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EditorialSometimes you need to step back to experience the immensity of the changes happening everywhere. The reach of developers, programmers, coders, and engineers permeate, often in swift and radical ways, almost all aspects of our everyday lives. These changes are altering not just technology itself but the very way companies operate and organize themselves. Increasingly, we are living in an all apps world. And as the world goes, so goes the nation. In this case it’s a Developer Nation.

As technologists and as users living and working in Silicon Valley, our experience of the past 18 months has been the basis for the work presented between these covers. Our fundamental intuition is that what the communications and computing industry is experiencing right now is at least as profound as the birth of personal computing. Perhaps more so. And like that world-changing phenomenon, not all of us are able to stand back and look beyond the latest market share numbers, to grasp how fundamental this shift is. We hope this document will give you the opportunity to get that bigger perspective

Our focus in this work starts, and ends, on the creative and technical wizards that have mastered a growing list of programming languages, frameworks, APIs, and device stacks to generate compelling applications for us all — hence our title, Developer Nation. But along the way, we were fortunate to see a bigger picture: one where the Internet has come to the trillion-dollar Communications industry; where Web methods and procedures are being applied to mobile infrastructure and functions; where dedicated operating systems and programming languages for each class of hardware give way to cross-platform and cross-device app portability.

A world where Developer Nation, either inside or outside the company, can write to a processor and operating system that powers a mobile phone, a tablet computer, and a set-top box is fast upon us — it is a New World. Inside these pages, you will find a timeline that shows how the previously separate lines of evolution for Computing, Telephony, and Television are intersecting and converging.

Our hope is that Developer Nation — which implicates a vibrant ecosystem of programmers, tools providers, service platform owners who expose their rich data via APIs, hardware OEMs, software platform providers both open source and proprietary, and service providers (fixed, mobile, Internet) — whether it is web-based, enterprise-facing, start-up or publisher, will take this document as the basis for an ongoing conversation.

To start that conversation we have built this contribution on top of conversations with the Silicon Valley developer ecosystem as described above. An accompanying video captures highlights of these interviews, and some of the questions we put to our interviewees were also embedded in a recent wave of the Appcelerator Mobile Developer Survey, which extended the reach to 2,700 developers in Q2 of this year. Some of the findings from that extensive survey appear in our Stats + Numbers roundup. Finally, the document before you contains contributions from the technical staff of Orange San Francisco, a chapter of Developer Nation that understandably contains some passionate practitioners of the new world of apps.

As the world shifts, it’s hard to see the disruptions afoot. Our intent here is to enable a conversation thattranscends conventional zero-sum game perspectives of winners and losers. We argue for no specific business model, channel, or ecosystem arrangement. Instead, we call for the recognition of the imaginative power of Developer Nation and begin to consider the disruptive future already at their fingertips.

Georges Nahon, CEO, Orange San Francisco October 2010

table of contents

04 Stats + Numbers

06 The March to a Programmable World

08 What Makes Dev Nation Tick?

10 Love + Loyalty

13 Social Coding

14 A Developer’s Journey

16 Enterprise Dev-Ops Trends

17 The Value of Concealment

18 Developer Pain Point: Mobile App Discovery

20 Nurturing Your Inner API

By Developers, For Developers

22 Four Questions for Dev Nation

2 3

Stats + Numbers

4 5

85%

increase in 2009 (over 2008) in the number of lines of code written for mobile open source software

90%of developers are “very interested”in developing for the iPhone

86%of developers find Android the most "open" platform on the market

62% of developers are "very interested" in developing for the iPad

billion AppleApp Store downloads

5APP STORE

app stores have reduced the average time-to-shelf for apps by two-thirds

68DAYS

22DAYS

TRADITIONAL CHANNELS APP STORE

22% thinks it is Twitter

34% of developers think that Google provides the best API

80%of developers rely on each other for support during mobile development

2.8average number of platforms mobile developers work with

75%of developers cite market penetration as the most important selection criteria for platform choices

37%of developers choose Fun, Fame, and Glory as motivation for working with APIs

1152K memory size of Digital Equipment’s PDP-10 minicomputer in 1968,it sold for $99,000

100LBS weight of first automated car telephone system (Mobile System A) in Sweden in 1960

50%of developers would pay for network APIs such as billing APIs, messaging and location

6%of developers are "very interested" in developing for the Kindle

11%of developers are "very interested" in developing for Intel and Nokia's MeeGo

$1.7Bpredicted revenue of TV-based apps by 2013

31%of developers find "porting to multiple platforms" the most

challenging part of the development process

2by 2013, Android will be the 2nd largest OS worldwide

Sources:Appcelerator Q2 2010 Mobile Developer Survey.Black Duck Software, March 2010. IDC Worldwide Mobile OS 2009-2013 Forecast and Analysis.Mashery API Developer Pulse Results, May 2010.Vision Mobile/Telefonica Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond, July 2010.

