The Need for Responsive Design when going Mobile

Mobile is the new black. Especially, when you talk of technology & web 2.0
Everyone is going mobile, even I launched a mobile app for Jewelove 2 years back & a few 100 people use it, without me doing any marketing at all!

Today, 2 years later, I have tried a lot of different things, & I know one big difference when developing for mobile & when developing for a computer user. Whether you are using a MAC, a PC, a Laptop or a Mini, more o less they have at least a certain dimension & they come in all sizes as long as they are wide. Although as a web-designer you may not realize it, but it simplifies life, a lot.

But this is not the case when you come to the mobile arena, every phone, every OS, every model is different. God Bless iPhone, for all their models come in 1 standard size, but think of android phone, symbian phones, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola (RIP), Sony, every manufacturer is a master of his or her own universe & creates a model as widely different from its previous versions as the wildlife or maybe the insect life on this Earth.

That spells Trouble when you develop for the mobile.

Whether an app or a .mobi website, everything has to fit into that tiny little screen your customers look at the whole day. It is really tiny, I guess my iPhone screen is about a seventh that of my laptop & iphone & htc boast of some of the larger screens in the market, think of your customers who use Blackberry (soon-to-be RIP) & Nokia (soon-to-be-RIP too, despite Stephen Elop's bravado).

There are 3 unique challenges that we face when develop for the mobile that are otherwise not encountered when developing for the PC or other similar wide platforms.

1. Screen size : As I mentioned above, the screen sizes of mobiles are very small. After all, the customer has to fit that thing into his pocket. But that is not the real challenge, the bigger challenge every manufacturer thinks he is GOD & gives his phone a different screen size. Think of iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia E71, those are just 3 phones with 3 totally different screen sizes! If you fit content into one, it totally fall off the edges or falls short the edges of another.
   It gets worse. Some manufacturers think themselves the masters of the universe, they make every model have a different screen size! Think Nokia E71 & Nokia Lumia. That means even if you were targeting people with just Nokia phones (though I have no idea why would you do that), your website or app would end up looking completely different on 2 different models of Nokia!
   
2. Platform : iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, & these are just the popular ones. This issue props up only in case of apps, you have to create as many apps as the smartphones (users) you want to target. If you want to target just Apple customers, only building an iPhone app would suffice. But the moment you move on to Android, things get tricky, very tricky. Mostly because apps supported on one version of Android may not be supported so well on another. eg. If your app supported Gingerbread, it may not very well be supported on phones with Honeycomb or Icecream versions of Android.
3. Landscape : This is more a blessing in disguise. On most phones, The dimensions of the effective screen change depending on whether the phone is being held in Portrait mode (like when you were dialling a number) or in landscape mode, like you were playing Angry Birds. You don't need to, but you may want to use it to provide an enhanced version of your app or website in the landscape mode, like the Calculator app on iPhone, which goes from simple calculator to Scientific Calculator when you go from Portrait hold to holding it wide-landscape.
4. Internet Speed : Not a major issue, nowadays anyway. But remember unless your customers are always connected to hi-speed wifi, they are connected to internet via a slow, turtle crawling, 2G or, if you are lucky, 3G connection. Make sure your website complies.

Now, where making a responsive design really saves you (time) & your customers effort, is that it ADAPTS. It adapts to the screen size, the way the customer is holding the device, & if you are a really savvy programmer, even their platform, version & the internet speed!

Think of a website that really adapts to your phone screen, like Huffington post's mobile website, whether you are viewing it on the iPhone, the HTC megascreen, your laptop or your friend's blackberry, it renders seamlessly. A true example of Responsive Design mobile website, which adapts to your screen size, os (it kills the flash when viewing on your iphone or ipad) & whether you are holding your phone straight or sideways.

I hope you can now see how a responsive design might really help your customers, & in turn you. :D

P.S. : This is when I haven't even covered tablets yet, will do that in another post.\

Happy Mobiling!

Paypal is such a nightmare for Indian businesses

Paypal I used to love it. It was such a convenient way to accept payments from my international customers. They could pay me without disclosing their credit card details, they were comfortable with it & I could auto withdraw funds to my bank account in India, without any hassle.

That was a long time ago.

Now, the scenario is completely different. Now, Paypal tells me my PAN No. is invalid! The same PAN No. which can be verified on the Income Tax Department website, the same PAN that I have used for over 4 years to pay my taxes & as an photo ID for numerous train journeys & many other purposes, Paypal refuses to accept it.
That is sad, because Customers still ask me if they can pay via Paypal, but now I cannot accept their payments, because of no fault of mine or theirs, but a fault of Paypal in their PAN verification.

Moreover the issue is not simply just with me but numerous businesses in the country. If you google Paypal says Invalid Pan, you see a lot of search results.

One big reason for this could be, sole proprietorship businesses in India, no sole proprietorship businesses in India have a separate PAN, they work under the PAN of their proprietor but they may have a separate name (eg. my company name is Jewelove but my name is Sambhav Karnawat) & it might be so, that Paypal is trying to verify the name of the company with the name of the PAN Card. Whatever the issue, Paypal should try to rectify it so that it can earn from Indian businesses again & so that Indian e-commerce business can receive payments from their international customers peacefully once again.

Junglee.com overtakes Flipkart.com & ebay.in website traffic on just the 3rd day!Junglee.com overtakes Flipkart.com & ebay.in website traffic on just the 3rd day!ebsite traffic on just the 3rd day!

Junglee.com overtakes Flipkart.com & ebay.in website traffic on just the 3rd day! Photo courtesy : Mahesh Murthy

Its just the third day since Amazon launched junglee.com & Junglee.com has already overtaken Indian e-commerce "giants", flipkart.com, ebay.in, infibeam.com etc.

