to encourage smarter, data-driven decisions.

By identifying these key factors that can impede organizational growth, you can develop a system of engagement that truly addresses your employees’ needs - and helps propel your business toward its goals.

Natalie Lambert is the Vice President of Marketing at Sapho.

Previously, she was at Citrix where she held multiple product marketing leadership positions and was most recently responsible for the company’s multi-product solutions, thought leadership efforts, and positioning of Citrix as a leader in digital workplace technologies.

Prior to Citrix, Natalie spent seven years at Forrester Research, where she was the leading expert on end user computing. In that role, she advised clients on technology investments and best practices surrounding the enterprise computing environment. Natalie has been widely quoted in the press, including outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and has written for Wired, Forbes and CIO.com.

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A poor tester blames his tools We've all heard that an artist is only as good as his tools. But does that ring true for app testing? The shear number of application testing products may seem overwhelming at first, but finding the most efficient environment for your app can be the difference between success and failure.

Asaf Saar is the Director of Product Management at Sauce Labs, a company that develops automated testing solutions for mobile and web. We recently had a discussion with Asaf about the importance of app testing within the correct environment.

ADM: Which came first: emulators, simulators or real devices?

Saar: Our initial offering in 2008 was a cloud-based Selenium grid for automated cross-browser testing across browsers on Windows and Mac OS. Interest in mobile had reached a fever pitch by 2012, so we focused our attention there and released our first Android emulators so that developers could perform automated testing at scale. Then, with the release of Appium in late 2012, developers had access to technology to easily automate mobile testing for native and hybrid apps.

Sauce was quick to adopt Appium and provided support in early 2013. Today, we offer over 150 Android emulators and iOS simulators on our cloud along with over 1000 physical devices.

Emulators and simulators were developed

by Google and Apple so that developers could easily test apps on their respective platforms. Before emulators and simulators were available, developers could only test on the actual phones they had in their possession - so it was difficult/impossible to scale testing.

ADM: Can you provide a brief description of each?

Saar: An emulator is designed to take the place of a physical mobile device and duplicates every aspect of the original device’s hardware and software behavior.

While a simulator sets up a similar safe environment to the original real-life device’s OS, it doesn’t attempt to simulate the real device’s hardware. So what you will see is the OS and the interface of the device you want to use, but you won’t experience all the problems the hardware might cause.

Some apps may run a little differently, which is why final testing on real iOS devices is so important.

ADM: When did Sauce first identify the need for a healthy mix of all environments?

Saar: With emulators and simulators you can’t test hardware specifics like a camera, memory or SMS. You ultimately need to test on real devices at the end of your test cycle to ensure optimal performance.

Asaf Saar is the Director of Product Management at Sauce Labs

ADM: How are your competitors approaching these environments? Are they prioritizing one method above all others?

Saar: No, most are just focusing on real devices - but they are more expensive.

ADM: What is the purpose of each - emulators, simulators and real devices - and in what scenario does each best perform?

Saar: Emulators and simulators are best when you need massive concurrency, as you can spin up an unlimited amount of virtual instances. They also allow you to reduce build times as they are immediately available. And, of course, they are much cheaper and allow you to save costs.

Real devices are best when you need a variety of device types for panel, display and compatibility testing purposes. They also allow you to replicate an issue to match exact model as reported by your users. You have no choice but test on real devices if you need to test hardware dependencies like CPU, memory, display, GPS and carrier network-based testing like real phone calls and text messages

ADM: Why are they needed to achieve automated and continuous testing?

Saar: They each fit a different scenario and are useful at a different points in the development process. A mix of all three is the only possible way to achieve automated and continuous testing that is both effective and cost sensitive.

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AI will create more jobs than it takes

BY JAMES RAMEY

It is safe to say AI-powered terminators will not be taking over the world anytime soon.

But the idea of AI automating jobs and taking them away from Americans has been the talk of the town. AI, known as artificial intelligence, has had increased use amongst large companies with its intelligent technology ranging though many industries. Instead of consumers focusing on the negative "what ifs," the spotlight should be moved to how much AI has reinforced large companies in the customer care department. Because of this, AI may actually create more jobs in the U.S. instead of taking away jobs.

