Field Mobility News Weekly - Week of March 5, 2012

The Field Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to field mobility that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

Geneq Inc. has released the SXPad, a full-featured, rugged handheld computer for GPS/GIS data collection that is built for mobile GIS users in applications ranging from Federal/State/Local government, water/electric/gas utilities, and transportation to mining, agriculture, and forestry. Read Original Content

Magic Software Enterprises Ltd., a global provider of mobile and cloud-enabled application and business integration platforms, announced its mobile offering has been successfully implemented by UK-based Cape to develop an integrated business solution that can run natively on any mobile device. Read Original Content

The BlackBerry PlayBook has joined Android and Apple tablets as mobile gateways to the enterprise thanks to the introduction of the PlayBook-compatible Webalo app. The Webalo app can run an unlimited number of secure, encrypted enterprise-to-mobile connections, allowing PlayBook users to access SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, in-house, and other applications directly from their tablet. Read Original Content

Since 1995, Syclo has enabled hundreds of companies in 37 countries and industries supercharge their businesses with mobility.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Syclo. http://www.syclo.com/.

University of Georgia researchers have developed a new method for determining where emergency vehicle stations should be located. The results of their work could improve ambulance response time for the 200 million Americans who dial 911 each year, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Read Original Content

NXP Semiconductors, the co-inventor of NFC technology, has created a smart washing machine that's NFC and RFID-enabled. The device recognizes what fabrics you put in it and then chooses a washing program to suit. It can read RFID-tagged buttons on each item in the washing pile, which tell the machine the exact fabric properties. Read Original Content

Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly – Week of March 4, 2012

Welcome to Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility in Asia.  Asia is predicted to be the fastest area of growth for enterprise mobility between now and 2016.

Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
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Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
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Also read Mobility News Weekly

Satyam Computer Services has partnered with Japan’s SBI Holdings to launch a fund for investing in information and communications technology companies on a global basis.  The CEO of Satyam states “With sharp focus on the future trends, we intend to go full throttle on investing in emerging spaces such as mobility, social networking, security solutions and cloud. Read Original Content

The Symantec 2012 State of Mobility Survey indicates 71 percent of enterprises are discussing the deployment of custom mobile applications and one-third are in the process or have already implemented custom enterprise mobile applications.  The survey was conducted in 43 from August – November of 2011. Read Original Content

A new mobile payment service through HDFC Bank has been launched in India.  The new service, Movida India Pvt., Ltd., is a joint venture between Visa and Monitise, and will allow mobile and online payment services via basic prepaid mobile phones. Read Original Content

Chinese Internet company Tencent is moving away from personal computers and focusing on mobile devices.  The online advertising market in China grew more than 40 percent in 2011. Read Original Content

India’s online insurance giant PolicyBazaar.com has announced a new mobile website to service a mobile customer base that has doubled in the last six months.  The company’s CMO states “With increasing mobile penetration in the country, mobiles are becoming the tool for accessing Internet.” Read Original Content

Mobile Expert Video Series: TPC's Tony Smith

I had the pleasure of attending a session this week led by The Principal Consulting firm's Tony Smith at the SAPinsider Mobile2012 conference.  They now have experience working on over 25 SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform) implementations.  In this Mobile Expert Video Series segment, I corner Tony and ask him some additional questions about their experiences.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Volunteer

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

Read The M2M News Monthly

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Predictions on Enterprise Mobility and HTML5

I have conducted several surveys recently where I asked people to predict the percentage of enterprise mobility applications that will be written in HTML5 by 2014.  Three months ago I asked a group of "big firm" analysts for their prediction and it ranged from 30% to 50% of enterprise mobility apps.  Yesterday I asked a person here at the SAPinsider Mobile2012 event and their prediction was 20%.

Last month I polled a group on Linkedin, SAP Enterprise Mobility, and 20 people responded with their predictions.  Here are the unscientific, but interesting, results:

Question: What percentage of enterprise mobility apps will be developed using HTML4 by 2014?