Goes to prove,  Why could Indian ecommerce startups partner with Amazon rather than compete with it?

Junglee.com has over 16% of Flipkart traffic in 2 days without any ads!

Photo Courtesy : Mahesh Murthy via Alexa

I found this infographic by Mahesh Murthy today. It clearly shows how Junglee.com has reached over 16% of flipkart traffic & close to 50% website traffic of infibeam.com, homeshop18.com & letsbuy.com (individually, not collectively, yet) in just 2 days, without any advertising that I know of!

Seems, Junglee.com is up & running (wild)!

Reinforces the views expressed at Why could Indian ecommerce startups partner with Amazon rather than compete with it?

Moreover, what will be even more interesting is, what happens when  they start their full-fledged advertisement campaign in India.

What is Junglee.com?

Junglee.com used to be the official website of Junglee Corp. which Amazon took over alongwith AllPlanetCorps in 1998 for $280 Million. Junglee Corp, then based in Sunnyvale was a provider of database technology to help consumers find products on the Internet, also known as an aggregation & comparison shopping service.

That is what Junglee.com used to be, as of right now, junglee.com is not a website functioning but the domain name still rests with Amazon.

Now Amazon plans to launch in India under the name of Junglee.com

Trivia : Junglee means wild in Hindi & the late Shammi Kapoor maintained his website at http://www.junglee.org.in which is now maintained by his family.

Junglee.com Amazon.com's India Venture

Amazon.com finally plans to enter e-commerce in India (wildly), via
www.Junglee.com
What is Amazon upto?
Amazon is planning to launch an E-commerce marketplace in India,
Junglee.com, which would be like an aggregation & comparison shopping
network between various E-commerce brands already working in India,
for example, flipkart.com, jewelove.in, letsbuy.com etc.

There are 2 important questions that arise,
1. Why does Amazon need the Indian E-commerce merchants as partners?
2. Why would the Indian E-commerce merchants be interested in partnering with Amazon 's Junglee.com rather than compete with it?

The second one is simpler to answer, so let's get to that first.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC. plain & simple, amazon.com receives more daily
traffic from India than any Indian E-commerce merchant & if it is able
to redirect all that traffic to its Indian counterpart, Junglee.com,
that could mean a lot of extra sales for the Indian E-commerce
merchants.

For the fist question, why does Amazon.com need Indian E-commerce
businesses as partners, the law says so. 100% FDI (foreign direct
investment) is not allowed in multi brand retail sector in India.

Will we see a very popular Junglee.com pretty soon, what do you think?

Further Information : What is Junglee.com?

Venture Capitalists Investments soar to $28.4 Billion!

VC Investing Soars 22 Percent To $28.4B In 2011, Internet Sector Reaches Highest Levels In A Decade

Double-digit increases in investment dollars in 2011 were spread across a number of industries, including the Clean Technology and Internet sectors. Investment dollars also increased across every stage of investment categories, with the exception of a 48 percent decrease in seed stage investments.

Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers observes that investors “are acting prudently and not chasing excessive valuations” and we’re “unlikely to see these sectors overheat like we saw in the 1999 to 2000 era.”

The Software industry brought the most VC dollars by sector for the year, with the amount raised up 38 percent over 2010 to $6.7 billion in 2011. VCs invested into 1,004 software deals, a 7 percent rise in volume over the prior year. Reflecting the fourth quarter decline, software investing was down in the last quarter of 2011 with $1.8 billion going into 238 deals. Despite this decrease, software was also the number one sector for dollars invested and total number of deals in Q4 and counted more than double the number of deals during the quarter than the second largest sector, Biotechnology.
Internet companies also saw a significant increase in investing in 2011 with $6.9 billion going into 997 deals. That’s a 68 percent increase in dollars and 24 percent increase in deals from 2010 when $4.1 billion went into 807 deals. In fact, 2011 marked the highest level of Internet investment over the past decade.


Early Stage investments experienced double-digit increases, rising 47 percent in terms of dollars and 16 percent in terms of deals in 2011 to $8.3 billion in 1,414 deals. For the fourth quarter, Early Stage investments increased, with $2.3 billion going into 364 deals, an 11 percent increase in dollars in Q3 while the number of deals was flat. Early Stage companies attracted 29 percent of dollars and 38 percent of deals in 2011 compared to 24 percent of dollars and 35 percent of deals in 2010.
Expansion Stage investments increased in 2011 by 9 percent in dollars and dropped 8 percent in deals with $9.7 billion going into 999 deals. Expansion funding dropped in the fourth quarter, dipping 9 percent from the prior quarter to $2.4 billion. The number of deals also decreased during the quarter, falling 21 percent to 222. Expansion Stage companies attracted 34 percent of dollars and 27 percent of deals in 2011 compared to 38 percent of dollars and 31 percent of deals in 2010.
In 2011, $9.5 billion was invested into 864 Later Stage deals, a 37 percent increase in dollars and a 5 percent increase in deals for the year. For the fourth quarter, $1.8 billion went into 178 deals, which represents a 26 percent decrease in terms of dollars and a 9 percent decline in terms of deals from the third quarter of 2011. Later Stage companies attracted 33 percent of dollars and 24 percent of deals in 2011 compared to 30 percent of dollars and 23 percent of deals in 2010.






Reblogged via Techcrunch

Paypal India : Good News

Effective October 13, 2011, the RBI has raised the limit on international payments to be received in India to $3000 from the meager $500. Though a lot of industries (including gem & jewelry industry, fine handicrafts, painters, artists etc.) are still not so happy. But Neils Armstrong said, "It is a big step for e-commerce in India".

GO India!


Reference : https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2011/10/great-news-for-our-merchants-in-india/