Explosion of Apps Market

I was going through some articles related to the Mobile Apps Development and their market place recently, and found very interesting statistics in one blog with the heading, Apps to Explode to $38 Billion Market by 2015 (click here).

While iPhone leads the market with an astonishing 82.7% as of the start of this year, the race has begun for the market share from the giants, Android, Black Berry, HP, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft, LG etc. The interesting trend is that, the parameters change in such a big pace, we cannot predict the situation after 2-3 years of time now. Who will dominate the market ? Which all new players will be there ? We should wait and see.

iPhone has just triggerred this explosion, but if you look at the competitors, Android is penetrating the market in a bigger pace, Black Berry is targeting business class customers, even Acer has emerged as a strong player in the field.

The collaboration of Microsoft and Nokia over the Windows Phone 7 for Nokia smart phones is a clear indicator on what is Microsoft's aim on this market. The exciting new features released with Windows Phone 7 Mango clearly tells us how fast they want to capture the market.

All indicators predict that what we see now is just the tip of the big iceberg yet to emerge in the coming days.

An interesting discussion going on over this link on topic, Does Windows Phone 7 stand a chance versus iOS, Android and BlackBerry?. Take a look.

Few interesting reads on the topic.

• Mobile App Internet: Making Sense Of The 2011 Mobile Hysteria (Forrester Blog)
• Can Anyone Compete With the iTunes App Store ?
• Major mobile app store revenue will grow 77.7% in 2011

Just wondering, what will be our share in this big figures .... :)

Aitrich Welcomes Thrissur Pooram

HTML 5: Set to conquer Mobile Web

HTML 5.0 is still in its infancy. But the industry leaders are embracing it in a frenzy. Web designers and developers are seeing this as the next big platform where they need to migrate to tap the offerings of Mobile Web Development world. They realize that HTML 5 is the future of Mobile Web and many people are already looking for what this new technology have to offer anew.

Michael Galpin, an architect at eBay iscusses developing mobile web applications, HTML 5 and many other related technologies, presented at Strange Loop 2010, a developer-run software conference, republished in

InfoQ in this link - InfoQ: Mobile HTML 5.0.

Most of the mobile browsers started supporting HTML 5 capabilities, but no one completely implemented it yet. The W3C working draft on HTML 5.0 specs can be found here.

You can test your browser's HTML 5 readiness here at html5readiness.com . It is interesting to open this link in various browsers, both from your PC as well as Mobile. Try it out.

If you want to see how people use different HTML features from a best picked array of websites, visit here http://101besthtml5sites.com/.

HTML 5 and related technologies already hot in the job market. They are paid very well from the very beginning and the role offers a lot of growth opportunities. Mobile web skills will definitely be a big value addition to your profile as a forward-looking software professional.

Mobile Web Developers are already in big demand and there is no comprehensive training available for this technology area. What makes it tougher is that these technologies are still evolving and those who know these technologies are getting hired for high paid positions in software development, which makes the availability of trainers much harder. Major software training providers are not yet ready to provide a comprehensive course in Mobile Web.

HTML 5 is an integral part of the Mobile Web Developer Course of Aitrich Technologies Training Division, where it covers other supporting technologies like

• JQuery Mobile
• PhoneGap
• Server side scripting,
• Geolocation
• Local storage,
• Offline Access
• etc.

You can find the complete information here Mobile Web Developer.

The course content is getting ready for the advanced level of the course, which is more on cross-platform native application development and server-side programming. This very comprehensive and futuristic course can get you ready for a deep dive into the sea of Mobile Web. 

So, don't wait. Jump start your career in Mobile Web. 

Cheers guys !

agile - Great Days Return

Recently, I was involved in a project that used Scrum. It was a new experience for me and delivered a good knowledge about agile scrum. The agile was very interesting. 

Scrum is an agile software development methodology intended to improve communication and co-operation among team members.

The scrum is excellent because at the end of every sprint, we have something which could conceivably go to quality assurance and you can conceivably ship with. We really had the complete visibility in to how the health and well-being of the development project.Also we had the visibility in to how is the team going, what are they accomplishing, we had the sprint backlog and can see, at the end of each sprint, what the team did, what they failed at, and why?

