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

Teach a Kid to Code and Unlock Their Future

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. There is a reason ancient proverbs are still quoted and it’s because they ring true in our modern lives. In today’s uber-connected world driven by digital asset innovation, a proverb like this deserves a 2.0 version, so here it goes: Give a kid an iPhone and he’ll play Angry Birds, teach a kid to code and he’ll create value on the iPhone. OK … we realize this isn’t quite as elegant as the ancient proverb, but you probably get the broader picture. Tomorrow’s jobs and opportunities are based in understanding how to create value in the digital realm. So we set out to teach the children… to code.

After receiving a grant from DARPA to fund a whole, new community for students ages 13-18 to encourage CS-STEM skills which we called NoNameSite.com, we leveraged the TopCoder community to build it, improve it, and run it.

Since 2011, NoNameSite.com has come a long way and gained over 3,200 members. To name a few cool features:

-       9 Games; Including one where you’re programming ants to perform missions by using waterbear coding blocks.

-       A Level editor to give our members the control to build new levels for our games.

-       Last but not least, we introduced Zeepl; the NoNameSite.com avatar creator with options to design your own avatar gear.

Learning through games is not a new theory, in fact it’s being used in schools across the country.  It is a great way to get the attention of the students in a roundabout way.  But are the games on NoNameSite.com enough to interest students of all backgrounds and intelligence into pursing CS-STEM careers once they reach the collegiate level?  Is there still that perception of programmers and coders?  Technology and programming is for geeks?  There shouldn’t be…

In this day and age, technology is everywhere.  From phones to televisions to tablets, etc.  Twenty years ago in school we were forced to take a second language to learn – which was appropriate and necessary.  Nowadays all students should be taught to code.  It is part of the now and their future.

If you search the web for coding schools, you’ll get loads of hits; Codecademy, Khan Academy, etc.  They are excellent at what they do and a huge advantage for our society.  I’m jealous I didn’t have these opportunities when I was growing up.  But even now, being a non-technical person and trying to learn to code with what’s available is frustrating; it’s not as easy as it seems.

So we built our own School of Code or SoCo.  It started out as an idea or a quest for me to find a way to become more technically savvy.  I gave the specs to our NoNameSite.com copilots; basically telling them this School has to be easy to use, quick to learn, and provide instant gratification; our target audience being 13-18 year olds.  So our NoNameSite.com members can be texting their friends and even watching television as they participate in lessons.

SoCo was born and it’s ready.  As an intuitive learning platform that makes a game out of learning to code through interactive lessons, scores, badges, and community recognition, it provides that instant gratification that students want. Students with no programming experience are motivated to complete lessons and master programming basics. A simple, drag and drop interface makes the lesson easy to follow. Tasks and projects increase in difficulty as the students move deeper into the process of learning how to code. SoCo offers students a profile page to show personal statistics, badges, and achievements, sharing mechanisms for posting individual scores or lessons to social media and public forums for questions and community feedback.

But we’ve only just begun.  There are so many other things we are going to add to SoCo to make it even better.

 To rip off Mark Zuckerberg, “We’re 1% finished.”

We encourage any educators, parents, aunts and uncles out there to show SoCo to the kids in your family or social circles. You just may change their life and help them unlock their potential in what is an undeniably digital future. 

Google v. Apple: NFC or AirDrop and How the Industrial Internet Might Decide

To NFC, or not to NFC, that is the 3.0 question. Sure, it’s not quite Shakespeare but what is these days? This very question is raging on as varying mobile OS platforms – mainly Android and iOS – are embarking on wildly different paths. A video of interactive  signs featuring downloadable content from Google Play (Google’s App Store) just surfaced and it gives us a pretty cool glimpse into some fun ways that NFC can be more widely adopted. We’ve embedded the video below, please enjoy. 

