Start with focusing on a particular market segment, says ReadWriteWeb. RWW published a very interesting post today to give mobile developers some insight into what they should be thinking about before building their killer app.

The main gist of it was to focus more on whom you’re developing for vs. the functionality of the app. I’m guessing this is the part where testers all over the world want to beat someone up right about now. Of course testers want developers to develop with functionality in mind; however, I do think the article brings up a good point.

Balancing the technical side (functionality) with the business side (target audience) will get you one step closer to having your new app “heard” and raking in the cash.

According to ReadWriteWeb (and Pew’s & Flurry’s survey results),

“The smartphone sweet spot, and by extrapolation, the target for mobile developers looking to make money, is the adult market of college educated, urban and suburban males (Pew survey). Games, social networking and news are the top apps that people spend time with. A study by analytics firm Flurry shows that males 25-34 spend the most time with freemium games and make the most transactions.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. It seems like my husband (who is in the target market) gets me hooked on a new iPhone game every week! The latest one was Disney’s “Where’s My Water” – a physics-based puzzler which challenges you to go through a series of mazes and obstacles (e.g. algae, toxic ooze and traps!) and guide the flowing water down to Swampy the alligator (pictured above). And 2am last night says I’m addicted.

Bottom line. “With all the analytics tools available to developers these days, there is no reason that apps and products cannot be built to take advantage of this type of data and create and app that will do well in a particular market segment.” (RWW)

What do you think? Is it better to focus on an app’s functionality or the market segment in order to really be heard? Or is it a balance of both?

It’s no secret that web and mobile apps represent a lot of money to businesses and app markets are in a race to keep up. Google is using this as an opportunity to greatly expand their presence — and the early returns are impressive. In fact, the Android app market is growing 3x faster than Apple’s iOS market (although, as its marketshare grows, it become a more attractive target to black hat malware apps).

Google isn’t stopping there, though. They’ve recently launched their Shopper app on iOS – an alternative to Amazon’s really nice native apps – and the “One Pass” a publisher subscription alternative to Apple.

In case that’s not enough of a running start for the first 45 days of the year, Google is also rumored to be launching a digital music store. All of these items, coupled with more frustration about Apple’s policies and Verizon’s “not terribly hot” iPhone sales should spark Apple to step it up.

Obviously we’re quite excited about Google’s latest developments. We love the increased competition and resulting innovation in the mobile app space – which (selfishly) means more projects for uTesters and a better choices and products for consumers.

Yesterday, Kelton Research announced the results of their study on mobile enterprise apps, and I think they may shock you. According to Kelton, a whopping 90% of U.S. and UK IT managers surveyed will implement new mobile apps in 2011! 250 IT managers in the U.S. and UK at companies with revenue of $100MM+ were polled.

At first, I thought these stats seemed slightly inflated, but the more research I did, the more surveys I found that indicated that 2011 is indeed the year of the mobile enterprise app. In fact, ABI Research expects worldwide enterprise mobile data revenues to reach $133 billion by 2014.

With new apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, and Android making deep in-roads in healthcare, finance, education, media, and retail, employees are using mobile apps to access everything from CRM systems, to financial results, to marketing campaigns, to tracking orders, etc.

Another very interesting finding in the Kelton study… Saving money is the most popular reason (63%) for deploying mobile apps (chart above). I agree with Eric Lai of ZDNet who said, “It’s heartening, as it shows that mobilizing appears to be a fiscally sound strategy, not something with a pie-in-the-sky ROI.”

Some other interesting stats from the study include:

• Nearly one in two believe that successfully managing mobile applications will top their priority list
• 56% consider customizing company information for mobile purposes a crucial part of conducting business
• 21%  look to introduce 20 or more mobile apps into their organization
• IT managers report that possible data security issues with mobile applications cause more problems (65 percent) than implementation (25 percent) or employee adoption hurdles (10 percent)
• One in two respondents (50 percent) say that employee demand is driving the adoption of new mobile apps

Do you think enterprises are ready?

It sounds great, but I feel like I’ve seen this movie before (“write once, run anywhere”, anyone?).  Maybe IDC is right and the pieces are coalescing to make this brave new world a reality for app developers.  Maybe I’ve simply become jaded.  That said, I do think the timetable mentioned below is aggressive and overly optimistic.  Here’s a blurb from what IDC had to say over at Network World.

Cloud services, mobile computing, and social networking technologies are going to mature in 2011 and beyond, according to IDC. The research firm predicts these technologies will coalesce into a new mainstream platform for both the IT industry and the industries it serves.

Critical transition

Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC notes that next year will see the critical transition of the transformative technologies from early adopter status to early mainstream adoption.

The IT industry will thus revolve more around the build-out and adoption of this next dominant platform, characterised by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics.

Gens added that this restructuring will not only create new markets and opportunities but will also change nearly every assumption about who the industry’s leaders will be and how they establish and maintain leadership.

Interested to hear what testers, devs and tech execs have to say.  Color me skeptical, but hoping beyond hope that IDC is right.

According to ReadWriteMobile, a new study by barcode tech company ScanBuy claims that barcode scanning is up 700% in 2010!

