Static touchscreens can be compared on dimensions like pixel density, screen size, or refresh rate, but no such vocabulary exists for shape-changing devices, Roudaut said. One of the goals of the Morphees project was to create metrics to describe flexible devices and their ability to change shape. Having these “shape resolution” descriptors will help the construction of devices to fit the services they are designed to support. Roudaut cites the example of a stress ball: downloading the app would cause the device to collapse into a sphere that the user could squeeze.

Right now, the Morphee prototypes need external help to change shape, like wires, springs, and actuators, but in the future, the flexible material, touch sensor, and actuator will be merged. “All the layers will be made of flexible material,” says Roudaut. “My work is to make that happen faster, with new prototypes, and pushing the vision so companies [become] interested in making higher fidelity devices.”

Roudaut and colleagues experimented with six different Morphees — made of materials like wood, dielectric electroactive polymers, and smart memory alloys — and measured their shape resolution along dimensions like speed (how fast can it deform) and ability to curve. They wanted to get a sense of what kinds of materials are functional — and safe. “The electroactive polymer requires a huge voltage. We had to figure out how to use it without electrocuting ourselves,” says Roudaut.

A tiled touchscreen made of wood and smart memory alloy wires (above) seemed the most promising of the prototypes. It was able to hold its shape and could quickly curve. Another prototype using a two millimeter-thick E-ink display could roll into a cylinder, but could achieve greater flexibility if it was even thinner, according to Roudaut.

These concepts are already being brought to life by companies like Fremont, Calif.-based Tactus. Its shape-changing display layer takes the place of the front glass on a smartphone and creates a physical keyboard with inflatable buttons that can appear and recede. The challenges in this space, according to Roudaut, remain finding suitably heat-resistant materials that can create sufficient force – after all, having your stress ball phone crumble when you squeeze it would be decidedly stress-inducing.

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I’m certainly not trying to defend Nielsen’s study, nor the experiences of the dozen participants. In fact, I’ve struggled with the new operating system on a Surface RT review unit and I have 15 years of hands-on I.T. experience in Fortune 100 companies that relied heavily on Windows. Plus I have some previous with experience Windows Phone, which has used a similar interface to that of Windows 8 since 2010. But Windows 8 is more than tiles and touch targets.

There’s a learning curve

I couldn’t figure out how to share a web page, for example, but the function is there; thanks to my podcast co-host, Matthew Miller, I learned that the Charms section has a context-aware Share feature. Closing applications on Surface RT stumped me as well, but then I found out how to do it: While in an application, swipe down from the top of the screen to the bottom and the app will close. Well, it’s supposed to, anyway. Russell Holly at Geek.com notes that some apps are still running in the Task Manager even after closing them in this fashion.

So part of the issues then, could be due to a learning curve; not from poor design. That’s certainly a problem, but one that can be corrected through education on Microsoft’s part.

Microsoft’s multiple personality disorder

Nielsen is spot on when it comes to the touch-friendly tile user interface and the old desktop mode, however:

Unfortunately, having two environments on a single device is a prescription for usability problems for several reasons:

• Users have to learn and remember where to go for which features.
• When running web browsers in both device areas, users will only see (and be reminded of) a subset of their open web pages at any given time.
• Switching between environments increases the interaction cost of using multiple features.
• The two environments work differently, making for an inconsistent user experience.

While Windows 8 is probably the biggest break from Microsoft’s past operating systems, it’s not a complete break. Support for a desktop mode is a by-product of legacy design and, to me, represents the largest missed opportunity for Windows 8 tablets. The old Desktop mode is really there for one reason only: Microsoft Office. Instead of creating a Desktop mode for the productivity suite, Microsoft should have created a productivity suite for the touch-friendly environment. It’s as if it was easier for Microsoft to simply cram Office on tablets in a special mode rather than redesign it for effective use on mobile devices. And we know the latter can be done: Look at QuickOffice, iWorks or any number of productivity apps that work well on touch devices.

The world isn’t flat, but icons can be

I don’t quite agree with Nielsen when it comes to his criticism of the flat icons in Windows 8. I find that these fit in well with the tile interface and reduce the amount of flashiness found in icons on other systems. Utilitarian? Perhaps, but isn’t that what a section of choices for device settings is? Here’s a look at what Nielsen is complaining about, in particular.

