Theme: Have fun with Arduino and Amarino toolkit
Location: TechJini Solutions
Participants: Sudar (Our kit sponsor), Amrita, Krishna, Sandeep (our guide 2), Anil (our guide 1) and Amit

For next event please sign up at http://www.meetup.com/blrdroid/

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 per cent increase from the same period in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services.

“In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. “Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China,” said Ms Milanesi.

The first quarter also saw some movement outside the top five mobile handset vendor rankings (see Table 1), Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 per cent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the “others” section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. “This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

In the first quarter of 2010, Nokia’s mobile phone sales to end users reached 110.1 million units, a 1.2 per cent decline in market share year-on-year. Although Nokia’s midtier products sold well, Nokia lacks a high-volume driver in the high-end. “MeeGo based devices and other high-end products will not rejuvenate Nokia’s premium portfolio until the end of the third quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and Nokia will continue to feel pressure on its average selling price (ASP) from vendors such as HTC, RIM and Samsung,” said Ms Milanesi. The reorganisation announced last week demonstrated that Nokia is trying to streamline the reporting process to deliver results quickly, which we believe shows its recognition of the pressure it faces from investors.

Samsung sold 64.9 million devices in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 26.3 per cent year-on-year. Samsung was one of the five vendors in the top10 vendors ranking to grow its market share, which increased by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Samsung saw healthy margins in the first quarter of 2010 and was also able to grow its presence in developing markets such as India and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

RIM’s mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 per cent increase year-on-year. RIM is making its debut into the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking. RIM’s focus this quarter was centred on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM’s strengths.

Sony Ericsson sold enough units to remain in the top five mobile handset manufacturers, but its market share declined 2.3 percentage points in the first quarter of 2010. The channel held some inventory for Sony Ericsson in the first quarter of 2010 as some new products reached the channel late into the quarter. One of Sony Ericsson’s most important future differentiators is its relationship with its parent company, Sony. This partnership, combined with Sony Ericsson’s ownership of the strongest portfolio it has had since 2007, place it well to lead the trend toward increasingly connected consumer devices.

The first quarter of 2010 was Apple’s strongest quarter yet, which placed the company in the No. 7 position with a 112.2 per cent increase in mobile devices sales. “Growth came partly from new communication service providers in established markets, such as the UK, and stronger sales in new markets such as China and South Korea,” said Ms Milanesi. “The second quarter of 2010 will be a very important one for Apple. We expect that Apple will present its new iPhone in June during its Worldwide Developer Conference, which will be the first to feature the latest release of the iPhone OS that includes welcome improvements for developers and users, such as multitasking.”

In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010 (see Table 2). Android moved to the No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OSs vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the No. 1 position but continued to lose as Nokia remains weak in the high-end portfolio.

Smartphones accounted for 17.3 per cent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.

As seen with the iPad and web books based on Google’s Android platform, mobile OS ecosystems are developing and will move beyond smartphones to continue to deliver consumer value and a rich user experience,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. “To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users,” said Ms Cozza. “Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today’s various consumer segments.”

The morale of the research would be to understand the domain of mobile marketing and effectively utilize the advantage to our marketing efforts.

Mobile is no more used only for calls, it is being used for more than that. Every consumer wants to have the power of mobility with him. He wants to order pizza on the go, book tickets for a movie on the go, want to Google on the mobile, want to pay his bills from his mobile and what not!!!!!!!!. We want everything on the fly because we lack only one thing now a days and that is time.

Probably this was best understood by the Mobile OEM companies in the right sense who are eagerly looking out for continuous innovation. Yes, then there entered something called business phones which are supposed to be only for the C Level Executives in the early stage of its evolution. You do only business work like  checking only important emails, and open spreadsheets and do numbers of Total revenue and Net profit that bothers them always ( Hope the usage of BlackBerry had no impact on increase of revenue but yes I have to agree that for sales guys it had impacted to identify the person if he is a decision maker or not). As everybody knows that  RIM has best understood this strategy, and BlackBerry has become a luxurious tool for C-Level Executives.

