The Hidden Costs of In-house App Development

Developing a mobile application involves more than just the costs outlined by the technical specifications for a converting a killer idea into a quantifiable reality. There are a whole lot of hidden costs if app development is in-house, further fuelling the long-standing debate between the pros and cons of outsourcing versus in-house. So what does an in-house application development entail?

1. The first stage of incurring additional investments arises in the form of hiring and setting up a team of developers that encompasses the 24/7 remuneration for employees.

2. However, the investments do not end with the hiring of a bunch of developers. In order to build a cohesive and effective team of app developers, designers and project managers, the businesses are required to spend funds in training them as well.

Re-engaging Users: Going Beyond the Initial Installation

The current ecosystem for mobile application downloads, engagement and usage is very much different from what it used be just a year back. With app downloads and installs no longer a metric to determine the success of the app, app makers as well as marketers need to change their strategies of connecting with users. Studies show that almost 80 to 90% of the mobile apps are used just once before being removed from the system. The key to retaining users lays in the effective implementation of user engagement strategies, including the need to re-engage their users.

Re-engagement implies a set of practices or technologies that can identify users who have downloaded an application and presenting them with offers or services prompting them to use the app more often. If the users have stopped using the app after a specific duration of time, these very offers or entitlements or offers act as an incentive to the user to use the app again. For re-engaging the customers with an app, a web development company California can either implement in-app messaging or push notification services.

The Latest Trends in Big Data Arena

With the buzz around “big data” only increasing over the years, we find out how well organizations are catching up with data and vice versa. We look at some of the recent trends that are doing the rounds in the enterprise world of big data adoption and implementation.

1. The market for big data is growing – the $7 billion estimated market cap way back in 2011 is set to grow over $61 billion by 2020 and $84 billion by 2026. It indicates a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17% spread over the 15-year duration, starting 2011.

2. Despite the rising awareness about the advantages of implementing and adopting big data analytics solutions, the success rate of its implementations is still ineffective. While there are only 27% (1 out of 4) enterprises that have successfully managed to execute their big data strategies, 24% enterprises have either not implemented or do not plan to do so. In addition, there are 13% organizations with full-scale production of big data, 35% in partial production and 29% are in the stage of doing a POC.

3. Two-thirds issues hindering the effective implementation of big data analytics solutions are processes (or people) and not the technology concerning it. There are quite a few additional common issues like:

The 5 Essential Analytics for Optimizing App Performance

At 3 million (and counting) mobile apps in leading apps stores along with 2 billion smartphone users, it becomes an uphill task to ensure that an app is discoverable in the app stores, at the very least. Although the app development process takes up a lot of resources and time, it is just the beginning. There has to be a short as well as long-term marketing plan that would chart the post-launch roadmap for ensuring product success. In addition to the app marketing strategies, regular tracking and monitoring of various parameters like downloads, user engagement, conversion rates, etc are very much necessary.

Pooling resources with a web development California company and the right kind of analytics, it becomes a lot easier to determine the possible areas of optimizing performance. Here are the five essentials to enhancing mobile app performance:

1. Monitor user behavior and demographics to evaluate how the application is converting with users. A mobile application development company can offer effectual insights on the latest market trends along with user behavior.

2. Measure the current financial goals and generate inferences as to what would work best in the future.

Real Estate Software Solutions to Enhance Online Presence

Like every other business, real estate too has found a stronghold on the web and now, the Internet powers most of the initial searches for properties and plots. With the current generation of connected users, real estate businesses can find it extremely challenging to generate revenues if they are not available on the virtual space, yet! Statistics like 90% of home searches now occur on the web, while 89% consumers use their smartphones for pulling up information on listings and properties indicate just how important the web has become. However, real estate businesses have a hard time figuring out the right approach in establishing a successful web application.

To ensure that your real estate business makes an effective online presence, you can enlist the services of a web development company California. They can either optimize your existing website to include more user engagement features like enhanced search & listings, CMS/ CRM implementations, buyer-seller interactions, etc or build an entirely new one comprising these features.

Changing Paradigms of Mobile UI Design

With every update of the Android and iOS operating systems, multiple changes in terms of app design or development can be observed, especially the design principles. Moreover, the ever-evolving device hardware and product requirements make it only prudent that web along with app designers not only adapt to this change, but implement it as well.

1. Material Design is the newest design language for the Android platform that makes use of layered interfaces, floating action buttons, and interesting animations in response to a user activity. Although, originally launched for the Android platform, Material now extends to other platforms like iOS and Windows as well.
 

2. Motion design has been around for quite some time, but they were primarily a part of advertisements, music videos or movie intros. It is however, now used for refining the user interface as a way of delighting the users for an action they have taken.

Five Crucial Features of Selecting a Content Management System

If your website features high volumes of data and information or if you are in the process of launching a content-rich website, it would be ideally a feasible solution to integrate a CMS into it. However, there are a few key points to keep in mind while selecting and integrating the same. We list the 5 crucial features to look into while selecting a content management system for your web enterprise project:

• Performance and scalability are two intrinsic requirements of any project. The website should not only be recording optimal performance, but it should also be scalable if the need arises at some point in the future. Caching a page at multiple levels is an effecite way of improving performance.

• Extensibility and Integration implies that the CMS effortlessly integrates with other technologies as well as systems. The ready-to-use connectors are an effective solution for extending the usability of the system while at the same time significantly reducing development times.

• Multisite Support has become quite a popular requirement nowadays, given that website are no longer limited to just a single corporate website. Most organizations often have online stores, blogs, intranets, community websites and at least a few microsites targeting specific segments of users. With Kentico, enterprises get to design and deploy multiple sites from a single dashboard.

5 reasons to move real estate business online

By this time, your business should already have made its virtual way into the digital world of mobile and web apps. However, if you are not there already, it is high time you thought of implementing a mobile-centric business strategy for your real estate services. A mobile or a web application ensures that your business is accessible to the tech-savvy millennial population.

Here are five reasons (statistics) affirming why you should utilize/ incorporate/ implement online real estate software solutions for your business:

1.    The mobile and web usage by millennials for real estate has increased 81% and 30%, over a period of May, 2013 to July 2014, respectively.

2.    Mobile devices accounted for 44% of the searches for one or other form of real estate services.

3.    Of the half of the total millennial population in the U.S. that visited a real estate website in July 2014, thirty-six percent of those were accessed from mobile devices. The numbers indicate that millennials are twice as likely, if not more, to explore information on real estate on mobile devices.