He notes that few users actually tapped the “Change PC settings” link when tasked to change the background wallpaper in Windows 8; they thought those words were a label. Given that they were using a Surface RT tablet, perhaps the link should be “Change device settings” but this is easily fixable in a software update. The fact is — and it bears repeating — this is a new platform and there’s a learning curve involved, just as there has been for iOS and Android devices.

Scaling mobile up or bringing desktop down?

Getting back to the core issue is the approach that Microsoft has taken: One that keeps its legacy alive with a desktop version of Office. Here, I agree with Nielsen when he says:

The underlying problem is the idea of recycling a single software UI for two very different classes of hardware devices. It would have been much better to have two different designs: one for mobile and tablets, and one for the PC. I understand why Microsoft likes the marketing message of “One Windows, Everywhere.” But this strategy is wrong for users.

Looking to Apple, I see a different, so far, more successful, approach when it comes to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Much of the core of iOS and OS X is shared, but the interfaces are different: The former is designed solely for touch while the latter is solely for mouse and keyboard. While some apps are similar — think iPhone, iMovie and the iWorks suite — they’re designed to work effectively on their respective form factors. In some sense, Apple is scaling up from mobile as it brings more mobile user interface tweaks and services to the desktop.

Microsoft on the other hand, is still doing what it has done for a dozen years with its Tablet PC platform: Scaling the desktop down. Granted, it’s doing far less of that than ever before as Windows 8 is the best version for touch devices yet. But that doggone Desktop is still there and once you get there, touch becomes an exercise in frustration and you revert to the keyboard and touchpad on a Surface.

I like Nielsen’s idea of one platform dedicated solely to phones and tablets. Essentially because of the design choice Microsoft made by lumping the OS for tablets and PCs together, I find that the Surface RT device competes more against other Windows laptops than Apple’s iPad or Android tablets. In my mind, that’s the biggest issue here; not how flat the icons are or the learning curve for Microsoft’s new platform.

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Zoomdata Founder and CEO Justin Langseth started Zoomdata on the premise of building a company that envisioned BI free from decades of legacy baggage. In 2012, that means abandoning the desktop and designing for tablets, and taking advantage of the nearly unlimited computing power available in the cloud and even on our mobile devices. It also means designing a user experience so intuitive that users know how it works without ever really having to learn.

Just like someone can open up Google Earth and know they’re seeing the planet Earth, Langseth said Zoomdata users should open the app and say, “Oh, that’s my business.” And then they should be able to easily zoom in right where they want to go, using only their fingers. In a few swipes and pinches, Langseth said, users are soon uttering the business equivalent of “that’ my house, that’s my car, that’s my tree.”

It’s a pretty heady concept for a guy like Langseth who has been entrenched in the space for years, first at MicroStrategy in the 1990s and most recently doing a text-analysis startup, but he appears to have pulled it off thanks to the array of powerful components now floating around the web for free. Zoomdata is able to take data from anywhere — web apps, enterprise systems, Hadoop, email, you name it — and process it as it hits the system using an open source stream-processing engine called Storm. Once it’s processed, Zoomdata applies intelligence to figure out the best way to display that data visually and puts the result on the screen.

Data is like paint on a palette

That, Langseth said, is where the magic really comes in. “We’ve been thinking of data as kind of like paint,” he explained. The app takes many of the concepts from the D3.js project for creating HTML documents using data, but then makes them interactive and “lights them up with real-time data.”

The human interaction becomes a combination of watching a movie and finger painting. Combining data sources and sets by swiping your fingers is akin to blending colors from a palette. The interface comes with set of buttons for pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding the visualization, too — because it’s a real-time engine, the data keeps coming and the visualization keeps changing until someone temporarily stops the flow.

Under the hood, of course, Zoomdata is a lot more complex than meets the eye. It’s all about scale, speed and huge amounts of data, Langseth explained.  The backend does all the work and only streams the data required at any given time, so as to save the processing load on the user’s device. If a user presses pause or rewinds, the system keeps processing new data while also letting the user interact with the older data unaffected. Zoomdata also supports historical data sitting inside databases and other data stores so that users can compare their real-time information against the past.

