The internet doesn’t sit on a desktop anymore; a website is now visible from a wide range of different devices: phones, tablets, smart-TVs. The only thing these devices have in common and will always have in common is that they have a screen. We are living in a society full of screens; you are staring at one right now! Screen width varies from device to device, so if the standard doesn’t exist anymore, how “large” should a design be? The answer is: there’s no answer.

This is where responsive web design comes in handy:

“Responsive web design is a new approach to building websites. It’s about carefully crafting a website to be usable and aesthetically pleasing across a wide range of devices. Responsive websites use a fluid layout that adapts and responds to your user. Meaning that you are able to maintain one website that will serve all of your customers, no matter where or what they are viewing it on. ” [1]

What’s challenging in RWD is that you have one structure only, a graphic layout and content that need to be adaptive, because you don’t know what device the user is going to see it from; you hopefully want to provide a frictionless experience, whether on a desktop computer or a mobile device.

But what does a responsive website look like? How do you recognize one? While you’re browsing www.neomobile-blog.com for example, start stretching your browser window horizontally. See how the content adapts to the width of the window and how it reorganizes itself to fit, see how some graphics disappear to leave more space for the content, etc. Play around and spot the differences and see how it “reacts”, if you have time, open it directly from your smartphone or tablet.

Ok let’s try a NON responsive website now, for example www.poste.it. So, you’re on a smartphone, you can see the website and it works… then this must be a mobile site! Well, absolutely not. It is just a zoomed out version of the original  www.poste.it. You can still visit it, most of the things “work” (depending on your browser and hardware capabilities) but the user experience is a rather low quality: the font size is way too small for you to easily read, you have to zoom in/out and pan around to look for what you need, the website is probably very “heavy” and it already sucked a fair amount of your daily available connection megabytes. This translates to a horrible user experience and a waste of bandwidth. Poste should definitely get the mobile treatment.  

It’s not just about the layout

The fascinating thing about RWD is how it forces you to go beyond pure graphics and coding patterns. Let’s explore it a bit deeper.

Content

RWD forces you to accurately understand and think about what content is most important for your user. Imagine being on a bus, you’re hungry and you want to find a Chinese restaurant nearby. What’s the priority when landing on Mr. Wong’s mobile website? You don’t care about the photo gallery, some boring intro text, tons of graphics or the complete menu. You maybe just need a phone number for a reservation and an address to easily copy and paste on your Google maps app to get there. This is what a good mobile website delivers: what you really need, quickly. When you’re sitting in front of a desktop computer, you have more time and patience to comfortably search at the information. The mobile context is totally different: there’s simply not enough space in a 320 by 480 pixel screen for extraneous, unnecessary elements. You need to prioritize.

Performance

Another big difference between desktop and mobile is bandwidth usage and connection speed. A desktop connection is fast, and you don’t mind the quantity of megabytes you are downloading while browsing. A mobile internet connection is slower and it has a daily/monthly limit of usage so you want to be careful about 2 main points: your page weight and the consequent loading speed. Speed does matter, the major search engines measured how much web site slowdowns hurt their business metrics:

• Bing – A page that was 2 seconds slower resulted in a 4.3% drop in revenue/user
• Google – A 400 millisecond delay caused a 0.59% drop in searches/user
• Yahoo! – A 400 milliseconds slowdown resulted in a 5-9% drop in full-page traffic [2]

From a recent study, a user doesn’t stay on a mobile page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. There are a lot of page optimization tricks to make it faster, but I’m not going too technical on this one, because you probably are not interested, and if you are, here is a wonderful little website about the topic: http://browserdiet.com/

User Experience

“Does this website adds value to my browsing experience? Is it easy to use? Is it pleasant to use?” These are the questions that run through the minds of visitors as they interact with our products, and this is what you should have in mind while designing it. It’s about conceptualizing design that matches user expectations and standards of latest UI patterns and components. You may not be an expert of the discipline, but you can try. “Designing user experiences for the mobile web is challenging. Designers need to account for the enormous variance of capabilities and features of mobile devices. More importantly, they need to help users achieve goals in a hard-to-define mobile context.” [3] Food for thought … Does it really matter to create a responsive/mobile-friendly version of your website? The answer is YES, simply because that’s where the future of the internet. We, as designers, are responsible to make the web move forward; we need to be “adaptive” as much as the context we work in, and think in a “future-friendly” way.

