iPad Application Development
The iPad is the latest “wow” gadget from Apple and like the iPod and iPhone before it, it’s likely to kick-start an entirely new market which bridges the gap between smartphones and netbooks. The iPad runs a similar operating system to the iPhone but since it is bigger and more powerful it can run larger and more resource intensive applications (or apps, to use the industry buzz word). You can essentially think of it as an overgrown iPhone.
The iPad has the same multi-touch and accelerometer technology as the iPhone and so many of the application functionality designed for the iPhone can be used in the iPad. Given that Agriya already has experience in iPhone Application Development, we have begun offering iPad Application Development and welcome any enquiries or questions about this new service.
Even though the iPad has recently launched and has almost created a new market by itself, analysts are expecting anywhere between 2 million and 4 million units to be sold in 2010 and since the iPad can handle much more powerful and robust applications, the price tag for the apps can be increased significantly.
Although any iPhone applications will work on the iPad since they share the same iPhone SDK, they can be shown at the original size (which will look small on the iPad) or full screen which will distort the graphics. The best option, and one that many companies are choosing, is to port iPhone apps to the iPad. Agriya can also help with iPhone to iPad ports.
So if you are looking for iPad Apps Development, get in touch with Agriya, we’ve got the experience and expertise to transform your idea in to a fully working iPad app.
Get a free iPad application development quote now!
Facebook Application Development
Ever since Facebook opened up their platform to allow 3rd party developers to access the core engine and build new applications on top of their existing site Facebook has experienced incredible growth as a vast array of companies rushed to build apps that can tap in to the Facebook market.
Without a doubt some of the most popular apps are the simple ones like personality tests, quizzes, comparison tests and games – all of which can be created and start getting users within a month. Take Zynga for example, they created a number of social games using Flash and are now one of the most successful companies to have exploited the Facebook audience, even introducing a revenue stream thanks to their micro-payments which allows users to buy digital items for just a few dollars – the tens of millions of people that play their games means that only a fraction need to get their credit card out in order to make the company profitable.
While you might not want to be as ambitious as Zynga for your first Facebook application development, the potential is still there to create a wildly successful app that can utilize micro-payments (or even SMS payments) to create a real income pulling Facebook app.
Agriya has been helping customers with their Facebook application development since Facebook first opened their doors to 3rd party companies. Our Facebook developers are able to create virtually any type of Application, whether it’s to promote your website or to try and tap in to the enourmous market on Facebook, get in touch with us and get a free quote on your Facebook app idea.
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Find out more about Facebook application development.
Liferay Portlet Development
Liferay is a very popular open source social network script that has been programmed in Java and as a result has become a favourite amongst cost conscious Enterprises who are looking to deploy intranet and collaboration solutions. The main rival to Liferay, which is also aimed squarely at the Enterprise market and developed in Java, can cost upwards of $25,000 for the base solution and when you consider that it doesn’t do much more than Liferay, you can see why businesses are opting for the open source solution and then looking for Liferay Portlet Development to enhance the software to their exact requirements.
Liferay is very modular in design and just like WordPress, a number of add-ons can be created, the terminology for which is “Portlets”, little snippets of code that query the database to display some information. Mostly the portlets add a small amount of functionality, and since Liferay is completely free to use the development costs for deploying an Enterprise social network script can be significantly lower than a commercial option.
Since Agriya has been actively developing social networking software for clients for over 5 years, including Intranet and collaboration platforms, we have a unique insight in to what kind of functionality you might require from a Liferay powered website. We’ve developed numerous Liferay portlets in the past for companies like Cisco and are ready to help you right now with Liferay Portlet Development and even Liferay Theme Development.
Get in touch with us now, and get a Liferay quote or find out more about our Liferay development work.