As mentioned earlier, AI has carved a path across many industries today. The incorporation of AI to complete tasks humans would usually complete has moved companies forward. Within the customer care industry, AI has been used to create advanced customer systems such as chatbots. These bots can be interacted with by customers either through the web, mobile apps, or over the phone.

Customers want positive customer service experiences, and today, AI is helping companies give that to their customers.

Because AI can automate general customer care interactions, customers can have their problems resolved through the bot, leaving live agents to be able to speak

App Developer Magazine September 2017

with customers with more complex and specific problems. AI and live agents are becoming the power couple of the customer care industry.

A recent article from Harvard Business Review revealed how subjects of several studies felt on the topic of AI on automation and jobs. Some participants believed that 47% of jobs will fall under automation by the year 2033. Others concluded there will be a small job loss of 4% by 2020. The article declares however, that the idea of AI taking over the majority of jobs is over exaggerated since today AI is mostly used by companies for digital system purposes in customer care departments.

creating a demand for live tech-savvy customer care agents. There seems to be a new smartphone, laptop, or social app being introduced to consumers every few months, which means an increase in troubleshooting issues and complex inquiries with these technologies.

Though it seems like a separation is being made, AI taking care of tier-one positions and live agents in tier-two, AI and live humans can help each other during customer interactions to create positive customer experiences. Because AI is a machine learning technology, live agents can use AI to access support materials to answer customer inquiries. A smarter AI benefits live agents in assisting customers and resolving inquiries in a short amount of time.

This leads to discuss "tier-one" positions often found offshore. If wondering what tier-one positions are, it's the first customer Because AI technologies are constantly service agents contacted for questions on expanding, the demand for the workforce a product or service. Because AI to become tech-savvy is increasing. This technology is rapidly creating opportunities means more IT positions or other tech-related openings need to be filled for in customer care, such as online chatbots companies to keep up with tech-related and downloadable self-help materials, inquiries. However, this doesn't put a customers can resolve their own general barrier between tech industries and other questions. This decrease in tier-one live unrelated industries. AI is benefiting agents leaves an opportunity for customer-care systems across all companies to expand and reinvest in industries. This gives the potential of positions for "tier-two" agents. creating numerous U.S.-based jobs for people who have reasonable to advanced Tier-one takes care of general inquires, knowledge in AI technologies for customer thus tier-two takes care of more refined assistance. and sophisticated customer questions.

Technology's quick advancement is

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The HBO hack is the latest in a string of high-profile hacks over the last two years (Dropbox, Yahoo!, UK Ministry of Health) where a handful of vulnerable servers were compromised and used to take down and steal information. Studies have shown the next year represent a turning point in the digitization of enterprise content. A recent Forrester study commissioned by Alfresco found the number of firms with virtually all digital content will shift from 14 percent today, to 50 percent in just two years. One of the biggest concerns those firms will face is scattered content and the security risk it poses.

Whether it’s content saved on Dropbox or locally on employee computers, many companies have already resigned themselves to the fact that their ecosystems will be penetrated at some point in time. But for most of them, their top priority will be to minimize the exposure and limit the surface area vulnerable to attack. There are three questions every company should be able to answer: Can we effectively inventory our most vital/precious/sensitive information? Can we effectively secure it? And, do we have consistent protocols that are followed and policies updated in place to ensure effective governance/data lifecycle management of these assets? The importance of being able to answer these questions easily will only continue to increase as the level of diligence on the part of the Black Hat community continues to grow.

Ankur Laroia serves as the leader of Solutions Strategy at Alfresco, a suite of digital information management systems.

We sat down with him to learn more about how Alfresco is keeping businesses safe.

ADM: Explain Alfresco’s digital business platform and how it pertains to security hacks such as HBO's.

Laroia: Alfresco’s digital business platform provides an open, transparent, scalable foundation that enables enterprises large and small to inventory, curate, secure and manage their most vital asset - information and intellectual property.

ADM: How has the latest HBO hack served to shine a spotlight on data security?

