Mobile Device Management: How to Deliver Business Data to iPads and iPhones

You get a request every day it seems from executives who want IT to give them the ability to download critical business data to their iPads or iPhones. These executives don’t care what it takes; they just want to see this important information quickly and easily, and they expect you to respond fast. Rather than stress out, let’s talk about a solution that gives employees the information they want, and the control IT needs. If your company is like most, the proliferation of both employee- and company-owned mobile devices, particularly iPads and iPhones, is driving demand for access to corporate data. But in most companies, there is little support for such access. There is great dissatisfaction with the level of support IT provides for consumer technologies in the workplace, a 2011 IDC survey1 of 2,820 information workers and 610 C-level executives, vice presidents, director-level IT personnel, and business-unit level executives from 10 countries found. This lack of access to business data is getting harder to justify. Executives, business managers, knowledge workers, and other employees already use iPads and iPhones to surf the Web, get email, and conduct other tasks directly related to their work. So they also want (and in many cases insist on) access to the sales, inventory, customer, and other data they need to perform their jobs, be more efficient, and make timely decisions.

Delivering what users want
The information users need is often stored in SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, and a variety of other data sources. Access to raw data can be helpful, but employees often want their data in easy to read reports and charts. IT organizations are especially keen to and easy and quick ways to deliver business info to iPhones or iPads. To do this requires tools that are efficient for those quick “one-off” requests, yet robust enough for long-term solutions. Ideally, these tools should be easy, and usable by a wide range of IT staff, not just by the most experienced programmers. Overall, delivering business data to iPhones and iPads demands:

A quick development cycle: Users want results in days or weeks, not months

Easy import of data in a range of native formats (e.g., SQL databases, spreadsheets, etc.)

Painless serving of data to iPhones and iPads with forms optimized for these devices’ screens

Ability to deliver data in visual formats such as charts, as well as in reports, lists, and forms

Ability to combine data with ?les, such as PDFs, spreadsheets, photos, and videos

Choice of distributing information to users for of?ine viewing, or connecting directly to live systems for real-time information

Tools usable by a range of IT staff, not just experienced object-oriented programmers.

With these criteria in mind, how can companies provide workers with fast and easy access to data on their iPhones and iPads?

One Option:
Deliver business data with FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go FileMaker®, Inc., a subsidiary company of Apple®, creates database software that is the ideal tool for developing and securely hosting databases that reside at the heart of such solutions, and for delivering information to iOS devices. FileMaker Pro allows organizations to quickly build iOS solutions, including the rapid creation of easy-to-use charts, reports, lists, and forms. The software, which runs on Windows and Mac OS PCs, has shipped more than 16 million copies to organizations of all sizes, from large corporations to small businesses, and from schools and universities to government agencies.

Secure iPhones in the Enterprise

Copy of an free white paper from Zenprise: With over 75 million iPhone OS devices in use, the odds are that someone is connected to your corporate network with an unauthorized iPhone or iPod Touch right now. There’s nothing wrong with allowing your end users to access your network with an iPhone, provided that the device has the appropriate IT security settings. Left unsecured, the iPhone OS however can present security risks to both corporate and customer data. Stolen personally identifiable information or trade secrets is the last crisis any IT manager or executive wants to manage. The compliance risk alone is staggering. As a recent Aberdeen Group report detailed, a single compliance lapse (e.g., SOX, Privacy, PCI, HIPAA) can cost a company up to $2 million USD. A single lost or stolen iPhone incident may encompass multiple compliance lapses. Authorizing, securing, and updating the iPhone OS should be a top priority. The risk is real. Apple is diligent at fixing and patching security risks. But, is your mobile workforce or IT administrator as diligent at applying Apple’s updates? An unpatched iPhone – not the iPhone itself – is the real security risk. In the last two iPhone OS updates alone, Apple identified and fixed 15 security risks.1 Numerous iPhone Safari security patches were made that fixed the device’s vulnerability to exploits from basic web surfing. More worrisome still is the recently repaired recovery mode vulnerability that allowed for someone with physical access to a device to bypass passcode and access user data. Additional remote attacks and security vulnerabilities are identified every month. A secured and updated iPhone can empower mobile workers to be more productive than ever before. There is good news: Apple has taken significant steps to improve iPhone security for the enterprise. You can implement a number of iPhone training, process, and IT best practices that greatly mitigate the security and financial risk to your company. In this white paper, we identify ten best practices that you should consider implementing immediately to best support iPhone OS devices. Overall, we suggest that corporations that support the iPhone OS use Microsoft Exchange 2007 or 2010 with Active Sync and use Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility. Combing these two applications with other well-known certificate, directory, and authentication security services make implementing these best practices possible. MONITOR FOR AND BAN JAILBROKEN IPHONES Jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches can represent the largest security threat to an IT department. A jailbroken phone is one that has been modified in order to use the device on non-issuing carriers. Last year, a worm (i.e., ikee-b) was launched that exploited an SSH service activated during the jailbreaking process. This was just the first of many likely attacks against vulnerable iPhones. REQUIRE EXPLICIT IPHONE ACCESS PERMISSION AND CORPORATE DATA ENCRYPTION Require each mobile user to explicitly enroll and configure both employee- and company-owned iPhones. Managing over-the-air enrollment and configuration for the iPhone is possible via the tools provided by Apple. IT departments must create their own iPhone Profile Distribution Service that accepts HTTPS connections, authenticates users, and creates iPhone mobileconfig profiles. Users with new, recently activated iPhones can access a simple URL (e.g.,https://iphone.company.com) via Safari to make the enrollment process seamless. TRAIN EMPLOYEES ON IPHONE DATA SECURITY Every employee who has an iPhone should undergo training on not only how to configure and use the device, but also what to do if the device is lost, stolen or compromised. Trainings can be delivered online or in person, and need to stress the importance of immediately contacting the IT department as the moment a device is lost or stolen. Training employees how and when to react to security issues could save your corporation millions of dollars in security and compliance breaches. CONFIGURE AND ENFORCE IPHONE SECURITY POLICIES Always secure and restrict iPhones. Like any other network-connected system, an iPhone must have welldefined security policies that are monitored and enforced. By using the iPhone Configuration Utility, you can create profiles for different organizations (e.g., sales, marketing, engineering) that have different payload settings. Payload settings define a collection of individual settings for certain purpose, such as VPN settings. Polices can be created for the iPhone that comply with other mobile phone security policies, including: passcode requirements; Wi-Fi settings; application and hardware restrictions; email, calendar, and directory settings; and, credential settings. More from this white paper here>>