Advertisers try to Use Geolocation – and the Law Wonders if it Should
In the world goes crazy over privacy breaches on Buzz, and Facebook, there is a lot of material in the new geolocation services, to get worked up over. There are nearly 100 location sharing applications out there, and one thing that really comes across anyone who has used any of these, is that Privacy features are not really central to the way these applications work.If we thought that Facebook and other social networking applications, outraged our privacy, that sounds so old next to what geolocation services are able to do. The US government is quickly trying to catch up with protecting the rights of the citizens affected by these new services. It can’t be long before advertising services try to geo-locate you to serve you advertisements for the place you are in at any point. But now, if everyone can find you – you could be in trouble with the government, or with your job for it – if you can’t ever keep your life to yourself. And will the police be allowed to check on your location if you forget to turn off that function when you are on the run? Do they have the right? All these will be thrashed out, over the coming years as privacy begins to be defined as has never been imagined before.
Meanwhile, there are major new services jumping on the bandwagon all the time. Google Chrome’s latest version, uses a new kind of geolocation. It looks at your WiFi network, and all the ones around you to determine where you are. And the most anticipated entry in the arena is Facebook – as it plans to announce at its f8 developer conference. Facebook has been trying to get this feature right for about a year now, and has included location sharing regulations on its boilerplate. App makers are now going to be able to make use of the Facebook location API to get some real useful functions out there.
But Facebook isn’t really trying to steal market share from established players like Foursquare. In fact, Facebook plans to make use of all the location services, to present them all on its network. What Facebook seems most interested in, over destroying any startup’s business model, is in trying to gain advertising share from Google. Facebook has had revamped business pages for months now, in hopes of enticing small business advertisers away from Google. Google’s Latitude is a great competing service in this area.
With such a Fragmented Geolocation Market, how does one keep Track?
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a group of immensely popular cultural festivals for music and film in Austin, Texas,that rouses tremendous interest in culture buffs everywhere, and this year’s edition, is set to start this week in March. The reason this is of interest to a tech blog like this is, that social media services get a tremendous boost catering to events of this magnitude where there is always something spectacular happening undiscovered that someone or the other needs to spread the word about. But in the months leading up to the festival, social media reports have been completely swamped with one new buzzword – Geolocation.With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.
Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.
When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.
How Today’s Tiny New Search Engines may Win Big Tomorrow
There is a reason why Google is No.1 in the search business: anytime you ask anyone about their choice in search engines, you’ll probably discover that they don’t even see it as a choice anymore, so monolithic is Google’s influence on its customer base. And while the Google vs. Bing contest is avidly watched as ever, another more interesting contest is being fought in the microscopic minority of the search market share left over after the majors are through with it. This is the crowded part of the search engine market with hundreds of innovative new search engine providers chasing after the crumbs of the Internet user market, no more than one in 10,000, left over after the big boys have finished.In the credulous times of the early Internet, Ask Jeeves was a very popular search engine that claimed that you could type in your search in natural human English. They call it Natural Language Processing these days, and they still haven’t bested that challenge yet. Google’s attempt in this area at one time was to eschew computers altogether, and put people in charge; and it was called Google Answers. It wasn’t free either – you posted your questions, and real people, if they knew what the answers were, offered to help, for the right price. Of course that program was a miserable flop. The search engine ChaCha, with the insight that the main problem with Google Answers was that you had to pay, picks up where Google left off, and gives you ChaCha Guide. You get a real person to hand-hold you through your search, for free. Their tagline is ” Real people answering your questions! Crazy, huh?”. And it’s so crazy it makes sense.
Quintura is a search engine that tries to offer you possible searches related to your search – in a cloud of related keywords you can take ideas from. Useful related keywords are certainly things Google never helps you with. All you get with Google is your standard list of search results. Google has always been a pure search engine; it won’t give you any recommendations, it will only help you find a thing you have in mind already. And then there is the intelligent search engine. Enter, the market, for the recommendation engine, where when you try to search for, say the movie Titanic, you’ll get asked if you like tragic romantic movies and get offered a few suggestions. This of course uses algorithms like you see on Pandora, the music finder website. But it uses that and wider context.
