Work In Progress

QR codes and your business

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:00:06 +0100

Latest research shows that 40% of UK consumers know what Quick Response codes are, and 12% have actually scanned them to access the information they contain. This means that it’s a good time to start getting serious about how you can use them for your business.

Here’s some ways you could use a QR code for your business.

Sharing information with customers

This restaurant is using QR on it’s plates. When scanned on your phone, you’ll be shown a list of ingredients in your meal. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to Adam Jones for this one.

Put a QR code on your product packaging

Pepsi are putting QR codes on their product packs. When scanned, people are taken to watch an amusing video of “Rusty”. They can also get to news, games and other content.

WinergyInc are encouraging wine distributors to put QR codes on the labels of their bottles, so that customers can instantly scan them and then rate the wine or add bookmark it.

Put one on your business card

A QR code can include all your business contact details. So, by printing one on your business card, you people to simply scan your details into their address book, rather than making them tediously type it.

In your advertising

Advertisers are starting to use QR codes in creative ways.

In the UK, Brands such as Heineken, Sky, Pizza Express, Grazia magazine, and Gamma DIY all adopted QR codes in campaigns during Q1 of this year (2011).

The neat thing is that, when people scan a code, they can be taken to a more engaging experience such as a web site or video. It allows consumers to take the experience away with them.

Levis using QR codes in bill-board advertising

Scottish Attraction using QR codes in tourism

QR codes in Facebook, Twitter and Online

There’s opportunities to get the benefits of QR codes in any other mediums you publish to.

Coupons and vouchers

A UK survey revealed that 49% of people would be keen to have QR codes contain vouchers or additional brand information.

This article discusses how The Gift Experience are one company looking to make the mobile phone a more powerful shopping tool.

Who uses QR codes?

18-24 year olds are the most likely to scan your QR code, followed by 25-34 year olds. So, you’re going to have more success if you target younger audiences.

Further Reading

This Social Media Experiment articles gives a good background to QR codes, and also discuss various applications.

Incredibly cool QR Code Generator

Mon, 30 May 2011 11:17:37 +0100

By Tobin Harris

We’re playing about with QR codes at the moment, thinking we’d like to put some on both our business cards and on our office windows.

A QR code is like a barcode that you can scan with your phone. When scanned, interesting things can happen. If the QR code contains a URL, your phone can open that in a web browser.

Or, if the QR code contains a vCard, your phone can grab the name and address and add them to your address book.

Thomas Hansen, a good friend of mine, seems to be a bit of a guru in the field of QR codes. I found this very cool QR code generator on his web site.

Here’s an example:

The QR code scanner was created by Thomas’s company - Winergy, Inc. It also lets you create QR codes containing URL’s and SMS messages.

Thomas and I worked at Gaia Ajax Widgets in Norway, he was the founder, and the genius behind the ideas! We had some great times in Barcelona (exhibiting at TechEd), and also in Norway. Most involved beer and guitars :)

Thomas is also doing some really interesting stuff in the wine/QR code space. He’s in the heart of California, so a handy place for creating benefits for wine merchants :)

Winergy focus on creating Loyalty Programs for Merchants, Producers and Service Providers. Their primary products for achieving this is WinePad [http://www.winergyinc.com/buzz] - which only really works for Wineries with Wine Tasting Rooms, which was launched about 7 months ago.

And they also have a QR Code Program, which works for basically everyone.

The QR Code program works such that anyone can put a QR Code anywhere they wish, and have consumers and customers rate their location, object, product or service. And then the Raters are encouraged to share their rating with their friends on Facebook and similar Social Media sites. In addition, every time somebody rates your QR Code, the owner of that QR Code gets that person email address, exact location, and their consent to initiate Direct Marketing to that person.

So basically they help customers with two things;

Initiate social buzz in the social media, such as Facebook
Initiate Direct Marketing through harvesting customer’s email addresses, and their consent to do Direct Marketing towards them

Like everything Thomas get’s his head into, it’s really interesting stuff, suggest you check it out!

