Mobile Computing And Networking Conference: Discussion

Discuss About The Conference Mobile Computing And Networking.

The application Movie Time has an Australia based network and is responsible for the management of an online database comprising of information regarding various movies all over the world. The application developers has the aim of making it a one stop solution for the movie goers. People would get information regarding all upcoming as well as the currently screening movies. This app also allows the users the facility of watching trailers of different movies also. The prices of tickets of any movie and the name of the theatres where the movies are being screened are also informed by this application. The current aim and objectives of the application development team have been assessed in this report and detailed analysis about the future scope of the application have been provided. The future strategies that the development team, marketing team and the financing team must undertake, and the roadmap that they should follow in this context have also been discussed in detail. Lastly, the advantages that the owners of the application can reap out of these strategies have also been indicated and evaluated.

The MovieTime application is a digital media platform regarding movies in Australia. The application was designed by a group of young software developers in Sydney region. The initial stage of the development of the application involved creation of a webpage that provides links to the various movies’ details. The application was light and also ran in almost all mobile platforms like iOS, android or Java. The initial web version of the application occupied only 2.6 megabytes of space. This made it popular among the users. This popularity prompted the developers to bring out further versions of the application. The official movies app of Screen Australia have been popular already. Hence the developers of this application had to0 make it attractive and unique. Hence they decided that the MovieTime application would show the detailed and exclusive reviews of various exponential personalities in Australia and around the globe. Famous Country singer Keith Urban became the ambassador of the application. After the application began to popularise gradually in the whole of Australian territory the owners of the application started vibrant and vigorous advertisement campaigns to make the application more popular.

The most important stakeholder related to the application is the Project Manager. She is the leading head of the app development committee. The second most important stakeholder group is the Project team. The project team is responsible for gathering all important, relevant and the exclusive information about the movies in individual and update them in the application, the rile of this stakeholder group is very essential as viewers always want to use a most6 updated application and favours the applicati9on with the most relevant information and details. The project sponsors are also important stakeholders to this application. On many instances the sponsor are the production houses. According to the ideas of Brambilla, Mauri and Umuhoza (2014), the partners who have rights of ownership of the application are also among the stakeholders. The third party platforms like Google play store or iStore are also important stakeholders. The clients who are the uses of the application are another important group of stakeholders. There are other less relevant stakeholder groups also.

Key Stakeholders

The MovieTime application has been founded to provide a wide range of services to the users of the application. The information base includes data regarding the upcoming cinemas, the currently running movies, the show timings of the popular movies as well as peer reviews of the movies. The movies are rated among 1 to 5 stars by MovieTime based on the exclusive review provided by the eminent personalities.

The ultimate vision of the development team of this application is to create a single platform based on everything related to movies. Screen Australia have been organisation whose webpages offer relevant information about the upcoming and current movies along with various posters of the movies. The critics of Screen Australia also evaluate the movie and give reviews (Burton & Felker, 2015). The developers also aim to create this application as a platform where the users’ would be able to book movies also after checking out all relevant information about the movies. The tagline of the advertisement of MovieTime starring a famous film critic, states the same:

“In a year about 300 movies hit the theatre. How will you decide which one you should see? We are here to help you choose.”

This application is a B2B platform that drives through the value like leadership and innovation in digital technologies, making the use of digital platforms more useful and relevant. Influenced by the ideas of Chandra and Manjunath (2017), it can be opined that most of the services of the application are knowledge driven and this is an essential value rendered by the app development team to produce the most relevant, authentic and unbiased knowledge to the users.

The application is created with an idea to provide information to the users about movies. The range of movies are increasing with every new version released by the development committee. Another objectives of the application is to provide the users a comparative view of the prices of the tickets of the same movie in various theatres. Initially, the company do not have the direct ticket booking facility. However the links that can be used by the user to book tickets are provided in the application. The next objective of the app developers is to provide a list of reviews about a ny specific movie. Reviews are obtained from eminent movie critics and some famous television personalities and these reviews and ratings are specific to Movie Time. The aim is to attract the users with exclusive stuff about the most cashable movies. In future the company also have the aim to extend their reach outside movies and present details about theatres, game shows, sports events and concerts.The developers are engaged in a constant effort to make the application more user friendly by using HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery and CSS. In order to attract the users, the application has adapted the service of sending customised emails. By registering to the application using email id, the users are guaranteed to get reviews about various movies, delivered directly to their mailboxes. The application developers are also planning to work with “Whatsapp” in the future. As per Gronli et al. (2014), the future versions of the application are supposed to bear links for sharing over Whatsapp, the same details.

Mission

The main business goal of the application at present is to collect all relevant information that the users seek about a movie and deliver them in such a way that it is easy to access for the user. The primary challenge for the development and the management committee is keeping the portals updated with all kind of current information. Moreover, it has to be kept in mind that there is uniqueness in the presentation. As per Hirsch et al. (2014), this is why the management committee have engaged a team of creative web developers and android developers, who are recklessly working towards the development of the application. The basic requirement is providing the users with accurate show timings of the movies. The data regulations of the Australian government prompts the development team to remain conscious with the authenticity of the data offered to the users and shuffle the application  with new data within short intervals. Since the operators of the application are mostly dependent on the data provided by third parties, the reliability and authenticity of the sources of data is very important and also crucial for their success (Khalid et al. 2015).

The key business drivers are:

• Installations per city
• Order in the app list in the app stores
• Reduction in the operating and maintenance costs

The starting process is the development of the app idea. The framing of the idea is subsequent to the mapping of the market efficiencies of the framed and proposed business idea behind creation of the mobile application. The next step is the framing of the strategy for the development of the application. As per Kochhar et al. (2015), the strategy planning involves phases like Initial conversion, goal definition for the application in future, a competitive audit of the similar applications in the Australian market. This is followed by gathering user feedback about this kind of applications and in the end, in the light of all these researches, the goal review is conducted.

