Mobile Talent in Short Supply as Employers Seek to Fill Jobs

Technology companies are running up against a dearth of qualified developers to create applications for mobile devices, according to a survey by online job board Dice Holdings Inc.

Almost 57 percent of employers and outside recruiters that hired for mobile-related jobs this year plan to boost such hires in the next 12 months, the survey, conducted on behalf of Bloomberg Businessweek.com, showed. More than half the respondents described the supply of quality mobile-software designers and engineers as “scarce.”

Companies need app developers as the market for mobile software surges to $17.5 billion by 2012, from $4.1 billion last year, according to a study by Chetan Sharma Consulting. The demand for programmers who can write for mobile platforms, such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Google Inc.’s Android and Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, has stoked competition among recruiters, driven up salaries and led employers to consider getting new talent through acquisitions.

Small Rise

The online survey, conducted Oct. 11-15, was based on 283 recruiters who use New York-based Dice’s site and said they had hired mobile professionals this year. Dice sells services to businesses who recruit employees through its site.

More than a fifth of respondents said they hired substantially more mobile experts this year than last year, and more than a third said they added slightly more. Some 36 percent hired about the same number, while 6.6 percent said mobile hiring fell this year.

In the next 12 months, a fifth of recruiters anticipate a substantial increase in hiring, 37 percent see a slight increase, and 34 percent plan to hire about the same number.

The most common salary range for mobile engineers and designers was $75,001 to $100,000, according to 41 percent of respondents. About 28 percent said average pay was $100,001 to $125,000, while 21 percent said it was $50,001 to $75,000.

Higher Salaries

Almost a third of employers raised salary levels for the average mobile worker “higher than normal,” citing the increase in demand for talent.

Experience with Apple’s mobile platform carried the most weight on resumes, with 72 percent of recruiters saying they are hiring for development of iPhone applications, and 38 percent saying iPhone expertise is the most attractive among platforms.

“Anybody that has an application that has been working on a notebook now wants that to work on an iPad, an iPhone and on Google Android,” said Todd Thibodeaux, chief executive officer of the trade group Computing Technology Industry Association in Oak Brook, Illinois.

He described the supply of qualified talent as “scant.” “There’s a whole bunch of specialties that have to develop and emerge there,” Thibodeaux said.

Android Software

About 60 percent are hiring for Android development, and 23 percent said new recruits with knowledge of Google’s platform is most highly prized. Some 48 percent of employers are hiring for BlackBerry, while just 16.1 percent said that’s the most desirable type of mobile expertise.

This month, Dice’s site had 758 job listings requiring skills or experience with the iPhone, up from 264 a year ago. The site had 685 listings requiring Android skills, up from 158.

“If you look at jobs that require either iPhone skills or Android skills, the number of jobs is still pretty small, but if you look at the growth rate, it’s huge,” said Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.

Mobile was described as one of the top three priorities in technology hiring by 35 percent of employers. A year from now, as more businesses incorporate mobile technology, Silver predicts that number will be closer to 50 percent.

The vast majority of employers, or 95 percent, said mobile hiring was either competitive or extremely competitive.

Overseas Demand 

That competition has intensified partly because of increased demand for talent in other countries, especially India and China, said Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a San Jose, California-based group formed by business leaders to focus on talent-pool concerns in the region.

While programmers and other skilled workers from India and China have had a significant presence in technology companies during the Internet boom, “in the past decade, that has tailed off significantly,” Hancock said.

Some businesses are resorting to acquisitions. About half of the respondents plan to add mobile-software expertise by buying companies in the next 12 months.

Other companies have learned to be more flexible in their hiring. Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of local-business reviews site Yelp Inc., said he began recruiting engineers talented enough to learn and adjust to new types of mobile platforms.

“If you’re doing searches for people with iPhone experience, it isn’t going to be a deep pool of people,” Stoppelman said. “We just look for good engineers.”

Mobile Mashups: Breaking Out of the Pocket

What is a Mashup?

Mashup is a very general term for an application that incorporates realtime data and services (APIs) from 3rd party sources over the Internet. A Mashup is often very focused and task oriented.

Although the browser is the most accessible platform for developing and distributing a Mashup it is by no means the only platform, and arguably not always the most appropriate from an end-user perspective. mWorks, for example, provides a platform for creating mashups that run as an application on your mobile phone, Apple Widgets and Yahoo! Konfabulator both provide a platform for creating a mashups that run as Widgets on your desktop, and the list goes on. The important thing to remember about a Mashup is that it is an application that leverages realtime data and / or services accessed over the Internet. The delivery mechanism for the Mashup is completely independent. In fact, many mashups are available in mobile, widget, and browser versions.

The mobile browser is NOT the only platform “open” to the developer. You may be surprised to find out that you could create a mashup using SMS and Java in addition to the browser on a device.

