The iPhone is perhaps the most popular phenomena of our times. It has become an instant success and is one of the most coveted technological devices that are being used today by young and old alike. Soon after this came in iPad that created a rage and was a great success for both versions. The major feature that has made iPhone a massive success is its superior quality operating system and its brilliant application features. Within a very less time iPad games development became one of the most coveted business propositions.

There are multiple kinds of mobile application development features that are being designed today for iPhone. The existing ones include utility apps, gaming apps, music apps, entertainment apps, social networking apps, Newstand app development and many more. There are applications that are made by businesses to make their business service much more accessible to the users. This phenomenal growth in the application development market has been spelling success for the developers that are introducing applications on an ongoing basis.

Today eminent software development companies, with their service portfolio have shown an in-depth understanding of the dynamic environment of mobile iPhone and Android application development. These companies with their mobile technology know-how spans across all the operating systems, mobile devices and platforms have worked on almost everything from a chip set to a complete application. Furthermore, they develop, design, test, implement and support both enterprise and consumer mobile application for the following technologies:-

Mobile Devices

·         iPad

·         iPhone

·         Motorola

·         LG

·         Samsung

·         Motorola

·         Microsoft

·         Nokia

·         BlackBerry

·         Sony Ericsson

Mobile Operating Systems and Platforms

·         Android

·         iOS J2ME

·         BREW

·         Windows Mobile

·         Palm

·         Symbian

·         BlackBerry

The best thing about iPhone application development is that every kind of market has been capable of setting up a huge market for itself. There is yet another type of applications that is also gaining prominence with the iPhone users, and that is the location based apps. This kind of application is a new concept having a great deal of potential.

According to a latest study conducted by iPhoneAppQuotes.com it has been noticed that iPhone application development trends today are gradually shifting towards business uses. What at a point of time was once a 50/50 split between consumer applications and business applications, today appears as a 70/30 split in favor of business applications.



Related links: Android application development, Agile lifecycle management



 
 
Today companies have to use innovative techniques to attract prospects to their websites. Since most visitors are well informed before they reach the webpage, it is imperative to keep them engaged with quality content. Apart from content there are some webpage aesthetics that need to be followed to succeed in lead generation.

When driving leads to online web pages, some important best practices must be followed. Here are the top best practices to be followed for lead generation.

Hassle-free Website Navigation
  • Keep website layouts simple and straightforward because prospects do not linger on sites that confuse them.
  • Project highest benefit your solution offers and keep the content bold and bulleted.
  • Use engagement tactics like polling, voting, sharing to gain their attention.
  • Do not have multiple links on the website. Provide only one URL where they can register or subscribe to your site or newsletter.
  • Categorize content within website searches in order to provide them with recent and updated information on the solution or service.

Clear Call to Action
  • Call-to-action buttons help in lead nurturing by taking the prospect interest to the next stage.
  • Design new and innovative call-to-action buttons that kindle the curiosity of the prospect.
  • Keep CTAs near sign-up forms.
  • Place them in a visible position so that the prospect need not search for them.
  • Link CTA buttons to website pages so that the prospect is able to view/read information from the home page as well.

Short Form-fills
  • Form-fills help elicit prospect information in a friendly manner.
  • Use an auto-responder email once the data has been filled in.
  • Confirm the request and ask them to provide more information such as industry domain, prospect title etc.
  • Include form-fills in feedback and suggestion forms as well.
  • Keep the questions less so that the user does not abandon the form-fill activity.
  • Keep form-fills above the screen fold.
  • Ask for email address, name and company name – which are vital to establish the identity of the user.
  • Display your privacy policy at the end of the form-fill to assure the user that his information is secure.
  • Vary content for the Submit button. Use buttons with Click here, Know more, Read more or Find out now, etc.
  • Use marketing automation software to track leads that have filled information on your web pages to further nurture them.

Also read on - Marketing automation, Lead management
 
 
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Software development or application development is a complicated process that involves various phases such as research, requirements gathering, analysis, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. When the software development team completes all these phases neatly and perfectly, it results in software products that satisfy all user requirements. But is it as simple as that? Let’s take a peek into the software development process in a typical application development environment.



Every software product is the result of the joint effort of a team of stakeholders such as business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers, who put in all that they have i.e., Their expertise, hard work and experience in developing a product that complies with customer requirements. However, the fact of the matter is though all the stakeholders are working towards developing a high quality software application, there exists no actual collaboration between the various stakeholders. Moreover, the different functional tools that the stakeholders use for performing various activities do little to improve the quality of software development process. This is because although these are highly expensive best of breed tools they are actually sealed tools with no effective collaboration and synchronization between them to ensure consistent quality. The result is last minute surprises that cause irreparable damage to the software being developed. Let’ look at some of the challenges faced by the software team involved in agile software development.