2001Apple launches iTunes

2006Twitter is launched

2009Digital Television

2005Hulu

2005Google buysAndroid

2005Adobe’s FlashLitetargets mobile developers

2007 iPhone Kindle 1G Skype Phone

2007Apple App Store

2008Netflix streaming

20105B apps downloadedon the Apple App Store

1993The AT&T EOPersonal Communicator

19961st smartphone

1950TVs become mainstream, 8M TV sets, 107 TV stations

1970Fiber Optic

1953Color TVs

1996WebTV

1998WAP wireless data standard

2001Apple launches iTunes

2005Hulu

2005Google buysAndroid

2007 iPhone Kindle 1G Skype Phone

2008Netflix streaming

2008Google bids $4.7B for wireless spectrum

DEVELOPER NATION

2008Android Market

2010Windows Phone 7

MOBILE

TV

PC/INTERNET

MOBILE+PC/INTERNET INTERSECTION

TV+PC/INTERNET INTERSECTION

2010iPad

2010Android,Qualcomm’s Snapdragon,Google TV

2009iPhone 3GSKindle 2

2007Joost signs one millionth beta user for TV over Web

6 7

The March to a Programmable WorldThe evolution of digital culture from its origins in separate, dedicated devices and disciplines to today’s cross-platform programmable world is measurable in just a few decades. The high points in this journey — the tectonic shifts — come when the media/technology paths cross. Crossing the personal assistant with a phone (Eo), crossing the Internet with a TV set (WebTV) — these are defining if sometimes spectacularly failed moments that are shown on this map.

Today, the idea of a capability that exists only within one of the native domains of TV, PC/Internet, or Mobile, seems quaint, old-fashioned. As the acceleration of these crossings (like Hulu, Streaming Netflix, Android tablets) in the pastfew years shows, Developer Nation is programming a cross-platform world where content flows everywhere.

by Pascale Diaine and Maria Iu

What Makes Dev Nation Tick? moving towards a more fine-grained motivation model

by Mark Plakias

According to Yukihiro Matsumoto, one of the world’s most revered geeks and the creator of the Ruby program-ming language, there are two things that motivates open source develop-ers: Joy, and Money. In regards to Joy, Matsumoto speaks as a true coder, observing that programming is “fun — you create something from nothing.” Additional properties of Joy include a sense of community built by members of the project all working towards a common goal. This community, located primarily on the web, gets the sense of belonging to a global effort that speaks to basic human needs for social accep-tance and in-group solidarity.

The Money motivation, according to Matsumoto’s thesis, is that the economy behind open source is massive — “every-thing runs on software.” He points to a commoditized economy where software is needed on everyday devices from TVs to appliances. For example, presence of open source Ubuntu and Linux on a new class of low-cost netbook comput-ers forced Microsoft to radically alter its operating system pricing for Windows just so it could stay relevant in the new rapidly-growing market. It is clear Mat-sumoto takes satisfaction in seeing how the power of the open model can bend the will of the world’s largest monopoly. This speaks to a basic human motivation that we all experience: hope that we can prevail against much larger forces.

As authentic and modest as Mat-sumoto’s motivational model is, if large organizations want to utilize the genera-tive power of Nation, they will need a more fine-grained motivational model. In our research, we are fortunate to have

Appcelerator survey. These are cross-referenced to the two primary motiva-tions as expressed by Matsumoto.

In order to appreciate what the inventory is telling us, one can reflect on how the two primary drivers of Joy or Money often overlap. For example, “global reach” is a motivator that appeals to both — to see an app running on mil-lions of devices in multiple markets is both an accomplishment that speaks to pride of achievement (Joy), and presum-ably is lucrative as well (Money).

Others, such as “learn something cool” is clearly a Joy motivator rather than an immediate financial consider-ation. What we see is a fascinating blend of long-term thinking — choosing a plat-form because of its ability to extend to “other devices” is one example — versus short-term, more immediate consider-ations, such as “it’s my day job.”

This is a preliminary analysis from a corpus of highly-targeted messages to a developer community that is structurally biased — the Appcelerator community is under one roof because they all share a common desire to work across multiple platforms. Other parts of the Nation may not have this eclectic, multi-platform in-clination. Even with this caveat, it is still

a rich and current resource within a fast-changing landscape.

A nuanced examination of motiva-tions is highly relevant to the ecosystem for two reasons. The first is that a review of traditional outbound messaging to Developer Nation by platform provid-ers has often restricted itself to financial motivators: “make money with us” is the high-level formulation of this overly-sim-plistic call to action. Historically, in the op-erator world, this “show me the money” value proposition has been accompanied by walled garden models that are increas-ingly lagging behind more open (not nec-essarily open source) ecosystem models.

The second related rationale for a deeper understanding of motivational factors is that it can lead to segmented appeals, providing relevant messages to the right tribes within the Nation, cut-ting down on noise and creating a more responsive ecosystem infrastructure. One size does not fit all, and even as they defrag the software stacks, OEM’s and operators need to get more granular in their value propositions.

Underlying all the motivational mod-els is a common thread: the realization that a new day is dawning over a more programmable and empowered world.

8 9

partnered with Appcelerator, a company that engages with over 50,000 devel-opers, and conducts quarterly surveys of their developer community. These surveys provide a comprehensive view on the state of the Developer Nation — how it’s feeling about various platforms, what it’s reasons for developing on spe-cific platforms, and what outcomes the Nation sees for its work.

Appcelerator is able to directly en-gage with the Nation because it sells cross-platform development tools, thus easing a significant burden imposed by a fragmented device and operator eco-system. In its quarterly survey, which we draw from for some of the statistical analysis in this article and elsewhere in our report, Appcelerator skillfully probes across a range of motivations. Questions (and the results) are powerful because they are highly contextual — a Nokia developer is likely to have specific out-comes and goals that may not be shared by one predisposed to iPhones for ex-ample. By examining the statements that the Nation responds to in the Appcel-erator Mobile Survey, we have a granular view of the motivational spectrum.

