GMO Cloud

Is Mobile The Best Place For Cloud Application Development?

Currently, millions of people scarce remember life before smartphones. According to World Mobile Applications Market, seven billion smartphone applications were made in 2009, mainly from natural and third-party application stores that generated huge revenue. By 2015, this mobile application market will likely be worth $24.4 billion – at least a 64% increase on 2009. The mobile application market is growing due to advancement in network technologies, growing adaptation on smartphones, and lower data usage cost. Here, we look at how mobile phones serve as a lodging places for cloud application development.

The Rise of Mobile Cloud Computing

With the progression of mobile cloud computing, greater efforts have been plowed into developing platforms for cloud-based mobile applications. Mobile and cloud computing are the same technologies that move applications from user to server. Building applications for mobile cloud is a relatively diverse business, starting with development of applications for traditional smartphones like iPhone or Android. However, in the long run, mobile cloud computing models will generate more revenue for application developers.

From Cellular Devices to App Development

Mobile phone companies can create their own parallel cloud to develop mobile applications, meaning mobile phone users need not go online to find stores for installation of apps. Procurement of mobile apps will thus become obsolete. Not all cellular devices can easily access an integral cellular cloud unless all developers make a trademark that supports the application. This is not a difficult process since apps can even run from their current mobile operating system. Concept cloud computing can thus take things into a new dimension.

If analysts are to be believed, there will eventually be no need to install applications as everything will run within a cloud environment. Some technologies that facilitate these kinds of improvements are now available causing accompanying apps to be more accessible and easy to use.

Setting up Mobile Applications

Smartphone developers, manufacturers and others now have cellular computing software, paving the way for new mobile services and applications. Their own packages include excellent operating systems, which borrow from a computer-based cloud. More companies need also to be in line with this technological change.

The Bad

Though mobile sectors are the fastest-growing platforms for applications, worrying issues include the interruption of network connection. Sometimes, you may experience lower download frequency and a blinking broadband device, or inactivity of voice calls during the web-based procedure. Other mobile app marketplaces are not structured in terms of ad-revenue generation, causing ads in free applications to be annoying to users.

The Good

The development and setup of mobile applications is opening up a new source of revenue for mobile phone manufacturers. In the near future, iOS and Android will no longer lodge in up-to-date devices. Not only will mobile application development remain an inspirational element for all, but also serve as a grand helping hand, creating and improving mobile applications to produce groundbreaking services.

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About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a full-time freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.

Japanese Banks Embrace Social Media

A recent survey by Celent has shed light on how Japanese financial services differ from Western counterparts in use of social media. About 88 percent of such firms are using social media platforms to reach their customers, with more than half using several networks simultaneously. Western banks, in contrast, have been far more cautious in this approach.

A deeper look at these surprising statistics

Interest in social media among Japanese banks has grown impressively in the last couple of years, with many now using such networks to form a core part of overall marketing and services strategy.

How Japanese banks are using social media platforms to their advantage

The main advantage that social media networks offer banks is real-time communicate with customers, making it an extremely efficient form of market research and a great platform for providing certain services. Social media networks have also had a great impact on improving financial institutions’ brands and recognition among the public. They offer better communication between people within a single financial institution, and improved efficiency of offline interactions by allowing online transactions enacted by customers or employees.

Banks not yet involved in social media are showing strong interest in participating, while those already using social media to their advantage are looking for ways to expand to a strategy involving multiple social media platforms.

How does this differ from how non-Japanese banks utilize social media?

According to a similar survey carried out by an independent financial information source , Western banks have a very poor social media strategy in comparison to Japanese. Out of the top fifty non-Japanese banks, the vast majority are using a token page on Facebook which usually receives no activity.

In fact, about a third of these banks had no Facebook profile. Even the banks that did were not accepting friend requests or interacting with users. The statistics for Twitter and YouTube were similar. Only about half had active Twitter accounts that were regularly used, with half of these using Twitter to engage with the public about wealth management and financial issues. Meanwhile, fewer than half were using YouTube.

