Alas, all good things must come to an end. IBM InterConnect 2016 day 4 marks the end of the conference. From a mobile business perspective, this was a valuable four days spent learning about the tools, resources and creativity that all of us can draw upon as we rethink the limits of mobility in our businesses and lives as a whole.

Here are four main takeaways that are important for mobile businesses to recognize:

• Consider Swift as an enterprise-class language Swift, an open-source language, supports the foundation of one of the most popular mobile platforms around. Before, you may have had trouble building rich Swift applications because of the language disconnect that occurred when you connected to your back-end data sources. Now, Swift runtimes can execute directly on your servers or in the cloud, which makes it easy for you to use a single language to build end-to-end, rich, robust mobile applications.
• When developing for mobile, focus on the APIs first APIs are the cornerstone of modern apps, as they allow you to connect to your own services as well as those of your business partners and customers. Now, your mobile apps can provide a surface to engage your customer. But these apps can also become a product in themselves, because they offer connectivity and partnerships that really add value and deepen the relationship with your audience. From a development angle, it’s important for you to make sure that all of the services that you build into your architecture have their own APIs.
• Understand the roles of aggregator apps and how they enhance the mobile experience Aggregator apps make use of the API economy and consume all sorts of information to produce a very targeted customer experience that takes into account preferences, location, other contextual information and any data points that are accessible through other services. Watson Trend sheds light on information about products that are popular or seeing sales trend upward. The app, which is powered by Watson, creates a level of brand awareness and engagement that feels very personal.
• The content within your mobile apps is hugely important While you can rely on partner APIs to deliver some content, the information you present to your users on behalf of your own organization must be relevant, actionable and timely. You should consider adopting solutions that allow you to easily separate content creation while automating the delivery of that content to the app on a certain schedule or based on specific triggers, which may include a proximity to a store, being in a location that’s near a beacon or displaying a certain level of engagement with your app.

For more insights on mobile from a variety of experts, check out our mobile CrowdChat from InterConnect 2016. Until 2017!

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