M2M in the Home and at Work

Twice in the past two days a machine has sent me a M2M message in my home.  The first time it told me that its inventory was low, and then asked if I wanted to replenish its inventory from a specific vendor.  The second M2M message alerted me to a mechanical problem.  In both cases it was my HP wireless printer.

Ericsson predicts that by 2020 there will be 50 billion M2M enabled devices.  Those are large numbers, but I can see the value in my own home.  I can just image the value in a large manufacturing operation.  All the machines monitoring themselves and reporting mechanical problems, maintenance or replenishment needs.

I can also see the need for any company that has geographically dispersed high value assets like trucks, tractors, trailors, tools, etc., to want to track them and to know when they need repaired or serviced.

I have recorded a number of video comments on M2M which you can find on the SAP Mentor channel on YouTube.  Click here for the list of YouTube videos:   http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-video-comments.html , or read my M2M newsletter, M2M News Weekly here, http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/m2m.html.

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://twitter.com/krbenedict

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analsyt, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles. ***************************************************

SAP Enterprise Mobility Podcast

One of the key messages from SAPPHIRENOW 2010 is that this is the year of SAP mobility. To get a better handle on how mobility trends impact the enterprise and how to track those trends on the SAP Community Network, Jon Reed sat down with SAP Mentors John Appleby and Kevin Benedict.  During this twenty minute podcast, John and Kevin explain the difference between enterprise mobility and point solutions and share their take on the SAP mobility trends to watch for this year.

Podcast: http://www.jonerp.com/content/view/354/55/

Newsletters:  If you are interested in the latest news on enterprise mobility, check out Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-mobility-news-weekly.html or Kevin's M2M News Weekly - http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/m2m.html.

Video Comments: View my ramblings on enterprise mobility - http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-video-comments.html

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://twitter.com/krbenedict

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analsyt, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles. ***************************************************

Kevin’s M2M News Weekly – July 14, 2010

Welcome to Kevin's M2M News Weekly. This is an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to M2M (machine to machine) and embedded mobile devices that I read each week. I aggregate the information, include the original links and add a synopsis of each article. I also search for the latest market numbers such as market size, growth and trends in and around the M2M market.

I believe that enterprise mobility and the M2M markets are converging. Both areas exchange wireless data with the enterprise. Both play important roles in enterprise asset management, fleet management and field services.

You can read archived editions of Kevin's M2M News Weekly at http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/m2m.html.

Also check out Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly and Kevin’s Enterprise Mobility Blog.

Please send me any interesting M2M news links, market numbers, events, case studies, analyst reports or whitepapers that you come across and I will include in my newsletter. Enjoy!

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I found this video by Vodafone on YouTube that paints an interesting vision of M2M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujk1cprLpD8&feature=related

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Cumulative global investment in smart grids, including smart meter implementations, as well as upgrades to the transmission and distribution infrastructure, will approach $46 billion by 2015 according to the latest forecasts from ABI Research.

http://www.fieldtechnologiesonline.com/article.mvc/Smart-Grid-Spending-Will-Top-45B-By-2015-0001?user=2373698&source=nl:28057

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Within the next five years, mobile phones, sensor technology, portable medical devices, and wireless health applications will play a larger role in connecting patients with their healthcare providers, yet many healthcare chief information officers haven't put plans in place to accommodate this surge.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/mobile-wireless/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224900533

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The global market opportunity for mobile health could be worth as much as $60 billion, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/worldwide-m-health-market-opportunity-could-reach-60-billion/2010-02-23

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The market for mobile health technology will reach an estimated $4.6 billion by 2014, according to a report by CSMG. mHealth is already a $1.5 billion market and it is expected to grow over the next five years at a 25 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate). If certain broad healthcare reforms are instituted, such as pay-for-performance, adoption could accelerate.

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/new-report-offers-insight-fragmented-mhealth-market

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The U.S. market for wireless home-based health care applications will grow from $304 million this year to $4.4 billion in 2013, according to a new report. That translates to an estimated annual growth rates of 96 percent in 2010, 126 percent in 2011, 95 percent in 2012 and 68 percent in 2013.

http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/home_health-38778-1.html

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According to recent studies, the M2M market is estimated to grow $19 billion over the next five years.

http://m2m.tmcnet.com/topics/m2mevolution/articles/91259-machine-to-machine-market-grow-19-billion-over.htm

********

A new fire safety product alerts deaf or hard of hearing people, via their cell phones, of fire alarms in public places such as supermarkets, hotels, shopping centers and libraries.

http://m2m.tmcnet.com/topics/m2mevolution/articles/91327-uks-fireco-chooses-wireless-logics-m2m-fire-alarm.htm

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What if my blood sugar's too high today? Is it time for my blood pressure pill? With nagging text messages or more customized two-way interactions, researchers are trying to harness the power of cell phones to help fight chronic diseases.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_med_healthbeat_cell_phones

