UCL Bite-Sized Lunchtime Lecture 11th May 2012

I am giving a Bite-Sized Lunchtime Lecture at UCL in May.

Everyone is welcome to attend! Admission is free and details are as follows.

Talk title: How to be a successful app developer

Abstract: It pays to be an app developer. Some of the world’s most recent millionaires made their money from mobile apps. Ethan Nicholas made his million from his iShoot app in less than a year. Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds, made a revenue of $100 million in 2011. With hundreds of thousands of apps in these online stores, what strategy should a developer use to be successful? Should they try many different ideas, make many similar apps, improve on their existing apps or just copy the apps of others? To answer these questions, we created AppEco, an agent- based model of mobile app ecosystems, and use it to simulate Apple’s iOS app ecosystem and investigate the effectiveness of different developer strategies. This talk presents our simulation, results, and lessons learnt.

Time: Friday 11th May 2012, 13:10 – 13:55

Place: Mully’s, UCL Lewis’s Building, Gower Street (map)

Nearest tube: Euston Square

Any questions?  Email me at s.lim@cs.ucl.ac.uk

AppEco in New Scientist

My AppEco work has been featured as lead technology story in New Scientist this week!

The story focuses on our forthcoming paper for GECCO 2012, where we investigate the success of different app developer strategies.

The article is available on the New Scientist website here. I have also included the article below.

GECCO’12: How to be a successful app developer

Over the past few months, I have been very busy developing AppEco, a C++ simulation of mobile app ecosystems. I had a lot of fun with AppEco! It enables me to ask different kinds of “what if” questions about mobile app ecosystems. For example, with so many developers trying out different strategies to increase their downloads, I wanted to know if an innovative developer would receive more downloads compared to a copycat developer.

My collaborator, Peter Bentley (who created the No. 1 best-selling app iStethoscope Pro), and I used AppEco to simulate for popular developer strategies: Innovators, Milkers, Optimisers, and Copycats, and evaluate their performance in terms of number of downloads, app diversity, and adoption rate. We found that Innovators produce diverse apps, but they are hit or miss – some apps will be popular, some will not. Milkers may dwell on average or bad apps as they churn out new variations of the same idea. Optimisers produce diverse apps and tailor their development towards users’ needs. One interesting we did find is that Copycats receive the most downloads on average, but it can only work when there are enough other strategies to copy from. In addition, Copycats can only exist in a minority, otherwise the app store will have many duplicated apps and the ecosystem will suffer. Our paper “How to be a Successful App Developer” has been accepted at GECCO’12.

 

 

Copycats are the minority when developers choose their own strategies

 

 

 

 

*  *  *

AppEco has a lot of potential. In a separate study, we have also used AppEco to study the effects of publicity on app downloads. We simulated different apps, ranging from fabulous to terrible, and applied different publicity strategies to promote the apps. Appearing on the New and Noteworthy Chart is most likely to guarantee downloads. Our simulation shows that with so many apps in the app store, a fabulous app that is not publicised may go unnoticed and consequently receive no downloads at all. We also found that the spike in app downloads after a publicity event resembles a typical epidemic curve. For all the juicy bits, read our paper “App Epidemics: Modelling the Effects of Publicity in a Mobile App Ecosystem.”

 

 

 

The spread of a highly infectious app through the network of users after the app is broadcasted using mass media.

Visiting Professor, Technical University of Loja, Ecuador

I’ve been invited to be a visiting professor at the Technical University of Loja in Ecuador.

They are organising a workshop on requirements engineering using collaborative tools in May.

I am looking forward to visiting Ecuador and attending the workshop!

Ready, Set, Transfer Winner

I won the ready, set, transfer event at RE’11 for StakeSource! The event is organised by Daniela Damian and Jane Cleland-Huang to facilitate technology transfer from research to practice.

The session follows the format of Dragon’s Den, where entrepreneurs (I am one of them) get three minutes to pitch their business ideas to five multi-millionaires. A lot of people turned up – more than I expected.

I got the most claps for all 3 rounds, and the most votes from the audience.

Two of the dragon’s came up to tell me they really liked StakeSource.

As the winner, I received 160k Euros (in the form of a fake cheque) from Jane.

The Seilevel Software Requirements Blog describes this exciting event in detail. It’s a fabulous blog about the event – I couldn’t have done it better!

GECCO’11 Paper Accepted

Yippie! My GECCO paper with Peter Bentley has been accepted.

The paper describes a method that uses Cartesian Genetic Programming to evolve relationships between social networks and stakeholder involvement in software projects.

Trento

I will be visiting Paolo Tonella’s group at FBK, Trento next month!

Before that I will visit the University of Porto in Portugal to attend a medical iphone app seminar.

StakeRare TSE Paper Accepted

My StakeRare paper with Anthony Finkelstein has been accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering!

StakeRare is a method that uses social networks and collaborative filtering to identify and prioritise software requirements. It is developed for projects with many stakeholders in distributed locations.

This is my first journal paper, and TSE is one of the most prestigious journal in my field, so I am super excited!

Digital Thesis for UNSW Library

The digital version of my thesis has been processed by the UNSW library and made public!

My thesis can now be downloaded from the library website.

Got my PhD!

Just heard from Paul, I have officially received my PhD!