Commentary

Helping to COPE with Enterprise Mobility

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Over the last year I have been quite a convert in the area of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as part of the Consumerisation of IT in Enterprise Mobility. It allows the Prosumer in the company to bring their own device into the workplace, increasing their productivity. Less training etc ! Mobile Weapon of Choice ;-). Though for the Company it brings in the areas of device management and security above and beyond any reduction in cost of supplying any such devices. Some would class it as a win-win and it has been for a while.

Mobile Apps Have to Have the LOOK!

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Branding and Corporate Identity is another part of the Mobile Application UX that will be important from 2012 onwards. Compliance to a standard corporate visual design helps to build a consistent look and feel for your brand, that you have already have spent time and money on. Now you must visualise the look that the Mobile Application will be designed around. Nowadays we can take a number of approaches, such as Paper, Pencil & Stencil and digital means. I prefer the digital way forward. There are a number of Applications that aid iterative RAD design processes such as Balsamiq Mockups, iMockups (iPad Application), App Layout (iPad Application), Mobile elements available for PhotoShop, Illustrator and Fireworks.

What to Build in Your Mobile Apps

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:22:00 EST

What should you always keep in mind when building your Mobile Business App? Mobile Applications should be available everywhere, though there may be restriction if Wireless 3G/Wifi is not. This may be because of geographic location or maybe restriction on the usage of radio signals. Personally I am a great believer of building as much of the Application in an ‘occasionally connected – always available’ model that allows data to be stored locally on the mobile device and updated bi-directionally back to the backend systems when available, minimising down-time for Application and the Information Worker.

It's the Mobile Apps Experience That Counts

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:18:00 EST

User eXperience or UX groups User Interface, User Interaction and Graphic Designs together that in turn aids, how your Mobile Application is perceived, learned and ultimately used. The key points of UX are the focus on real end users, the validation of their needs & requirements, understanding the users’ working models ultimately to design for a awesome user experience. Building Applications that use Native features will achieve high quality Applications with added value for the user. Follow Tablet and Smartphone Guidelines. For iOS it is the Apple HIG (Human Interface Guidelines), as these are there to advise and guide

It's All About Beautiful Mobile Apps

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:54:03 EST

Mobile Business Applications should help users get their jobs done, intuitively, effectively and efficiently. This can be achieved with a Beautiful Mobile Application, which in turn means a great experience and that’s no different from consumer to business Applications. Now that the Prosumer (Professional with Consumer expectations and knowledge) is part of every workforce, it is most important to satisfy your Mobile Information Workers with adequate, correct, and consistent information, in new innovative ways

Mobility in Business Is Now a Necessity!

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

If you have been reading my articles and blogs you will know that I am a staunch believer that the iPad is the Corporate Mobility game changer and enabler for the future and the Future of Mobility is NOW! I totally believe that the Mobile device is a tool for the future worker that can be unlocked with the forward thinking and design of bespoke business apps. Having a Mobile Device and never building Corporate Apps is like having a Swiss Army Knife on a Survival Trip and never using it.

Developing Your Enterprise Mobile 'iDea'

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST

In my last article I looked at the motivation behind and part of the iOS Developer's DNA. I mentioned that many great apps had started with a great 'iDea' that was either inspirational, formed by personal needs or to better apps that did not quite do it as well as they could have. It is very easy for the developer to get to thinking of how to use the technology first, but this is not a great approach and can limit the opportunities for applications. My friend Anne Skare Nielsen, at Future Navigator in Denmark (http://www.futurenavigator.dk/) identified the formula to be an innovator...

The iOS Developers DNA

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

I have been lucky enough to travel over the last few years and either attend or work at events that centre around the iPhone and iPad, one of which being Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, but also regional iOS Developer User Group events. During this time I have met many great iOS developers each with their own stories of how their apps started with an 'iDea' (sorry for the 'i' pun, could not resist it) and more... Why they got into developing for Apple iOS, along with their motivation and each with pretty good levels of success in Apple's App Store.