Above, we show an inventory of the motivations that are presented in the

FOR JOY/FAME & MONEY

Global reachExtra money outside of job

Distribution for my workBe on most wanted device

FOR JOY/FAME

Be on other devicesFreedom (vs. control)Learn something cool

Long-term opportunitiesCapabilities/featuresBe on most devices

FOR MONEY

Enterprise apps make $$It’s my day job

Do you seek joy, fame, or money?

Results from the Appcelerator Q2 Mobile Developer Survey

Developer Nation is powerful.

Consider what the Nation did when given the

opportunity to create apps with minimal supervision

under an automated submission process by Apple.

On July 11, 2008, the App Store went live on the

iPhone in conjunction with the release of its iPhone 2.0

software. Users found a library of 500 apps available

in the store. In the 24 months following, an astounding

225,000 apps were unleashed by the Nation onto the

platform, triggering over 5 billion downloads. 4 billion of

those downloads took place within a one year period

between April 2009 and April 2010. An overwhelming

percentage of the Nation’s apps are free. This brings

us to the topic of Motivation. Why pour your talent into

something that has no immediate financial return?

...a deeper understanding of motivational factors...can lead to segmented appeals, providing relevant messages to the right tribes within the Nation, cutting down on noise and creating a more responsive ecosystem infrastructure.

Love + Loyaltythree controversies that changed the game for developers and the companies that hire them

In January 2010, Google secured a patent for MapReduce, a framework for large-scale data processing that serves as a foundation for Google’s own search engine. However, open-source projects that utilize the parallel programming model — such as Apache’s well known MapReduce-inspired Hadoop — began to wonder if Google’s claim to MapRe-duce would threaten their operations.

Google’s role in the birth of Ha-doop started in the 1990s. Internet-scale search engines thrive on the influx of data that is added to the web every day. But as the amount of data increases, scalability issues started to arise. For Google, they combated the problem by implementing scalability requirements in their data centers by the end of the 90s, but a complete re-design was necessary by the early 2000s. In October 2003 and December 2004, Google published two papers, one on the Google File System (GFS), and the other on MapReduce, documenting the set-up of models that would create an efficient data crunching system to run their online services.

These two papers became the ba-sis for the Hadoop software framework, which was developed in 2005 by Doug Cutting to support distribution for his

Nutch search engine. As an open-source project, Hadoop benefits from a global community of contributors, including Yahoo, Amazon, IBM, Facebook, Hulu, the New York Times, and a slew of other Silicon Valley startups. Strong actors like Cloudera, Karamasphere, and Datameer are selling Hadoop management tools built on top of Hadoop to solve the scal-ability issues that more companies are beginning to face.

Google also has a substantial in-vestment in Hadoop. In partnership with IBM, they created a university outreach program in 2007 called Code University, which uses Hadoop to teach students about webscale programming.

However, Google’s new patent on MapReduce gave Google the power to influence the evolution of Hadoop. Moreover, if they chose to enforce the patent, many third-party MapReduce-based projects would be threatened. Did Google want to capitalize on companies selling Hadoop solutions? Or was Google merely protecting its own technology? Google isn’t likely to risk a lawsuit for monetary gain when they are already a highly profitable company. And as part of the Open Invention Network patent pool, Google doesn’t have a track re-

THE PLAYERS

GoogleApache Hadoop

THE CONTROVERSY

Hadoop is a popularopen-source project inspired by Google’s

MapReduce. In January 2010, Google was granted

a patent for MapReduce. Will Google enforce their patent to sue third-party

proprietors of MapReduce for infringement?

by Shishir Garg and Christophe Bertagni

cord for filing litigation claims. Neverthe-less, concerns were significantly reduced when Google granted a license to Hadoop in April of 2010.

What can we learn from the Hadoop saga? It’s well recognized that open source projects are attractive proposals to developers — it invites them to chan-nel their innovation into new areas. But even if open source becomes a key stra-tegic component of a business model, it’s necessary to emphasize the community aspect of the project to developers and the developer ecosystem. A strong com-munity of contributors provides significant benefits to entrepreneurial developers, giving them the opportunity to collaborate with a wide pool of talent to build some-thing that is for the community, by the community.

While Google could have made some short term gains by imposing their newly acquired patent, they recognize the po-tential for open innovation, and Hadoop’s ability to bolster developer interest in their technologies.

For developer-centric companies like Google, it is important to nurture such de-veloper relationships and it is something that Google does well. Via major events like Google I/O and through meetups, the Summer of Code, various code camps, and technology apprentice programs, Google spends a great deal of time, mon-ey, and energy to get developers to think about Google-related technologies when making choices.

THE PLAYERS

TwitterTweetie

THE CONTROVERSY

In April of 2010, Twitter bought Atebits, the creators of Tweetie, a popular iPhone Twitter client, and rebranded

it Twitter for the iPhone. Was this an attempt to

knock out third party competitors? How can

developers who build similar apps compete with

Twitter’s official app?

by Julian Gay

Today’s tech companies take Bill Joy’s “most of the smartest people work for someone else” adage to heart. App stores harness the energy and creativity of the global developer communities and open web APIs to enable developers to stand on the shoulders of giants and to push the boundaries of innovation. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are creat-ing symbiotic relationships with their eco-system of developers, but they still need to evolve — resulting in winners and losers.

