Step one to increase Apple Fan-Girls and Boys
So yesterday Apple announced how it will revolutionise education with iOS. The quick answer is by selling lots of iPads and taking commission on text book sales. This is marketing utopia.
The focus of the product release was aimed at K-12 education – high schools / secondary schools. So how will Apple change the classroom for ever? By replacing the text book with the iPad, of course what else? What did you expect, maybe to replace the teacher with the iPad and have a new social network ‘Ting’ answer any questions.
The solution to education is iBooks 2 which supports a new authoring tool from Apple which will be free. The text books will be submitted to iTunes in the same fashion as Apps, and go through a review process. Presumably for functionality not accuracy and correctness. No textbook can cost more than $14.99. Apple will take their standard 30%.
So how will an iPad actually change the text book? The solution supports rich media, note taking (although the demo of this looked awkward), search, and quizzes. This is a big ask from the publisher, how many text book authors have 3d modelling skills to demonstrate a concept, or video content to illustrate their point? I think its great, and if the content is created at a high enough quality then this could be a wonderful learning tool. In the UK it could change the textbook industry and boost the BBC / Open University to a premium position. They have heaps of rich media content and now have the opportunity to add text and wrap it up in a more compelling package.
But there are a few areas I believe are missing and clearly must come in the future. Perhaps the most obvious is the kindle feature of shared highlights between readers, or the ability for a class to socially communicate between each other around the textbook but limited to their class. It brings the text book half way to Internet generation.
A well as iBooks 2 and an authoring tool Apple are providing new planning tools to support schools. They are also extended their already successfully iTunes 2 so K12 level can have access.
Will this change education? If the teaching staff adopt it with the and embrace it as they did by adopted computers when I was a kid then – no freaking way!
But we have a younger generation of teachers now, who are IT literate and grew up with a computer. If this format is more to the pallet of pupils and we can reach a stage where kids consume the text book more rapidly or even in a different format within school then the impact could be huge. This is key so teachers have more time with the kids to overcome the areas that need support and to inspire.
The different format could really help those who suffer from learning difficulties, and greatly improve the experience for those with various impairments such as sight. The text book could be listened to.
I struggle to see this working to its max and with no prejudice across social class barriers, which in my opinion is a serious problem.
It does feel like a very clever marketing strategy to increase sales of iOS and generate millions of Apple FanBoys and FanGirls. We learnt yesterday that there were 1.5 million iPads in the education system. This really could establish Apple for a long time into the future.,
If at all successful this move will result in success for Apple at the University / College level. Students leaving secondary level bound to the iPad text book will not be pleased with a heavy, static, probably damaged, textbook. In addition Apple are under threat of various tablet innovations from the Android market targeting education. If they sit back and do nothing, school leavers may all be running around as Android fan boys.
I believe this can really have an impact on education, and as with ALL technology it will be down to the people who implement it. Apple need to run teaching training courses to ensure this solution has the biggest impact it can.
Will it revolutionise education, I who knows, but let’s hope so. The hope is what makes it such a powerful marketing message.
I fully expect Apple will sell a LOT of iPads and text books. It’s just too irresistible for a secondary school to not interact- assuming budgets allow. Apple should offer educational discounted iPads.
The education system is out of date, I would be keen to see a bigger change with focus on vocational skills, problem solving, social skills and project ability. My 9 year old is currently doing a class project which copies the young apprentice (a uk tv show with Alan Sugar). Through designing a company logo, a Product and calculating costs, profit margin etc the groups within the class are engaging in multiple elements of their curriculum, while competing and having fun. And gaining entrepreneur / business skills This has nothing to do with a text book, instead it is inspired and innovation from the teacher.
Mobile solution guide
The mobile industry expectations are on target, mobile web will be bigger than desktop really soon. The world of marketing and commerce has worked it out. We are all consumers of various apps and mSites which sell product or extend brand. But have you recently been looking for a new job? What was the experience like?
In the UK the recruitment industry should be ashamed that the biggest site where job ads are viewed in the millions is GumTree. The major job boards are now enjoying mobile as a channel and are befitting from huge growth in this channel. In some examples job boards are getting 10 times more traffic through mobile compared to just 12 months ago.
Now that marketing has proven this mobile stuff can work. Now that job boards have delivered millions of job seekers via mobile. What are companies doing to engage with the channel directly?
This is dependent in many ways on what are vendors offering.
