Did you know that 91% of IoT developers use open source technology in their projects? Our latest Premium report in the IoT series –Open source in the Internet of Things -not only confirms the figure but also sheds light to a number of tools and strategies that developers employ for open source, open hardware and open data. The Open Source in IoT report provides developer program managers with objective data-backed insights on the use of open source technology by IoT developers and helps them to manage the use of open source in their projects. Some of the key questions that this report answers include: How mainstream is open source in the Internet of Things? Is it just for hobbyists and idealists, or is there more to it than that? Which developer demographics use open source and why? How can I make sense of the hundreds of open source, open hardware, and open data licenses that are out there? Should your project be open or closed? How can you use open source to achieve commercial success? The data in this report comes from our 10th edition Developer Economics survey (Q4 2015). 3,700 Internet of Things developers answered questions about their use of and attitude towards open source technology. To give you an idea of the findings of the IoT report we have prepared an infographic depicting some of the key findings. Have a look at some of the most interesting trends that have been extracted from the report and give a very  representative outline of the the mindset of IoT developers and their contribution to the open source community  : #opensourcecode #iot #internetofthings #opensource #softwareopensource #IoTdeveloper

We recently published a report showing that e-commerce doubled in popularity as a business model for Internet of Things (see Commerce of Things report for details). But what does an ecommerce business model really mean in the case of Internet of Things? Broadly speaking, a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. We add to that the question of how an organization creates a sustainable competitive advantage (a barrier to entry that is difficult to replicate by competitors). It’s simpler than it sounds. Let’s take Oral-B, a toothbrush maker, as an example. (This example works well in our strategy workshops.) A toothbrush maker creates value by improving dental health. The value is delivered through, well, a toothbrush. The value is captured by sales of toothbrushes through retail channels. Ability to put the product in front of as many shopper as possible is of paramount importance. Therefore, access to the retail shelf-space becomes the key competitive advantage. Can we use technology to make a better toothbrush? Of course! Let’s make a Bluetooth-connected toothbrush that comes together with a smartphone app. Now the “smart” toothbrush helps Oral-B do a better job in maintaining dental health by “focusing, tracking, motivating and sensing” (whatever that may mean). The toothbrush is smarter, but the business model isn’t. The connected product supposedly creates more value for consumers, but all the other elements of the business model remain the same. The value is still delivered through a toothbrush device, captured by the sales through retail channels, and access to the retail shelf-space is still the key competitive advantage. Not much business model innovation here. What’s next?… Well, let’s make an open toothbrush! Developers will use a Software Development Kit (SDK) of the open toothbrush to make apps that extend the product. Sceptics, of course, will ask “who the heck needs developers to extend the toothbrush?” But mothers of young kids will see a sea of opportunity here: Someone can make a game rewarding kids for good job in teeth brushing and save the mom the need to “hover over their kids telling them that a couple of brushes is not good enough” (actual quote from a Slack conversation). Now we are making progress with innovating on the business model, too. Not only do developers improve in value creation, but value is delivered through apps working in concert with the connected toothbrush. Plus, the developer ecosystem formed around our developer program creates competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate. However, we still have to make money by one-time sales of the “smart” toothbrush through retail channels. (See “5 Ways Developers Can Extend Your Business Model” for deeper discussion on the role developers in business model innovation.) Can we take the business model even further? Meet Beam Dental. The Ohio-based company offers a connected toothbrush that comes together with dental insurance and a subscription for the supply of floss, toothpaste, and brush heads—all delivered to your doorstep every 3 months. In fact, the offering is a recurring service that makes money outside the “toothbrush market” going beyond one-time product sales. The toothbrush itself is part of the customer acquisition costs for the much more lucrative dental insurance and dental consumables market. Beam completely reimagines the business model of a “connected toothbrush”. The value creation is much more comprehensive and includes all aspects of the dental health. Value is delivered through insurance and re-supply service. Value is captured through making money in insurance and consumables businesses. The toothbrush and the app are “top of the funnel” consumer touch points allowing Beam to acquire new users and interact with their customers. Notably, Beam doesn’t really compete with toothbrush makers like Oral-B. Instead, the company competes in the dental insurance market, where it has decisive competitive advantage in the form of consumer data collected by the toothbrush and the app. This data helps the company to optimise its insurance premiums and offer insurance at prices that are difficult to match for the traditional insurance companies. As simple as they may sound, the series of toothbrush examples shows that: Technology (software, connectivity or data), when viewed as a feature of a product, is hardly a game changer for the product maker. Opening the product to the external innovation by developers can create competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate. E-commerce companies see devices not as source of profits, but as a part of the customer acquisition costs, serving as a vehicle for customer acquisition and engagement. (Amazon Echo or Xiaomi phones are not much different in this respect.) You can replace the toothbrush with almost any everyday object to see how adding connectivity, developers and data can help reimagine its business model. (See this video on understanding developers.) — Michael #customeracquisition #ecommerce #iotdeveloperprograms #toothbrush

Integrated Development Environments have evolved to solve every problem a developer can have, but in recent years we’ve seen a scaling back of capabilities as developers embrace more-basic options. At VisionMobile our latest developer survey is (amongst other things) trying to find out why, though we do have some ideas on the subject. When I first programmed a computer I was lambasted, and very nearly ejected from the school computer club, for not having written my program out on paper before arrival. Computer time was too precious to spend composing lines of code, minutes at the keyboard should be spent entering pre-written programs; not making them up as one went along. Needless to say that was a very long time ago, and these days program composition is done using a screen (or several) with working code being thrown together in what looks suspiciously like a process of trial-and-error. The modern IDE won’t let a compiler crash for want of a missing semicolon, or the use of the Queen’s English (“colour”? Really? ). A modern IDE will spot variables using the wrong case, and APIs which haven’t been imported, reducing the development time and making life easier for the developer – but, if modern IDEs are so great, why do so many developers choose not to use them? Vi, Emacs, Notepad++, and Sublime, all make regular appearances in developer toolkits, despite the existence of fully-featured alternatives. You might be a savant mnemonic who’s only outlets are Street Fighter II and programming in Vi, but for most humans a menu structure and “compile” button are essentials. Microsoft’s Visual Studio is