Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of May 27, 2012

In this edition of "What's New in HTML5" I seem to be collecting people's arguments in support of HTML5.  I guess it serves it's purpose of helping people make good mobile strategy decisions.  Enjoy!

Companies including the Financial Times of London, Technology Review, NSFW and The Toronto Star are moving away from native apps and putting their support and efforts behind the “build once” HTML5 platform as their mobile publishing platform of choice.   Read Original Content

By using features such as geolocation, offline caching, web storage, canvas and others, mobile web apps can hold their own against native apps, thanks to HTML5 and open web standards.  Video and transcript of the educational session, “How to build, distribute and monetize HTML5 mobile web apps” by Emanuele Bolognesi are available.  Read Original Content

HTML5 is the best platform for rapid game development available right now, according to an article by University of Texas student Austin Hallock.  Read Original Content

One of the benefits of an HTML5 mobile site is that users will always receive the most updated version of the website, without having to update an app each time there are revisions.  Another is that developers only need to create one version of an HTML5 mobile website, rather than creating four separate versions of code for a native app for all of the major smartphone operating systems (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows).  Read Original Content

According to spaceport.io’s PerfMarks II Report, the best iOS and Android smartphones ran HTML5 eight times slower than on a laptop computer, on average.  Additional benchmarks show that Android HTML5 performance is falling behind iOS, with iOS approximately seven times better than Android.  Read Original Content

There is room for all forms of mobile apps - native apps, HTML5 web apps, and hybrid apps, as the look, feel and functionality are rapidly evolving to be equal across the board for each type.  Depending on the scope, depth and complexity of a given mobile app and its intended deployment, any of the approaches could work, or an app could conceivably go through iterations that cross all three approaches.  Read Original Content

Mobile gaming company Tylted has launched a new HTML5-based game called CuBugs, the first in a series of HTML5 games in development.  Read Original Content

Diesel eBooks has launched a suite of new mobile products, including the eFreedom app, an optimized eBook Store for mobile devices built using HTML5 technology.  Read Original Content

When it comes to mobile, it’s no longer an “app-only world” for digital publishers.  HTML5 has become the default form of coding for many news sites, and according to the CEO of news aggregator Zite, “the decision isn’t a technology one — native code versus HTML5 – instead, it’s a distribution decision”.  Read Original Content

Noteflight LLC has developed an HTML5-based mobile music viewer for musicians wishing to view sheet music on a mobile device rather than on the printed page.  Read Original Content


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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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.

Mobility News Weekly – Week of May 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 and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly

The latest report from IDC says Android and iOS control a whopping 82 percent of the smartphone market. Android and Apple devices simply dominate with a combined market share of 82 percent.  Read Original Content

IDC has released new numbers showing that Android now has a 60 percent market share, while BlackBerry has fallen to a meager 6 percent.  Read Original Content

According to a report from advertising network Chitika, the share of internet-connected mobile devices has risen to 20 percent in the U.S. and Canada, a large portion of which are Apple products like the iPhone and iPad.  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/.

Smartphone sales will total between 750 million and 800 million units and reach over $230 billion during 2012, according to Richard Kramer from Arete Research. However, Apple, Samsung Electronics and HTC are the only vendors making money, he said.  Read Original Content


Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, said its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone went on sale Tuesday in 28 European and Middle Eastern countries, hoping to cement its lead over Apple’s iPhone.  Read Original Content

New York Times has reported that Facebook may come out with its own smartphone next year. Employees of Facebook and engineers briefed on Facebook's plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year.  Read Original Content

Mobile Strategies Workshops in Boston and London

London Eggs with Benedict,
Mobile Strategies Workshops
June 12th and 18th, 2012
This is the busy season for a mobility analyst.  This is the time of the year when I achieve my frequent flyer mileage targets.  This is also the time when I meet many new friends and mobility experts.  In the next few weeks I will be presenting three mobile strategies workshops.
  • Boston, June 7th
  • London, June 12th
  • London, June 19th (corrected date, sorry!)
In these half-day workshops I will be covering:
  • The latest research numbers on enterprise mobility
  • Mobile Analyst Insights into the Trends - what the trends mean for your company
  • Mobile Business Strategies
  • Mobile IT Strategies
  • Challenges
  • Recommendations
  • Q&A
Each of these mobile strategy workshops are small events organized around a breakfast or lunch.  The venues are small and the number of seats will be limited, but if you and/or your colleagues would like to attend, please email me and I will see what I can do.  This is the 2012 version of the Eggs with Benedict, Enterprise Mobility Tour. These workshops are sponsored by enterprise mobility consultants and/or mobile solution providers, but focused on research data, advice, education and recommendations.

