I also chatted with a number of clients here about mobile workforce applications, and achieving ROI through a combination of a mobile app and some level of process change. Here in Australia it seems harder to change working practices than in some other countries. This resistance to change seems to be caused by a combination of cultural factors and perhaps more unionised workforces.

Another topic which came up a few times was workforce modelling, i.e. building a model of job roles and their mobile application and communication needs as a foundation for strategy and planning. A workforce model is a great way to take a snapshot of your mobile needs to serve as a basis for planning. But like all snapshots it gets out of date as the world evolves, so you need to revise it occasionally. And this was one of the points that came up; organisations were finding that the model they created a year or two ago was now well out of date and needed refreshing. Given that we started talking about the first generation of workforce models with many of our clients a couple of years ago I suspect this is quite a common situation. Is it time to refresh your mobile workforce model?

My other main impression of Sydney is that it’s too hot. Parts of the region today are predicted to get to 40C, which is way more than Brits are designed for. We’ve evolved to be waterproof, not fireproof.

I noticed a real difference in sentiment between Cannes and Orlando. In the USA there was a lot of buzz and activity around mobile. People had projects under way and a lot of discussion was about implementation as well as strategy. In Cannes the Europeans were less advanced than the Americans, more discussions were about strategy than implementation. Partly this reflects a fundamental difference in attitude between Europeans and Americans. Europeans tend towards interminable analysis before action, which can be frustrating if you’re a vendor trying to sell things to them. This isn’t altogether surprising, Europe includes nations such as France whose primary export for the past few hundred years has been philosophers, so we can hardly blame them for intellectualising. Americans lean towards action before analysis, sometimes followed by action in a different direction if the first action failed to deliver as expected. In the long term things probably even out, the Europeans make less mistakes, but the Americans get places faster. The Europeans in Cannes also seemed less positive and optimistic than the Americans in Orlando, but much of that could be explained by national attitudes; Europe after all includes traditionally miserable and undemonstrative nations such as we Brits. Overall, I think it could be 6 months or so before the Europeans catch up with American mobile optimism.

While I’m on the subject of undemonstrative Brits, Reuters reports a survey from T-Mobile showing the rise of the British metrotextual. Apparently 22 percent of British men are signing SMSs to male friends with a kiss (x). Some of my colleagues think this is positive indication that the Brits are getting in touch with their feminine side and maybe soon grown British men will actually embrace male friends in public as the French and Italians do. I think it’s a sign of serious degeneration of British moral fibre.

One of the joys of an analysts job is I get to play with a lot of mobile devices lent to me by kind-hearted vendors, and last week in the US the two handsets I used most were the Nokia E72 and the Motorola Blur. The E72 is a very worthy successor to the E71 and is the best Symbian business handset I’ve used to date. It looks good, has nice email software, and a good keyboard. About the only quibble I have with it, is that I wish the new optical sensor were a bit more sensitive. The Blur is also a good handset, if a bit chunky, and it makes me think that Moto may have turned the corner. The Blur also illustrates how fast  Android is maturing into a credible platform. I was less captivated by the social networking widgets all over the Blur’s main screen mostly because I don’t use them. I have a theory that you can either have a life or talk about your life. I choose the former so don’t use Facebook or twitter much.

I’ll be at the Symbian show tomorrow, and will likely have some thoughts to report on afterwards. Next week I’ll be at Gartner’s European Symposium in Cannes; hopefully I’ll see you there.

On an altogether different topic, I’m regularly amazed and entertained by the dubious behaviour of some web sites, and today’s prize for web weirdness goes to British Airways. One of my little jobs this week is to book flights for US Symposium plus some West Coast visits I’ll be making on the same trip, so I tried the BA web site to see what they could offer. The route I wanted was London -> San Diego -> Orlando -> London. BAs web site suggested a bizzare 30 hour trip for the leg from San Diego to Orlando that went via Chicago and London. So it looks as if I won’t be using BA.

One trend I’ve noticed recently and will likely return to in a future blog is a revival in network operator interest in WiFi . Network operators seem to have got a lot more positive towards WiFi recently, probably driven by the fact that they see LTE retreating somewhat because the handsets are late and they don’t want to spend the money, and partly because the growth in data traffic is stressing their networks faster than expected. As operators become more enthusiastic about WiFi they’ll range more WiFi handsets which in turn will encourage developers and vendors to create interesting applications using WiFi, for example integrating with home entertainment systems. More WiFi handsets at lower price points may benefit people like retailers with real-estate who can experiment with WiFi as a bearer for in-store customer applications. Someone at Nokia World commented that “the cellular network is becoming the network of last resort” for data. Maybe that’s a bit extreme, but I do wonder if looking to WiFi as a quick fix for network problems is opening a Pandora’s box the operators will regret.