still the standard by which others are measured, though at $499 it’s not the cheapest option which may put some people off. Eclipse provides almost as much utility for a lot less money (none at all), and Visual Studio Code (Microsoft’s free code editor) is now at version 1, and also free. A licence for Sublime Text, on the other hand, will cost you $70 – so the choice is not really about money. We know that [tweetable]developers increasingly work across platforms, languages, and sectors[/tweetable], and this may provide an answer. Visual Studio can do it all, creating applications for mobile devices, embedded technology, and cloudy servers, but so can Notepad++, and with less effort, and better support. Take the support site for the Adafruit Trinket (a $7 prototyping board), which provides a step-by-step guide to creating applications using the Arduino IDE, so when I want to program a Trinket then that’s what I use. I’m sure that I could use Visual Studio, and it would be pretty and probably reduce my development time, but it would take effort to get it configured and I don’t spend enough time programming the Trinket to make it worthwhile. Similarly – if I’m knocking out some Python I’ll boot up IDLE, and when I need a bit of HTML I’ll use Notepad++. These are not the best tools available, but they are the default tools and will work with every library, plugin, and extension available. If I programmed Python every day then I’d find a better tool (or perhaps a better job), but I’m too lazy to muck about getting a proper IDE configured and will make do with what’s available. Thanks to a dot.com development career I’ve no time for debuggers or unit testing (testing is what users are for) which makes these bare-bones tools ideal for me, but what we at VisionMobile would like to know is why you choose one IDE over another, and how many you’re using on a daily basis. When you complete our 11th Developer Economics survey you won’t just be asked which IDE you like to use, but also what you use it for, and why you like to use it. We’ll break down the data, and share information on who is using what, and why. We’re not just collecting data on how developers create software, we’re collecting data on how developers would like to create software, and what stands in their way, so if you have 12 minutes to spare then do join us in finding out. #developersurvey #ide #integrateddeveloperenvironment #onlinesurvey

Or why the new API evangelists might not even need to code Some years ago APIs were clearly built and branded for developers. The marketing playbook of an API first company was straightforward: sponsor developer events and send developer evangelists around the world to attend hackathons and conferences. But the market is maturing and what was considered as products for developers only now appeals to many more profiles. [tweetable]APIs are starting to fill the toolboxes of many marketing, sales and support teams[/tweetable]. The line between pure API and pure SaaS product is blurring and this trend will accelerate and give birth to great companies. First lets see what are the consequences at the product and distribution levels. Product: more touchpoints with more users The most obvious evolution in term of product is how users can interact with APIs: before it was mainly through a terminal or an IDE (a.k.a a code editor, where developers write code) and now it’s also through platform plugins, widgets, messaging bots and drag and drop interfaces, which are democratizing the way we use APIs. Let me take some examples to illustrate it. Clearbit Clearbit is probably the best example of this new generation of API startups which are built to ride this trend. It offers a classic API for developers but also many platform plugins and widgets ready to use “out of the box” for SalesForce, Slack, Google Spreadsheet, Gmail, Marketo, close.io etc… without touching a line of code. In the same category Email Hunter is also an interesting example of an API first startup with a great Google Chrome extension. Timekit Timekit is an availability & scheduling API which lets you build real-time booking solutions without reinventing the wheel. Again, they offer a classic API for developers but also a ustomizable widget that anybody can use to integrate a booking calendar on their website. Algolia Algolia is well known for its kickass developer API (we’re proud investors) but they also recently launched DocSearch, which lets you add search to your documentation without having to dig in their API at all (you share the url of your documentation, they crawl the pages and create your search index automatically). Tray.io Tray.io is an integration platform for connecting the tools you use every day. It’s a good example of a well designed drag and drop interface that you use to connect tools together. I believe that we’ll see more and more of these interfaces to configure API products. I can totally imagine such an interface for Algolia where you drag’n drop the different elements of a page you want to index on a side bar that you order (to setup fields priority), then the pages are automatically crawled and your search widget is created. Distribution: non developers are the new API evangelists We’ve just seen how the products are impacted but the changes are obviously going beyond product. This democratization also impacts how these startups market their API and acquire customers. I’ve personally witnessed several startups adopting Clearbit after it was initially brought by the sales or marketing team and not by the dev team. API marketing / acquisition will not only be about sponsoring hackathons and sending developer evangelists to conferences but also about providing value to non developers and leverage them as internal evangelists. It’s kind of funny to think that marketers and sales can bring APIs in their companies without the approval of developers first (what the developers actually do with the IT department :-)). But make no mistake, these [tweetable]startups need to provide an awesome API to convince developers to really close the loop[/tweetable]. Developers are of course still at the heart of these products. Is it a real trend or fad? I believe this is a real trend. I think we’ll see an increasing number of this new breed of API startups for which the line between pure API and SaaS is blurring. This trend is driven by several factors. The traditional SaaS product model has limitations In many software categories (Marketing, Sales, Support etc…) there is no shortage of SaaS. And plenty are really good. But at the same time I’m still hearing many people complaining that SaaS X or Y is cool but does not fulfill all their needs and that they are looking for a better solution blablabla. The truth is that traditional SaaS products cannot answer 100% of the needs of every company. This is a compromise inherent to a product model where the features are packaged and organized the same way for every customer (very little product customization). If a SaaS can cover 80% of your needs it’s already huge. The 20% of “frustration” left are due to the fact that every company is different so you need a bit of customization. And this new breed of APIs are perfect to to cover these 20%. This is exactly what happens with Clearbit. Most of the startups that I know and which are using it didn’t replace all their sales and contact management tools with Clearbit. They just leverage the flexibility of its API and widgets to solve the 20% of uncovered needs or to enhance the products they already use. And this approach would be interesting for many more categories. I cannot wait to see the Clearbit of customer support (please drop me an email if you see that clement@pointninecap.com). We’re reaching a critical mass of B2B platforms SalesForce, Google Gmail — Spreadsheets — Docs and Analytics, Slack, Marketo… the number of mature B2B platforms is only increasing and this is great for the democratization of APIs at several levels: As a delegated UI. APIs can reach non developer users where they already are and on interfaces with which they are already familiar. As a distribution channel. Promoting and marketing API widgets on these platforms will be key to reach more customers. What’s next? My 2 cents: We’ll see more of this new breed of APIs emerge. We’ll see more pure developer APIs expand their targets to non developers. Several software categories are craving for this approach (like Support, Analytics, Marketing). As usual don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments or to send me an email at clement@pointninecap.com, especially if you are an API startup 🙂 The post was originally posted on Medium.com –Clement Vouilon Clement Vouillon senior research analyst at point Nine Capital