The future: Bigger screens, smarter visualization and stiff competition

As if all this doesn’t sound futuristic enough, Langseth’s plans to take the technology further. “There’s a whole bunch more intelligence we can add to the system,” he explained, referencing his plans to incorporate machine-learning algorithms that will make the system even better at choosing how to visualize the raw, often schemaless data it’s receiving.

He also likes the idea of big touch screens, like CNN Big Board big. Sometimes when he has his iPad display showing on this 50-inch office television to play music, people come in and just assume they can start interacting with it like a touch screen. “Not just being able to see it, but to touch it, really excites people,” Langseth said.

Of course, as with all companies trying to carve out their space in the lucrative BI market — including the newly cash-rich Platfora — Zoomdata will have to prove itself a worthwhile alternative to big, expensive legacy technologies. Langseth thinks the real-time, mobile nature of his company’s product will at least make it a nice complement to existing desktop-based BI tools for historical data. And like pretty much everything powered by the cloud and rendered on a mobile device, its simplicity might appeal to a lot of users who don’t need the price or complexity that comes along with much legacy software.

“Some people need 10,000 features,” he said, “but most people need 5 features.”

We’ll see if Langseth is right soon enough. Zoomdata is currently in private beta after development began in March, and the company hopes to keep refining the user experience and open it up for broader consumption next year.

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And I should know. As a serial Voice-over-IP entrepreneur and the cofounder of Hookflash, I’ve worked with teams that have built plenty of voice and video apps from scratch. WebRTC could take a great deal of heavy lifting out of the equation for developers and end up becoming the common denominator in the new mobile network.

In the wake of this proposed standard, many traditional VoIP  service providers will wither and die. Mobile operators who continue to behave the way they have been will experience a grand exodus as users flee to new innovative providers. Traditional landline sales (phone lines) and traditional mobile voice usage will slow to a halt, and the phone network you know today will be gone for good.

Imagine a world where no matter what we use or where we are we could all communicate via video, hassle-free, for free — native video from Apple devices to Samsung devices, from business phones to the TV in your living room, from your car to your home to a beach in Hawaii. That is what WebRTC can do for us.

When it comes to mobile, Google and Apple own it. If these two giants got on the same page with WebRTC and convinced the mobile operators to play along, consumers everywhere would rejoice.

Google could see some big payoffs via WebRTC. Managing end-user software deployments, such as Google Hangouts, which range in the millions of users equates to real complexity. By reducing or eliminating the need for end-user software, WebRTC will help in a very material and measurable way.

Device manufacturers will also be in a better position. Since Google is a major stakeholder in the WebRTC movement and Google owns Android, we can surmise that Android-powered devices could start shipping with data plans and service offerings with free voice and video. Those services should be interoperable with other services that spring up using the WebRTC open standard. This would surely help Google’s handset and tablet sales.

Apple has been relatively quiet on the WebRTC front, which is somewhat disconcerting. Without Apple’s buy-in, approximately half of the mobile market is inaccessible. Which means that if developers were relying on WebRTC to deliver a voice or video service, they could only deliver service to half of the users that they could if they were to build a native application for both Android and iOS. This would be a major blow to the WebRTC community. On the other hand, Apple could easily take the openly available technology (as could anyone else) and drop it into a new version of iOS at any time, surprising everyone. Everything considered, I would say that  Apple will play along, albeit quite a bit later than everyone else.

In terms of user adoption, Skype is the standard on the Internet. So why won’t Skype dominate on mobile? Skype is an app on a device. It will never win the mobile battle if it’s just a third party application. Even if Microsoft embeds Skype deep in the fabric of its own mobile devices, that only represents a small portion of the market. And I don’t see Apple and Google embedding Skype as the native form of communication anytime soon.

As it turns out, Microsoft and Skype have recently joined the discussion in earnest, creating a bit of a kerfuffle due to their late arrival, which could cost us a six-month delay or more in getting this new proposal approved in the respective standard bodies. At any rate, it’s good to see them getting involved. I just wish it had happened ten months earlier.

