With the skyrocketing popularity of Android and iOS operating systems, software developers got a whole new arena opened up. Many of the programmers have progressed to concentrate solely onto Mobile Technology Development. This is mainly due to the high demand as well as numerous lucrative ideas left to explore in the Mobile App world.

Exponential growth of smartphone users

As per the survey by eMarketer, the number of smartphone users across the globe crossed 1 billion almost two years ago. The expected number of smartphone users by 2014 end is 1.75 billion.

With smartphones, iPads and Tablets getting more accessible and less expensive day by day, the development potential for mobile apps is truly vast. The under-penetration in emerging markets like India and China in Asia shows that there seems to still a lot of steam left in the mobile app development industry.

Social marketing firm Buddy Media is being bought out by Salesforce.com in a $689 million stock and cash deal. The transaction will close Oct. 31 (the end of the third fiscal quarter).

Among its 1,000 customer, Buddy Media includes the companies ofFord, Hewlett-Packard and Mattel. Thanks to its capabilities of sending targeted marketing content through YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, Salesforce.com will build on the monitoring technology in social media through its recent Radian6 purchase.

According to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, the Marketing Cloud leadership will enable the company to take advantage of the massive opportunity within the next five years.

The purchase is arriving on the heels of rival Oracle’s buyout of Virtue, who is the competitor to Buddy Media.

The iconic software company that is based in King County Washington has been getting almost universally slammed from it's recent Los Angeles press announcement about its entry into the hardware business with the convertible laptop/tablet known as Surface.

Certainly I can see the point that it is now competing with its hardware vendors/partners. Intel has done a good job in the arena creating 'reference designs' without competing with its partners.

There is another viewpoint which seems to be ignored. The cold facts are Microsoft is a public company. This puts Microsoft in a legal position of doing the most it can to return value to its shareholders. Failure to do so means somebody is going to jail.

Microsoft has a vision, which at the end of the day is, a certain way to get enough people to see enough value to hand over their money, to fulfill their fiduciary duty.

One of the most anticipated features that came on the iPhone 4S was a new thing called: Siri. Zooming out before concentrating on Siri, mobile assistants were the new rage. Beforehand, people were fascinated by the cloud, and how you could store your files in the Internet and retrieve it from anywhere. You could store your file at home, and get it at your workplace to make a presentation. However, next came virtual assistants. When you’re in the car, it’s hard to send text messages. It’s hard to call people. It’s hard to set reminders that just popped into your head onto your phone. Thus, came the virtual assistant: a new way to be able to talk to your phone to be able to do what you want it to do, and in this case, text message, or call people, and many other features. Apple jumped onto the bandwagon with the iPhone 4S and came out with the new feature: Siri, a virtual assistant that is tailored to assist you in your endeavours by your diction.

Getting started with Siri

To get Siri in the first place, you need an iPhone 4S; although you may have the latest updates on your iPhone 4 or earlier, having an iPhone 4S means you have the hardware that is required to run Siri on your phone. Therefore, if you are interested in using Siri, check into getting an iPhone 4S, as they are getting cheaper every single day.