AllBabble: Our Celebrity Fuelled Social Network

Wed, 25 May 2011 14:35:58 +0100

By Tobin Harris

Last Friday we launched AllBabble, a social network for debating. It was built as a joint venture between Engine Room Apps and the innovative guys at Offficial.

AllBabble is a bit like twitter, but discussions are focused around topics of debate. Debates are sparked by celebrities, including Jimmy Carr, Bri Smithy, Martin Lipton and David Badiel.

We’ve released it on iPhone, Android and mobile web (for BlackBerry). Engine Room Apps helped refine and expand the concept, and took it from design to launch.

AllBabble is built on cloud technology, which means it can be hosted at low costs and can survive a lot of traffic - handy for when we get a flash-flood of traffic.

How fast do we deliver?

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:33:30 +0100

By Tobin Harris

Engine Room Apps is a service company that creates mobile solutions for it’s lovely clients. We have 10-20 projects at any time, and like to measure how fast we’re getting through them; how fast we’re delivering useful stuff to our clients.

We call this measurement our velocity.

Here’s our velocity over the last 3.5 months (we’re 19 days into April)

The velocity indicates how much stuff we’re delivering to our clients. In ERA, “stuff” usually means “features for smartphone apps”. We also track internal projects as part of our velocity too.

Why measure velocity?

Measuring velocity brings many benefits:

Reflection: We know when we get faster or slower, so we can ask the more important question of why? This allows us to reflect and improve.

Targets: We can set ourselves some targets and measure ourselves against them.

Not About Finances: Financial targets are great, but our productivity is not always aligned to our financial success. For example, when we invest in projects, we don’t necessarily make money from them straight away, so we still want to know if we’re being productive outside of our bottom line.

Change Indicators: When the environment changes, we can see if it allows us to get through more or less work. Team growth, training, time of year, holidays and type of projects undertaken can all trigger changes in velocity.

There are more important things than velocity

Despite the fact we measure our velocity, it’s not our key driver. Above all, we want to kick out quality work. Measuring speed is a useful thing, but it’s also dangerous to give it too much importance.

Measuring quality is a separate blog post I think :)

Constant visibility

Our velocity is no secret. We’re currently making this information constantly visible to the team via the information radiator, along with our company-wide work queue.

Everyone is encouraged to chip-in on the current state of projects, so that we can self-correct (this idea is based on the lean term: Kaizen culture)

How To Calculate Your Speed

The principle in calculating velocity is pretty simple. When we sell a project, we do so by giving it a cost in points. These points represent how much work the project needs us to deliver.

Some rough examples:

A small-ish app like iSight Test might be 10-20 points in size.
A big app like ASDA Price Guarantee might be 40-50 points in size.
A full solution like the AllBabble social network might be 100+ points in size (for both the app and related back-end stuff).

So, as we progress through the project, we deliver working features to our clients. Just like a project has a value in points, so do the features. As clients accept those features as being complete, we know we’ve delivered X points in Y months. This lets us calculate how much stuff we’re doing over time.

Mobile Job Trends

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:31:49 +0100

By Tobin Harris

The growth of jobs in the mobile sector is booming along with all other aspects of mobile. We generated some live graphs from the indeed.co.uk job engine. They can’t be taken too seriously, but it’s interesting to see the indicators.

Mobile Web vs iPone vs Android vs Blackberry

This graph shows how Mobile Web is hottest right now, closely followed by iPhone and Android.

iPhone vs iOS vs iPad

iPhone jobs are still hotter than iPad and iOS.

Yorkshire vs London

This is no surprise, but there is a staggering difference between job openings in London to Yorkshire.

Apple's Shocking Customer Service

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:29:00 +0100

By Tobin Harris

One of our iMacs has been playing up by turning itself off at random times. Annoying when you’re in the middle of something.