The bottom line

Western banks can learn from Japanese financial firms’ usage of social media, being active on the same channels as their consumers, reaching them more effectively. A strategy that utilizes multiple social media networks casts the widest net. Unfortunately, banks outside Japan have yet to grasp the core concept of social media usage: an inactive account is worse than no account at all. Setting up an account and abandoning it conveys a poor company image.

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Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

How to Enter the Japanese Game Market

Japan remains a sturdy and voracious market for social game creators. But unlike Western countries, it focuses on mobile gaming across the whole spectrum: from regular and smart phones to portable consoles. Social gaming in Japan has thus grown into a dynamic, highly-competitive market buttressed by Nintendo, Sony, Capcom and Sega.

Over the years, a new breed of game developers emerged, causing social games to sweep across the web and mobile phones. Social gaming in Japan is led by the big three of Mixi, Gree, and Mobage-town, who are accessed by consumers using mobile phones rather than web browsers. Half the population of Japan lists social gaming among their past-times. This data is from Pikkle developer David Collier, who believes the Japanese market for social gaming is as huge as the American one.

M-create ranking revealed that as of August 2012, Nintendo continues to dominate the local gaming market with an allocation of 70 per cent. In hardware alone, Nintendo owns 75 per cent of the market, followed by Sony’s 23 per cent. Nintendo also owns the top 10 bestseller consoles: five 3Ds, four Wii, and one DS. Gree, on the other hand, shifts to feed the voracity of hardcore game players with a goal of bringing video game market to smartphones.

Entering the Japanese Social Gaming Market

Faced with such a promising market many game developers from the United States, Europe and neighboring Asia are expressing desires to enter social gaming in Japan, with many foreign firms already develop social games for the local market.

Translation of the game to Japanese is paramount, as locals tend to turn their backs on games with any foreign language. Culturalization is another factor. To make social games more attractive, developers structure contents to reflect real life scenarios in Japan, just as pioneering game developers did from the beginning. Given Japanese patriotism, new game developers should be mindful of appropriate game backdrops.

Uninterrupted and smooth game experience is also crucial. Imagine the scenario of hot gamers at the height of a game… obstructed by bugs! Such situations can turn them completely off. Debugging is an essential component of a social game. Before the game is launched in the market, it should be run-tested and reviewed for any error and incompatibility with devices.

Social gaming is similar to an online shop, a customer service or online banking. It should be running throughout the day, non-stop. Though this may not be difficult to achieve, it may have issues from time to time. Game developers understand servers need to be high-performance and capable of accommodating hundreds, if not thousands of gamers. A “must” feature of a social game is the online game support accessible any time by the game users, with inquiries responded to within 24 hours.

Needless to say, promotional events of new social games require significant capital. But with dynamic and multifunctional social networks in Japan, the expenses for advertisements have been reduced. Even huge promotional investments could pay off, given that Japan’s social game market yielded $3.4 billion profits in 2012.

The high standards required of social game developers are epitomized by the multi-million dollar film adaptations of Japanese epic games. Adaptations that awed the world.

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

A Case Study: The Restructuring of Japan’s Long Term Credit Bank

Amid the mayhem of economic problems in Japan in 1989, the Long Term Credit Bank (LTCB) underwent a surgical transformation. Ten years had passed since the economic downturn and the bank was still lurching from one problem to another. Many felt that the end was near. Finally, in 1998, the bank was sold to an international group who restructured and renamed the bank, giving birth to the present Shinsei bank in 2000.

LTCB’s mainframe-based IT infrastructure had developed haphazardly with different applications and systems supporting a number of moderately different card products. The new owners were very keen to consolidate these into a single product, but were anxious that customers did not face further disruption. Thus, closing all competing card services was not an option.

The path Shinsei followed was this: each card type was molded into a separate business with a new, specialized IT application. Over five years, the bank transferred each of these ‘businesses’ to a common platform and application. Existing customers were slowly moved to a common hardware and operating system without ever becoming aware of it. All mainframe and legacy systems were ported. A full bank was ported to the cloud in small steps, with no disruption to its already fragile customer base.