And there are other more specialized search engines too; if you want to search for pictures, far better than the Google images, is Like. And how about search engines like Speeglebot and Nayio that are speech and voice enabled? The sky is the limit for innovation in search engines; and when the sky is Google, innovators re really motivated to do things better.
Reasons for Twitter Holdouts to Join in the Fray
As wildly popular as Twitter is, most people still haven’t tried it, for the simple reason that there is nothing they believe they have to say worth sharing with the world. Which is a curious thing to say; Twitter is as much about subscribing and following, as it is about tweeting and posting. Twitter could be the best newspaper, the best gossip column or the best community gathering place – anything you need it to be – to answer to your very specific interests and viewpoints. This is in fact, true of even the most active tweeters out there. Tapping into what everyone has to say about a subject that is close to one’s heart, a favorite movie, sports team, thoughts about George Bush or anything, has quickly become the most important part of connecting through Twitter. You just need to be there in the cloud of information people share with you, to understand how useful, and appealing it can all be; and while you’re at it, you’ll probably find yourself reacting to what you read, with a tweet of your own. You probably won’t come away from your time on Twitter empty-handed; there are tens of millions of tweets published on Twitter each day. Here are more reasons to turn Twitter on in your life, if you haven’t done so already.Conferences and trade expositions are such difficult places to keep track of people in, that conference organizers quickly realized how useful a tool Twitter could be in sending out thoughts and messages to groups of people all at once; and to use the ubiquitous Twitter hash tag for this. For instance, if you are attending a medical conference called UniMed, you just need to add #Uni or something to the end of each one of your tweets, and right away, everyone who is tuned in to that hash tag, reads you.
Twitter is also great as a way to know what is around you in places you travel, or go to. Twitter now allows you to search for trending topics, for whatever geographical area you are in. There are apps for Twitter with names like Twitter Local, that allow you to look for tweets coming out of places close to you. And if you want to find out what happen to be the most discussed topics in the area you are in, you could check out Happn.in.
And of course, all this leads up to how you can participate yourself one day. A good way to participate, if you feel you have something to actually contribute, is to simply ask the question. To set the ball rolling, you could ask a question on a popular topic that people are sure to have strong opinions on. For instance, you could ask people if watching the Academy Awards ceremony, is as hip as it once was. Or, if there is a strange physical symptom that is bothering you, you could put out a question about it on twitter, and watch wonderful inputs for and by the truckload. Twitter is what you make it to be. And the best part is, it’s greatest uses, probably haven’t even been discovered yet.
Looking at the World with Google Blinkers On
The world more and more depends on the Internet to go about even its most basic everyday business; and this would be a good time to begin thinking about how effectively the Internet is regulated. The FCC in the US is beginning to put together a set of conventions for the Internet, that aim to make sure that Internet infrastructure providers, are never given the freedom to discriminate among different kinds of services in the setting of prices for the use of infrastructure. They call it the network neutrality rules. Any kind of Internet service or website needs to be given the same terms of service as anyone else. But these rules are only mainly aimed at Internet giants – the Warners and AOL’s of this world, and the FCC needs to expand the scope of its rules.It isn’t just the service providers that own the Internet’s hardware that need to be regulated this way; the software and services that form the backbone of the Internet, the search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo, need to be brought in as well. New companies and services are discovered by users through these gatekeepers of the Internet; and little startups have their entire survival controlled by how well they are visible on these search engines. Any kind of discrimination they face, would be their undoing. The FCC needs to make sure of this.
So do any of the major search engines actually use active discrimination? Google is a company that has a finger in all kinds of pies at the same time: maps and directions, e-mail, Internet payments, among others. Google doesn’t feel any compunction plugging its own products with top billing on its search results with no mind paid to what its own algorithms think of it. Without a doubt, Google is not impartial; and for a basic service that ought to belong right up there with the other human rights, this is intolerable.There is also the Google sandbox that lots of companies and get permanently lost in, because they can never make out what rules Google has that they have broken.Google has near-complete domination of the Internet; if something doesn’t appear on Google, chances are it will never be found. And this is not good for innovation.