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of Messenger vs Skype vs Slack vs Telegram? Conversational UI and messaging bots are becoming one of the defining tech trends of 2016. The idea of mobile messaging as a B2B2C channel has been proved in China by hugely popular Tencent’s Weixin/WeChat messaging platform. Messaging dominates time people spend with their phones. Why not use messaging to connect users and businesses? This approach is being imported to The West by Facebook, Telegram, Kik, and now Microsoft, all competing for the leadership of the post-app era. The lessons learned from the iOS and Android platform wars can help us see future winners in the brewing battle of messaging platforms. [tweetable]The mobile platform war was won by the halo effect between users and 3rd party developers[/tweetable]. Users attract developers. Developer create apps. Apps attract more users, which attract more developers. A very similar dynamic is taking hold in messaging platforms now. Back in 2011, when mobile app platforms were very new, we created a 5-ingredient framework to help our clients understand why iOS and Android are becoming so powerful so fast and why they soon to become a duopoly. The framework stood the test of time helping us predict the duopoly of iOS and Android, the fate of HTML5, and the demise of Nokia and Windows Phone. I find the tried and tested 5-ingredient framework very useful for making sense of the emerging landscape of messaging platforms. Successful computing platforms like iOS or Android have 5 key ingredients: Software foundations: a rich set of APIs with managed fragmentation and a toolset for creating apps and services A community of developers writing to the same set of APIs to spur innovation and cater to diverse use cases Distribution (reach) to millions of user across multiple devices A means of monetization, such as payments or ads A means of retailing content (discovery, promotion, recommendations) Platform owners (e.g. Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) control their ecosystems of users and developers by means of two control points. First, [tweetable]platform owners control content creation by locking developers into a proprietary API[/tweetable]. Second, platform owners control content distribution by gating how apps are discovered by and distributed to end users. The same exact thinking applies to messaging platforms: The winners and losers in messaging wars will be defined by the strength of the halo effect between users and bot developers, and The owners of the messaging platforms will battle for rights over bot creation and bot distribution control points. The 5-ingredient framework helps to see the relative strengths and weaknesses of Messenger, Skype, Kik, Telegram and Slack platforms, as well as where these companies may put their efforts next. For simplicity, I’ll keep LINE and Amazon Alexa outside the picture for the time being. So far the focus of Western messaging platforms was clearly on bootstrapping their developer ecosystems. This begins with publishing an open API, but the key to success is in creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around this API. Slack and Telegram are in the lead today. Facebook and Microsoft will intensify their developer outreach efforts following their API announcements. At VisionMobile we are measuring how Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, Telegram, Kik and others are successful in attracting developer attention in the upcoming 11th edition of our Developer Experience Tracker survey. As the messaging ecosystem matures, the focus will shift to distribution, monetisation, and retailing of business accounts and bots. WeChat is already at this phase with their almost 700M monthly active users, the popular Tenpay payment network and widespread use of QR codes in China. WeChat QR codes are used to discover and register for updates from WeChat official accounts. Facebook Messenger looks the strongest contender for the leader of Western messaging platforms, with 800M monthly active users, integration with Facebook Payments, and the expected announcement of a “bot store” at the F8 2016 conference on April 12. Microsoft made an impressive set of announcements about opening Skype to developers, the Bot Framework, and integration with Cortana’s AI capabilities, during their Build conference in March 2016. At the same time, Skype will need a credible payment solution to compete with Messenger in the consumer market in the long run. Telegram was an early leader of the Western messaging bot space introducing its Bot Platform in June 2015. The platform gained substantial traction with developers who created thousands messaging bots for the platform since then. Many of these bots are mere experiments and the lack of an official “bot store” reminds me of the early days of Palm OS developer ecosystem. It’s difficult to see how Telegram can escape its niche status given Facebook and Microsoft are opening their messaging platforms for developers. It’s still very early days of the post-app era. Many questions remain. Will Apple, Snapchat, Viber or even Google join the game? Which messaging platforms will gain the most developer traction? Will discovery and recommendations of bots be done through a “bot store” or some other mechanism? What new use cases will stick across ecommerce, customer support and entertainment? We will continue following this exciting space in our developer surveys and in our analysis of the messaging platform landscape. Stay tuned for the results of our first-ever bot developer survey coming with our upcoming Developer Experience Tracker. — Michael

That might sound odd, but it’s one of many conclusions draw from our biannual study, and presented in our (free) State of the Developer Nation report. The report draws on data from our most recent survey of those working in software, which reached nearly 22,000 respondents, and found that [tweetable]software developers have less experience than they did a year ago[/tweetable]. Not individually of course; there’s no memory loss involved here, but the developer community is growing, and new programmers inevitably bring down the average level of experience, and that has serious implications for the future of the industry. If we take mobile developers, who are typical, we can see that right now 40% of them have been developing software for more than six years, but a year ago that proportion was 43%. Conversely, at the other end of the spectrum we have 17% of developers with less than a year under their belt, up from 14% this time last year. That pattern is repeated across all sectors, even IoT (which is so nascent it often bucks the trends). While a good proportion of software developers have built up their skills over time we are going to have to adjust to a world where more software is being created by developers with less hands-on experience, and understand the implications of that trend. One of those implication is a shift in the popularity of certain programming languages over their more-traditional brethren. This time we’re focusing in on the last six months, but if we again look at mobile developers we can see them embracing scripting languages, at the cost of Java and the various forms of C. Objective C takes the biggest hit, assaulted by Apple’s new wonderkid Swift on one side, and the (JavaScript powered) cross-platform toolkits on the other. [tweetable]Objective C is dropping fast, while C/C++ has a gentle decline[/tweetable] and C# is just about holding its mindshare (thanks to Xamarin, which compiles C# to Android and is now a Microsoft property). On the cloud the trend is less pronounced, but still evident. Java is growing, but so are all the other languages. PHP… C#… Python… in fact all the top languages have gained mindshare as cloud developers become increasingly polyglot while