Google South Africa 2.0

This is just a brief of the few useful points I found worth jotting down, enjoy

Nelson Mattos, Google Vice President, Europe & Emerging markets – Keynote

• SA low internet usage, 70% between 24 & 44 years

Google Strategies:

• Peering/Caching:
  Regional Points of Presence – reducing user’s perceived latency
• Enabling the ecosystem.
  Building support & training programmes – University programmes, business & devt programmes
  Ubono : Strengthening SA Startups
• Localizing global products:
  Search engines, maps
• Localizing global products:
  Youtube is now in isiZulu & Afrikaans. It was available in Kiswahili in 2010

Has innovation stopped?

• Google 1B searches a day, +3M computers, +1M emails a day, every min 48Hrs of video uploaded on youtube

Google Cultural Infrastructure:

• Hire the best
• Foster Entrepreneurship:

• Ideas come from anywhere, take ideas seriously
• Flatten mgt structure, 20% time freedom, Seargey’s resource allocation rule
• Transparency & open communication. Be effective, avoid duplication, internally share all info
• Data analysis & user experiments. Its all about data, data, data
• Users come first, not REVENUE
• Speed matters. Innovation, not perfection. Launch Fast and often, dogfooding, fail fast & beautifully

Pieter Greyling, Google Android App Developer Advocate – Android development

Follow him on twitter @pietergreyling

Tips on App Development. Don’t see them as soo obvious, for they are not.

• Dont just port ur UI over from another framework
• Consider your use of the back button
• Be consistent:

• standardize your margins, paddings, font sizes, colors, common layouts
• use styles, themes & included layouts. Use xml files to standardize formats. Colors.xml for consistency.

• Be responsive: humans perceive 100>200ms as slow.

• Keep UI thread for… UI!,
• Ensure UI remains responsive.
• AsyncTask, Services, Threads + Handlers, IntentService
• Use strict mode (policies on threads and vm)
• Asynctask enables proper and easy use of the UI!

Do's

• Build a great app
• Market the app
• Make it easy to rate and comment
• Provide timely, useful updates
• Target appropriately: Location, software version, hardware capability
• Provide great marketing

Feature image

• No adverts
• No app screenshots
• Eye catching
• Text: Branding, App name

Dont's

• Launch prematurely
• Require excessive permissions
• Spamming
• Overprice relative to category

What is Android 4.0 - Icecream sandwitch (ICS)

• Unified UI framework for phones, tablets and more
• Android 3.x features, now for phones too

• fragments, loaders, rich notifications, annimation system, multimedia enhancements..
• And much more
• Social API, calendar API, new connectivity options, accessibility improvements, enterprise features.

ICS FEATURES:

1. Navigation controls
   For phones without controls
• Back
• Next
• Cancel
2. Action Bar
• Stacked action bar
• Split action bar
3.  Social APIs
4. Multimedia
5. Camera
• Face detection (locates eyes and mouth)
• Register, then start detection and impln a call back
6. Android beam
• NFC Push…
7. Wi-Fi direct
• p2p connection
• discover peers
8. Enterprise features
• Device policy to disable camera
• Key chain API to manage certificates
9. Webkit
• support for additional fonts
• support for WebDriver
• browser updated V8 Javascript compiler
• Incorporated a bunch of 3.0 enhancements
10. New widgets
11. Gridlayout
12. TextureView…
13. Bluetooth health profile
14. Device sensors
15. Renderscript
16. Visual Voicemail API

An awesome guide to the app galaxy by google for app developers, check:
www.guidetotheappgalaxy.com

Bruno Albuquerque, Google Mobile App Developer – Tips to mobile development

Why develop for mobile?

• Fast growing market worldwide
• Close to desktop usage and growing faster
• Several ways to monetize
• “Always on” / Personal
• Location-based targeting
• Low-cost / High volumes
• Getting rewarded for being creative

In south africa:

• 52M activated SIM cards (for a population of 49 million)

Market Segments

Mobile web

• Needs constant connection (no offline mode) or HTML5 online storage
• Not all mobile browsers are born equal

Native apps

• Specific to each device/OS
• Different features and UI styles for each device/OS
• Different distribution channels for different device/OS

Entry phones

• Accounts for 40% of all mobile devices in Africa (as of end of 2010)
• Little or no data access
• Very small screen
• No support for installed apps
• SMS
• Simple and short plaintext commands/responses
• High latency (up to many hours)
• Expensive

Feature phones

• Accounts for 45% of all mobile devices in Africa (as of end of 2010)
• Small-size screen
• Some installed/offline apps
• Some connectivity

• EDGE
• MMS
• Content

• Simple HTML
• Native apps (J2EE, Brew etco

Super phones

• Accounts for 0.5% of all mobile devices in Africa (as of end ofg 2010).
• Fast CPU (vs. battery usage)
• Large screen (upto 720p, larger on tablets)
• Allows complex UIs (but simple ones are still better)
• Good data connectivity

• 3G, 4G, WiFi
• Bluetooth / Bluetooth LE

• Location (GPS)
• Content

• HTML/HTML5/Flash (also offline access)
• Native apps (Java/C++/Objective C)

Bruno Albuquerque, Google Mobile App Developer – Google Web toolkit

App Engine

• Allow deployment of applications without the worry of managing resources, controlling logs, monitoring services.
• Supports several programming languages

• Java
• Python
• Go

• Scales easily

• http://code.google.com/appengine

Google Web Toolkit

• Write code to run on websites in Java.
• Automatically converts Java code to highly optimized javascript code.

Google+ API

• Used to integrate your app or website with Google+
• Read only access to public data

• People
• Activities
• Comments

Hangouts support

• Develop collaborative apps that run inside hangouts

+1 button

• Adds a button that allows people that allows people to express that they were interested on the associated item
• https://developers.google.com/+/