The WebRTC open standards project has been in progress for more than a year now, and there are plenty of early demos of WebRTC already. I think we will likely see some production deployments of WebRTC in the next six to nine months, when Firefox and Chrome for Android support it in a production version of their browsers. And Google seems primed to deploy it to their large user base on Hangouts.

As for the rest of us, we will all keep close watch while building our own technology. With some luck and careful coordination, we will all arrive at the same time. It’s a guess, but I expect things will get really interesting near the end of 2013.

Erik Lagerway is a cofounder at Hookflash, creators of Open Peer, a new peer-to-peer network specification, built to enable global P2P communications and services. Open Peer powers the Hookflash mobile apps, enabling free voice and video chat on LinkedIn. You can follow him on twitter at @elagerway and @hookflash.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi.

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Chief among them is the added focus companies are putting on preventing their networks from the types of attacks that have befallen seemingly everyone in the past year. On Tuesday, for example, news broke of an AntiSec hacker gaining millions of Apple UDID numbers by hacking an FBI agent’s laptop (although the FBI has denied that story). Tenable Founder and CEO Ron Gula says his company can help prevent this type of attack from happening.

The key to everything is Nessus, a product for scanning networks for vulnerabilities that could leave them open to attack. And while it performs traditional analysis such as malware detection and compliance audits (as well as less traditional ones such as scanning networks for sensitive content), Gula and his new investors are very excited about Nessus’s ability to give companies a real picture of what mobile devices are on their networks.

“People say BYOD,” Gula said, “but it’s really connect your own device to the network.” And, of course, networks have expanded in the world of mobile access and cloud services, so it’s not just a matter of knowing who’s on the LAN, but also who’s accessing your Exchange server from a Starbucks halfway across the country.

Nessus lets users figure out how many mobile devices are accessing their network, as well as device information such as serial number, timestamp of the last connection, whether the phone has been jailbroken and what operating system versions they’re running. This type information can be particularly helpful, Gula said, because identifying, for example, a phone that hasn’t been updated in three years means identifying a possible avenue of attack via a vulnerability that has been patched in subsequent releases.

According to Accel partner Ping Li and vice president John Locke, their firm is also high on Tenable because of the volume of data the company generates. Tenable’s flagship customer is the entire U.S. Department of Defense, for which the company provides continuous monitoring of the agency’s network, but it also has more than a million other users ranging from Amazon to Dropbox to Walmart. The obvious benefit of this large user base is that Tenable has a broad community from which to learn about potential threats in the wild, but Gula said the company is also working on research detailing how different industries compare when it comes to security practices.

As for why Tenable finally decided to take money from Accel (“We’ve been stalking these guys for a long time trying to convince them to let us invest,” Locke joked), it all comes down to growth. Already, the company has grown revenue by 550 percent over the past four years and has doubled its staff to nearly 200 employees in the past year. Gula said the money will help his company make sure its growing list of customers all get the attention and products they need, which means even more employees and a broader global presence.

The Tenable investment is also the latest in a series of investments Accel is making in established companies staring down potentially huge growth. In January, it led a $52.5 million round in veteran backup and software-recovery company Code42; in May, along with Sequoia Capital, Accel helped infuse decade-old marketing research company Qualtrics with $70 million.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user kentoh.

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Placed Founder and CEO David Shim says the company wants to change the discussion around mobile analytics away from metrics such as how long an app was open or someone’s basic location for simple geo-targeting. The question Placed wants to answer, he told me during a recent call, is “How does context of place impact what people do within a mobile device?” Thanks to a database of more than 300 million locations, Placed users can slice and dice data by geography, time of day, business name, type of business — 400 criteria total — to determine where and when their users are engaged with their apps.

This data could be especially compelling for maximizing ad revenue, of course, by providing valuable information about where potential consumers are in relation to a given advertiser’s products. If you have a travel-booking app, knowing that people are booking hotels while sitting in train stations might be useful, he explained. If people are scanning bar codes with your app, you (and potential advertisers) might want to know whether they’re doing that most often in Costco or in Best Buy. You might just want to know your audience is “more Whole Foods than Albertson’s,” Shim said, or that users are most often nearby a Subway when they’re using the app.