I hope to see you!

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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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 May 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 and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

Sense Networks has introduced a pair of new ad services to help marketers and publishers hone in on their mobile audiences through its platform analyzing real-time location data from phones, GPS devices and Wi-Fi. Read Original Content

Out-of-home media owner Eye will next month begin a rollout of what it says will be the world’s largest mobile-enabled network of advertising locations. Read Original Content

According to the findings of the soon-to-be-released Q1 2012 Rhythm Insights Report from Rhythm, in-stream video ads are out performing online ads by 31 percent. 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

Newly released information from Google indicates mobile Web impressions publishers in all verticals except travel saw double-digit growth in the fourth quarter of 2011. The strongest vertical in mobile usage was Shopping, followed by Food & Drink and People & Society. Read Original Content


Stagecoach Group has teamed up with Everything Everywhere to transform how consumers use tickets to journey on public transport. The two companies have announced the first government-standard commercial deployment of mobile contactless transport ticketing in the UK. Read Original Content

Mobile Commerce News Weekly – Week of May 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 and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

PayPal has revealed 15 new national retailers that will eventually accept PayPal payments, as well as numerous agreements with terminal makers and point-of-sale software vendors that will significantly increase PayPal's presence as an option in brick-and-mortar stores. Read Original Content

Mobile online shopping holds the real opportunity in mobile payments. M-commerce is ramping up, proving that consumers not only like to shop via their mobile device, but also will purchase. Read Original Content

Intuit’s GoPayment is using geolocation to help small businesses determine local sales tax. The new GoPayment mobile credit card payment offering is among the first to provide geolocation-based sales tax calculations. 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

Worldwide mobile payment transaction values will surpass $171.5 billion in 2012, a 61.9 percent increase from the 2011 figure of $105.9 billion, according to a report from analyst firm Gartner, Inc. Read Original Content


A big jump in mobile payments is expected, but not with NFC in the U.S. NFC usage is still low in the U.S. and Europe, partly because relatively few smartphones and NFC-ready networks and terminals are in use, various experts have noted. Read Original Content

Apparently a factory reset will completely disable Google Wallet on some (and possibly all) NFC-enabled Android devices. Read Original Content

Where is the Mobile Magic Quadrant for the 98 Percent?

Webalo's Peter Price
This article is written by guest blogger Peter Price, the co-founder and CEO of Webalo, a cloud-based SaaS platform that provides an enterprise-to-mobile model.

This past week, I met with a customer who had taken the time to visit us at our Los Angeles headquarters. In our cloud-based world of enterprise mobility, this is pretty rare since face-time with customers is not required for them to get the business benefits of our service. So it was a real pleasure to have an opportunity to talk face-to-face.  The part of the conversation that interested me the most was when they described the IT/User reality of their business.

Their IT reality is a collection of in-house-developed applications (mixed together with some packaged ISV applications) and the challenge of operating and maintaining this primarily legacy environment in the context of today’s real-time, global, business operations.

Their business reality involves mobile users who require access to the enterprise information that IT manages in these applications. BlackBerry devices, iPhones, iPads, and Android phones are their users’ devices of choice and, today, those users demand the ability to do the things they want to do on whatever device they use.  No surprises here because their reality is also that of 98% of businesses.  Enterprises face the challenge of connecting a legacy IT world with today’s BYOD reality, which is different.  It requires a flexible, rapid, scalable way to provide mobile access to enterprise applications and data, and without this, IT will find itself in an ongoing pattern of creating a major IT development project for every mobile app required and that approach is neither scalable nor sustainable.

I recently read Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms and was struck by how different the requirements are for today's market, tackling our customers BYOD mobile application challenges, rather than those of that old mobile application development paradigm. As Gartner pointed out in its Magic Quadrant report, the programmer toolkits required for the old paradigm fall into three categories; native toolkits, web toolkits, or cross-platform toolkits. All of which are hard-core software development platforms.

Of course, these MADP tools (as Eric Lai of SAP/Sybase recently blogged) require the very best of software developer expertise – experts who typically earn $240,000 or more a year – and they are required for that operational type of mobility application.  These projects need to support field service personnel, logistics, and similar remote business processes (think FedEx delivery drivers), and often merit the very high cost of mobile application development because the business requirements justify the substantial resources needed to utilize traditional, complex, MADPs.