giving up on some of the niche dialects. One area on the rise, across all the sectors, is the use of visual tools for software development. These drag-‘n-drop environments are often looked down upon by “proper” programmers, who respect the digital hierarchy (where Assembler is king, dialects of C make up the court, Java is left outside the room, and scripting languages aren’t permitted into the palace). These visual tools are still only used by a minority (25% of mobile developers, 19% of cloud) and fewer still rely on them as a primary tool (5% across mobile and cloud) but that proportion is growing steadily, and relentlessly. The fact is that there aren’t enough low-level programmers to go around, and most applications don’t need them. Visual tools, and scripting languages, are good enough for the vast majority of applications in any sector. That applies across consumer and enterprise markets, as users of all kinds start creating apps with a few clicks, but there is a question about how long can we consider those users to be software developers, and the tools they use to be designed for software development. “If This Then That” (IFTTT.com) is a marvellous tool, enabling anyone to create “recipes” where an event (“this”) triggers an action (“that”). So an incoming email can trigger the (Philips Hue) lights to flash red three times, making the owner feel like Batman while simultaneously aggravating his whole family. IFTTT users can chain recipes together, creating actions that seed multiple events, loop back on themselves, and even branch based on inputs, so at some point we have to accept that the IFTTT user has become a software developer, or that IFTTT shows us what the future of software development might look like. Not all applications will be written that way of course, lower-level languages will still be needed to plumb the functionality together, but there will come a time when the vast majority of applications will be created by developers with no software development experience at all. That day is a long way off, but with every year it gets a little closer and our data shows that process in action. You can see more by downloading our State of the Developer Nation report, or talking to us about drilling down into the survey data. #developereconomics #developerskills

How are desktop and cloud development evolving? We’ve prepared an infographic with some key insights that can help you better understand the cloud and desktop developer landscape, based on our recent report focusing on the topic. Here are some of the key insights: [tweetable]49% of developers are working professionally across both cloud and desktop[/tweetable] [tweetable]41% of desktop developers are creating applications which never leave the browser[/tweetable] [tweetable]54% of cloud developers who use advertising are making less than $500/month[/tweetable] Check out the infographic for more insights! Want more insights? Find out how you can access the full report.

Back in the 1990’s, during the first great browser war, we were assured that our web browser would soon be the only platform we would need. Applications would dynamically download and the single-click hyperlink would simplify interfacing to the point where computing was accessible to the masses. Sadly, and despite waterfalls of VC cash splashing around at the time, that didn’t happen, but twenty years later at least part of the dream is becoming true. At VisionMobile we’ve been looking at Desktop developers, taking data from our biannual Developer Economics survey which reached more than 13,000 developers across 140 countries. When we look at that data we can see that the never-humble web browser is now the most-popular platform amongst desktop developers, and those who aren’t developing for it are distributing their apps through it. Windows Classic (versions prior to Windows 8) still makes a strong showing, but with the sole exception of Eastern Europe the most-important platform for desktop developers is now the web browser. Many of the original arguments in favour of web-based applications are still valid: Inherent support for cross-platform applications, fast development using WISIWYG paradigms, and a runtime environment that can execute code which make a finite number of monkeys blush, while the many of the limitations have passed into oblivion. Back in the day Apple users were still happy with a single click and the long-hold, but the rest of us could manage to use two fingers. But that didn’t stop Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing the hyperlink-as-an-interface with Windows Active Desktop, in 1997. The new paradigm replaced the Windows desktop with a web page, complete with hyperlinks, embedded content, and security holes big enough for an Australian road train. Anyone who had used Windows before ended up running applications twice (double click is a hard habit to kick) while everyone else wondered why the icons were all underlined (hyperlinks were always underlined in the 90’s), and Microsoft shelved the idea with the launch of Windows Vista. But shelving doesn’t mean giving up, and web interfaces have come on a very long way since then. Drag ‘n drop, right clicking, accessible hardware, and application persistence, have made the browser into a workable user interface, which is why [tweetable]65% of the global desktop developer community is targeting the browser as a platform[/tweetable] in which to run their applications. Google is rebuilding the browser-as-a-platform with ChromeOS, though its recent announcements regarding the use of Android on laptops (notably the Pixel C) throws some doubt on the company’s commitment to the Netscape dream. Even developers who aren’t creating browser-apps are dependent on the browser to get their native apps distributed. Our figures show that the majority of applications are being distributed that way even if they are executed locally. Both Apple and Microsoft are trying hard to get desktop developers to embrace the app-store concept, exchanging the freedom of channel for the security of a curated store, but with limited success. Even in games; the most-popular category, only 25% are sent out through an app store compared to the 29% which are delivered through the web browser. App stores are very nice things to have. Secure distribution of applications reduces the quantity of malware enormously, and the tighter the platform is locked down the less malware there is, but app stores also assure clean uninstallations and provide a central location for peer reviews to quickly identify errant (or worthless) applications. That’s one reason why Microsoft and Apple are working so hard to promote them, but it is not the only one. Quite apart from the revenue stream (30% of every transaction sure adds up) there is the matter of control and communications – Apple controls the applications available for iOS devices, while Google exerts less (but still significant) control over Android, but those companies also maintain a relationship with the end user which disintermediates the network operator, the device manufacturer, and anyone else in between. In 2007 Vodafone’s CEO, Arun Sarin, summed up the operators’ position, which was largely built upon hubris: “The simple fact that we have the customer and billing relationship is a hugely powerful thing that nobody can take away from us … Whoever comes into the marketplace is going to have to work through us” Application stores replace that billing relationship, undermining the operators’ relationship with the customer and opening the way for more premium services (video, music, etc) to be sourced from the platform owner with the minimum of friction. Right now the browser is the preferred runtime platform, and the preferred distribution mechanism for desktop developers, just as Netscape envisioned it 20 years ago. That’s where we are today, but it would be a brave man who’d state that the age of the browser has arrived – developers might like it, and users have grown comfortable with the extended feature set it offers, but [tweetable]the web browser might not be serving the corporate interests which are (after all) paying for it all[/tweetable]. If you’d like to see more about what Cloud and Desktop Developers are doing then take a look at our Landscape report in the subject.