Twitter, whose very success was built upon its vibrant ecosystem of independent app developers, temporarily stunned their business community when they indicated they may turn upon the community they had actively nurtured. On April 7, 2010, Twitter investor and respected VC, Fred Wilson, posted a blog entry which articu-lated what had been in the back of many developer’s minds, that for the good of the broader user community, Twitter would need to consolidate some of its fragmented app diaspora directly into the Twitter plat-form, effectively picking winners from the jungle of competition. Shortly afterwards, on April 9, 2010, Twitter announced the acquisition of Atebits, creators of Tweetie (a popular iPhone Twitter Client), makng it free and announcing it’s rebranding as ‘Twitter for iPhone’. While this may have

10 11

$$$

been a calamity for developers trying build businesses from similar apps, it’s surely a victory for developers who win the beauty contest and end up getting acquired into the ‘mother ship’. The bitter taste is the ‘winner-takes-all’ outcome of this kind of exit. Rather than the custom-ers deciding, the platform owner gets to decide the destiny of the category — a precarious place to build a business.

These delicate relationships be-tween customers and platforms are also evident in Apple's App Store. The capriciousness of the App Store is well known in the developer community, with its opaque approval process and some-times arbitrary denial of applications, but the recent changes (and revisions) to their iPhone SDK Terms of Service was particularly troubling to developers as the damage was done without a single tech-nical change. The offending line, appar-ently aimed at heading-off Adobe’s entry into the iPhone development space, in-advertently almost squashed a burgeon-ing sector of cross-device compilers such as Appcelerator and Ansca Mobile. While the storm seems to have subsided as Apple later relaxed their guidelines, the panic felt in those startups and by their investors won’t be easily forgotten.

Ultimately, app developers need to evaluate the terms of the Faustian pact they are implicitly entering when they le-verage the power of the platforms they’re using, whether it’s the social graph from Facebook, app distribution and moneti-zation through Apple’s App Store or real-time communications from Twitter, the fate of a business can turn on the change of a single line in the Terms of Service.

THE PLAYERSApple

Adobe

THE CONTROVERSY

After unilaterally expelling Adobe Flash from its Garden

of Eden, Apple stared into the eyes of the Federal Trade

Commission and angry developers — and blinked. Flash is back as a path to

creating iPhone apps.

by Steven Rose

Github is a public hosted facility for open source developers to store their projects. It is home to almost 100,000 unique repositories, and as such, offers a rich cross-section of what is going on with the open source ecosystem. From venerable open source projects such as GNU Smalltalk, or Ruby, to newer proj-ects such as Sinatra, GitHub bills itself as a destination for “Social Coding.”

The social nature of GitHub involves showing a member’s output (Public Repositories), attention data (following/watching), and an activity stream on a user's dashboard.

GitHub is a lens on the contem-porary open source scene, spanning almost 100 different programming lan-guages and apps for everything from drinking games to medical imaging.

From a mobile Internet perspec-tive, GitHub is an observatory on the great migration of Internet/Web/Open Source developers onto the historically fragmented, proprietary worlds of mobile development. We thought it would be a good tool to measure the extent to which Open Source developers were sharing their involvement in the mobile world with their kindred spirits in the open source community. What we found corroborat-ed this hypothesis.

The figure on the right shows a sim-ple comparison of keyword incidence for key mobile platform terms. As we have seen from other more rigorous quantita-tive surveys such as Appcelerator's Q2 Mobile Developer Survey, the new wave of developers coming from the Internet and Web are primarily focused the two platforms with deep roots in the Internet. The overwhelming share of mentions by Android and iPhone validates both the specific thesis — that Google and Apple are bringing web/PC developers to mo-

bile and the general thesis — that the Open Source community ethos is com-ing to mobile.

Historically, mobile development was a solitary, specialized, and painful process. Knowing the peculiarities of several hundred devices across dozens of platforms is not a widespread passion. As a result, mobile development has oc-curred within specialist firms, which can be quite large (mobile games boutique GameLoft employs over 4,000), but are not plugged into the community model of open source.

As a result, we can reasonably ex-pect the influx of open source develop-ers of all types to have an immediate impact beyond their absolute numbers simply because they are more social in nature and methods.

Social Coding

12 13

A middleware firm specializing in open source software, Black Duck, has conducted its own survey among its open source community, with a specif-ic emphasis on mobile. The results are striking. Among the highlights of Black Duck’s analysis:

New open source projects for mobile totaled 3,207, a 39% increase compared to new projects created in 2008.

2009 saw an 85% increase over 2008 in the number of lines of code written for mobile open source projects.

The open source model is coming to mobile, and it’s bringing all its friends.

NUMBER OF MENTIONS LISTED ON GITHUB

Numbers as of July 20, 2010

SYMBIAN44

J2ME 57

BLACKBERRY 58

WEB OS124

ANDROID1,992

iPHONE2,113

open source developers create new communities by turning coding into a social activity by Mark Plakias

Apple's announcement that it would not support Adobe Flash technology on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices got divided reac-tions from the developer community. Some fa-vor Flash support, which enables developers to create applications that deliver a consistent user experience, and others are looking towards a future based on open web standards.

Varying support for open web standards such as HTML5 makes it very difficult to cre-ate a web application that works the same way across different web browsers. With Flash, apps can run in the desktop browser that be-haves the same way for all users. However, with the growing popularity of touch-based devices, many existing Flash applications that depend upon interaction with a hovering mouse cursor would not work properly, even if Apple fully sup-ported Flash.

Now faced with the need to rewrite exist-ing Flash applications for touch devices, devel-opers are confronted with the question of how to provide a consistent user experience across touch devices with different levels of support for open web standards. With technologies such as Google Web Toolkit, they now have the abil-ity to create a single version of an application that natively works the same way across all ver-sions of all browsers without the need for Flash.