Knowing more about where your users are could make a difference on the product-development front, too. One private beta customer, he said, saw that people were using its app a lot while driving and decided to add voice controls as a result. Placed’s analytics dashboard also lets customers track movement — they can, for example, watch app users collectively move from the suburbs to the city and back during the course of a day. For a restaurant-rating app, perhaps that means it’s time to incorporate recipe reviews for users who usually end up cooking dinner rather than eating out.

In the demo Shim gave me, it was easy to see differences geographically (some of which are clear in the infographic) as well as by time of day (although Subway and McDonald’s are close in terms of overall percentage, people are in or near them at entirely different times). And that people in Atlanta use apps while driving a lot more than do people in Seattle.

Millions of data points make it happen

If you’re wondering what makes Placed different than just tracking the GPS signal within a user’s phone (and which many apps already have permission to use), Shim said it’s a matter of granularity. Its model extracts signals from noisy location data in a fairly unique way to show where someone is, right down to the very business.

For example, while a GPS signal might be very accurate in the parking lot, it can become muddled when someone enters a building. All of a sudden, someone clearly in the Costco parking lot is in a half-square-mile area that could just as easily encompass the McDonald’s down the street. Because of Placed’s location database — of which the company has already verified more than 600,000 locations — it’s able to infer that the user actually entered the Costco located at that very spot.

Or, in another scenario, Shim explained, Placed’s model can determine a user’s whereabouts by process of elimination. If every other business in an area is closed, there’s a good chance your user is in the sports bar that’s still open. As noted above, the model also takes into account factors to infer whether someone is walking or driving while using an app.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s not. In order to accurately infer where people are, Shim said, you have to be able to stitch together a series of data points in a meaningful manner. The company already analyzes 24 million raw locations a day in its Hadoop cluster in order to add structure to messy data. Placed has ties to former Seattle big-data startup Farecast (now part of Microsoft), but “we collect more data in a 30-day period than Farecast had total,” Shim said.

Placed also has four Ph.Ds. on staff constantly working to refine its model by taking into account new data points such as captured images or search queries that might indicate where someone is, and specific mobile devices’ varying accuracy of location data.

Privacy-first approach

However, any discussion about a cool new approach for tracking users’ locations is bound to bring up privacy concerns. When I broached the subject with Shim, he was quick to point out that Placed takes privacy very seriously. It only works with apps that already have permission to access users’ location data, and Placed only delivers aggregate analytics.

Because it doesn’t let its users see individual results, he said, “someone’s behavior being measured isn’t going to affect them at all [in the form of individually targeted advertising or the like].” Rather, a company like McDonald’s can confidently place ads on a given app knowing that a certain percentage of its users will be within spitting distance of a McDonald’s (or a competitor) a large amount of time that app is open, presumably making them more willing to actually pop in for a hamburger.

Even when showing Placed users where their users are on the map, Shim said, the dashboard only goes as granular as a 150-meter-by-150-meter area so as to not get too personal.

I think Placed is onto something with its service (which is currently free, by the way) and hints at what we can expect as that mobile analytics space begins to heat up in the next year with a focus on developers rather than just marketers. Along with companies such as Structure Launchpad winner Keen.io and some stealth-mode companies ready to hit the public eye, mobile developers — many without access to corporate IT resources or analytics tools — are going to start getting the data they need to build better apps and to put the power to monetize apps into their hands.

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The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement has gained unstoppable momentum. And thanks to the burgeoning mobile app market, employees have high expectations for these tools. They want an attractive user experience tailored to their devices. In other words, companies need to invest in building apps, period.

During my two decades of working in enterprise IT, I’ve observed the client-server revolution, the internet explosion and the service-oriented architecture (SOA) boom. Despite all the buzz around cloud and big data, I believe mobile will dominate enterprise IT transformation over the next decade and help to shape those other two trends. Our company, Layer 7 Technologies, and competitors such as Apigee and Mashery, are providing API management solutions to support mobile integration for the consumer app market. I believe that BYOD will spark an ever greater demand for API management to address enterprise mobile apps.

