PointAbout’s Dan Klaussen joined a crew of heavy hitters on a panel that focused on the intersection of mobile applications and government agencies. Alongside Dan on the panel were Shea Felix (the United States Postal Service’s Manager of Online Development), Abdul Shaikh (Challenge Manager at the National Cancer Institute), and Katie Lewis (Interactive Producer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center). We’ve embedded the first half of the panel discussion below. In it you can hear war stories from Dan and the others about some of the apps and mobile products they’ve fought through a barrage of red tape to bring to market. The cliffhanger? How to deal with 508 compliance regulations in creating apps and websites for government agencies. Check back soon for the 2nd half of the panel discussion.

– Turning our office into an art gallery. We, or rather those of us that weren’t nose deep in designing/developing apps for our clients, spent most of the first week of November prepping for our DC Week Drink in the #MobileRevolution party. If you didn’t catch it live, check out the photo album on Facebook to see some more of the artwork that was on display courtesy of DC’s own Glenn Fry, Wesley Clark, Marta Perez-Garcia, and Banksy. Yes, Banksy.

- Welcoming a crop of new ballers to the PointAbout team. What does that entail? Picture day, website bios galore, some fresh new 2-screen setups, and a general sense of relief to have a few more partners-in-crime that eat, drink, and sleep (but only after the job is done) mobile applications.

- Celebrating Thanksgiving as a family/company before going our separate ways to gorge ourselves with our respective families. We’ll spare you the list, but we have a lot to be thankful for in 2011. Like the fact that Christmas is right around the corner!

- Making “Day in the Life…” videos. A slew of us put together video shorts for the DC Week party that were meant to answer the age-old question so eloquently summed up by Bob Slydell in “Office Space”: “What would ya say…ya do here?”. Because inquiring minds, potential clients, and our parents/grandparents all want to know. The first such video to hit the blog comes from the one and only Colin Hart, our Senior User Experience & Visual Designer. If you’ve ever wondered what the pre-development phase of mobile application development looks like, take two minutes and eight seconds out of your day to feast your eyes on the below.

The list is comprised of private technology companies that earned more than $500,000 in 2010. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth from 2008 to 2010. Among the other notable companies on the list are mobile ad provider Tapjoy, real-time media ad provider TubeMogul, and SEO software provider SEOmoz.

The honor caps a banner year for Three Pillar Global. On top of acquisitions of two stellar companies (PointAbout and BrickRed), Three Pillar Global was named to the Inc. 500 list for the second consecutive year in August. Congratulations again to all our colleagues here and abroad on being named to the Tech 200 List!

It matters because millions upon millions of smartphones and tablets are being sold every year, which opens up entirely new economies of scale and opportunities to create, refine, and improve business processes. Mobile devices will increasingly be the gateway through which people conduct business, access and create content, and otherwise communicate in a digital world. So, that’s why they matter in the general sense. Why does it matter which smartphone is in your pocket?

For starters, it matters because iPhones and Androids (and Blackberries and Windows Phone 7) run different operating systems. Different operating systems require different bundles of software to create products (read: apps) that run on both platforms. So unless you’re talking about a mobile website or a web app, which for the sake of this blog post we are not, one of the first and most important questions companies developing mobile apps face is: “Do we need to develop apps for iOS, Android, neither, or both?”

With all the numbers floating around out there (Apple sold 4 million iPhones the first weekend the iPhone 4S was on sale, Android should be seeing 900,000 activations a day by now) and all the various claims being made to market share supremacy (Apple claims 43% market share in the mobile device market, which presumably includes iPads and iPods, whereas comScore’s August numbers show Android controlling 43% of the smartphone market to Apple’s 27%) we thought we’d do a little “market research” into a small but very knowledgeable subset of the market – PointAbout employees I could corral into answering that question.

The results? Fifty percent use an Android as their primary device, 43% use an iPhone as their main device, and 7% use Windows Phone 7.

We don’t have a lot to add to the fitting tributes and richly-deserved praise that have been flowing in from all corners of the globe, other than to say it makes us feel very small in comparison to contemplate the effect one man and one company can have on people and businesses all over the world. Aside from the obvious industry of personal computing, the music, movie, publishing, transportation, and education industries are among the many that will never be the same thanks to Steve Jobs. The world certainly won’t be the same without him.

Of all the articles I’ve read and slideshows, videos, and pictures I’ve looked over since news of his death broke, two have stood out to me. The first is an Apple commercial called “Think Different” that was narrated by Jobs but never aired. It might as well be called “Here’s to the Crazy Ones.” That’s the catch-line, and Jobs narrates in part, “You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them…about the only thing you can’t do is ignore them…Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world…are the ones who do.”

The second is the commencement speech Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005, which is an autobiographical story about “connecting the dots” of life, and how it can only be done in retrospect. It shows a man who is bright, funny, philosophical, and acutely aware of his own mortality. If you don’t have 15 minutes to watch the video, you really should read the full text here.

Mango is Microsoft’s updated operating system for its line of Windows Phone 7 devices. As Joe Belfiore, Windows Phone Corporate VP, discusses in the video below, one of the three main tenets of the updated OS is “a smarter approach to apps.” Edward Baig at USA Today gives the Mango update (and Windows Phone 7 as a whole) high marks for social networking components, apps, search, and XBox integration in his review of the recently-released update. Whether the new and improved user experience will lead to a larger slice of market share for Microsoft is the $64,000 question. With the iPhone 5 set to debut in the very near future, things don’t figure to be getting any easier in that regard.