Since then, the rhetoric has subsided and a significant part of the developer community has advocated bringing Flash to Apple devices. Additionally, FTC scrutiny and the success of Google’s Android platform have also led Apple to make some key changes to its walled gar-den model:

1. Though Apple devices are still not supporting Flash directly, they will allow Flash apps to be created in Flash and translated using Adobe’s Flash Packager for iPhone

2. Developers are allowed to develop using any third-party tools (instead of previous restrictions limiting devel-opment to Objective-C, C, C++, and Javascript)

3. Apple will publish their internal review guidelines for admitting applications to the App Store

Though Apple would clearly like to be able to enforce a hard-line approach to controlling content and use of third-party tools, the pres-ence of Android as a strong and open alterna-tive creates a hostile business environment for such policies.

DESIGN

DEVELOP

PORTING

APIs

USER ACQUISITION& MARKETING

DISTRIBUTION& LAUNCH

MONETIZATION

AD SERVICE

QATESTING

ANALYTICS

How does an application get from a single idea to your screen?Here is a map of what it takes to get an app to the market today, the actors involved, and the pain points developers face along the way.

by Pascale Diaine and Maria Iu

Demographic and usage data from operators can be very useful in the design process but is usually difficult to access.

A Developer’s Journey

There is still room for improvement in the "write-once-run-anywhere" vision.

Developers find the porting step the most painful in the development process and most of the time, it requires a complete

rewrite of the application.

In the mobile space, the cost of certification remains high and not worth it for low cost applications. However app stores have reduced the time-to-shelf by two-thirds.

APIs

Amazon Web ServiceCloud VoxFacebookFlickrFoursquareGoogle CheckoutGoogle MapsNetflixOrangeTropoPaypalTwilioTwitterYelpYouTube

DISTRIBUTION & LAUNCH

Android MarketApple App StoreAppUP CenterBlackberry App WorldhandangoOrange App ShopOviWindows Marketplace

Hosting in the cloud:Amazon EC2/S3EngineYardGoogle App EngineHeroku*Rackspace

USER ACQUISITON & MARKETING

AndrolibAppliciousAppsfireApptizrChorusMobspotmPlayITOMAD

AD SERVING

AdMobGreystripeiAdMobclix*

ANALYTICS

Appcelerator*BangoFlurryDistimoGoogle AnalyticsMobclix*Motally

DESIGN

RationalVisio

DEVELOPMENT

Process:Behavior driven devTest driven dev

Languages:C++C#ErlangHaskellJava.netObjective CPERLPHPPythonRuby Scala

Tools:Appcelerator*AptanaEclipseIntelliJHeroku*HudsonMavenNetBeansRubymine

Framework:Appcelerator*HadoopRhomobilePhone GapQt

OS:AndroidBlackBerry OS iOS4MeeGoSymbianwebOSWindows Phone 7

TESTING

CucumberJUnitPerfectoSelenium

* = Appears in multiple categories

Discovery remains a real challenge. Developers are ready to pay consequent fees to ensure their app visibility, which is triggering the fast bloom of a third-party discovery platforms ecosystem.

App stores have reduced the average time-to-payment in

the mobile space. But the ad model remains the second

source of revenue after paid applications, according to

a 2010 VisionMobile study. How iAd will impact the ad business model has yet to

be determined.

14 15

An ecosystem sampler…

All companies face the challenge of IT-Business alignment, with the need to ensure that IT is work-ing towards the company’s business goals. Both developers and operations have a similar challenge — they must make sure operations provide the nec-essary tools that developers can use and that devel-opers deliver software that operations can deploy and maintain. Unfortunately, these two teams rarely collaborate and must hold frequent meetings to en-sure that they are working in accordance.

IT organizations have attempted to resolve this discrepancy in a variety of creative ways.

A trend among larger groups has been to cre-ate Skill Centers and Competency Centers that can align skills across the organization and manage the availability of skilled resources.

But with the rapid growth of Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay, another in-teresting trend is gradually emerging — a Dev-Ops style model of combining targeted developer and operations teams that are focusing on a specific business problem. This approach has been made famous by Amazon’s ‘two-pizza’ teams. (If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large). These teams include members who are developers, creative talent, and operations.

The driving component of this strategy is the recognition that developers also possess system administrative skills and operations understand development. Since smaller teams can stay more agile and execute more effectively, dev-ops style teams stay focused, multi-task across development and delivery, and ultimately ensure the success of their project with minimal external dependencies outside their unit. In terms of office culture, it also helps maintain the small company or start-up feel-ing that many Internet companies strive to retain as they grow.

Cloud computing is another trend that is help-ing developer agility by eliminating the low level op-erations-related activities that a developer needed to perform. As enterprises start to adopt cloud com-puting, the gap between developers and operations will continue to shrink, freeing up developers by le-veraging automated and semi-automated infrastruc-ture and platforms to do rapid prototyping, enabling the dev-test-deploy cycle to run more smoothly.

The combination of Cloud computing and dev-ops trends leads to a key area where enterprises will need to focus: IT Governance. With smaller teams being given significant levels of freedom to innovate, enterprises can lose out on other benefits such as volume licensing. Moreover, considering the multi-tenant and shared resources that are critical to Cloud computing, IT Governance is essential to en-sure the smooth operation of an Enterprise Cloud.

