With the number of people using mobile devices increasing exponentially each year, several companies are entering into the mobile application development market. This has led to the proliferation of mobile operating systems. In many other industries, this increased level of competition would benefit consumers. In the mobile application development industry however, it has lead to industry fragmentation.

Fragmentation is a phenomenon commonly experienced in information technology and computing related industries. Fragmentation occurs when there are several standards or platforms in the industry. This prevents developers from accessing the full scope of the market and forces them to focus only on the most popular platforms. Only developers with an unusual wealth of resources are able to cater to the full market. Even large companies have attested to the detrimental effects of fragmentation in the mobile applications market. In February 2010, the BBC announced plans to launch a mobile news application. During this announcement, they criticised fragmentation within the mobile applications market saying it prevented them from reaching all consumers equally and that until a solution is found profitability in the mobile application industry will suffer.

Fragmentation prevents smaller developers from entering the market for a number of reasons. Firstly, it increases costs. In a fragmented market, prospective developers will be forced to comply with a myriad of different standards and procedures in order to take their application to market. This raises the cost and time involved in developing an application and acts as a barrier to smaller or newer developers. In turn, this is detrimental to consumers as it reduces choice in the market. Developers must also incur considerable cost to learn how to develop for a particular platform. In a fragmented market, it is often difficult to predict which platforms will become dominant and have a larger install base. If developers choose a platform that is phased out later or becomes a niche platform, they will have wasted valuable time and money.

Fragmentation in the market also prevents developers of highly technical or targeted applications from entering the market and making a profit. Highly technical applications are difficult to port across platforms and or often targeted at a specific niche audience. If the audience is split across a number of devices, it is unlikely that such applications will be profitable at market.

Fragmentation in the mobile devices market is a relatively new phenomenon. In the early 2000s there were very few mainstream mobile device operating systems, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Less than a decade later there are over three times those numbers with new platforms emerging such as Android, iPhone and more variations of Palm, Symbian and Windows platforms. With no system completely dominant in one area, it is increasingly difficult for developers to reach their target markets. Each mobile platform also tends to have its own digital distribution channel. Distribution across different channels also adds to the costs incurred by developers as they have to comply with the rules of each distribution channel and pay a percentage of their revenue to each store.

Fragmentation stems from having so many mobile operating systems and therefore is can only be tackled by the owners platforms cooperating to find a solution. The best example of this to date is an industry alliance, the Wholesale Applications Community. This alliance consists of 24 mobile companies including Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and Orange. The aim of this alliance is to create a mobile distribution channel that distributes applications to all devices irrespective of the mobile platform. They aim to create this common standard for mobile applications within the next 12 months.

A common standard for mobile applications is the best way to tackle fragmentation in the long term. However, some developers have started to develop mobile web applications instead of native mobile applications. Although web applications do not have the functionality of native applications, any device with a recent internet browser can access them. Mobile Web application development has become more viable in recent years as mobile browsers have improved and have support for scripting languages such as JavaScript.

However, web application development is not ideal for many developers, especially those developing complex applications. With the formation of the Wholesale Applications Community and the cooperation of many of the major firms in the mobile development market, it seems that a concerted effort is being made to deal with fragmentation in the industry. As long as the interests of all the firms in the Wholesale Applications Community continue to converge, it is likely that the negative impact of fragmentation on developers and consumers will be greatly lessened.

The development of mining technology plays an important role in the mining industry as well as in the environment. The mining industry plays a crucial role in our economy. The mining industry was very conservative in initiating and adopting new technologies in the past due to high capital requirements, environmental limitations and small profit margins. However, the mining industry has made significant progress in productivity, mining technologies used, environmental control, and worker health and safety. The mining industry has also introduced improved clean technology to carry out best mining processes and practices. Such practices have been applied in developing countries which achieved best results. When mining technologies become more widely available, there will be only technology gap between mining industries and countries.

The mining industries continue to play their essential role in sustainable technological development to improve their performance, reduce environmental pollution to all media and enhance the quality of life within their operational work area. The mining industry aims at adopting and implementing innovative technologies through the usage of both mining and environmental technologies to create a better environment quality in mining industry areas, reduce negative impact to human health and environment, reduce water and air pollution, and land degradation.

Most of the recent developments made in mining technologies prove to be cost-effective and environment-friendly technologies. For example, Solvent-extraction/electro-winning (SXEW) is a hydrometallurgical process that differs from the traditional method of producing copper by milling, smelting, and refining. The development of the SXEW process helps in the low-cost production of copper from waste and raw ore dumps of copper minerals excavated from copper mines. SXEW helps United States and few other copper-producing countries very much. EESTECH provides environmentally sustainable technologies that have direct application in the world’s coal mining and energy industries. EESTECH’s Hybrid Coalmine Gas Technology (HCGT) is a recognized Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that uses waste coal and ventilated coalmine methane as a fuel source to produce cost effective clean coal energy. Clean coal technology offer solutions in the fight against global warming.

The development of new mining technologies helps to reduce production costs, enhance the quality of mined metals and minerals, enhance the quality of commodities using mined minerals, reduce adverse environmental effects, health and safety impacts. Thus the mining technological developments benefits consumers and producers, as well as nation’s economy, national defense, health and social well being.

The most developed and developing countries have already imposed environmental standards for emission, effluent, groundwater contamination, and hazard and toxic management guidelines. But because of weak law enforcement, lack of monitoring capability and skilled human resources, the mining industry do not obey. Hence, the environment standards must be harmonized within the developing countries in order to improve the environmental performance and management of mining industries.

Political and social institutions could exert enormous influence over the mining industry development. Political Institutions including central government, local government and public decision makers must creating international harmonization of environmental standards for better positioning for global competitiveness in mining product. Doing so will improve the corporate image of the mining industries as well as benefit the global consumers.

Workshops and training programs on pollution control and measurement techniques of mining activities, and development of network among mining partnership organizations should be carried out through internship and technical assistance in mining industries.

Technical translation services are crucial for companies aiming to penetrate a foreign market. Companies can spend a considerable amount of time and resources developing high quality documentation to ensure the usability of their products and a good customer experience, yet poorly translated documentation puts all that hard work at risk.

Translating technical documentation goes beyond simply converting words from one language to another. Aside from the actual linguistic challenge of translating technical data, there are also various cultural and social nuances that can directly affect the content being translated. Images, graphics and other non-textual content in a document are taken into consideration. This is because imagery and even colors that are appropriate for some cultures may be offensive or have negative connotations for others.

While choosing individual translators can be cost effective for smaller projects or basic projects, they often do not have the kind of resources and industry experience necessary to achieve the accuracy needed for large scale, multi-lingual localization projects. Technical documentation also follows specific standards which can affect the language and appearance of the document in its final form, which individual or in-house translators might not have the experience to handle. This is where professional technical translation service companies have a distinct advantage.

Working with professional technical translators that specialize in their particular field and are native speakers of the target language gives companies the assurance that aside from the technical accuracy of the translations, they will be able to avoid the pitfalls of inaccurately translated documents.