Things are getting really interesting in the mobile development field.

Five years ago when you talked about application development you were most likely targeting web browsers, desktop computers, game platforms or very limited phone OS’s. On each of those platforms the vast majority of the input was via the user’s fingertips — text, buttons and joysticks.

Today’s devices obviously offer so much more. Touch, GPS, compasses, accelerometers, and proximity detection to name just a few previously unavailable input modes. This has made possible a raft of new types of applications.

The idea that the mobile phone should be a one-stop shop of digital services is universally shared in Asia. There's also a convergence of features among cell phones, personal digital assistants, cameras, MP3 players, and high-speed wireless networks that's turning mobile phones into all-purpose digital devices.

But the combination of disparate features into one device isn't just a top-down phenomenon pushed by carriers and manufacturers. Consumers often take the lead, playing with user-generated content in myriad ways. They can seamlessly "mash up" or combine, say, music or video from various sources and integrate applications from their personal computers and printers with their handsets.

The feature-power of mobile phones and the creative melding of content and software applications are bound to increase as 3G mobile handsets and ever-speedier wireless networks continue to be rolled out across the region.

Korean handset maker LG Electronics is also trying to export high-end multimedia mobile phones to the U.S., where the mashup fad is also entrenched, though more PC-based. LG's Fusic mobile phone delivers an array of services over Sprint's high-speed network. Subscribers can access Sprint TV and Sirius Satellite adio via the handset, buy songs, and copy tunes from one handset to another—or even transfer music collections to a car radio or personal computer.

Japan's mashup scene is more dominated by small Web 2.0 venture businesses than programming-savvy individuals. A company called DigitalStreet has come up with software filters that let mobile-phone users view Web pages that would normally only be accessible from a PC. In the past, businesses had to direct cell-phone users to special Web sites that were pared-down versions of the actual site, with few graphics, loads of text, and limited content.

The new programs aren't limited to Web browsers. For instance, a program called Fileseek lets you check out the latest YouTube videos from your cell phone. I see real potential as we move forward with the synergy and integration between mobile social media and enterprise applications. I am reminded how much Web 2.0 trends will drive mobile technology. When I originally started to design mMashups I had it in my mind to create a platform that would allow me to pull together interesting web services in a way that was intuitive and useful on any mobile device. Today, web services are now passé and terms like Ajax and Mashup are gaining in popularity; but this does not change the fundamental technology and concepts upon which mMashups was originally designed.

My research (with help from co-workers Viktor Stephen and Amit Kapur), has turned up an interesting list of services and sources of services. Amit pointed me to http://www.programmableweb.com which has an impressive list of XML APIs for creating mashups. Technorati and Feedburner also have some interesting APIs for navigating and browsing blogs and feeds. Sites like Flickr and TextAmerica have some interesting API’s for accessing a wealth of image content, and Google and Yahoo both have API’s for a variety of things. In addition there are some UDDI registries for for premium Web Services such as StrikeIron and XMethods.

Mobile Mashups sounds like a really interesting niche to me.

Google forays Into The ebook Biz

Google has indicated its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

The move pits Google against Amazon, which looks to control the e-book market in a very Apple-like way with its Kindle offerings and e-book sale pipeline to them.

Since many ebooks are found from a Google search in the first place there is a binding logic to seeing Google skip the middle man and enter the ebook business themselves.

What’s going to be really interesting I suspect, is to see how well this does against the Amazon Kindle crowd. That ought to be really interesting. Because it will mean Google having to tread onto Amazon’s home turf, I bet that Amazon is not going to take this lying down.

Amazon versus Google

If Amazon have made a false move with the Kindle, who benefits? One beneficiary is surely going to be Apple. The iPhone and the iTouch are already very text capable and they will only get more so as Apple extends the touchscreen interface to larger systems. But the other big gainer, in the long-term, perhaps the biggest beneficiary, is going to be Google. Google with its Book Search program and its alliances with publishers and libraries is going to occupy the place that would otherwise appear to be Amazon's of becoming our preferred source of access to published literature. Amazon seems to have taken a wrong turn in supposing that distribution, rather than access and search, is the key challenge for digital print.

Google and Apple, between them already have the solution for eBooks (and its not a download solution). Read and search on your iPhone and access via a web browser, anything in print can be handled that way. More to the point: everything in print can be handled that way. Everything will be searched via the web, everything will be accessed via the web. Downloads are pretty much of an irrelevance. The question is: what do authors and publishers plan to do about that?

Answer: "Maybe the publishers should themselves try selling/granting access direct". Aside from Google with its Book Search, the publishers are the other variable in the market-place which has a promising opportunity if the Amazon Kindle download system bombs. After all, scientific and technical publishers have made a reasonable fist of creating a digital market for their STM periodicals. Book publishers need to create access opportunities and figure out how to sell digitally direct.

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