For those who might not know, NFC stands for Near Field Communications, and you likely have seen it in action, or at least have seen the now famous Samsung Galaxy S3 commercial where a perfectly suburban wife & mother taps phones with her husband who is about to head out on a business trip, and then ‘warns’ the husband that he ought not watch that video on the plane. It’s funny and linked above if you’ve never come across it.

NFC has hit what might be considered some early user-doldrums as widespread adoption just doesn’t seem to be taking hold… yet. TechCrunch recently published this aggressive post entitled NFC Stands for Nobody F***** Cares and Apple Gets That that talks about Apple’s decision to not incorporate NFC technologies into the iPhone; instead opting to deliver AirDrop as part of the newest iOS 7 offering that delivers users an ‘easier’ way to share files between mobile devices without the need to ‘bump’ phones.

But alas; if you are focused on mobile device to mobile device connectivity – as cool as it surely is – you are completely missing the bigger picture. The entire physical world is being digitally tattooed with sensor technologies and if you think there are a lot of humans on the Internet, just wait until that # is dwarfed by the # of “things” collecting and streaming data to the greater Internet. NFC enabled chips are streaming into all types of sensors and these sensors will ‘awaken’ industries to a new data renaissance, creating brand new user experiences for the individual holding their NFC enabled mobile device. Couple this with fast coming advances like the smartwatch and Google Glass and the ways in which an individual can interface with NFC embedded “things” will get easier, more niche, and more useful to the individuals. Speaking of useful, now is a good time to watch the video we teased at the top of this post.

Related Read: Innovating in a World Full of Sensors

This is just one man’s opinion, but I think the debate is already over. The Industrial Internet will demand it. This isn’t about sharing my Pandora playlist with my cousin through our phones at a family reunion, though it would be nice if he listened to music in the post-Twisted Sister era. Rather this is a complete re-invention of how humans interface with physical “things”, how these things collect and deliver data, and how we use these new delivery mechanisms to improve our lives.

Do you have an opinion on NFC technology and potential uses? Is NFC needed or are there simpler ways to deliver the same functionality? Please share your thoughts in the comments

The Important Role of Collaborative Questioning in Open Innovation

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Asking questions, attaining answers; it’s a very human thing to do. The very notion of Q&A has spawned some of the most valuable social networking sites we have today including Reddit and their popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) “sessions” and of course Quora, which is a social network based wholly on people asking questions and subject matter experts selecting to offer up their time to answer the questions in what is a “social” environment. The knowledge share that takes place on these sites can be impressive and in Open Innovation communities, this knowledge share can be crucial to the overall success of any project, challenge or campaign. So how can you foster valuable Q&A within your own community or effectively set up purposeful Q&A for your Open Innovation initiatives? You’ve got to open things up, of course. But there is also a very important role your internal players will assist with. 

Related Read: How Quora Founder and Ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo Became a TopCoder

The Role of Collaborative Questioning in Open Innovation  

Collaborative questioning, it sounds like a fancy term, but in reality it’s an exercise that you can execute repeatedly. It is simply the practice of hosting a lively Q&A (in a tech setting that supports multiple virtual users) prior to your Open Innovation or Crowdsourcing project going live. The key to the discussion is in allowing the people who are asking the questions (in this case the community) to see all the questions being asked and gain the value of hearing the answers to all of the questions. 
When domain expertise is being shared via an open forum session on the TopCoder platform, each participant has the advantage of hearing answers to questions they themselves may never have thought to ask. Collaboratively, the community asks scores of questions, and as a whole, “better” questions. Individually, they benefit from the answers and knowledge transfer taking place and that can often help them create a better solution for the client. That, in a nutshell, is collaborative questioning and it is a practice you can adopt and repeat for your Open Innovation initiatives. 
Here are 4 steps you can take to set up collaborative questioning properly:

Step 1 - Identify Your Internal Experts Early
Identify your internal subject matter experts who can help with the specific project at hand. You probably already know who they are, and of course, depending on the challenge or contest, this person(s) is likely to change. Early on, as you identify this project as a good fit for Open Innovation, bring your subject matter experts into the discussion and alert them that their participation in this specific challenge is being requested. Have a clear way to communicate to them (your internal experts) what their role is, how you need their support, how much scheduled time will likely be needed, and the importance of their role as well as the overall importance of attaining a successful output from the challenge. You are asking someone for their time and you already know (likely first-hand) just how busy they are. Communicate early on why you need them for this unique and important role.