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The U.S. Army is using mobile technology to transmit health tips, appointment reminders, and general announcements to the cell phones of more than 300 wounded soldiers. The mobile phone based secure messaging system called mCare is one of several innovative wireless technology solutions that the Army is deploying to improve the health of its employees.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/patient/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XRAP20EITORINQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=225701968

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Tracking and tracing applications have always been a big part of M2M technology, and it seems there are no signs of this market slowing down. Companies continue to introduce new components and products that can be used for keeping tabs on location, whether it’s tracking a vehicle, cargo, or something else.

http://www.m2mmag.com/m2mnew/news/articles/article.aspx?ID=8469

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Europe has 345 million energy meters, 254 million motor vehicles, 8 million security alarm systems and 6 million POS-terminals. Altogether these segments represent a potential market of over 600 million wireless M2M connections.

http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1493111

********

Ericsson is identifying M2M as a key component in the future growth of the mobile industry, driven by devices such as smart meters, tracking solutions in the logistics industry, digital signage, cameras, and vending machines which can reorder for them. Up to 50 billion devices are expected to be connected by 2020.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/352836/50_billion_device_connections_by_2020_ericsson/

********

Doctors have already been finding ways to incorporate the new iPhone 4 and its videoconferencing features into their practice of medicine.

http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/surgeons-connect-iphone-4s-facetime-videoconferencing-app/2010-07-13


***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict http://twitter.com/krbenedict
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analsyt, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
***************************************************

Incorporating Video in Your Enterprise Mobility Application

Video on mobile devices is powerful.  I started blogging about videos in mobile applications about three years ago, but at that time it was only available on Windows Mobile devices via a link to a browser that connected to YouTube or other video sites.  Today mobile devices take and support HD video natively.  YouTube can now be an application on your device, and with the new iPhone's FaceTime application you can have real time video (if speaking to another iPhone 4 user).  All interesting, but how can it be used by the enterprise?

I believe training videos embedded in mobile device widgets or in your mobile enterprise application can be very useful.  The videos can also be multilingual.  I can image a field service technician installing a new piece of equipment and having challenges.  He/she clicks on the related video widget in their mobile field services application and watches how the equipment should be installed.  I can also imagine the field service technician video recording his work in real time and getting advice from a distant expert.

A quick three minute "How To" video, that is run on your smartphone, could communicate what it takes six pages of documentation and 30 minutes to read.  I can see embedded videos being used in many areas including:
  • Implementation instructions
  • Customer service strategies
  • Product features and functions
  • Sales instructions
  • Business process instructions
  • Safety videos
  • Repair and maintenance instructions
  • Company policies on various topics
  • Best practices...etc.
Gil Bouhnick, Director of Mobility at ClickSoftware, recently wrote about using video widgets on mobile enterprise applications on his blog Mobilefever, http://clicksoftware-mobilefever.blogspot.com/2010/07/importance-of-training-in-enterprise.html.

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://twitter.com/krbenedict

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
***************************************************

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - July 8, 2010

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week. I aggregate the information, include the original links and add a synopsis of each article. I also search for the latest market numbers such as market size, growth and trends in and around enterprise mobility.

You can read archived newsletters here - http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-mobility-news-weekly.html

You may also find Kevin’s M2M News Weekly on the subjects of M2M (machine-to-machine) and the mobile embedded device market of interest.

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/m2m.html

********

Microsoft discontinued its Kin cell phone effort just weeks after launching a pair of Kin-branded gadgets with Verizon Wireless. "We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship Kin in Europe this fall as planned," Microsoft said in a press statement quoted by a number of media outlets. "Additionally, we are integrating our Kin team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from Kin into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current Kin phones."

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/microsoft-quits-kin-focuses-windows-phone-7/2010-06-30

********

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently stated that the computing giant approves 95 percent of App Store submissions within seven days.

http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/mozilla-submits-cloud-based-firefox-home-app-iphone/2010-07-01

********

Motorola will be split up the first quarter of 2011. One unit will be named to Motorola Solutions and will be headed by the other co-CEO, Greg Brown. His company will specialize in Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Network units, which includes wireless LAN gear, public safety communications equipment, and service-provider networks. This will effectively serve as Motorola's enterprise division, which requires a lot more integration work in a different way than its home division does, one of Motorola's claimed reasons for the split.

http://www.techeye.net/mobile/motorola-reveals-details-of-company-split#ixzz0sr0TyTBi

********

57% of applications on the Android Market are free applications, far more than what the other stores average. Most of them clearly circle around 25% free vs 75% paid, according to Distimo’s research findings. In fact, the only other app store with a share of free apps larger than one third is Palm’s App Catalog.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05/distimo-june-2010/

********

ClickSoftware is an SAP mobility partner and the leading provider of automated workforce management and optimization solutions for every size of service business. This newsletter is sponsored in part by ClickSoftware.