• 20% said less than 30% of enterprise mobility apps
• 15% said 31% to 40% of enterprise mobility apps
• 10% said 41% to 50% of enterprise mobility apps
• 15% said 51% to 60% of enterprise mobility apps
• 40% said more than 61% of enterprise mobility apps

Fifty-five percent predict that more than 50% of enterprise mobility apps will be developed using HTML5 by 2014.  What are your predictions and why?

SAP has taken a strong stance in favor of HTML5 this last month.  They are investing a great deal into their HTML5 UIs.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Volunteer

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

Read The M2M News Monthly

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

M2M News Weekly – Week of February 27, 2012

Welcome to M2M News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to M2M (machine to machine) and embedded mobile devices.  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.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

The University of Strathclyde has begun a $2.2 million project to equip cows with a "smart collar" that will allow their owners to keep tabs on them via cell phone.
The collar uses the same 3D sensor found in Wii video game controllers to detect shifts in the cow's head position. Read Original Content

According to Cisco, M2M traffic globally will grow 22-fold from 2011 to 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent. Cisco predicts M2M will account for five percent of total mobile data traffic in 2016, compared with four percent at the end of 2011. Read Original Content

Pedigree Technologies has released OneViewPOV, tablet applications for fleet management and field service automation that give field service workers a mobile interface that connects the mobile workforce and resources in the field to the enterprise. Read Original Content


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/.


China's M2M is expected to grow from $642 million in 2011 to $2.76 billion in 2016, with smart meters and smart grid a significant portion of the market, according to ABI Research. Read Original Content

AT&T will provide M2M solutions to Ice Energy, a U.S. company that makes energy storage solutions for the utility space. The company's energy storage systems are mounted on large commercial buildings and used as an alternative to high-power-consumption air conditioning units. Using M2M, the company is able to monitor and maintain the units remotely, as well as diagnose faults. Read Original Content

Billions of dollars are being invested into upgrading the United State’s electric grid to an intelligent system capable of handling two-way transmission of information and power, but its security remains uncertain at best, a panel of government and industry experts said. Read Original Content

Mobility News Weekly – Week of February 27, 2012

The Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly

According to an Aberdeen Survey of 240 enterprises mobile apps designed to help employees complete works increase productivity by 45 percent. Read Original Content

Business Computing World in the U.K. found in a survey that 73 percent of executives reported growing use of employee-owned technology is a top priority in their business, and 88 percent of executives state that employees are using personal technologies for business purposes.  Read Original Content

By next year the Army will begin a shift toward allowing some soldiers and Army civilian employees to use their own personal mobile devices at work says Army deputy CIO Mike Krieger.  Read Original Content

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 U.S. and EU5 markets, smartphone penetration grew at least 8 percentage points over the past year, with the UK showing the highest growth rate with a 17.1 percentage point increase, according to comScore’s latest report.  Read Original Content

A survey of around 500 Jaspersoft business intelligence users found that two-thirds of them have already deployed or now have concrete plans to deploy BI tools on mobile phones in their organizations.  Read Original Content

Mobile Health News Weekly – Week of February 27, 2012

The Mobile Health News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to mobile health that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

According to a recent Manhattan Research survey, just over 25 percent of doctors in the EU use an iPad for professional purposes. The doctors surveyed use it primarily for content consumption: twenty-five percent of their “work online time” is spent on it, looking up articles, showing online resources to patients, and so on. Read Original Content

Aruba Networks has released the results of a survey focused on the networking priorities of more than 130 healthcare information technology professionals. Of the 85 percent of respondents who said they are supporting physician and staff use of personal devices at work, 53 percent said that they are currently relegated to Internet access only, while 24 percent provide limited access to hospital applications. Only eight percent currently enable full access to the hospital network with user-owned devices. Read Original Content

GPs in the UK could soon offer patients free smartphone apps to help manage their health. One app that has already been tested by GPs and community nurses as well as hospitals is called Patients Know Best. Using the app, patients can have online consultations with any member of their clinical team, receive automated explanations of their results, and work with clinicians for a personalized care plan. Read Original Content

Webalo technology eliminates the need for traditional mobile application development tools and custom programming to provide in hours, instead of weeks or months, mobile access to the specific enterprise data and functions that smartphone and tablet users rely on to do their jobs.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Webalo, www.webalo.com.