In the continuous evolution process,  when many of the mobile OEM’s are coming up with low price strategy to enter into development markets, some innovative guys like Steve Jobs, whose another name itself is innovation has probably some day woke up and said to himself ” I want to build iPhone “. Hope the letter “i” is very rhythmic in sense with innovation or Steve. If we look at his brands that has brought Apple to a huge limelight the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iStore, iTunes have brought him much more fame than “Mac” ( Of Course outside US). Now a days we have started speaking about iPhone a lot and who knows the better revenue model other than Steve. Even if he opens a App Store we know that there is a revenue  model for Apple and he wants his customers to be loyal to his products because of the abundance of Apps. Hmmm, probably this is the marketing strategy where other OEM’s should focus on.

Whether it’s an individual or an organization, there is a lot of buzz in Smart phones.  iPhone has created a revolution in the market and now Google’s intervention into the segment with Mobile OS.

The possibility look at all the three phones BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, gives us a sense that it is not going to be easy one for Apple and BlackBerry where their presence is limited to only the phones they manufacture, compared to Google’s Android, where there are nearly 18 manufacturers of the handsets. The moral of the story is that it’s not enough to have a single model  phone to rule the market but probably Apple and BlackBerry can look at different initiatives to expand their market presence by collaborating with other manufacturers.

This argument I would definitely support with  Gartner’s latest report headed by the title “Android to grab No. 2 spot by 2012, says Gartner”. I have read it in Computerworld magazine.The below article is courtesy of Computerworld magazine.

“While the Google-backed Android mobile operating system currently runs on less than 2% of all smartphones, Gartner Inc. predicts it will surge to 14% of the global smartphone market in 2012 — ahead of the iPhone, as well as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones.

In that year, Gartner forecasts Android will actually rank second globally, behind the Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia devices that are highly popular in Europe and many countries outside the U.S. Symbian now runs on about half of all smartphones, but will fall to 39% in 2012, Gartner says.

The Gartner forecast gives Android such an enormous surge in popularity because of a variety of factors, but chiefly because of Google Inc.’s backing of Android and the range of cloud computing functions and related applications that Google will make available in coming years, Ken Dulaney said in an exclusive interview with Computerworld. And because Android and Google operate in an “integrative and open environment, [they] could easily top … the singular Apple,” he said.

The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.

Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.

Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.

Android will have moved up the most from 2009 to 2012, from sixth place to second. BlackBerry will have moved down the most, from second to fifth, while iPhone will remain in third position and Windows Mobile will remain in fourth position, Gartner says.”

I still don’t know perfectly how Gartner does future predictions like Astrologers but I strongly support them because I find a strong logic behind their research.

Smart Phone Apps

Thanks to Apple, Google, and BlackBerry. Whatever competition does we don’t mind but we ourselves equip in providing the latest apps on all platforms.  Probably these guys have now created an economy that may be named as “App Economy” which never existed before.

Organizations are looking at Smart Phone Apps as a great movement and Ad agencies are rejoicing the power of new medium for elevating the Brand experience for their customers in a very personalized way. Every one wants to put their strengths in smart phone apps to showcase their creativity and to help their customers in building much more loyal brands.

Still, I understand one thing, probably after Recession, it’s not only customer satisfaction but customer loyalty has also become a very high priority for all the organizations. The Marketing and Branding heads are breaking their heads to use this new medium.  Some use apps for brand elevation and some use it for mobilizing their Enterprise Applications.

What I could suggest is whether you are looking at any of these apps, we need to prioritize, the usage of our customers. We need to look at the ratio of Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry among our customer’s community and then work on building apps.

Why Smart Phone Apps ?

There has been a huge buzz about using latest technologies for marketing. It was facebook, twitter and now the latest is  Smart Phone. Smart Phones are very handy compared to other technologies and they provide the following benefits with a a very personalized and targeted approach to your customers

• Brand Elevation
• Improves Customer loyalty
• Easy way to promote your promotional offers faster
• On the go mobility to reserve or book
• Improves Customer Satisfaction
• Improves Revenue at low TCO
• Real time data for Customers about the latest happenings

Cnet reports that the number of users who will tap into the App store will be at 100 million by 2013. Just imagine the momentum and let’s grab the opportunity with a well build good looking app that helps in your Brand Elevation.

Why TechJini ?

Whether you need to build only an iPhone App or a BlackBerry or Android App,  TechJini helps you in evaluating your customer base first.

