5 business apps I have on my Android (and iPhone)

We've all been playing around with consumer apps. We've been all sending e-mails, browsing the web, getting GPS based driving directions, listening to music and watching YouTubes. Many of us take pictures, tweet and facebook and keep calendars on the phone. We check-out sports / scores and instagram / pin(our)interests. Some of us have their little groceries lists on their phones.

But when it comes to business and productivity related apps what do people use?

Well as a mobile apps developer with like four phones in my hands all the time (I need to have handy at least an Android, an iPhone, a Windows phone like a Nokia and a Blackberry all the time plus a Motorola Xoom Android tablet and an iPad), I have quite a few business apps installed on my smart phones and tablets.

And here are five of the ones I use on a daily basis.

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great social media solution for professionals. I've been a member of the site since 2010 and recently exceeded the milestone of 1,000 direct connections with access to an impressively larger 2nd and 3rd degree connections. Historically we got multiple contracts, jobs and professional relationships LinkedIn and our network is growing every day.

The reason I like the mobile app is that I can nurture and work my network in a mobile way. Weather I am in a meeting with a prospective customer who wants professional references on the spot or I am just on the road on a project, I can grow my network, post updates and back links to my website, promote my blog or even start a PPC campaign. Accepting new connections on the fly or responding to e-mails is a breeze.

LinkedIn is well designed and it works well on both my tablets and all my smart phones. Downloading and using the app is free. There are paid (but fairly inexpensive) packages for sponsored ads and expanding your network. I LOVE LinkedIn!

2. Meetup

I extensively use the app of Meetup.com. The reason is that it provides me with access to a large number of local (such as Miami based or NYC based) groups and their meetings. The groups are well structured around topics like web development, mobile development, start-ups, e-commerce and retail, enterprise applications, public and Government related work, environmental and non-profit work. There are also a number of groups focused on certain technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Android Development or iOS development.

My experience so far is very good: people who participate in these meetings are dedicated professionals, they brainstorm and collaborate and they are always open to tackling new projects (actually most of them go there with a specific project in their mind).

The Meetup app is well done, it gives you real estate to present your practice, it provides two ways communications channels with the groups, it gives you updates on events and opportunities and it naturally ties the scheduled meetings into your phone's calendar.

The local factor of these groups makes a big difference: attending in person meetings has a better outcome than just bidding online on projects. I LIKE Meetup a lot and will be a long time user.

3. Skype

Skype has been around for a while: I personally used the web app for almost a decade. I started with making free PC-to-PC calls to Europe to talk to my family but more recently I mainly use it as a business collaboration tool.

What the mobile app adds to the table is the ability to basically make free (or very inexpensive) mobile video phone calls / video conferences all over the world. I use this app a lot when I work with my overseas team: we chat, face-to-face collaborate, exchange files, notes and specs and watch videos or training content. I use it on all my smart phones but also on my tablet as it gives me a little more real estate while I am still mobile.

The fact that I am not locked into a specific office location (such as my location in Miami Beach on Lincoln Rd) but I can still run my meetings with  geographically dispersed teams adds a lot to the productivity: you can go see a client at 11:00 AM and have an immediate meeting over lunch from a Starbucks nearby.

4. Office Mobile

Even if they were kind of late to the party, Microsoft launched their flagship product for mobile platforms. It was expected and necessary. The Office Mobile offers most of the traditional Office for desktop functionality on mobile platforms. You have things like Word, Excel and PowerPoint ready to be used wherever you are.

While some people use Office Mobile just to be able to open up and read Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, I find it useful at editing docs as well especially when used on a tablet with an attached physical keyboard and/or mouse. That kinds of hardware basically turns your tablet into a laptop.

So I read and edit docs from e-mail attachments, I write quotes and proposals, make graphs and PowerPoint presentations and even do some UI/UX work while on the road.

I like Office Mobile and I use it weekly.

5. Google Maps

I use Google Maps as a business app. It is a very important app for me because it tells me who is my competition in my neck of the woods or who maybe a potential referral partner.

I always scope Google Maps & try to evaluate my partners and members of the local community: places and addresses, customers reviews and ratings, pictures, descriptions. And, of course, I use the Maps for driving directions as well. As a programmer, I extensively use Google Maps API: it has a tone of data immediately available to incorporate in your apps!

In addition to these I sometimes use an app called StockSpy where I am checking how my stock market portfolio is doing. Even though I tend to be a longer term investor than a weekly or monthly trader, I find this app useful.

I also extensively use Google's Hangouts- it is an awesome collaboration tool that gives you rich functionality including video conferencing, notes and artifacts sharing and remote control to a client or business partner machine.

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com

3 most used programming languages

According to multiple online and offline sources and to my personal research and experience the following three programming languages are the most used programming languages today.

So for those of you who are looking for a job, it is time now to start learning these languages.

1. C

It is probably not a surprise that the old C remains the most used programming language. The main reasons are the volumes of legacy code still exists at the Enterprise level, there are entire Operating Systems written in C (such as all the Unix based Operating Systems), there is a large pool of low level / embedded devices written in C etc.

C, a venerable programming language that has been around since the early '70s, is a general purpose structured programming language fairly solid and versatile. It's fast (compared to other competitors), imperative/declarative and fairly straight forward syntax. Memory allocation uses pointers (which is one of the reasons some people fear C- remember those ugly core dumps?).