Video of what’s rumored to be Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich in the wild leaked earlier today (embedded below), setting the interweb on fire with speculation about whether the video was real. Regardless of whether the video is authentic, here’s what we know from the Android Developers blog about Ice Cream Sandwich: it’s designed to allow developers to write one app capable of running on Android phones and tablets. AppleInsider doesn’t think it will help Android tablets take on the iPad, and lots of people seem to think the new Amazon tablets chop Ice Cream Sandwich and other Android tablets off at the knees.

As for iOS 5.0, we’ll give Apple a pass for not naming their latest OS after a food since the entire company is. Apple’s direct integration of Twitter into iOS 5.0 has gotten a ton of press. If you haven’t seen enough videos already for one day, here’s a link to Apple’s rundown on what exactly to expect in iOS 5.0.

The app, which is currently only available on the Samsung Nexus S 4G, will initially be rolled out en masse in San Francisco and New York. PCWorld’s Megan Geuss took Google Wallet for a test drive yesterday in San Francisco with mixed results.

While we’re not exactly struggling to find ways to part with greenbacks these days, the notion of leaving our wallet at home and breezing through the checkout line at Whole Foods or the Social Safeway with merely a tap of the phone is pretty appealing. A bevy of major credit card companies – Citi, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and Visa – are already on board as partners, which makes sense since credit card companies have a vested interest in making it faster and easier for consumers to spend money.

Questions are still swirling over whether the iPhone 5 will be NFC-enabled when it hits stores later this fall. Sources quoted in a New York Times article last week say it’s still unknown whether consumers will have to wait for the iPhone 6 to get an NFC-enabled device from Apple. The article suggests that whenever that time comes, Apple will have a giant advantage over competitors like Google and Microsoft because they already have 200 million credit cards on file via iTunes. If that doesn’t happen until the iPhone 6, however, Google will have plenty of runway to make in-roads with Google Wallet, assuming consumers are actually “ready” for mobile wallets.

If you come here often, you know we here at PointAbout have been keeping a close eye on NFC and “mobile wallets” for some time now. You can also check out PointAbout’s whitepaper on NFC that covers the basics of the technology and gives some perspective on its past, present, and future.

User experience is one of the most important aspects of designing for mobile, possibly more than for the web. The real estate offered by mobile devices is extremely limited in comparison to that of traditional websites; therefore careful consideration for the user’s overall experience is a must.

UX is a multi-disciplinary field, encompassing sociology, psychology, graphic design, anthropology, and computer science, just to name a few. It refers to an individual’s feelings, attitude, perception, and thoughts about or toward a product or system. A loose definition of UX design is the creation of models or products that affect one’s experience or interaction with a product or system.

Due to the many different offshoots of UX design, companies should focus on finding designers with varied skillsets. After all, UX designers are visionaries, taking the ideas of clients and transforming them into something tangible, something live. They should be intimately knowledgeable in both interaction and the visual specifications as required by each (mobile) vendor.

Two of our primary UX designers have just that. Olga Howard, a seasoned UX consultant, primarily focuses on the “psychological” facet of UX design. She develops user stories and scenarios, personas, and written specifications, along with some visual design. On the other hand, PointAbout’s Colin Hart concentrates mostly on visual design, as well as interaction design and the app’s task flow. In other words, he creates the actual experience the user will have. He creates visual deliverables such as, but not limited to storyboards, mockups, and wireframes, all of which drive the end user’s overall experience.

Wireframe Example
To hear Colin speak, he is drawn to the interaction side of UX. “I like being able to hand over something tangible to a client, turning their ideas and visions into something they can visually see, hold and take with them. Being able to create an experience for the target users is awesome!” He believes UX design is an often forgotten component of mobile app design. “Anyone can make a mediocre app, but it’s important to take design a step further by keeping the end user in mind.”

According to the Bloomberg article on the purchase, each store will be equipped with 25 iPhones that will replace scanners that date back to the early 1990s. Ah, the 90s. Hammer pants, Vanilla Ice, grunge, land lines…those were the days. Wayne Kernochan at Enterprise Apps Today published an article this week about the future of mobile business intelligence that’s at least tangentially related to the journey on which Lowe’s is about to embark. It’s a good read and definitely worth taking five minutes out of your day to peruse if you’re involved in mobile strategy on a business level.

One of the head-scratchers, as Kernochan calls them, facing any company looking to wed mobile devices and business intelligence data like sales transactions is: “What’s the use case? Is it sales-type customer interaction, with just-in-time price comparisons and local inventory search? Is it global marketing, with the executive travelling light and always in touch with local markets and corporate financials? Is it the manufacturing process, with supply-chain analytics in the middle of the factory floor or the warehouse?…What’s the killer app?”

In other words, when you have a device like an iPhone (or an iPad or a laptop for that matter) that’s capable of doing juuuust about anything, how do you hone in on what exactly it can and should do for you? For a company like Lowe’s, at least one of the answers was, “Allow our workers to process purchases anywhere in the store.”

What can mobile do for you? We’re getting to the point where the answer is “Pretty much whatever you want it to.” As long as you can afford 42,000 iPhones, of course.

PointAbout’s President, Pete Johnson (Happy Birthday!), kicked the event off by presenting Olga Howard (Lead UX Designer at Three Pillar Global), who shared her wealth of expertise and experience on mobile UX design. Wilkey Wong, a Tobii Training and Researcher Manager, took the stage after Olga and discussed how usability testing using eye-tracking devices can be a valuable supplemental method of testing mobile apps.

We’d like to send a big “Thank You” to everyone who came out in the pouring rain for MoBeta! Special thanks also to Busboys and Poets, which once again provided the space for our meetup, and saxophonist Robert “BJ” Simmons III for his musical treats. Be sure to join the MoBeta Linkedin group for details on MoBeta III, pictures and video from MoBeta II, and much more!