Managing Mobile Apps Will Be IT's Biggest Task

The prominence of mobile applications has exploded over the past few years, and with good reason. These apps provide a simple conduit between users and networks and allow businesses to provide services or content in exchange for ad revenue or data collection. The app boom provides an opportunity for midsize businesses to get ahead of the competition by properly managing mobile apps, but it also introduces some obstacles that must be considered when building a forward-looking network infrastructure.

Mobile Apps as the Future of Big Data
Industry analyst firm Gartner has watched this trend mature and now predicts that by 2015, the majority of mobile apps will collect and analyze large amounts of data concerning users and their social graphs. This means that within a few years, mobile will be at the heart of most big data initiatives. The company also predicts that by 2017, wearable devices will compromise 50 percent of application interactions, providing even more detailed information about users.

Despite these trends, Gartner suggests that most IT departments are not yet ready to take advantage of the flood of information cascading in through these apps and devices. While many of these mobile apps — especially the existing apps for wearables — collect plenty of valuable information, most of it is only used in direct support of the application's functions.

By getting out ahead of this mobility trend and preparing their systems to take advantage of this new data, midsize businesses can turn proactive thinking into a market advantage. Grasping the advantage here is all about preparing the infrastructure to not only manage mobile apps, but to also manage and master the massive influx of information they will provide.

This transition is the perfect time to expand the company's cloud footprint to build a powerful synergy between the cloud, mobile and big data solutions.

Managing Emerging Legal Concerns
Gartner also predicts that as more information is collected from apps and wearables, some IT departments will have difficulty managing the sensitive nature of the information. Data collected from smartphones, tablets and wearables can be both extremely personal and protected by law, and it will fall to IT managers to ensure that the management of this new influx of data is compliant with the company's information governance policies.

IT managers must be mindful of which policies affect which groups of data and ensure that information that should be managed in-house is not accidentally shifted to the public cloud while it is being analyzed.

These new data realities will add a significant layer of complication to the network infrastructure and the rules that govern it, but the cost of not managing this data correctly could be very high. Not utilizing the influx of data nor properly managing mobile apps can lead to a competitive disadvantage, and failure to properly secure customer data, especially the data retrieved through wearables, can lead to legal issues or customer service nightmares.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Karbonn A11+ available online starting at Rs 5,790

The Karbonn A11+ has surfaced without an official statement in sight, but that hasn’t stopped e-retailers such as Snapdeal and Saholic from stashing it. It was only last week that Karbonn introduced two Android ICS-driven smartphones dubbed Smart A1 Star and A5 Star, and the gadget in question has just joined the list.

The Karbonn A11+, however, walks a step ahead of both the handsets, featuring a larger screen and a better processor. Speaking of which, a 4.7-inch capacitive touch panel with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels resides on the device’s faces. Resting under the hood is a dual core processor sprinting at a speed of 1GHz.

A 3.2MP camera can be seen on the rear panel fitted next to an LED flash, while a VGA camera has been lodged into place above the display. Out of the 512MB of internal memory, merely 161MB has been made available to satiate users’ storage needs. This is when the built-in microSD card slot enters the picture to facilitate further expansion of up to 32GB.

Saholic has put the A11+ smartphone on sale at a price of Rs 5,849, while Snapdeal is selling it at a relatively lesser amount of Rs 5,790. White and black are the two hues in which the device has been made available through both e-retailers.

Let’s quickly run through the smartphone’s key specifications:
- Display: 4.7-inch capacitive touchscreen
- Resolution: 480 x 854 pixels
- Platform: Android 4.0
- Processor: 1GHz dual core
- Main camera: 3.2MP with LED flash
- Secondary webcam: VGA
- Memory: 512MB flash, expandable up to 32GB
- RAM: 512MB
- Battery: 1,450mAh
- SIM slots: Two

Facebook app allows video sharing

With the latest version of the Facebook application for iOS, you can now record and share videos. This update comes just a few days after Twitter launched Vine, its own video-sharing solution for members of its network.

This 5.4 version of Facebook for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch allows users to record and share videos directly from the application as well as send voice messages and share their favorite places.At the start of January, Facebook had already included the exchange of voice messages in the latest version of its Messenger application.

