Mobile Web

FiddleFly U: Growing the next generation of mobile masters

As FiddleFly has grown, we have expanded from a company offering a mobile development software into a company focused on complete mobile solutions. This means a large part of what we do is actually taking on full creative builds for our clients, many of which are creative agencies themselves. If there is one problem in the industry we have noticed, as have so many of our clients, it is the lack of mobile-informed manpower coming into the job market. With mobile being one of the fastest growing industries in history, it is a huge disservice to students for colleges to be slow in adopting mobile design and development as a key focus of study, yet this remains the case in far too many universities.

We’ve never been a company that is prone to calling attention to a problem without offering a solution, which is why we have been working on a program that we think could help change the face of the university trained mobile employee, and potentially make the web a better place. We call the program, FiddleFly U. Read More…

The Fear of New Technology, Get Over It!

Nobody wants to be replaced. When a new tool or technology emerges that seems to have the potential to save a company time and money, it is only natural that there will be someone on that company’s team quickly trying to kick some dirt on it and pretend like it never happened.”I can do that myself” mentality is certainly admirable, but the fact of the matter is it has cost plenty of businesses opportunities to get ahead.

One of the biggest sticking points that we tend to encounter when we present new clients with FiddleFly is hesitance from developers or an IT staff that claims they can do what FiddleFly can in-house. The truth is if they are talented, they usually can, however, the question we always present to them is “if you have the resources to do it, why haven’t you yet?” The answer almost always is simply that they have so much on their plates that mobile has been pushed to the back-burner. This is a problem just about every business has had, no matter what it is you do. You put your best people on your biggest projects and unless you are over-staffed, you are going to have projects that get pushed back. Read More…

The trick to earning trust is being transparent.

We have a sort of mantra here at FiddleFly that we like to tell our customers: “Anyone that claims to know everything about mobile is a liar.”

So, why does a company that has positioned itself as a leader in the industry make it a point to tell the world we don’t know everything? The simple answer is that it is impossible to. Mobile is constnatly changing and evolving. The technology we use gets better daily, the strategies that worked two months ago might not today. Anyone that truly believes they have everything figured out in this business is fooling themselves, period. Read More…

Why social media should be a cornerstone of your mobile site.

It should come as no secret to anyone that social media giants worldwide have gotten the memo that the future of their businesses lie in creating and monetizing great mobile experiences. When Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Disrupt SF last week, he couldn’t talk enough about the future of Facebook in mobile, and across the board just about every major social media outlet has taken major strides in upgrading and optimizing their mobile experiences. Social offers a perfect compliment to almost any mobile site, and needs to be one of your biggest weapons if you want to offer your customers a top-notch mobile experience, and especially if you intend to create returning visitors. Read More…

How the Mobile Web is changing the world most of us never see.

The other night I was at home eating my dinner while surfing the web on my phone and as is the case with nearly 80% of smartphone users, my television was running. When I looked up, I realized that not only had I been proving a point we here at FiddleFly have been trying to make for months, but I also happened to be just in time to catch one of the long-standing players in the tech industry, Mark Andreesen, talking about the mobile market on Charlie Rose.

Now Mark is a very tactful individual these days and most of the interview was spent carefully dodging questions about the inefficiencies of Microsoft and Android (Mark just so happens to be on the board at Facebook), but it was the philosophical side of his offerings that really caught my interest. Mark talked about a few of the more unpublicized benefits the mobile web is having for some of its poorest users, and it got me thinking about the true potential this amazing technology could actually have. Read More…

The Facebook Stalker App: Was it really such a crime after all?

If you have been keeping up in the latest drama from the Facebook camp, you have no doubt seen the controversial rise and fall of what many are labeling the “Facebook Stalker App.” The app, tentatively named Friendshake (that is at least until it was pulled down less than a day into its existence) allowed users to locate other Facebook users nearby using a geo-locating feature of their phones. While the app was designed to create a more connected community experience through mobile, it quickly became the target of concerns about users’ privacy, causing the folks at Facebook to quickly backtrack.

While many are chalking Facebook’s effective sweeping under the rug of Friendshake up to a blunder on the social giant’s behalf, the truth is a lot of good can and will likely come from this. We all know Facebook has been scrambling to find ways to capitalize on mobile, and this little experiment has already provided some really important answers. Read More…

Is mobile advertising a mirage, or just misunderstood?

Earlier this week I came across an article from Jean-Louis Gassée titled, “Mobile Advertising: The $20B Opportunity Mirage”. In it, Gassée argues that while the projections for mobile advertising revenue continue to skyrocket, there is no evidence that those lofty expectations will ever really come to fruition. He even goes as far as claiming:

“If the industry hasn’t cracked the mobile advertising code after five years of energetic and skillful work it’s because there is no code to crack.”

As much as I would love to claim that Gassée is flat out full of hot air (apologies for the pun) I must admit he raises some valid points. In 2011 mobile advertising was roughly a $1 billion business, compared to the $32 billion market for all around internet ads. Technologies such as television and the original web were able to generate much greater percentages of ad revenue in their first five years than mobile has, so it is easy to see where Gassée is coming from. What is also easy to forget that sometimes it takes even the greatest technological and creative minds a little longer than expected to figure out how to take advantage of a new innovation’s potential. Read More…

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