For our industry to capture mass market mobile we need vendors helping us. So I am kicking off a number of posts to share and review what is on offer. So hear up, if you are a vendor contact me, tell me all about the product and give me interesting case study example and I will share your product and add it to my list of mobile vendors. Ideally I want to have a Skype chat to uncover the details.
If you have been a customer of a mobile solution, please contact me. I want to hear all the problems and all the great stuff. These stories need sharing, if you don’t want your name unpublishing then I can keep that to myself.
So who is brave enough to go first? Who is good enough to set the benchmark? Next week I will publish the review of CareerBuilder Mobile who are based in the USA but have clients all over the world.
Eye grabbing QR codes
This gallery contains 8 photos.
It frustrates me how frequently I have seen examples of eye grabbing QR codes on Mashable, but there is never any that are related to recruitment. Well here are some examples of eye grabbing QR codes: After a great chat with Eric J Offner, Managing Director at CareerBiulder Mobile US, I am pleased to share [...]
Recruitment industry #fail the candidate
Does your recruiting function send emails to candidates updating them with new job opportunities? Are links to job adverts posted on social media? Do you think carefully about SEO to attract job seekers to opportunities? Do you attend recruitment fairs or visit college campus? Do you run Google Adword or Facebook ad campaigns?
Did you answer yes to any of the above? So last question, do you have a mobile website?
Did I hear “no” to that last question? Why not? The mobile channel can increase your return around all the activities mentioned above. You are failing to double your social recruiting return, empower your SEO and attract more candidates while offering a better candidate experience. Today you are failing in good company – most of the recruitment industry.
The silver lining is you have vast potential to increase your pipeline of talent from your existing marketing activity simply by supporting mobile devices with an optimised mobile website. By demanding mobile support from your advertising channels (such as job boards and recruitment agencies) you can improve your situation. But to do things properly you need to ensure your career site and web campaigns are fully mobile optimised. In case you had not noticed, or have been in a cave for the last 5 years – web activity, either via apps or the browser is increasing rapidly. Next year it will overtake desktop activity.
So it is clear that the mobile channel is here to stay. However it is feels a technical project and recruitment functions are putting their heads in the sand to avoid it. There are very few companies engaging with mobile for recruitment, in the UK companies making the most of mobile is barely out of single digits.
In a typical month in the UK the mobile channel attracts over 2m job seekers (according to ComScore) and the number is increasing every day. So which companies are winning and capturing the traffic?
Currently the recruitment industry is failing the Job seeker who uses their mobile. The number one site in the UK where job ads are viewed on a mobile is GumTree. While GumTree is I am sure wonderful for classified adverts to buy sofas and cars, the candidate experience is not ideal.
After GumTree the major job aggregators are attracting the next level of traffic, lead by Indeed. If you pause for a moment, this is possibly a worse experience than that of GumTree for the job seeker.
The candidate experience is typically:
1. Search in Google Mobile
2. Land on a mobile optimised aggregator site such as Indeed or SimplyHired
3. See an interesting job advert and click it.
4. Be taken to a desktop website to read the full advert, #fail
6. Struggle through the non mobile friendly job advert, click the apply button and immediately be faced with an impossibly large application form or more frequently a browse button to upload a CV.
Incase you don’t know, uploading a CV from your phone is near to impossible and very few people will have their CV on their phone.
The process is disappointing for the candidate and makes the company look rubbish.
A few UK job boards support mobile web very well, Jobsite and Total Jobs perform very well. However the niche job boards, company career sites and recruitment agency sites typically fail completely.
Why is so much of the recruitment market failing on mobile?
Is it cost and budgets?
Is it the lack of mobile application solution?
Is it disbelief that mobile matters?
Is it failure to recognise the benifts?
Is everyone getting such great returns from social recruiting that no one wants to double the return by engaging on mobile?
I would very much like to hear your thoughts on why you have done something on mobile, or why you are not bothering. Or is it as I fear, you are waiting for everyone else to do it first?
Why I did not buy the Nokia Lumia 800
Over the festive period I purchased a new phone to carry about everyday. My needs are simple, email, social network access, Skype, Yammer if possible, a good chess game, an alarm clock, a note taking app (ideally Evernote), a good camera and a fast browser. I guess would like to make calls and send text messages too.
