eValid -- SmartPhone/Tablet Leverage Analysis

Summary
The eValid Patents are key resources of importance to companies involved in the mobile device space (tablets and smartphone) because they apply to the way in which web applications for these platforms are developed and delivered.

The Mobile Device Space

Among the ~5 Billion cellphones and tablets in the world, ~1 Billion are smartphones or web enabled tablets. The device counts are growing rapidly.

Apps (including web apps) that run on these devices are equally numerous. The Apple app store has ~700K iPhone and iPad apps (~400K iPhone and ~300K iPad). Google has recently (October 2012) tied Apple with over ~700K Android apps.

Major suppliers of SDKs for these tablet/smartphone devices include: Apple's iOS 10.n; Google's Android SDK; Microsoft's VS2010/2012 on W8/RT, and Surface SDK 8.0; Blackberry's BB10 SDK; Mozilla's Firefox OS's SDK; Samsung's variant of Android SDK; Ubuntu's variant of Android SDK; and Tizen's Magnolia SDK.

Web App Qualification Support
Most suppliers control/gate the entry of [web] apps into their [web] app "store" via some kind of QA certification, supported for their devices in their own SDKs. All suppliers (except Microsoft) rely on the WebKit Rendering Engine, originally developed for the Apple Safari browser and now open-sourced; Microsoft relies on its proprietary Trident Rendering Engine, used in the IE browser family.

Wherever the WebKit base is used, the above SDK's use test engines that rely on the Selenium browser-based Google WebDriver API, already a defacto standard and now a W3C Working Draft on the way to becoming the standard. Microsoft uses VS2010/2012's CUIT browser driver.

The existence in all of the suppliers' systems of support for HTML5 assures that even native apps for mobile platforms will easily migrate to full featured web apps.

Web apps need careful and thorough testing before being accepted for inclusion in one of the app stores. Such web application testing involves utilizing features and capabilities that are the subject of the eValid patent portfolio. Such capabilities include the ability to synchronize AJAX testing via DOM interrogation, the ability to test internal page content with DOM extraction, and the ability to provide detailed timing/performance data based on collecting fine-scale DOM-centric data about web page behavior.

Conclusion
The eValid patents thus represent an extremely valuable resource to any company involved in this technology area.