• Global Consulting Company
• Innovation in every aspect of Application Development Life cycle
• More than 25 iPhone Apps in the Apple App Store
• Focused and personalized approach towards each Client
• Experience in working with Mobile OEM’s and Fortune 500 companies
• Quality Process with Zero defect delivery
• Flexible Engagement Models
• 100% Delighted Customers
• More than 60% of annual revenues from repeated business
• More than 100% growth YoY

Contact us for a World class  Smart Phone App and get your idea conceptualized and take a perfect shape in TechJini. Just Email us always zameer@techjini.com

It was a great experience and achievement for us to be competing with the big names in the Industry and we were one of the first companies to begin placements for the 2010 batch ( so we have taken the best talents with us  ). We had the opportunity to make our first Company presentation on Campus in front of 1000 and odd students (it was a combination of excitement and nervousness) . Our presentation lasted for 6minutes and then we had experience sharing followed by answering the queries of the students.

The Interview process was divided into 3 rounds. 1^st Round – Written Test, 2^nd Round – Technical and 3^rd being the HR round. We came up with a list of 45 shortlisted candidates by noon. It was with great joy we called out each name in the huge auditorium which was filled with anticipation and cheering of the people who got selected for the II Round. Since it was not possible to conduct 45 Interviews in the time left we scheduled for 13 interviews the same day and the rest were called to the office on weekends. We received good feedback about our presentation and interview process from the students. I would like to mention the names of our new family members in this blog – Bindushree , Neha Fathima, Savitha, Royce Pinto and Shravya. We are happy to have found the best among the 1000. I would want to thank SJBIT for the well organized event and for the hospitality shown.

We shall conduct Campus Talent Hunt every year to add more smarter and  crowd to the Team of TechJini!!

Many prominent Hotel Groups like Hilton, IHG, Choice Hotels, Best Western, The Peninsula, Four Seasons and many more are looking at mobile apps as a very strategic initiative to increase customer loyalty. Hilton’s app was downloaded 126, 000 times till date.

Why buzz in mobile Space?

• 75 million Blackberry users in the world
• 50 million iPhone users in the world till date and 450,000 iPads sold in 1^st week and growing.
• 172 million Smartphones users in the world with 4% on Android

Smartphones market growing 25% YoY basis

How do we help you to Benefit?

We could develop a customized iPhone or any smart phone app that will initially give your smart phone toting customers basic tools for booking and managing reservations. Expect to find:

• Search and book hotels
• GPS functionality to find nearby hotels
• ability to see hotel photos and facilities
• custom directions using the iPhone’s GPS
• click-to-call front desk for each hotel
• automatic use of any membership Club account information to speed bookings
• redeem loyalty points for stays
• view point balances, level, etc…
• view and cancel upcoming reservations
• enroll in the program, if you’re not a member
• customize billing preferences and room/rate preferences
• Customer could customize his requirements even before arrival into the hotel.
• see special offers for loyalty members

Why iPhone App for Hotels?

There has been a huge buzz about using latest technologies for marketing. It was facebook, twitter and now the latest is iPhone. iPhone is very handy compared to other technologies and it provides the following benefits with a a very personalized and targeted approach to your customers

• Brand Elevation
• Improves Customer loyalty
• Easy way to promote your promotional offers faster
• On the go mobility to reserve
• Improves Customer Satisfaction
• Improves Revenue at low TCO
• Real time data for Customers about the latest happenings

Cnet reports that the number of users who will tap into the App store will be at 100 million by 2013. Just imagine the momentum and let’s grab the opportunity with a well build good looking app that helps in your Brand Elevation.

ROI on Smart Phone Apps for Hotels

The main driver behind the increased usage of mobile apps by Hotel customers is ” Convenience”. It is said that many of the customers are booking rooms on the fly. Given below are some stats that could help you i evaluating the ROI quotient for Smart Phone Apps.

• Mariott Hotels mobile initiative has generated nearly $ 2 million in gross revenuebetween its Aug, 2008 launch and end of the year. Courtesy Ad Age.com
• Omni Hotels mobile site traffic has grown by 85 % in the past six months and mobile is seeing a conversion rate of 25% said Kerry Kennedy, the hotel’s e-Commerce Director.That means one in every four people who visit the chain’s app end up booking a room.
• Mr. La Rose of Hilton told that wireless bookings have generated roughly $ 1.4 million dollars in an average 100 day period.
• Many Hotels have improved ROI of more than 25% per year.
• Mobile bookings have improved to nearly 85% without any promotions of mobile apps.