My desires for a new phone was change, something different, I have carried an iPhone for too long but the replacement had to be slick and look great so I ruled out a Blackberry straight away as it does not do it for me! The latest ice cream sandwich Android versions look great and the HTC and Samsung devices are nice to hold and do everything I need. For me the Android OS now looks great, but many of the apps I looked at still felt clunky and unfortunately the apps are really where my usage will be. Few apps appear to make best use of the bigger screen or the high resolution, this is a result of so many different Android device form factors. I have other Android devices, but always carried the iPhone, so until the Android apps get better, I rules out Android. A shame because some of the Google innovation is great.
It was looking hopeless, it felt that fate would force me to buy the iPhone 4S. But in the shape of a curved blue bound device came hope for change. The Nokia Lumia 800. The device feels really great to hold, it’s very well made. It is running the latest Windows Phone 7 which feels slick and easy to use. All my favourite apps are available on Windows Phone 7 and new ones I looked at felt great and well designed. The camera takes good photos, and the phone quality is great. The CPU etc are slower than others’ but the apps I tested seemed to work well.
So for a week prior to my contract upgrade date I felt decided, I would go back to Nokia. The memories of my old Nokia 3110 and all those that followed that first one made the decision feel nostalgic.
Then upgrade day came, as I walked to the shop, I remembered I had not used mobile Internet Explorer since owning a Compaq iPaq about 10 years ago. I could not recall the last time I used IE on a computer. Did I really want to return to IE?
Some research quickly (via my iPhone) showed that IE on the Nokia was slow, it’s JavaScript benchmarks were about four times slower than iPhone 4S. This was a disaster, I use mobile web all the time. So on arrival to the shop I tested a few websites out and compared to the 4S. The result was a huge disappointment. A browse of MS marketplace showed no suitable alternative browser that may be quicker. The performance may well be impacted by that slower CPU.
So, after lusting over the Nokia for weeks, I bought an iPhone 4S. It is super fast, the camera is wonderful, I restored a backup from my 4 and everything was working within minutes. As for change, I now carry a white one not a black one.
Free Mobile Recruiting Guide
Over the last few months after attending Mobile Recruiting Camp I felt that the industry needed some well defined documentations to support executives around the recruitment industry.
So with the fantastic support of Matt Alder, we put together a mobile recruiting guide in a white paper format.
Please do send us your feedback, @Mobile_Dave or @MattAlder
Authored @Mobile_Dave & Metashift
#mvir 2011 Top 4 Take mobile take aways (so far)
I am sitting at the Mobile and Video in Recruitment conference. Before saying anything congrats to Mike Taylor for setting up a great event. I was honoured to be invited to speak for the second year in a row, I wonder if I can do the hat trick next year?
So what is there to share from this event? What are the top 4 lessons and tips for you to take away?
1. The job seeker is already on mobile web. The overall attitude from the audience this year is aligned that mobile matter. This is a contrast to last years attitudes. The challenge now is understanding how to make it work for recruitment. Potential Park were able to share wonderful research from thousands of students which illustrated 88% of job seekers are or want to search for jobs on mobile.
2. ComScore provided great data and reminded us that Mobile Internet is not just Apple iPhone. Depending which cut of the data you read Android is ahead of iOS. The “real” feeling was well put in the Meeker report that it is a two horse race. ComScore also reminded us of the power of SMS and number of devices that are SMS capable.
3. Social and Mobile are handcuffed together. Autodesk illustrated a preview to their app which was heavy in social media. Facebook gets 33% of all its traffic from mobile and Twitter gets 55% of all its content from mobile web. Any strategy using social must support mobile.
4. Top most wanted features by a jobseeker according to Potential Park is Job Search, then Job Alerts. A surprising result was the third most wanted feature by jobseekers is the ability to track their application.
Mobile in recruitment is still young. It needs to be planned and strategically aligned with clear objectives. Even those that appear to be doing mobile well are failing at the basics. One example is where a careers url was pushed via SMS to job seekers, which was great, until you clicked on the url and discovered it goes to the companies mobile site which sells screws with no career information.
Consider the basics, think about who clicks your links and on what device. A simple mobile website could significantly increase the return from your social efforts.
Is Facebook mobile ‘app market’ coming soon?
A couple of months ago Facebook announced at the GigaOM Mobilize conference in San Francisco that they were devoted to HTML 5 for mobile. They finished the same speech with a hint to the future, ” you will think of Facebook as a mobile company within 12 to 18 months”.