Chris phoned the Sheffield Apple store at about 10am this morning to report the problem. The conversation lasted about 3 minutes.

Within that time they’d diagnosed the problem and informed us a replacement would be with us within the next 3 hours.

WTF! 3 hours?

We were expecting 2 days at least, and a reasonably large dose of hassle.

For example, we thought we might need to package up the machine into it’s box, do some paperwork, and arrange it to be couriered back to the store. And then wait for a replacement. Also, Sheffield is 40 minutes away. And our machine is custom spec. You know, all the usual faff…

At 1pm, 3 hours after the call, we got a call from reception saying we had a delivery. A cheerful dude carried in a shiny brand new iMac. The thing had even been assembled to custom spec to match the one it was replacing. And, he waited for 1 hour whilst we restored a backup, just to be sure we had everything.

After that the delivery dude merrily carried away our broken iMac. Problem solved. No faff.

To top it off, at around 3pm we got a follow up call from the Sheffield store to make sure everything was going ok.

As someone who’s running a company, it’s awe inspiring to see this level of service. It’s remarkable. Remarkable very much in a Seth Godin Purple Cow kind of way.

P.S - Sorry for the Apple fan boy post, but we’re impressed :)

The Information Radiator

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:58:26 +0100

By Tobin Harris

Now that we’re in the new office, we’re taking the opportunity to sort a few bits and bobs out. The first is the information radiator, a tool which helps us feel the heart beat of the company.

Chris and I are huge fans of information radiators. The concept is simple. Put up a big screen in your office and make it show critical project information, visible to the team at all times.

The team can see what’s in the production pipeline, and where it is. We’ve got a 27” screen, but a 60” screen would be much better :)

Tracking Up To 300 Work Items

We’re typically working on 10-20 projects at once, across 8.5 man team, tracking up to 300 items of work (called stories).

The first screen we’ve developed shows the status of our work items in columns, from left to right. Since we develop software, our statuses are

Backlog (work scheduled)
Started
Finished (ready for Quality Assurance)
Delivered (sent to customer for review)
Done (customer gives the thumbs up, woohoo!)

The more items on the right, the better. That’s the “done” column.

More Screens

We’re developing more screens to show on the information radiator too. Our current screens are custom made to mine information from our project management system - Pivotal Tracker. We are also looking to connect to our CRM system (Highrise) to visualise sales statistics. I’ll be implementing this soon, with the help of Lee, so watch this space!

Commercial Projects

We’re currently rolling out similar tools at a Yorkshire NHS trust, in 3 separate departments. These tools will allow the lab staff to see their 3000 specimens and cases moving between various stages of their process. It will then help them spot bottlenecks and problems, and take steps to correct them.

Our workflow visualisation tools can display information to any business system, so if you’re interested in getting an information radiator for your business, give us a call.

iPad and Mobile Information Tools

Engine Room Apps is primarily a mobile studio, so of course we’re playing with bringing critical project information to ourselves on the move. Chris already has an ace working iPad app prototype which lets us view the state of all projects in the long term. It’s really funky. Again, we’ll post about that soon.

New Office

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:33:00 +0100

By Tobin Harris

Yesterday we moved into a slightly larger office space here at the Round Foundry.

The new Engine Room Apps office, at the Round Foundry Media Center

Despite a few concerns, we’re all really happy in our new home.

The wall at the front of the room is the only original red-brick still visible in the building. It looks cool with the sections of wood panelling scattered around the walls.

We’ve also got some epic windows with a direct view of the pub, hurrah.

There’s still tons of boxes and junk lying around (how do we collect so many cables!), but we hope to have it Zen-like within the week.

Last week we did a bit of 3D modelling in Sketchup to see how the layout might look, and to see where the light falls. Handy for planning.

Planning the office layout with a 3D model

The real thing is not quite as Zen, yet.