By looking at the above stats , we could at least safely consider that it is going to wow the customers and when we get the ROI in 2-3 years it is going to wow the management. As a customer focused industry, we need to bring that convenience and comfort to customers which in turn improves Sales.

Why TechJini ?

• Global Consulting Company
• Innovation in every aspect of Application Development Life cycle
• More than 25 iPhone Apps in the Apple App Store
• Focused and personalized approach towards each Client
• Experience in working with Mobile OEM’s and Fortune 500 companies
• Quality Process – Zero defect delivery
• Flexible Engagement Models
• 100% Delighted Customers
• More than 60% of annual revenues from repeated business
• More than 100% growth YoY

2) CodeIgniter project set up time is very less compared to symfony.

3) CodeIgniter works well for something quick and small, symfony hits when it comes for complicated projects.

4) As CodeIgniter does not accept arguments via the command line, you can not call a specific controller or function, a work around should be adopted but it’s not the case with symfony as it provides a concept called task.

5) CodeIgniter does not have any code generators like symfony which completely rocks symfony.

6) Working with fixtures makes life easier in symfony during development phasem, this is missing in codeIgniter again a run  around should be done.

7) Symfony allows to view the queries fired through development environment but codeIgniter has no such option.

Last weekend we went to The Rappa -An Island Eco Resort located 210 kms away from Bangalore near Hassan. We left Bangalore on the 31^st of October at 7.15am, families were also invited. The bus took the NICE Road till Magadi and we stopped at Kunigal for Breakfast. We played Dumb Charades, Cards, Housie and Antakshari during the journey. We were only few kms away from Rappa when we had to stop our bus as the road ahead was blocked due to temple inauguration in the village. We were invited to join in the festivities as it would take 2 hours to clear the road ……so we decided to do the 30 minutes walk in the afternoon sun accompanied by the cool breeze from the river to reach Rappa. We were welcomed by 3 lovely dogs -Shunti(Pomeranian), Brownie(Golden Retriever) , Shadow(Basset Hound) and another surprise awaiting us was Jack, a mighty horse which was brought to Rappa a month ago. We were so excited to check out our accommodations which were Machans, Tree houses and Swiss Tents spread beside the river. After the walk, we had all worked out a good appetite and so we enjoyed the lunch.

Nobody wanted to rest so we started with the games. We had four teams for each game which were divided earlier and each team came up with team names like Jinis, Shakalaka boom boom , Rainbow, TechJini Warriors, Parasites and Halloween. Yes, Amal we haven’t sensored ‘Shakalaka boom boom’ from being mentioned in this blog

We started with Lagori which was good fun and The Rainbow team won the game….. of course there were lot of fights which added to the fun. It was not tiring enough for few so we decided to play Cricket followed by Foot ball. I guess too much work and no play gave everyone too much energy we didn’t even want to take the tea break. The Sun was setting by then and we were surrounded by good music, chill breeze and everybody settled down on the sand around the campfire under the dark sky, full moon and stars shining bright (which we hardly get to see here due to city light). After soaking into the lovely atmosphere everybody started dancing and singing along with the music. We had hot hot bajjis and chicken kebab served during the campfire. The dancing did not stop till the fire went off and we had dinner around 12. People at Rappa had planned a Night trek for us. We drove 20 kms from Rappa to reach the point where we had to begin the climb to the top of the hill. We started the climb accompanied by the Shunti, Shadow and Brown with the help of Moon Light. There is a temple on top which is opened once a week to worship God. The view from atop was spectacular (Should be clear and better in day light) . We could see other range of hills, forest and Tipu’s Fort below. It was quiet, dark and very cold on top. We sat there, enjoyed the view and listened to the stories of Tipu Sultan and his secret underground path told to us by our Trek Guide(Nagesh). And yes how can I forgot Rohit and Santosh have lost their 4 hours of memory due to too much mixing of water and juice

We came back to Rappa at 4am to catch up on some sleep and were up by 6.30 to do Kayaking. The river is wide and long as it is a place were two rivers meet and there is an island in the middle of the river. Most of us went rowing till the island and some went swimming in the deep waters.