Mobile is Facebooks biggest growth market when looking at audience share and active users. How do these mobile users contribute to the Facebook bottom line?
So how could they turn this around? They could follow the rumour mills and release a Facebook phone, but this is a huge jump from their current business and expertise? Instead they could kick start their mobile adventure by building an app market for HTML 5, Facebook enabled apps!
Given the direction of HTML5 and WebGL a Facebook mobile app market could work very well. Many native apps today are HTML5 apps placed in a native window. The world of HTML5 mobile app frameworks is currently the focus of silicon valley M&A with Motorola recently snapping up RhoMobile.
The experience to the Facebook user could be to search for mobile cross device apps that run in the Facebook ecosystem, but are built using HTML5. The market is accustomed to paying for mobile apps, Facebook could offer payment via FB Credits. This would give Facebook mobile revenue! They already have 320m mobile users which is bigger than either Android or Apple individually. If they can deliver the right experience and high quality in the future we may well look at Facebook as the mobile app market?
Ever since sitting in the audience at Mobilize this concept has been in my mind but with no real evidence. Recently Facebook acquired Strobe, a small silicon valley start up building out powerful developer tools to build desktop and mobile apps.
In addition the latest Facebook mobile app has undergone a major overhaul. A big change is the navigation which includes an App sub section.
Now there is some evidence! Yes it may be quite weak, but perhaps it would be wise for development teams to brush up on their mobile HTML 5 and mobile javascript frameworks – a Facebook Mobile App Market could be visiting a device near you!
RIM spots potential in Mobile Flash
Adobe have killed mobile flash, so what! Who really cares?
Obviously it’s made huge news with the main focus being that Steve Jobs publicly slated mobile flash and refused to allow it onto his iPhone. The Apple fan boys are cockahoop that their leader continues to be ‘right‘
even from the grave.
This news is zero impact to over 150m iOS users. The iOS user did not have flash prior to this news and won’t have it after this news. How does it affect Blackberry and Android users?
In the main it probably has zero impact to most users! All the big sites of the world Eg Facebook, EBay, BBC, etc function extremely well on iPhone sans flash so they can support users on Android without flash.
It is slightly different for the majority of Blackberry users, most are not lucky enough to get css3 support. I can not imagine that flash is top of their wish list! A BB user would get more benefit from stronger web standards support.
So I repeat, so what, who cares?
The non iPad tablet market cares. Android tablets have a unique selling feature that Flash website and Flash games work on the devices, unlike iPad.
But there is someone who cares even more and that’s RIM. Focusing on their new OS QNX which powers their Playbook and will power the future Blackberry phones was betting on mobile Flash. RIM promoted to developers that they could create super apps for the Playbook via Adobe Flash! For the Playbook, Flash is more than a selling point against the iPad, it was a content strategy.
The Playbook sales have been far below expectations. I believe they would be better off killing it quickly and burying the Playbook. But instead, showing determination, and probably believing they are “on to a winner“, or perhaps desperately hoping for a winner, RIM are committing to continue support for Flash mobile. You can read RIMs official thoughts on their blog. This seems crazy! Flash use on websites is rapidly decreasing, HTML5 and CSS3 is maturing so some other technology must move out of the way, Flash is loosing. RIM will be sitting there in a few years with a product no one is buying and expensive software rights that no one is curating content for.
Finger Friendly
This post continues my focus on best practice and good guidelines to deliver delightful mobile websites and mobile apps. One major difference between mobile and desktop web is interactivity. There is no mobile mouse, the days of a stylus are behind us. When Steve Jobs re-joined Apple one criticism he made of the Newton before killing the product was the stylus, he is quoted as saying “We don’t need a stylus when God gave us ten of them!”.
So your mobile design must be finger friendly. I have quite big hands, with chubby fingers, I need a mobile interface with links and buttons that my fingers can easily tap.
To achieve this you must not place buttons and links close together, it makes it too hard to tap the right one.
Perhaps the toughest UI element to tap is the checkbox. So when you do use it make sure there is plenty of space around it, ensure that the text is clickable as well.
Remember that when the user is tapping an element their hand is over the screen so avoid putting prompts for buttons etc that may be hidden by my hand.
The result of being finger friendly will be a simpler looking design.
Being finger friendly is not difficult, hence the short blog post. But many mobile sites completely forget about it!