Today, however, the number of mobile-capable employees is expanding exponentially, growing beyond this subset of field employees to encompass more than 80% of the workforce. This new mobile user paradigm needs different types of enterprise interactivity, and there are very different mobile development requirements necessary to deliver them in this all-mobile-all-the-time/BYOD reality. Speed and affordability are not the least of them.  I’d describe these requirements as follows:
  • A great user experience on the device and a simple IT experience in delivering mobile apps to users. 
  • Users will demand the ability to do the things they want to do, so your “app development” model has to scale – it has to enable the high volume production of apps.
  • Given this high volume requirement, speed and cost become paramount, so “same-day” response rates and app costs at pennies per app are also prerequisites. 
  • Apps that support existing business processes found in existing enterprise applications. 
  • In large corporations, this all has to be enabled at the departmental level – IT cannot be burdened with all the responsibility because their to-do list is already full. This means the model cannot require $240,000 a year specialists; instead, departmental IT administrators, and perhaps even “citizen developers”, need to be able to use their skills to meet their departments’ enterprise-to-mobile app requirements. 
  • In mid-size and small businesses, this new approach is the only valid one because the MADP world is just, well, mad and a cost-prohibitive, IT skills-intensive, non-starter for all SMBs. 
  • Secure, robust, scalable, and available goes without saying but provided in a way that utilizes the cloud for multi-tenant accessibility while also supporting behind the firewall deployment if security requirements demand it.
When 98% of businesses need to satisfy the vast range of mobile application requirements of their entire, all-mobile-all-the-time workforce, MADness doesn’t do it. So Gartner, where’s the Magic Quadrant for the 98% of businesses facing today’s BYOD reality, like the company that visited us last week?   We’re looking forward to reading it. 

Do you agree or disagree with Peter?  I would like to hear your thoughts.
Join me on this webinar, Wednesday May 30th!
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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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.

Infonomics and Enterprise Mobility

Do you value and manage your enterprise information like it is a strategic asset?  In an insightful article by Gartner Inc.'s Douglas Laney, titled Infonomics: The Practice of Information Economics, the value of company information is explored.  I read this article with great interest and interpreted it in the context of enterprise mobility.

Here is Laney's description of Infonomics, "When considering how to put information to work for your organization, it’s important to go beyond thinking and talking about information as an asset, to actually valuing and treating it as one. This is the basis of the new theory and emerging discipline of Infonomics which provides organizations a foundation and methods for quantifying information asset value and formal information asset management practices."

In my mobile strategy workshops, I spend time with my clients exploring the value of "real-time" information to a company and the role enterprise mobility plays in it.  Laney's article takes it to the next level by treating it as a discipline. 

Here is another excerpt from Laney, "Infonomics posits that information should be considered a new asset class in that it has measurable economic value and other properties that qualify it to be accounted for and administered as any other recognized type of asset—and that there are significant strategic, operational and financial reasons for doing so."

Let me add some context, if you have a mobile workforce in the field and you know the following real-time information:
  • Location
  • Job status
  • Skills and qualifications
  • Inventory
  • Equipment
  • Costs (hourly wage)
Then you can make some important decisions as to how you can optimally schedule and utilize your workforce.  In contrast, if you don't have real-time knowledge of the six points listed above, you cannot.  There are significant competitive values to this real-time information.  Laney's article explores how you can measure that value.

Once you have placed a value on real-time information, then you can determine an ROI for developing and implementing a system that supports the use of real-time information.  I see this a lot when discussing mobile workforce scheduling solutions.  Many organizations simply do not have the IT systems in place that can support real-time scheduling based on real-time information (location, job status, etc.).  This is a limitation.  This prevents them from transforming their company into a real-time enterprise and effectively competing with companies that are.

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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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.

Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly – Week of May 27, 2012

The Field Mobility and M2M 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 Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

The new Cyber Navi GPS system uses an augmented reality heads-up display attached to a vehicle’s sun visor and displays the map and directions right in front of the driver.  Read Original Content

 A barcode app that assists users in reading what is written in barcodes reached 1 million downloads in 2011.  The “Bar-Code” app, created by a self-employed developer, provides a method to use the scanned barcodes in other software.  Read Original Content

The rugged “Presto” tablet used by E La Carte allows diners to view and order from a digital menu, and pay using the in-built card reader and is now used in 600 restaurants in the U.S. and worldwide.  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/.

