Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

In How to Build a Billion Dollar App George Berkowski takes you through the stages of coming up with a mobile app from concept to being a billion pound company. It is based on his story co-founding taxi app Hailo.

As you might expect it is a pretty whistle-stop tour of each stage of the business. However, it provides a good overview with various comments and advice that Berkowski brings from his experience at Hailo. He stresses the importance of getting the product right for the market and how you should be measuring growth, two of the keys to getting a successful product out there.

While it is a good overview, I am not sure how much I am going to take away from it. Compared to something like The Hard Thing About Hard Things which offers plenty of specific and useful advice, this is more of a general guide to the journey. The one thing I did really like was a list of concepts that have universal appeal to humans. This is great for brainstorming ideas from.

I also found it interesting that he recommended having one Scrum Master for around 12-15 engineers. I have worked at a number of companies that do agile and a typical setup in the UK would be one Scrum Master to around 3-5 engineers, a considerably different ratio.

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what – it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.