Events and training programs are a main component in many developer programs for IoT – but just how effective are they? This infographic sheds some light into the effectiveness of training and events, based on our Best Practices for IoT Developer Programs report. #surve #developerresearch #iotdeveloperprograms #datadriven #bestpractises

Developers deeply value the community they belong to. With this in mind, real-life events are surely the ultimate, high-touch way to get together. Or are they? Our new report uses data from 3,150+ IoT developers to shed light on the matter. [tweetable]Developers deeply value the community they belong to[/tweetable], and use community resources including open source communities and Q&A sites (such as StackOverflow) every day to find information, stay up to date, and get professional support from their peers on the tools, platforms, and APIs they use. This is one of the clear conclusions of VisionMobile’s new report on Best Practices for IoT Developer Programs, which explores what IoT developers value most in a developer support program. For this report we surveyed 3,150+ IoT developers from 140+ countries in our 9th edition Developer Economics survey – the largest research to date on IoT developers. If developers value the sense of community so much, then real-life events are surely the ultimate, high-touch way to get together. In our experience events are often the focal points of developer programs – and a big budget-eater! It’s worth looking closely at which developers attend the different types of events, and which don’t. In general, events like conferences, seminars, workshops, Meetups, and hackathons are a mid-range source of information for developers. Between 10% and 30% of developers attend them, depending on the type of event and the developer segment. Workshops and conferences are the most popular, each a source of information for 22% of developers, followed by Meetups (18%) and hackathons (16%). In other words, [tweetable]you reach only about a fifth of the developer population with events[/tweetable]. The expectations towards developer programs to organise events are even lower: only 8% of IoT developers consider events to be a key feature of the support program. It is a good practice to tune the events you organise or support to your specific developer audience. For example, developers working on Data Mashups value the formal knowledge transfer offered by seminars, trainings, and workshops (+10 percentage points relative to other developers), and to a lesser extent conferences (+4 pp). In contrast, device makers value the opportunity for playful exploration offered by hackathons (+5 pp). Similarly events are, by and large, an enterprise affair. Developers working in large organisations are significantly more likely to attend events of any kind. This includes hackathons, which are often considerably less formal events than conferences or seminars. Events have limited reach and are certainly not the activity with the highest ROI in a developer program. They should be considered carefully before including them in the program mix. This said, they can be a valuable addition when they are centered around PR and networking, i.e. community building, and optimized for the right audience. In the full report, we look in detail at what Internet of Things developers need and expect from your program, beyond the obvious activity of organising developer events. We show how Internet of Things developers can be an important ingredient in your business model, but also how competition for their attention is fierce. We discuss the best practices in supporting your developer constituency by fiercely attacking friction points and by fostering community. We also discuss how developers prefer to get educated in your technology, what role money and commercial opportunities play, and how you can reach out to developers in an effective way. Our data from 3,150+ developers lays out a roadmap for the creation of a solid developer program, in tune with developer needs. Get it here. #developerevents #developerprograms #developerresearch

The fact Donald Rumsfeld is now in the app business is not the only reason to believe that mobile apps have reached a plateau. The mobile app industry, it seems, is settling down: Android and iOS have formed an entrenched duopoly, the same few familiar publisher names dominate app store rankings, while the rest are fighting for every app install. But… Just as mobile app industry starts to mature, things are about to turn upside down again The days when almost every mobile use case required a dedicated mobile app may soon be over. As it looks, fancy graphical user interfaces are about to give way to spartan-looking messaging bots. Such messaging apps as WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, Viber, Weixin, LINE, consistently lead in usage and sessions per app. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, acknowledged in 2014 that: “Messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking.” Messaging apps trained hundreds of millions of people to use a text-based user interface to message their friends and family. Now this user interface paradigm is being extended into communication with brands, companies and services. At the same time, [tweetable]messaging apps are transforming into messaging platforms[/tweetable]. The transition to a conversational paradigm is already in full swing in China. Weixin (known as Wechat outside China) allows users use the messaging app to hail a taxi, order food delivery, buy movie tickets, play casual games, check in for a flight, send money to friends, book a doctor’s appointment, get banking statements, pay the water bill, find geo-targeted coupons, search for a book at the local library, get updates from their kids school, get a loan, donate to charity, and even participate in court proceedings. In 2010 reaching mobile users was all about apps. In 2016 messaging platforms emerge as the next frontier in tech after apps, social and the web itself. Facebook is the undisputed leader in messaging platforms – Outside China Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) have amassed 800 million and 900 million monthly active users respectively, becoming the largest messaging platforms second only to SMS which has 3.8 billion users. Both Messenger and WhatsApp are shifting their business models from person-to-person messaging to B2B2C, that is helping businesses to interact with mobile users. This is very worrying news for Google’s B2B2C business. Hangouts, Google’s own messaging app, failed to make a dent and win substantial user base. Surprisingly, this is despite that the app has over 1 billion installs – every Android handset maker has to pre-install Hangouts together with Search, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and other Google apps. However few people use the app – Most Android users don’t even know that the Hangouts app is installed on their handsets. Apple can potentially become a player in messaging platforms with its iMessage service. However, learning from the history of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), Apple will need to make iMessage available on Android to provide comparable user reach. Coincidentally, Microsoft is a ‘no show’ at the messaging party, despite having had a head start with the Skype acquisition – another miss for the Redmond company. Calling all chat bot developers Facebook has began turning Messenger into a B2B2C channel by working with a small number of partners, that includes Uber, Hyatt, Walmart, and KLM airlines, as well as