Mobile Social Networking: The New Ecosystem

Social networking and the next generation of handheld devices will improve business decision-making through efficient, unified communications and location awareness. Business Anywhere, Anytime • By Paul Gillin When interactivity is combined with unified communications and location awareness, next-generation social networks will have significant business value. Unified communications integrates the wide variety of voice, data, video and collaboration tools that business professionals use today into a single environment. This can dramatically improve the speed of decision-making by connecting collaborators quickly, regardless of their location. In nightclubs, railroad stations and city squares across Germany today, people are striking up conversations with total strangers based upon invitations received on their cell phones. The connections are made by aka-aki Networks, a new mobile social networking service. Users download a free application that alerts them when another aka-aki member is within range and interested in meeting. People can read one another’s profiles before deciding whether to strike up a conversation. Aka-aki is one of an emerging class of Internet applications that is extending online social networks to mobile devices. The market opportunity for these applications is enticing. There are 3.3 billion mobile communications devices in use around the world today, yet only a tiny percentage of them are participating in the social networking craze that has swept the wired world. Social networks have caught on because they make it easy for people to stay connected to large numbers of friends and acquaintances. Social networks have been the talk of the Internet since early 2007, when Facebook began its rapid growth and specialized social networks began to blossom. There are now more than 2,500 social networks online, according to the Go2Web20.net directory. They serve everyone from dog lovers to doctors. Some are beginning to tap the underserved mobile market. For example, more than 1 million BlackBerry® smartphone users have downloaded the recently released Facebook client application to their BlackBerry® smartphones. Research firm eMarketer forecasts that the mobile social networking market will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to more than 800 million worldwide by 2012. Informa Telecoms recently reported that approximately 50 million people already use portable devices for social networking activities ranging from chatting to multimedia sharing. It expects that number to quintuple over the next five years. The trend is especially pronounced in Europe and the Pacific Rim, where PC penetration is lower than in the U.S. For example, a quarter of all mobile phone subscribers in the UK use their portable device for social networking-related activities, according to Nielsen Mobile. The trend can be expected to spread into business applications of social networks, a market that Forrester Research expects will account for $4.6 billion in annual spending by 2012. Technology Drivers Portable devices have been getting smaller and more powerful for years, but technology breakthroughs are enabling new applications to emerge. Chief among these is location awareness, a feature that enables users to meet new people or find colleagues nearby. It is likely to spur a new generation of mobile services as the capability moves to the mass market. About 15% of smartphones today come equipped with support for the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS), according to Kevin Burden, director of mobile devices at ABI Research. However, GPS-enabled phones, like the camera phones that preceded them, will rapidly go mainstream. “Social networks will get to a new level once the network knows your location and the location of people you’re interacting with,” Burden says. “I can’t think of any feature more important to build into a mobile phone.” While all cell phones are required by law to support rudimentary location awareness, the GPS network offers far more precision than the cell-tower triangulation techniques used in standard cell phones. GPS makes it possible to pinpoint a device to within a few feet. Once users are able to label – or “geotag” – their messages and images with location information, interesting new applications emerge. For example, mashups built on platforms like Google Maps and Google Earth will make it possible for groups of devicetoting individuals to assemble a rich tapestry of images in near real-time. Business applications of location-aware devices include fleet logistics, field sales coordination, and knowledge management and mapping. Once businesses have a handle on the location of their assets and employees, social networking tools can be used to connect people in virtual teams for project management, brainstorming and on-location customer service. Some companies are already using internal social networks to create knowledge maps of their employee skill sets and are combining them with unified communications to enable rapid access. Using this model, employees can quickly tap into organizational expertise as needed. These internal social networks will have great value as businesses become more geographically distributed. Users will maintain rich profiles of their own skills on internal websites and make themselves available to share their expertise as needed. As a result, businesses will become more flexible and efficient. “The 20th century fully evolved the concept of the home office employee, but now we are envisioning the mobile worker where location anywhere, for that matter, is secondary to getting the job done,” says David Heit, director of enterprise product management, of Research In Motion. Vendors, recognizing that their tools need to work as well for the mobile professional as for the desk-bound, are designing and building their tools with, and for, mobility usage from the start. For example, when the BlackBerry® Client for IBM® Lotus® Connections was announced, it was deemed a core deliverable in the design of the Lotus Connections software release. Many vendors are opting for the benefits of a full client approach rather than a browser interface. A mobile client offers the advantages of offline access, tolerance for the intermittent connectivity that one is likely to encounter when relying on a browser-based interface, as well as full integration with other local applications. Wireless networks are also getting faster. As handheld devices increasingly become the preferred Web on-ramp for mobile users, people are seeking to duplicate their desktop experience as closely as possible. Screen size will always be a limitation of mobile devices, but technology solutions are emerging, such as devices that project screen images on a wall or sheet of paper. Trust Equation While experts differ on whether users will ever trade in their PCs for mobile devices, there is ample evidence of demand for mobile social network features. One reason: people trust information from their peers. A recent study by the Society for New Communications Research found that nearly three in four consumers agreed with the statement, “I choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.” A late 2007 Nielsen survey found that consumers listed “other consumers” as their most trusted source of information, far ahead of mainstream media. Peer reviews are seen as being more genuine than opinions delivered by businesses or even the mainstream media, particularly when a person already has a relationship with the reviewer. But even when a prior relationship doesn’t exist, peers are perceived to be more credible because they have little cause for bias. Social networks such as Yelp and ThisNext, which combine reviews from many sources, benefit from the “wisdom of crowds” effect. That wisdom can apply to enterprise decision-making as well. Corporations can tap into customer conversations on public or private, branded social networks to discern attitudes and buying intentions. By facilitating peer interaction and recommendations, businesses can also quickly build credibility and “buzz” faster than they would with expensive advertising campaigns. This helps with branding and marketing campaigns. Emerging Applications The mobile social networking market has been energized by Twitter, a service that enables members to exchange short messages among users and groups of their “followers.” Twitter’s immediacy and its effectiveness at eliciting rapid response has earned it a cult following. Users find that they can get answers to complex questions delivered to their cell phones in a matter of minutes. Other services have sprung up to build on Twitter’s foundation. Utterz, Bluepulse, Mocospace, Zingku, Jaiku and Pownce offer additional features like multimedia and group calendaring. Now a new breed of application is emerging that leverages location awareness for rich new functionality. For example, Loopt enables members to track their friends on a map and share text messages or plan meetings based upon proximity. Gypsii has similar features and also includes photo and video-sharing. Helio sells location-aware cell phones and related social network services. These services add value to the social network experience in the following ways: Immediacy – Users can get answers to their questions or report on important events in minutes. In addition to tapping existing online reference sources over the mobile Web, members can leverage the wisdom of crowds to get answers when they really need them. Mobility also enables people to document their observations and thoughts immediately. Relevance – Social networks deliver knowledge from trusted sources in a person’s circle of friends. Location awareness makes it possible to target queries and messages to people within a defined geographic