Valerio Pierbattista

Jr Front End Design Specialist 

[1] http://www.pshift.com/blog/109-what-is-a-responsive-website-and-why-is-it-the-most-important-thing-for-your-business

[2] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performance-optimization/

[3] http://mobilewebbestpractices.com

The post A Neomobile Insight: Challenges of a Web Responsive Design appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

Here is an overview of what the future is bringing to us.

Until now, it was impossible to select the parent selector of a given element. CSS4 should provide the possibility to target the parent of any given element without having to rely on pure JavaScript or external libraries like J-Query.

From a designer perspective, one issue that has to be faced is the difference between touch input devices and standard user input devices. One of the differences is the fact that touch devices cannot react to a hover state.  For instance when we have a menu that expands on the hover state of the mouse pointer, we won’t be able to have the same interaction on smartphones. The new specification aims at allowing to query for an ‘hover’ capability instead of querying for specific devices and this avoid an endless list of media queries to target all of the devices. This feature would allow tackling design differences in a more structured and easier way.

CSS4 in the actual draft is expected to provide the possibility to calculate CSS values without the need of JavaScript.  Properties can be calculated with common values mixing all of the units available (px, em’s etc.). This could turn out to be an exciting feature to design better responsive or adaptive layouts for different devices. If we mix this feature with the new ability to use and define variables from within CSS, the time needed for writing style sheets could be dramatically reduced. As of now this feature was implemented with Less and Sass, which are CSS Dynamic languages in the form of external JavaScript libraries.

Still from a designer point of view, one exciting area that is being taking into consideration in the CSS4 drafts is the use of graphic filters on elements just by using CSS. The simpler implementation of this feature could allow the designer to avoid creating different graphic elements to be included in the HTML file (raising the download size of the document) by applying a bunch of effect to one base element.

Right now the draft includes basic effects like grayscale, blur, contrast, saturation, brightness and some other, but the coolest feature that should be implemented is the use of custom filters based on shaders.

Shaders are small programs that are common in 3D environment and are used to manipulate 3D vertices and the color of pixels. With the use of CSS shaders, HTML elements are turned into some sort of 3D meshes that can be deformed and modified. For instance, the often seen effects of a flipping page effect created in flash, could be replicated with CSS.

These shaders are programmed using the language based on the WebGL shader specifics, but difference between WebGL shaders and CSS shaders are that the first one works in the canvas element while the second one should work on any element of the web page.

Overall it will take some time to standardize these specifications. As mentioned above, there are still many CSS3 modules that need to be worked on before they become a standard for the browsers, but I believe that the direction taken for the future development of the CSS standard will bridge even more the gap between a graphic and a web designer and allow an easier process in the design between desktop and mobile devices.

Fabrizio Fabricatore

Sr. Multimedia Designer 

The post A Designer’s Perspective: CSS4 & the Future of Web Design appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

To organise a meeting in advance, please contact us on partner.relations@onebip.com 

When: 21 – 23 May 2013

Where: Shangri-La Hotel, 22 Orange Grove Road, Singapore 258350

Onebip location: S#7 (Silver Sponsor area on the 3rd floor of Shangri-La Hotel)

What is Casual Connect?

Casual Connect is the premier event for the casual games industry with over 4,500 people attending events around the world every year.  The event is organized by the Casual Games Association and aims to bring together developers, publishers, distributors and related industries to share insights on cutting edge topics and network.  For more information, visit http://asia.casualconnect.org/

Let’s set up a meeting in Singapore to discuss your needs

Please get in touch with us at partner.relations@onebip.com to arrange a meeting in advance or come and see us at the event held in the Shangri-La Hotel, Singapore.

 

The post Meet Onebip at Casual Connect Asia in Singapore! appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

2012 was the year of the music industry revival. This revival is mainly owed to the gradual but constant growth of digital music: in 2008, this industry was worth $ 4.3 billion, today it’s worth $ 5.6 billion*.

What drives the market for digital music?

Three elements are fundamental in this new chapter for the music industry:

1. The (legal) download, individual songs or entire albums (iTunes and others) which now accounts for 70% of this market.