NFC and iOS: Will It Become a Reality in 2012?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

Lately there has been a lot of rumor on the web about the iPhone 5 and iPad 3. One thing that most people and technical loggers seem to agree on, along with more internal memory for running of programs and a faster processor is a thinner design and new innovative features such as the use of NFC (Near Field Communication). Yes still speculation until the time the next iPhone will be announced, which will probably be in June at Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference), but worth talking about in advance. As a quick example of NFC, think of something many thousands of us use daily, the London Undergrounds successful use of the Oyster card and beyond that card payments , such as Barclaycard's Contactless Payment systems.

Traveling Light with iOS

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

The world is becoming a mobile place and even if you are not a mobile worker in your daily job, you will want to interact while on the move, in your personal life. That is why the Smartphone, iPad or Converged Mobile Device as I like to call it, is a great success... It gives you access to everything you want in the palm or your hand. Some may say that tablet devices will become our day-to-day third device along with the laptop and the mobile and I would partially agree with that statement providing one thing...The Laptop is the new Desktop and the Tablet is the new King of Mobile Computing. I use my iPad whenever I travel as a replacement to my MacBook Pro, for presentations, document creation, spreadsheets, email, etc. It is such a delight now to travel light with such a powerful and mobile device. Take it from someone that has 10 years of business travel under his belt, mostly with heavyweight Windows Laptops. So what I decided to do in this article was to list the reasons why I think the tablet devices are becoming hot stuff and making laptops less attractive to leave the confines of the home and office. In fact this article along with others was created totally 'on the go' with my mobile workhorse iPad.

Looking into Enterprise iOS

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

Enterprise Mobility has a lot of benefits, such as improving the efficiency of a company's business processes and their Information Workers alike. If the term Information Workers is new to you, then a brief explanation is that they are traditional employees using corporate data in their day to day tasks, historically they were chained to the desktop. Now they are free and can become mobile. This mobile enablement gives a competitive edge to a company and a leading position, using such a forward thinking initiative. I travel into the City of London every day and have noticed more and more over the last few years the iPhone becoming visibly the 'weapon of choice' of the city worker, rather than having two devices, one the corporate Blackberry and the other the personal iPhone. A lot of companies are allowing their worker to bring their personally owned iPhones into a corporate plan, where the data and voice charges are taken care of by the company after the employee agrees to a usage policy (BYOD). Also I am seeing the chose your own device (CYOD) policy being lead by the Prosumers in the company choosing iOS. In the last half of 2010 I noticed a trend emerging of corporate iPad use, culminating one evening in my train carriage of four commuters within meters of each other, using email, games, Numbers and Pages on their iPads. Since then this has increased massively and become the majority in 2011 and it's my opinion that it will continue in 2012!

Apple in the Post-Jobs Post-Modern World

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EDT

While Steve Jobs deserves full credit for incredible achievements not only at NEXT and Pixar, I believe what enabled Steve Jobs to succeed at Apple was his application of the "Apple Brand" to the iPod. Apple Computer always had a cult-like group of followers who were willing to pay a remarkable premium for Apple's Macintosh line of PCs. Moreover, such people (and I was one of them) would not hesitate to vehemently evangelize the Apple vision and brand to any poor soul foolish enough to approach or befriend. For example, when I moved to New York City in or around 1993, I told a friend that I would simply not work for any company that had not chosen Apple as their computer platform. As a result I worked for firms like Ernst & Young (at the time Apple's financial auditor).

Yet several years later I found the burden of wearing the Apple "hair-shirt" too great and decided to defect to the world of PCs and UNIX and all thing outside the narrow little world of Apple. Yet the point I'm trying to illustrate is that Apple always had the ability to capture people's imagination and spirit and that this has been a characteristic of Apple that endured well beyond Steve Jobs's departure. What I believe is the event that unleashed the Apple "idea-virus" (to appropriate Seth Godin's most excellent phrase) is the iPod. Before the iPod a person needed to have a very very high level of faith and independence in order to join the Apple cult. To buy a Mac in 1987 I think the cost was in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. The number of people at that time who were interested in computers was very small. And within that small group, the number of people who were rich enough to buy a Mac was even smaller. And among that group of the rich, only a subset subscribed to the Macintosh Way (Guy Kawasaki's title for his book on the Apple brand and marketing strategy).