Android was the most popular smartphone platform by far with 45% of barcode users, followed by Blackberry (27%), iPhone (15%), Symbian (9%), Java (3%) and Windows Mobile (1%).
Other Key Findings Include:

• Health and beauty products were the most popular items among 1D (UPC) scans with 21% of users, followed by groceries (14.4%), books (12.6%) and kitchen items (9.2%).
• Over 45 countries have scanned barcodes.
• Linking to a website is the most popular action delivered by a 2D barcode scan with 85% of scans.
• 1D (UPC) and 2D (QR) codes are being scanned equally.

In response to this huge news, I thought I’d have some fun with URL shortening service bit.ly‘s new QR-generation tool that launched a few days ago (FYI: goo.gl launched a few weeks ago too). Go ahead! Scan away and see where it takes you! (Hint: I am the PR Maven .)

While barcode scanning isn’t new technology by any stretch, the 2010 mobile boom is driving its increasing popularity. Even Calvin Klein recently replaced its massive billboards in New York and LA with QR codes (pictured above) – not to mention the giant QR codes in Times Square! I wonder what new and exciting mobile app testing doors this will open…

According to Game Developer Research, 25% of game developers are now making mobile games – that’s up from a mere 12% in 2009!

In addition, a survey conducted by iGR found that more than half (53%) of US mobile developers are building apps for Apple’s iPhone OS. BlackBerry was the next most popular, followed by Android and Windows Mobile.

In response to this incredible momentum, this year marks the launch of Mobile App World 2010, where global leaders in mobile tech and app development and entrepreneurs will gather to network and learn about the latest developments and innovations.

uTest will be among the outstanding line-up of more than 40 speakers, which includes Google, Microsoft, Ericsson, Orange Global and the BBC, who will be discussing the future of mobile apps. Shoot us a note if you’ll be around!

Note: If you’re looking for some cool, new mobile apps, check out Mobile App World’s August Apps Of The Month. You may spot a uTester’s favorite app!

Doron starts Wednesday morning off (after his usual 10-mile run, of course!) in London with some tea and networking with friend and colleague, James Whittaker and UK partner, TCL.

Then he’s off to QCon London, an excellent conference for the enterprise software community. On Friday, 3/12 @ 2pm, he’ll be presenting at QCon re: The Mobile App Quality Challenge & How Crowdsourcing Can Help.

Doron is one of five software testing leaders chosen to present in the “How Do You Test That?” track. This track explores unique solutions created to address situations in which automated testing does not suffice.

And on the last leg of his marathon journey, Doron will present at Garage Geeks in Israel on Monday, 3/15 @ 8pm. There, Doron will be taking a deep dive into the topic of Crowdsourcing, and how smart recruiting, training and incentives can turn an unstructured, loosely assembled mob into a unified, professional community.

So, where in the world is Doron this week?  Catch him if you can!

In addition to inviting Doron to be a keynote presenter, QUEST features a week-long agenda packed with more than 100 opportunities for attendees to build new skills and prepare for the testing professions of the future.

From exploratory testing to test automation to security audits to crowdsourced testing,  QUEST will cover a wide range of testing topics that give attendees insight into the latest best practices and innovative approaches to testing today. To learn more, here’s a sneak peek at the QUEST Magazine.

Special Note: Members of the uTest community interested in registering for QUEST are eligible for

a 10% discount, so please shoot us a note if you’re interested in attending.

Doron will be speaking on Crowdsourced Testing for Mobile Apps. In his keynote, he’ll be speaking about adoption of mobile apps in enterprises and the implications for QA leaders.  This includes addressing how testing methods fall short of meeting mobile’s ‘in-the-wild’ testing requirements and how crowdsourcing is a fresh approach to help meet the mobile app testing challenge.

Known as one of the most serious telecom bugs in history, more than 75 million calls were not connected during 9 hours, an estimated $60 million loss.

Dennis Burke of California Polytechnic said it best: “The Jan. 1990 incident showed how bugs in self-healing software can bring down healthy systems, and the difficulty of detecting obscure load- and time-dependent defects in software.”

Speaking of “load defects,” AT&T — after signing up to be exclusive U.S. provider of iPhone service — has recently come under fire for the quality of its network coverage. Businessweek‘s top headlines read:

• An AT&T Mystery: Abrupt New York iPhone Shutdown
• AT&T Mulls Plans to Deal with iPhone Data Demand
• Can AT&T Meet iPhone Network Demands?

In light of this bug-iversary, I can’t help but wonder if more testing should have been done before AT&T took on the massive data demands of modern 3G smartphones? What do you think?

For anyone looking to deploy an app across multiple mobile platforms and a gazillion different handsets, one massive problem awaits them: QA. uTest solves this problem with an army of testers across the world. Crowdsourced QA… Problem solved. (Click here to see Doron’s presentation.)

And that’s not all! Doron was able to connect with multiple partners, prospects and top media outlets, including Mashable’s Ben Parr (@benparr), editor in chief at IntoMobile.com Will Park (@willpark), ReadWriteWeb’s Dana Oshiro (@suzyperplexus), as well as participated in a couple great video interviews with bnetTV’s Michelle Sklar (@bnettv) and GoMo News’ Cian O’Sullivan (@gomonews) which are posted below!

Take a peek at the video interviews below to learn more:

Doron Reuveni-CEO of uTest speaks with bnetTV.com at the Under the Radar event.

GoMo 1-to-1: let the public test your application with uTest.

All in all, a really great show! We highly recommend checking it out.