The most attractive part about scrum was its daily meeting/ stand up feature, in which team members (actually stand up) and answer 3 questions 1) What was done yesterday? 2) What's going to be done today? 3) What barriers are faced , if any ?.

One thing we found really useful on this project is doing our burn- downs by discipline. We can see the velocity of how the project is going. They give a great insight in production level.

Lastly , it is the retrospective meeting. Retrospective meetings are the heart of agile Methodologies. At the end of every sprint the team will be having a retro meeting. It is not a postmortem, it something "look back".  In the retrospective meeting each team member will answer to the questions 1) What went well ?  2) What went wrong ? . It also will have a root cause analysis which finds why they failed at wrong tasks.

I couldn't see myself using any other development methodology that's in current practice today, I am a Scrum fan.

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Posted by Selmath M U

Launching Mobile Courses @ Aitrich Training

 

Aitrich Training Methodology

Software development profession is among the best paid careers in this globalized world. However, the current trends and approaches in the software training makes the technology learning a difficult and boring job, that keeps most of the students at bay.


While the software organizations are facing a big shortage of talented resources, the vast majority of freshers are struggling to land in good careers, as they do not acquire the qualities and capabilities required to be jump-start with today's job needs. Aitrich Technologies tries to fill the big supply-demand gap between the job aspirants and job providers in the software development industry, with a very effective and time-tested training methodology called – Aitrich Training Methodology(ATM).

What is Aitrich Training Methodology ?

Aitrich Training Methodology(ATM) is the corner stone and the backbone of the Aitrich Training Division, that produces the Aitrich Trained Professional(ATP), an industry-ready software professional.

Aitrich Training Methodology combines all the elements needed to make a novice into an industry-ready software professional. It takes the student through an exclusive experience of working in a highly dynamic and motivated software development environment, in different responsible roles that enhance their capabilities and qualities.


What makes ATM so interesting ?

Aitrich Training Methodology creates a highly interactive, self-organizing and delivery focused team with the students as members where each team member performs different responsible roles of a typical software team, following the Agile Methodologies such as SCRUM and eXtreme Programming (XP).

Read more at http://www.aitrich.com/aitirch_training_methedology.htm

Aitrich Training goes Agile

It was a thrilling start of agile adoption by the software training division. The team decided to streamline different activities taking place in a very transparent and the most efficient way by adopting a simple but very effective methodology.

Even though SCRUM is traditionally used for managing software projects, it has been proven to be very successful with many other industries.

Aitrich Technologies, as part of establishing their leadership in software training on most modern and futuristic technologies, is in the process of introducing many technology courses. Different teams are busy with many related activities such as course material preparation, technology research, training for the trainers, teaching, the final projects of each course etc. All these activities needed to be optimized and directed towards the highest quality. It is very important to always focus on the goals, effectively measure the progress and continuously improve the process.

These were the forces behind the look out for an effective methodology that should be simple, but easy to adopt. The methodology should facilitate communication, team work and the participation of all team members.

So the team decided to implement their own version of SCRUM for their many small projects and tasks.

Here is the first SCRUM board of the team, for their new mini project, Database Concepts, the material preparation of the topic.

You can see the user stories brought up as backlog items on the board. Each item is a measurable unit of work.

There was an overwhelming response from the team members for SCRUM. The team has already created the sprint backlog items and started picking up in the morning stand up meeting, and working on the tasks.

The above SCRUM board was created just to get the process started. The team plans to hold proper Planning Sessions, to prepare the backlogs in the coming days. There will be small sprints(small iterations in the scrum terminology) for their projects. Their projects, or a release can be anything like the complete material preparation for a particular topic, say, Android or BlackBerry Development(which are already in queue). There will be sprint retrospectives and the product demo (may be a pre-release demo of the course for the Course QA Team or the management).

Anyway, Aitrich Technologies can claim the first ever organization to adopt SCRUM and Agile at Thrissur. Kudos the team, for your agile adventures. Let us wish them a grant success for this humble start.