So the problems Apple faced early on never involved the brand itself, the loyalty of the followers, nor did the fervor or loyalty dissipate quickly after Jobs's departure. Rather, the issue was that when selling products to consumers, the "network effect" remains powerful and manifests itself even more acutely in consumer products than it does in business to business products. The real genius of Steve Jobs was to translate what was essentially a misguided approach to market expensive business machines to an approach to selling consumer devices such as the iPod and the iPhone. In other words, the entire winning strategy had been in place from the beginning, it was simply that the number of followers and the pool of people who could potentially be converted was too small.

One could argue that Steve Jobs was ahead of his time, and yet this misses the point. The vision which endures beyond Steve Jobs is that of how to design user experiences. When Jobs applied that vision to a market for business machines, he failed in every case (Apple, NeXT). Yet when Jobs applied his vision to a true consumer market (iPod, iPhone) his vision resonated and brought into sharp relief the difference between the status quo and Apple. Once infected with Steve's vision his iPod users and iPhone users could no longer defile themselves with "unbeliever" desktop, laptop, or tablet computers. So in my opinion once, realized and unleashed in the consumer space, wild horses cannot return the masses to a world where Apple does not thrive and grow.

The Mobile App Development Differentiator

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:18:16 EDT

The first part of this post explained why a good user experience is critical to the success of an app. Now, here are a couple of ways in which developers can keep the people who download their apps, both internal and external audiences, coming back for more. The mobile app development process can be a long one, and it can be made longer by waiting until late in the game - when the app has already been built - to bring customer feedback into the process. This is why it's essential for developers to incorporate user feedback as early in the development process as possible, even if the app isn't available to the marketplace yet.

Twitter, Cloud Computing, and Steve Jobs

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 04:00:00 EDT

An unapologetically random reprise of yesterday's Twitterstream in and among the executives, commentators, and other stakeholders in the Cloud Computing ecosystem...

The Mobile App Development Differentiator: User Experience – Part 1

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:17:00 EDT

The delineation between great mobile apps and bad ones is becoming easier and easier to see as the mobile app ecosystem edges closer and closer to maturity. What makes a great mobile app? Simply put, it's a great experience for the user. The best apps in the current marketplace are those that can engage the user beyond a mere day or two, and become the go-to destination on their smartphones for an extended period of time. In this two part post, I will discuss a real life case of how a great user experience leads to app success and explain the steps that developers can follow to enhance their own apps' user experience. For developers, extended use of an app is the holy grail. Whereas mobile app discovery poses an enormous challenge - one that developers are still struggling to overcome - it's really only half the battle. If a developer can not only get the user to download their apps, but keep them on the phone, they're cultivating a loyal audience that is more likely to pay attention to future apps that they deliver.

