home
Some time ago, the internet was considered a ‘killer’ platform in respect to other media platforms such as print or television, while this still remains true today; it’s an ideology we have come to embrace, and now we find ourselves with more and more ways to access this universe of content. At one time the internet was loosely associated with sluggish desktop computers with nerdish computer scientists with glasses and skin problems, this cannot be said today as the internet has evolved into a true omnipresent entity. The internet is everywhere, and we can access it through many mediums, desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, PDA’s and mobile phones. While the internet has always been accessible through mobile phones, their ability to view content was somewhat limited, however with technological advances available today, mobile phones are more powerful than some computers of the yesteryears.
Whether it be the Google Nexus One, boasting its 1 GHz processor, or the ever popular iPhone, handsets have evolved rapidly and with technologies such as mobile broadband giving true broadband speeds, Wi-Fi capability, and GPS tracking giving users real-time updates as to their position and even capable of providing maps of their current location.
A popular feature of modern mobile phones, are applications developed by third parties or ‘apps’, made popular with the iPhone app library, many brands advertise their product with this as their flagship feature, apps are available for nearly all modern handsets and are becoming much a part of our everyday life as the mobile phone originally intended.
Developing these applications could be somewhat of a daunting task however, with each handset running on its own custom operating system, for example the extremely powerful open source Android operating system developed by Google, the RIM platform for Blackberry devices, or the overwhelming Nokia Symbian platform now porting an open source version. Each of these operating systems would require an application writing using the native coding language, usually C++ or Java, and thus a working knowledge of this language, however recently mobile frameworks have emerged, allowing developers to make use of a universal platform to develop on, able to run on a wide array of devices. Such frameworks include the Sancha Touch, allowing web content to be displayed with the use of CSS3 and HTML5 coding standards, the Web kit engine used by Adobe Air, Google Chrome and Safari, or the Nokia Qt, allowing developers to create applications for the Windows platform, Symbian, OS X, and Meamo.
Applications built for mobiles allow the ability to use the handsets position either via GPS or mobile signal triangulation and using this these apps can take advantage of area specific content such as nearby restaurants or tourist attractions, and some even feature augmented reality where this content is placed over a video feed provided by the handsets camera.
Montage Media will now be taking advantage of these technologies by developing applications capable of manipulating this close integration of GPS data and content, providing our clients with rich internet applications for the mobile platform, for use within the industry, for customer data mining, feedback and analysis, allowing for a whole new avenue for data analysis on a global scale.