Technology Toolkit

As of today, more then 10,000 applications have been released at Apple Store. Most of these applications are developed by budding entrepreneurs. This article aims to provide holistic overview of application trends at Apple store and then describe few selected applications.

IPhone applications are categorized into 19 categories at Apple store, including Games, entertainment, Utilities, Education, Finance, Weather etc. Amongst 10,000 applications submitted at store, 23.10 % are Games. This was expected as IPhone was initially positioned as “fun & cool” device. Hence, we see a lower number of business applications, accounting only 2.69 % of total applications.

However analysts predict the proportion will change significantly in 2009. Finally, there are still 51 Applications submitted in Weather category despite the fact that IPhone has a built-in weather application.

To substantiate IPhone Applications trends, we can also review number of applications submitted at App store each month. Alone, during the month of September, 2008; a total of 2912 applications were submitted at Apple store. No wonder this was right after 4 months of App. Store launch.

Following September 08, each month had more than 2000 Applications released as App Store. Considering trends, Analysts divide the era in 3 stages of technological innovation:

1.Testing Waters:- From May,08 to September, 08
During this era, developers submitted applications to evaluate IPhone SDK capabilities and understanding market dynamics. During this stage simple fun applications were submitted by developers. On consumer side, IPhone users tried each application and were willing to spend 4-5 US $ on each application as trial.

2. Complex Applications:- October, 08 to January, 09
During this stage, entrepreneurs are using their experience of stage 1, to build more complex applications. During this stage analysts expect to see more complex applications being submitted at apple store and expect a major surge in application submission before Christmas and at New Year.

Consumers have become matured, and are not willing to try paid applications without reading reviews. However, consumers are still trying every free application but the usage of free applications is limited to trial only.

3.Business Strategies:- Feb, 09 to May,09
Analysts expect that the third phase will focus on building marketing and revenue strategies for IPhone applications. The “Open Marketplace”, App Store, will require sophisticated marketing campaigns to differentiate product from others. During this phase the major investment would go into marketing and customer acquisition, while investments on product development will be lower.

To substantiate the arguments presented above we selected following applications for review naming “iThrown” and “Starvin Sharks”.

1.iThrown:-
iThrown is developed by Magnatron Kinetics, in cooperation with GenITeam. This fun application allows users to check how far they can throw their beloved IPhone, without really throwing it. The application was rated as top-free download during first week of October. The application was released at end of phase 1, “Testing Waters”. The application became extremely popular amongst young IPhone owners, who used the application to demonstrate cool-gadget to their peers and friends.

The application used accelerometer technology to identify IPhone movement to evaluate force and strength. The application got rave reviews. However, in order to retain the user base, Magnatron Kinetics needs to enhance the application and keep adding new features.

Starvin Sharks:-
This is a simple competitive game with very attractive graphics. The application is worth noticing for its emotional marketing tactics i.e. 10 % donation of revenues to Share10percent organization. The application is built by Scribium in partnership with GenITeam. The application got a slow start and needs to employ strong marketing tactics for high promotions.

Microsoft was looking for best approach in advanced programming concepts developed by various software programming companies; Suddenly it turn its attention toward C sharp programming interface to develop most critical applications.

Microsoft was keen to create powerful interface to interact with the NET integrated environment. So, it was the next step to develop such programming language that could solve complexity that may be produced by many programming handlers all over the world.

C sharp is strongly typed OOP or an object oriented programming interface that is designed to develop an optimum blend of simplicity, comprehensiveness, expressiveness and very important is performance.

Performance of a programming language is directly proportional to its simplicity of designing that gives better approach to generate programs & run or execute that program flawlessly and rapidly. All these features of a good programming language are well satisfied by c sharp.

This is just because of its integral inheritance from previous famous programming languages like C, C++ & Java etc. In addition to simplicity provided by sequential programming languages like C, it also fulfills all features of C++ and those of Java.

The NET platform is created with various programming runtimes like JVM called as java runtime environment and those carried out with sequential programming languages called as sequential runtime environment. It also provides Inner classes to implement intrinsic functions.

C sharp and NET are a little symbiotic: some features of c sharp are there to work well with NET, and some features of NET are there to work well with c sharp (though NET aims to work well with many languages). The c sharp language was built with the hindsight of many languages, but most notably Java and C++.

C sharp compiles into machine independent language independent code which runs in a managed execution environment. C sharp also provides garbage collection coupled with the elimination of pointers (in c sharp restricted use is permitted within code marked unsafe).

Garbage collection feature is very much useful one when it comes across invalid pointers and references that do not exist anywhere in the memory. A powerful reflection capability of c sharp includes inheritance, polymorphism, virtual functions, overloading & much things newly added to it.

In case of c sharp there is no need including header files, as all code scoped to packages or assemblies, no problems declaring one class before another with circular dependencies. In c sharp, all classes descend from object and must be allocated on the heap with new keyword.

Office Automation involves the planned application of integrated information handling tools and methods to improve the productivity of people in office operations. Although the handling of information by office people is the focus of office automation technology, other aspects of your business will be affected.

Office automation is a key function of the IOVC strategy and technology approach to building a successful business so first let’s discuss a few key areas that can be handled by office automated technology and then we will discuss the results upon your business.

Managing your books – Well you know how the government requires that you must keep track of your income and expenses. You can do like a lot of folks do and manage your books manually or you can get your accounting system setup and with one touch of a button, your accounting system can automatically perform your work for you.

Managing your email – When you have a lot of email, it continually uses up way to much of your time. This means you spend too much time in one area and you suffer in another area. Well if you are building a list via email then you need to put this process on auto pilot with an auto responder.

Making appointments – If you have done it manually, you know how time consuming it can be. But if you get the right automation software and automate your appointment process activities then your customers get access when you are not available. So add a contact management program to your business systems and never miss another appointment again.

Manual writing tasks – There are many writing activities and one of the most frequent areas to automate is word processing. Get your work into an automated process and start to determine how you can use the automation capabilities built into MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There is a lot more automation capabilities built into these software programs then you can imagine.

Consider the needs of your business and your daily schedule. Decide what you like and don’t like before you put an office automation system into your business. When it is time for an automated process you should develop a cost for doing the work manually and build a case for spending the time or the money to automate that process. Keep in mind; you don’t have to automate your business overnight, so take the time to think it through.