Steve Jobs & The Gift of Charisma

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 04:14:00 EDT

Zachary Woolfe writes in a local newspaper, “On March 19, 1965, Maria Callas returned to the Metropolitan Opera after a seven-year absence...(her) first entrance set off a wave of applause for several minutes. There were 16 curtain calls at the end.” Thus is “the mystical gift of charisma,” as the article's headline states. In the performing arts, charisma is valued. It separates mere technical brilliance from the sublime. In politics, it is dangerous. And in business, charisma will forever be known as “Jobsian.” Bill & Steve History will record the great business battle between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They're the same age, started their companies at the same time, and built great companies out of cool stuff they'd seen a previous generation invent. And they both smirk. The Bill Gates smirk seemed to be one of self-satisfaction, of a certain condescension. And it was uncharismatic. Sure, it drew legions of like-minded geeks to Redmond. But when did it set the world on fire? (The good news is that Bill, in his uncharismatic way, is using his wealth to eradicate disease and improve the lives of millions. Defenders of his legacy have no worries.) Steve's smirk always seemed to be driven by anger. Anger at a world that so often failed to have taste, at people who so often failed to push themselves to their limits, and at anyone who simply would not listen. And it was a charismatic smirk. It appealed to pirates and mods alike, and set the world on fire more than once. Greatness Fades, Then Returns Steve and Bill spent their earliest years, as I did, in the era when the US ruled supreme. We finished high school just as the American debacle in Vietnam ended and the American Dream seemed to fade for the first time. We entered college when Detroit forgot how to make cars, when the first Oil Shock exacerbated the initial decline in our industrial might. These were the days when Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter were in the White House, and Alan Greenspan was first toying with the economy. But there was something cool going on in places like Steve's native Santa Clara County, in New Mexico (scene of Bill's famous mugshot), and in untold thousands of garages and basements throughout the country. The Post-Industrial Age had begun, and was about to move from highly financed leviathans and labs owned by the likes of IBM and Xerox, to creatively financed start-ups owned by guys like Bill and Steve. Steve is just one in a long line of American innovators dating to Benjamin Franklin, and of geniuses dating back to the Lascaux cave painters, original wheelmakers, and paleolithic harvesters of fire. It's often been remarked that his closest contemporary predecessor is Walt Disney, and so it seems appropriate that Steve is Disney Co.'s largest shareholder today. Add Jobsian charisma to Disneyesque magic-making, place him in the corporate world, and The True Dao of Steve emerges. I think an additional, mucho importante part of his appeal is our realization that this guy would stand no chance of being hired by most companies. College drop-out, arrogant, not a team player, talks too much, mentions European washing machines when discussing computers, dresses different, probably couldn't tell you how he's leveraged mission-critical tasks around core objectives to achieve alignment with business objectives that drive customer value and achieve competitive advantage. I, Steve There are many people like Steve Jobs. Orchestra conductors and players, professional athletes, radiologists, physicists, philosophers, screenwriters, and comedians. Folk musicians, the folks working on creating life from RNA, and of course, your quotidian brain surgeons and rocket scientists. Novelists. Painters. Sculptors. A thousand other professions. And many, many worker bees. It's always a pleasure to watch bricklayers, car mechanics, and dedicated waiters practice their craft. It's cool to watch bank tellers (those who are left) and blackjack dealers effortlessly handle their money and cards. And it's always fascinating to ask someone during a tense job interview what special talent they have that no one knows about. Some people are operatic singers. Some are serious gymnasts. Some know every lyric of every Bob Dylan song. Some have memorized swaths of Proust. Others know every frame of Truffaut and Godard. I know people who really can name the vineyard of most any particular bottle of red wine. The list is endless. I have a weakness for Beethoven, Ravel, and Merle Haggard myself. Oh yes, and Maria Callas. And there are still some companies that produce insanely great products. Boeing springs to mind. The problem is, there are very few business leaders like Steve. There are very few who are so focused on every detail while bringing an aesthetic sense into the game. Even those who could not abide working for Steve seldom denigrate his talent, and never his taste. Thus, he gets placed on a pedestal because he seems unique in a business world too often defined by id, idiocy, hubris, and criminality. He is admired because there is an inner Steve (if not as talented a Steve) within us all.

Living in an Appy World Is the Only Way!

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:00:00 EDT

I wanted to use my article to tell you about some of the best productivity apps I have come across in the last year, which have really transformed how I work. If you are like me and constantly on the move and your Converged Mobile Device (SmartPhone and/or Tablet) has become your virtual office, then these mobile device apps could really helped you out, as they have me: # Evernote lets you gather notes, articles, ideas or presentations on your iPhone or Android phone and can then synch them to your computer. What makes Evernote worth the hype is the fact that whatever you note down gets almost instantaneously synced to the cloud. For instance, if you write a note on your iPad it will pop up on your Android Evernote or on Evernote.com and so on. This is very handy indeed, as the problem of transferring documents from one device to the other has been eliminated.

