Emerging Tech

ComScore released a new 2015 U.S. Mobile App report tracking native mobile app usage among adults over 18 years old, and it reinforced a lot of the trends we’ve been reporting on DigitalGov.

Will Sullivan

Oct 27, 2015

The Data Briefing: Highlights from 300 Federal Mobile Moments

DigitalGov’s theme this month is mobile moments, which explores the impact of mobile applications in the federal government.

Bill Brantley

Oct 21, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Focus on Mobile Performance to Provide Better Mobile Moments

The New York Times recently published a report evaluating the cost of mobile ads on news websites and found that on many of the major sites, the ads were taking as much bandwidth and time as the content (if not more, in some cases). This comes after the recent hubub over Apple starting to allow

Will Sullivan

Oct 20, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Is Crowdsourcing the Future of Mobile Design and Development?

NASA recently announced the winners of a smartwatch app interface competition. A Canadian duo won the design competition, and NASA’s plan is to build the app with 2016 funding to have it available for astronauts to use when they are aboard the International Space Station. This is the first government smartwatch app development we’ve talked about

Jacob Parcell

Oct 13, 2015

The Data Briefing: White House Asks Data Scientists and App Developers to Help Suicide Prevention Efforts

This article describes some of the data sources that could be leveraged for building data analysis and apps to aid in the suicide prevention effort.

Bill Brantley

Oct 07, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Rise of Apps, The Decline of TV

Move over, 60 inch widescreens—for the first time ever, U.S. consumers are spending more time in mobile apps than on TV. An article from Flurry Insights, the blog for Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, covered the recent viewing trends. Apps are now the top media channel in the United States: on average, people spend 198 minutes on

Ashley Wichman

Oct 06, 2015

The Data Briefing: Connecting the (Data) Dots—NASA’s NYSpaceTag App

OpenNASA has recently completed another redesign of their site. With over 31,000 data sets, 194 code repositories and 36 APIs, OpenNASA probably has the largest collection of open data of any of the federal agencies. An especially helpful feature is a set of icons devoted to five types

Bill Brantley

Sep 30, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: How Much Does It Cost to Go Mobile?

A penny saved is a penny earned. But spending your pennies on mobile development is necessary to meet 21st century needs.

Ashley Wichman

Sep 29, 2015

The Data Briefing: Surrounded by Fields of Federal Data—U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s PatentsView

Hello, everyone. My summer sabbatical was short but educational, and I am glad to be back in the federal government. I am also excited to again take up the weekly API article that is now expanded to include all things federal government data. Much has happened in the open data realm, and there is much

Bill Brantley

Sep 23, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Content is King for Mobile Apps

Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, Flurry, released a new and provocative report about mobile apps versus mobile browser usage, in which they found audiences are spending almost an hour more with their mobile phones than last year.

Will Sullivan

Sep 22, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Mobile Internet is Dead. Long Live the Mobile Internet.

Benedict Evans, a leading mobile analyst with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, published a provocative post last week about the death of the mobile Internet. He details the history of the mobile Web and posits that the mobile Internet is the Internet now. The desktop version of the Internet audience is smaller

Will Sullivan

Sep 15, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Prepare for ‘Mobilegeddon’ II—Interstitial App Ads

Google has announced a second wave of Mobilegeddon search penalties for websites using mobile app install interstitials.

Will Sullivan

Sep 08, 2015

On DigitalGov, we frequently talk about some of the most popular app experiences, and research almost always shows that mobile messaging and social apps are the most frequently used. Pew Research released a new report specifically about

Will Sullivan

Sep 01, 2015

DigitalGov Summit Recap: The Need for Change Agents, plus the Internet of Everything, from A to Z

The Internet of Things is already here. How will we prepare for the Internet of Everything?

Ashley Wichman

Aug 26, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Web Standards Advocate Advises Adaptive Web Design for Government Sites

This August, Aaron Gustafson, Web Standards Advocate at Microsoft, industry thought leader and speaker, and an author who wrote a leading book on adaptive web design, spoke to the government tech community at the U.S. General Services Administration

Will Sullivan

Aug 25, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Rise in “Mobile Addicts”

Yahoo’s mobile analytics division, Flurry, released an interesting report, in July, comparing mobile usage among three distinct types of users around the world based on how frequently they launch mobile applications each day: Regular Users, Super Users and Mobile Addicts. According to Flurry, of

Will Sullivan

Aug 18, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Impact of ‘Mobilegeddon’ on Non Mobile-Friendly Sites

Adobe released its quarterly Adobe Digital Index report this month, which showed websites that aren’t mobile optimized are seeing more than double-digit drops in traffic from Google’s organic search referrals. This is after the leading search engine announced it would start penalizing websites, after April 21st, that weren’t optimized for mobile—also called “Mobilegeddon.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine also

Will Sullivan

Aug 11, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Mobile Web Audiences Abandon Sites with Interstitial Ads

David Morell, a software engineer with Google, posted an interesting case study from the tech giant, sharing data about how users interacted with interstitials (ie webpages displayed before or after an expected content page) on their website. Their analysis showed that 69% of users completely abandoned the page and their original intent after being shown an interstitial. Interstitials take many

Will Sullivan

Aug 04, 2015

Community Rock Star Round Up

Around this month’s Communities Theme, the DigitalGov team thought we’d round up your community rock stars. These are people in your communities who’ve gone above and beyond, who’ve contributed content, organized events, participated in developing toolkits and more.

Alycia Piazza

Jul 30, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: People Over 55 Soon to Be Mobile-Majority Users

In July, comScore released a research paper, The Global Mobile Report: How Multi-Platform Audiences & Engagement Compare in the U.S., Canada, UK and Beyond, covering a lot of areas from smartphone penetration to Android vs. Apple preferences.

Will Sullivan

Jul 28, 2015

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