After the strategy planning, the next key business process is identification of the market competition. Fore mostly, it is essential to look out if any other developer is creating a similar application. In case, if any similar application has been launched in the market, the number of installs of such applications have to be noted. The ratings and reviews that are provided against the applications are to be analysed. This would be helpful for framing an idea about people’ likes and dislikes about such an application.  Lastly, searching the company history, it has to be located what challenges the companies faced while developing the application. Other two valuable aspects of the business process are monetization and marketing. The monetization process shows how the owners can earn with the application. Finally, the UI of the application have to be laid. The last stage is the development and iteration. This is a cont6inuos phase, because the application would keep upgrading with new information at regular intervals.

Core Values

After successful foundation of the application comes the testing phase (Liang et al. 2014). The kinds of testing that have been conducted for this application are functional and usability testing, performance testing, regression and user acceptance testing. After this comes the phase of Beta testing. A group of finest Beta developers of Australia conducted the Beta testing of the application. Thereafter the owners needs to install a Web API for the application. Lastly, the app stores where the app would be flaunted were decided and required contacts were made.

One of the key internal issues of the application is that the management is facing difficulties to manipulate the operational costs. The exclusive interviews and the use of strong Web based API is incurring high costs. This prompted the application developers to develop a premium version and shift many of the free services to the paid premium version of the application. Other issues involves poor error monitoring. The language codes used in the application prevents the application form running in certain connection. The usage tracking facility of the application is weak also. As such the payments done by means of the application are meant to be insecure in certain cases.

Among the external issues, the crashes are a big problem. Many if the users have given negative reviews to the application for the sudden crashing of the application in android devices below Android 6.5.5 versions. Besides, the app developers had promised that the application would show a comparison of t5he ticket prices in several Australian theatres for the same movie. However, the developers have not yet been able to deploy the facility.

The application shows live posters of the movies in panoramic formation. This facility have been programmed using JavaScript and Jquery. Besides, several movies are listed in the website. The page that contains the movie options have been programmed combining the JavaScript and CSS software. In order to simplify the use and reduce buffering, the movie trailers are shown using HTML video tags. As per Sanaei et al. (2014), this can effectively reduce the data cost.

The application developers wish to develop a reliable source of information for the users. The project teams of the application have to interact with the production houses, movie cats and other important people associated with the movies for extraction of more relevant information. The developers hope that this would lead to an increase in their user base and revenue generation. At present, the application is operating with a domestic server only. However, in future the application would be available to customers outside Australian and even in Europe. Details of famous cinema all over the world would be incorporated within the domain of this application in the future. Further versions of this application would incorporate facilities like comparing ticket prices, booking tickets directly and a detailed user profile for the application.

Objectives

The number of users of the application would increase upon inclusion of these facilities and consequently the number of premium customers would also increase. As per Schlesinger  and Doyle (2015), the application would also be able to get an app listing among the top apps of the various app stores.

The facilities like direct and safe ticket booking can attract large consumers. However, this would also mean large word of Mouth publicity for the application. The facility to compare the ticket prices of the various movie halls would prompt users to use the application every time before watching a new movie. This would draw them towards exploring the other features of the application.

Reference List

Ahmed, K., Khan, M.S.A., Siddiqui, O.A., Iftikhar, S.A., Das, B. and Khurrum, M., 2018. Proposed efficient method for ticket booking (PEMTB). Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, 10(6S), pp.321-338.

Brambilla, M., Mauri, A. and Umuhoza, E., 2014, August. Extending the interaction flow modeling language (IFML) for model driven development of mobile applications front end. In International Conference on Mobile Web and Information Systems (pp. 176-191). Springer, Cham.

Brisebois, M.A., Drummond, B., Mehta, A., Chene, M. and Flannigan, M., Prontoforms Inc, 2017. Method and system for customizing a mobile application using a web-based interface. U.S. Patent 9,836,446.

Burton, M. and Felker, D., 2015. Android App Development For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons.

Chandra, P. and Manjunath, G., Hewlett-Packard Development Co LP, 2017. Method to search a task-based web interaction. U.S. Patent 9,639,627.

Gronli, T.M., Hansen, J., Ghinea, G. and Younas, M., 2014, May. Mobile application platform heterogeneity: Android vs Windows Phone vs iOS vs Firefox OS. In Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on (pp. 635-641). IEEE.

Hirsch, S., Pereymer, A. and Rajpal, S., Media Direct Inc, 2014. Systems and methods for a mobile application development and deployment platform. U.S. Patent 8,898,629.

Khalid, H., Shihab, E., Nagappan, M. and Hassan, A.E., 2015. What do mobile app users complain about?. IEEE Software, 32(3), pp.70-77.

Kochhar, P.S., Thung, F., Nagappan, N., Zimmermann, T. and Lo, D., 2015, April. Understanding the test automation culture of app developers. In Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on(pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Liang, C.J.M., Lane, N.D., Brouwers, N., Zhang, L., Karlsson, B.F., Liu, H., Liu, Y., Tang, J., Shan, X., Chandra, R. and Zhao, F., 2014, September. Caiipa: Automated large-scale mobile app testing through contextual fuzzing. In Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking (pp. 519-530). ACM.

Sanaei, Z., Abolfazli, S., Gani, A. and Buyya, R., 2014. Heterogeneity in mobile cloud computing: taxonomy and open challenges. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 16(1), pp.369-392.

Schlesinger, P. and Doyle, G., 2015. From organizational crisis to multi-platform salvation? Creative destruction and the recomposition of news media. Journalism, 16(3), pp.305-323.