Thirty Years Later the PC Revolution Is Here Again

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:36:20 EDT

Thirty years ago today the IBM Personal Computer was launched igniting a new way of computing that empowered individuals and forever changed the way we work and play. In talking with some of the early pioneers, they knew they were on to something but really had no idea just how impactful the changes would be. It was much more than just an affordable piece of hardware that could run programs. The PC legitimized and demonstrated to the world how individuals equipped with a useful tool could automate a task, eliminate paper, even run a business. No longer were employees limited to what the company MIS ( now known as IT ) department could provide at whatever schedule was dictated. The fact that the PC was also open enough to standardize interoperability, peripherals and third-party applications enabled an ecosystem to develop and scale at an exponential rate. Aside from pure work MIS tasks, individuals also took PCs home for desktop publishing, educating their kids and early gaming. A revolution was born.

Predicting Mobility Trends

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Just over a month ago I spoke to a few colleagues on the subject of Enterprise Mobility and I went into my Evangelistic mode proclaiming that... "Mobility in business is now the norm and that any company that is not looking at mobilizing their workforce and creating Mobile Information Workers, will be left in the starting blocks, where as others sprint away allowing proactive business processes and access to core information anytime anywhere". Then out of the blue one colleague asked me what my predictions would be in the area of Mobility for the next three years. I immediately started to chuckle and said that it would be hard enough to predict the next 12-18 months, but after I stopped laughing I started to brainstorm my thoughts and predictions for the next 12-18 months ahead.

Rise of Enterprise App Stores Points to Need for Better App Services

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:45:19 EDT

About 30 percent of enterprises -- that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises -- are using app stores to deploy some of their applications at some level. As enterprises and most business users rapidly adopt smartphones and make them mission-critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor. These fast-moving mobile trends together are also escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

The Insane Growth of the Mobile Cloud: Big Data

Mon, 16 May 2011 06:49:00 EDT

Big Data used to be confined to a few big problems being worked on by small numbers of people—meteorology, epidemiology, nuclear bomb simulations, other scientific applications. Now a combination of ubiquitous sensors, continuous surveillance, and proliferating smart devices has brought Big Data into the realm of innumerable small problems being requested by very large numbers of people. Never mind the 600 millions of MicroSkype users and Facebook friends; think of 4 billion handhelds all streaming Sponge Bob or the latest Xollywood flicks. I just posted my observations on a very small aspect Big Data growth—the scene in the Philippine. Now I'd like to address the global scope of Big Data. A Boatload, in Layman's Terms On this topic, I recently heard of Gartner figures that estimate the world will need 1.2 zettabytes of remote storage by the year 2020. That's 1.2 trillion gigabytes, or 1.2 billion terabytes. At current prices of about 8 cents a gigabyte that's about $100 billion USD in storage, plus the costs to buy, house, and cool the processing power needed to support it. (Given the continuous drop in storage prices, that number could be half this amount by next week and only 10% of it by 2020.) Imagine slightly more than half the people of the world having a handheld device. Imagine, then, 4 billion devices, and imagine each user wanting 100 gigabytes of storage. Imagine 400 billion gigabytes. That 400 billion gigabytes is equal to 400 exabytes. Heck, we're already one-third of the way to the 1.2-zettabyte level! Hmmm... So a zettabyte is a big number, but maybe not that big a number. A report from IDC in 2008 estimated a “digital universe” in the hundreds of exabytes at that time already—including all those BlueRay DVDs sitting around, as well as data that is transmitted but not necessarily re-stored (think of a YouTube video viewed by 1 million people who don't download it). The IDC report also estimated that enterprise IT created only 5% of this digital footprint. Clearly, as I wrote in the lede of my other article, “the mobile web is on the verge of accelerating worldwide computing and bandwidth requirements to a degree unimaginable just a few years ago.” And I think Cloud Computing is the only way to tame this enormous data monster. Can we realistically expect to plan and deploy—and keep up—without Cloud's elasticity, fluidity, and metered delivery model? What Shall We Name This Baby? In any case, it may well be that we run out of names for these large-scale numbers in the lifetimes of some people alive today (if not the lifetimes of most of my readers). The current system ends at the yottabyte, just one magnitude higher than the vaunted zettabyte. It's already very difficult for the slow ones amongst us (such as me) to keep these terms straight. So I think that soon enough we'll start expressing these massive amounts of information in either exponential or binary terms. Instead of saying exabyte and zettabyte, maybe we'll say 18byte (as in 10 to the 18th power) and 21byte, or 60byte (as in 2 to the 60th power) and 70byte. Does anyone have a better, more poetic idea than this? I hope so.