smaller e-commerce company JackThreads and startup Assist. There is no doubt that as soon as the Messenger SDK is ready for the prime time, Facebook will make it available to all developers. Today messaging startups, such as Operator, Agent Q and Mezi in shopping, Magic in virtual assistants, Digit in personal finance, Pana in travel, have to either use SMS or build their own messaging apps. When Facebook opens the Messenger SDK (and presumably WhatsApp later) we will see a burst of innovation with all these startups moving to the platform with hundreds and thousands of new developers joining them. The shift from apps to messaging platforms brings upon new opportunities to developers. They can innovate in creating engaging user experiences without fancy graphics, and leave behind the issues of dreaded App Store approval, app updates and OS fragmentation. This excellent post by Meekan, a calendar assistant bot, gives a glimpse on what it takes to “cheat on the Turing test”. Moreover, building conversational bots costs less and takes less time than building and maintaining apps for iOS and Android platforms. This will allow developers to iterate much faster and discover new messaging use cases we just cannot imagine today. We at VisionMobile believe that much like in mobile apps [tweetable]developers will be the kingmakers of the messaging era[/tweetable] – We will begin tracking the experience of messaging bot developers in our upcoming 11th Edition of the Developer Economics survey. This time the developer-led innovation will shift from the walled gardens of Apple App Store and Google Play the the walled garden of Facebook. Discovery, recommendations and monetisation of messaging-based services will be controlled by Facebook in a sort of a messaging bot “app store”. How exactly such an “app store” will look like it’s too early to say. For example Slack, the messaging leader in the enterprise, takes the traditional app store approach for showing users all the bots and integrations available on the platform. (I’m not convinced that this is the only way – I’d like to see something as friendly as Meekan to help me connect with the right services.) While many questions remain, it’s clear the tech industry is ready to move from the “there is an app for that” world to the “there is a bot for that” future. — Michael #businessmodel #messagingapps

Facebook started 2016 with the bold claim that it intends to eradicate phone numbers and replace web browsing, but the Social Network has a mountain to climb before Facebook Messenger becomes the centre of our online world. That’s the stated intention of the Zuckerberg empire – to replace all our myriad internet communication systems with one interface. Facebook claims that its Messenger app has been installed 800 million times, but at VisionMobile our latest research shows that those installations are very much concentrated into the lower end of the market. If Facebook is going to recruit the shops, taxi companies and airlines it needs to make Messenger a one-stop internet shop it will need to get the app installed across the demographics before Microsoft (with Skype) steps in to take the cream. [tweetable]Facebook has long known that the days of pokes and personal walls are fast disappearing[/tweetable], and has quite a history in struggling to adapt to whatever the future might bring. Facebook Gifts/Credits/Deals/Questions/Beacon haven’t lit up the future, so now the company is betting on messaging, and value-added messaging platforms. Such platforms are proliferating in business. The bots that proliferate across Slack and Yahoo Messenger have turned those platforms into much more than messaging, but taking that functionality into the consumer sphere is much harder. The medium is the Messenger With that in mind, Facebook Messenger was forked from the main Facebook mobile app back in 2011, but messaging remained possible in the main app until 2014. These days, the Facebook app will notify you that a message has been received, but if you want to read that message then you’ll have to download and install Facebook’s new Trojan Horse. That analogy isn’t perfect: the horse of Troy was disguised while Facebook has made no secret of its plan to migrate key internet functionality into the Messaging client. If Facebook can’t own the interface to your phone (it tried that), then it will own the interface to the internet, which the company believes will be Facebook Messenger. The inspiration behind this idea isn’t hard to see. In China, where Facebook/Google/Twitter fears to tread, the competitive market created in their absence has driven huge innovation as companies strive to differentiate themselves with new features and functionality. Every month, 600 million Chinese are using Weixen, Tencent’s WeChat client, to book taxis, check into flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, make doctors’ appointments, and even manage bank accounts, all without touching the web browser. [tweetable]In China, messaging has become the platform of choice for accessing a wide variety of services[/tweetable], and Facebook plans to replicate that model in the rest of the world – with it owning the messaging platform, obviously. This process has already started with Facebook integrating Uber into its messaging platform. It’s worth noting that Uber isn’t integrated into the Facebook website, or the mobile client, but into the Facebook Messenger app. And Uber is just the beginning. As David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, makes abundantly clear: “We can help you interact with businesses or services to buy items (and then buy more again), order rides, purchase airline tickets, and talk to customer service in truly frictionless and delightful ways” – and that’s before Facebook becomes your personal assistant, Facebook M. “Facebook M” starts listening in to all your conversations to suggest ways it can make your life more, as they say in such circles, “delightful.” The Facebook wall will be supplanted by the Custom Conversation, providing a personalised interface (colour, style, emojis) for every chat thread. The visual equivalent of a ring-back tone, customised for every caller, will enable you to decide how both sides of the conversation see their interface, unless the other side has other ideas. Walled garden of Zuck In Facebook’s brave new world, everything is done through Facebook Messenger, and Facebook takes control of the delivery channel, removing that irritating “Open in Web Browser” which takes so much control away from the Social Network. But that brave new world is predicated on the idea that people will install Facebook Messenger, rather than relying on the website, and email notifications, to stay in touch. Our research, in partnership with Celltick, looked at the top 10 applications installed on different handsets, and shows that while many low-end handsets do have Facebook Messenger installed, the application is almost invisible in handsets costing more than $200. In high-end phones, Skype consistently rates top – well above the main Facebook application – and Facebook Messenger isn’t even in the top 10. In handsets costing less than $200, Facebook Messenger rates around four or five – a couple of positions below the main Facebook application, and very close to Skype. What this means is that those who can’t, or won’t, invest more than $200 in a handset are happily installing Facebook Messenger, while those with a bit more disposable income are refusing to commit. What it makes abundantly clear is the opportunity this presents to Microsoft. If messaging really is the future of mobile interaction, as Facebook seems to think, then Skype is perfectly positioned to grab the most important demographic. If Microsoft were half as willing as Facebook to launch into value-added messaging, then it could make Skype into the messaging platform of the future, if indeed users really want such a platform at all. You can read more in our free report, here (email address required.) ® Article first published on the Register

