In the course of researching mobile web application prototyping and testing, I came across Mob4Hire, a new service that aims to help mobile application developer with reliable testers through crowdsourcing. I went ahead and signed up. I look forward to testing out my first mobile application and checking out Mob4Hire at the same time.
With the sheer number of devices, operating systems, browsers, carriers, and geographies that may need to be tested, it can be really difficult to test against all the scenarios.
Crowdsourcing may be just the solution to this problem. Of course, the reliability of the testers probably cannot be guaranteed to be as good as, say, your in-house QA. I imagine that this service would mostly be useful to ensure that everything ‘looked’ ok in various devices leaving the functional, unit, and regression testing to the development teams.
The Austin American-Statesman has partnered with Quattro Wireless and updated their mobile web portal. You can view the new mobile site by visiting http://statesman.com in your mobile browser, or directly by visiting http://statesman.qwapi.com. I’d never seen the qwapi.com domain before, but a little Google search shows that the service is quite popular with content portals. The NBA, CoverGirl, Boston.com, and Playboy Mobile all use the service to deliver mobile content.
Interestingly, visiting the root domain qwapi.com goes to a GoDaddy domain parking page.
Here’s a link to the presentation I gave during Refresh Austin’s September meeting.
Mobile Web: A Primer on Design and Development
- When did Karl Marx write The Communist Manifesto?
- What exactly do Kasmir Lime leaves look like and where the hell can I find them?
- Just how much of a badass is Chuck Norris?
- Is it the second or third right after Manchaca where that Christmas party is being held?
- Where are dog-friendly restaurants in San Antonio?
These are all questions I have quickly answered at a party, from within a grocery store, a bar, or while walking down the River Walk. I did so instantly by accessing the greatest store of information ever amassed - the Internet - effortlessly.
There was a New York Times article recently, Supercharged With All the Answers, that addressed this same phenomena in society at large. Surveys “show that three-quarters of Americans have cellphones and 44 percent of that number can connect to the Internet[...] The number of people with hand-held devices is much smaller, 11 percent of the population, and of that group 57 percent can surf the Web.”
I am one of those individuals who can and do surf the web from my hand-held device. I use a Samsung Blackjack and I have to agree that it is “stunning” to be able to access obscure information from the palm of my hand. It’s nothing for me to look up information, stats, or wikipedia entries when they come to mind. Of course, these trivial pursuits are in addition to the more mundane, but common tasks of checking email, news headlines, and weather. I can also perform much more technical tasks such as access a command-line shell on any number of work or personal servers. I can take and instantly share pictures on flickr and videos on YouTube.
With advanced mobile devices becoming more prolific, networks faster, and even the naivest consumers more savvy, we’ll see more and more people access the Internet from devices other than their traditional computers.