http://www.clicksoftware.com/

********

In the first quarter of 2009 more than a third of smartphone subscribers used less than 1 MB of data per month. This number has dropped to a quarter in the first quarter of 2010 as the number of applications and the utility of smart devices has increased substantially. That means about 20 million current smartphone users are hardly using data.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/entner-quantifying-mobile-data-tsunami-and-its-implications/2010-06-29?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

********

With Google's Android Market now offering about 65,000 applications, far behind the more than 225,000 iPhone and iPod touch apps in Apple's App Store, the company plans to fuel developer interest in the platform by introducing new in-app revenue opportunities like sales of subscriptions and virtual goods.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/technology/companies/05iht-android05.html?_r=3&scp=2&sq=google&st=cse

********

I recently wrote an article for The Enterprise Mobility Foundation, The Next Step in Business Process Optimization: Mobility. In this article I describe the enormous amount of work that has gone into designing and automating business processes and ERPs like SAP. The conclusion of the article is that as sophisticated as ERPs are today, there remains significant feature gaps, especially in extending business processes out to the mobile workforce.

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2010/07/completing-field-force-automation.html

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RIM's BlackBerry devices control 35 percent of the U.S. market, compared with 28 percent for the iPhone and 9 percent for Android, according to the Nielsen Co., a research firm. But the numbers belie a significant shift as RIM's market share — which five years ago was more than 50 percent — erodes in the face of increased competition.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/blackberry_still_leads_in_smart_phone_market_97824479.html

********

Google will introduce Android in Indian and China. It will introduce various programs to enable developers of India and China to make money by developing applications for Android.

http://www.southasiablog.com/2010/07/google-is-looking-forward-to-popularize.html

********

Remember the stylus? The handy little hard plastic faux pen used to write on the screen of PDAs, handheld computers and smartphones. They remain important to many field service processes today.

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2010/07/stylus-proof-of-delivery-and-windows.html
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Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has posted financial numbers of US $741.392 million for June 2010, up 66.68% from a year earlier. HTC is the largest producer of Android phones globally, and these results speak loudly to the success of the platform in the smartphone space. HTC is the producer of many of the top Android phones — the EVO 4G, Droid Incredible and the Nexus One to name a few.

http://jkontherun.com/2010/07/06/htc-posts-66-revenue-increase-in-june/

********

Wireless broadband connections using LTE and HSPA+ technology accounted for 17 percent of all broadband connections in Europe at the end of 2009, and 7.1 percent in the United States and Canada, according to Berg Insight, a mobile telecommunications research firm in Gothenburg, Sweden.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/technology/07nokia.html?_r=2&ref=global?dbk

********

LG Electronics is following its larger South Korean rival Samsung into the Android tablet market and said it plans to release the device in the fourth quarter.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20009674-1.html

********

Seventy-Four days after the iPhone was introduced at $600 a pop, one million have been sold. The Droid, at $200 has sold 1.05 million. The Nexus One has sold an estimated 135,000 units. By any measure, that's a total sales flop. Even worse: The sales rate is declining. In the first month, Nexus One sold 80,000 units. That's means that only 55,000 additional units have sold since.

http://gizmodo.com/5494406/the-nexus-one-is-a-total-sales-flop

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Garmin has been trying to establish a foothold in the smartphone market. However, the location services company has had difficulty addressing threats by free navigation services like those provided by Google and others. Garmin's latest navigation based mobile phone is reported to be seeing sluggish sales, with an estimated 20,000 units sold since the handset went on sale in the USA just under a month ago.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/44112.php

********

The largest U.S. airline carriers, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, plan to expand their mobile workforce equipped with handheld devices that agents use to check flights and issue bag tags and boarding passes. They'll soon be able to sell passengers items or get them to pay for oversize bags that shouldn't have cleared security.

http://iphone.usatoday.com/News/1855239/

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Gartner's new and complete 2010 Gartner Field Service Management Magic Quadrant report can be found, compliments of ClickSoftware, at the following URL – http://www.clicksoftware.com/Gartner.

********

Last week Foursquare raked in $20 million in venture funding. The ultra popular Foursquare, which offers a free application that lets people flag where they are, whizzed past the 1 million member mark in April and just passed 1.8 million.

http://iphone.usatoday.com/Tech/1853481/

********

The following links are interviews that I have conducted over the past few months with enterprise mobility experts and CEOs.

Mobile Expert Interview Series:

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/mobile-expert-interview-series.html

Mobile Expert Video Series:

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/mobile-expert-video-series.html

Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly archives can be found at:

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-mobility-news-weekly.html.

I would invite those interested in enterprise mobility to join the Linkedin Group SAP Enterprise Mobility, http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro.





http://www.clicksoftware.com/e86e075b-4fca-44c9-bfeb-4efcc978f416/knowledge-center-white-papers-delivery.htm
***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://twitter.com/krbenedict

***Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
***************************************************

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