The Insane Growth of the Mobile Cloud: Microcosm

Mon, 16 May 2011 06:34:00 EDT

The mobile web is on the verge of accelerating worldwide computing and bandwidth requirements to a degree unimaginable just a few years ago. Only Cloud Computing will be able to handle this growth. These thoughts occurred to me as I watched hordes of young Filipinos sampling the latest smartphones and pads at a local Globe Telecom center and the Power Mac store nearby. The World in Microcosm The Philippines remains a poor country overall, but it has a growing middle class and an insatiable cultural urge to communicate. Filipinos are known as the leading texters and most avid Facebook users in the world. They are also increasingly idroidberrypad addicts. About 85% of the country's 90 million people have mobile phones, and my observation is that people swap out phones here the way most folks swap out ballpoint pens. The percentage of smartphones is estimated to hit 38% of the market by 2015. In other words, there could easily be 30 million smartphones in use here within a few years. If each of these people wants to store 100 gigabytes (about $10 USD) worth of photos and videos online, there'll be a demand for 3 billion gigabytes, or 3 exabytes of storage. In the Philippines. What sort of numbers does this imply for all of Asia? For the world? Getting a Grip And how is anyone going to manage this much data? It's spiky, too, and continuously growing. Think kudzu, except in a good way. Think virtualization of resources and metered Cloud Computing as a way to tame it. Three exabytes of storage alone costs about $200 million USD at today's prices. And that's hardly all the data that will be generated by IT in the Philippines by 2015. So who's going to store it? And where? It seems that the more local a datacenter, the better. Latency and other performance issues come into play. And governments are just not comfortable having anything stored offshore. I can see more legislation to this effect throughout the world as politicians wake up to this issue. The year 2015 is not an abstract concept; it falls within the term of current Philippine President Benigno Aquino III. Those exabytes are already accumulating, by the way. If there are exabytes in the Philippines, that means there are dozens and hundreds of exabytes in China, India, Europe, and maybe even the good old USA. Who's going to get a grip on all of this, and how?

What I Am Expecting for the iPhone 5

Fri, 06 May 2011 10:00:00 EDT

I thought I would get the iThain's iPhone Crystal Ball out again, polish it up and gaze a few months ahead towards the end of 2011. First of all I have to say that I do not think we will see the device until the latter half of this year, maybe just before the end of the year holidays would not be a total surprise. I believe the reason for this will not because of component supply issues, but due to the fact that it has only been on release within Verizon for a few months. This would be a break from the norm, of the usual yearly cycles of updates for the iPhone, but this will not effect the hype and demand! Now I have said that, I am also thinking that the iPhone 5 will be such a great leap forward that the delay will be Apple's way to make sure enough there is enough supply to satisfy the demand when it hits the streets. I do expect that we will get some hints during WWDC, though Apple have said outright that this year's WWDC will not be a platform for any hardware launches. OK, my iPhone Crystal ball has now booted up, so here are the things I would like to see happen for the iPhone 5…

Cisco Is Killing the Flip! WFT? Save the Flip!

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:23:00 EDT

Everyone, even Cisco CEO John Chambers, agrees that it's time Cisco got back to being a plumber. Time to rid itself of all its consumerish pretensions. This would also be a great time to shed its image-oriented TV commercial barrage that positions the company somewhere between the UNICEF and Mother Teresa. But surely, and I will call you surely when I want, its brainstorm to kill the Flip cam will be a PR disaster. Anyone who's ever used a Flip cam has loved it. The Flip is the easiest piece of machinery I've encountered since my six-transistor Japanese transistor radio in 1962. It has brought me similar joy to this radio as well. Word is that the iPhone and Droid phones have killed the Flip. I hope not. I have a Samsung Droid phone; its cam and video suck. It's worth it to me to carry the extra piece of plastic around, ie, to carry the Flip around. Mr. Chambers' decision to de-diversify seems to have been made rather hastily, even as it's clearly the right decision. But I cannot believe that Cisco did its due diligence in finding a buyer for the Flip business. Maybe it did. But the company needs to go public with this information, and go public with it now. Today. By sunset in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, I have no choice to scream...SAVE THE FLIP!