2. The advertising, which represents 15-20% of the digital market that found new formats and means of expression in the music.

3. The subscription fee that users pay for portals and apps that offer music in streaming.

The latter, very recent model is based on the subscription fee allowing unlimited access to the songs without ads, and many other services. The world of streaming, the most interesting and fast-growing part of the market, is tackled by new players such as Spotify and Deezer, capturing the attention of Google and especially Apple. Music is definitely in the air, technically speaking. No matter how much the local music or mp3 download still sound comforting, the future of music is created day by day, app after app, with the new ways we access our favourite tunes, through streaming and cloud.

Streaming services market still remains quite limited ($ 600 million turnover  from subscriptions in 2012), but in huge expansion, with 40% growth in 2013, which already can count on a very large user base (about 20 million paying users globally), and is expected to grow significantly over the next 2 or 3 years.

Furthermore, there are many drivers that are accelerating the growth of this new sector:

1. The immediate access to millions of songs, making usability even better of download (legal and illegal) for which several things are necessary: accurate research, update of the mobile device (smartphone or MP3 player), playlists created manually. While with streaming everything is immediately accessible from any device, just synchronizing the music with only one account and obtaining over the air updates for albums or playlist (e.g. charts).

2. Safe and easy payment, which makes these services straightforward to use.

3. Finally, the strong “social” aspect:  the demand and appreciation for the vertical social experience is increasing, simultaneously with Facebook’s positioning as undisputed social leader. Nothing better than music can act as an emotional hook that connects people.

It becomes obvious, at this point, how premium streaming services have found the way to open the world of music to the world of social networks and at the same time, manage to monetize the vast number of users, that access these services daily, from their PC or even more from their smartphone.

On the other hand, it’s a publicly known fact that various web portals, more or less social, have created their fortune on music, from MySpace to YouTube and Twitter: all these portals have built their strength and their user base on the music, which is a very strong factor of socialization, especially among young people.

Until now, however, the music was a tool used by social networks to attract users and monetize them, but today the music streaming services are using social media as means of engagement to attract more and more users and provide an experience that goes beyond listening. That’s why music streaming services have all the requirements to satisfy a market that is getting accustomed to the world of cloud and that is leaving the “download” behind, becoming famous for both critical mass of users and turnover. 2012 was the first year since 1999 that has seen the music industry growth again, and today we’re observing the evolution of this market in a new light.

Neomobile, a leader in the digital entertainment, is willing to face the challenges of this market by supporting the international expansion of Soundtracker, one of the first real Social Music Services. Soundtracker is present on all major mobile platforms and it allows free access to a 22 million songs catalogue to hundreds of thousands of users every day, satisfying the most diverse musical tastes and inspiring the social discovery through music.

Download Soundtracker App

*All data source: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry “Digital music report 2013”

The post A new era for music? appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

Città della Scienza (City of Science) in Naples is one of those places: a giant complex dedicated to exploration of science, natural phenomena, and it hosts a wide number of exhibits and cultural events. Well it did, until the 4^th March, when the structure disappeared in flames. But it still remains, as a symbol of growth and innovation, a renovation imperative for the entire local and global community.

As pioneer in the innovation, Neomobile was among the first to support the reconstruction, and with great pleasure we received the news that a part of the structure, maybe the most important one dedicated to the children, has reopened. The small museum-lab now hosts the future scientists, giving the sense of continuity as we eagerly await the construction of the new Science Centre.

Neomobile would also like to express a special gratitude to Prof. Vittorio Silvestrini, the president of the City of Science, for embracing our support and for his efforts to bring back this precious institution back to the community.

If you want to help the reconstruction please visit http://www.cittadellascienza.it/amici-cittadellascienza/

The post Neomobile supports the reconstruction of the Città della Scienza appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

Our new colourful palette inspired the our brand new corporate web site (available also in Italian), minimalistic in design, with quality content, the harmony of words and images that introduces the curious eye into the dynamic and wonderful world of mobile. The visitor can navigate from web and mobile, and learn more about our company, our business offer, latest news from global mobile industry, or browse our creative portfolio, with corporate videos and infographics.