Most of Google’s greatest services, YouTube, Google Maps, or even AdSense, were developed by others,and when they became popular, Google acquired them one way or another. What if a Google stranglehold over the Internet prevents new services like this from ever having a fair chance?
Outsourcing PHP Projects
Do you need to outsource your next PHP project to save on costs or maybe take advantage of expertise not available within your company? Then get in touch with Agriya, a company with over 10 years of experience developing websites for clients who have already been outsourcing PHP projects.
Get a free PHP outsourcing quote now, and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
We have over 150 highly qualified PHP developers who all have 2 or more years worth of experience, so you can be sure that your PHP project is in very safe hands!
Many companies and individuals like you have been outsourcing in the past two years because costs can be as much as 60% less than if you developed your site in the Western countries. When you consider the fact that PHP has even lower costs than proprietary languages like ASP.NET and Java, the effects of the recession and economic slowdown can be mitigated by more than halving your IT costs.
Find out more about outsourcing PHP projects.
Agriya has developed PHP powered websites for some of the biggest names in the world, including Google, Cisco and Shell Oil, but don’t let this big names put you off, we are still affordable for small and medium sized businesses. You will find our working practices align very well with the Western way of working and outsourcing web development to Agriya can be as seamless as developing your project inhouse – while enjoying a huge cost saving.
When you outsource web development to Agriya, you will be given a dedicated CRM who will be your point of contact within the company and be your bridge between the developers and yourself. They will available at a time that suits you and work to arrange meetings via Skype, WebEx, IM or over the Phone.
Have you heard enough? Get a free quote.
Need more information to make a decision? Get more information about our expertise.
Want to contact us before going ahead with a full quote? Get in touch here.
Google and Bing Consider a New Search Engine Just for Children
Have you ever stood by a child struggling to get a search going on Google, and itched to tell him what obvious search keywords he was missing, or how he needed to understand the psychology of search differently? Most adults don’t rush to help the children out right away; the only way to learn the mind of a search engine, to learn the way it uses words, is through repeated trial and error. As far as making search engines child-friendly goes, most search engines usually go no farther than to protect them from unsavory content. It may be time for the major search engines to think of the child constituency differently. Children are using the Internet for all kinds of learning, and homework; and they need search engines to be tailored to their level of maturity. The search engines are only just beginning to grasp this; and their programmers are studying usability by children.The problem is, search engines were basically always designed for the adult mind; while they could have seen it coming, the engineers just always assumed from the start that the Internet was for serious pursuits such as research, and that frame of mind has persisted. Children for instance, do not read as effortlessly as adults do. Search engines aimed at children could conceivably make better use of pictures or videos. Children could even use an automated help system with pre-recorded content when they come up against a wall. Google is today considering designing a search engine just for children; and they have a deeper reason to do this then just being nice. They consider it possible that children would just have the same problems that adults have, only amplified. By studying the way children work on Google, adult weaknesses could become easier to notice. Studying children can provide deeper insights into the exact ways in which adults go wrong.
Google has had a Related Searches feature for about two years now. Looking up a phrase like ‘the jungle’on Google could give a child the regular results, but also possible related suggestions, like videos on YouTube, information on the various national parks in the US, and some information about species extinction in the Amazon. Children don’t type really well, and tend to look closely at the keyboard as they go along. The part of the screen closest to the keyboard, at the bottom, is therefore important screen real estate for the search engines. Bing has found a special niche with children. The search engine has especially leaned towards images far more than the others, and it attracts children.
Not to be outdone, Google has had the Wonder Wheel feature turned on for a few months now. You get to it when you press on ‘Show Options’ when you get your search results. A wheel pops up, with spokes pointing you in different desired directions. Search engines don’t understand what exactly you’re asking; they find it hard enough as it is to understand what words you want. Children seem to want to use natural language when dealing with searches. And search engines want to be able to make some sense of natural language questions. The most promising development here so far has to be the Voice Search feature available on the iPhone and Android smartphone operating system. Of course those were developed with business users in mind;children would think it was pretty cool too.
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