Mobility News Weekly – Week of July 15, 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

In our recent CIO study of more than 3,000 CIOs, IBM discovered that 75 percent of respondents asserted that mobility is a top priority in their business strategy.  Read Original Content

According to Nielsen, Google crossed the tipping point in the second quarter with 51.8 percent of current smartphone users running some variant on the green robot's OS. The increase is coming mostly at the expenses of BlackBerry (8.1 percent) and Windows (4.3 percent).  Read Original Content

During Q2 2012 smartphone penetration grew to 54.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers. This growth is driven by increasing smartphone purchases: 2 out of 3 Americans who acquired a new mobile phone in the last three months chose a smartphone instead of a feature phone.  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.

Strategy Analytics forecasts that in 2017 Android and Apple iOS will remain the dominant smartphone platforms, but their combined share will have declined. A main beneficiary of this decline will be Microsoft.  Read Original Content

Android grew 81 percent globally in 2011 and Strategy Analytics forecasts it will slow to 22 percent in 2013. Apple is squeezing Android in many areas of the maturing postpaid market, while Android's growth across the emerging prepaid category is not fully offsetting this trend.  Read Original Content


Text-based communications are now surpassing phone calls or face to face meetings as the most frequent ways of keeping in touch for UK adults, claims a new Ofcom report.  Read Original Content

Samsung has bought the mobile-phone technology division of CSR - the British firm formerly known as Cambridge Silicon Radio. The $310 million (£198 million) deal includes patents to the firm's Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPRS location innovations.  Read Original Content
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Geo-fencing, GPS Tracking and SAP Enterprise Mobility

Geo-fencing
Have you thought much about geo-fencing and its value to your business?  To me, it is a very interesting feature of most GPS tracking systems and a useful feature when you want to track locations of resources, materials, equipment and other assets.  Here is how geo-fencing works - when a location-aware device (GPS tracking enabled) enters or exits a particular geographic area that is configured (in the GPS tracking system) with a geo-fence boundary, the device sends or receives an alert/notification.  This notification can be the trigger for any number of clever business processes that you can design.

How is a geo-fence useful?  You can view, in real-time, when vehicles, equipment, materials and mobile devices enter or exit a job site, depots, routes or any other geographically defined area.  You can see when a truck is arriving at a warehouse and route it to the first available warehouse dock.  You can let the job site manager know when materials are about to arrive so they can be prepared to receive it.  For security reasons, you can set geo-fences around job sites so any vehicle, machine or equipment leaving the job site after work hours sends you a notification.  This can be an effective anti-theft feature.

You can also use geo-fencing to notify customers when you are nearing their location.  Let's say that a service technician is dispatched to a customer's location.  When the service technician is estimated to be 15 minutes from the customer's site, a text message is automatically sent to the customer notifying them of the estimated time of arrival.  This certainly is an appreciated customer service interaction.

Another scenario is the arrival on your job site of a specialized piece of equipment.  When it is 1 mile from the job site, the site manager is notified so they can meet the driver and show them where the equipment needs to be off-loaded.

Another use of geo-fences is to identify all resources and assets within a particular area.  Let's say a service technician is dispatched for an emergency repair at a remote location.  It might be prudent to look for other maintenance or repair jobs that can be done at the same location while the service technician is there.

Some companies have service contracts to maintain and repair all customer equipment for a given period of time.  In these situations, the service organization tries to optimize their services and service visits in order to maximize profits.  I worked on a mobile project with a commercial HVAC company (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) in the UK that worked on these terms.  The first thing they did when they signed on a new customer is geo-tag all equipment that they agreed to service.  This enabled them to understand the exact location of all equipment under contract.  Once this was completed, they could geo-fence areas and know exactly how they could optimize service visits in particular areas.

There are an unlimited number of uses for geo-fencing.  I know SAP has a program in place to quickly determine the location of their employees in case of emergencies.  SAP wants to be able to support their employees in times of emergencies and they can set geo-fences around particular areas to quickly see who is there.  I don't believe they are using GPS tracking in these cases - I think they just have a way to see who is in a particular area based on schedules, home and office locations.

The military uses geo-fencing to organize their missions.  Weapons have defined effective ranges.  Aircraft have limited ranges based on fuel consumption.  Soldiers have travel limitations based upon available transportation.  Are they required to walk, drive or be flown in.  All of these tasks and resources have limits.  Understanding locations, resources, schedules and limitations enable commanders to effectively identify and organize missions based upon these variables and timing.  In my mobile strategy workshops I call these "optimized intersections."