On a more geeky note, I’ve finally got my information radiator set up. It’s a 27” monitor showing team progress across all projects. The idea is to make important information highly visible to the team at all times, so we know when we’re faltering, or flying. I’ll be blogging about this soon.

The Round Foundry Media Center is a very flexible place for a growing business (or shrinking one!), and our thanks to Sharon and the team for continuing to be really helpful with our erratic office movements :)

P.S - Thanks to Lee, John, Chris, Richard and Thomas for doing most of the hard work :S

The Funding Conundrum

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:19:00 +0100

By Tobin Harris

Engine Room Apps is in an interesting position.

1) We’re in a market that’s exploding. We originally thought that mobile was a fun and interesting market to play with, but it’s kicking off big-time now. Let’s just say the phone rings very regularly, even though we don’t do any marketing.

2) We’re new to growing a business. Not been there before. Not done that before. So, we make lots of mistakes. Most mistakes cost us hard earned cash, because it’s not fair to let our customers suffer. Staying afloat in businesses isn’t easy for the inexperienced, no-matter how many books you’ve read, nor how many people you seek advice from.

3) We want to offer an amazing service with world-class quality solutions. We’re perfectionists (well, I’m the worst for that), and we want to make stuff that really does improve lives, save the world and be slick and sexy at the same time.

4) Our business is becoming attractive. It’s not just a few guys playing around anymore. We’ve gained a ton of in-house experience, resource and skill in this market. We want to do great things.

Now!

This cocktail of factors means that we want to create the dream company now. That means getting help. Possibly of the financial variety. We feel that bringing a dollop of outside cash and business brains will accelerate our growth, and give us guidance in our business decisions. It will mean we can build the dream faster, and get a foothold in the market before the competition goes crazy.

“Funding is the business equivalent of rocket fuel.”
Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Right now we’re in talks with an investor. It’s fun, but scary too. I’ll be posting about it along the way…

Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned: Part 2

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:51:00 +0000

By Tobin Harris

We recently posted up some lessons learned in our attempts to hire some iPhone developers without using recruitment agencies. It describes the dirty tactics we’ve seen recruitment agencies taking: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned: Part 1

Our original post caused an interesting discussion on news.ycombinator.com - we got to position 20 in the ycombinator rankings!

I’m logging the key take-aways from the thread for my own benefit, hopefully you’ll find them useful.

Candidates Suffer Too

A few people noted that agencies are not only cloning job posting to drown out the real-deal, they’re also cloning candidate profiles. That makes it harder for a company to find a candidate directly, they get piped through to recruiters instead. Dirty.

Get the Salary Right

One opinion was that we got the job title, expectations and salary wrong, by as much as £5K - £10K. Basically, some thought we weren’t offering enough salary for the skills we’re asking for (others thought it was reasonable). Perhaps we should have asked for a “Middle Weight” iPhone developer? We really just want someone who’s got some of the best practices nailed, and has pragmatism/experienced approach to their work. I.e. not a “junior”.

The bottom line is, the salary has to match the position to draw the right attention. Right or wrong, we should do our homework when setting salaries and job descriptions.

Recruiters Lie About The Candidate’s Desired Salary

One poster on ycombinator noted that:

Even if you’re willing to pay the recruiter’s fee, you’ll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they’ll essentially be offended by the offer, since it’s lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw.

We’ve seen this too, where salaries on CV’s are lower than the candidate wanted. They’re widening the net to catch more punters, it’s a numbers game.

Some Recruiters Do Have A Clue

One poster on the thread mentioned that some recruiters can be pretty good, I can believe that. He also noted where you might want to use them.

More companies might be able to ‘go direct’ without needing a recruiter, but many don’t know how to sell their own company to a potential employee. Money helps, certainly, and they’d be able to offer more if they weren’t involving a recruiting agency, but it typically takes a committed involvement from the company to do the initial screening.

