Changing the Mobile Development Landscape

Existing mobile development platforms have created an aura of exclusivity around mobile development.
Whether by design or as a side-effect of the cost or complexity involved in developing native applications, most mobile phones will remain nearly identical to what they were when fi rst unwrapped.
In contrast, Android allows, even encourages, radical change. As consumer devices, Android hand sets ship with a core set of standard applications that consumers demand on a new phone, but the real power lies in the ability for users to completely change how their device looks, feels, and functions.

Android gives developers a great opportunity. All Android applications are a native part of the phone, not just software that’s run in a sandbox on top of it. Rather than writing small-screen versions of software that can be run on low-power devices, you can now write mobile applications that change the way people use their phones.
While Android will still have to compete with existing and future mobile development platforms as an open source developer framework, the strength of use of the development environment is strongly in its favor. Certainly its free and open approach to mobile application development, with total access to the phone’s resources, is a giant step in the right direction.
Each Android application runs in a separate process within its own Dalvik instance, relinquishing all responsibility for memory and process management to the Android run time, which stops and kills processes as necessary to manage resources.
Dalvik and the Android run time sit on top of a Linux kernel that handles low-level hardware interaction including drivers and memory management, while a set of APIs provides access to all of the underlying services, features, and hardware.

The key skills required by staff

The technical skills required by staff to perform their duties varies with the nature of the
specific job. However, there seems to be common agreement throughout the sector concerning some generic skills which, it is believed, are required by most, if not all, of those who work in business tourism.
Rogers (1998) analysed a range of jobs in the UK to see what skills were required.
Common themes throughout the advertisements included:
interpersonal skills
communication skills, in both oral and written communication
attention to detail
ability to work under pressure
analytical skills.

Given the changing nature of business tourism, there are clearly two other sets of skills that will become increasingly important:
1 The ability to speak foreign languages.
As globalization develops, more business tourism events and individual business trips will take place across national and cultural boundaries. A survey of the UK conference and incentive travel agencies in 1999–2000 found that 39 per cent of staff questioned had no language skills. Of those who did, 47 per cent spoke French and 8 per cent could speak more than three languages. However, as the geography of business tourism changes, the demand may well be for people who can speak the language of the growing business tourism markets such as Russia, China, and India.
2 Technology skills.
The industry is heavily dependent on different types of technologies and therefore requires staff skilled in the use of these technologies, which include:
(a) video- and satellite-conferencing
(b) audiovisual equipment and special effects equipment used in conference production and product launches
(c) Internet marketing
(d) computer reservations systems and global distribution systems.
As we will see in the next section, staff generally have to develop these skills though experience as the industry has not yet developed, in general, a comprehensive, sophisticated system of training and education provision.