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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.
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Mobile Marketing News Weekly – Week of July 15, 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

Marin Software, a digital advertising management company, found in its quarterly U.S. Online Advertising Quarterly Report, that 18 percent of paid search clicks come from mobile devices. Read Original Content

Kiip, a startup allowing brands to promote themselves in mobile apps through rewards and contests, has raised $11 million in Series B funding. The company sells its approach as a smarter, more engaging approach to mobile ads, where developers can give their users real-world rewards for achievements in their apps. Read Original Content

Empathica recently issued a survey among 6,500 U.S. Internet users — a little more than half (52 percent) of whom identified as smartphone owners — to take a closer look at how they’re using mobile in stores. Fifty-five percent of smartphone owners said they’ve used a mobile device to compare prices between retailers. 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

The latest quarterly report from ad agency TBG Digital indicates that cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) on ads on Facebook rose by 58 percent compared to the same period last year, with overall engagement also up by 11 percent, a reversal of the decline seen last quarter. Read Original Content


According to a survey conducted by EPiServer, 47 percent of respondents selected Amazon as the coolest mobile or social affiliate program they have seen to date followed by eBay at 20 percent, and Shopkick and Wrapp each with five percent. Read Original Content

The mobile ad market in China is so small that if the top 10 ad networks there were combined they still might not be as big as the fifth largest network in the U.S. in terms of monetization power, according to Opera evp/consumer mobile Mahi de Silva. Read Original Content
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Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of July 15, 2012

Every week we search all of our sources and contacts for news and developments around HTML5.  I hope you find these weekly updates useful.

Now for the news...

The U.K.’s Swanify, specializing in cross-platform development using HTML5 technology, has been selected to develop a mobile app framework for IPC Media publications.  Read Original Content

Neil Goodman weighs the pros and cons of HTML5 mobile apps in this article “Thoughts on HTML5 Based Mobile Apps”.  Read Original Content

Games portal Itsmy has launched a cloud-based HTML5 gaming service for smart TVs and set-top boxes, enabling users to play games using a TV remote control or a smartphone app from the TV manufacturer.  Read Original Content

Micro Focus has developed a mobile app testing solution to enable companies to create mobile business applications.  The Silk Mobile tool provides functional testing of apps on mobile devices across multiple platforms including HTML5, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian.  Read Original Content

Figures from Nielsen research indicate that mobile app users devoted 58 percent of their time on the top 50 native apps in March 2012, a decrease from the 74 percent devoted to the top 50 apps in 2011. The time spent overall with native apps, however, doubled from March 2011 to March 2012.  According to eMarketer, the increasing functionality of HTML5 may close the gap between the performance of mobile websites and native mobile apps.    Read Original Content

Mobile tech startup bMobilized has introduced a do-it-yourself tool that converts any website into a full-featured HTML5 mobile site.  Read Original Content

The New York Times finds that native apps, designed for specific operating systems and devices, still have an edge over HTML5 technology.  “There just isn’t an industry standard way to deliver ads into HTML5 apps,” states Michael Finkel, director of Web product and emerging technologies. Read Original Content

Hunter Loftis of Skookum Digital Works shares 20 HTML5 mobile development tips along with an interactive demo in this article - http://skookum.com/blog/20-html5-mobile-app-development-tips/.

The Dolphin Engine browser (in Beta) is now the fastest HTML5 browser for mobile, with a score of 450.  Chrome and Opera Mobile have scores of 371 and 369 respectively, the highest for current mobile browsers.  (http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html)  Read Original Content

The latest version of the data visualization system from Panopticon Software supports a new HTML5 thin client for tablet deployments, enabling organizations to make interactive dashboards available to mobile users without additional software or browser plugins.  Read Original Content

MyOVS has introduced an HTML5 mobile web application suite for SAP HCM with a new UI optimized for all major smartphones.  Read Original Content

The Arts Council and the BBC released a new project, 60 Years in 60 Poems, an HTML5-based multimedia platform to appreciate 60 years of poetry in a new way.  Read Original Content

U.S. Olympic sponsor BP funded an HTML5 video site which highlights the life and training of Olympic and Paralympic athletes.  Read Original Content

HTML5 game engine Playcraft Labs has officially launched, and founder Martin Wells states he believes HTML5 will become the standard over Flash for web game development, as it is “accelerating and getting better”.  Read Original Content

Flash and HTML5 publishing platform Wix announced that users have built more than one million sites using their HTML5 tools in the last three months.  Read Original Content

*************************************************************
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.
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Kevin Benedict's Q2 2012 Mobile Expert Video Series

In case you missed any of these Mobile Expert Video Series the first go around, here is the list of video interviews that I recorded in Q2 of 2012.  Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
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Interviews with Kevin Benedict