I used to think recruiters had no place, and that companies should always go direct. I’ve found that strategically, it makes sense in a few cases if they need a specific skill and don’t want to broadcast to the wider market (their competition) about upcoming plans. However, those instances are pretty rare

So, a few nuggets there, but nothing ground breaking.

CoderStack

Another thing, it was nice to see the guys at coderstack.co.uk being active in the discussion, they’re doing some good stuff :) Would recommend you consider them for publishing your IT job descriptions.

On A Lighter Note…

recruitMENTAL has some shocking and hilarious stories about UK recruitment agency dirt-tactics. Worth a read (and run by a fellow frustrated Yorkshire company).

Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned: Part 1

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:13:00 +0000

By Tobin Harris (with thanks to Lee Sommerville for the “lessons learned” idea)

We’re currently in the process of hiring iPhone developers. Given the modern age of social networks and t’internet, we’re keen not to use agencies for this task.

As many may have discovered, it’s not easy. So… we’re blogging a bit about the process. This is the first instalment, which touches on what happened when we spuffed £200 on a cwjobs.co.uk advert.

WARNING: it’s not pretty. Sorry for the RANT!

So, one of our starting points was cwjobs.co.uk, a highly popular job board for people looking for jobs in the UK.

We spent over £200.00 on posting a nice job advert up, which looked a bit like this…

Ok, so what happened next? Did we get 100’s of responses from eager iPhone developers? Did we connect with awesome people who would love being on our team?

No. Not even close.

What happened was this…

Ad Cloning Galore

I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place.

The cheekiest one by far was by Opus, who copied the add and put it up on the same site with an increased salary to attract more attention.

Spot the difference between this and the above…

Great, they’re diluting our ad-impact. Thanks.

To make matters worse, they then got in touch trying to sell us a candidate! So, they:

Copy our ad under their own name
Make it more attractive by giving a false higher salary
Bombard us with phone calls
Then try and sell a single candidate to us for £7,000.

No wonder they wouldn’t drop under 15% on rates, they need us to pay heavily for all this fun they’re having.

Nice.

Agency Bombardment!

A 2nd side effet of posting up at cwjobs.co.uk is a volley of phone calls. For the last week, every day we’ve had about 3-8 phone calls from agencies. I think every agency in the game has phoned us to try and sell us candidates.

Basically, they must see on this site, and target us like animals.

On The Plus Side

cwjobs.co.uk isn’t all bad. We’ve had 2 genuine enquiries from good people. Unfortunately they don’t have the skills we’re looking for, but we might be able to train them up. So, not a complete fail.

Key Take-Aways

£200 isn’t much to pay csjobs.co.uk for a job posting, but be ready for recruitment agencies to clone your add and drown it out from an SEO perspective. I don’t think we’ll be doing this again unless we learn more about how to do it successfully.

Consider putting copyright notices on the bottom or your ads, it might stop agencies cloning them, but I doubt it.

Have a response ready for when you get bombarded with agency phone calls.

Sorry all this is a bit negative, we’ll try and post up more positive feedback once we have more success!

Smartphones Revolutionising Customer Relationships

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:50:45 +0000

The IGD have released an article about how smartphones are set to revolutionising customer relationships in the supermarket industry.

They also mentioned ASDA price guarantee app, which we developed in 2010.

Asda’s iPhone app now plays a key role in the retailer’s digital strategy by allowing shoppers to validate its Asda Price Guarantee. This commits Asda to being at least 10% cheaper than its main competitors with the retailer refunding the difference if items bought were less than 10% cheaper. The app enables shoppers to input receipt details, compare the cost of their shop with competitors and receive a refund if applicable.

Guardian Reviews Our iLegal App

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:33:11 +0000

By Tobin Harris

Was nice to see some praise for our iLegal app in the Guardian today.

The good news is that the interface is excellent. The app is simple, fast and well designed. It runs offline, which means that you can access it when you have no phone signal. Legislation is presented clearly and is fairly easy to read.