Every company should master developer ecosystem skills. Our new IoT Megatrends 2016 report sheds light on the state of the art in the IoT developer economy, distilling the major data points and insights from our research into six important trends in IoT. IoT Megatrends 2016 from VisionMobile Software is eating the world. [tweetable]Access to developers has become a competitive advantage in every industry[/tweetable]. Today a business in media, games, finance, or transportation, can only compete by using software to improve productivity and efficiency through every part of the business. Businesses in healthcare, construction and agriculture now find they need to use software developers to remain competitive. As the Internet of Things takes hold and more and more traditional products get a software component, this trend only accelerates. Already, [tweetable]over 5 million developers are active in the Internet of Things in early 2016[/tweetable]. This year, we estimate that their number will grow by 800 thousand developers. That’s about the population of South Dakota, Macau, or Cyprus. [tweetable]By 2020, there will be close to 10 million Internet of Things developers[/tweetable]. 6 key trends for 2016 In our 60+ page IoT Megatrends 2016 report, we highlight 6 key IoT developer trends for 2016. Developers are more and more the center of commercial strategy. If you’re not into developers, you’re not doing it right. If you believe that the Internet of Things is only about making new, stand-alone devices and solutions, then think again. More and more key players in every IoT market build their strategy around developers who can extend the product beyond what it was when it left the factory. From Amazon and SmartThings in the home, Apple and Pebble on your watch, and Ford and Automatic in your car, all the way to ThingWorx and IBM in industrial settings, 3D Robotics and DJI in drones, and Oculus and Microsoft on your virtual reality headset – developers are key to success in the marketplace. And it’s clear to see why. Our report offers four ways that developers can extend a business: as innovators, customers, extenders, and distributors.The trend towards placing developers in the center of commercial strategy is in full swing. For example, Industrial IoT counts almost as high a percentage of professional developers as the mobile ecosystem does, while the smart home sector trails behind. Battle of the Smart Home Hubs. Every major consumer technology is vying to become the hub of your home nowadays, from Amazon (Echo) and AT&T (Digital Life) to Xiaomi and Xfinity (by Comcast). It shouldn’t surprise then that with 1.4 million developers, the smart home is the most popular IoT sector. Smart home hubs compete on three axes – new touchpoints, new interaction models and developers – each of which raises important questions for the future. Touchpoints like voice control, next-generation remote controls, apps, and messaging are the core of the user experience, but most solutions don’t come from the maker of the smart home hub itself. Who will control the customer relationship in the future, harvesting user loyalty? Conversational platforms (voice, chat) in particular are coming up strong. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence fundamentally challenges the central role of developers as creators of use cases. Will developers go extinct? For now, key players still count on developers to drive value creation, also in AI-driven conversation platforms. The 4 frontiers of wearable platforms. Innovation in wearables is in full swing. Wearables move from consumer electronics devices to being unobtrusively embedded in clothing, which make the technology more and more relevant for traditional fashion companies. Soon, brands will compete on digital identity – an opportunity to create a powerful connection with users. Smartwatches and AR/VR platforms will compete on who has most apps. In smartwatches, Android Wear is under pressure from new platform challengers. On the one hands, Chinese internet companies build their own Android derivatives for wearables. On the other, victims of the Android smartphone strategy build direct challenger platforms based on Tizen or webOS. Finally, our research shows that [tweetable]data-centric apps are more lucrative than simple smartwatch apps or new wearable devices[/tweetable], but that few developers go that way today. From Connected Car to software-defined transportation. The innovation focus in Connected Cars is shifting from the dashboard to vehicle data, and in the future to data-driven transportation platforms. Car makers struggle to keep control over and to gain access to the necessary supply chain, expertise, and data to be leaders in this evolution. Will car makers miss automotive computing just like Microsoft missed mobile? We’ve explored this trend in depth here. Consumer and Enterprise technology converge. Consumer and enterprise technology are increasingly converging in most industries. The smart home of today will become the smart office of tomorrow, as smart locks turn into access control and smart TVs into meeting room equipment. The equivalent of wearable-sensor-driven health apps in the enterprise are people analytics, such as the Humanyze platform. And Jeff Immelt, head of GE, famously said this about data technologies developed at Amazon, Google, or Facebook making their way into the industrial world: “If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Consumer, and not enterprise technology will be the foundation for the converged future. Why? Consumer markets offer much faster product evolution and validation with customers. Consumer-grade ease of installation coupled with enterprise-grade security will be the future. [tweetable]Developers from their side will be increasingly mobile between consumer and enterprise markets[/tweetable]. The hottest business models in IoT. The prevalent business models in the Internet of Things are moving from product sales to recurring revenue, and from products to services. Industrial IoT technology creates opportunities for vendors to sell access to assets like jet engines or locomotives as a service, rather than selling the machines themselves. In the home, smart appliances (e.g. washing machines) are becoming an e-commerce point of sale for consumables (e.g. washing powder). Companies like Nest, Oscar Health Insurance, or Automatic have paved the way for moving from a ‘consumer pays’ model to a ‘consumer gets paid’ model, subsidizing devices with other revenue streams like insurance or energy company rebates. The full IoT Megatrends 2016 report can be downloaded here for free. #developer #iot

