Monday, July 26, 2010

"There's a crAPP for that." Mob4Hire blogs about Big Brands on MRWEB.COM

Hi There:

Just wanted to let you know about my article for MRWEB.COM that was posted a couple days ago. "How to make a Big Brand App Not Suck." Truthfully, I was torn between that as a title and "There's a crAPP for that," so I used the latter for this post. :)

This was my second article for MRWEB (I wrote "Fear the One Star" back in November), and this time, I extend the concept and explore how Big Brands can approach the mobile marketplace with engagement and stickiness. With 400,000 apps globally in 75 different app stores, it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd.

I use a bit of the research in the new market research survey that we've got coming out within a week or so to help describe the app marketplace. I also reach into our experience here at Mob4Hire helping Big Brands bring apps to market and become as successful as possible as soon as possible. The article also includes a comparison of the New York Times Crossword puzzle app and Burger King's Valentines "Catch a Heart" app.
Smartphone users are savvy, brutally honest and have the attention span of a two year old. If it looks like crAPP, and it smells like crAPP, it’s crAPP.
Would love to hear your feedback ... post comments here or on MRWEB.

Thanks. Hope your summer is going great!

Stephen King, CEO
Mob4Hire Inc.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Mob4Hire CTO, John Carpenter, to present "The Power of the Crowd" at Starwest in San Diego

This year's STARWEST "Software Testing, Analysis and Review" conference is taking place in San Diego on Sept 26 to Oct 1, 2010 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront. The greatest software testing conference on Earth, STARWEST is a gathering place for software testers, developers, and managers to interact and learn how to improve software-testing practices.

Mob4Hire CTO, John Carpenter, has been selected to speak on the topic of crowd-source testing. With an engineering degree in Geomatics and spatial programming, John has incorporated mapping and LBS technologies into mobile applications and games since 1999. John has many years of first-hand experience on the difficulties and expense of mobile application and cloud testing. He is a noted mobile technology evangelist and speaker.

John's topic is: "The Power of the Crowd: Mobile Testing for Scale and Global Coverage"

John's MUST-SEE presentation is on Thursday, September 30th at 9:45 in the "Embedded & Mobile Testing" track T5.

Register for STARWEST before July 30th, and get $400 super early bird discount off the price of the conference! Click here for Conference Brochure. Click here for the website: http://www.sqe.com/STARWEST/

Here's the topic description ... hope to see you there!


The Power of the Crowd: Mobile Testing for Scale and Global Coverage

Crowdsourced testing of mobile applications, a middle ground between in-house and outsourced testing, has many advantages: scale, speed, coverage, lower capital costs, reduced staffing costs, and no long-term commitments. However, crowdsourced testing of any application—mobile or not—should augment your professional testing resources, not replace them. Most importantly, crowdsourced testing has to be done well or it’s a waste of time and money. John Carpenter reviews the applications and ways he’s outsourced testing to the crowd. Focusing on adopting crowdsourcing for both functional and usability testing in mobile applications, John describes scenarios in which you can leverage the crowd to lower costs and increase product quality, including scaling the application to large populations of global users. John also reviews scenarios in which crowdsourcing can add unnecessary time and cost to a project and ways to avoid those pitfalls. Learn about the power of the crowd and when to use it to propel your testing project forward.