Welcome to Scribble

Tablets in business

For many consumers, tablets may still seem like an extravagant ‘extra’ device.  They are mainly used for passive tasks, such as browsing the internet, watching movies or playing games.  They do not replace conventional PCs and laptops for many serious tasks, and as such are still considered extravagant because of the high price for an ‘extra’ device.  The marketing of tablets by manufacturers has also contributed to their perception as a luxury consumer device – with selling points mostly focusing on media content.

But tablets and smartphones are increasingly being taken seriously as business tools.  Touchscreens, portability and of course mobility are attractive points.  In many cases too, however, tablets are a cost-effective business solution, rather than a high-tech extravagance.  Innovative apps across all scales of business are appearing, from small retail businesses to large industries like construction and even medicine.

“I give a lot of speeches, and all my speeches are on the iPad — I have templates for 8 different speeches, and I usually just customize them for each speech   …  with the iPad, I don’t need to worry about IT issues because everything I need is right there.”   – Nancy Lublin, CEO of DoSomething.org.  (Read full article on Mashable)

Point of Sale

For an everyday consumer, a tablet may seem expensive to buy on top of a traditional PC or laptop, but when the tablet can stand for itself, it can be an attractive solution.  Square’s clever technology allows a small card reader to be plugged into an Android or iOS device to allow the user to be able to take card payments.  This means that a smartphone or tablet can be turned into a point-of-sale payment system with no monthly costs or expensive setup.  Of course, with a tablet, the device becomes an easy to use touchscreen till with no additional or specialized hardware required.  ShopKeep POS is an iPad app designed to do just this.  One company has even implemented iPads as an ‘at-table’ ordering and payment system, allowing people to place and pay for their orders right at the table.

Apple

In it’s marketing and branding approach, Apple appears to be largely consumer-oriented.  In many ways, the iPad is less suitable for business than other tablets, such as ones running on Windows or Android which offer better ease of integration with PCs, but the iPad is still the most popular tablet for businesses by quite a long way.  But behind the scenes, Apple is starting to do more to support businesses, including the recent launch of the Volume Purchase Program for B2B apps in the app store, and a growing business section on their website.  Apple’s configurator app for Macs allows apps and configurations to be applied to multiple iPads – ideal for IT managers to configure iPads for large teams.

Scribble were approached by Land Securities to create a tool that they could use internally for showcasing their London property portfolio.  We chose the iPad 2 as the perfect platform – the mobility and portability and amazing screen quality make it perfect for giving presentations, but the device is powerful enough to show interactive 3D graphics and carry a large amount of content.  The app gives employees a single place to find all the content they need, offline.  They can then use the app to create and give presentations.  Future CMS integration will allow centralised management, allowing Land Securities to update and manage content in the app.  Find out more about our Land Securities iPad app here.

The major tablet manufacturers like Apple, Samsung and Sony have so far not made a concerted effort to market their devices to business and industry.  Instead, businesses and entrepreneurial developers have created applications to turn tablets into powerful business tools.  This trend will only continue, and better integration with other devices, faster processors and better support from the manufacturers will continue to strengthen future tablets as powerful business tools.

The growing network of people, through telecommunications, smartphones and the Internet allows people to come together in many ways.  People share aspects of their lives in numerous ways and access unprecedented amounts of information, content and services.  In recent years, however, it has become apparent that this vast network of connected and on-line people are not just consumers, but a valuable resource. ‘Crowdsourcing’ is the term used for outsourcing tasks to large groups of people, and today’s massively connected world makes crowdsourcing more viable and powerful than ever before.

Recently, we have seen some fun and exciting applications of crowd-sourcing in scientific research.  Classification tasks, or repetitive tasks that cannot be performed by a machine are particularly suitable for crowd-sourcing.  The idea is that certain tasks that may usually be performed by teams of people or by computers can be broken up into many parts, so everyday people can offer a few minutes of their time for free.

MoonZoo is such a project (read an article on Wired), focusing on classifying features of the universe, such as the formation of galaxies and the surface of the moon.  The project aims to classify features in the gigantic archive of photos taken by astronomy satellites, thus extracting invaluable information.  Users of the site look at photos of the moon surface and identify and locate craters, boulders and other features by comparing them with examples provided.  GalaxyZoo uses the same approach to classify types of galaxies –   human input is invaluable, elegantly put ”Computers will slowly get better at classifying galaxies, but looking at an image and asking ‘what’s that odd thing?’ remains uniquely human.” - Galaxy Zoo.  Another interactive science crowd-sourcing project, Foldit, allows users to solve visual puzzles folding proteins to help discover ways of making chemical reactions more efficient.  For more examples of science crowdsourcing projects that you can try look here.

