The explosion of platforms have made building news applications a challenge for publishers, who often use multiple developers and fragment their apps’ infrastructure. Yet according to Rich Cheary, Founder of Baobab Suite, the creation of mobile applications should be about long term goals rather than a race to the app store. This week’s GEN interview is a must read for any publisher thinking about building a mobile application which will not need a complete overhaul within a few months.

GEN: What does Baobab Suite provide to the news industry?

Rich Cheary: Baobab Suite provides an efficient way to aggregate, package, and distribute content securely across native mobile platforms as well a social feed services. Afrozaar is the professional software development business that is behind the Baobab Suite platform. We have collaborated with a number of global publishers to date to build what we are calling a mobile back-end as a service platform which is specialised towards the publishing industry.

We are hoping to build strong working relationships with publishers to share our experiences and lessons learnt. We believe software is a people’s business. When you are running software solutions, companies are really opening themselves up to you so there is a lot of trust and reliance on the provider.

From your perspective, what are the top best practises in mobile apps that publishers need to consider when building their own apps?

There is a need for consolidation and reliance on a single mobile back-end service. Mobile apps are in quite a complicated space, so the more you can consolidate all the services which your mobile app ecosystem is reliant on, the more stable and efficient your journey will be. To build a mobile app you need to have a very strong server component, and often it’s the case that one partner can’t build all your platforms equally well. What we have witnessed is some publishers manage their risk by having specific partners who are specialized in either Apple, Android or Windows8 and HTML5. On top of this each of those partners has their own technology in-house which they build their apps on it. If you don’t consolidate your apps into a single server environment, you are going to end up with a crazy architecture with multiple server compartments that are all operating and doing the same thing. If you consolidate, you could get a lot of reusability and consistency, and are able enforce better standards that will allow for a more scalable and optimal app ecosystem.

The consolidations of your mobile apps should also be built on open standards, meaning that any partner can easily integrate into that mobile ecosystem. If you can provide standardized code libraries to use in the apps that work very closely with the consolidated mobile server, then you really are managing your risk quite nicely because you will prevent any lock-in to a third party partner in the future.

Where do you see the place of innovation in today’s media ecosystem?

In the media ecosystem there are a lot of great conceptual thinkers that are unable to progress with their creative ideas because the platforms in use don’t always allow for it.

We believe innovation is about executing, experimenting, and trying the ideas that the creative minds have in real world environments. When technology is a stumbling block, there are often head-to-head battles between business and technology teams as to what they want to try, such as a new advertising technique combined with the metering of certain content on a particular platform.

We want to contribute innovative mobile tools to people who want the ability to experiment, fail quickly, learn, and then to apply those lessons in a cost effective manner and minimal risk environment.

Why is mobile a different experience from the browser when it comes to news?

Mobile is anytime, anywhere, on any device. Publishers have the power to make that a reality, because they are the owners of the content and responsible for its distribution. Content providers have the ability to provide that single-view of content to their user no matter what platform their readers are using. Content providers should look at providing a rich consistent content experience across all platforms and devices. Any digital strategy that doesn’t cover today’s phones, tablets; tomorrow’s TVs and near future’s cars and airplanes must ask itself why not, is it our technology or target market that is stopping us?

Given your professional experience, what is one piece of advice you can offer to GEN’s editorial community?

A lot of publishers are embarking on a “going mobile” journey, and if I can say one thing, “It is not a race. It used to be a race, but it is not a race anymore”. I would recommend not just satisfying your short-term goals, but rather taking a long-term outlook of at least three to five years and establishing a technology foundation that can see through those goals. We’ve seen this before where publishers took the short-term approach and then had complete system overhauls and replaced suppliers. This is extremely costly and will slow down the journey to achieve the ultimate mobile goal of distributing your content efficiently in a rich manner across any platform and device.

Baobab Suite has partnered with the Global Editors Network for the GEN News Summit. Rich Cheary, Marco Theart (Technical Director) and Dirk le Roux (Baobab Suite CEO) will be announcing their new platform developments with one of London’s most popular newspaper, and will be holding a masterclass detailing a case study of their different platform services.Register here for the GEN News Summit (19 – 21 June, Paris) to meet Rich Cheary, Marco Theart and Dirk le Roux in person.

The post “Mobile strategy is not a race anymore”, interview with GEN2013 team appeared first on Baobab Suite.

“Developing and maintaining mobile news apps is simple and easy”          

The above statement is ……

• True, if you look at it from a single-app build perspective and disregard the entire mobile solution architecture needed or the fact that you may want a more content rich and evolving viewing experience for all your future apps.
• False, if your objective is to establish a sustainable multi-title app ecosystem that provides scalability and flexibility for multiple content sources, integration points, development teams to collaborate effectively and deliver consistently and in accordance to defined publishing workflow standards.

Where most mobile news app initiatives fall short is from a cost and risk perspective. There is more to a mobile news app than just the frontend view. A successful mobile news app is heavily dependent on the quality, frequency, packaging, security and synchronisation of published content from source. It is the unexpected operational overhead aspect of owning and maintaining a news app that normally surprises all, not to mention the numerous obstacles and variations that each app store requires for compliance.