In the constitutional frame of the mobile commerce world, the website flows through the definition of our industry keywords, our history, beliefs and values, arriving to Neomobile’s core: our expertise in the m-entertainment, m-payment and  m-advertising.

Curious about HTML5 and the apps world? Want to know more about the monetization of mobile internet? Looking for top mobile AdNetwork for your advertising campaign? Well, you’re lucky, you are in the right place!

So sit back and relax, and surf through the pages of our new website. We hope you’ll enjoy it. And don’t forget to connect with us on through our Social Lab on all major social media, and stay updated in real time on the latest news from the digital world.

Let’s explore the meanings of Neomobile colours, the symbolic expressiveness of each nuance and the Neomobile’s corporate value it stands for, in our new infographic.

The post Welcome to the new NEOMOBILE.COM appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

The A’ Design Award and Competition aims to highlight the best designs, concepts and design-oriented products and services in the world.

Here’s what Onebip’s product specialist, Gokmen Atak said during his speech at the Award ceremony:

“We are proud to receive this award which recognizes Onebip’s advanced one-click payment technology and the end-user experience of its payment interfaces. We always believe that the best end-user experience secures the best conversion rate for our merchants and we worked hard to find the most intuitive way for the end-users of paying for the goods and services. Our motto explains our aim to provide merchants a payment solution that is fast, secure and that will ensure the best conversion rate: “MOBILE PAYMENTS WITH THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE AND THE MOST ADVANCED BILLING TECHNOLOGY”.

For more information on the Awards, please visit http://www.whatisadesignaward.com/

Check out Onebip Blog for the latest insight into the  mobile payments industry.

The post Onebip wins prestigious Design Award for One-Click mobile payment solution appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

Google, that already  uses artificial intelligence techniques and machine learning in its search algorithm, decided to redefine the concept of innovation. In the Silicon Valley, this concept has often been related to the devices size/capacity or creation of new Apps; Google X Lab is  heading in a different direction. We’re talking about ground-breaking research, aiming to revolutionize our lives. Astro Teller, one of the leading scientists at X Lab, the man who holds the title “Captain of Moonshots”, recently talked about Lab’s guidelines, stating that the main requirement is “overcoming society’s prescriptions for caution and embracing both audacious ideas and failures”[3]. It is a hard work, where thousands of ideas get filtered, most stay on paper, some arrive to prototypes but very few become reality.

Some of these mind boggling projects are the self-driving car, space elevator and neural network, but the one that could be launched officially in the near future is the Google Glass, as announced last Wednesday on  Google Blog, introducing the Glass Collective, an investment syndicate that’ll offer seed funding to entrepreneurs working to create apps for the high-tech eyewear.[4] The Explorer Edition of Glass, a test version, will be available soon, at a price of $1,500, for those who signed up for the Explorer program last year at the Google I/O developer conference and those who applied for the #ifIhadglass social media contest[5].

So how does the Google Glass work? These Internet-connected glasses contain a small camera, a processor and a screen in the upper corner, from where the information are projected directly into a user’s view. You can get a weather forecast just by looking up to the sky, when entering a subway station you can get the precise timetable of the trains or directions while walking the streets. Of course, everything we see can be shared on social media instantly, like photos or videos, activated with voice commands.

The companies that  are currently collaborating on this on-going project are giants like Twitter, Path, Evernote and The New York Times, bringing their own creative ideas to this amazing project. Glass has been beautifully defined by the Path CEO Dave Morin:

“Glass represents a future of freedom. A future where you spend more time focused on the people you are with and the experiences you are having, rather than focused on your mobile device. Glass brings you the important information, context, and moments when you need them most.”

As we eagerly await to see Google Glass in everyday use we need to ask ourselves how it will change the way of living and perceiving the reality. One thing is sure, we are witnessing the future, in the realized ideas of curious minds that will never stop dreaming, and believing that there is always a way to transform our society for the better.

I used Google Glass

Google’s Sergey Brin Previews New ‘Google Glass’

The post Google X Labs – a Neomobile insight appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

But it is really convenient to develop an application today?  To enter this market with a start-up or a spin-off with your current activities?

