Posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Getting Your Business Ready For Mobile 2.0
The New York Times
An account executive who sells aluminum siding to builders needs information about inventory and shipping dates from the field. Using a Blackberry, he or she is able to access a mobile-optimized version of dashboard applications to collaborate with that information from the office in real time.
Meanwhile, a human resources consultant walking into a client meeting pulls out her Nokia N5 and logs into her Salesforce.com account for a quick track record of all previous communications with the client from everyone in her firm.
Scenes like these are not science fiction. It’s happening now and they are perhaps the first surge of the next technological tidal wave about to hit: Mobile 2.0. “I see it as an extension of Web 2.0,” says Ajit Jaokar, author of the book Mobile Web 2.0. “It’s really about the ability to harness the collective intelligence that comes from things like collaboration and social networking. It’s giving certain people certain information in a certain way and in a certain place.”
While the technological pieces are falling into place, it may take longer for today’s mobile culture to catch up. Most mobile users with Web access are not actually using it to surf the Web — only about 20 percent, according to Sonal Gandhi, an analyst from Jupiter Research. “E-mail is still the most popular application at 40 percent. Twenty-nine percent use their phones for travel alerts, 27 percent for directions, and 22 percent for checking banking information,” says Gandhi.
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