Adam Blum

Smartphone apps are the most exciting trend in computing since the advent of web apps.  How do you as a developer take advantage of this?  More generally, how do you do that and get maximum reach for your app across the diversity of smartphones out there.  If you’re writing a consumer app you can get away with just targeting the iPhone (albeit missing some market opportunity).  If you’re writing a business app you need to be able to reach all the users in the enterprise.   There just are no homogeneous mobile device environments in any place but the smallest mom and pop shops now. There are in fact several high level alternatives, but probably only one practical one at a high level.  Let’s start with the most seemingly obvious one: Write natively in each underlying op... (more)

Building iPhone Apps for Business

Friday I’m speaking at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Mountain View.   The topic is “iPhone for Business”, which, if I took the topic literally, raises many issues about distribution and maintenance of smartphones in the enterprise. But I’m really just going to focus on the narrower issue of “iPhone apps for business”: how do you build compelling and useful smartphone apps for enterprise i... (more)

The Enterprise Smartphone Server

Rhodes is a great option for allowing developers to write their smartphone apps one time and have them run natively on all devices. After being out for a while several competitors emerged and now we have a product category known as the “smartphone app framework”, with several participants.   We believe that our first mobile Ruby, our fullfledged MVC framework, our hosted development site... (more)

App Store Rules

The iPhone and the Apple App Store have been THE critical agents in changing the mobile consumer’s attitude with regard to mobile applications.  Specifically they have converted virtually all smartphone users (beyond just the iPhone) to wanting and expecting to use native apps on their mobile devices.  This is a huge sea change in behavior, especially for U.S. consumers.  As enabling tec... (more)

UDDI as an Extended Web Services Registry

As enterprises build a critical mass of Web services, they need some way of keeping track of those services. UDDI is an ideal store for such information. Using UDDI's built-in abstractions of business services, binding templates, and tModels referring to interface specifications, UDDI can be used to manage all of the addresses and protocols and formats of those services. This information ... (more)