[The hype around wearables is giving way to new opportunities for developers. Wearables move from “smartphone copycats” to wearables-first applications, to data-driven powerhouses. In this post we present the recording of our webinar on developer trends in wearables, and we answer the most pressing questions from participants.] Wearables are moving from a period of hype to a period of deeper exploration. In a previous post, we called the Internet of Things the peace dividend of the smartphone wars, and IoT developers the baby boomers of that period. In other words, smartphone innovation made hardware technology abundant. It’s no longer the bottleneck. IoT breakthroughs will happen not by making more powerful processors or larger memories, but by identifying new applications for the sensors, devices and connectivity. This certainly seems to be the case for wearables, which arguably started with the first Fitbit in 2008 and boomed after the launch of the Pebble and Android Wear in 2013 and 2014. Those were the days of the wearables hype. That hype has now died down. Developers in particular are getting more cautious about wearables. Between Q4 2014 and Q2 2015, the percentage of IoT developers targeting wearables dropped from 28% to 21%. Developers have not turned their back on wearables entirely – many still plan to develop for wearables in the future – but the initial enthusiasm is making way for realism, and a search for truly valuable uses for these new devices. Towards deep exploration and mature platforms We investigated the burgeoning space of wearable developers and platform in detail in our October 2015 report: The Wearables Landscape 2015. The report draws data from the 670+ wearable developers that participated in our 9th edition Developer Economics survey (Q2 2015). We also took a good look at the platform space for wearables, and presented a leaderboard of the 15 smartwatch platforms vying for developers’ hearts and minds. Some of the key insights from the report include: Wearables move from “smartphone copycats” to wearables-first applications, to data-driven powerhouses. Companies experiment with fashion, authentication, entertainment, and workplace applications. Digital identity will be the new axis of competition for fashion brands. The future winning developer platforms for wearables are emerging right now. These winners will be as dominant as Android and iOS are in mobile. In smartwatch platforms, Apple Watch OS leads, while Android Wear is under pressure from new challengers. Data apps are the next big untapped opportunity for wearable developers. Platforms are emerging for health and wellness apps, and for productivity-oriented people analytics. Data platforms will be at least as important in defining the wearables market as smartwatch platforms. Developers have yet to discover these lucrative data app opportunities. Power shifts from West to East. Strong Chinese wearable platforms are emerging that no longer need the West for innovation, or to reach a critical mass of users. The wearable developer population of Asia is almost as big as those of North America and Europe combined. We covered all of these insights in our webinar on the topic. Your questions After the webinar, we received lots of questions from participants. While we didn’t have time to cover all of them during the webinar, we don’t want to withhold you our answers. Q: Do you foresee any technology discontinuities which will drive either customer or enterprise adoption of wearables & hence market size to the next level? A: While there are certainly interesting technologies on the horizon (I mentioned printable electronics and energy harvesting in the webinar), we look for the key market driver elsewhere. What wearables need are killer apps – use cases that are so powerful that they become almost universally desirable. The way to find a killer app is not by doing better market research, but by exploring thousands of use cases and letting the most powerful ones emerge. That’s why app platforms (both on the device and the data level) are so important, and also why it’s so important for app platforms to have the most apps. Q: Does having an app store, like the Pebble app store or the Myo market, impact the size of the developer and app ecosystem? A: Absolutely! App stores are the glue that connects developers and users. App stores reduce the effort it takes for users to find a suitable solution for their needs, and makes it easier for developers to get discovered. But it’s more than just convenience. Having this discovery, promotion, and sales mechanism, is a key element of starting network effects, where developers and their apps attract users to the platform, and users provide an attractive addressable market for developers. Network effects are the dominant economic driver of app platform success. Q: Do you see data being stored on the device, centralized on the mobile, or rather sent to the cloud? A: Engineers will presumably pick the solution that makes more sense, given the ever-evolving capabilities in bandwidth, on-device storage, battery life, connectivity, and requirement to connect the watch to a phone. Different companies will have different philosophies in this regard, e.g. Apple is more device-oriented, Google more cloud-oriented. The more interesting question is what developers will do with that data. In a device-centric model, you’re not just limited in processing power, storage, and battery life, but also to the data coming from that device itself. The more “up” you go, the more opportunities there are to connect device data with other sources (like other devices, smartphone sensors, or internet services) and with historical user data. Q: Do you believe there is an opportunity for testing the software for wearables? Or do wearable leaders appeal more to the Shiny Object Syndrome phenomenon and focus more on initial market appeal rather than quality? A: To answer this question, we can look back at the history of smartphone apps. Quality was indeed not the first consideration in the early stages of the app ecosystem. Still, the user rating feature of app stores ensured that reasonably successful apps had to take care of quality. Over time, as competition increased and technology matured, testing and quality became more important. Today, we track as many as 180 app testing tools on developereconomics.com, depending on which ones you count. I would expect a similar evolution in wearables. Q: How would you calculate the value of the longer lasting customer relationship for traditional fashion brands? A: When fashion embeds digital technology into its products, its economics change to that of a digital company, to some extent. To calculate the value of a long-lasting customer relationship, digital metrics like customer lifetime value, churn, customer acquisition cost, etc become more and more relevant for fashion businesses. These are fundamentally different metrics than the ones fashion companies use today, and it will take time to adjust the corporate culture to valuing them properly. Q: When it comes to those health data platforms, do you by chance have any data regarding adoption of those by health players (clinics, hospitals, etc)? There are a lot of strict regulations regarding medical data… A: We are currently collecting data about developer adoption of health data platforms in our 10th wave Developer Economics survey, so stay tuned. It’s very early to see a lot of systematic data on these emerging platforms. There is some anecdotal evidence out there, e.g. see this article on the progress of Apple ResearchKit. Regulation might not be as big a hurdle as it seems. Some types of data and applications are not explicitly regulated (yet). There’s a spectrum between, say, simple step tracking and data generated by the CAT scanner in your hospital. Even for the more serious medical research, the work of Apple (ResearchKit), Google (which also has research partnerships) and others prove that it can be done, with a reasonable amount of time and investment. #businessopportunities #connecteddevices #wearables