area, enabling groups of people to share experiences virtually. Brevity – In social networks, this is often a virtue. Brief messages delivered by a mobile device are easier for others to absorb and respond to. This enables a more interactive and vibrant conversation. Retrieval – Facts and conversations can be archived and retrieved later by participants or others, creating a kind of real-time archive of a social interaction. Business Value and ROI When interactivity is combined with unified communications and location awareness, next-generation social networks will have significant business value. Business Value and ROI When interactivity is combined with unified communications and location awareness, next-generation social networks will have significant business value. Unified communications integrates the wide variety of voice, data, video and collaboration tools that business professionals use today into a single environment. This can dramatically improve the speed of decision-making by connecting collaborators quickly, regardless of their location. Social networking technology is so new that ROI models are only just emerging. While hard dollar numbers are scarce, early adopters are focusing on the following metrics and reporting positive early results: Customer support savings – When customers solve problems or answer questions by consulting online databases or one another, they save on company support costs. Technology vendors learned long ago that by building databases of advice contributed by customers, they could slash support costs by up to half. Mobility promises to make this information easier to obtain and to disseminate to a wider variety of markets. Logistical efficiency – By building a database of employee skills and matching it to location information, businesses can more quickly deploy the right resources to their customers on a timely basis. This leads to cost savings and revenue opportunities that would have previously been missed. Reduced training expenses – With some 80 million Americans expected to reach retirement age over the next 15 years, knowledge preservation is becoming a critical issue. Social networks enable employees to populate their own profiles and make it easy for businesses to capture interactions between employees and customers into a kind of corporate memory. Marketing benefits – Word-of-mouth marketing is the most credible and cost-efficient form of promotion. Businesses that make it easy for their customers to recommend products and services to their peers can reap great benefit from the resulting “buzz.” Participants can also leverage the tools that are most appropriate to the task at hand to enable a decision. For example, a group may initiate a discussion by text message and then move quickly to a voice or video conference supplemented by a shared whiteboard. Unified communications also authenticates users for secure communications. “I can link my device directly to a PBX,” says RIM’s Heit. “Mobilizing corporate resources such as this needs to be, and can be, done in a trusted and secure manner.” This is an example of a social network in action. Many businesses are implementing unified communications today, but the added dimension of location can enrich the value of the application. For example, consider how a logistics management company could apply these technologies. A client manager might initiate a virtual meeting with field-level supervisors and delivery personnel over a conference bridge. If the client was shipping an unusually large or delicate product, specifications and images could be transmitted to participants in near real-time. If the client needed to make a sudden rush shipment, the appropriate field units could be identified based on proximity and dispatched to the client’s location armed with all the necessary details. Members of the team could even be tracked for billing purposes. Computerworld recently wrote about a logistics application involving J.B. Hunt Transport Services’ use of global positioning systems to deliver the latest installment in the Harry Potter book series for a successful, timed nationwide release. Technology Evolution Much of the technology needed to enable the kinds of applications described above already exists. Processors and memory have sufficient capacity to handle all but the most taxing tasks. “My current BlackBerry® smartphone is more powerful than my PC of just a few short years ago,” notes RIM’s Heit. Network bandwidth is evolving more slowly due to equipment incompatibilities and a lack of carrier standards in the U.S. However, progress is being made in those areas and the goal of universal, interchangeable network access looks increasingly achievable. Location awareness is already standard on high-end handsets and should quickly spread to the mainstream market as chip prices decline. Technology Evolution Technology Evolution Much of the technology needed to enable the kinds of applications described above already exists. Processors and memory have sufficient capacity to handle all but the most taxing tasks. “My current BlackBerry® smartphone is more powerful than my PC of just a few short years ago,” notes RIM’s Heit. Network bandwidth is evolving more slowly due to equipment incompatibilities and a lack of carrier standards in the U.S. However, progress is being made in those areas and the goal of universal, interchangeable network access looks increasingly achievable. Location awareness is already standard on high-end handsets and should quickly spread to the mainstream market as chip prices decline. The challenges are in the areas of displays and input, where the handheld form factor presents some structural barriers. Displays have improved greatly in recent years, but a handheld device will never match the quality of a desktop monitor. “No matter how good you make a browser on a phone, it’s never going to deliver a PC experience,” says ABI’s Burden. “You can’t make the screen any larger, but you can make viewing space larger.” Handheld input using hard and “soft” keypads has evolved to the point that some skilled users can achieve speeds of 20 words per minute. The best hope for improvement in data input is voice recognition. This feature has long been used in mobile devices for a limited instruction set, but with commercial PC-based voice recognition products approaching 99% accuracy after training, it’s likely that this technology will be viable in mobile devices before long. Devices will also offer more support for rich media. Cameras, which were once a high-end luxury in cell phones, are a standard feature today. In fact, some new handheld devices are shipping with two cameras so that one can be trained on the speaker while another records a scene. Full-motion video will also be standard within a few years. This will enable individuals to become, in effect, video producers, with social networks supporting live video feeds. Envisioning the Future The one unchanging truth of information technology is that disruptive change manifests itself in unanticipated ways. It is likely that the changes that will result from the spread of mobile social networks aren’t even imaginable today. Within a few years, billions of people worldwide will carry handheld devices that are capable of capturing full-motion video and transmitting those images in near real-time to friends and institutions. Our concept of event “coverage,” which has been shaped by decades of network television, will change. Sporting events, political rallies, business meetings, community festivities and every other kind of social gathering will be documented by participants and observers. The sounds and images that they capture will be collected and disseminated by media organizations that specialize in leveraging the power of loosely organized communities. Events that never would have been documented in the past – ranging from Little League games to presentations by corporate executives – will be captured as digital sounds and images, and saved to servers for others to share. Powerful software will enable organizations to stitch together images captured by multiple mobile devices into a kind of three-dimensional tapestry of unprecedented richness. The concept of an online map will evolve into a virtual world that is constantly updated by contributions from observers. These collages will be overlaid on an ongoing conversation among colleagues, vendors, temporary acquaintances and total strangers who come together to share their perspectives on their situation and their surroundings. For businesses, the applications are exciting. An auto manufacturer, for example, could combine images uploaded by field service technicians to quickly identify possible defects and make production changes more quickly. A retailer could check on the quality of store promotions by viewing images or videos sent by on-site personnel. Businesses will be the most enthusiastic adopters of mobile social networks. They will build knowledge maps on a foundation of expertise contributed by employees and business partners, and enriched by data captured from projects, experiences and observations of others. Workforces will grow more distributed as the network replaces the office as the lifeline of information. Logistics will become more efficient, and group interactions faster and more flexible. We will come to expect information to be at our fingertips – in the literal sense – more so than we already do. Regardless of where information comes from, the mobile social networks of the future will give users nearly unlimited choice over how they choose to share and consume information. The ecosystem that develops around the next generation of handheld devices will make applications that once seemed fantastic a part of everyday life. << >> Paul Gillin is an author and consultant specializing in social media.