I’ve seen some companies try to cut corners by pushing their existing browser-based enterprise apps out to mobile devices, and the returns are not encouraging. One electronics company Layer 7 worked with wanted to create a multi-platform mobile app for their employees, but discovered that their web security tokens were truncated on iPhones. An airline we worked with rolled out their first iPhone app and failed to get traction, because the user interface mimicked their backend green screens. These companies limited themselves by not taking advantage of the unique features of mobile devices, and employees were uninterested in using the clunky apps.

These are cautionary tales, but they have happy endings. Both companies ended up investing in the user experience. And by reusing much of their existing enterprise infrastructure, they still saved a lot of money. The electronics company fixed their mobile security protocol without replacing their access control servers. And the airline rewrote their mobile app to be more user-friendly without changing the backend enterprise application. Both companies combined their existing enterprise assets with an API management solution to create mobile-friendly APIs. These APIs powered the mobile apps with suitable security, reliability and performance.

Redrawing the borders between the presentation, logic and data tiers

These examples signal a shift in the enterprise IT landscape. During the internet explosion, applications settled on three tiers: presentation, logic and data. Because of the enabling technologies, the lines between the presentation and logic tiers frequently blurred, and a hard border was created between the logic and data tiers. For example, a web app for order processing might include business logic steps in the browser code either deliberately or by accident (if the same developer codes both tiers). With the enterprise mobile movement, I think that the tiers will remain the same.

However, I believe that the overwhelming emphasis on user experience combined with the impact of cloud and big data will now blur the line between logic and data, and the border between presentation and logic will become much more complete. That concrete border has a name: it is the API. That order process now needs to be available on the web and to a variety of mobile devices, so that the logic tier can be accessible to all channels through the API.

The API border is the new security perimeter

Because personal mobile devices cannot be trusted the same way a company-owned and managed desktop PC could be, the concrete API border is also the new security perimeter. For these reasons, an enterprise API proxy that provides secure, multi-channel access to the logic and data tiers will be valuable.

This API proxy plays a dichotomous role. It opens and eases integration with enterprise APIs, and it enforces the policies that check user identity and control access to backend resources and data. Due to the mixed personality of BYOD devices — business and pleasure — no API request message can be trusted outright. Identity must be checked using any number of principals — app, device, end user — and weighed against the requested assets.

The value proposition of the API proxy increases dramatically if it is able to map between the security protocol of choice in the mobile world, OAuth, and the existing security infrastructure in the enterprise. Web single sign-on solutions are too heavyweight for mobile devices, but their underlying policies and infrastructure can be reused in this context. The API proxy is the key to bridging the gap between the integration and security needs of the mobile devices and the existing and proven enterprise services and policies.

Companies are using the API proxy at the core of their API management solution for secure mobile app integration with their enterprise systems. A healthcare company we worked with wanted to offer an iPad-based app to collect their member data. The company was very concerned about data privacy and access control. Through the proxy, they were able to exceed the industry’s security requirements and easily reuse their enterprise applications to launch the app.

A developer-driven approach to integration

Driven by BYOD, companies are also following consumer app trends and offering API portals where developers can find out which APIs are available in the enterprise, how to connect to them, and how to establish contracts that include quotas, costs and service levels. I believe that this developer-driven approach to integration is a refreshing shift from the current SOA state and will help to improve the overall agility of enterprise IT.

Business and IT leaders who are wrestling with whether or not personal devices should be allowed in their company’s network should embrace this change. There is no stopping it, it’s already here. And there is a big upside to BYOD beyond employee satisfaction. People treat their personal mobile devices as an extension of themselves. Employee productivity improves with each new task that they can accomplish on their favorite toy and a ton of costs can be saved through reduction in paperwork and manual processing in general.

If companies turn their worries to figuring out how to engage field employees with apps that leverage 1080p resolution and LTE connectivity, they can rest assured that through API management they will have a solution that delivers on the promise and protects against the threats of the mobile future, adds immediate value to the present, and leverages the investments of the past.

Matt McLarty is vice president of client solutions for Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of API management solutions. Prior to Layer 7, Matt led technical sales for IBM application integration middleware and worked extensively as an enterprise architect in the financial service industry.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Robert Agthe.

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