Mobile Enablement Presents Challenges and Opportunities

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EDT

The best way to facilitate mobile enablement projects is with focused, goal oriented, up-front planning that doesn’t underestimate the complexity of the process, especially when dealing with traditional data integration techniques. Mobile adoption rates are on the rise and if market reports are any indication, growth rates aren’t slowing down anytime soon. Consumers and employees alike are the driving forces behind mobile adoption spurred by the evolution in mobile device capabilities along with the speed of mobile networks.

Building the iOS Application

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 09:20:45 EST

Welcome to article number 6 in my series of 8, covering the creation of an Enterprise iOS application using the Sybase Unwired Platform, with the ability to synchronize data. So far I have covered the overview of a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) and the benefits it brings to Enterprise Mobility Projects. I have also covered basic synchronization and the concept & creation of the abstraction of data from devices by the Mobile Business Object (MBO). Lastly I mentioned how the Sybase Unwired Platform could create an Object-API Wrapper of Objective-C (for iSurvey) to access the data and manage synchronization etc... and now lets see an overview of how we can use it to build an application.

M-Lifestyle Is Now a Reality

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:32:48 EST

Mobile applications and the Mobile Web are now part of our lifestyle, it is a fact. Ask yourself... Could you think of not having your device at hand 24x7? Now, I am not suggesting that folks are addicted to their devices, as addiction suggests 'total dependency, to the detriment of everything else', but the line is getting very blurred for the most of us that interact with mobile systems whilst mobile. Thankfully the majority of mobile users do not go that far and the fact that the benefits of the Mobile Lifestyle we all enjoy, totally enhance our daily lives. This is not specific to any age range either, young and old now have a huge range of services and power at their fingertips.

Obama Endorses the Value of U.S. Social Technologies

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 09:00:00 EST

"We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living." With this one sentence, President Barack Obama ushered in once and for all the Age of Sociotechnology, the age that recognizes the importance of the interaction between people and technology in both workplaces and society.

Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USA

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:45:00 EST

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future.

Common Enterprise Mobility Hurdles

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:15:00 EST

I have seen many companies use Mobility to create & expand advantages over their customers and streamline processes, increasing staff & customer satisfaction. Recently a Sybase Survey by Kelton Research highlighted that this year 21% of IT Managers surveyed are looking to introduce 20+ Mobile Applications into their organizations. What sort of questions should these guys be asking to help qualify their Enterprise Mobility Projects? I have 9 questions that should help you in initial discussions in 3 sections and once answered help to reduce any problems later down the road, before letting their users loose!

Book Review: iOS Admin

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 09:40:00 EST

During the Holidays I managed to get a copy of the 'Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator's Guide' from Apress, written by Charles Edge. If you are a regular reader/follower of my blogs and tweets you would already know that Enterprise iPhone and iPad is a subject very close to my heart. I believe that this has already started and is being accelerated with the iPad over the iPhone. So this book should explain strategies for iOS Deployment, Integration and Control.

iPhone 5 and Cloud Computing?

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EDT

I thought I would take a few minutes and think of what new features and directions the next iPhone and its supporting iOS could take. Now this is a little harder after what the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 has brought to the table and that we are only just using them both, but I will take a shot. With the new Apple Data Center I think that Cloud Computing will be more apparent for a iPhone 5 device. I believe that we will see as near as to a zero configuration device as we could hope for, based around MobileMe accounts. Though I am also certain that these types of devices will become more powerful in themselves.