A more common example that you are likely to have come across is “captcha” the security check on many websites that asks you to spell out difficult to read words.  A basic nuisance to most, this process is actually helping the process of digitising books – words that cannot be correctly identified by the scanning software are crowdsourced by getting people to identify what they are.

But crowdsourcing has many uses beyond science and academia.  Mobile apps are emerging that can take advantage of their users, to help eachother, or to help businesses.  MapShare, Trapster, SubwayArrival and GoogleMaps all allow users to share information about transport and traffic to promote safety on the road or help others avoid congested areas.  LocalMind allows people to share information about what’s going on around them – such as whether a particular bar is busy.   Crowdsourcing is a great way to quickly  acquire up-to-date information about an area or situation, and has recently been employed in many humanitarian and natural disasters.

Businesses already value the extensive customer behaviour tracking that is now possible because of our extensive digital lives.  Facebook has become a useful source of information for businesses to perform consumer research, with many people wilfully publishing information about their behaviours and preferences that they would previously have had to go to great lengths to get via customer surveys.

Here in the Scribble offices, we’ve been playing the massively popular ‘DrawSomething’ app – a social game similar to Pictionary.  With millions of people drawing their interpretations of specific words, could this be an interesting resource: for example to analyse social trends, or to help train computers to recognize images?  Game developers have recently started to monitor detailed stats about game-player’s habits to inform design changes.

Crowdsourcing offers businesses and app developers a new way of looking at how they relate to their customers – users can be viewed as a resource and not just consumers.  Maybe the way people use their apps can offer interesting insights – so what exciting uses will we see for crowdsourcing apps in the future?

While many were flocking to the MWC to get a glimpse of the latest consumer tech, much of the big news was around the technologies driving the networks and infrastructure.  With mobile devices, and in particular web-enabled smartphones, being adopted at a massive rate (a spotlight of the show was the emerging smartphone market in India), smartphones are becoming more established as a primary route for accessing content.  The mobile industry is ready and hungry to adopt new network technologies that will be able to supply the greater speed and bandwidth that is already in demand.

The next generation of mobile communication standards is referred to as 4G.  This represents a step up in the amount of data bandwidth possible via the mobile networks.  But the step to provide this service to users is not simple, there are different ways that the technology can be implemented (4G is a classification based on a data transfer rate, it does not specify the means of providing it), and there are many network operators in competition.  Mobile networks, radio, WiFi and other kinds of wireless networks all use radio transmission, so now there is a limit to the available frequency bands that can be used to transmit information – so any new standards brought in by operators have to find a way to fit in to what is available.

LTE, the primary technology that will be driving future 4G networks, has already been deployed in some places for several years – Sweden and Norway have had LTE networks since 2009, as has the USA, but these are not yet considered to be performing at 4G level.  There were a number of announcements at the conference around 4G and LTE, such as the arrival of the first LTE networks to the UK, and demonstrations showcasing new ‘small-cell’ base stations.  These smaller transmitters mean that transmitter can be more easily installed to allow greater coverage by placing them closer to where people are going to be.  It will still be some time before things settle down, but an infrastructure for 4G networks is starting to look like a reality.

Whilst the mobile networks are struggling to roll out the new technology, another approach is taking hold.  The aim is to increase bandwidth available to smartphone users by seamlessly connecting to WiFi hotspots when they are available.   The idea is likened to cellular ‘roaming’.  WiFi is typically very short range, but can offer greatly higher data bandwidth than 3G or even 4G networks. The service is intended to work in densely populated areas where there are many overlapping hotspots.  Cisco Systems have announced major commitments to this approach.

Smartphones have taken hold extremely quickly, with demand for data escalating.  In addition to downloading apps and accessing the internet, streaming media and cloud-based computing are becoming more and more in demand.  The demand for high-bandwidth mobile internet has already exceeded what today’s networks can offer, but WiFi roaming and 4G services are now not far off.  We can see a glimpse of a future where there is much less destination between PCs, smartphones and tablets – Microsoft’s Windows 8 is designed for tablet and PC (rather than having customised versions for each) and Google has already released a laptop that runs on Android, previously only used on mobile devices.  Cloud-based services allow the exciting possibility of bringing the power of a desktop PC to a mobile device, an exciting prospect for cloud gaming (see our article on cloud gaming here).  Cloud storage and computing mean that mobile computer no longer needs to be a compromise, with home and business users able to access their documents, media and applications wherever they are.

An always connected world will bring many more day-to-day services to your smartphones and mobile devices, and multi-channel solutions that provide a seamless experience across many devices will become more important info the future.

Find out more about Scribble: multi-channel solutions

Find out more about Scribble: features and technology

Mobile is huge.  For some evidence of how huge, take a look at the vast crowds of attendees at the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.  Some 60,000 people attended the event, and the amount of content and technology on show was simply staggering.  Scribble were very excited to join the crowds this year.  News is still filtering through the networks, and with so much to take in, it is hard to know where to start.  We will spend the next few weeks talking about some of the hot topics for mobile this year to come out of the MWC, beginning with an overview of new mobile devices on show at the event.