Design and Deploy your own iPhone and iPad Application

Finally, you have that phone-sized or pad sized gadget where you can browse the internet on hours, play music or watch videos wherever you are, take pictures anytime and share all of these whenever you want. Your new toy is as lovely as its manufacturer has promised with its multi-touch screen, downloading ability that is faster than a personal computer and automatic switch of view from portrait to landscape depending on how you handle it. But, while exploring the widgets installed, don’t you wish to personalize it more by designing and deploying your own application? There is of course the choice of paying iPhone or iPad application programmers to do the job as you specify. You just have to be financially prepared as this entails paying thousands of dollars that many would probably choose to buy ready-made applications rather than customizing their own. Appcraft.org is a website that offers a wide variety of downloadable applications. Each product has reviews which may serve as your guide if the app will be beneficial to you or not. Anyway, it may seem that to design and deploy your own application is possible only in your dreams especially if you are not versed with SQLite database and other programming-related software, let alone know how to use them. However, this is not just a dream anymore with AppWizard. This is a website distinguished as an iPad and iPhone app creator. It allows its users to build their dream application then modify it as needed 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. The site does not leave their clients to discover the simple way of creating their own app. It will assist with every step of the designing process from the colors you will use to the name and icon you prefer. It even provides the choice to develop applications entirely from scratch or turn a regular website into an iPhone app. Note that the iPhone apps you created through this wizard is compatible to your iPad as iPhone apps or you can open them through iPad Safari. Moreover, AppWizard will not leave you after perfecting your application. It will let you install your app and make sure it runs just the way you like it, or deploy it in technical terms. It will host your app and monitor it with its dedicated server. AppWizard will also assist you in launching your work in AppStore using their Apple Account or you could pay an additional fee for it to be published in your very own Apple Account. Whether your work will be available for free or with a free depends on you. Using this iPhone app creator is as easy as click, drag and drop with a minimal price that is incomparable to hiring programmer firms. Another reason for this choice is that it allows clients to subscribe for the creation only or up until they want to. Long term users though are free to edit their products as they wish.

Choosing The Right Screen Size

AThe fundamental problems with screen size are power and the size of a person’s hand. Screen size is constantly growing. It is not uncommon to find screens larger than 2.5 inches these days that are capable of displaying a CIF-sized image with high clarity. At least one business handheld now boasts a four-inch screen size with 640x480 VGA resolution. This is nearly four times the resolution of a CIF image; however, it is more likely to be used with downloaded content (loaded into the handheld’s memory via a USB interface to a PC). Going beyond this, the products coming on the market now allow a user to plug an external eight-inch monitor and keyboard into the USB or Bluetooth connections on a Windows® Mobile handheld, greatly increasing the viewable image area and providing a suitable keyboard for real content creation (as opposed to that used for SMS text messages and short emails). Eventually, head-set mounted displays will most likely be available that create high-image resolution in front of the eye.

The Benefits of Mobile Device Deployment

A growing number of small and midsize businesses are finding high-value ways to deploy mobile devices – well beyond phone, voicemail, and Web access. Nine out of ten SMB (Small Medium Bussines) companies enable employees to check email via mobile devices and 64% use mobile devices for remote computing. More than half of SMBs allow employees to access applications and business data via mobile devices. With the hiring of so-called Gen-Y workers, organizations of all sizes can expect to see an exponential increase in the amount of textmessaging, which today is occurring in just two-infive small and midsize companies. Interestingly, texting does not represent a dramatic change in mobile usage, though it may result in fewer calls and fewer emails and thus require further refinements to carrier contracts. Serious text-messaging (and email-capable) devices, such as the RIM Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, do tend to add a cost premium above basic cell phones; however, the added functionality can lead to higher satisfaction – particularly for Gen Y workers who most likely already own such devices. While we're still in the early years of mobile technology deployments, smaller companies are finding that sheer “mobility “ remains the key advantage – rather than more traditional goals such as increased sales or revenue. In fact, only one in four SMBs report that mobile technologies help them boost sales and revenue.

A growing number of small and midsize businesses are finding high-value ways to deploy mobile devices – well beyond phone, voicemail, and Web access. Nine out of ten SMB companies enable employees to check email via mobile devices and 64% use mobile devices for remote computing. More than half of SMBs allow employees to access applications and business data via mobile devices. With the hiring of so-called Gen-Y workers, organizations of all sizes can expect to see an exponential increase in the amount of textmessaging, which today is occurring in just two-infive small and midsize companies. Interestingly, texting does not represent a dramatic change in mobile usage, though it may result in fewer calls and fewer emails and thus require further refinements to carrier contracts. Serious text-messaging (and email-capable) devices, such as the RIM Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, do tend to add a cost premium above basic cell phones; however, the added functionality can lead to higher satisfaction – particularly for Gen Y workers who most likely already own such devices. While we're still in the early years of mobile technology deployments, smaller companies are finding that sheer “mobility “ remains the key advantage – rather than more traditional goals such as increased sales or revenue. In fact, only one in four SMBs report that mobile technologies help them boost sales and revenue.