 As an app supplier in the past to a number of industries, we made many mistakes in the early days and vowed to never make them again. We learned a lot of lessons and have put all of them into our Mobile Backend as a Service platform Baobab Suite which specialises in the importation, redistribution, entitlement and metering of curated content that is rich with multimedia and requires secure packaging and storage across multiple native mobile and social news app platforms.

Our advice to publishers is, “understand your market and existing system landscapes, define your short and long term digital goals and agree on how your current revenue streams need to evolve and fit the inevitable digital platforms that your news content will need to be channel through”.

What we advise not to do, is rush out to the open market waiving your “I want an App” brief document. What you need is a solid mobile app foundation upon which your future expectation of building multiple apps easily in the future can become a reality.

Kind regards
Baobab Suite Team

The post Building a Sustainable Mobile News App Ecosystem appeared first on Baobab Suite.

Earlier this month six Baobab team members lined up for the world’s largest timed cycle race, with 37, 000 people riding 109km Cape Argus cycle tour around Cape Town, South Africa’s splendid peninsula. The team had been preparing for a great show down, as to who will be the fastest and the slowest in the group. The Baobab Suite team also raised substantial amounts via GivenGain donation platform for official charity South African Education and Environment Project (SAEP) thanks to friends and family members.

The most amazing part of the race for the team was climbing Chapmans Peak, what a rush and privilege to be able to freely ride this amazing engineering feat tucked into the mountain cliff traversing along dangerous Atlantic coast line into Hout Bay.

The Baobab Suite office banter, support and interest leading up to the race was great for those riding, especially when we saw some of the team spectating along the route. The highlight of the cycle tour was being able to put on the NEW Baobab Suite cycling kit organised in nick of time (day before the race), with team members proudly putting the newly launched Baobab Suite and Afrozaar.com branding.

Big thanks go out to our design and office admin team who contributed to our preparation and good looks, as well as a massive congratulations to the cyclists you guys were great and the spirit in which you executed was amazing.

The post Riding the Cape Argus cycle tour for charity and fun appeared first on Baobab Suite.

There will always be obstacles to overcome in the digital publishing space, it’s how effectively we deal with them to establish a stable platform from which to launch a competitive mobile strategy..

Going mobile is no longer a race, it’s a journey worth planning.

The solution(s) you choose must:

• add as little editorial overhead as possible
• complement existing systems rather than replace;
• be open in the interfacing standards applied
• be sustainable from a publishing frequency and change perspective
• allow for flexibility through the standardisation of a set of native API wrappers (SDKs)

We recommend Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) architecture for the following reasons:

• reduces the time needed to develop native applications by 70%
• reduces the complexities of native app development by dealing with complex server side programming
• reduces the maintenance of apps by taking logic to the server side and making changes at an administration level rather than a code changes
• reduces the redundancy in creating backend code blocks, providing ready to integrate features and template backends
• developers can focus more on the front end of the applications and the marketing activities needed for the application.

Additional MBaaS information:

• wikipedia: ”MBaaS is a model for providing web and mobile app developers with a way to link their applications to backend cloud storage”
• forrester: “It’s no secret that demand for mobile applications is skyrocketing in both the consumer and enterprise space. To meet that demand, application development shops are continually looking for new ways to accelerate development of apps that meet their consumers’ needs”
• baobab suite: “First MBaaS for newspaper publishing industry”

Have a great day && please THINK MBaaS!

Zeitschriften-Content mit Leichtigkeit mobilisieren

The post Mobilising newspaper content with ease appeared first on Baobab Suite.

We love looking to the future, and there’s nothing quite like a yearly turn in the old Gregorian Calendar to make one stop and reflect on the year past (good or bad) and take time out to plan for the next year ahead.

We are super excited about 2013 and what it has in store for publishers, consumers, providers all riding the mobile wave towards what some see as the perfect sunset and others the perfect storm.

The Future of Mobile News ?

• When majority of publishers will implement a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) solutions to facilitate their mobile journey

• We’ll see many more native “news apps” with responsive layout designs leading the way users want to consume content on device

• Publishers will move away from a PDF digital reading experience, knowing they can embrace MBaaS and distribute content for responsive on-device layout of the news

• Mobile apps will integrate with existing publishing systems, and complement rather than disrupt the editorial processes in place.

Whatever you are riding towards make sure you are prepared and not alone, the journey is so much better when you can share it with others and enjoy the finer moments along the way.

We can’t wait to plan a mobile adventure with some of you in the future – let’s make news last forever.

The post Future of Mobile News appeared first on Baobab Suite.

Where and What
The Afrozaar executive team dedicated the month of November to sharing lessons learned by presenting at events, performing product demos, participating on panel discussions, performing TV interviews, judging best app competitions at a number of events; World Publishing Expo 2012, AfricaComwhile also co-sponsoring Mobile Web Africa. In between all the events Afrozaar was part of technology delegation representing a Western Cape Government and Silicon Capetrade mission to London (UK) to learn about, and investigate possibilities of obtaining foreign investment, while also sharing their opinions with London’s successful tech incubators on how and what is needed to ensure a sustainable tech start-up environment.