The real answer is: it depends…

Provokingly speaking, here is a list of 5 reasons why you should not enter the world of apps:

1. A bit’ of harsh data: only 59% of the app reaches the break-even point (percentage continues to decrease day by day), 68% of the apps present on the markets generates less than € 4,000 of total revenues, while only 12% generate revenues over € 40,000.

2. The market is overfilled, if you think that your idea is original and innovative, think again, in 99% of cases your app already exists and it failed, or it was successful and already copied

3. The concept of copyright in the world of app does not exist, is a true Far West: if an app is successful in just 2 weeks at least 2 or 3 similar apps will hit the market and probably they will be more successful than yours

4. Gaining visibility in an ocean of apps is very difficult and very expensive, virality and organic  downloads are almost a myth; to create visibility for your app you need to have skills in marketing and economic founds, or simply said, it requires a lot of money, especially on iOS.

5. Your app will most likely be based on the integration of APIs provided by the Facebook, Google or Twitter, and the management of these APIs is difficult: they are constantly changing and therefore must be updated to keep the app working. It’s a hell of a job, especially if your app does not generate revenues that justify this work.

So is everything so gloomy in the world of apps?

Luckily no, as there is always the other side of the coin, not everything is black or white. Under some conditions app creation makes sense – here are 5 reasons why you should create an app:

1. You had an idea that you believe is genius, you had confirmation by some impartial opinions (if you, your mom and your friends think it’s brilliant doesn’t mean a thing…) and you’ve verified that there is nothing similar on the market , maybe there is a base to start working on a successful product

2. You have the economic resources needed to make your app stand out through marketing, or you know where to find them. Or you don’t have them, but you have a strategy in order to reach commercial agreements with companies that are already working in this area and that could be interested in a partnership with you (Tip: if you think Neomobile could an ideal partner for you, contact me via LinkedIn)

3. You have decided to develop for Android and Windows phone where it is easier to achieve good app store ranking at acceptable costs, and  you do not disdain alternative markets for emerging  mobile operating systems (Firefox, Tizen etc.)

4. You have made the wise decision to launch your product in a basic version, with a few features, to test the market response investing little time and resources, at least in the development phase, minimizing the risk

5. You have in mind a clear monetization strategy for your app, not based solely on the payment offered by the markets. You have to provide (when possible) alternatives to credit cards for in app purchase and alternative monetization methods: from innovative advertising formats to pay-per-action, from data selling to coupon rewarding. Be creative with the business model and the range of monetization methods.

To conclude: should you create an app? The answer is always the same: it depends!

Fabrizio Parzanese

Product and Partnership Manager

Check out some interesting global statistics regarding the world of apps in our new infographics

The post 5 reasons why you should not create an app appeared first on Neomobile Blog.

The future of the mobile ads market is all about the big numbers; in fact, there are very few global industries that can boast with spending rise of 400% in the next 4 years. The recent Gartner report, “Forecast: Mobile Advertising, Worldwide, 2009-2016” shows, global mobile advertising revenue is forecast to reach $11.4 billion in 2013, up from $9.6 billion in 2012, up to $24.5 billion in 2016. This growth is largely owed to the rapid global expansion of the smart connected devices. The monetization performance is led by iPhone, closely followed by Android devices, while the rest of the mobile phone field is significantly behind, indicating that better usability (i.e. larger screen size, touch screen  and interaction between the advertisement and the device’s functionality (e.g. click to call, expand, play video) have better monetization potential than less capable and less user-friendly devices[3].

In this ever-expanding “click through” world our premium mobile advertising network NeoPowerAd (Neomobile Premium Ad Network www.neopowerad.com) has achieved an important milestone: 600 million monthly impressions globally. The growth of the network was driven by the increasing number of publishers (editors, app developers, content provider and gaming companies) who have chosen to monetize their advertising space relying on our innovative technological solutions offered to agencies and clients: various targeting options for their advertising campaigns, including the new rich-media formats offer, for both smartphones and tablet: animations, light landing page, video and many more.

Check out NeoPowerAd and get the best solution for your mobile display advertising campaign.

Visit www.neopowerad.com and follow @NeoPowerAd on Twitter

Discover more interesting facts & figures on state of mobile advertising in our new infographic

The post State of the Mobile Advertising: a brief outline appeared first on Neomobile Blog.