By far the most widely reported mobility challenge facing SMBs is insufficient battery life, which was cited by 71% of SMB organizations. Workarounds for battery life are increasingly plentiful, but these represent an additional cost that may strike someorganizations as unexpected or burdensome. Security issues remain a key concern for SMBs. Two-fifths of smaller companies find device security to be challenging and nearly a third cite network security as an issue.
A case in point: Nearly 10% of SMBs report that their mobile security has been compromised at least once and 39% believe that even though they've had no incidents reported, their security policies and safeguards need improvement. That makes sense, considering that most smaller organizations still take an ad hoc approach to mobile deployments. Few SMBs have specific security policies and procedures related to mobility. Most rely upon cell phone carriers, for example, to secure mobile communications.
Partly abridged version of the bMighty Research Report

Wireless Technologies Types

There are several different types of wireless technologies. Personal area networks (PANs) enable users to connect everyday devices wirelessly, such as digital cameras to printers, or handheld devices to earpieces. Wireless local area networks (WLANs) act as cable replacements for local area networks and are often referred to as Wi-Fi or 802.11. The third and most common type of wireless technology is the wireless wide area network (WWAN), which enables access through a wireless link that is regional, national, or global. These networks are not restricted to a specific physical location, such as a campus, as is the case with Wi-Fi.

Mobile Video Business - Promises to Expand Rapidly

Consumers and business users alike have come to rely on mobile voice and data communications. Now demand is building for mobile video services as well. ABI Research believes that the move to all-digital TV will pave the way for mobile TV services that can “attract over 500 million viewers by 2013.” [ABI] Add to this the revenue of other mobile video services and applications, and the market potential grows even larger. Infonetics projects worldwide mobile video service revenue to increase at a 5-year CAGR of 130%, reaching $35 billion by 2011 [Infonetics].
Traditional carriers see mobile video as a way to reverse declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) caused by the decline in revenue from voice-only services. Others, including application and infrastructure developers, see it simply as a major new opportunity. Wainhouse Research expects worldwide revenues for personal mobile video communications — including professional services, software, toolkits, and other infrastructure products — to grow to a billion dollar industry by 2010 [Wainhouse]. Mobile Video Service Examples
Dozens of video services are already available on the internet, and these services are beginning to be offered on mobile handsets as well. The services fall into two broad categories: consumer-oriented and business-oriented. The two lists presented here provide just a sample of mobile video service possibilities – and revenue opportunities.

Consumer-oriented mobile video focuses on entertainment and social networking:

• Mobile TV • Video on Demand (VoD) • Video sharing with family and friends • Viral video sharing • Video blogging • Conversational video • Video portal • Video messaging • Video SMS • Multimedia ring-back tone • Mobile advertising • Social networking

Business-oriented mobile video services emphasize enhanced communications and collaboration:

• Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR) • Conversational video • Video sharing between a business and its customers • Video training • Video messaging and video SMS • Video conferencing

The market for mobile video services promises to expand rapidly over the next several years. To exploit this opportunity, application developers and service providers must move quickly, providing innovative new services with the quality, responsiveness, and price points that users find attractive. But mobile video is a complex medium, presenting developers with a variety of technical challenges.

Mobile Technologies In Use

Adoption of wireless local-area networking (WLAN) technology is widespread and seems on the road to ubiquity; more than half of SMBs already use it, though that's still far short of cellular's 85% penetration. WiMax wide area networking, now in use at less than 10% of smaller companies, also holds promise. One lesser-known reason is that WiMax offers business continuity in the event of a failure on the part of standard Internet services. Although smaller companies typically do not create custom “mobile “ applications, increasingly, more packaged applications – and information services – will be pushed out to mobile devices. In the meantime, integration with desktop operating systems is helping to drive interest in Windows as a mobile operating system. The leading mobile operating systems in use are Windows at 80%, followed by Blackberry at 66%, and Palm OS at 37%.

Given the prevalence of cell phones in America, it's easy to assume that nearly every organization uses them. Odds are that many employees of almost any company use them at work on a regular basis. However, the design point of this study is whether the organization itself deploys mobile devices such as cell phones - not whether individuals use their own devices in the course of their work day. Even with that more-restrictive measure, cell phones are deployed by nearly four out of five SMBs. That edges out the three-quarters of smaller companies that deploy wireless laptops. More than two-thirds of companies use Smartphones equipped with voice and data capabilities.
Wireless laptops and Smartphones also top the list of most useful mobile devices. PDAs without voice capabilities, on the other hand, are moving down the list of usage and are cited as a mobile device SMB companies love to hate. A year from now, we expect to see wider deployment of handsets that use wireless Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. SMBs may initially adopt VoIP phones mostly for wireless campus deployments. The fact that wireless-enabled laptops top Smartphones in perceived usefulness by SMBs is further evidence that neither basic productivity applications nor custom business applications are yet commonly available on Smartphones. The value of PDAs has steadily declined because their functionality has become an intrinsic part of Smartphones, which add the ability to communicate in real-time with voice and data. Eventually, PDAs will go the way of the Day-Timer, as they will be unable to match Smartphones' ability to synchronize calendars in real-time with co-workers or customers, for instance.

Mobile Device Platforms '09 - Fragmentation is Here to Stay

Although the market for web-enabled phones has strongly grown during the last years, the fragmentation of software platforms has stayed - none of the players can expect to dominate any major market. Vendors, developers and operators will continue to focus on the few platforms that matter most for their geographical regions – such as Windows Mobile, iPhone OS and Palm in North America, or Symbian and Windows Mobile in Europe. In addition to the various platforms, the number of form factors poses challenges: Most touchscreen phones are good enough systems for web-based applications, while this service delivery approach may not be feasible for smaller-screen devices.

Netbooks are increasingly sold in conjunction with mobile broadband packages – but operators who want to differentiate through applications have yet another OS or browser type to add to their list of platforms. The majority of application downloads continues to be MIDP Java games – a platform that many high-end internet devices do not support. Hence, most operators will continue their strategy of low involvement into mobile software design - only global players with high involvement in device supply chain and retail presence have a business case for commissioning, launching and supporting customized applications for flagship devices. For the majority of operators, generating profits with mobile applications comes through partnerships with companies providing development, testing and sales across various markets, ensuring high quality applications at acceptable cost.

Fixed-Line and Wireless Convergence

Why Fixed Mobile Convergence?

With fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), users benefit from the features and capabilities associated with both fixed-line and wireless networks. Service providers in this market are racing to deliver products that address ever-increasing employee mobility, growth in IP adoption, availability of WiFi networks, poor indoor mobile phone coverage, and — most important — enterprises' need for tools that help them improve employee efficiency, manage network complexity, and reduce costs.

The rapid growth of WLAN deployments in enterprises, hotspots and homes; the improving ability of WLAN access to provide high-quality voice service; and the introduction of dualmode handsets that can support both cellular (GSM, UMTS or CDMA) and WLAN radio are creating new market opportunities for service providers to deliver a comprehensive service that converges mobile and fixed-line infrastructures, beginning with voice.

Value
Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) promises a superior user experience delivered cost-efficiently and with unprecedented convenience. FMC offers service providers the potential for first-mover advantages to attract customers and gain momentum. It extends an opportunity for service providers to enter new markets and to bridge the wireless/wireline divide. But this isn’t just about voice. The industry sees video and multimedia as the means to capture customers and differentiate from client-centric solutions (e.g., Skype over WLAN) — in particular to take content from the existing world and customize it for delivery to mobile devices. The key to a successful FMC deployment is to compete not on price, but with value-added services.

Three approaches to FMC
There are currently three primary approaches in the industry to delivering a converged seamless service: Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), VoIP Extension and IMS-VCC (Voice Call Continuity).

Strategies For The Emerging Mobile Workforce

Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers Painting a rosy picture of mobile workers without examining some of the risks and challenges would be irresponsible. Risk and benefits are often closely related. A benefit for one manager may be a risk for another. In the next two sections we look at a few of the risks and challenges associated with mobile workers.

• Potential Decrease in Productivity
Fears abound on this one. Can someone really work at home and be productive? What about all of the distractions? Then there are moments in projects or employees’ job responsibilities that require tight synchronization that is next to impossible to coordinate with the separation of distance and or time. If Cindy takes thirty minutes in the middle of her day to do yoga will that make her less productive? Opinions may vary but from Cindy’s perspective the answer is obvious. As long as people do not abuse the flexibility extended to them and we design workflows that support mobile workers, this concern of a decrease in workers’ productivity may be more irrational than many of us want to admit. Tied to loss of productivity is a deeper and more difficult issue: the loss of control and oversight. If you are migrating from a traditional workforce to a mobile one, you undoubtedly are reinventing your job as a manager. What you managed before was concrete. What you manage now is less tangible. This is not trivial. Essentially, managers are faced with no longer knowing how to do their jobs. Managers know their business but they are foreigners in an alien world of work. Well-designed workflows can mitigate some of these issues. Managers also need to reengineer their jobs and negotiate new performance management metrics with their bosses. Most of all, managers need to be patient with themselves and others. Mobile workers change the way we manage. It takes time to sort out all the rules of a new game and their implications.

• Influence Replaces Positional Power
Positional power exerts less influence with mobile workers. Without the daily four walls of an organization, remote workers are unlikely to perform their jobs in prescribed ways. Managers need strong influence skills. Since influence skills are relational in nature it takes to time cultivate the trust and interpersonal connections associated with them. Time is not always on our side. Lapses in management styles that revert to more coercive techniques may achieve short-term objectives but ruin managers’ chances of building strong twoway influential relationships with employees. There are no short cuts and the amount of energy and creativity it takes to cultivate influence with remote workers is one of the most difficult aspects of managing mobile workers.

• Fragile Project Dependencies
Coordinating deliverables with offsite employees, contractors, vendors, and partners is a risk familiar to all project managers. These risks need to be identified at the front end of a project and managed throughout its life cycle. As a general rule, the greater the number of dependencies assigned to resources less in your direct control, the larger your contingencies need to be. Even non-project-related work will naturally be prone to more delays with mobile workers. In both of these instances central project management can be subdivided into smaller areas of ownership. Create informal subgroupings around clusters of resources tied to a deliverable. This gives autonomy and increased flexibility to the people most affected by project dependencies.

• Information Sharing
The reduction of face-to-face interactions hampers information sharing. Many organizations are culturally challenged when it comes to sharing information. Isolation experienced by mobile workers compounds these tendencies. Technology can play a powerful role in addressing these challenges and can even nudge cultures towards more information-sharing practices.
Author:Terrence L. Gargiulo, the paper is supplied by Citrix Online

Wireless Deployment Strategies In Small Companys

Wireless technologies are proliferating through small and midsize businesses as the cost of handsets along with voice and data plans plunge to attractive, commodity levels. At SMB organizations, higher demand for mobile technology coincides with rising perceived business value of the technology. In the study, four out of five companies report that wireless voice and data networks are highly important and another 16% believe they are somewhat important. Not surprisingly, nine in ten companies with above-average deployments of wireless voice and networks rate those networks as highly important to their organizations. Companies with above-average deployments also tend to be more committed to mobility as a business and technology investment. This surge in importance is also reflected in SMB spending on mobile technology. Three out of five small and midsize businesses report that their spending on mobile technology increased compared to last year, and 36% report it stayed the same. Only 4% of companies report a decline in mobile technology spending – and that may be due to costsavings more than a decline in use. Companies with above-average wireless deployments are helping to drive this push. By a 66% to 55% margin, companies with above-average wireless deployments will invest more in the coming year than those firms with below-average wireless deployments. Clearly, satisfaction is helping to drive increased investment. Generally, small and midsize organizations feel that their investment in wireless technologies is paying off. Sixty-two percent of the companies in our study are highly satisfied with their investment in wireless voice and data technology and services. Significantly, a higher percentage of companies with above-average voice and data network deployments report an even higher level of satisfaction than their peers with smaller deployments. Sixty-nine percent of those widely deployed sites report that they are highly satisfied with their investment in wireless technologies, compared to 57% for below-average deployments. The more widely deployed networks appear to be generating more business value. In 2007, it's hard to imagine a company opening a new office with a strictly wired infrastructure. Wireless networks are now pervasive - with 42% of SMBs deploying a wireless network across the whole office or campus and 36% deploying in a limited manner, for example in conference rooms. Among companies with a wireless network, two-thirds offer wireless Internet access to guests such as business partners and contractors. Yet if companies are largely satisfied, why isn't deployment more widespread? Three out of five companies report that less than half of their employees use mobile technologies for work-related purposes. In most cases fewer than one-in-four employees use wireless for work-related purposes. The reasons for this limited deployment can be chalked up to several factors, we believe, such as: • Most use is ad hoc. In many small firms there are lots of users with different plans or devices
• Lack of custom or dedicated business applications
• Lack of management or administrative controls
• Security concerns
• Cost – mobility is a commodity for some companies but overhead for others. Cost is a gating factor when a company lacks plans to accrue revenue from its mobile networks or devices.
• Unlike larger enterprises, many smaller companies are used to having all personnel visible on site and may be less comfortable with a truly mobile workforce.
This report comes from CMP Technology

Netbook Tricks: Getting the Maximum of the Lively Guy

S. Appel from Mobile Tech Today gives some useful hints:
Another key trick: turn off the WLAN when it's not needed. Pressing "Ctrl+F11" will do just that instantly on most netbooks. Reactivating the wireless connection is just as quick. The same holds true for Bluetooth. Both wireless functions represent more than just an energy suck: they also provide a potential portal for hacker attacks.