Enterprise Dev-Ops Trendsinformation technology and developer-operation alignment by Shishir Garg

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><vxml xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/vxml" version="2.1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/2001/vxml http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-voicexml21-20070619/vxml.xsd">

<form id="get_address"> <field name="country"> <grammar type="application/srgs+xml" src="country.grx-ml"/> <prompt>Say a country.</prompt> </field>

<field name="city"> <grammar type="application/srgs+xml" srcexpr="country + '/cities.grxml'"/> <prompt>What city in <value expr="country"/>.</prompt> </field>

<field name="street"> <grammar type="application/srgs+xml" srcexpr="country + '/' + city + '/streets.grxml'"/> <prompt> What street in <value expr="city"/> are you looking for? </prompt> </field>

<filled> <prompt> You chose <value expr="street"/> in <value expr="city"/> <value expr="country"/> </prompt> <exit/> </filled> </form></vxml>

The Value of Concealmentthe new ecosystem of startups that create simplicity by hiding complexity

DEVELOPERS WHO CREATE NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR OTHER DEVELOPERS BY CONCEALING COMPLEXITY ARE A BOOMING SEGMENT OF DEVELOPER NATION.

It’s a paradox, wrapped inside a contradiction, and presented as a non-event. Some of the most exciting work in open software today involves tak-ing standards-based capabilities and hiding them from developers, who are encouraged to ignore them. In the process, tremendous value and whole new ecosystems are being created by allowing developers to go on programming as usual — but plugging those applications into complex underly-ing platforms that in turn, extend reach for the de-velopers’ work.

For most of us, complexity is ugly. But surpris-ingly pervasive. Take something as simple as voice telephony and all those recorded announcements and now even speech recognition — how complex are we talking? Think ugly. Very ugly. In fact, 10 years ago, a whole new set of languages, based on HTML but for telephony instead of Web, were created to help ‘web’ developers work with tele-phony. But the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, and today, VoiceXML has evolved into a horribly complex scripting nightmare that a new generation of developers are trying to conceal.

Here in Silicon Valley, we are seeing (and en-gaging with) a new ecosystem of startups that are seeking to mask the spaghetti code of VoiceXML with simple, one could say laconic, languages and frameworks that reduce what was once hundreds or thousands of lines of VoiceXCML into less than 10 commands, and scripts of a few dozen lines of code at the most. Initiatives such as Twilio, Teleku, and Tropo are among the new wave of a continuing tradition of developers trying to help other develop-ers come into a domain without the complexity of what has come before.

Here’s the contradiction: this concealment is increasingly using open source approaches. Sounds crazy — how can you conceal complexity by using code that is open for anybody to use and contribute to? Hopefully the reader understands enough about open source ethos to understand the amplifying power of open source communities. If we want to generate more innovation in spaces historically constrained by complexity, then it is ex-actly the right way to go.

Success is measured by how painless it is to accomplish once complex and painful processes — that’s the ‘non-eventful’ part. In the particular case study of replacing VoiceXML with telephony-savvy frameworks for native Ruby or Python program-ming, success consists of how little is different from the business of writing in Ruby or Python. In these demos, the ‘wow’ is function of how few clicks or little code needs to be added to connect the simple to the complex underneath.

The motivation behind the ‘urge to submerge’ is to create developer joy by allowing access to previously restricted and controlled domains (think the public switched telephone network). The thrill comes from unleashing new experiences to mass-es of users — everybody has a telephone — with-out having to ask permission of gatekeepers (think phone companies).

The business model that follows this is clear — new experiences means new capabilities for com-panies and other kinds of customers (government, public utilities, healthcare) that previously were un-derserved by constrained, complex ecosystems. Those new capabilities often cost far less than the complex solutions developed by specialists, who charged too much money just because they under-stood the complexity.

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STORE METHOD/SOLUTION THE DETAILS THE RESULT

Apple App Store “Top” & “Featured” Lists: Apps with the most downloads within a 24 hour period are listed on the front page of the App Store.

Developers can game the system through coordinated efforts of ad campaigning and spam-ming the social networks to be featured on the top application list.

Apps featured might not be based on the merits of the application, resulting in limited app discovery.

Genius: collects users’ app usage information in an effort to come up with better app discovery and recommendations.

Only relies on existing information;mobile application developers often include inaccurate application information and tags to their applications.

Excess noise in the application description increases the difficulties of getting meaningful app recommendations.

Android Market Proprietary Algorithms: take into account user acceptance of apps through number of active app installs on a device to come up with a top applications list.

Makes it difficult for developers to influence the system.

A “Top Apps” list helps users find apps, but app discovery and recommen-dation is still limited.

Blackberry AppWorld Top 25 Apps: AppWorld provides a list of 25 apps from the Free, Paid and New application categories.

The lists of top apps are based on the number of downloads in AppWorld.

Applications with the poor user ratings will end up in the top application categories.

Ovi Store 30 Recommended apps: list provided by Ovi Store

Ovi store recommends apps based on the user’s location and preferences.

Even the applications with the poor user ratings can be seen on the recommended app list.

Windows Phone Marketplace

Windows Phone Marketplace provides the list of the most popular and newest applications.

Also features a "try-before-you-buy" option where users can download a trial or a demo of an app.

More data will be available once Windows Phone 7 launches at the end of 2010.

EXISTING OEM SOLUTIONS FOR MOBILE APP DISCOVERY

Mobile App Discoveryby Srinivas Chervirala

In the years prior to today’s thriv-ing application marketplace, mobile app developers had to go through a lengthy submission and approval process, often prolonged by revenue negotiations, to convince mobile operators to place their app into their catalog.

However, with the arrival of vir-tual storefronts like Apple App Store, Google’s Android Market, and Blackberry App World, mobile developers are pub-lishing their applications faster than ever, extending their reach to millions of mobile customers worldwide.

