Is it Time to Develop for Google Glass?

We know what you are thinking: Oh don’t say this, you can’t be serious! We just got our heads around mobile and put out a few decent enterprise apps that people actually use… no, no no no no no! Not listening to this … la la la la la… Great weather we’re having!!! What??? Yes I enjoyed Anchorman very much, you??? 
OK… maybe that’s not EXACTLY what you’re thinking, but likely it’s close. It’s OK to admit it. And here is the “good” news … the answer to the blog post question is…
Maybe.
Glass is going to be – and please pardon this clear non-word – “nicheier” than you may imagine. The purposes behind why people will want to wear and use Glass will be more specific than say that of the smartphone, and the apps created on top of this wearable platform will be significantly more niche than that for the current mobile device. 
Let’s start with the super obvious groups that need to be developing on Glass now. If your industry is entertainment, music streaming, social, media, fitness, sporting goods/apparel/equipment – and there are others – then yes; you should already be experimenting with creating new user experiences on Glass. Just as mobile changed the game the world over, Glass (and the larger umbrella of wearable technologies) is set to do it all over again.
Let’s talk about a potential example: If you are say, Pandora, isn’t it just patently obvious that you are going to want to lead in your category and bring new user experiences to a platform like ‘Glass’? Currently, many times when you are using Pandora, the phone is either in your pocket, strapped to your arm band during a run, in your hand but you are texting someone anyway, on your dash as the tunes stream through your audio system, or inside on the counter as you sit next to the bluetooth speaker out on your deck. But what should Pandora do, strategically, when all of the sudden the application has the opportunity to be the center of attention? And not just the audio content but the visual content as well. Should Pandora just recreate the current mobile experience, delivering solid band bios and such? Absolutely not. Likely, they will re-invent how user’s experience Pandora through ‘Glass’, add services, add smart visually-based content, re-think how audio can interact with visual in compelling ways, and by doing all of this… convert more users to a premium subscription OR push more effective advertising to the end-user. Either path makes Pandora more money. No path will be presented if they fail to innovate.
But what about the not so obvious? What types of industries are we talking about here? Let’s start from the macro and say; any industry where your organization has people “out in the field” will likely need to develop on Google Glass. Electricians, surgeons, police officers, masons, foremans, military, welders, agriculture, auto, service providers – any industry where your people will gain productivity or safety because both hands are always free, will be an industry that will be developing on glass. We understand, a surgeon isn’t tweeting during surgery – she waits until post-op like the rest of us! – but what if the surgeon never had to reach for her mobile to receive an emergency message or look down at a patient’s chart as a trauma case entered her OR? Then, there is the very real promise that a surgeon could perform even more accurately while actively wearing and engaging a glass app during surgery. What if ‘glass’ could make her even better? Think this is far fetched? Meet Dr. Rafael Grossmann and read this Forbes.com article, then tell me how far-fetched this is.
In the same exact way that the best mobile applications are true new experiences that eloquently use the sensors and services mobile can provide; the best Google Glass applications will do the same. Just as porting your website to the mobile device made for a really crummy, and worse, mainly non-useful mobile experience, porting your mobile app to ‘Glass’ will create most often, an all too familiar poor experience. In short, it’s time to innovate again. 

Related Read: Why Your Mobile User Experience  Must Be a “Useful” Experience

The content in this post will sound “old” faster than you likely envision. Is it time for you to develop for Google Glass? The answer is, at the very least; maybe.

Ignite Your Front End of Innovation

In a very recent post on the TopCoder Blog, we discussed what you should really be after in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. In your front end of digital innovation – spanning ideation, concept designs, UI/UX experimentation all the way through prototyping – you should be after one thing, vision. You want an incredible variety of new ways to create value for your end users. When you utilizeOpen Innovation and Crowdsourcing to develop mobile applications, you receive scores of submissions throughout your front end, affording you more looks, created by people outside your four walls, that can help you bring new user experiences to market. As Lady Gaga has shown us, when you change the user experience, you win the game. 