Obviously we did something right! That said, the article does mention some feedback about the content being out of date, which is a real shame. We’re working on fixing that with Tim Leigh, the inventor and owner of the iLegal brand.

Where to look for UK iPhone and Mobile Jobs

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:32:00 +0000

By Tobin Harris

We’re currently hiring iPhone app developers, and we’ve been hunting for places in the UK to post up job adverts. Ideally places that have a community around them and won’t charge a small fortune.

If you’re looking for an iPhone job, this list might help you. Feel free to post up more in the comments.

CoderStack

www.coderstack.co.uk

This is a site written by developers, for developers. It’s nicely done, and easy to post up a job posting.

So far, job postings are free “whist they get traction”. Looks like there are 20-30 UK iPhone developer jobs up there right now.

AppDevJobs

www.appdevjobs.com

This site allows free job postings, and seems to have a healthy selection of UK iPhone jobs going. This is focused on the mobile sector, so also includes Android, BlackBerry etc. And it has both freelance and permanent positions.

The Engine Room Apps Phone job up on there too.

CWJobs

www.cwjobs.co.uk

Ah, this is one of the big guns in the UK when it comes to looking for jobs. They seem to have a lot of iPhone positions on there. We’ve posted a job up there too, cost about £195.

SuperScout

www.superscout.com

This is a growing social network for the job industry. The idea is to use social stickyness to grow a job community. I love the idea, although it needs more traffic (go and give it some!)

I also spoke to the founder, Stefan Debattista, he’s a nice guy with a clear vision. I really hope that SuperScout gains traction.

Google

google.com

As part of our recruitment drive, we’ve also created an Adwords campaign for attracting iPhone developers. It looks like others are doing the same.

So, just search google and look at the non-organic links, you might find something!

A Few Misses…

We were hoping that StackOverflow Careers would have had more UK companies posting jobs up there, we didn’t find many for iPhone.

We were also hoping that the Yorkshire Evening Post would have more local software development jobs, but nope.

Any More?

There’s probably loads more places we could have mentioned, but these were the most promising ones. Please suggest more if you know them.

Video Review of iLegal on The Daily App Show

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:57:45 +0000

iLegal is an app we developed in partnership with Timothy Leigh in 2010.

iPhone Development Jobs

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:37:47 +0000

By Tobin Harris

We’re reaching out to any experienced developers who want to help us create great iPhone and iPad solutions here at Engine Room Apps.

This is a permanent role in our Leeds city center offices.

Here’s the deal..

You’ll earn up to £35,000 salary
You’ll get to practice agile methods on a daily basis. We take that seriously.
You’ll be working with our creative team who love new technologies and best software practices.
You’ll have the opportunity to skill up on new stuff. We also work with MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, Android and Mobile Web Apps.
We provide you with a top spec iMac for development
You’ll be working in a cool office, with loads of nearby creative companies, and bars & cafes on site. There are regular tech/creative conferences in our building too.
You’ll be in a relaxed & friendly working environment, and encouraged to occasionally work from home.
You’ll be joining a young growing team who want to kick out world-class mobile solutions.

What we need you to have…

A few iOS apps on the store that we can download and try out
Some code to talk us through, demonstrating your approach to solving problems and excellent OOP skills
A diverse history with a great deal of development experience and wisdom
Expertise with Git or some other version control system
The ability to put clean, crisp user interfaces together. We don’t expect you to be a designer, but we’d like you to have an eye for detail and an understanding of user-flow.
An understanding of what it means to deliver business value to customers, and a willing to participate in an agile studio.
Expertise in Objective-C and deep knowledge of the iOS SDK
Expertise in SQL and normalisation, and Core-Data of course
Expertise in creating apps that work over RESTful web services, using JSON or XML. Also, expertise in handling offline mode and caching.

