Enterprises Turn to Mobile Apps in 2010

There was a great article called "Enterprises Turn to Mobile Apps" in ZDNetAsia by Victoria Ho yesterday. (Some parts of Asia, particularly South Korea and Japan, have amazing mobile technology. It's always interesting to read the trade magazines out of that part of the world because of their different, and often foresighted view.)

Victoria got it right - mobile applications are important for business. That makes them important to secure and manage.

From the article:

Enterprises should also adopt a "walled garden approach", she said. This, she suggested, can take the form of enterprises pre-approving a selection of apps for users, or tying up with mobile app stores to set up a more rigorous testing and support process for the selected apps.

I couldn't have said it better myself. IT managers should decide which apps can be brought into the enterprise, because so much important data is on our smartphones. And an app store, like AppCentral, is a great way to do this.

Three Ways the Nexus One Will Change Enterprise Mobility

This month Google began selling the Nexus One. While a new Android phone with a beautiful OLED screen and 1 ghz+ chipset is certainly exciting, the Nexus One will bring about some changes in how we deal with smartphones in the enterprise.
1. The Way We Buy Phones Will Change
Traditionally, mobile phones have been sold through carrier-branded stores (in the United States), and sold into enterprises by either a) OEM sales teams (from RIM or Apple, for example), or b) came with you carrier contract. Google's decision to sell the Nexus One is a bold new decision.
Carriers are getting further decoupled from value chain, and are acting more as a utility provider than a channel/customer-owner. Expect telecom carriers as a whole to become more like ISPs over the next 5 years, and less like the phone companies they are today.
2. Google and Microsoft Compete for the Enterprise
Windows Mobile has done reasonably well in the enterprise. At last tally, there's something like 10 million Windows Mobile Phones in the US, mostly in the enterprise. Windows Mobile has made its way in the enterprise by natively integrating with Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft products (ActiveDirectory, Office, System Center, etc) that are omnipresent.
Between Android and Google's substantial affront to Microsoft's Exchange business with Google Apps, expect Google to move beyond the consumer market and into the enterprise, challenging Microsoft on their home turf. While predicting who will win is fully beyond me, when great companies compete, even better products emerge. Google will be challenged to deliver more whole products, while Microsoft will be challenged around usability and competing with Google's incredibly low prices.
3. IT Consumerizes Even Further
The Consumerization of IT is one of our favorite causes here at Ondeego, and the Nexus One further moves the enterprise in that direction. Back in 2005, Gartner said that the Consumerization of IT will be the largest trend of the next decade.
Now, end users have incredibly cheap access to great technology. They take this technology and bring it into the enterprise - like BlackBerries, salesforce.com, and now iPhones - and then this great new tool rapidly becomes a management nightmare. The IT tools of the future will be end-user accessible and IT manageable.

Gartner Names Mobile Applications a 'Strategic Technology for 2010'

Yesterday, Gartner named Mobile Applications one of the 'Top Ten Strategic Technologies' for 2010. Other technologies named for their disruptive and strategic implications include cloud computing, client computing (virtualization), and social computing.

We at Ondeego have thought mobile applications are strategic technologies for quite a while. Everyone with a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other smartphone now understands the benefits delivered by mobile email. Now, finally, other mobile enterprise applications are getting the respect they deserve. Particularly when combined with other innovations, like cloud services, social computing, and advanced analytics, mobile applications can be truly disruptive, lowering costs, and driving competitive advantage.

What Gartner doesn't mention: With mobile enterprise applications, it is important to remember that a complete strategy is needed - not just a single tactical mobile application. These applications have other management questions - what happens when someone loses a phone? What happens when an employee leaves a company or transfers workgroups? Most importantly, how do you provision these applications onto (potentially) hundreds or thousands of isolated devices?

Ondeego Selected to Present at MobiTechFest Americas!

Ondeego is among the 16 companies that have been chosen to present to investors and industry executives at Investorfest Media's MobiTechFest 2009 conference at the Sun Microsystems Conference Center in Santa Clara, CA on October 27.

More than 120 of the mobility industry's top investors, innovators and executives will attend the conference. The event focuses on bringing together professionals from related disciplines to showcase the most promising innovations from the mobile and WiFi communications industry to a group of leading investors, including partners from Storm Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and other notable venture firms.

"We are very impressed with both the number and quality of submissions we received for MobiTechFest Americas. This is a showcase of the latest technology being developed in the mobility industry, and the event is a must-attend for these innovative companies and the top investors in the field," said Investorfest Media founder Gopan Madathil. "We are pleased to select Ondeego from a list of more than 50 companies that submitted to present at this exciting conference."

For more information, see the press release.

Ondeego at Mobilize09!

Ondeego will be at Mobilize09's LaunchPad Event on September 10th. We will be launching our new product, AppCentral. (AppCentral is not on the website yet. It is in stealth until it launches.)