Laroia: The HBO hack underscores the inevitable proliferation of digital data and when left ungoverned - the exposure sustained by enterprises. Studies have shown the next year represent a turning point in the digitization of enterprise content. In fact, Alfresco recently commissioned a Forrester study that found the number of firms with virtually all digital content will shift from 14 percent today, to 50 percent in just two years. The same Forrester report showed that 67 percent of end users have to reference external content every time they onboard new customers or partners, address customer service requests, or manage financial or accounting processes. Scattered content, whether it’s saved in Dropbox vs. on-premises or some other non-integrated solution, poses a major security risk.

ADM: Do the ways companies protect their data change if they have employees working all around the world?

Laroia: We live in a global economy and the threats are both exponential and global.

With the advent of outsourcing and offshoring, data theft/data compromise are existing risks that organizations must mitigate against. The challenges they face relate to the increasing amount of data (the 3Vs - Volume, Variety and Velocity) that proliferate across systems across the globe. Companies must adopt good information management practices along with modern technologies and platforms to effectively thwart bad actors.

ADM: While this was "just" an entertainment hack, are you aware of other industries, such Ankur Laroia, leader of Solutions as insurance, accounting Strategy, Alfresco and medical, being ADM: Are data breaches proactive in preventing the “new normal” for the same from companies? happening? And if not, what would be holding Laroia: Data breaches will happen; most or CISOs have resigned themselves them back from doing so? CSOs to the fact that their ecosystems will be Laroia: The theft and or compromising of vital information is becoming a fairly common phenomenon. This tends to be a two pronged issue, there are threats from outside the company and there are also rogue actors lurking within the organization’s firewalls. Companies that store PII (personally identifiable information) such as financial institutions as well as those that deal with patient data (hospitals, labs, health insurance companies) find themselves especially susceptible to attacks. Most have hardened their perimeter and put in infrastructure centric measures to thwart hackers from the outside, to date, little has been done to effectively inventory, secure, manage and dispose of data/information in the enterprise.

penetrated at some point in time. The offset is to minimize the exposure and limit the surface area vulnerable to attack.

ADM: Are hackers getting more sophisticated? Or are companies just not keeping up with cybersecurity?

Laroia: There are nation-states that have “elite: militarized hacking units that constantly look for vulnerabilities in closed, black box software - where the code is available for perhaps a few divisions of developers to review. The hacking methodologies as well as techniques and tooling are growing ever more complex

ADM: What are the three questions any company should be able to answer about its data security?

Laroia: Can we effectively inventory our most vital/precious/sensitive information?

Can we effectively secure it?

Do we have consistent protocols that are followed and policies updated in place to ensure effective governance/data lifecycle management of these assets?

ADM: What are the biggest issue companies will have to watch out for on the security front over the next year?

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Laroia: We will see hacks more like the ones we’ve seen this year and last year (Dropbox, Yahoo, HBO, UK Ministry of Health) where a handful of vulnerable servers are compromised and then used to take down and steal information. These attacks are well planned, well orchestrated and impeccably executed. That level of diligence on the part of the black hat community will only continue to grow.

ADM: Where do you see the technology in 3-5 years in regard to preventing security breaches?

Laroia: I predict that there will be a greater emphasis on business processes/protocols that help govern information through its lifecycle coupled with investment in modern platforms such as Alfresco’s to

inventory, curate, secure and manage information through its lifecycle.

About Ankur Laroia Ankur Laroia serves as Leader - Solutions Strategy at Alfresco, where he leads, guides and directs the application of the latest Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Orchestration technologies and frameworks with respect to developing transformative strategies and models that support the use of computational technology to gain competitive efficiencies and achieve successful business outcomes. Mr. Laroia is a recognized thought leader and expert in the disciplines of business transformation and information technology (IT) strategy. Ankur has advised many of the Global 2000 with regards to Enterprise Information & Content Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Enterprise Application Integration strategies and business architectures.

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How app developers can avoid costly IP mistakes

BY CHINH PHAM

In the early stages of product development, app developers often pour time and resources into building a viable business, development, and marketing. And while most app developers certainly take intellectual property (IP) protection into consideration, the unfortunate reality is that many underestimate just how integral a strong IP strategy is to commercial success and revenue. When app developers (or app development companies) fail to adequately protect their IP, the repercussions can be severe. In order to safeguard their IP, app developers would do well to consider the following dos and don’ts.

