Apps and IT, Telecoms and Engineering Entrepreneurship in Jamaica – Def Jam’s How to Be A Player

Be still, sad heart! And cease repining;

Behind the Clouds is the Sun still shining.

Longfellow, The Rainy Day

The news of the weeks shenanigans in the Internet Space of Hacking and cloud-Based Service Failures has many a person shaken up and coming to their senses as to the vulnerability of the Cloud-Based Services which everyone seems to be pushing towards as suggested in my blog article entitled “AWC Fail, PSN Hack and Nokia Layoff - Murphy Law in a Clash of The Titans” and the article entitled “Seagate Buys Samsung HDD Business - SSD's in Rihanna's Shut up and Hard-Drive”.

Even Microsoft Windows 8 appears to be Cloud-Based as stated in my blog article entitled “Windows and Cloud Computing - Audia Resident Evil After-Market Taste-and-Buy”. This as running the OS via the Internet Explorer 10 Browser may be where Microsoft is going, keeping step with Google Chrome OS which powers the Acer and Samsung made CR-48 Smartbooks as stated in my blog article entitled “Google Chrome OS and Open Source - Star Wars A New Hope”.

Still this is research in progress; as these Cloud-Based Services fail and hacked, Telecoms Researchers, IT Personnel and Software Engineers can use the information from the compromised Cloud-Based Services to design better more hacker attack resistant systems. While they are at it achieving the five 9’s i.e. 99.999% uptime, should not seem so distant an ominous a goal to achieve.

So with the Cloud so insecure, downloading of programs will be with us for quite some time, despite Researchers pushing the speed barriers into the 1TBps speeds as stated in my blog article entitled “Verizon, NEC and the Dawn of the Terabit Age - Audia's FlashDance and Surf's Up” and even the 100 TBps speeds as stated in the article “Faster! Faster! Scientist push 100 Terabit Speeds”, published April 29, 2011, 7:40am PT By Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM.

People will still have a preference for hard copies of programs stored on various storage media, be it DVD Disc, Blu-Ray Disc or Removable Hard-Drive as stated in my blog article entitled “Netflix & the Death of Blu-Ray - Rise of the Machines meets Chicken Run”.

So the article from the Associated Press in which Research Analyst ABI predicts that forty four billion (44,000,000,000) apps will be downloaded over the next five (5) years should be an indication of a robust market for smartphone and smartbook App purchase as stated in the article “What 44 billion mobile App Downloads by 2016 Means”, published April 28, 2011, 1:49pm PT By Kevin C. Tofel, GigaOM.

It is also a follow-on of previous predictions by Gartner, as stated in the article entitled: “Gartner: Mobile apps to generate US$15 billion in 2011”, published January 26, 2011 11:54 AM PST by Erica Ogg, CNET News - Circuit Breaker with regards to App purchase in 2011:

1.      US$15 billion worth of apps are expected to be purchased in 2011 alone

2.      17.7 billion apps will be downloaded in 2011, double the 8.2 billion downloaded in 2010

Thus a ready market, both now as well as in the foreseeable future, awaits the plucky Jamaican with programming skills and wiling to buck the trend of a lack of interest in using IT (Information Technology), Telecoms and Engineering as a vehicle for entrepreneurship as noted in my blog article entitled “Senator Darly Vaz and the WEO NRI - Bragging Rights and Broadband Rights Required”.

How to be a Player (1997) in the lucrative Developer culture is not as hard as one would imagined, as it is as simple as having the required programming languages, the relevant SDK (Software Development Kit) and a really good idea for an App.

A little guerilla marketing never hurt anyone in promoting your App. Combine with in-App payments or payments for additional upgrades to your App and you will find that you regularly have to be checking the balance on your Paypal Account to verify that balance on your Virtual VISA Debit Card.

Not to mention you can quit your day job, as was the case with the Developer and founder of Mojang’s Markus “Notch” Persson, a Swedish programmer who developed the now hugely popular online game, MineCraft as stated in the article “The Insane Success of Minecraft: $33M and Counting”, published April 8, 2011, 1:00pm PT By Bobbie Johnson, GigaOM.

Thus an answer is provided to my rant on the Geezam blog entitled “Jamaica's Low Net Penetration - Broadband Internet A Universal Right” in which I declared the only way to get Jamaicans interested in computers, aside from removing the tariff on computer importation well as declaring Broadband Internet a Basic Human Right, is to show Jamaicans how to make money directly from the Internet.

Simple – just become a Developer!

Apps and programming is a way How to be a Player (1997) in the lucrative App market, set to explode in 2011 and beyond as the London Olympics 2012 slated to commence on July 27^th 2012AD, draws nigh and as the Dark Clouds hanging over Cloud-Based Services begins to give way to a Silver lining!