I wonder how many of you are reading this article on your mobile device or iPad/tablet while waiting for your kids’ school to come out?  I will not be surprised if 40-50% of you are.  Mobile is the fastest growing industry in the world and the future of the internet.

Currently, iPhones account for 58% of mobile internet usage, and 17% come from iPads. . Furthermore, over 74% of the world population own mobile devices, which calculates to over 5 billion people worldwide!  Google also estimates that they have seen a 500% growth in mobile search from 2008 to 2010.

The statistics are borderline unbelievable, actually, but a great reminder as to why it is so important to make websites mobile friendly.  Operative word to this is, of course: Optimisation.

Optimisating mobile sites would include the following:

1. Content: Keep in mind that your computer has a bigger screen than a mobile; put only the necessary information on your mobile site.
2. Design: Try to avoid large images on your mobile site. Too many images can influence the amount of traffic to your website. The reason for this is large images takes longer to download on a mobile device and this can lead to a click away from your website.
3. Navigation: Put bigger buttons on your mobile website. Today, most of the smartphones are touch screens and bigger buttons makes it easier for a user to click on it and this will also make the navigation much easier.
4. Bigger: As discussed earlier, the screen of a mobile is smaller than a laptop screen, make your content, text, images bigger and put important links in big buttons.

After you have optimized your mobile website, make sure you test to see what the site will look like on all kinds of devices (Android, Iphone, Blackberry, Windows Device and an iPad) before you go live.

Can you believe it’s already the end of January 2012. In this article I will quickly recap on some highlights of 2011 and what we can expect in 2012 when it comes to technology world-wide and in South Africa.

2011

One of the most exciting launches in 2011 was the launch of the iPhone 4S, officially launched in South Africa December 16th 2011. The new member of the iPhone family has a dual core processor, improved camera (8 megapixels) and improved video capturing capabilities. With this Apple set a new standard for the development of Super Phones.

After months of speculation Google launched their new attempt at Social Media. Google Plus (Google+) was launched in mid 2011. The platform seems to be a combination of features from existing social media platforms and is visually very plain and simple to understand. It remains to be seen if Google+ will play a big role in Social Media or will it come to an end like its predecessor Google Wave.

YouTube got a little renovation. In 2011 YouTube improved the user experience of their website. They changed the layout to make navigation and finding channels easier and also made it visually more appealing.
Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5B, a dedicated Android partner, which will enable Google to supercharge the android ecosystem.

2012

Mobile! I think a lot of tech companies will be focusing on building better and more functional mobile applications as the market for smart and super phones is exploding. Mobile penetration in Africa especially is higher than some European countries. I think we’ll see a lot of innovation in the mobile application sector especially in terms of location based services, social networking, mobile commerce and mobile banking. I think we’ll also see advances when it comes to mobile hardware especially battery life.

Social media should have a large impact on search engines delivering more personalized search results than ever before. I also think Google and other large search engines will take social media more in account when it comes to delivering organic search results using user generated information to establish whether a website is a good resource or not. See Marcel’s article: The Impact of Personalized Search on SEO

Android will probably increase their market share in mobile device operating systems with the purchase of Motorola Mobility.

Whatever is in store for us for the year 2012 – it will be an exciting year for technology. I am sure we’ll see great innovation in technology in general and especially in mobile devices.

Being a huge iPhone fan I usually can’t wait when they announce something new. It was no different this time when they announced that IOS 5 would be available for download the 12th of October. It’s been out for more than a month now and I had time to play a bit.

After the 700MB+ download and some backup and restore issues, I got it installed, luckily with no loss of data, and I was good to go. I started playing around immediately to see what is new and how it will affect and improve my use of the phone.

Apple added over 200 new features in the IOS 5 and I will go over the major, more obvious ones as well as a couple of other features that I thought were pretty cool.

Notification System

The new IOS has a notification system that makes things easier to access than ever before. By just swiping your finger from the top down you will access this menu. It shows the weather, upcoming calendar events and any other apps that have unread notifications. The new notification also only shows a small alert while you are busy working on another application, so it is not as distracting as in the past. You can also open notifications from the lock screen by swiping your finger across it the same way you unlock your phone.

Newsstand

The Newsstand application automatically updates your subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. The newspaper store is also integrated into newsstand so it is easy to get access to subscriptions.

Reminders

You now have a built in reminders app that allows you to create reminders as well as lists of reminders. You can also set reminders to go off when arriving or leaving a certain location.

Twitter

Twitter is now integrated with a lot of Twitter enabled apps on the iPhone. With this, you can open up the ‘More options’ menu in the gallery, and tweet straight from there. The same applies when you are browsing the web and want to share something immediately.

Safari Reader

The Safari reader functionality lets you save a website article to read later in the ibooks format that allows for easy reading. You can also change the font sizes in the reader.