Do Avoid Public Disclosure of Inventive Concept Any disclosure of your inventive concept or innovation to the public is dangerous territory for an app developer. Even if unintentional, any disclosure of this nature can delay or even end the patent granting process. To avoid inadvertently disclosing your innovation to the public, app developers should be careful to avoid the following missteps.

Conducting Research & Development in the Open With the growth of co-working spaces, doing any kind of research and development (R&D) in the open is unwise, and therefore should be avoided., Many developers are unaware that conducting R&D in the open (in their office at a co-working space, for example) is technically considered a public disclosure and can foreclose patent protection in most countries. While the United States does allow a one-year grace period for filing for patent protection, it is still a best practice to

avoid any type of public R&D.

app developer should become familiar with the different protections offered by different IP options. In general, IP can be categorized as one of the following:

Discussing Plans for Future Innovations Even after an app developer has filed a patent application, it is critical for her to limit any presentations or discussions to strictly the subject matter that exists in the filed patent application. For example, if an app developer is giving an interactive presentation and enters into an unintended brainstorming discussion with another party, it is possible that the discussions may result in an invented concept not previously in the patent application being discussed. In this situation, the inventive concept has now been publicly disclosed, and the other party becomes a co-inventor of the new inventive concept. App developers can avoid this undesired outcome by simply choosing not to partake in discussions about future innovations.

Unveiling Your Innovation Too Early This one may seem obvious, but in reality, is difficult for many innovators to remember. There exist several scenarios in which an app developer is at risk of unveiling his innovation too early fundraising meetings with potential investors who refuse to sign an NDA is a common one. In order to best protect his IP, any app developer should make certain that his innovation is filed with the USPTO as soon as possible, preferably before the meeting.

Don’t Confuse Which IP Is Necessary for Your Intangible Assets Before pursuing any kind of IP strategy, an

- Patent protects the idea.

- Copyright protects the expression of the idea and requires the memorialization of the idea on a tangible medium.

- Trademark protects the logo or the name and acts as an identifier of the source of the product or services associated with the logo or name.

- Trade Secret protects anything confidential or proprietary.

When considering intangible assets, app developers need to understand what it is they are looking to protect, and then decide which IP regime to implement. If the goal is to protect an inventive concept, a decision to either pursue a patent strategy or pursue trade secret protection must be considered.

Every type of IP is different, and incorrectly pursuing the wrong IP to protect your asset can place your product at risk. It is a best practice to seek the advice of an IP attorney.

Do Make Sure Domain Name and Trademark Are Available To ensure the best use of time, effort, and marketing dollars in branding the product, app developers should immediately ensure that the domain name is available before considering a trademark. Domain name and trademark are two separate entities, so it is important for app developers to consider both. Without a domain name, having a trademark that users cannot easily associate with your product can act as a detriment.

It is also integral to perform a clearance study to ensure that your trademark is available before spending resources in a branding campaign. It would be unfortunate - and, more importantly, costly - if you were to find out late in the process that a competitor had the same trademark for a similar app.

He brings with him over 11 years of experience. Prior to Flock, he has worked for different business units at Directi and Cleartrip. At Flock, he previously led development on the iOS app. He has played a pivotal role in launching FlockOS, and currently spearheads all initiatives to strengthen developer relations.

He is an engineering graduate from the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. When not writing code, Chaitanya likes to spend time with his family, enjoy the outdoors and study astronomy.

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When Taylor Swift crashes servers Whether it be a new pop star album, release of a new season of a TV show, or a "fight of the century" style hyped up fight, we never quite think about what it takes in technological infrastructure to make all of the magic happen. In particular, with the release of Taylor Swift's latest song, "Look what you made me do," a similar situation arose which had many scrambling to keep up with the traffic.

Here's what Michelle McLean, Vice President of Marketing, ScaleArc, had to say about the matter.

ADM: Taylor Swift just released a new single “Look what you made me do”, have you heard it?

ADM: What qualifies as a “high demand” or “surge” event on a server to you?