Interfacing Mobility to the Outside World

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:30:00 EDT

1973 brought us the first hand-held mobile phone, which was the size of a house brick and did nothing more that make and receive calls. For many years the percentage of people worldwide who had a mobile phone was minor. Now let us jump to the current day... In 2010, the worlds population is 6.8 billion people and the number of mobile subscribers has surpassed 5 billion. That makes over 70% of the current worlds population have a mobile phone and it has now truly become a part of our lives, especially nowadays the Smartphone, which nobody could have foreseen in 1973.

iPhone vs. Android: Getting Over the Hype

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:59:00 EDT

I'm a long-time fan of Apple products. I've owned Macs for 20 years and an iPhone for the last 2. I also own a Motorola Droid, and a Google Nexus One phone. Over the years I've seen a lot of people convert to Mac, and even more convert to the iPhone. I've also watched as bloggers and the tech media drank concentrated Apple Kool Aid by the gallon in the last 2 years. These guys, along with the legions of Apple "fans", seem to have lost most measures of objectivity about the the iPhone and the iPad. So I thought I'd give business owners and managers trying to decide whether to buy iPhones or Android phones some of the major reasons to go with each of the platforms.

Great iPhone 4 Launch Day

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:26:38 EDT

So it was only two weeks ago in San Francisco, at Apple's WWDC, that the iPhone 4's launch date of June 24 was set in front of 5,200 Worldwide Developers (from 57 countries) and the World's Press, I was lucky enough to be their and take it from me, there was a very large throng of reporters and camera OB crews. For most of the countries able to launch today, the initial pre-order stock were exhausted in a matter of hours.

Sybase Blogs Application Due Soon on iPhone via the Apple App Store

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:48:54 EDT

It seems nowadays, that all large companies have an presence on the App Store with their own iPhone Applications. Sybase already has the iAnywhere Mobile Office as well as the SAP Mobile Sales & Workflow Apps, but thanks to Sybase Employee Marcelo Palermo, we will soon have the Sybase Blogs Application, which will allow you to keep in touch with all news from Sybase, the industry leader in delivering mobile solutions.

Jobs Hints of Proprietary War on Open Source Codecs

Sun, 02 May 2010 03:45:00 EDT

Steve Jobs has certainly gotten a lot chattier and a lot feistier since he got a new liver. Right after he went public the other day with all the reasons why Adobe Flash sucks and why Apple wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot barge poll – an item the commentariat lavished billions of pixels on – he told the assistant on policy matters to the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe Hugo Roy to expect patent holders to “go after” the open source video codec Theora and its ilk for infringement.

Adobe Flash vs. The World

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:30:00 EDT

Does it seem like everyone is ganging up on Adobe these days? Apple and Microsoft have made some bold moves lately in an attempt to prevent Adobe’s Flash technology from transferring the same dominance it has on the PC onto mobile devices. At the recent Mobile World Congress exhibition Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer announced that the new Windows Phone operating system would not support Flash “out of the gate” and gave no indication on when Flash support might be available. Apple took the battle further when they nestled a controversial passage into their new iPhone SDK that effectively bans any Adobe Flash application from the company’s flagship device. This move certainly caught Adobe by surprise and has angered millions of Flash developers throughout the world. To add fuel to the fire, Steve Jobs, when asked why the new iPad doesn’t support Flash, said “We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology” and reportedly told Wall Street Journal staff that Flash was a "CPU hog" and a source of "security holes."

Sybase Study Reveals U.S. Consumers' Reasons for Using Apple iPad

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EDT

Just over one week away from the launch of the Apple iPad, Sybase has announced the results of a survey on mobile device usage, commissioned by Sybase and conducted by Zogby International. The survey, which was compiled from an online survey of 2443 adults with a mobile phone, 770 of which own smart phones, uncovered that the #1 reason U.S. consumers would use a device such as the Apple iPad is for working on the go.

Consolidation of iPhone Applications?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST

A few days ago I was watching the TV News in the evening and as usual lately, there was coverage of a company acquisition, nothing new there... But then following that story was an iPhone related story about great new apps... again nothing new (I'm always expecting those stories). The close proximity of the stories got the 'old grey matter' thinking... Will we see applications be purchased and technology acquired? How many different takes on the same idea can co-exist? Will this help the App Store?