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Google brings Instagram like app for Android - Snapseed

Google has unveiled a content sharing app, named as Snapseed. Google brings Instagram like functions, which help users to edit images and share the same via Google+ or other social networks.

This new app has been developed by a company named as Nik Software, which has been brought by the Google previously. Last year the Snapseed application was even adjusted as the best iPad app, and was available for $4.99 for Apple devices. Although, this app is available for free on both iOS and Android platforms, and will challenge Instagram which was purchased by Facebook for a heavy amount.

As stated by the senior vice president of Google in an official blog post , "Having welcomed Nik to the Google family, we're excited to bring their Snapseed app (last year's iPad app of the year) to Android."

Snapseed has lots of new features like tune, straighten and crop, add creative filters such as drama, black and white, and vintage that users can apply individually or in combination to images. Users can also use one 'Point technology' to selectively enhance their photo-to brighten just a face, for example, or deepen just the sky. Gundotra stated," Google+ also will be adding a new feature called "Communities," which makes the "hangouts" feature of the social network into permanent locations".

He further added, "Google+ has always been a place to crowd around common interests and meet new people. What's been missing, however, are more permanent homes for all the stuff you love: the wonderful, the weird, and yes, even the things that are way out there. With Google+ Communities there's now a gathering place for your passions".

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One DIV, Holidays Calendar, Command & Conquer in HTML5, MapBox, 24 Ways and More

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• What qualities do you need to become a creative director and how do you become one? Expert creative directors share tips on how to be one.
• Five things you can do to make your terminal window more helpful.
• Dune II, one of the best games of all time, ">ported to the web by caiiiycuk using Emscripten
• 24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December a daily dose of web design and development goodness is published to bring a little Christmas cheer to its readers.
• MapBox, is a site for designing and publishing maps that uses open source map data.
• A recreation of the original Command and Conquer game, entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript with multiplayer support using Node.js.
• A useful search tool for finding variations of domain names.
• Mozilla's @codepo8 has created a 2012 holiday calendar featuring one awesome demo or article per day.
• Is ramification something your site needs? Get in on Gamification and tips for building site badges.
• One Div is a site dedicated to single element logos created with just CSS and one DIV element.

You can propose links to us on Twitter (@YDN) or try bookmarking them on delicious with the tag "forydntt".

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iPad Mini is inexpensive, impressive - Review is here

Apple's iPad Mini will bring a lot more excitement and a little more confusion to the holiday shopping season. It only takes a few minutes playing with the iPad Mini to realize the scaled-down tablet computer will be a sure-fire hit with longtime Apple disciples and potential converts who've been looking for a more affordable entree into the mobile computing market.

With a 7.9-inch screen, the iPad Mini is perfectly sized to be stuffed in Christmas stockings. Recipients who will discover the pleasure and convenience of being able to take pictures, surf the Web, watch video, read books and listen to music on an exquisitely designed device that's pancake thin.

As enticing as that all sounds, the iPad Mini also causes a dilemma, albeit a pleasant one.

The new option will make it even more difficult for holiday shoppers to figure out which mobile device to buy for their loved ones -or for themselves.

I felt the pangs of indecision within a few minutes of picking up the iPad Mini for the first time.

As the company usually does at its product unveilings, Apple Inc. only provided reporters with limited, strictly supervised access to the iPad Mini on Tuesday.

That meant I could only experiment with it for about 15 minutes, but as an experienced user of the iPad 2, I could quickly see that the smaller tablet does just about everything its bigger brethren does.

Even though the Mini's screen is 1.8 inches smaller than the standard iPad, the movie The Avengers looked lush, even in a side-by-side comparison with the larger tablet.

When I pulled up the latest issue of the New Yorker, I didn't have to strain to see the text or pictures on the smaller screen. A quick check of other websites verified that the Mini's screen isn't so tiny that it's going to cause a lot of squinting.

After I took a very crisp picture of another reporter testing out a Mini, I decided to email it to her to test how easy it was to use the keyboard on the smaller screen. No problem there. Best of all, the iPad Mini can be held in one hand and is about half the weight of the larger iPad.

The Mini worked so much like my standard iPad that it immediately caused me to have second thoughts about a decision I thought I had already made.

I like my iPad 2 a lot, but it's just too big to carry with me wherever I am. But there have been times I really wish I had it with me, like when I spot something that would make a great picture or when I've needed to check something on the Web.

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