Step 2 – Schedule the Collaborative Questioning Session
Working with your community platform provider, find a day and time that will likely draw a high level of participation from the community you are working with. Keep in mind, many creative and innovation communities are quite global, TopCoder for instance has members in over 200 countries from around the world. So, depending on the discipline and specialized skill you will want competing on this project or contest for you, schedule your session at a time that hopefully best fits your audience. Perhaps this means a late night for you and your small team, but the vibrant session will prove worth it. Get the date on the books and work with your community platform provider (that would be TopCoder or an innovation platform as such) to help socialize the word community-wide that this important Q&A will be taking place in order to support a very specific upcoming challenge or contest. 

Step 3 – Execute a Purposeful Q&A Session
Go in understanding macro themes you know you will need to cover and micro-details you believe should be shared. Provide documentation (intra-community) on the web where the community member can access prior to the Q&A as to familiarize themselves with these macro themes, your objectives and more. Prep the community so they have a nice base of knowledge heading into this Q&A so that the forum time isn’t spent on the vague or readily accessible. You want to foster natural “rabbit holes” that will allow your subject matter expert(s) to share high-levels of detail with the entire audience on very specific subjects they are bringing up in this collaborative session. The community will ask very detailed and intriguing questions, so be on your game!

Step 4 – Document the Session
This is simple. If you can, document the session and provide a transcript to the community so they can go back to this Q&A banter later on if they so choose to do so. It can help them recall a specific detail that ultimately helps them create a better solution for you. 

Sometimes, “simple” things are a bit more nuanced than what appears on the surface and repeatedly executing purposeful Q&A sessions is likely one of those “things”. Remember the keys: Have your subject matter experts in place, foster collaborative questioning, and help steer the discussion towards the appropriate level of detail so the community members have access to specific detail and knowledge that can really help them create better assets for you

Collaboratively Creating an iPad Application for NASA Astronauts

Call it Crowdsourcing, call it co-creation, or just call it plain cool. The TopCoder Community is embarking on a very creative endeavor to design, develop, and produce an iPad app that will help NASA astronauts more seamlessly and accurately track their dietary intake while living aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Throw into the mix some very unique technical variables, such as this new iPad application will not be connected to the Internet, and we’ve got a sincerely interesting challenge on our hands.
The official name for this newest Open Innovation project is the NASA Tournament Lab ISS-FIT (Food Intake Tracker) Challenge and the first contests helping to comprise this overall challenge, a voice command idea generation contest and a conceptualization contest have just been launched. Follow those links to learn more about the individual contests and to register to compete. 
These competitions are the latest in an ISS focused series of challenges running on the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) which is powered by TopCoder and is in partnership with Harvard Business School. To help kick-off this particular challenge NASA was kind enough to arrange a Skype video sit down between TopCoder and NASA Astronaut Dr. Donald Pettit and that interview is just below for your enjoyment. Dr. Pettit has logged more than 370 days in space and has lived on the ISS for a total of 13 months. So to say we sat down with a subject matter expert would be putting it mildly! 

Understanding our readers  and community members are busy, we created this helpful video legend. We of course encourage you to watch the interview in its entirety, but if you wanted to focus on Dr. Pettit discussing potential new user experiences for the forthcoming iPad application, that section begins at approximately 12:13 – Thank you. 