McLean: Any event that even doubles traffic can be really difficult for sites to handle. Companies try to run their systems at about 50% of capacity so they can handle a doubling of load, but many systems will go down running at 90% capacity. Consider that Black Friday events trigger 15x to 20x increases in traffic over that single day, and you can see how it can be really hard to scale capacity quickly enough.

McLean: Load balancing at the database tier is analogous to load balancing at the web tier - the software provides an abstraction layer that breaks the dependence of apps on the database. You connect apps to the database load balancing layer instead of directly to the database and now your app is free from having to be coded to talk specifically to that database. The load balancing software shields applications from any changes at the database tier, so developers don’t have to recode for scale out or failover, improving application uptime and performance with no code changes.

ADM: The requirements to provide high server availability when online Michelle McLean, Vice President of Marketing, ScaleArc McLean: I was surrounded by 5 “surge” events occur is “tweenage” girls this weekend, so yes, I important, how do heard it!

ADM: So what happens companies deal with it? when something fails and ADM: Have you heard any McLean: Companies need to scale across ScaleArc kicks into reports of servers or all layers of the technology stack, including action? storage, network, database, website, and databases failing while applications. In many of those areas, the masses try to get the scaling isn’t too tough - the layers are McLean: When you have ScaleArc in new single? What about in separate enough from each other and can between apps and databases, the software scale independently. Apps and databases, times gone by with similar though, have a special relationship - if you is instantly aware when a database is failing over. The ScaleArc software takes in all the scale the database, the app can’t use the online events? queries for the database. When those McLean: Many media reports cited social media sites “blowing up” with traffic as her fans rushed to hear the song. And we’ve certainly seen meltdowns before. This same weekend, we saw the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight delayed because of challenges with the Pay-per View system. And ESPN’s site melted down during the opening of the NFL season as Fantasy Football players rushed the site. Similarly, HBO’s servers failed during the first show of the current season of “Game of Thrones.”

App Developer Magazine September 2017

new capacity unless you recode the app.

For Black Friday, some companies make 40% of their revenue in just a couple days, so investing in that recoding for Black Friday sizing makes sense - you’ll more than make back revenue that justifies the additional spend. But for other organizations, the payout can be harder to quantify, making the investment harder to justify.

ADM: What exactly is load balancing as ScaleArc sees it?

queries are reads, the ScaleArc software sends the reads on to the unaffected secondary servers, so that traffic gets served right away. When the queries are writes, ScaleArc holds those queries in its queue, waiting to see that the new primary is ready to take over. Then ScaleArc drains its queue, and traffic flows into the new primary. Users see delay during this process, but without ScaleArc, the applications would have failed or hung or errored out - much more disruptive than a delay.

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ADM: How do developers take advantage of load balancing in apps that require remote database connections?

operations, when some database resources might be remote from the application. ScaleArc handles the intelligent “routing” of database queries on behalf of the apps, reducing the coding burden.

About Michelle McLean McLean: When developers have load balancing software in the mix, they avoid a bunch of development work. They just design the application to request the info it needs - they don’t have to program database logic into the application at all.

They can rely on the load balancing software to manage connections into the database, reducing the load on servers and improving performance. Developers can also avoid programming for active/active

App Developer Magazine September 2017

As Vice President of Marketing, Michelle is responsible for overseeing all of ScaleArc’s marketing strategy and initiatives. She has more than 20 years of networking and market positioning experience. Prior to

ScaleArc, she held director of product marketing positions at Silver Spring Networks, ConSentry Networks, Peribit Networks, and Trapeze Networks, and prior to that, she was director of strategic marketing at Pluris. She previously served as program director at the research firm META Group, providing technology and strategy direction to global 2000 enterprise clients. Before that, she tracked technical developments, networking trends, and vendor strategies as a journalist for two leading networking publications, LAN Times and LAN Magazine. Michelle earned her BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Build a mobile API ecosystem that is high performing and reliable

BY SHLOMI GIAN

Application Program Interfaces (API's) represent an effective way to build and manage mobile services. By using API's - a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications - application developers no longer have to buy technology software or hardware. Instead, they can simply plug into a growing open ecosystem of API-driven services. It is simple to integrate, and saves time and money for new developers.