Please come out and support us, and please, vote for Ondeego!

Branded E2C Portals: the Next Phase of Branded Mobile Applications

Branded mobile applications can be much more than simple games or brand building exercises. They can truly be services, driving loyalty, customer service, and revenue.

Because you’re reading this, you probably know that branded mobile applications have exploded as an interactive marketing tool in the last 18 months. While this can be primarily attributed to the iPhone and the success brands have had in the App Store (see Kraft’s iFood Assistant and Zippo’s Zippo Lighter), other factors, such as the rise of smartphones, the growing prominence of pull marketing, and increasing consumer awareness of mobile internet services have all played a big part in branded apps’ growth. However, these entertainment-only mobile applications are only the tip of the iceberg in mobile applications for brands – smartphones are ubiquitous, always carried, internet connected computers, and they can be used for a lot more than just games.

Branded mobile applications can move beyond simple brand-building exercises in the newest of new media into customer experience facilitators, offering services of true utility to the consumer. This new breed of mobile applications includes more functionality than the previous generation of branded mobile apps.

The new breed of mobile apps will be applications that help consumers use products and services. For instance, applications from pharmaceutical companies that drive compliance, applications from retailers that function as enhanced loyalty cards, and applications from airlines and travel companies that provide mobile customer service portals. These new services will take advantage of the unique features of mobile: personalization, ubiquity, and context-awareness.

Personalization

Bill Drummy, CEO of Heartbeat Digital says here (it's all Flash but go to "Who We Are") that “there is something inherently more intimate about a digital relationship than any other media.” I agree, and I would add that mobile experiences are inherently more intimate than other digital experiences. Mobile is a uniquely personal medium – only one person uses each mobile phone. As such, mobile experiences can be uniquely personalized to the user, offering them quick access to the services that interest them the most.

Ubiquity

The mobile phone is a modern essential. Research firm StudyLogic found 84% of professionals check their smartphone before going to sleep and immediately upon waking up. The device is so essential, 87% of professionals reported bringing it into the bedroom. (Sadly, the study was lacking statistics about how professionals’ significant others felt about this.) 35% of smartphone users even picked their mobile phone over their spouse, if forced to choose. The mobile device is a perfect way to connect consumers with frequently used services like health care information. People carry their phones places that laptops or web services can never go – like directly into a store or during air travel lay-overs.

Context Aware

Today’s mobile phone is a device that can understand context. Unlike Flash sites or some of the desktop experiences marketers use, the mobile application can understand if your consumer is standing in a store, on vacation, or at home. Using this information, different messages can be delivered depending on the location of the user. For example, consumers passing by a store can receive promotions personalized to their shopping habits, or travelers in an airport can receive customer care directions specific to where they are. While so much marketing is context independent, location-based services can achieve a level of understanding intention on par with paid search.

Conclusion

Branded mobile applications are a new way for brands to directly communicate with consumers. Rather than just games or search functions, they offer a new channel to give narrowly targeted services to consumers. Brands should embrace this channel for more than just trivial apps – the right mobile application can drive sales, market share, and customer satisfaction.

Fragmentation Stifles Innovation in Mobile and It's Here to Stay

Kenan Wang


There's a concept that we at Ondeego call the Mobility Barrier. The Mobility Barrier is our name for all the issues that prevent companies or individual developers from creating mobile applications. It is the reason that innovation in mobile hasn't hit the point of inflection, where growth becomes exponential. Right now innovation in mobile has largely been linear (with the notable exception of the iPhone). Up until a couple years ago a select group of people from the carriers or the handset manufacturers provided almost all the innovation (primarily in the form of new devices and features) in the mobile space up. "Apple has fundamentally changed the industry from a focus on hardware to a focus on software and content," says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at consultancy Gartner (IT). In response the major players in the mobile industry - the carriers, platform vendors, and handset manufacturers - are showing a willingness to work with outside groups particularly ISVs (check out the 100 Million Club http://www.visionmobile.com/research.php#The-100-million-club) to drive innovation through software and content. However, the Mobile Barrier still prevents the everyday developer from contributing much to the mobile space outside of the iPhone app store. What will change things is when the economics change so that the everyday developer can contribute to innovation too.

One lesson that Mobile can learn from the recent Web movement is that innovation is largely a product of economics. When making websites became easy and cheap enough to make, so that businesses and everyday people could contribute- that's when the web took off.

The potential of HTML to create graphically attractive web-sites and the ease with which these sites could be accessed through the new generations of web-browsers opened the Web to whole new groups. Until now, the Web had served two main communities - the scientific community (accessing on-line documentation) and a wider 'netizens' (net citizens) community (accessing e-mail and news-group facilities). Now commercial web-sites began their proliferation, followed at a short distance by local school/club/family sites. These developments were accelerated by the appearance of ever-more powerful (and cheap) personal computers (which increased both the number of netizens and the potential market for businesses) and by the increase in capacity of the communications infrastructure. The Web now exploded.

