Cloud is Accelerating the World

In the guest lecture of this week, one guest from Amazon gave us some brief introduction about their cloud services and some successful start-up examples powered by Amazon EC2 services such as DropBox and Instagram. Besides his detailed explanations and suggestions about startup work flow emphasizing on business model (actually I did not quite get all the content because business model really requires some background knowledge…. :P), I did some deep thinking about the cloud service.

Cloud computing is really not a fresh topic in recent years, even though most of the people probably do not understand what it is. While indeed it is influencing our lives more and more without our awareness. Amazon may not be the first one to push out this service. But it is qualified to be treated as the pioneer of cloud service. Under the pressure of Amazon on pushing cloud service intensively, great IT companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have deployed their own cloud services respectively. Therefore, now we can automatically get the PDF files, the videos, the bookmarks and so on from any others devices which support the same cloud. These benefits really leave a deep impression for people on cloud service but they are far from the whole meanings of cloud.

As I know, Cloud computing is a new kind of interactions relations among numbers of clients and servers. In the past, the client side could just passively receive the content sent by server without any customizing ability. As time goes on, the positions of client and server become more and more balanced by the increasing technical improvements of browsers. While for cloud, I will say it does emphasize more on client side, which means that client own more power to control and customize the whole work flow in the internet interactions and services. Furthermore, cloud enables users to “move” the tough computing work to cloud side, which owns huge computing power. In this case, user own huge computing resource by just a bit cost to enable them carry out much more large-scale business without deploying too many hardware facilities. That is what Instagram and DropBox applied successfully and how Amazon EC2, S3, etc. and many other cloud services gain profits. So with the development of cloud service, the structure and strategies of many companies especially IT companies has changed greatly and start-up becomes more and more popular as the investment requirements become much lower.

Therefore, no matter in industry area or society area, cloud has proved itself to be a significant role in current age. It makes a person to be much more “powerful”. It is accelerating the development of the World.

Create Value, Not Just Create Apps

         For the lecture of this week, we have met a lot of entrepreneurs (or guys just needing some technical assistance), who came with various project topics from sports, home communication to E-commerce and English education. Besides a lot of projects I was interested in, what I realized to be worth sharing is how we should consider when we build apps. Just in purpose of creating a cool app or creating value for users or even yourself by the app.

         As what the situation showed in the pitching session, web apps have been widely accepted and used in many real life areas. Therefore, apps are not long the “toys” for developers to play with but an industrial style to bring values for people’s lives, business production efficiency, etc. In this case, caring more about the product positioning and user experience of the app are much more important and necessary than before. Only after users can gain values from your app can it be called as a real “app”. That is also why our lecture Colin emphasized once and once again that before you started creating your app, thought carefully on the your whole workflow including the purpose of your app, your target users and the best design plan fitting them.

         Furthermore, as we know, the age that any app you build will probably be popular has gone. That is when apps tended to be quite a few about users were just of high interest about this kind of mobile experience. However, now there are about 800 thousand apps in Apple app store. Intensive competition forces us to think more about the usability and user experience of app, which is user-centralized. So in this case, to create value becomes a new standard principle to judge the success of an app. For example, Flipboard turns out to be quite a successful app. Not only its excellent user interface design, but also its integration of social networking and News media create sufficient value for users to give much more convenience for users to read news and posts. That is a significant point for the success of Flipboard, which is sustainable.

         All in all, apps now have been categorized detailedly to fulfill the needs of different areas. In this case the value goal is sort of easier to settle down we developer has a clear idea about what they want to create. But application homogenization makes it much harder to stand out from the “sea” of apps. Here the one that thinks more about how to create value for users will probably win finally. Therefore, hope in following web development, we can think more about that instead of blindly playing inside ours own colorful word while ignoring the actual value brought to users.

Innovate From Life(team 5 presentation review)

      For the presentation of Flipboard, all in all I think the following three points should be important to mention:

1.      Mind about details. This is the most impressive point I got from the presentation. The choice of font style and color makes it quite nature to view the content of the app as if it is a really magazine. And the particular interface design on mobile phone really improves the user experience a lot. This is not also what good design talks to, but also a sort of idea that will be delivered to all the users, which is: the developer care about their feelings. This will definitely win the users hearts and keep them around the app, which is what Flipboard owns now.

2.      Accept users from multiple contexts. So unlike twitter, Facebook or some News apps, which focus on either social networking or News publishing, Flipboard uses its RSS function to integrate social networking with News publishment and present with their wonderful designed GUI. This is really a way of innovation. As a result, users from both sides will be attractive and this is quite beneficial for rapid expansion of the scale of the app.

3.      Last point I will emphasize on one bad point of Flipboard, which is not caching enough content. For this sort of app which requires online remote update access, caching is always a good and necessary way to enhance the user experience, as offline cases will be more or less inevitable for users. So this is really a necessary point for Flipboard to improve.

Flipboard, as the presenter had said, is nothing new. The successful point of it is re-innovating from exist industry models. Here are two points. First is what I have mentioned in point 2 above. Integration of social networking and News publishment really makes Flipboard stand out of others. This is a good model for seeking new ways to innovate. Second is what I observe from many apps. As we know , the growth of IT industry is mostly rely on the trend that IT technologies are more and more used and in people’s normal lives and influence the people’s living styles. Typically example is the popularity of ebooks. This is actually nothing new, but just free book readers from carrying heavy books and read on device conveniently without losing much reading experience. So does what Flipboard has done. It is just nothing new but “moving” magazines from really one into electronic style, which may reduce some reading experience, but with much faster browsing and updating speed and relative low cost. This is really a kind of good innovation strategy, which is what I mean by the title of this blog. In the future, I believe this will be proved to be effective by many new apps or services.