Nielsen has released figures illustrating how consumers use their smartphones when shopping – comparing prices, scanning barcodes and redeeming coupons.  Read Original Content


Major Software as a Service benefits to mobile workforce management include:  Fast deployment, improved reliability and paper reduction.  A whitepaper, “Mobile Workforce Management Gets SaaSy”, is now available from TOA Technologies.  Read Original Content

The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina has found that the iSynergy and iScan electronic content management solution saves time and money, allowing patrol officers with in-car computers to access important information immediately from the field.  Read Original Content

Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly – Week of May 27, 2012

Welcome to the 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 and 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

New research from site monitoring firm Pingdom reveals that mobile web traffic in Asia grew over 192 percent from 2010 to May of 2012, from 6.1 percent to 17.8 percent.  Read Original Content

Vodaphone India has launched a “Customer Experience Center” for business customers, enabling them to explore communication solutions.  Read Original Content

According to executives at PayPal, mobile commerce in Singapore is predicted to grow ten-fold, to $2.4 billion, over the next three years. It has already grown 660 percent, from $33 million in 2010 to $259 million by the end of 2011.  Read Original Content


Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten is leading a $100 million investment in image-based social network Pinterest.  With 25 percent of all Rakuten sales in Japan on a mobile device, the company would like to see more development in mobile commerce.  Read Original Content

Antenna Software provides a complete cloud-based enterprise mobility suite that enables both IT pros and business executives alike to create and manage mobile apps, websites and content across the entire business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Antenna Software www.antennasoftware.com

According to Microsoft’s Greater China COO, the Windows Phone has edged out the iPhone claiming seven percent of the Chinese market.  Read Original Content

With the condition that Android for mobile devices remains free for at least five years, Chinese authorities have approved Google’s plan to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.  Read Original Content and Read More Original Content

M2M, SAP and Enterprise Mobility

I had an interesting call with the team at DSI Online this week.  They are a veteran enterprise mobility company, that integrates with Oracle and SAP, and they are also big into M2M (machine to machine) communication.  Any company involved in plant maintenance, enterprise asset management and utilities would benefit from being able to remotely communicate with machines in distant locations and monitor their operations for maintenance and repair requirements.

This week I also learned a new M2M related acronym, MBAN (mobile body area networks).  This is the acronym for wireless sensors that can remotely report on the health of the patient wearing them.  In a presentation by SAP's Mobility team in Rotterdam that I attended this week, they showed a slide that said Health Monitoring is going to be one of their mobile priorities.  Can you see the trend toward convergence of M2M and enterprise mobility?

According to recent studies by the FCC as reported by The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Medical Devices in Hospitals to Go Wireless published on May 24, 2012, an unmonitored patient has a 6% chance of surviving a cardiac arrest, compared with a 48% chance for a monitored (M2M connected) patient.  That sounds like a good ROI to me!

SAP certified partner ILS Technology has documented some good reasons for connecting M2M solutions to ERPs like SAP.  In an article, Case Study: Emerson Network Power, ILS Technology describes the requirement for M2M Monitoring.  Emerson Network Power manufactures the Liebert brand of precision cooling and power management solutions for data centers. The company provides cooling units, uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) systems, batteries, and other components that help keep data centers from overheating, and ensure that back-up power kicks in if there is any type of electrical interruption.


Large data centers are complex facilities to manage. The heat generated by the racks of servers has to be dissipated using special cooling equipment, and each device requires specialized back-up power equipment to ensure up time. Emerson manages data centers for large companies that can’t afford any type of power failure. The back-up systems Emerson provides are critical, because they can keep the equipment powered in case of a system failure or power outage, until the emergency generators can kick in. If the cooling and power systems fail, a data center could potentially lose capacity or even go offline.

The ramifications of an outage for any Fortune 1,000 company can be phenomenally costly. If a regional bank loses its ATM network, it can cost upwards of $50,000 per minute. Because of the high cost of downtime, Emerson’s customers rely on ILS Technology (an M2M solution provider) to ensure downtime doesn’t occur.
PSION's EP10

The equipment documented above can all be connected to and monitored by M2M wireless chips that can report back to EAM (enterprise asset management) systems and in turn can automatically issue service tickets to field services organizations.  See the connection between M2M, SAP and enterprise mobility?  The enterprise mobility solutions tie backend EAM, dispatch, scheduling and work order management solutions to mobile service technicians using devices like Psion's EP10.


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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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.

Interviews with Kevin Benedict