To help eliminate potential patient data breaches on mobile devices, the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Stage 2 Meaningful Use has proposed that mobile devices that retain patient data after a clinical encounter should have default encryption enabled. Read Original Content

Ophthalmic imaging technology company Bioptigen now has regulatory clearance in Canada on a handheld medical device developed to give doctors better images of their patients’ eyes. Bioptigen is further developing its technology into a more compact handheld medical device that can be used with premature and neonatal infants, an effort supported by a $2.7 million grant awarded late last year by the National Institutes of Health. Read Original Content

Observations about SAP Enterprise Mobility, MEAPS and SDKs

I am attending the SAPinsider Mobile2012 event in Las Vegas this week, and have had the honor of meeting and speaking with many people involved in SAP enterprise mobility.  These people were SAP partners and SAP employees.  One of the distinct impressions I got was that most are focused on simply extending existing SAP systems out to a mobile user, but not focused on transforming businesses with mobility.

I attended a session on SAP's mobile EAM solution (enterprise asset management) yesterday.  In it they demonstrated how the mobile app integrated with SAP and extended SAP fields out to the mobile device. However, there was no SDK (software development kit) that would enable the user to customize the app for their specific requirements and projects.  It is basically a generic hard coded solution that extends SAP EAM functionality to the field.  There is value to that, but not transformational value.

I asked the SAP person if they used the SAP's mobile SDK to build the mobile EAM solution and they said no.  This seems very odd to me.  Shouldn't SAP's mobile SDK be robust enough to be used by SAP  to develop their own mobile applications?

When I was the CEO of a mobile application's company a few years ago, we had a MEAP and an SDK robust enough to be used to deliver all of our own custom mobile applications.  We then made that SDK available to our clients so they could use it in the future to edit and support their apps.  That SDK was built to be used on top of Sybase's iAnywhere solutions.  I don't understand why years later SAP/Sybase has not dramatically improved upon that model.

I am a strong advocate that companies should select a MEAP and IDE (integrated development environment) and use those to deliver as many of their mobile solutions as possible.  That doesn't mean you need to develop them internally, it means you can develop internally, buy off-the-shelf or contract with third party mobile experts to develop solutions for you - just insist they use your selected MEAP and IDE.

Today it seems that even if you purchased all of SAP's mobile apps, you would get a plethora of applications developed in many different ways and with many different development tool kits, styles and manners.  This is exactly what you want to avoid.  How can you support that kind of collection long term?  The TCO (total cost of ownership) would be high.

SUP can solve the MEAP issue if you can afford it, but there needs to be a standardized software development kit sufficient to support the majority of your mobile solutions, and that permits you to make edits and updates to your own solutions.  Mobile apps should not be held hostage to service providers or ERP vendors.

Through my many years of enterprise mobility experience I have come to realize there are many, many projects in the field that would benefit from mobile solutions.  Many of these projects are unique and their needs for unique data and mobile data collection require the ability to rapidly develop and deploy mobile solutions that may only be used for 6 months (the duration of the project).  Robust mobile SDKs should be able to deliver that.  Without a good mobile SDK you are again in bondage to a vendor, and your project based work suffers.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Volunteer

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

Read The M2M News Monthly

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Marketing News Weekly – Week of February 27, 2012

The Mobile Marketing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile marketing that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

