Brian is the Founder and Creative Director of pinch/zoom. Brian is a 10-year veteran of the mobile industry and author of O'Reilly's Mobile Design and Development. He is an authority in the field of mobile user experience design.
Come help us create the next generation of mobile products. We have a very busy year ahead and are looking for a variety of roles, including Mobile Designers, Mobile Developers (iOS and HTML5) and Account Directors.
If that sounds like you or someone you know, please email hello@pinchzoom.com and let us know!
Chetan Sharma has compiled a list of mobile predictions for 2012 from various industry thought leaders. Some very interesting insight into the year ahead. I’ve listed the top answers here:
iOS is still the titan of mobile browsing. Down from 54% in November and 61% in October. 25% coming from iPhone, 24% iPad and iPod touch just 2%. Android is just 16% coming mostly from phones.
Next month should be telling to see if holiday sales gives iOS a larger lead. And we’ll see if the Kindle Fire boosts Android’s overall web browsing percent.
Source: NetMarketshare
Joe Wikert interviews me about our new HTML5 mobile publishing platform pinch/zoom Press that we created to make mobile publishing easy.
Some of the highlights of the interview:
A great post on the value of hiring “10x Teams” or teams that can scale beyond themselves, not just 10 times the people – or “butts in seats” as I refer to them. The idea is five of the right people is better spent than building one team of ten. That extraordinary people can do far more than regular people. And you should hire for the extraordinary.
My favorite part of this post is this diagram, which shows the qualities you need in a 10x Team. From my experience, this diagram is spot on for creating the perfect team that can solve really hard problems and create some pretty amazing shit.
I think we see this at a lot of great companies, but most clearly at Apple versus Microsoft or Google. Apple has created far better products with less resources than the competition. And now the market reflects that – Apple created 10x the value by hiring 10x Teams. Clearly the 10x Team model works.
Building a strong core team has always been a core principle of mine at each of my companies. That it is better to be focused, specialized and boutique rather than a big crank-it-out app factory. The problem in advanced markets like mobile, customers don’t always know what they want, so it can be hard for them to see the value of one versus the other.
So your small boutique firm ends up doing a bit of everything, because they are ethical and believe in building great products. But this also means while you have your A-Team, you’ve given them B-level work. So it doesn’t take long for your A-Team to feel like a B-Team.
This clearly doesn’t work, but fortunately goes away as the market matures. I think 2012 will be that year as we’ve already seen the signs in 2011.
Today I posted that we are looking to add to our family at pinch/zoom but let’s be clear: we are looking to continue to add to our existing 10x Team, we are not looking for 10 times the people.
We are looking for mobile designers to help us create tomorrows amazing apps for some of the biggest brands on the planet. We are seeking designers based in Seattle with experience in creating pixel perfect designs, that can communicate creative strategy and approach, has experience working in a fast paced, agency environment and has an eye for interaction and usability.
We offer a great salary, health benefits, unlimited time off, profit sharing, generous time allotted for education and personal projects, learning opportunities aplenty, super flexible schedule, family friendly workplace and an unrivaled team of passionate people, dedicated to making great mobile products.
If that sounds like you or someone you know, please email hello@pinchzoom.com with your job history and links to work that you’ve done.
The pinch/zoom designed – and now award winning – BBC iPlayer is now available for iPhone in Europe, Australia and Canada:
Watch a selection of the best classic and contemporary British shows on demand, including Doctor Who, Top Gear and Gavin & Stacey. Subscribe today for unlimited access, offline viewing and AirPlay.
Now you can watch the best of British television pretty much anytime anywhere… except in the United States.
CNET seems about as frustrated as I am about iOS and Android stats:
There are lots of metrics you can use to compare the two platforms, with new factoids arriving daily – some of them direct from Apple and Google, but more from research firms and other third parties. I decided to gather some recent competitive numbers to see if considering all of them at once helped to clarify the competitive situation.
Here is the breakdown from his research:
Read the full post for sources
I will be a guest speaker at Chetan Sharma’s upcoming Mobile Breakfast Series along with Mark Anderson, Satya Maliya and Laura Marriott. We will be talking about the highlights of 2011 and what we can expect from the mobile world in 2012.
I have begun writing my second book. After I finished Mobile Design and Development I didn’t think that I would ever write another book again. It is a long and painful process with marginal rewards.
But something has changed.
When I wrote my first book I felt I had a duty to share my knowledge and experience in mobile. I don’t know to who exactly, but I wouldn’t say it was for me. Don’t get me wrong – I stand by my work and what I wrote – but there is a greater message that I wanted to convey back then, but didn’t feel I was in the place to communicate it.
I’ve debated writing a second book for two years now. I’ve learned a lot since writing MD&D and founding pinch/zoom and there is plenty of good stories and techniques to share. I have a lot of notes and ideas on how to write that book. But that still feels like scratching the surface to a much broader thing that is happening all around us.
For this book, I will continue to tackle the topic of mobile. But I have no desire to write another technical book. This book will be for people like me, who are trying to understand how mobile fits into the world we live in – what to do with it – how to harness mobile to change the world.
At the heart of all of these transitions is mobile. I’ve seen it have a transformative impact on some of the biggest and oldest companies on the planet. I’ve seen geniuses become dumbfounded. I’ve seen great intentions fail miserably.
I want to explore and share those stories. I do not talk want to talk about the virtues of native apps or HTML5 apps – or any other irrelevant discussion that revolves around the technology of today. Mobile is no more about the technology, as the printing press was about paper.
Instead this book will be as much a manifesto of 21st century experiences as it is a guide to using century old tools to solve the problems of today, even the ones we may not be able to define yet. Or to use the words of Steve Jobs, to empower people to “stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities” for themselves.
I’ve decided to write this book in its entirety first before I decide on how to publish it. I may go back to O’Reilly. I may self publish. I just don’t know yet.
But for now all I do know is I have a lot of writing to do.