The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility - David Armano. By David Armano | 8:03 AM July 18, 2012 While the globe grapples with uncertain economic realities, “mobile” appears to be gold. Facebook is expected to announce their uniquely targeted mobile advertising model before the end of the month. Amazon is talking to Chinese manufacturer Fox Conn with ambitions of building their own mobile device to serve as a complement to Amazon’s considerable digital ecosystem of products and services. China itself has surpassed the US as the world’s dominant smartphone market with over a billion subscribers and roughly 400 million mobile web users. However, there will be blood as the business world pursues the mobile gold rush. We’ve seen this movie before.
In the early days of digital, the core behavior we needed to understand was that people wanted information at their fingertips and the convenience that came with digital transactions. Mobility is radically different from the stationary “desktop” experience. Mobility trumps mobile. Google’s GoMo Launches To Help Businesses Go Mobile. As was previously leaked, Google is now launching its new GoMo service, which aims to help businesses easily create a mobile-friendly website. The website for the service was discovered earlier this week, but the details sat behind a password-protected front page. Today, Google is making GoMo available to the public.
On HowToGoMo.com, business owners can enter in their current website’s URL to see what the site looks like on mobile. GoMo will then make suggestions and recommendations on how the site could be mobile-optimized. GoMo will also show examples of great mobile websites for inspiration and point to a list of mobile site developers who can help design a better experience. Of course, Google itself provides this service through its recently updated Google Site Builder, which it is happy to link to.
The list of providers can also be filtered by service type (DIY, Full service), cost and timeframe to build. 7 Steps for Building A Mobile Future In Your Enterprise. One of the major trends we have seen in business in 2011 is how enterprises are coping with the movement of employees to bring their own mobile devices to work. There are a plethora of problems associated with the bring-your-own-device culture, from security to application and device management to employee reimbursements.
This is an ongoing topic that is not going to go away any time soon. Research firm Forrester has come out with a roadmap of how to "build an operations stairway to a mobile future. " The firm outlines seven key aspects that will help IT departments prioritize efforts in the mobile enterprise, from workforce segmentation to how to handle multi-platform development. The main thrust of the Forrester report is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building "an operations stairway to a mobile future," as Forrester calls it.
Segment employees - Not every employee has the same needs. Does your enterprise organize its mobile policies? The Future of the Web: Mobile, Data Rich Apps Built by Everyday People? Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, told audiences today at the Web 2.0 Summit that the next stage of the Web will be building apps and mobile UIs on top of our collective data. Some people believe that a big part of that could come in the form of technology platforms that anyone can use to create those apps and UIs. Cross-platform mobile Web apps may be poised to become a big part of the future of the Web, but they just aren't as powerful as native apps yet. Cabana, a do-it-yourself mobile Web app creation platform first seen at the Launch conference in February, announced a big new step today that will make mobile Web apps far more feature-rich as well. It's called the Cabana Exchange, and it's an API marketplace that allows app builders to incorporate some powerful 3rd party data and functionality.
I'm not sure what to think of HTML5 mobile Web app authoring tools in general. Each of those is a good chunk of functionality to bring to the crowded market of DIY mobile app creation tools.
Rein in smart-phone chaos at work. If smart phones are a small-business boon, they’re also a potential liability. Not only do businesses who offer them to employees have to keep track of who is using what device, they're also loaded with information you don't want “just anyone” to have access to. (If you've ever had to replace a lost or stolen company smart phone, you know what a hassle it can be.)
Research In Motion Ltd. recently debuted its new BlackBerry Management Center – basically a do-it-yourself tool for managing three to 100 BlackBerry devices. It's free, which makes it an appealing choice for companies that can't afford expensive IT services to handle their growing arsenal of smart phones. It's also one more reason RIM hopes businesses will continue to use its products. Here's a first look: What it is: BlackBerry Management Center lets you manage your business's BlackBerry devices from anywhere using an online Web application.
What you might not like: The mobile work crowd is diverse. Mobile apps, sites trickiest to hand off. Of all the turnkey solutions we’ve looked at in this series – the various ways that small businesses can hire an outside firm or use a service that does all of the hard tech work for them – mobile apps and sites are probably the trickiest to figure out. Setting up a social media page may not take a very long time, but building a mobile app from scratch can be a difficult – and, if you pay someone else to do it for you, expensive – endeavour.
And given that a lot of small businesses don’t even have regular websites, there’s a tendency to wonder if going mobile is even worth it. For most businesses, the answer is a definite maybe. Whereas a lot of people aren’t currently using their mobile devices to find the nearest plumber or driving school, there is a growing movement to ditch traditional desktops for smart phones and tablets. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to establish a mobile presence without having to do a lot of the technical work yourself.