Paul Golding ended the day with a look at future trends in mobile. He framed it in terms of future opportunities for developers working in mobile. Judging by the fact Golding's children are Android developers at the age of 11 and 13 - there is already very stiff competition from the next generation of developer!
Golding started off by quoting William Gibson (author who coined the term 'cyberspace') . . . The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
Golding expalined that Gibson means we have what we need to build the next generation technology - it's just a case of configuring correctly what we currently have.
This was a key theme running through the session - that innovation does not necessarily mean reinventing the wheel. Far from it - successful innovation comes from improving what's already there - look at Google, Apple etc.
Golding then rattled through some top tips for developers:
1 Myth of first mover advantage - it is often a bad idea.
Be the first to win, not the first to market.
Copy what others are doing but do it better. People are guilty of trying to hard to innovate.
2 If you don't experiment you will never find out whether it works.
Golding uses the example of crossing the chasm as outlined in Geoffery Moore's book Dealing with Darwin) in which the real problem for innovators is jumping from 10,000 users to 100,000 or 500,000 - the point at which you really scale up.The chasm in the growth curve is where failure happens. When users don't adopt the technology in large numbers.
Trick: code towards customers (not users) so that you can identify how a line of code benefits the customer.
3 Code for adoption and a viable business model.
Reduce your operational friction. Golding mentioned books by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Dave Bclure, Osterwalder - see presentation below for names!
4 Don't code the future into the product. Build the future into the process.
5 Innovate where it matters.
Undersatnd where in the development process you get traction with your innovation.
6 Master the whole apps journey.
Idea, choose platforms, develop product, deliver product, engage market
7 Know when you are really a platform
8 Know a biz model vs innovation
The key shift over the coming years will be that cloud services will dominate infrastructure. Operating systems will be delivered as web services and users will be choosing 'experience platforms' where elements we like will be abstracted from their core service - the platform will curate the services we want - more on this concept later.
A final piece of advice for entrepreneurial developers: leverage the start-up eco system. Get a mentor or join an incubator.
Here is Paul's excellent presentation