 

Enjoy the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bmWQRFVSf-8

 

 

Sincere thanks are owed to the team from NASA who helped arrange the interview and of course to Dr. Pettit who was gracious in every manner. We look forward to tracking what the TopCoder community will create and hope it benefits the astronauts performing  incredible science aboard the ISS for many “moons” to come.

2013: The Year of the Sensor – Your Year to Innovate in the Physical Realm

The One Word Answer

“Sensors…” It was the one word start of an answer he gave as he reached into his pocket for his mobile device. Sitting in a conference room at the start-up incubator – LaunchBox Digital located in D.C. – I remember thinking, he reminds me of “House M.D.” minus the cane, and nicer. The question he began to answer was a simple one: “What’s the next big thing in technology?”
The date was Summer 2009 and the answer was delivered by Tim O’Reilly.
It hit the room and resonated in such a way that it reminded us of another very famous one word answer – enjoy this iconic clip from 1967 Dustin Hoffman classic, “the Graduate”.
Tim continued, fumbling a bit to get his phone in hand and went on to delicately describe the sensors he was now holding, what these fairly limited sensors were measuring and providing for him in real time and how these sensors (and many, smaller and highly sophisticated ones) were about to permeate every piece of our public life. From the clothes we wear, to the packaging holding the food we will consume, to the streetlights we cross under, the world was about to receive a new layer of “skin”. A digital layer where data was generated, collected, and manipulated by tiny sensors… and now, it is coming to pass. It seems 2013 is the year of the sensor. If resistance is indeed futile, then how can you out innovate your competition and gain competitive advantages in this collective “Borg” that is the emerging 3.0?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PSxihhBzCjk#t=0s

 

It does not matter if you call this sensor-laden future (and in many ways, our sensor laden present) the 3.0, the Industrial Internet, the Internet of Things, the era of the Quantified Self, the era of Big Data or all of the above! The reality is simple. Technology is moving into physical “things” at an incredible pace and because of this, new opportunities to innovate in the physical realm are re-emerging. This new convergence of data, sensor technologies and your ability to create innovative interfaces successfully blending the digital and physical worlds is your opportunity to succeed and out innovate your competition in 2013.
Need some inspiration to get going? Here’s just a few articles from the last 2 weeks that showcase some brazen innovations happening in this new frontier of the blended digital-physical realm. 
Sensor Equipped Snowboards Teach You How to Carve the Slopes 
Cruise Control App Changes Music Based on the Pace of Your Run - What a simple way to create a new experience for these users.

Energy Harvesting on the ISS: NASA’s Newest Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Challenge

“Space… the final frontier.” For many sci-fi fans – myself included in the geek-dom –  that iconic opening line from Star Trek speaks to the vast openness of both the physicality of space and the opportunities that lay ahead for us humans. As we continue to explore and experiment in space, a newer technique for innovating continues to emerge and evolve here on Earth. Open Innovation challenges focused on solving or improving rather complex mathematical solutions is finding great and repeated success in this format utilizing a community of competitors. Each new Open Innovation challenge represents one small step for man, and one giant leap for innovation kind.

NASA is one of the pioneers in this field, consistently leveraging Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to help their teams solve big, and rather specific challenges. This very complex algorithm challenge is being launched via the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) an Open Innovation platform powered by TopCoder and in partnership with Harvard Business School.

I very recently had the pleasure to interview William Spetch, a NASA aerospace engineer from their VIPER team – Vehicle Integrated Performance, Environments and Resources – who is heading up a brand new open innovation challenge focused on energy harvesting aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Watch the video below to understand the importance of this Open Innovation challenge, not just for the space station and NASA, but potentially for all of humanity as well. 
We encourage all readers to join or pass along this exciting challenge and here’s an easy way to do so. Below is a short animated video that sums up this exciting algorithmic competition. Please watch and share the contest and if you’d care to register visit www.TopCoder.com/iss right now.
Let’s help NASA power the International Space Station so they can continue to boldly go and so we can truly say; “I’m giving it all she’s got Captain!”