This case study has formed the blueprint for thousands of such transformations since 2000. The cloud itself has evolved enormously over the years and become far more advanced and user-friendly. It has also become far cheaper than the fees Shinsei Bank paid due to ever-increasing economies of scale in the public cloud. Improvements in cloud security have undermined other reasons to stay with a private cloud. Automatic patching and updating of cloud-based systems is already closing the window of opportunity available to hackers.

Cloud systems are becoming much more compliant with various regulations that govern computing practices. As technology evolves and our understanding of security and inter-operability requirements improves, compliance issues become better defined and cloud systems are adapting. For example, whereas e-commerce used to be held back by lack of reliable digital signatures, this has now changed and we take these for granted. Today you can even take out a bank loan with a digital signature. As the number of subscribers to the public cloud increases, compliance mechanisms will naturally develop. Enormous computing capability and practically unlimited storage is making compliance easier than ever before.

The low costs of cloud computing are making people develop applications privately. This is sometimes even called rogue IT. One of the best known examples is of Derek Gottfrid wanting to put all of the New York Times archives online. Instead of waiting for the Times’ IT set up to give him the equipment, he promptly set up a cloud instance and hosted the archives on it without the knowledge of the IT department. The archives came on line in a fraction of the time and the cost it would have taken otherwise.

The cloud-reaching path illuminated by the Shinsei Bank is now trodden by thousands of businesses, a sure sign cloud computing is getting more cost effective and robust.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.

Highly Profitable Social Games Market in Japan

Mobile and Internet technology has assisted the unprecedented growth of social games in Japan. New Japanese game companies like Gree, Inc. and DeNA are dominating the social-games market with their card-battle games that allow members to actively interact and influence each other’s style. This development is making traditional big-player manufacturers like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft reform and compete on equal footing with these dynamic newcomers.

The gaming industry is a huge one, with an estimated turnover of about $78 billion. However, the percentage taken up by mobile social games has increased tremendously from almost nothing a few years ago to about $4.36 billion. Developers and companies marketing social games were, at the earliest times, able to market social games on most locally-produced Japanese phones that allow graphics and gameplay structures – even before the invention of smartphones.

Sensing the possibility of becoming the leader in the social games industry, Japanese gaming companies are modifying their games to meet the tastes of foreign players. DeNA, for instance, attested that the three games on its Mobage network—namely, card-battle game “Rage of Bahamut”, role-playing game “Blood Brothers” and battle game “Ninja Royale” are reportedly in the Top Ten of the best downloaded games on U.S. Chart for Google Play.

At the 2012 Tokyo Game Show, Isao Moriyasu, the Chief Executive of DeNa, confidently stated: “We want to build social games up into an industry where it can become the next area of global strength for Japan.”

New Japanese game companies like Gree are considering acquiring franchises from large console-game players with the hope of bringing such games into the social sphere. In the pipeline are the deals between Gree and Konami Corps for its console game “Metal Gear Solid”; Ubisoft Entertainment SA for its “Assassin’s Creed”; and Capcom Co. for its “Monster Hunter”.

Social games also offer these new Japanese gaming companies opportunities of monetizing offerings through sale of virtual goods, weapons and additional powers. Shin Unozawa, Chairman of the Computer Entertainment Suppliers’ Association, pleasingly said: “I used to think the videogame industry moved fast, but this social-game market moves three times as fast.”

Yoshikazu Tanaka, Gree’s CEO, also believes that smartphones will eventually offer better graphics, more processing power, and bigger memory than other video game devices currently in use. However, he might also have been considering the challenges that increased gaming activities would bring to executives, who must now worry about increased storage, memory and security requirements.

Invariably, social game developers will have to design the appropriate mechanism for storing their clients’ games so as to provide uninterrupted gaming procedures. Cloud computing will of course offer both developers and players the unique chance of storing their games’ data in the cloud. This will not only guarantee uninterrupted gaming activities, but also add value to the joy of social games. 

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About the Guest Author:

Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/