Griffiths, R. T. "Internet for Historians, History of the Internet: The Development of the Internet."

What we see is that the Mobility Barrier is preventing the supply of mobile apps from meeting the latent demand for mobile apps - there is a gap in innovation. In a study by IBM, “89 percent said they would like a higher level of personalization through the ability to pick and mix applications, services and other characteristics of the handset such as form factors and designs. Moreover, 81 percent would switch to a provider that offered greater choice for customization.”
http://www.telecommagazine.com/international/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4564

Furthermore, a detailed look at the behavior of app phone users and non-app phone users shows promising signs of the potential for mobile innovation. http://www.gravitytank.com/apps/#

There are three main layers to the Mobility Barrier. One layer is technical issues. The second layer is business issues. The third layer is the lack of understanding of the mobile space. All of these layers are interconnected and affect each other; however, it's possible to take one area as the focus of our discussion to drive our analysis of the problem. Today we will talk about the technical issues blocking mobile innovation, particularly fragmentation.

Damith C. Rajapakse, from the National University of Singapore, School of Computing, has a superb article discussing Device Fragmentation. Rajapakse describes fragmentation as "the inability to 'write once and run anywhere'." He breaks down the reasons for fragmentation as

-"Hardware diversity, such as differences in screen parameters (size, color depth, orientation, aspect ratio), memory size (heap, persistent), processing power, input mode (keyboard, touch screen, etc.), presence of additional hardware (camera, voice recorder), and connectivity options (bluetooth, IR, GPRS, etc.).

Software diversity:
-Platform diversity, such as differences in platform/OS (Symbian, Nokia OS, RIM OS, Apple OS X, PalmOS, Mobile Linux, Android, BREW,etc.), API standards (MIDP 1.0, MIDP 2.0, etc.), optional APIs, proprietary APIs, variations in access to hardware (e.g., fullscreen support, access to local storage), and differences in multimedia support (e.g., codecs), maximum binary size allowed, etc.

-Implementation diversity, such as quirks of implementing standards (different interpretations of the standards, bugs, etc.). Incideentally, fragmentation resulting from implementation bugs/quirks is one of the most tiresome type of fragmentations, according to practitioners.

-Feature variations, such as light version vs full version

User-preference diversity, in aspects such as in language, style, etc., or accessibility requirements

Environmental diversity, such as diversity in the deployment infrastructure (e.g., branding by carrier, compatibility requirements of the carrier backend APIs, gateway characteristics, opened ports, restrictions on access to outside the network etc.), locale, local standards."

Each of these separate issues don't just add to the problem, they multiply it. We as application developers have thousands and thousands of possible variations (Rajapakse calls them Operating Contexts or OCs) to worry about. The problem is big.

Rajapakse further classifies these issues into two types of diversity:

"Essential diversity: This is the diversity that differentiates a product/service in some useful manner. This kind of diversity is intentional and often unavoidable. For example, users will continue to differ in their preferred size for a device, and the device manufacturers will continue to differentiate the devices in terms of size.

Accidental diversity: This is the diversity that - does not serve any useful purpose, is often introduced unintentionally, and is often avoidable. For example, diversity due to API implementation bugs/quirks is unintentional, avoidable, and does not serve any useful purpose"

He states that essential diversity is here to stay and will only get worse as the additional features and capabilities are added to different devices. This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption. Because each person treats and uses their mobile device so differently no hardware or feature standardization, like what has happened with PCs, is likely. Two factors contributing to increased essential diversity are:

" Desktop-class mobile applications: As devices become more capable, there is more potential for feature-rich, mission-critical (and consequently larger, and more complex) applications to move to the mobile platform. This is likely to exacerbate the fragmentation problem. Specifically, it will increase the effort required to fit one application to multiple OCs.

Growing number of new device models: Even released applications will continues to fragment, as more and more new OCs need to be supported. This fragmentation may be hard to predict, or plan for. It also becomes necessary to identify OCs no longer cost-effective to support."

Accidental diversity can be addressed, he says. Better standards would go a long way to help. However he accurately points out that the major mobile players - Carriers, Device Manufacturers, and Platform vendors play a critical role.

I believe even accidental diversity has little chance of getting better in the near future. Some efforts exist toward promoting standards and consolidating the number of platforms. Things like the Open Handset Alliance, or efforts by Sun may help in the long run. However, with such a proliferation of platforms in the market, more platforms entering every day, and no pressing need for the major players to reduce fragmentation, fragmentation will only get worse in the near future, and will be slow to get better.
http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.com/2008/03/handset-os-fragmentation-is-here-to.html

Rajapakse also discusses at length the various ways of dealing with fragmentation. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~damithch/df/dfApproches.htm

We use what Rajapakse calls the All-In-One, Self Adapt approach to dealing with fragmentation.