  • Team members not on the same page with respect to work item priorities

  • Lack of real-time collaboration

  • Lack of visibility of the whole project, forming silos and general misalignment



In agile software development, cohesiveness and a shared understanding within the team are imperative to achieve success. This can be achieved through application lifecycle management (ALM). According to Forrester, application lifecycle management is “the coordination of development life-cycle activities, including requirements, modeling, development, build, and testing, though:




  • Enforcement of processes that span these activities;

  • Management of relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these activities; and

  • Reporting on the progress of the development effort as a whole.



Application lifecycle management thus helps to develop software applications of high quality at a faster rate by synchronizing the various development activities. It integrates the disparate tools and thereby provides up-to-date real time information to the various stakeholders involved in the software development process. This helps the stakeholders to gain greater visibility into the progress and quality of development projects.



Read More On: Android Application Development, Nearshore Development Services, Offshore product Engineering






 
B2B marketing requires powerful tools that will convince the buyer about the usability of the product. In B2B, the buyer signifies a group of people who will take a collective decision for purchasing. This collective decision has to be influenced by B2B marketers so that the buying team chooses their product. Some of the powerful ways of B2B marketing include social media, emails, paid advertising and offline events. In this article email marketing has been discussed.

Email marketing is a powerful and popular marketing tool for B2B lead generation. Email marketing services are usually preferred by B2B enterprises as it is low cost and an effective means to reach a wide range of targeted audiences.

B2B email marketing can be viewed as a process of building a relationship with prospects or past and present customers by sending newsletters, brochures and information updates about products/services/offers via email.

Success of Email Marketing
The success of any marketing campaign depends on delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. Marketers need to send personalized emails that will make them curious and make them reach out to the company’s website for more information.

For this to materialize marketers must first know the intent of the prospect which would make it simpler to run targeted email marketing message to him. This is where marketing automation solutions step in to intensify email marketing efforts of the marketer.

Intelligent marketing automation solution help companies achieve their marketing goals by identifying the “website visitor intent”. By revealing the prospect identity the sales and the marketing teams can run targeted email campaigns based on intent.

Using Marketing Automation Tools for Email Marketing
Marketing automation tools help email marketing efforts to multiple by creating campaigns easily based on identified leads ad tracking email campaigns based on intent and website activity. It can be used to enrich the understanding about the prospect and his buying interest and engage the prospect with relevant content to sustain the interest shown.

Marketers can assess generic information like opens and clicks and getting detailed information on the intent of the users and, achieve higher conversions from email marketing efforts.

Email marketing can also be used to nurture prospects. Marketers can send out follow up emails with information based on intent and also share their success stories with links. By sending out invitations to technology events or online seminars/webinars marketers can invite them to read content collaterals that may be of interest to prospects.

Nurturing prospects through email marketing in real time helps understand prospects and his current buying stage. Sales and marketing teams can make the right move and a faster closure of deals can be expected.



Click here to read more on - Marketing automation software, Lead management system 
 
Behavioral tracking has been a key tool in B2C marketing for some time, which has caught up with B2B companies as well. The best example of implementation of behavioral tracking of B2C sites is Amazon.com. Targeted email campaigns from Amazon.com let users know when the items they are interested in, or have looked at in the past, go on sale. Campaigns like this are triggered by information gathered and analyzed by tracking the behavior of the online visitor.

By using behavioral tracking tools in the B2B environment B2B companies can get insight into visitor behavior on their web pages. This includes profiling of the online visitor, tracking visited pages, time spent on each page, keywords clicked on, visitor's location, time of visit, source that led them to the corporate website, etc. This data is then categorized and analyzed to determine the visitor interest and intent.

Features of Online Visitor Behavior Analysis Tools
By capturing the visitor’s "fingerprint" on the website, behavior analysis tools enables B2B companies to obtain in-depth knowledge about their intent and achieve a significant advantage in determining the best approach to targeting a marketing and/or sales response (which are greatly useful for lead generation). It also provides them with competitive advantage to inside sales, sales and marketing departments who can then leverage this information for customized lead nurturing.

New age marketing automation solutions have behavior analysis features that can be integrated with their existing tools to enable marketers in their lead generation and lead management efforts.