Sprinting to Prototype

Receiving dozens of quality submissions at every phase of  your front end of digital innovation is one huge benefit to utilizing Crowdsourcing to create mobile apps. But if it occurs at a snail’s pace, it is all for naught. However, when you marry the variety of looks and feels you will receive with a sincere acceleration of the innovation and production timeline, the decision to leverage Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation becomes that much smarter and more powerful. How fast? From idea contests through prototypes in a matter of 4 – 8 weeks depending on the complexity of the app.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Besides the obvious advantages of getting an app. to market faster, there is a more subtle layer and that deals with the incredible amount of ways in which you can choose to bring a mobile app to life. For instance, for a Global 50 client of TopCoder’s – sorry we cannot share the name of the client – we recently completed a complex iPad sales and marketing application that is loaded with 382 articles, PDFs, videos and instructional/sales content. The app was developed in Xcode and the CMS was custom designed utilizing Python/Django. The client’s ability to pivot on demand, to the languages that best fit the build allows for an innovative liquidity that only an open innovation, community-created model can provide. This offers you the hyperspecialized talent you need, working on the atomized portion of the build, exactly when you need them. That is digital innovation on-demand. 

Understand Atomization and Why it Matters to Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation(Page 3 of the Archived Webinars)

 

Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3,000

When it comes time to test your mobile or tablet application, Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation offer a superior alternative and this one is simply a volume play. In a development community like TopCoder, you have specialists who are really good at the art of “nit-picking”, so we craft contests specifically honed to their penchant for perfection. By attracting dozens and even hundreds of participants to mobile app testing and bug “hunting”, you receive a massively parallel effort that helps you more quickly, and more thoroughly test your app. 

Related Read: Hunting Bugs and the Power of Cognitive Surplus

Version 2.0 (It’s About Documentation)

Documentation? I thought we were talking about Open Innovation!?? We are and amazing documentation of how your first build was crafted is a key to successfully creating updates. A wonderful consequence of crowdsourced competitions (on the right platform) is incredible and didactic documentation showcasing every phase of the build and how it was brought to life. When this level of expert documentation is delivered as part of the digital assets you are receiving, it simply makes spinning up a V2 that much easier, faster and less expensive.

Show Me the Money

Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation can often save you money when developing mobile applications because the mechanism to create the digital assets is of course open competition. The competitions have pre-determined and transparent budgets, so you as the “host” of the competition understand before-hand what prize monies you are offering and therefore, what that part of the build is going to cost. A great and recent example of cost savings in mobile application development was the work done via the TopCoder Community for a start-up named Reward Summit. Their mobile application allows a consumer to quickly ascertain which credit card they should use for specific purchases to maximize credit card points and loyalty rewards. It’s an internally complex app – tons of paths, tied to disparate data sets – that required a seamless and intuitive user interface to succeed. They were able to develop this application via TopCoder at a cost of approximately 10% what a competitor of theirs recently reported spending on their build. 

For more details on this complex build, click here to explore the Reward Summit Case Study

 

The era of mobile applications is nowhere near a close. Sure, the device may change from a smartphone, to a tablet, to Google Goggles and onward to asheath of Graphene. But your need to create intuitive new interfaces and to bring these solutions to market faster and on less spend will not ebb. Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation has a major role to play in the applications of your future

Mobile Application Development remains all the rage. As new tablets like the Microsoft Surface emerge and the smartphone wars see Samsung’s Galaxy S III giving the iPhone a legitimate run for the world’s “top spot”, one thing remains constant and that is the need to bring intuitive applications to market, and to to do so fast. Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation are proving time and again to be extraordinarily effective techniques to create blazing mobile applications. Why? Why do these techniques work so well for a space that is in constant flux, operating on thousands of specific devices, on multitudes of operating systems, where millions of applications co-exist? Here are the 6 big reasons why you should look to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to create, develop and maintain your mobile applications.