There are countless mobile API-based services. From authentication, ads and payment API's to price comparison and reporting API based services. The availability of these API's made mobile app development much simpler, but this simplicity comes with a price.

Unlike images, game assets, videos and other type of static content, API's are dynamic in nature and their content cannot be cached at the edge of the internet to increase download speed. Often times the result of an API call is customized per user profile, its location and the activity he/she is trying to accomplish. A user searching for a Mexican restaurant in downtown San Francisco will get a unique (non cacheable) search result.

There are three main challenges with existing API configurations that directly impact any mobile app performance: 1.) Response Time - Since API responses are usually personalized, its content cannot be cached by the CDN. Some of the responses could be sizeable and include dozens of images that will have to be downloaded on a slow mobile connection.

This impacts the API response time and eventually the mobile app.

2.) Reliability - Mobile networks are less reliable than wired networks with Packet

App Developer Magazine September 2017

Loss and error rates that are 10-20 times higher. This affects not only the app API response time but most importantly its failure rates. Mobile developers have to factor into their code fail conditions and a proper way to handle each one of them, which can complicate things.

importantly, none of these techniques can be technically integrated with 3rd party APIs, unless the vendor operating the service is cooperating.

How can PacketZoom help?

3.) Server Load - There are two sources for high server load: (A) Failed transactions due to network error will usually follow by API call retry, keeping the server busier - PacketZoom Mobile Expresslane than it should be; and (B) API calls over operates on the last mobile mile which slow connections means that the server contributes to 70% of the latency and over has to keep connections open longer, 90% of the network errors. consuming more resources than needed.

- PacketZoom avoids TCP slow start since it leverages big data of network profiles.

- PacketZoom keeps the connection alive even after the mobile client loses its IP How could mobile address. This saves the developer the developers mitigate the need to catch the exception, analyze it and re-call the API. risk when using APIs? - When a disconnect takes place during an API call, PacketZoom resumes the request. Instead of making the backend While caching is not possible, one could server do the work again, you can just pick accelerate an API call using a few up where it left off. techniques: - PacketZoom saves developers the need to retry an API call and reduces server load - Protocol Optimization. By avoiding slow (i.e fewer failed API calls). starts, backoffs and other TCP hiccups, - Per Apple guidance most APIs are now downloading a sizeable API response could secured (using TLS) which adds two extra become faster. Traditional CDNs offer such round trips to establish a connection. Since an optimization in the middle mile for a PacketZoom proxy makes all the requests premium price. from a single source it uses connection pool more efficiently while avoiding - Routing Optimization. Speeding up performance overhead. access to the origin server API can be - Some API responses (such as "deal of achieved through better routing of the the day") could be cached for a limited time request/response in the first and middle so app developers add an extra miles. Traditional CDNs can offer this for a geo-caching layer to support this. premium price.

PacketZoom already provides this functionality and all app developers should - Persistent Connections. To avoid the do is to configure the caching rules in the "TCP handshake" overhead one could response according to the standard HTTP keep the connection open/warm and save specs. a few round trips for each new request.

This technique should be used carefully since overusing it will once again increase server load.

Unfortunately, since all the above techniques take place in a wired network (as opposed to the wireless link) the performance impact is marginally low while the cost (to various vendors) is not. Most

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Field Test Result The data below was collected from devices installed in dozens of cars in Asia for a few days. Each device was executing hundreds of API calls per hour with two different protocols (TCP and PacketZoom).

We measured two KPIs: 1.) API response time 2.) Error rate As you can see when using the PacketZoom protocol the API was almost twice as fast to respond and three times more reliable (i.e. over 75% fewer errors)

Shlomi serves as PacketZoom Chief Executive Officer since June 2016. Mr. Gian has 20 years of experience in the technology space with 12 of them heavily focused on mobile measurement and performance solutions. Shlomi joined PacketZoom after spending four years at Akamai where he co-founded the Emerging Mobile Business Unit and served as the Head of Mobile Market Development. Prior to Akamai, he served as the General Manager of Mobile Solutions at Cotendo, General Manager of Mobile services at Keynote Systems and General Manager of DeviceAnywhere. Mr. Gian holds an B.S. degree in Computer Science from Tel Aviv Academic College and MBA degree from the University of San Francisco.

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