| The recent proliferation of mobile devices and mobile consumer applications has unleashed an unprecedented amount of interest and excitement among business and IT professionals. Not since the dot-com days has the IT world been so abuzz with enthusiasm and innovation around a single technology. Mobility, simply put, has changed the way people expect to work and live. Along with Mobility tablet has added another flavour in the market. With cloud computing being the future and wireless high end internet available on the move, the life is going to be with Screens & gizmos. |
| But with all this excitement come a good deal of confusion and a host of questions about the future direction of enterprise mobility. While most business software users know mobility is soon going to affect their business more than it does today, they’re not sure how, lot of enterprises want to move to mobile applications but they are in search of reliable and trusted partner who can deliver on time with quality at a affordable cost. |
| Strong business needs. The perfect storm environment of mobile consumer solutions and devices makes mobility a sure competitive enabler and differentiator. The globalization of doing and managing business has made it even more important to be able to access business information to make informed decisions and perform tasks anywhere, any time. Therefore, many companies are ready, or have already started, to reengineer their business processes to move toward a real-time “mobile enterprise” and deliver sustainable business value |
| New trends in IT - Organizations are moving toward cloud computing and unwired mobile solutions as they recognize the cost and business benefits of running business applications on-demand and on-device. The shift of the mobile solutions development paradigm from “one app on one mobile operating system (OS) on one device” to “multiple apps on multiple OSs on multiple devices” became inevitable. BDI Systems has been providing BI services in SAAS model with On-demand services as well. |
| Mobility innovation and advances - The new generation of mobile OSs, such as iOS, Google Android, Blackberry, Nokia’s Symbian, Windows Phone 7, combined with the recent advances in mobile software development kits (SDKs), provides effective tools for quickly developing reliable mobile applications with a rich user experience for a lower cost. |
| BDI Systems along with its sister concern Re-invent software has worked on quite a few mobile projects. Some of them are described as follows – |
1. Morpheo (J2ME to BREW translator) |
| Morpheo is an application conversion tool that converts J2ME applications to the BREW platform. (We also prototyped the convertor for J2ME to Palm platform). |
Some of the special characteristics of the tools are: - Transforms the application at a semantic level. The output in the BREW platform maintains the original intent of the application but follows all development characteristics of the BREW platform (it very closely represents hand-written BREW applications)
- Handles all features of the J2ME platform, e.g. multithreading, HTTP, SMS, etc. The tool automatically handles those situations in which a feature (like multithreading) is handling differently on the J2ME platform and BREW platforms.
- Handles the special requirements of the BREW platform automatically in the tool, e.g.,
- No tight loops where a lot of time is spent processing a single event in an application. This prevents other events from being posted to the application and eventually causes the reset.
- Memory handling according to BREW platform.
- Develop device independent applications - use device specific characteristics like display, color, memory, key instead of hardcoded parameters.
- Small footprint of the output.
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The product involved: - Complete understanding of the J2ME, BREW and Palm platforms in detail.
- Implementation of the entire J2ME library on the BREW and Palm platforms.
- Development of several test applications (primarily games) on the J2ME, BREW and Palm platforms.
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2. Weather Monitoring System. |
| Architecture, design and development of web-based Weather Monitoring System based on client-server architecture. The clients (weather stations) and server interact with each other through SMS. The server stores the data in the database, which could be used for later viewing the current as well as history patterns in tabular as well as graphical format. |
The project involved: - Creating an SMS application for interacting between the remote weather-stations (embedded kits) and a centralized server.
- Configure the remote stations through the SMS application.
- Sending and receiving of weather data through the SMS application.
- Storing the weather and configuration data in the server database, viewing and monitoring these data through a web-interface.
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3. Mobile Memory Data Wipe. |
| The purpose of Mobile Memory Data Wipe is to wipe out all the user associated data and reset the phone settings to the factory default state. |
The project involved identifying and implementing an approach to wipe out - the user data(Messages,
- Contacts
- Call history
- PIM
- Downloaded games and Application
- Phone lock)
from the mobile handsets (Samsung(CDMA, GSM), Sony ericsson(GSM), Motorola(GSM), Nokia(GSM)). |
This required - Usage of AT commands to:
- Explore the FS, retrieve the device information like Device name, IMEI number, and Phone lock.
- Identify and Erase the user data from the file system and NV memory of the phone.
- And implementation of new AT commands and using different string APIs to deal with the Java Games and Application.
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4. Video Streaming from web-based server to Windows Mobile Phone |
| Design and development of a video streaming application for Windows Mobile 6.0, which can connect to any web server and download the video. |
| The play time of different videos could be scheduled, such that the video is already downloaded on the phone to ensure seamless streaming. |
5. Facebook Application on BREW Mobile Phone |
| Design and development of Facebook Application on BREW Mobile Handset which allowed user to browse Facebook from the Mobile Phone and view /make updates (e.g., Wall, Messages, Profile). |
6. Nokia App Marathon |
| Development of 100 applications on Qt for Nokia phones for one of Nokia's partners. |
Qt Framework |
Development of an application development framework on top of Qt, which enables programmers to implement complex effects with simple API calls. The framework included reusable widgets for - Grid manipulation
- Motion and Animation Control
- Image and Text effects
- Database handling and Forms.
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7. You Tube Application on BREW Mobile Phone |
| Architecture and Design consulting for development of You Tube Application on BREW Mobile Phone. |
8. Flickr Application on Nokia Mobile Phone |
Architecture and Design consulting for development of Flickr Application on BREW Mobile Phone. |
9. Application Development on Nokia Touch & Type |
| Development of games and mobile applications on Nokia Touch & Type platform. |
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