07 Oct 2012
Last week provided me with an occasion to feel the tempo of the mobile
ecosystem at Apps World in London. Here are a few thoughts about what I saw.
There were many many mobile agencies
exhibiting... and local UK agencies were dwarfed in number by offshore ones,
hailing mainly from India. Eastern European countries also had an important
presence, especially Poland. It seems that the golden days of apps development
are behind us. Most big companies now outsource their apps offshore. It also
means that it's becoming very important for local agencies to differentiate
themselves. I actually pitched many of them about Algolia Search and
differences in reactions were interesting. Most Indian based agencies didn't
have a second look; They preferred to wait for "requirements" from their
customers. On the other hands European ones were on average much more
interested in what they could do with such a lib. The most geniune interest
always came from technical guys when they were present. By the way, if I could
give advice to any agency participating in such a event, please come with at
least a developer, and at best your CTO. You would gain much credibility and
differentiation!
Out of all of the agencies, a few other disciplines were well represented...
actually I may say "too much" represented as it often indicates an over-
crowded field and a battle for survival!
- Testing and QA services. Offshore Indian firms are also very active in this space.
- Ad platforms and payment tools. I didn't know there were so many options to choose from! Competition seemed harsh to get the attention of the few apps developers attending.
- And most of all cross-platform HTML5 frameworks! I'm not a big fan of PhoneGap and consorts, even if I admit it's a good choice for some apps, especially "enterprise" ones. The space is so crowded with offers now, that many may not survive the next year! By the way if you want to offer a framework and want to differentiate yourself with a cutting-edge search functionality, you know how to contact me ;)
Two companies had a particularly important presence at the event compared to
what we could have expected:
- RIM, with probably the nicest booth of all. They proposed BlackBerry porting classes, offered developer guidance and gave several workshop speeches. After their recent commitment to paying BlackBerry 10 developers a minimum of $10K, they continue to do all they can to attract developers. But I'm afraid I agree with Charlie Kindel that paying developers is a bad idea!
- Twilio, actively promoting their voice and SMS APIs. Their immense success reminds us that there are still billions of feature phones out there!
The other less surprising major players included Samsung and Microsoft, but no
Google and no Apple (not unexpected!). Of course, they were present in many
conversations! I had for example a very interesting chat with Adam
Hościło about the many opportunities provided by the
new iOS 6 Passbook. It's opening a golden area for many in the next few
months!
28 Sep 2012
With the summer behind us, the period is pretty active. It's really difficult
to attend all the great events, big and small, organized out there. After
Mobile Monday,
Failcon and the first meeting of
Appsterdam Paris this week, here are the major mobile
app conferences we're attending in the next few weeks!
- Appsworld, the 2nd and 3rd of October in London. It's a major event attended by lot of mobile industry professionals. There are expecting up to 5000 participants!
- Mobility for business, the 11th and 12th of October in Paris. A big event too, they are expecting about 3000 attendees!
- Appdays, the 9th of November in Paris. A more human sized event (200 participants) and definitely a place to be!
If you happen to participate to one of these, get in touch for some passionate
discussion around mobile apps development!
24 Sep 2012
We are pleased to
announce Algolia Search Beta 3, our third release with a strong focus on
performance.
As for the previous release, we would like to sincerely thank all of our beta
testers for their excellent feedbacks!
Here what's new in this beta3.
iOS & Android changes:
Ultra fast loading: indexes are now loaded in a few milliseconds (always less
than 10ms!) With the Beta 2, an index of 500MB could take up to 20 seconds to
load.
Ultra fast search on big indexes: Beta 2 was able to search up to 100k entries
in real time. Beta3 can search in 5M entries in real time (and probably
more!). Our main use case was to search in all titles of the English version
of
Wikipedia on a IPhone 3GS. The speedup is also very nice for small datasets,
the near-zero CPU usage increases battery life compared to Beta 2.
- Highlight is now always done on longest match. In previous version a query 'anq' could highlight "Angeles" in
two different ways: "Angeles" or "Angeles", with this version you will
always obtain "Angeles" which is easier to
understand for end-users.
- Improved proximity scoring when a query contains multiple words.
- Fixed two memory leaks that could lead to problems with very heavy usage.
iOS specific changes:
- Added a version without ARC that allows to target iOS >= 3.0
03 Sep 2012
We are pleased to announce the launch of Algolia Search Beta 2, our second
release!
We would like to sincerely thank all of our beta testers for the great
feedback. You really helped us to make Algolia Search a first-class product
guys! Please continue your feedbacks!
And here what's new in this beta2.
iOS & Android changes:
- Improved performance for big data sets (up to three times faster). In our tests, we successfully used a 3 millions entries data set on a old iPhone 3GS. The index was 250MB large!
Documentation changes:
- Reworked the overview
- Fixed a lot of typos and small errors
iOS specific changes:
- Added an AlgoliaSearch.h header that includes all public headers
- Prefixed all public classes by AS
- Changed addEntry selector in ASIndexWriter to be more similar to NSMutableDictionary API
- Removed internal objects from public headers
- Changed ASAsyncIndexSearcher API to implement the delegate pattern
22 Aug 2012
Time flies! I just realized we didn't offer any feedback about our
participation in the Evernote DevCup back in July.
First of all, thank you so much for your support! We ranked 14th out of 174
contestants in public voting! That actually exceeded our expectations as we
aimed for the 20th position (so drinks are on Julien!)
But even with all of your support, we didn't make it to the finals. We would
have loved to fly to San Francisco, but the six
finalists all feature rich apps that merit their position. Congrats
guys, and good luck! The conference is in a couple of days now, and I can't
wait to find out who will win the cup!
As for us, it was a truly great experience! Remember our
post
announcing our participation? Well, outside the slight frustration of not
going to SF, the couple of days we spent building the Search for Evernote app
was really worth it!
- We were able to correct a few corner case bugs which this new use case highlighted. It's always better to find them yourself than let app developers stumble upon them :)
- We developed a new feature enabling prefix search on all words.
- Our participation led to an improved awareness of the company and helped our SEO.
- We created a new demo of the search lib which is much more compelling than Cities Suggest in many situations. It is actually a bit more than a demo for some people - as of today, it has 317 active users on google play!
That got us thinking... we may do this kind of contest again. But this time
we'll aim higher!