Smartphones are projected to over-take feature phones in the U.S. by 2011 and statistics show that a smartphone user downloads an average of 22 apps1. Though the success of application mar-ketplaces has created new opportunities for developers to distribute their prod-ucts in the form of an extended catalog, it has created a new issue — discovery. The discovery of applications has been

a difficult problem to address: the expo-nential increase of applications available for download has created a noisy mar-ketplace where every app is clamoring for the customer’s attention (a few doz-en more have probably been published since you started reading this article).

With tens of thousands of applica-tions available across many app stores, discovery is a challenge for the entire ecosystem: mobile customers, mobile developers/publishers, and app stores. Mobile customers can’t find the applica-tions that are most relevant to them, de-velopers don’t reach the right customers for their offerings, and app stores can’t effectively merchandise their extensive collection of content.

The current methods of app discov-ery utilize search, category, lists, word of mouth, blogs, news outlets, and ad-vertisements to sort out the 300,000 mobile applications that exist across 80 app stores worldwide. In an attempt to combat this issue, developers are in-vesting huge amounts of money in ad campaigns to promote their apps. Some have even gone as far as hiring people to write inorganic reviews and ratings for their applications in an underhanded ef-fort to solicit enough downloads to be featured on top app lists. This creates inaccurate application metadata that makes any kind of app discovery a frus-trating process for both developers and consumers. However, these tactics are not effective solutions because end us-

developer pain point:

But in order to address the growing problem of discovery, all the players in the value chain — mobile users, app developers and app stores — need to work together to create sustainable solutions.

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300,000+MOBILE APPS

80 APP STORES

ers cannot accurately gauge the legiti-mate value of the apps on display.

In the next few years, the app store is expected to grow exponentially. Accord-ing Ovum, an independent data monitor-ing company, by 2014, the total number of application downloads (for both free and paid-for applications) is expected to reach 18.7 billion worldwide. In par-ticular, there will be strong growth in the number of paid downloads — reaching 3.3 billion, up from just under 147 mil-lion in 2008. End-user revenues gener-ated through non-operator-controlled app stores, including those operated by device vendors and independent stores, will grow from $367 million in 2008 to al-most $5.7 billion in 2014. This indicates that the app store market will be huge and that app discovery will play a pivotal role in their success.

But in order to address the growing problem of discovery, all the players in the value chain — mobile users, app de-velopers and app stores — need to work together to create sustainable solutions. For example, one potential solution could be to create a crowd sourced mobile app directory with the community of mobile users, mobile app developers, and the app curators who work collectively to create a Wikipedia for mobile apps. This would serve to enrich app metadata to help achieve better app discovery and recommendations.

1 State of Mobile Apps, Nielson Wire. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/the-state-of-mobile-apps/

THIRD PARTY SOLUTIONS

Appsfire, Chorus, Apptizr, Chomp

Leverages a user’s social network to provide the better app discovery through social discovery and recommendations.

Built around user social networks, content preferences and community reviews.

The solutions may not be sustainable as they are not tightly integrated with application stores. Also does not provide effective application discov-ery and recommendations because they may rely on false application data.

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Nurturing your Inner API by Bosco So

So you built an API that exposes your services to the world. Now you can sit back and watch all those 3rd party de-velopers build amazing apps that drive traffic to your site. They will build these apps because they know what great services you offer and what a great API you have.

"If you build it, they will come."

Unfortunately, that only works in the movies. Having an API for your product doesn't mean automatic adoption by the developer community. You are fighting for their time, eye-balls, and resources and you must be proactive in market-ing, engaging, nurturing, and evolving your API. Sounds like yet another online product, doesn't it? Well, it is! Except that your audience is much more discerning, critical, and jaded. Here are some issues to consider:

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

In the same way that consumer web sites have Community Managers to keep their customers engaged and active, hire an API Community Manager. He or she will be responsible for the following activities:

Maintain an API Blog and update your latest news. Devel-opers need to know that your API is being actively worked on and maintained. They don’t want to work on dead proj-ects. A continually updated blog will reassure developers with the sense that progress is being made, that they’re being heard, and that the project has not been abandoned.

Email announcements. Support and “keep the flame alive.” For developers who don’t bother to read your blog or have an RSS feed to your news page, a periodic email updating them to what’s been happening is essential.

Create a forum where developers can gripe. When a de-veloper has questions, suggestions, and comments about your API, how do they get them across? You’ll need a fo-rum, bulletin board, email support, etc. to get their input. In addition to letting developers know they’re being heard, this is also a great avenue to:

* Enhance your API with developer suggestions* Clarify your documentation from analyzing where developers are being stumped* Strengthen your FAQ to make developer adoption easier

Tap into social networking. Use Twitter to inform your audience of the latest release—hint at your features, updates, and bug fixes. Set up a Facebook Page to get the word; perhaps use the Facebook Page as your forum.

Support meetups. Host a monthly Meetup so that developers see your company in action. Better yet, create a Meetup around your API. Host tutorials, hack sessions, and presentations from third-party developers who are using your API.

Run an API app contest. Allow developers to form teams to build apps with your API. Judge the apps with local tech celebrities (e.g., VC personalities). Reward the winners with iPhone, iPad, Tesla, etc. Run a conference. Think Twitter’s Chirp.

DOCUMENTATION

If you don’t document your API, no one will use it. If you don’t docu-ment your API clearly and well, no one will use it. Keep in mind that you’re fighting for developers’ time and eyeballs. If your API is hard for them to grok, they will simply use your competitor’s API.

