The Herald Sun is reporting a pilot app has been trialled in two Australian stores and McDonald’s is reviewing the results.

McDonald’s Australia spokeswoman Skye Oxenham said it was too early to say if it would be introduced across all stores.

If the system could be dovetailed with over-the-counter service, Australia would be the first country to introduce it, Oxenham said.

But health experts fear the app could make fast food seem too readily accessible.

Nutrition Australia spokeswoman Megan Alsford said she hoped it wouldn’t encourage users to eat more junk food.

“It’s hard to say if this app would increase visits to McDonald’s but I would hope people would still see McDonald’s as an occasional treat and not an everyday food,” she said.

By Expert Blogger – Josh Linkner 04 March 2012

As Chris Dixon pointed out in a recent blog post, Angry Birds, the incredibly popular game, was software maker Rovio’s 52nd attempt. They spent eight years and nearly went bankruptbefore finally creating their massive hit.

James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. Groupon was put on life support and nearly shut down at one point in its meteoric rise.

When looking at the most successful people and organizations, we often imagine geniuses with a smooth journey straight to the promised land. But when you really examine nearly every success story, they are filled with crushing defeats, near-death experiences, and countless setbacks.

We often celebrate companies and individuals once they’ve achieved undeniable success, but shun their disruptive thinking before reaching such a pinnacle. Before Oprah was Oprah, before Jobs was Jobs, they were labeled as misguided dreamers rather than future captains of industry.

In your life, you’ve probably had a setback or two. When you stumble, it’s tempting the throw in the towel and accept defeat. There’s always an attractive excuse waiting eagerly, hoping you’ll take the easy way out. But the most successful people forge ahead. They realize that mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward.

The ubiquitous WD-40 lubricant got its name because the first 39 experiments failed. WD-40 literally stands for “Water Displacement–40th Attempt.” If they gave up early on like most of us do, we’d sure have a lot more squeaky hinges in the world.

You have a mission to accomplish and an enormous impact to make. You will inevitably endure some “failures” along your journey, but you must realize that persistence and determination have always been primary ingredients in accomplishment.

Don’t cave to your mistakes, embrace them. In fact, mistakes are simply to the portals of discovery. There’s an old saying that “every bull’s-eye is the result of a hundred misses.” So the next time you feel the sting of failure, just realize you’re likely one shot closer to hitting your target.

And who knows? Maybe after a few dozen failures and months or years of hard work, you might just be that next “overnight” success.

By Matt McLarty, Layer 7 Technologies Apr. 8, 2012, 12:00pm PT

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.

Social network pays top dollar for app that took just eight weeks to build and launch.

Social network Facebook has bought Instagram – a profitless, two-year-old photo-sharing application – for $US1 billion.

Instagram is a mobile sensation that counts Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey among its backers and has been downloaded by more than 30 million people. The $1 billion price is the highest for a profitless startup since Google bought YouTube for $US1.65 billion in 2006.

When the Silicon Valley startup released a version for Android phone users this month, it was downloaded 1 million times in its first 12 hours.

The app allows people to share photos taken with their mobiles with friends on its own site and on Facebook, Twitter or via text. Photographers can use a variety of filters to alter the look of their pictures, giving their images a vintage, old-world feel. Users can then promote pictures and add comments.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg broke the news on Facebook. He said: “This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.

“But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

Instagram was founded in October 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Asked about Instagram’s history on the Q&A site Quora recently, Systrom said he had “never expected the overwhelming response” the app had received. “We went from literally a handful of users to the #1 free photography app in a matter of hours.”

Systrom said Instagram took just eight weeks to build and launch but was the result of more than a year of work.

“We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas,” he wrote.

After experimenting with a more complicated app, Systrom and Krieger scrapped the project and started with something far simpler. “What remained was Instagram. (We renamed it because we felt it better captured what you were doing – an instant telegram of sorts. It also sounded camera-y),” he wrote.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, this year, the pair announced that the company’s iPhone app had nearly doubled its number of registered users since December, going from 15 million to 27 million.

This is the first time Facebook, which is in the process of going public in a deal that could value the company at more than $US100 billion, has made a big acquisition.

Zuckerberg said the Instagram team would continue to operate as a separate company.

“We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products,” Zuckerberg said in the statement. “At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.”

The sale comes shortly after Zynga, the online games firm, paid $200 million for OMGPOP, maker of Draw Something, an online version of Pictionary that in less than two months has been downloaded more than 50 million times.

Guardian News & Media