We had a good breakfast of bread, jam, butter, omelet , poori, saagu, orange juice,tea and coffee. We went by the river side to play team building games to encourage bonding among each other. Each team had 6 members in this game and one person was blindfolded. The blindfolded person would lead the line and rest stand behind to pass on the instructions given from the last person. The twist in the game was that no member was allowed to speak. Instructions were to be passed on only through actions. There was a start line and finish line and on the way three objects were placed. The blindfolded person had to pick up these objects and then move ahead to the finish line. The Rainbow team won this game as well. The second game we played was ‘Brick Game’. There were 6 members in each team and were given 4 bricks. Three people had to step only on the bricks and three would move the bricks to make sure those on bricks are moving ahead towards the finish line without stepping on the ground.

We were physically getting tired and people started complaining about body pain so the next game we played was ‘Create an Ad’ where each team had to Create an Ad on the given product , name the product and enact. The products given were Baby Nappies, Glue, Designer Saree, Hair Growth Cream, Fat losing Belt, Detergent Powder and Mouth Freshener. This was real fun and told us a lot about people’s personal life like how is Akshi as a wife, Amit Singh as a husband and how was Rohit’s childhood

It was lunch time by then and we had to check- out after lunch so we packed our bags had lunch and left Rappa half hearted.

Well, lets get this straight, you are NOT an iPhone developer if:

• you have no idea why you write “nonatomic” and “retain” in all properties. And you’ve never tried to find out.
• you cannot tell the difference between release and autorelease
• you hear the terms “main run loop” or “event loop” for the first time during the interview
• you think all classes are either views or controllers
• you have never written code for “applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning” and “didReceiveMemoryWarning”
• you do not know if you should release objects you created by through “copy” or “mutableCopy”
• the terms build configurations and provisioning profiles do not ring a bell
• you have never even seen the iPhone HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) document
• you think both “viewDidLoad” and “loadView” are same methods
• you have never used breakpoints and the debugger
• you have never used the Instruments Application to monitor memory or network usage
• you do not know how to read crash logs or how to add symbols to crash logs
• even after programming for iPhone, you do not know about the Model-View-Controller pattern or the delegate pattern

And in case you are just starting off with iPhone programming, it would be wise to know the basics of both objective-C and the iPhone SDK. Don’t skip reading at least the following:

• iPhone 101
• Objective-C programming language guide
• iPhone Application Programming Guide
• View Controller Programming Guide for iPhone OS

I mostly use tabs to remind me of important emails. One, they are always in front and second when I restart Thunderbird I don’t have to look for them again as Thunderbird remembers/maintains last open tabs. Ofcourse tabs are also very helpful in keeping all open windows clean.
New Lightning addon works well with google calendar. Very helpful when sharing different calendars with different people. It synchs well and also gives reminders.

But thats not what excited me enough to write this article I upgrade to b4 pre today and they have included Gloda search engine based search and conversations. Earlier it was available as an add on and I tried this earlier with b2 but it didn’t work.

Thunderbird 2 has per folder indexing which is not so helpful. You will have several folders and then your replies going into sent items. So what is needed is a tool to search across all folders. Also several times you need to read full conversations which is very very difficult right now. Thunderbird 3 has this powerful search engine ‘Gloda’ which search across all the folders and presents them either as a list or as conversations. WOW!! could it get better?

Now you can search your entire mailbox, rss feeds etc from single place and that too with lot of intelligent options. The result is also displayed very nicely. You have several filters to further refine search/conversations.

We organized for distributing snacks, gifts (thanks to Akshi,Arun and Santosh) and planned to conduct games for the children. Another objective of the visit was to identify long term needs of the children and the Ashram so that we could help them in their development and not just provide them with momentary happiness.

As some of the team members were caught up at work (we missed you all) only 10 of us visited the Ashram. We reached the Ashram late in the afternoon and were glad to see that the children were back from school. The Ashram is an old house which needs infrastructural development (like painting, lighting, modern amenities) and accommodates 60 kids at present . There is a play area , garden with fruit bearing trees, washing area for the children and a friendly Dog named Belli  (means silver in English). We met Parvathamma (blind lady) who runs the Ashram and spent time talking to kids about their School and how they spend time in the Ashram. We then distributed snacks, gifts and asked every child to write a wish list. The children were welcoming and disciplined. Majority of the children were able to understand English hence we  were able to communicate with little difficulty.

It felt nice to bring a smile on the face of the children. We plan to sponsor education, provide uniforms for the children in future (during June-July) and get involved in the development of the Ashram.

As the children had to do their home work we could not conduct games  but we did play in the swing, see-saw, slide!!!!