There's so much news right now about mobile applications and stores, it feels like time to take stock.

When iPhone launched and I got my greedy mitts on a jailbroken Shiny from the US, one of the things I liked most about it was the dodgy "installer" app which the kind man who jailbroke it for me put there. At the time it definitely felt like the best experience I'd had of downloading and installing third-party mobile applications, and Apple have gone on to improve on it with their official Application Store.

Conventional wisdom had been that users don't download mobile apps, a generalisation which flies in the face of our experience; we know we've had well in excess of 750,000 downloads of apps incorporating our Cactus UI library to date, plus the installations we're unable to track ourselves. And our experience isn't unique. But there's definitely been some problems taking owners of conventional smartphones through the process of downloading and installing an application:

1. Text into a shortcode
2. Receive a WAP Push or text message
3. Find it, open it, click on the link
4. Ignore the warning that you might go online
5. Pray your mobile phone has correct connection settings
6. Go online, wondering how much this is costing you
7. Find out your phone isn't supported (whatever that means)
8. Wonder what all the fuss is about

So... application downloads to date have been by customers who are educated enough, driven enough or persistent enough to deal with this infernal procedure.

Just one more thing...

I love the mobile web. It's getting better every year as devices and networks improve, it's still got a long way to go, and it's the most cost-effective means of getting a mobile service launched.

But isn't it strange that Apple are getting massive success selling applications via a an application itself - that they're not selling and distributing iPhone apps via the web, either on the device or through iTunes? And it looks like Google are taking the same tack.

Isn't this a pretty strong endorsement of application as a route to online content, rather than the web? And isn't the success Apple has enjoyed with their application store testament to the fact that even in situations where the web might provide a perfectly serviceable experience (such as e-commerce), applications are a better route to take? Not that I'm suggesting we don't need to wait and see on this one, or that there won't be problems down the line as the quantity of content available via these stores increases.

I've been reading Jeff Pattons blog (or rather, re-reading). There's so much good stuff in here it hurts:

• On estimates: "Treat estimates given at the outset of a project as a budget for some possible solution, not as a bid for one specific solution."
• On changing your products UI more frequently: "What would a design and development process look like that encouraged frequent small change to user experience?"
• On agile product design and development: "This stuff is difficult. There isn’t an instruction manual to follow."
On getting design and dev working together: "If you want your product design and development to be effective, put someone on staff who's both a strong designer and technically capable of making design changes to the product directly."

I had the good fortune to meet Jeff at XP Day last year, wibbled at him and got some good advice. If I ever meet him again I'm going to drug him, abduct him, and keep him in a cage at FPHQ.

/me waves at Jeff.

...did you know we have a company weblog now? We're not so good when it comes to updating our main web site, so this'll be a good place to watch if you want to find out what we're up to...

So, Joh and I did our talk last night at The Werks - attempting to summarise experiences from the last year at Future Platforms, since we formally adopted Scrum for all our development processes.

I managed to get delayed slightly in London, and managed to arrive at Hove station a mere 3 minutes before we were due to start: oh the irony of arriving late when you're giving a talk about delivering products on time. But fortunately things were slightly behind schedule already and no-one seemed to notice.

The talk itself went OK; it was a rerun of, and expansion upon, a half-hour piece I pulled together for Barcamp Brighton a month or so back... and the Barcamp talk itself was a follow-on from one Joh and I gave at SkillSwap last year, summarising our experiences a week into Scrum. So I was pretty familiar with the material, although I made a point of adding in lots of (sanitised and anonymised) data from real projects we've been running.

There's far too much to go into here, and if you've been reading this site you'll have read quite a bit of it already. Plus I have to save *something* to say to people I meet in real life. But if you attended, you might find these annotated slides handy - I've taken the ones we showed on the night and added in a few notes here and there which might jog your memory on the points I was making as I went through them. Beware, for as a wise man says: if the slides make sense without my being there, there's no point in my presenting them; and if they don't make sense without me, you won't get much value from them. Caveat emptor :)

I was given an hour to do this skit, and with questions we ended up using just shy of two hours, which is the longest I think I've ever spoken publicly. With that warning in mind, if you'd like to chat about this sort of thing or find out more, do give me a shout: tom dot hume at future platforms dot com

Thanks to James McCarthy and Rosie Sherry for organising everything, to Joh for gamely keeping me on the straight and narrow once more, and everyone who came along for making it so much fun :)

MomoLondon NFC: Victoria Richardson, Proxama Shows a video of phones touching other phones to a pumping techno soundtrack. Things happen when the phones touch other phones. Service discovery, payments, ticketing and access control are easily made accessible via NFC. But why? Brands and retailers are on the edge of the NFC world Smart Poster: dumb RFID chip. Benefits: trying stuff out, accessing links, and sharing stuff. Sounds like a good scheme for avoiding the burden of knowing about or entering links. For some reason, a Hajj-like image of keen consumers desperately trying to touch posters springs to mind. NFC ties into an infrastructure which already exists (hmm... the readers might exist but this doesn't imply we'll have access to the installed infrastructure) Claire Maslen, Head of NFC, O2 Telefonica Presenting some insights from the NFC trial O2 ran, and some areas of opportunity which - in hindsight - they didn't give enough attention. Trial: 500 O2 customers (prepay/postpay), lots of use cases (transport, payment, access control, smart posters). All using Nokia 6131. Results:

• Encouraging positive reaction
• 9/10 trialists happy using the technology
• 79% said they'd like to use their phone to pay/travel in future
• Convenience, ease of use, and status were factors in getting this positive response

• 89% of triallists wanted to take this up
• 67% said it was more convenient than Oyster card
• 87% said Oyster support in-phone would make a difference to their choice of phone)

• 68% wanted to use this in future
• 41% felt it was faster than paying with cash (not sure how this is a good stat... most people still think cash is faster, no?)
• 47% said it was an influencing factor in phone purchase