Powerful smartphones

Many handsets are now appearing with quad-core processors – making them capable of high performance in entertainment applications such as videogame graphics and HD video playback.  It also means that devices will be able to perform processor-heavy tasks such as real-time image processing for better camera performance and photo and video editing.

Android

Android is continuing to gain momentum, powering many of the major smartphones on show.  Their new operating system “Ice-Cream Sandwich” was also on show, in handsets such as the impressive LG Optimus 4X HD and the HTC One X.

Tablets

In terms of competition, Apple still hold a very strong spot in the marketplace for tablets, especially with the recently announced iPad3 refreshing their lineup.  But the MWC showed that tablets are here to stay.  Rather than a competition to see who is crowned the winner, the entry of many new sizes and forms of tablets is testament to the arrival of a new category of devices that is sure to replace the PC for a number of common tasks, and allow more flexible mobile computing.

The metric for comparison still remains the iPad, which has set many precedents.  Some tablets will attempt to stand out simply with a smaller price tag, but there are a number of stand-out tablets hoping to carve a niche by offering something new, such as using docking stations to offer the functionality of a laptop, or having controls and graphics capabilities tailored for gaming on the go, many devices at the show were even touting water resistance, with basins of water ready to dump expensive digital devices into!

Somewhere Inbetween

Many new smartphones are emerging with a larger form-factor.  This move comes in tandem with faster processors and advances in screen technology – all with the aim of driving bigger and more impressive displays, for movies, gaming and making web and text content easier to read.  The LG Optimus 4X HD, LG Optimus Vu, HTC One X, Panasonic Eluga and many more have 4-inch and above screen sizes.  The Asus Padfone even connects to a docking station (essentially a touchscreen) to turn it into a 10inch tablet computer.

Windows 8

Whilst there are still comparatively few Windows Phones available, demonstrations of Microsoft Windows 8 clearly show that Microsoft is heavily invested in the future of mobile.  Their new operating system runs on both PCs and tablets – as opposed to having a separate system for each – and is designed with touch in mind.  Microsoft have been largely absent in mobile technology in recent years, but their impressive technology shows that they are likely to be a major player as the mobile sector matures.

This month, Land Securities (a FTSE100 company and the largest construction company in the UK) launched themselves into the world of digital, with their innovative new London Portfolio iPad app, developed by us here at Scribble and our partners Digicave.  The launch represents the end of several months of development for Scribble, and a foray into new territory for Land Securities.

The launch attracted the attention of Property Week, a leading trade magazine in the property and construction industry.  The app was the focus of an article on digital technology in the construction sector, where Land Securities are noted as being the first in the industry to take this step forward.

Land Securities came to Scribble to create a digital solution that would serve as an internal and business-to-business tool to showcase their extensive construction portfolio.  The initial focus for the deployment of the app was their London Portfolio – 12 buildings in central London (including a major development of several buildings in the London Victoria area).

Land Securities wanted to move away from their previous dependence on print-based media for presenting their buildings.  But more than just simply creating a digitized version of their print material, Scribble wanted to create a cutting-edge solution that would offer them truly unique possibilities.

Our technology partners Digicave, who specialise in 3D capture and delivery, created and unique platform that showcases the latest technology for app development. As well as this, a business tool was developed enabling Land Securities to deliver a complete solution for their internal team.

The development of the solution involved creating an operating system that would allow the user to navigate through various types of content in an intuitive way.  The iPad app opens with a 3D interactive map of central London.  From here, the user can see the locations of the various Land Securities sites in context.  Tapping on the building’s marker label will load the content for that building.  Each building in the app has a selection of images that the user can browse, an interactive 3D map that shows local amenities, travel distances and London Underground tube lines as well as PDF documents and videos related to the project.  Each building also has a detailed interactive 3D visualization that allows the main and surrounding buildings to be viewed from any angle – these 3D models had to be painstakingly refined from high end CAD 3D data to optimize them for viewing on the iPad2.

Scribble suggested using the iPad2 as the target device for deployment of the app, because of it’s superior graphics capabilities.  The vision for the app, however, is to roll out the solution across multiple platforms.  To make this process seamless, the app was developed using Unity3D, a development platform which allows projects to be built for iOS, Android, Mac, PC and for web.  This means that technology developed for the app can be easily deployed across other platforms.

Throughout the development, the solution evolved a great deal – and it will continue to grow and evolve with refinements to the interface, content and new additions and technology such as augmented reality.

Land Securities will be showing off the app at the upcoming MIPIM property and real estate conference in Cannes.