Research firm Nielsen surveyed more than 20,000 mobile consumers in the U.S. and found a strong correlation between age, income, and smartphone ownership. Adults aged 24 to 34 showed the highest proportion of smartphone ownership. 66 percent indicated they owned a smartphone.  Read Original Content

A recent IAB study reported that 63 percent of top brand marketers have increased their mobile advertising spending over the last two years, and that 72 percent plan to increase advertising spending over the next two years. Read Original Content

According to the latest Mobile Audience Insights Report from JiWire, 80 percent of mobile users prefer locally relevant advertising and 75 percent are more likely to take an action after seeing a location-specific message. The survey also found that 21 percent of consumers search for a coupon on their mobile device while in a store. Read Original Content

Verivo is a leading provider of enterprise mobility software, Verivo helps companies accelerate their business results. Its unique technology empowers teams to build, deploy, manage and update their mobile apps -- rapidly and securely. Verivo’s mobility platform is used by hundreds of companies in numerous industries, worldwide. This newsletter is sponsored in part by Verivo.  To learn more, visit www.verivo.com

Groupon announced that its mobile apps broke records in December 2011, with 25 percent of all of its deals in the region purchased via a mobile device. The company saw over 26 million app downloads of its Groupon Now app, helping to increase its mobile user base by more than three times to nine million, tripling its figures since December 2010. Read Original Content

A YouGov study last year found that almost half of Apple users (46 percent) and 42 percent of O2 customers remember seeing advertising on their mobile device. The study also discovered that 88 percent ignore ads in apps and 86 percent ignore ads on the mobile web. Read Original Content

According to a new survey sponsored by AisleBuyer, a Boston-based in-store mobile commerce firm, a total of 60 percent of smartphone-carrying shoppers said they would use their cell phone to pay during an in-store shopping trip if it meant they didn’t have to wait in line. Read Original Content

Forecasters at PQ Media predict that the mobile and social media industry will grow into a $100 billion market by 2015, so expect to see many mobile marketing solutions roll out between now and then.  Read Original Content

Mobile Commerce News Weekly – Week of February 27, 2012

The Mobile Commerce News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile payments, mobile money, e-wallets, mobile banking and mobile security that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility News Weekly
Also read M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

It is no secret that many U.S.-based banks are in trouble. One reason for that are government regulations on overdraft and transaction fees that effectively zapped $25 billion in revenue from banks coffers. Mobile banking solutions provider Clairmail believes that mobile payments will be financial institutions saving grace. Read Original Content

New research from Nielsen’s upcoming U.S. Digital Consumer Report reveals that 29 percent of smartphone owners use their phone for shopping-related activities. Top activities among mobile shoppers include in-store price comparisons (38 percent), browsing products through their mobile Web or apps (38 percent) and reading online product reviews (32 percent). Read Original Content

In November Square had signed up 20,000 merchants for its payments product, Card Case, and four months later that number has more than doubled to over 40,000 businesses using the loyalty and mobile wallet platform. Read Original Content

Tech Endeavour structures a mobile application as a multi-layered application consisting of user experience, business, and data layers. The mobile application development process starts with definition of the mobile application, understanding key components, learning scenarios where it will be used, learning key patterns and technology considerations as well as identifying specific scenarios such as deployment, power usage and synchronization.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Tech Endeavour, http://www.techendeavour.com/.

Vodafone is set to roll out mobile payments with Visa. Vodafone, which has 400 million customers in more than thirty countries, is working with Visa to introduce a global Vodafone Mobile Wallet. Read Original Content

Moneto is bringing NFC chips to standard MicroSD card slots and using an Android app to add in basic NFC payment capability to almost any Android phone. Read Original Content

Finnish R&D company's HearMeFeelMe project is focused on how NFC could be used to improve the way elderly and visually impaired people interact with the world around them, including a system that allows product information to be recorded on an NFC tag and read back to the user via an NFC phone. Read Original Content