It’s worth the time and cost to design a mobile site for your customers' convenience. But is it worth it to go one step further—to create an app? Apps require more investment and new marketing channels, but they could bring in new customers or help you manage the ones you have. Let's consider.
Beth Romanik is TechWell's online editor, managing everything you see published on our family of thought-leadership sites. She edits and publishes articles for TechWell Insights, StickyMinds, AgileConnection, CMCrossroads, and Better Software magazine. She has worked for several other newspapers, magazines, and sites of all kinds. Beth is excited about new developments in technology, but she'll always have a soft spot for paper and ink.
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Computers for US government intelligence agencies have hit such extensive performance requirements that power and cooling demands are becoming unmanageable. The solution? Put out a call for researchers who can help develop a new generation of fast, energy-efficient superconducting computers.
Police are attempting to beat suspects to the scene of a crime with a computer program that indicates where criminal activity is most likely to happen. It’s called predictive policing, and the software uses past statistics and continually calibrated data to predict when and where crime will strike.
Apple’s developer site experienced a security breach last week, and it still hasn’t fully recovered. The company created a status page showing which systems are back online. The site is in its eighth day of downtime as the company works to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.
With so many advanced apps, programs, and devices on the market these days, it’s no longer enough for something to just function the way it’s supposed to. What makes a successful product is influenced by how nice an experience it provides for the user—and more often, that comes down to the details.
The literary world was shocked to find out the nobody author of a new novel was actually super-famous J.K. Rowling. Her secret was uncovered by using software programs and algorithms to analyze her writing—a method that could also reveal hackers and others who might want to be anonymous online.
A new report predicts that the combined value of paid apps, app-enabled purchases of goods and services, and in-app advertising will double in the US by 2017, with the current market worth of $72 billion increasing to $151 billion. App economy jobs are also exploding, making it a hot industry.