Leading up to our WIPJam Session on October 8 @ CTIA in San Diego, we have asked Lauren Thorpe, Senior Director, Developer Relations, Qualcomm Incorporated, a series of questions regarding the mobile industry. Lauren is part of the first WIPJam UnPanel taking place @ 11:15 am.
You’re a veteran in the mobile industry having been with MForma, Helio, THQ and now Qualcomm. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the industry as a whole?
Finally people are looking at and “touching” their devices rather than just holding them up to their ear. For years I would travel around and observe people while they waited in airports and train stations, desperately trying to find someone who was a potential customer; someone who was playing a game or using an application on their device (other than email, of course). In the early days, while trying to pull marketing materials together there weren’t even any stock photos of people doing things other than talking on a mobile phone. The biggest change I have seen is with people – consumers finally get that there are lots of really cool things you can do on your mobile device besides just talk. We are finally seeing a hint of the full potential of mobile.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in mobile development specifically?
Mobile developers have been dealing with device and platform fragmentation for years. This isn’t going away any time soon, especially as new platforms seem to be proliferating. However, during this time, developers have gotten really smart and built some amazing tools and middleware to help manage this complexity. As a result, I believe developers are in a better position to compensate for device variation today. There’s also been a significant change the way user experiences are developed for mobile. In the early days – whether it was for WAP or an application – we brought other experiences to mobile, trying to cram an experience not made for mobile onto a 125 x 125 pixel screen. That’s a miserable user experience! As a development community we have moved on a long way toward “made for mobile”, which enables more positive user experiences and the hope for repeat business.
It’s pretty tough for small mobile development companies to survive on just one device and/or one market. What’s your advice to our mobile developers for growing a successful company?
Reach is clearly important to a developer achieving commercial success. However, it’s important to scale profitably. There are obviously lots of factors that impact this, but I would encourage developers to look for platforms that showcase the quality of their application, underscore their value proposition and deliver a good return, and then look at volume. Stay true to your core values since no amount of scale will make up for a poor user experience.
What do you think are the top 2 - 3 mistakes mobile development companies tend to make?
I think the biggest mistake is probably in building applications for the lowest common denominator device. At one level this simplifies the post-production/backend process. However, it’s likely to be at the expense of the overall end user experience which turns off consumers. Another mistake I’ve seen is in building an application without taking into consideration what platforms and devices it will eventually run on. This requires developers to stay on top of the market and be prepared to respond quickly to trends because putting in touch or accelerometer as an afterthought can degrade an application and definitely drives up cost and time to market.
In the global marketplace – what are you seeing that are hot geographic markets?
Certainly emerging economies are seeing a lot of growth based on advancements in the data capabilities of lower-tier devices. China and India continue to be hot spots of growth. However, we’re also seeing innovation coming out of Latin America. Here I would point to América Móvil, who is bringing more advanced data services to market including mobile widgets and new app stores. In developed markets, it’s fair to say that the iPhone App Store is driving a wave of innovation. The US is a hotbed of activity right now as carriers look to capitalize on the “new” app store phenomenon.
How do you think our mobile developers can take advantage of these hot/growing areas?
From a business perspective, Operators and OEMs are moving to create marketplaces for their various platforms. They *need* a strong development community – the more diverse the better – so in a sense the market is wide open. However, this creates a bit of a paradox. There seem to be too many go-to-market options. Developers can benefit by seeking out companies that are actively building cross-platform and cross-channel ecosystems to help them scale and address a broader set of opportunities. The can also look at partnering with aggregators to enter new markets, sharing revenue, but also risk as they prove out the opportunity. Once developers have identified their channel, there’s the challenge of scaling technically. Here developers can look at building apps in a way that makes it easy to swap out resources, for example supporting multiple languages by making it easy to swap out text files. They can also look at developing relationships with local porting shops to be able to correctly cover local devices with lower start up costs.
What’s your current role at Qualcomm? And how do you think you can support our mobile development companies’ growth?
Now I can provide a much better answer to your earlier question of how mobile developers can take advantage of global opportunities! At Qualcomm, I am responsible for growing our developer ecosystem. This means helping developers find cost efficient, high revenue paths to market working with more than 60 operators, more than 60 device makers and across more than 1,000 handset models worldwide. In terms of practical details, we work side by side with developers to identify commercial opportunities and provide a channel through which they can address them. We continue to introduce developers to new products like Plaza Mobile Internet – an end-to-end widget solution – and Plaza Retail – our device and platform agnostic storefront – in addition to the BREW solution. Lastly, we are working to streamline the process of porting, testing and commercializing against multiple devices across multiple networks worldwide. We have some interesting updates coming over the next few months in this regard so stay tuned!
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With over 2B revenue generating transactions, over $2B in developer earnings and an addressable base of more than 200 M devices, Qualcomm Incorporated, a leader in developing and delivering innovative digital wireless communications products and services, continues to deliver exciting and profitable market opportunities for developers. Visit the Qualcomm Developer Network at developer.qualcomm.com for content, resources and news on the products and services that are enabling developers and publishers to create extraordinary consumer experiences. Discover how to deliver high quality applications and services to the broadest array of devices. Identify new revenue streams and go-to-market opportunities. And join us in shaping the future of mobile one application at a time.
This week, Volker on Mobile hosts Carnival #193. Volker Hirsch writes, “We have an abundance of variety, showing how incredibly diverse this “little” niche has already become.” Blogs include: general market overviews, novel handsets, subscription services, mobile learning, how smartphones will look and a WIPJam interview with 
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