Ignite Your Front End of Innovation

In a very recent post on the TopCoder Blog, we discussed what you should really be after in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. In your front end of digital innovation – spanning ideation, concept designs, UI/UX experimentation all the way through prototyping – you should be after one thing, vision. You want an incredible variety of new ways to create value for your end users. When you utilizeOpen Innovation and Crowdsourcing to develop mobile applications, you receive scores of submissions throughout your front end, affording you more looks, created by people outside your four walls, that can help you bring new user experiences to market. As Lady Gaga has shown us, when you change the user experience, you win the game. 

Sprinting to Prototype

Receiving dozens of quality submissions at every phase of  your front end of digital innovation is one huge benefit to utilizing Crowdsourcing to create mobile apps. But if it occurs at a snail’s pace, it is all for naught. However, when you marry the variety of looks and feels you will receive with a sincere acceleration of the innovation and production timeline, the decision to leverage Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation becomes that much smarter and more powerful. How fast? From idea contests through prototypes in a matter of 4 – 8 weeks depending on the complexity of the app.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Besides the obvious advantages of getting an app. to market faster, there is a more subtle layer and that deals with the incredible amount of ways in which you can choose to bring a mobile app to life. For instance, for a Global 50 client of TopCoder’s – sorry we cannot share the name of the client – we recently completed a complex iPad sales and marketing application that is loaded with 382 articles, PDFs, videos and instructional/sales content. The app was developed in Xcode and the CMS was custom designed utilizing Python/Django. The client’s ability to pivot on demand, to the languages that best fit the build allows for an innovative liquidity that only an open innovation, community-created model can provide. This offers you the hyperspecialized talent you need, working on the atomized portion of the build, exactly when you need them. That is digital innovation on-demand. 

Understand Atomization and Why it Matters to Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation(Page 3 of the Archived Webinars)

 

Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3,000

When it comes time to test your mobile or tablet application, Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation offer a superior alternative and this one is simply a volume play. In a development community like TopCoder, you have specialists who are really good at the art of “nit-picking”, so we craft contests specifically honed to their penchant for perfection. By attracting dozens and even hundreds of participants to mobile app testing and bug “hunting”, you receive a massively parallel effort that helps you more quickly, and more thoroughly test your app. 

Related Read: Hunting Bugs and the Power of Cognitive Surplus

Version 2.0 (It’s About Documentation)

Documentation? I thought we were talking about Open Innovation!?? We are and amazing documentation of how your first build was crafted is a key to successfully creating updates. A wonderful consequence of crowdsourced competitions (on the right platform) is incredible and didactic documentation showcasing every phase of the build and how it was brought to life. When this level of expert documentation is delivered as part of the digital assets you are receiving, it simply makes spinning up a V2 that much easier, faster and less expensive.

Show Me the Money

Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation can often save you money when developing mobile applications because the mechanism to create the digital assets is of course open competition. The competitions have pre-determined and transparent budgets, so you as the “host” of the competition understand before-hand what prize monies you are offering and therefore, what that part of the build is going to cost. A great and recent example of cost savings in mobile application development was the work done via the TopCoder Community for a start-up named Reward Summit. Their mobile application allows a consumer to quickly ascertain which credit card they should use for specific purchases to maximize credit card points and loyalty rewards. It’s an internally complex app – tons of paths, tied to disparate data sets – that required a seamless and intuitive user interface to succeed. They were able to develop this application via TopCoder at a cost of approximately 10% what a competitor of theirs recently reported spending on their build. 

For more details on this complex build, click here to explore the Reward Summit Case Study

 

The era of mobile applications is nowhere near a close. Sure, the device may change from a smartphone, to a tablet, to Google Goggles and onward to asheath of Graphene. But your need to create intuitive new interfaces and to bring these solutions to market faster and on less spend will not ebb. Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation has a major role to play in the applications of your future

6 Big Reasons to Utilize Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing for Mobile Application Development

Mobile Application Development remains all the rage. As new tablets like the Microsoft Surface emerge and the smartphone wars see Samsung’s Galaxy S III giving the iPhone a legitimate run for the world’s “top spot”, one thing remains constant and that is the need to bring intuitive applications to market, and to to do so fast. Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation are proving time and again to be extraordinarily effective techniques to create blazing mobile applications. Why? Why do these techniques work so well for a space that is in constant flux, operating on thousands of specific devices, on multitudes of operating systems, where millions of applications co-exist? Here are the 6 big reasons why you should look to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to create, develop and maintain your mobile applications.