The display is small and the computing power Relevant Products/Services is closer to that of an outdated PC. Yet because they are ideally suited for mobile use -- whether on the sofa or on the train -- netbooks are currently topping the electronics bestseller charts.

Even so, working with the low-priced mini-laptops is different than working with desktop computers or standard laptops. Most users start wondering how to tickle more performance Relevant Products/Services out of the machines almost as soon as they start working with them in earnest. Fortunately, there are a few tricks for juicing up the netbook -- without having to upgrade the hardware Relevant Products/Services at all.

Many of the devices are equipped with three-cell batteries that typically allow for up to three hours of unplugged use. Six-cell batteries allow for double that battery life. Yet even that span isn't enough for really long train rides, making energy Relevant Products/Services conservation a must: "To achieve the absolute longest battery life, you can manually adjust the display brightness to reflect the ambient lighting," explains Robert Perenz, product manager for netbooks at hardware maker Acer.

Many models provide this function through a specific key combination like "Ctrl+F5." Lowering the brightness by just one or two levels is often enough to provide a noticeable bump to the battery life. That's because the factory default for brightness is often the maximum level, which isn't really required at all in practical situations. After only a brief period, you won't notice that the brightness has been reduced at all.

Another key trick: turn off the WLAN when it's not needed. Pressing "Ctrl+F11" will do just that instantly on most netbooks. Reactivating the wireless Relevant Products/Services connection is just as quick. The same holds true for Bluetooth. Both wireless functions represent more than just an energy suck: they also provide a potential portal for hacker attacks. In principle it's also easy to lower the processor's energy demands. Yet that comes at a cost to performance. "This doesn't make a lot of sense for netbooks, which are already coming to the table short on performance," says Fabian Schusdziara from Dusseldorf-based PC Praxis magazine.

Somewhat older netbooks in particular often have too little storage. In such cases Schusdziara recommends so-called portable apps: applications that can be started from USB sticks or a hard drive without any prior installation. "That keeps the registry nice and clean," Schusdziara says.

Many pieces of software intended for a PC can be optimized for netbooks, including Firefox. The "Littlefox for Firefox" add-on automatically reconfigures the Internet browser to utilize as much space on the display as possible. Want to make a small screen look bigger? It helps if one-third of the screen isn't covered with ads when surfing the Internet -- another Firefox add-on called "Adblock" provides major assistance in that regard.

Christoph Prevezanos, author of "Das Netbook-Buch," recommends that users start with a bit of spring cleaning, namely by removing unneeded programs.

To prevent unnecessary burdens to the storage space, as well as to cut down on wireless data Relevant Products/Services fees, it's helpful to access e-mail accounts using IMAP. Unlike the common POP3 protocol, IMAP doesn't automatically download e-mail messages from the server. It instead first downloads only the subject lines.

Small as they are, netbooks are easy to steal. It's therefore a good idea to prevent anyone who finds the netbook from being able to exploit what's inside. Encryption using free software like TrueCrypt is key to that effort. The Open Source program makes it easy to encrypt single files or entire hard drives.

Managing Mobile Devices for your Frontline Workers

Source Sybase:
Did you know that up to 70% of enterprise data exists in various frontline settings, from laptops to handheld devices, to store and remote office environments?

Your frontline workers may have a variety of skills but they’re rarely IT savvy and certainly not security experts. Yet more than 75% of enterprises leave responsibility for security in the hands of the user – literally.

With the increase in the use of mobile devices, you likely have questions that are left unanswered when it comes to managing and securing those devices. Well, now your answers are just a page away with Mobile Device Management for Dummies®.
Use Mobile Device Management for Dummies® to discover how to:

- Manage your mobile devices and applications - Secure your mobile data - Unleash your workforce’s mobile potential - And much more.

The complete report is available to download as free here

Fly into the Sky with this iPhone GPS app

From Darleen Hartley;
Xewton and Alexander Gross bring you V-Cockpit GPS, an app for the iPhone. It is not actually a GPS unit that tells you how to find or get someplace. Rather, it contains a set of airplane cockpit instruments that tell you how fast you are traveling, or how high up you’ve climbed. V-Cockpit GPS says it features a “unique photorealistic way of displaying all your iPhone 3G’s sensory data”. You can configure your output depending on which side of the Pond you find yourself, or just your simple preferences. For example, data can be recorded and displayed in miles or kilometers.

This is not like a Flight Simulator, where you can sit and “play.” The precursor to the recent app, called simply Jet Cockpit will let you do that. However, the V-Cockpit GPS application expects you to be on the move. It will record Gs and altitude, so go fast and up. But don’t be the one doing the steering while viewing the output. Better to be in the back seat, or review the data at the end of your journey.

Cool features are the night vision mode, and you can even get radio chatter and jet engine sound effects, which are not on the Lite version which was released in April. You can calibrate your instruments like a pro. V-Cockpit GPS displays speed, acceleration, compass orientation, and other measurements in the style of an airplane’s instrument panel. It displays data on its speedometer, altimeter, variometer, accelerometer , and HUD. An interesting heads-up display (HUD) lets you reflect its data onto your car windshield.

Previous apps from this developer include Ski-o-Meter, which applies similar data to that provided by V-Cockpit GPS to the winter sports enthusiast’s activities. The app supplies GPS data recording, speed, altitude, and distance figures. A skier can get a picture of their maximum and average downhill speed, a diagram of the hill’s height profile, and just how far they have skied, before retiring to the lodge.