Give examples. Give more examples. Show common use cases. Some developers are simply not good at reading specs or BNFs; for these folks, use code samples with input & output data. Hire a consultant to learn your API and give you feedback as to where the roadblocks are. Use your Community Engagement effort to improve your documentation.

OPEN SOURCE

Perhaps your product is not available as Open Source, but the client libraries definitely should be. This allows developers to see how to really access your API (because your documenta-tion just can’t keep up to date). For the lazy developers (i.e., busy), they can start using your API without reading a lot of documentation.

* Make the client libraries available in many languages.* Host the client libraries on GitHub (or a similar social source control) for all to see and share.

SUMMARY

Engage, promote, and keep the fire alive. Getting developers to use your API is similar to getting users to use your site over and over again. With developers, there’s a multiplier effect—one good 3rd party app using your API will bring you a significant amount of traffic. However, you cannot simply build the API. You will have to nurture the ecosystem, keep it vibrant, and fight for your developers’ time and attention.

San Francisco Mobile MeetUp in the Orange Innovation Gardens.

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By Developers,For Developersgiving corporations advice on how to strengthen relationships with developers

Danielle Morrill, Director of Marketing, TWILIO

3 tips for corporations thatwant to work with developers:

Have your API be defined by the people who will be using it. “By developers for developers” is very important because you got to think about the questions they’ll be asking.

Think about what you will do in your documentation to give them gratification in the first five minutes. How can they tell the world the “ah-ha!” moment?

Be really accessible, especially when you’re building an API that’s never been done before. People don’t always know what’s possible. You can help them imagine what’s possible.

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THE END OF END-TO-END For over a century, the communications experience was guided by the principle of a complete end-to-end view of the user experience. In the mid-60’s this view started to erode as the Carterfone deci-sion in the US allowed ‘non-telco’ equipment to be attached to the network. Today’s wireless broadband world delivers thousands of use cases where no one party sees the entire user experience from the start of the ‘call’ to the end of the ‘session.’ The concept of ‘over the top’ has replaced the need for end-to-end. But does this mean that users are on their own? Who can hold their hand?

MOTIVATIONAL FUTURES

In the past, especially in the mobile market but also in computing, developers would look at the ‘installed base,' the existing universe of target devices, customers, or users, and prioritize based on what was out there at the time. Now, with a multi-platform roadmap that becomes more visible as chip manufacturers, display makers, and other OEMs can describe what’s coming with more confidence, developers are factoring in future options into their engagement de-cisions. Here, factors such as extensibility, openness, and ecosys-tem triumph over the installed base. Like any commodities futures market, this is partly perception-based, and can be volatile. Does secrecy help or hurt this new model? Is better and more data the developer’s best friend?

FROM RAW DISTRO TO DISCOVERY

For a moment, forget all the hype about this app store versus that app store — you are free to enter any store you like and buy what-ever you want, the world is one ginormous app bazaar. In other words, Distribution is instant and ubiquitous. What then? How do we find anything? After all, isn’t that what we asked at the beginning of the Web? Discovery is a primal human emotion. It’s also a fiend-ish algorithmic challenge in a digitized world. Is Discovery the next big issue after Distro?

IS THE FUTURE REALLY ANOTHER COUNTRY?

Yes it is and Dev Nation is responsible for it. In Imagined Communi-ties, Benedict Anderson forcefully argues that the concept of the modern nation was built on new technology, like the printing press and newspapers, that fundamentally enabled people to bond and connect with fellow citizens they had yet to meet. New forms of publication and communication allowed people to read content in a simultaneous collective manner, and thus imagine the nation, its boundaries, and its citizens. A recent article from The Economist entitled “The Future Is Another Country” makes the observation that online social networks are beginning to act like nation states. Critical to this discussion is the developers’ role in this fundamental shift, enabling millions of people to check in, share, push, grow virtual foods, and swap virtual goods. So where do developers and the entrepreneurial spirits of Silicon Valley get their nation-building skills?

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Thank youThe research team includes Pascale Diaine, Maria Iu, Mark Plakias, and Natalie Quizon.

We would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this study:

To the people who took the time to share their experiences and opinions through our video interviews: Andrew Mager, Jeff Haynie, Robert Scoble, Josh Marinacci, Anand Iyer, Danielle Morrill, Chris Thorpe, Kent Brewster, and Trevor Smith.

We also gratefully acknowledge our colleagues within Orange who provided early feedback and encouragement: Yves Tyrode, Alexia Froudkine, Christophe François, and Satya Mallya.

To our Orange San Francisco colleagues who made time in their busy schedule to write for this magazine: Julian Gay, Bosco So, Shishir Garg, Steven Rose, Srinivas Chervirala, and Christophe Bertagni.

To our friends at Appcelerator who kindly agreed to partner with us for their Q2 Mobile Developer Survey.

Finally we would like to thank Georges Nahon, the CEO of Orange San Francisco, who inspired this project and enabled us to investigate the fascinating community of developers that are shaping the way we interact with the world. We hope this magazine will help facilitate the discussion around Dev Nation and its enormous generative power.

Four Questions for Dev NationThe worlds of computing and communications are changing each other in fundamental ways as we begin the second decade of the 21st century. Our intent here is not to culminate in a conclusion but to initiate dialogue, to broaden the discussion, generate alternative futures, and open up the imagination to consider the following questions:

Population/Users of Nations

A side-by-side comparison of the number* of people that reside within real and virtual societies.

*Numbers as of September 2010

1.35B 1.21B 500M 310M 300M 145M 141M 127M 125M400M

65M 63M

12M 11M

Design by Maria Iu

Copyright 2010 – Orange San Francisco