Generations of programmers (including mine) learned computer's programming with C. You should start learning C now!

2. Java

Since Sun Microsystems came up with Java in the mid '90s this programming language gained a lot of popularity and it is not out of the question that one day it will actually become the leader of all programming languages out there.

Slightly "heavier" in processing time than its competitors C and C++ Java is a very versatile object oriented programming language with a very natural syntax and ... without pointers! Memory allocation works better and makes the software written in Java more reliable. "Write once-run anywhere" is another big plus of this programming language as Java (as opposed to other programming languages) is a highly portable programming language.

Java was adopted by all the major Corporations, mid size firms and start-ups: nowadays you have Java anywhere from Enterprise platforms to small shops. The explosion of mobile devices and mobile phones based on Google's Java Android SDK pushed Java even further and will definitely contribute to its future global expansion.

Learn Java. Today. And you will get much more market-able.

3. C++

C++ is a super set of the C programming language developed to add the concept of object oriented programming to the old C. The language remains general purpose, still relies on pointers and it's heavily used in embedded systems, Operating Systems, server side applications (such as intense data collections applications), desktop applications, gaming software etc.

Most of the major Software Development Organizations (including Microsoft, Borland, HP, IBM) own a C++ compiler as well which makes it a desired programming language to have under your belt to become more employable.

Other popular programming languages / databases are: PHP, Javascript, SQL (with different flavors and implementations), Objective C (which is what people write Apple's iPhone applications in) and C# (of Microsoft). Some web centered programming languages like Ruby on Rails gain a lot of popularity lately while other strong regex / small code footprint like Python and Perl are growing too. Still the majority of the applications is dominated by these three mentioned up here.

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu

Miami Beach, FL

http://wittywebnow.com

3 major trends

In the mid '90s you had the PC and Internet revolution. Things were exciting as computers got more and more popular and more and more affordable. Everybody was jumping the wagon and in a short period of time a lot of people became "experts". Later on the bubble burst showed that in fact very few of them actually were ...

Almost a decade passed by without many major break throughs. We got more and more bandwidth. We started to collect more and more data. Our databases grew bigger and bigger and they invented the word "business intelligence". Our websites started to look slicker and slicker. We tighten up security and started to build more and more barricades. But other than VMWare with their innovative virtualization products, nothing really outstanding came up.

For a while things dragged. Major companies like Sun Microsystems and Digital went down and got acquired. Mid size firms started M&As processes. And start-ups had a harder time to launch.

And then people like Jobs and Zuckerberg stepped up to the plate with new concepts in mobility and social media. That worked. New industries were born and now we are still riding that wave.

Here are what we identified as 3 major trends of the last decade:

(1) Cloud computing

I used to say that cloud computing is not really a new technology- it just got a fancy marketing name. But in reality the concept of sharing networking resources and optimizing their utilization is new and is very useful. It's reliable enough. It's inexpensive. It's good.

Companies were slow (and they are still slow) in adopting the Cloud- as with any other kind of technology. Some of them have reasons (security, compliance, rules and regulations etc.), some others just don't bother: they either don't feel like they have the skills sets or don't see enough business value in it.

The Cloud is growing though. While there is still resistance every day we see new companies looking at hosting in either private or public cloud environments and asking us questions about it. The Amazons and Rack Spaces of the world did a good job at promoting the Cloud concept. And international markets (where the reliability of their electricity grid is an issue) are more open to migrate their hosted solutions to the Cloud.

(2) Mobile computing

Since Apple created the iPhone a whole new industry was born. An industry that got immediately adopted by the consumers and businesses of all sizes.

It happened so fast that companies like Blackberry for example (who actually had the first commercially available mobile e-mail device) could not keep up! Google jumped in with their Android acquisition and came up with a big challenge: an open source and totally free development sdk based on java and linux.

A couple of years later if you were not in mobile you did not exist: that was the reason we here at Witty Mobile Apps actually decided to provide design of mobile applications starting as of 2011.

And, if three-four years ago the market was driven mainly by consumer focused applications, nowadays we see a lot of businesses going mobile with pretty much everything from portable Excel spreadsheets, to real time business data for meetings, location based business services, mobile bidding systems, sophisticated decision making systems, stats, business niche mobile ready social media etc.

Mobile leads generation for different marketing companies is another growing segment. Real estate is definitely there- most of the respected realties sites are now mobile ready and the ones who are not will be soon. Attorneys are mobile. IT and Computer Repair shops are getting more and more mobile. Doctors are getting more and more mobile. You name it.

(3) Social media

Social media, like many other great things, started in a College dorm room and exploded to epic proportions. The other day I was reading somewhere that "if Facebook was a country, it would have been the second country population wise in the world." I would add than it will more likely become the first country population wise soon.

But what's interesting about social media is that lately it gears a lot towards business / niche social media rather than just a place to socialize with family and friends, share pictures, chat or show off locations.

Last year we had designed a social media solution for realtors and real estate investors. Over there people don't login to waste time. They login to socialize to do business. They refer leads. They present deals. They bounce ideas and collaborate on projects. The site is subscription based and it already has sixty four hundred professionals on it (the site is owned by a medium size business here in town). The realtors LOVE it! The site is designed with users security in mind: they do not sell people's data. And the site is 100% mobile ready: Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry.

Now THAT's where I believe social media is heading to.

We will be around for the ride :)

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com