If this sounds great to you, please get in touch by emailing tobin@engineroomapps.com, or phoning 0113 3944342.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Shazam's Mobile Strategy

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:32:00 +0000

By Tobin Harris

It was interesting to see that Shazam has launched on the Nokia platform this week. Shazam was been around for years, it’s that cool app that lets you hold your phone up in public places, and then tells you the name and artist of the song playing on the stereo.

I thought it would be interesting to take a really quick look at their mobile strategy over the last 3 years.

How Do They Reach An Audience

Firstly, it seems they’re methodically trying to cover as many platforms as possible, to have the widest reach of audience.

July 2008: iPhone Launch
December 2008: Android Launch
Apr 2009: Blackberry Launch
Oct 2010: Windows Phone 7 Launch
Jan 2011: Nokia Launch

Right now apple has 28% smartphone market share, Android has 26% market share, and Blackberry has 26% market share. Shazam have over 80% market coverage with those platforms alone. So…

…Why Bother With Windows and Nokia?

Last thing I heard, Windows Phone 7 has a 0.5% market share, and Nokia’s not been to hot in the apps/smartphone arena either. So, it’s interesting that Shazam are backing these platforms.

I think Nokia still have an absolutely huge customer-base that out-weighs Apple, RIM and the rest, but that’s more related to normal phones rather than smartphones.

My suspicion is that Nokia and Microsoft are 2 companies who have taken a hit, and who will rise to the competition. Therefore, Shazam wants to be ready for if/when that happens. I don’t have the market share figures for Nokia smartphones, which would help. Sorry :(

Native vs Web-Based Mobile

Another aspect of the Shazam strategy how they build their apps. Their apps are written specifically for each phone. That can be an expensive route.

Normally if someone wants to cover all platforms quickly, I’d recommend mobile-web, or something like Appcelerator Titanium. However, Shazam app needs audio recording capabilities, which you can’t easily do on a Mobile Web App or generic framework.

So, Shazam can’t reach new platforms on the cheap, they have to develop and support specific apps for each new platform. In turn, that explains why they’re keen to cover as many platforms as possible, they probably have cash in the bank and want to be ready for whichever smartphone-war players come home victorious.

54 Apps Submitted in 2010

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:04:31 +0000

By Tobin Harris

Chris gathered some stats from the first year of Engine Room Apps, which explain why we all welcomed the Christmas break so much.

In 2010, we developed…

20 iPhone Apps
3 iPad Apps
1 Android App
2 Universal iPad & iPhone Apps
1 web-based leisure boat booking system (to support iPhone app)
1 web-based twitter-like social network (to support to iPhone app)
1 sports promotional web site including that worked with YouTube
1 awards based web site
1 company product web site
1 agile productivity tool (internal project)

On top of that, one of our clients ordered 29 separate branded versions of his Android and iPhone/iPad app, bringing our app-store submission total to 54. Holy moses.

It was a year of highs and lows. We delivered a lot of work & built some great relationships. We also made a ton of mistakes and sacrificed a lot of income. That said, I think we all had a reasonably enjoyable time :)

Cheers to 2010, looking forward to 2011!

Asda App Launched!

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:04:11 +0000

Engine Room Apps worked with Asda to develop their first ever iPhone app.

The Asda Price Guarantee iPhone app was launched about a month before Christmas, and allows customers to compare prices with other supermarkets, and get money-back vouchers that can be redeemed in-store.

You can download it on the App Store.

The project was a great success, and we hope to continue to improve the app over time. We also thoroughly enjoyed working with the Asda team and were proud to be part of their first mobile app.

More info on our web site.

Welcome Thomas and Richard

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 08:00:09 +0000

By Tobin Harris

This is a quick shout out to our two new latest Engine Room Apps guys; Thomas Curley and Richard Towers.

Thomas has joined us as an iPhone app developer. In his spare time he’s also an independent developer, working with his brother Marting to create games for the App Store.

Richard is our user interface designer, who’s fascinated by interactivity and touch-based solutions.

Welcome guys, it’s great to have you on board.