Increasingly a mobile presence is essential to the well-being of a small business, which can be overlooked with the thought that it’s only for larger enterprises. However, one of the easiest and most integral parts of growing your business is creating a mobile platform that consumers can interact with in the manner of their choosing. Tablets, laptops, smartphones, all must be configured, and having hiccups in your company’s mobile platform can be costly to your business.
Perfecto Mobile is a provider of cloud-based mobile testing and monitoring for businesses, that focuses on helping small businesses test their mobile apps on real devices, remotely in the cloud. Eran Kinsbruner, Perfecto Mobile’s Director of Product Marketing, had a few insights that businesses should keep in mind when thinking about developing a mobile application.
First, you need to choose the right devices. When starting or expanding a small business, often they cannot afford to make their application compatible with all mobile devices. Therefore, they should choose the devices that people use the most, and a good place to start is by finding what devices are sold most in the location that the application is going to be used, as well as the most recent and common versions of them.
Second, businesses need to prepare for the future. Eran states that it’s important to build automation into the application’s lifecycle management (ALM) for future testing, and to improve the ROI. This will save time in the testing process, and likewise save money. It’s also important to scale your research and development to your business. Choosing the right application type, whether it’s native, hybrid, or fully web-based, is a crucial early step in the application process. Native app development requires more efforts, as opposed to simpler web-based applications.
Next, leveraging a cloud-based solution for mobile testing allows small businesses to enable offshoring and reduce labor costs, especially for the manual testing parts in the ALM. Often, small businesses don’t reside in the same area as the target market, so testing in said market is critical. Cloud-based solutions allow businesses to do just that. Finally, small businesses should consider continuous integration. This involves integrating code changes early and often, and testing these change for regression bugs, which helps to avoid the pitfalls of low quality code integration. Adding this to the lifecycle helps to increase application stability and quality, and saves time, money, and resources.
So what does that mean for businesses? In short, go mobile now. The sooner a business can build and test an application, the better. Whether native or web-based, every opportunity to reach a larger market and expand your consumer base should be taken. The explosion in the tablet and smartphone markets make mobile platforms very appealing, and an almost essential aspect to any growing business.
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Cloud application platform Heroku is coming off a streak of bad news after it was accused of misleading its customers about how some aspects of its service worked and potentially costing its users quite a bit of money in the process. Today, Heroku is putting the spotlight back on features again, with the launch of the public beta of its larger 2X dynos, which, in some ways, will also help alleviate the job-queuing issues that sparked the recent debate.
The 2X dynos (dynos are basically the containers that run an application process on Heroku) will offer exactly what the name implies: twice the memory (1GB instead of 512MB) and also twice as many CPU shares as the basic dynos (now called 1X). During the beta phase, the 2X dynos will cost the same as $0.05 per hour as the 1X dynos. After that, they will cost, as their name implies, $0.10 per hour. Heroku is also exploring the option to launch even larger dynos (4X+) in the future.
Heroku argues that these larger dynos will allow for increasing concurrency on single-threaded Rails apps using the Unicorn HTTP server for Rack applications. Heroku also says that the larger dynos will work well for JVM languages that can take advantage of the vertical scale the 2X dynos provide. In addition, the company says, this should help with performing memory-intensive background jobs for image processing and geospatial processing.
Back in January, we reported that GE would be partnering up with healthtech startup incubator StartUp Health and selecting 13 consumer healthcare startups (originally 10) to participate in a three year program designed to nurture and accelerate their growth. After a two month screening process, today they’re announcing those 13 finalists.
The application process, which began in January, took in more than 400 applications from 22 countries. The 13 companies that were selected will then be closely mentored by GE and StartUp Health over the next three years.
The companies will participate in the program for free, in exchange for 2 to 10 percent equity ownership by GE and StartUp Health’s Innovation Fund. They’ll each be partnered with a GE executive that will help them get in touch with experts and resources within GE. GE and StartUp health also promises that the selected companies will receive plenty of exposure to potential investors and VC’s.
We’ve listed the 13 companies along with short bios below:
Arpeggi is a company based in Austin, TX that specializes in affordable genome data translation and analysis.
Aver Informatics is a big data platform for healthcare data from Green Bay, WI.
Care At Hand is a mobile early warning system for elderly home care aides based in Boston, MA.
Caremerge is a company from Chicago, IL that provides apps that coordinate communication between seniors living in homes and their families.
Cerora is a company from Philadelphia, PA that delivers diagnostic data on brain health and function to patients and doctors.
Doctor.com is a database that connects doctors with patients based in New York, NY.
GetHealth is a company based in Dublin, Ireland and New York, NY that offers an online platform that encourages employee involvement in corporate wellness programs.
GoGoHealth is a company from Atlanta, GA that allows patients to get a diagnosis or a subscription from their health provider through their computer or smartphone.
IntellgentM is a company based in Sarasota, FL and New York, NY that specializes in hand hygiene monitoring in hospitals and other healthcare environments.
itMD is a company from Miami, FL that hosts medical records in the cloud that can be accessed, sent, and shared to anyone in the iTMD network.
Oxitone Medical is a company from Ashkelon, Israel that develops wearable pulse oximeters.
TalkSession is a platform that connects patients to mental health professionals based in New York, NY.
WalkJoy is company from Long Beach, CA that develops a wearable device that aids in the restoration of gait and balance disorders.