Ignite Your Front End of Innovation

In a very recent post on the TopCoder Blog, we discussed what you should really be after in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. In your front end of digital innovation – spanning ideation, concept designs, UI/UX experimentation all the way through prototyping – you should be after one thing, vision. You want an incredible variety of new ways to create value for your end users. When you utilizeOpen Innovation and Crowdsourcing to develop mobile applications, you receive scores of submissions throughout your front end, affording you more looks, created by people outside your four walls, that can help you bring new user experiences to market. As Lady Gaga has shown us, when you change the user experience, you win the game. 

Sprinting to Prototype

Receiving dozens of quality submissions at every phase of  your front end of digital innovation is one huge benefit to utilizing Crowdsourcing to create mobile apps. But if it occurs at a snail’s pace, it is all for naught. However, when you marry the variety of looks and feels you will receive with a sincere acceleration of the innovation and production timeline, the decision to leverage Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation becomes that much smarter and more powerful. How fast? From idea contests through prototypes in a matter of 4 – 8 weeks depending on the complexity of the app.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Besides the obvious advantages of getting an app. to market faster, there is a more subtle layer and that deals with the incredible amount of ways in which you can choose to bring a mobile app to life. For instance, for a Global 50 client of TopCoder’s – sorry we cannot share the name of the client – we recently completed a complex iPad sales and marketing application that is loaded with 382 articles, PDFs, videos and instructional/sales content. The app was developed in Xcode and the CMS was custom designed utilizing Python/Django. The client’s ability to pivot on demand, to the languages that best fit the build allows for an innovative liquidity that only an open innovation, community-created model can provide. This offers you the hyperspecialized talent you need, working on the atomized portion of the build, exactly when you need them. That is digital innovation on-demand. 

Understand Atomization and Why it Matters to Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation(Page 3 of the Archived Webinars)

 

Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3,000

When it comes time to test your mobile or tablet application, Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation offer a superior alternative and this one is simply a volume play. In a development community like TopCoder, you have specialists who are really good at the art of “nit-picking”, so we craft contests specifically honed to their penchant for perfection. By attracting dozens and even hundreds of participants to mobile app testing and bug “hunting”, you receive a massively parallel effort that helps you more quickly, and more thoroughly test your app. 

Related Read: Hunting Bugs and the Power of Cognitive Surplus

Version 2.0 (It’s About Documentation)

Documentation? I thought we were talking about Open Innovation!?? We are and amazing documentation of how your first build was crafted is a key to successfully creating updates. A wonderful consequence of crowdsourced competitions (on the right platform) is incredible and didactic documentation showcasing every phase of the build and how it was brought to life. When this level of expert documentation is delivered as part of the digital assets you are receiving, it simply makes spinning up a V2 that much easier, faster and less expensive.

Show Me the Money

Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation can often save you money when developing mobile applications because the mechanism to create the digital assets is of course open competition. The competitions have pre-determined and transparent budgets, so you as the “host” of the competition understand before-hand what prize monies you are offering and therefore, what that part of the build is going to cost. A great and recent example of cost savings in mobile application development was the work done via the TopCoder Community for a start-up named Reward Summit. Their mobile application allows a consumer to quickly ascertain which credit card they should use for specific purchases to maximize credit card points and loyalty rewards. It’s an internally complex app – tons of paths, tied to disparate data sets – that required a seamless and intuitive user interface to succeed. They were able to develop this application via TopCoder at a cost of approximately 10% what a competitor of theirs recently reported spending on their build. 

For more details on this complex build, click here to explore the Reward Summit Case Study

 

The era of mobile applications is nowhere near a close. Sure, the device may change from a smartphone, to a tablet, to Google Goggles and onward to asheath of Graphene. But your need to create intuitive new interfaces and to bring these solutions to market faster and on less spend will not ebb. Crowdsourcingand Open Innovation has a major role to play in the applications of your future