Key Features of Marketing Automation tools with Behavior Analysis features include:

  • Converting anonymous leads into prospects.
  • Reports on opportunity view for sales teams.
  • Some tools even offer real-time collaboration features such as live connects with promising prospects.
  • Updating sales and marketing teams with real-time analytics based on prospect behavior.
  • Campaign analytics to improve campaign efficiency.
  • Social media collaborations.
  • May even help to identify up-sell opportunities.

Marketing companies may be constrained by budget considerations and may find it difficult to measure the ROI on their investments. Behavioral tracking features of marketing automation tools enable marketers to measure it, against the number of leads generated or the brand value created.

So, if a marketer is going to spend largely on online marketing activities, then marketing automation tools can be the ideal solution for him. Automation tools enable B2B marketers to measure the effectiveness of marketing channels which generate leads through the website and in turn enable them to work on appropriate nurturing mechanisms to increase lead generation. So it not only helps marketers to evaluate the marketing activities yielding the maximum results, it identifies channels which are popular with the target audiences as well.

Click here to read more on - Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization Tools
 
 
Most Companies strive to develop and as per customer requirements and product exactly what customers want and when they want to. This also has to be done faster and cheaper than their competitors. Product development is can get complex given customers changing preferences and this has led to segmenting of many product categories.  Not surprisingly, then, studies have found that timely and reliable knowledge about customer preferences and requirements is the single most important area of information necessary for product development.

It has become necessary for all companies to phase out the old products and these end-of-life initiatives are often motivated by internal economic requirements like rebalancing resources in a product portfolio, reducing support costs, moving customers to the latest product version and removing products that can no longer pay for themselves. Product development services basically refer to engaging the services of a vendor to develop a software product and are the latest emerging trend in IT services. It is a target market for those companies who want to manage their lifecycle as a solution to a demand.

As product development is complex and unpredictable, it is necessary to be realistic. Activities like supplier delivery times, etc. cannot be directly controlled, it is therefore not reasonable to expect an outsourced service to control them any better than you can. Product development services can be a success only when the goals and the capabilities of the partner are understood. The first step to ensure compatibility is to understand what your short and long term goals are. Once these are agreed upon, the next thing is to select the development partner who will help you meet those goals. It is therefore essential to focus considerable effort on the quality interaction with the vendor. With communication being of vital importance, the service provider must fundamentally be able to communicate clearly and articulately, through both written and verbal means.


With the right service provider, organizations can build near-term capability, meet increased resource needs, reduce costs and bring a new development project perspective. Most of these service providers also offer product line management services that can provide opportunities to boost revenue growth. It undoubtedly makes good business sense to outsource either a complete or partial product development process.

By outsourcing product development services, companies can shorten time-to-market, increase number of releases, obtain additional expertise and put together additional resources thereby ensuring a successful revenue optimization.


Related links: Agile lifecycle management, Mobile application development
 
 
Most Companies strive to develop and as per customer requirements and product exactly what customers want and when they want to. This also has to be done faster and cheaper than their competitors. Product development is can get complex given customers changing preferences and this has led to segmenting of many product categories.  Not surprisingly, then, studies have found that timely and reliable knowledge about customer preferences and requirements is the single most important area of information necessary for product development.

It has become necessary for all companies to phase out the old products and these end-of-life initiatives are often motivated by internal economic requirements like rebalancing resources in a product portfolio, reducing support costs, moving customers to the latest product version and removing products that can no longer pay for themselves. Product development services basically refer to engaging the services of a vendor to develop a software product and are the latest emerging trend in IT services. It is a target market for those companies who want to manage their lifecycle as a solution to a demand.

As product development is complex and unpredictable, it is necessary to be realistic. Activities like supplier delivery times, etc. cannot be directly controlled, it is therefore not reasonable to expect an outsourced service to control them any better than you can. Product development services can be a success only when the goals and the capabilities of the partner are understood. The first step to ensure compatibility is to understand what your short and long term goals are. Once these are agreed upon, the next thing is to select the development partner who will help you meet those goals. It is therefore essential to focus considerable effort on the quality interaction with the vendor. With communication being of vital importance, the service provider must fundamentally be able to communicate clearly and articulately, through both written and verbal means.


With the right service provider, organizations can build near-term capability, meet increased resource needs, reduce costs and bring a new development project perspective. Most of these service providers also offer product line management services that can provide opportunities to boost revenue growth. It undoubtedly makes good business sense to outsource either a complete or partial product development process.

By outsourcing product development services, companies can shorten time-to-market, increase number of releases, obtain additional expertise and put together additional resources thereby ensuring a successful revenue optimization.


Related links: Agile lifecycle management, Mobile application development