“We enjoy being able to share and contribute our app learnings with the community. If we are able to help development teams and businesses, wanting a mobile app, to be more conscious of the potential value, dangers and risks, the mobile industry will be stronger for it.” says Rich Cheary.

How
Still classified as a start-up, this self-funded proudly African team of technical specialists has decided to take all their experience and lessons learned from building mobile app solutions for financial services, retail corporates, loyalty programmes and media publishing houses over past few years into their own internal development frameworks and have put it into a world leading Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) platform called Baobab Suite.

“We believe in our software product, and have seen it work wonders at one of London’s most traditional and popular newspaper houses. Our aim is to work with some more proud and traditional global newspaper publishers. I’m personally concerned about the status of newspaper print circulations and the way in which some are attacking digital. To be honest, I believe Baobab Suite approaches the challenges faced very differently to other systems, and combined with our team’s consulting services we can help an age-old source of curated content such as a newspaper remain relevant and continue to add value to people’s lives for more decades to come.” Rich Cheary.

Collaborating with Industry
Afrozaar team has collaborated with leading global publishing houses to tailor their Baobab Suite MBaaS to specifically solve and address the challenges currently being faced by the newspaper publishing industry. Baobab Suite now has the specific levers and workflow processes relevant to distribution of newspaper content without disturbing the current systems landscape.  Baobab Suite aims to compliment the current systems, and provide a mechanism from which this valued curated content can be consumed across all tablet and smart phone platforms.

Mobile app development has a reputation for being extremely complicated, costly and risky, which is why it’s refreshing to hear about a solution, such as Baobab Suite, which has the long-term objectives of being to decrease costs through minimizing operational effort and solution change-control process in the world of mobile apps. Not only does Baobab suite claim to decrease costs of app maintenance it also claims to provide monetization channels for a newspaper publisher’s content.

Looking into the Future
“We are very interested in learning how to harness the value of historical newspaper content (yesterday’s news) and breathe life into it by providing controlled access and development frameworks for third parties to leverage. Is there a market, I don’t know? Who’s keen to experiment?” Rich Cheary.

The post Spreading the word for Sustainable App Ecosystems appeared first on Baobab Suite.

Afrozaar have launched their Baobab Suite digital news platform at WAN IFRA World Publishing Expo 2012 in Frankfurt.

Baobab is a specialized content redistribution and mobile app platform for large newspaper and magazine publishing houses. The Afrozaar team have collaborated with a leading global newspaper’s editorial and digital teams for almost a year, designing and developing a publishing suite of products that span all major mobile app platforms. The product addresses the publishing industry’s need to dynamically distribute curated content to a subscription base via custom or licensed mobile, social or web apps.

When it comes to hosting the Baobab platform, customers can choose between public cloud (Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s App Engine, Amazon’s EC2) or their own private cloud hosting service. The Baobab cloud service offering has proven to be attractive from a cost saving and maintenance and support perspective.

“We are a focused team, dedicated to our products. We believe that newspapers can and should come alive. Mobile news should not try to emulate print, but should embrace the opportunities this new medium provides. We want to make Harry Potter style newspapers become a reality, with moving pictures and changing content.” says Dirk le Roux (Managing Director at Afrozaar)

Beginnings and Solutions

Afrozaar’s Baobab team’s digital publishing and mobile app development experience dates back to when the first iPad was launched, and they were commissioned to play a lead role in building Africa’s leading digital title subscription platform for Africa’s largest media publishing company. This platform evolved into facilitating the conversion, compression, distribution of multiple publishing house’s content and supporting media files across iPad, iPhone, Android native mobile apps and more recently a Google Chrome browser HTML5 offline web reading solution.

“Our team is very excited about Baobab being acknowledged by the market as the enterprise publishing platform of choice for digital newspapers and magazines. We are looking forward to meeting up with publishers, building relationships and planning a journey together on how we can achieve some newly defined digital objectives together”, says Rich Cheary (Director at Afrozaar).

Publishing houses can expect Baobab to provide the following:

• Tactical go-to-mobile-market solution
  • supported by a parallel strategic customized initiative
• Cost effective solution
  • with minimal risk and overall operational support
• Efficient aggregation and optimized distribution
  • for curated content from multiple sources, that eliminate slow and large downloads
• Previewing editorial content
  • by editorial team across live apps before final mobile publishing
• Mobile app management and dynamic content layout capabilities
  • that will minimize the number of app store deployments
• Ability to integrate effectively with all existing management systems
  • content, subscription and advertising systems to provide the much needed MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) when it comes to distributing content across multiple mobile, social and web app platforms

When it comes to moving large quantities of multimedia and curated editorial content across all major mobile, social and web app platforms then Afrozaar’s Baobab Suite is an attractive platform upon which a long term digital distribution strategy can be planned around.

The post “Extra Extra read all about it” appeared first on Baobab Suite.