Other apps for this developer include Mad Shells, the traditional shell game with a few new quirks, such as meteor showers, jokers, and the ability to compete with other players around the world. Just for fun, try iQualizer, which is more eye candy - visual real time audio visualization - it turns sounds into abstract imagery in twelve different modes. You can see music or voice represented as colorful and moving diagrams, electrical charges, atomic blasts and what looks like pulsating city skylines.

Since its initial release in late January, V-Cockpit GPS has been upgraded to Rel 1.4.1. It is 4.6 MB for the 3G iPhone only. The developer warns, due to questions received on his site, that you need a GPS enabled device to get the full effect of the app. Duh.

Enterprise Mobility Space Needs Solutions Converge

Andrew Mitchell send me a email regarding "solutions converge on enterprise needs for mobility", he wrotes:
Probably the second most frequently heard “f” word in any discussion of enterprise mobility is FMC or fixed mobile convergence. And in terms of understanding, FMC ranks among the top entries in the “most often misunderstood mobility term” list, even in spite of being with the wireless industry for over 6 years now.

FMC has generally come to be understood as a technology that will deliver voice connectivity for a single service over a fixed or wireless network. Over time various proposed and practical implementations of FMC technology have emerged, largely falling into the category of either carrier based network solutions or appliance based customer premises solutions. Regardless of the technology employed the usual premise of FMC solutions is that they will bring value to an enterprise, either through reduced communications costs or by the improved productivity associated with an Anywhere employee.

Capitalizing on the growing enterprise interest in unified communications (UC) solutions, vendor Agito Networks offers an FMC solution that provides location awareness and presence features. The functionality of Agito’s RoamAnywhere product allows it to integrate into popular UC platforms such as Microsoft’s OCS or Cisco’s UCM for example. RoamAnywhere also provides support for a number of wireless LAN products from vendors such as Aruba, Cisco and Motorola. A number of wireless handsets and PDAs support the RoamAnywhere client. Agito’s product is just one example of a capable and compelling FMC product that addresses many of the UC needs of a mobile enteprise.

Initially viewed as a customer provided solution to a carrier’s coverage void in a macro wireless network, the third “f” word is femtocell. Femtocells are now receiving attention not only for the opportunities they create in the consumer market but also in the enterprise market. In an enterprise environment femtocells are well positioned to provide more than voice and UC solutions. The femtocell platform provides the ability to extend a broad suite of enterprise applications over 4G networks. Unlike its FMC counterpart, the femtocell is not a point solution for voice, UC or any specific enterprise application.

Yankee Group Senior Analyst Nathan Dyer has some cautions to offer enterprise femtocell vendors to avoid some of the pitfalls experienced by FMC vendors. In his paper “Femtos in the Enterprise Must Learn from FMC Mistakes”, Dyer advises that vendors should “not wed femtocells to mobile voice” and should instead “emphasize the mobile data and application story.” Dyer also points out a number of clear and present opportunities for femtocells to provide cost effective anywhere connectivity platforms for enterprise applications. He goes on to highlight the potential for integrated solutions in which FMC functionality is delivered through the femtocell platform and enterprise PBX environment.

In summary, FMC and femtocell technology has converged on the need for enterprise mobility. For success in this market FMC vendors should consider leveraging the power of femtocell platforms. Femtocell vendors will want to consider differentiation by positioning their products as enabling platforms for enterprise mobility.

Growth in Prepaid Wireless Service Continues

Mike Sachoff reports about prepaid wireless services;
Online visits and search referral activity to six leading prepaid wireless sites increased 37 percent over the previous year, according to a new report from comScore.
Growth in prepaid wireless was driven primarily by MyCricket (up 107%) and BoostMobile (up 105%), both of which more than doubled in visitation over the prior year. MetroPCS and Net10 also saw solid gains, growing 63 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
The marketing messages of most prepaid wireless providers are focused on the youth market, data indicates considerable interest in the plans among 35-64 year olds. The majority of visitors to Net10 (60.3 %) and TracFone (58.7%) were from this older age segment. Even for sites where the majority of visitors were under 35 years of age, 35-64 year olds made up at least 40 percent of visitors.
comScore also looked at search referral activity. The results showed that both paid and organic search are driving increased referral activity, but organic search is significantly outpacing paid search referrals overall.
A few of the sites performed well in receiving growth from organic search referrals compared to paid search referrals. Organic clicks to BoostMobile grew 310 percent, while paid clicks grew 199 percent. Organic clicks to MyCricket.com grew 123 percent compared to 63 percent growth in paid clicks; and organic clicks to MetroPCS.com grew 148 percent compared to 17 percent growth in paid clicks.

Customized Mobile Business Solutions

On the field it is sometimes necessary to have information accessible from mobile phones. With AdaptAir, a developer software tool, which needs no programming skills, you can compose and create mobile content (Java ME or J2ME MIDlets) from wide range of file formats (text and images) and/or from the internet links, WITHOUT any programming.
Creating mobile Java midlets with AdaptAir is as simple as creating PowerPoint presentations, just inserting and editing the text and/or image content, MS Office documents (Word and Excel files) and web links.
AdaptAir can be used either as professional authoring tool for mobile content publishers or as utility for any kind of business and professional who might need simple, fast and inexpensive way to export information to mobile phones
With AdaptAir users can easily and quickly create and publish useful Java ME MIDlets with text and image content for any purpose. For example:

- mobile books or mobile databases - event schedules - marketing campaigns - tourists and travel guides - conference agendas - hotel directories - maps with driving directions - mobile newsletters etc etc.

Almost any kind of file (text and image content) can be imported into AdaptAir and turned into useful mobile content (Java ME Midlet), just within few minutes.

Who helps mobile finance business models to get started

Written by James Van Dyke (Javelin): Mobile finance business models, do they exist? Are they even important?
Everywhere I go I hear bankers’ refrain “When will we see a viable business model for mobile banking?” Mid-market and smaller banks, credit unions and card issuers that have yet to mobilize their business are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward mobile account access. I understand their concerns, even if I’m often surprised that many viable mobile business models aren’t being considered today. Yet here’s another way of looking at the issue: soon, many people will simply bypass laptops and desktops altogether, and just access their deposit or payment accounts via mobile. A good analog to this is the way debit or prepaid cards are replacing checks among the young or low-income, or how facebook or myspace is replacing email for millenials and teens. Eventually, physical wallets and checks will go the way of the banking passbook or check register. So while there are several potentially viable mobile business models, the argument that’s not getting enough consideration is this: very soon, you may not have a business that reaches vital consumer segments if your business isn’t available via mobile devices.