The recent launch of Nokia's new mobile phone, the Nokia 114, has something more than just a low price and array of features. The phone also supports Urdu among its nine languages, opening up the market for the 150 million Urdu speakers in India. In keeping with recent global mobile development trends, this launch is yet another great example of local adaptation for a global brand.
A quick look at any café will show that technology has radically changed over the last decade. Smartphones are seemingly ubiquitous with people checking their email as they wait for their coffee. Others sit in front of slim portable computers lightyears faster than the clunky laptops of 2003, using wifi to turn a table into a mobile office. And then there are tablets, large and small, changing how people read, bank, connect, and play.
What will a café look like in ten or twenty more years? Will your business be able to stay competitive as new technologies grow and change the marketplace even further? Read on for our recap of global technology trends that promise to create new business models and new marketplaces.
There’s plenty of buzz about BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries when strategizing about emerging mobile markets. But even as South America and Asia grab headlines, there’s another continent worth consideration: Africa. With 650 million mobile phone subscribers (that’s more than in either the European Union or the United States), African markets are set only to grow even more. Mobile phones are becoming the PCs of Africa, adapting to local needs and wants along the way. Read on for the top African countries on our radar as well as the special considerations needed for tapping into this booming mobile market.
You’ve got a lot of things to think about when taking your mobile app global. Carriers, networks, bandwidth, languages, devices…it’s a lot to consider. You want your global users to have the same experience with your app as your domestic ones, right? Right. So where and how do you get started?
Well, since you’re already here, we’ve got some tips on how to make the process more user-friendly. Read on for our tips on just how to do that.
Today, mobile data and SMS networks are vital tools for transforming economies and are opening up access to developing markets. While Americans may be absorbed by how the newest smartphone app can be used to program their home DVR, developing nations are putting core mobile technology to work in all sorts of ventures.
In this post, we’ll take a look at why mobile application localization will help you might interact with your future customers in these regions.
If you're considering creating a mobile app but aren't sure if a global audience will respond, let us reassure you: they will. Mobile apps are hot, and especially so outside the US. In fact, a majority of the fastest-growing mobile markets are found beyond American soil, and mobile app localization has moved from nice-to-have to an absolute must.
However, localization of mobile apps requires some unique considerations, such as the screen size and how much "real estate" it will afford, how much your content will expand or contract in translation, fonts, styles, images, and the various operating systems on which your app will be displayed.
But fear not. Read on for our tips on how to tackle mobile app localization with confidence.
Around the world, the growing field of mobile health, known as mHealth, is using simple wireless devices to keep people healthy and help doctors and public health workers work effectively with patients near and far. Wireless health can also help spread accurate information about public health crises like a tuberculosis outbreak almost as quickly as the spread of the disease itself.
In the developed world, people use mobile health apps for everything from quitting smoking to monitoring calorie intake. But mHealth is particularly effective in the developing world, where mobile devices are much more common than computers or TVs. While most trends in global health start with governments, mobile health is being driven primarily by the private sector. This new industry of health-related mobile apps presents challenges and opportunities for developers and users alike.
Flash Player will soon undergo a radical transformation for mobile apps, according to an article in Gizmodo. As the driving force behind video-dominant social media sites like YouTube, Flash was once the stalwart, must-code application for interactive media, but will soon morph into Adobe’s newest project: AIR, which will take full advantage of the rich media functions of HTML5. Acclaro’s Globalization Consultant, Jon Ritzdorf, explains what this could mean for the world of mobile app localization.
A localized mobile application is a great way to reach your global customers. However, it's not always as simple a process as making sure your app's language matches that of your user's mobile device or smartphone. There are some things to think about on the development side, which we've neatly summed up in our full newsletter article from earlier this year.
If you’re ready to tap into the growing global mobile app
market, we invite you to sign up for our
upcoming free webinar, designed to help you localize and take your apps to the
world.
Mobile app stores experienced explosive growth last year – and not just for iPhone and iPad. Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia apps increased by huge percentages (up 544% for Android alone), in every category from business and medical apps to entertainment, comics, and casino games.
Last night in San Francisco, The Disposable Film Festival premiered 24 short films made by people from around the world. Finalists hailed from the U.S., Israel, UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, Russia and France. The films, ranging in time from fifty seconds to seven and a half minutes, were not made by video recorders or professional cameras, but from point and shoot cameras, pocket cams, web cams, screen capture, SLRs, mobile phones and a “hacked” Kinect video game console.
While people in Arab countries are using their mobile phones to disseminate information and images about civic revolutions, these video artists are using their phones and other small devices to create a global film revolution. You don’t need to be a Hollywood or Bollywood film director with a big budget, diva movie stars, big name backers, or formal training to create innovative and compelling films.
Take a look at this film, titled “Thrush” by UK director Gabriel Bisset-Smith, the grand prize winner of the Festival:
Mobile advertising is definitely here to stay. In fact, across
all advertising media, it’s quickly emerging as the global dominator, second only
to online video. How does mobile advertising work and which foreign markets
offer the most promise for your mobile campaign? Here’s the 411:
Quick Facts
The figures will make your head spin:
The mobile app market is quite literally exploding, and developers are discovering that there is a fountain of new revenue streams from downloads and advertising outside of the US. Are you ready to capitalize on emerging markets? Do you have a mobile app localization strategy?
To make sure you do your mobile app software translation in the most efficient way possible, we'd like to share some tips to guide you through the process...
The mobile application economy will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012, with much of the growth driven by users in emerging markets of the Middle East and Africa, according to a report (pdf) released earlier this year by Chetan Sharma.
In terms of overall download share, Asia was ranked as the top worldwide market in 2009, and North American users accounted for about half of global mobile app revenues.
But these emerging markets — many of which are "skipping" the broadband revolution altogether and going straight to mobile — will account for the majority of revenue generated by the year 2012.
That's big enough news as it is, but when you look carefully at the numbers, you'll find it's an even larger divide. As Sharma points out in the report, per unit revenues are smaller in emerging markets, for both paid downloads and advertising. Volume, therefore, must not only surpass that of Western markets, but by much more than it would with a comparable pricing structure.
The Apple iPad is here. On launch day April 3, 2010, consumers bought a reported 300,000 of these color, touch-screen tablets. It’s still to be determined if it will revolutionize how people read a newspaper or watch a film — but what I really want to know is if it can teach you French.
One of the hypes about the iPad was all the apps that were going to be created for it — mobile apps on steroids. Productivity! Lifestyle! Light saber duels! Nearly 4,000 iPad apps and counting….
How does a lover of French cinema invite a friend to the movies using
just 11 characters? The savvy texter would type: “6né 2m1? A tt!”,
which represents: Ciné demain? À toute à l’heure! (“Movie tomorrow?
See you soon!”).
Around the world, users of text messaging (a.k.a. SMS or Short Message Service) have developed a wonderfully witty linguistic subculture that is arguably changing the way we use written language.
In any language, getting your point across in a restricted number of characters, as required by text messages, necessitates creativity. (Just think about how Twitter's 140-character limit has forced us to say a lot with so little.)
Smart, fun and useful. Acclaro shares news and tips on translation, localization, language, global business and culture.