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

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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/

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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/

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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
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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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