Camera

You can now double tap your Home button to get into the camera application and then take pictures by pressing the up volume button. You can also select to view a grid in your camera and swipe to view your album instead of pressing the preview button.

iMessage

iMessage allows you to communicate between IOS 5 users. It automatically picks up if you have IOS 5 and use iMessage and is integrated with your normal messages app.

Wi-fi Sync

With iOS 5 your device can now automatically sync when it is connected to wi-fi and plugged in to power. You can carry on working while it is syncing in the background.

iCloud

iCloud stores your music, documents, photos, calendar and more. It can then wirelessly push that to all your other devices.
These are some of the more known changes. The next couple of features are ones that were not shown in Apple’s intro videos of the IOS 5.

Dictionary

IOS 5 defines any word that you type in any application after you have selected it and tapped on it.

Usage

You can now see usage per application under the general settings menu. In the past you were not always sure how much space an app is taking up, but now you don’t have a problem with that anymore.

Custom vibrations

There are a few new options under the accessibility options menu in settings. One of these features is Custom vibrations. There are a couple pre programmed ones but you can also create your own ones under the contacts section of the OS. You can then give each of the contacts that you want their own unique vibration, so by the way the phone is vibrating you will be able to know who it is.

LED flash alerts

You can also enable LED flash alerts that will activate the LED whenever an alert goes off.
Triple-click home touch
The triple-click home can be assigned a couple of functions such as activating the Voiceover, white on black, zoom or assistive touch.

Emoji

Emoji is now a keyboard you can add, it is built in and you don’t need to install the app anymore.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts allow you to predefine any phrase that you often use and give it a shorter abbreviation. For example for “on my way” you only have to type “omw” then it will suggest the whole phrase to you. This can be found in the Keyboard menu.

Weather

The weather feature gives you hourly updates if you click on the current day.
I am thoroughly enjoying this new Operating System – and have especially enjoyed playing with it to get to know all the features. I think it’s well worth continuously learning more.

Google hosted their G South Africa 2.0 conference in Newtown, Johannesburg on the 3rd and 4th of November 2011. Having been at the conference last year in Camps Bay, Cape Town I was excited to see what Google had in store for us this time around as last year’s event was a major success.

Arriving there I immediately felt that the event had grown since its premiere event hosted the year before and the venue (Turbine Hall) was an excellent choice for hosting an event such as this.

I attended day 2, a day for the geeks (software developers) on the 4th. It started off with Nelson Mattos giving a keynote presentation themed around key opportunities and challenges in South Africa, Google’s mission to South Africa and Umbono.

Some of the key opportunities and challenges he mentioned was that South Africa is among the most prosperous countries in Africa (with a GDP of over $500bn) and has an impressive mobile penetration rate. Unique challenges we face are: still very expensive internet access (with infrastructure still very poor), lack of quality content, low penetration of businesses online and very limited general awareness of the internet in some of the regions.

Google’s mission in South Africa is to continue serving advertisers, businesses and general internet users. They also want to get others online by enabling an accessible, relevant and sustainable internet ecosystem.

Google strengthens South Africa’s start-up ecosystem with Umbono. A six month incubation project to help technology entrepreneurs in South Africa get their products off the ground – basically to jump start their ideas.

The Umbono project includes the following (if selected):

• $25 to $50k in funding
• Angel investors and networks
• Google mentorship
• Space and internet
• Visibility

You can learn more about the Umbono project by visiting the website.

Google on Mobile…

In the last couple of years there has been a lot of focus on mobile technology worldwide, and especially in Africa where the cost of other technologies is far higher than that of mobile devices. Entry level phones account for 40% of all mobile devices in Africa, however, drastically limiting mobile development because of the levels of content (and limitations of content) it can serve.

Bruno Albuquerque had an interesting presentation on mobile development and gives the following reasons for developing for mobile going forward:

• Fast growing market worldwide
• Different ways of monetizing
• Location-based targeting
• Low cost – high volumes
• 52 million activated SIM Cards in South Africa
• 14 million mobile internet users in South Africa
• 6.5 million smartphone users in South Africa (Nokia, Blackberry)

Market segments:

• Mobile web (browser based)
• Native applications (Specific for each device/OS)

Other categories touched on at the conference were Android development, Google Web kit, Web performance, Google+ (G+) and a couple of API’s, e.g. the YouTube API.

The conference was great! I can’t wait for G South Africa 3.0 which will probably be back in Cape Town next year!

With enough of a budget getting traffic to your site is often the easy part. Don’t get me wrong planning a good marketing campaign is definitely not easy but guiding your users once they have landed on your website can prove to be even more complicated.

Yes it is extremely important to make sure the pages visitors land on when finding your website through one of your marketing campaigns is tailored to the audience and platforms. This could mean the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one.

I’m going to look at specifically mobile traffic today. Now it comes without saying that you need to create a mobile version for your users who visit you on their mobile devices. This is because of the broad diversity of mobile platforms. There are hundreds if not thousands of variations of platforms being used in the mobile space. This means that you will need to make sure that your site works and is user-friendly on most of these platforms. Below are a few variations of the same site on different mobile platform.