There’s a huge untapped opportunity here to move beyond inadequate imitations of the PC to genuinely new forms of collaboration that leverage the unique features of the mobile device such as its portability and ubiquity. As usual a lot of the innovations are from academics experimenting with both mobile-enabled traditional collaboration and new ways to use mobility. A few of the many things I’ve seen recently include:

Audio Wiki, to access your Wiki from a mobile handset using voice alone.

Photo conferencing, the University of Bath here in the UK did some interesting work on how two people can share and navigate images on separate mobile devices. They combined voice with remote control over scaling and pointing to create a photo conferencing tool.

Spill-over video, the idea here is that two or more devices can be combined to increase the viewing area. E.g. if I put my mobile next to yours the video spreads across both screens and we together we can see a bigger image than if we each looked at separate screens.

VuPoints, this is a very neat idea from Duke University in the USA. A server scans a set of adjacent handsets, for example in the same room at a party, to identify socially interesting events like people laughing. It then triggers several mobiles to start recording audio or video so there are multiple perspectives on the event. The server can then stitch these together to produce a video and audio summary of what happened.

Multiplayer mobile games,the games industry has driven innovation in PC collaboration, visualisation, interaction and communication; and it’s a fair bet that the same will happen in the mobile space. Contextual, location aware games using interfaces such as motion and gesture control and peer to peer communication with Bluetooth will likely spin out ideas for new forms of collaboration.

Context. By next year I expect to see some powerful tools to let mobile developers create real time experiences that leverage location, identity, presence and behaviour. Consumer app stores will be the distribution channel and as usual sex, fear and greed will drive the early applications. Imagine, for example, real time dating that puts you in touch with someone in the vicinity who’s looked at your Facebook in the last week and likes the same music that you do. Or maybe tells you which night club queue contains the sort of people you’d like to meet. However, once developers get the early trivia out of their systems I’m hoping that some serious collaboration tools will emerge.

I believe context will be the next mobile revolution; the shift from mobiles as isolated personal devices to mobiles as a passport to interactive communities. What sort of community applications would you like to see on your mobile?

Professionally South Africa is the continent’s most advanced telecomms market with around 100% penetration (that does not mean everyone has a mobile, what it means is there are about as many mobiles as people in the country). Mobiles are used in some innovative ways in South Africa, mobile banking and payment for example using USSD is well established. South Africa also has 11 official languages, which makes education a challenge, and probably explains why SA universities like Tshwane have been leaders in mobile learning. SA is also part way through a process of telecoms liberalisation as the old state monopoly of Telkom is slowly eroded, one of the banks (FNB) recently acquired a telecomms license. Plus the recent election may bring new ministers and changes in political guidance for telecomms, so it’s an interesting time to visit.

There are lots of cool mobile things going on in South Africa and I’ll try to report on some of them live from the conference in August. If you’re based in Africa I hope to see you there. If you’re an existing client; I’ll be visiting Johannesburg and Cape Town for a few days before Symposium so if you want to meet up, call your local Gartner rep. who may be able to arrange something.

B2C applications. Enterprises developing mobile apps for consumers are in a no-win situation because they have to trade off quality / usability for audience size. E.g. SMS works on everything but is painful for anything complex. Native binary apps deliver superb usability but only for users with specific handset models. So most of these discussions were around balancing potential return with development cost. This is also a moving target because platforms and operating systems will become more decoupled in the next few years. The dilemmas of the future will be more about the choice between Silverlight, AJAX, Flash and Qt than between Symbian and Android.

Fame & fortune. Your very own app store is this season’s must-have fashion accessory in the mobile business. So pity the poor app developers who have to decide which stores and by implication which platforms they support. Fame and fortune beckon, but only if you’re in the top 50 and can stand out from the thousands of other apps in the store. Some developers are betting on a mature store like Apple’s. It has huge developer competition and a relatively small number of users, but at least they download lots of apps. On the other hand you can bet on a new store like Android marketplace or Ovi. The latter ought to have a bigger audience because Nokia ships over 400 million handsets a year. But Ovi is only just getting off the ground and Nokia users don’t seem as application-aware as Apple users. My bet is that the Ovi store will become a major force, but not for a year or two.

Cool and capable hardware. Anyone manufacturing mobile devices, whether they be industrial bricks or fashion accessories wants a platform that creates the most marketable devices. From a consumer device perspective Symbian and Android seemed on the uptick, and Windows Mobile on the downtick this week. However I worry that there’s still not a great choice of Android handsets yet. Let’s hope that it’s a temporary blip because manufacturers are waiting on the next release to add missing features and fix early bugs. But at least Android has lots of supporters. Those brave souls at Palm are running off on their own at right angles to everyone else trying to establish a whole new platform, but very few people asked me about it. As I said a while back this is a courageous decision in a recession.  

Follow your heart. Some platform discussions were driven by love and hope rather than reason. People wanted to find justifications for what their heart told them to do. There was a lot of positive feeling towards Android in some of the informal audience surveys we conducted despite its tiny user base. A few optimists hoped that Palm Pre would become a force in the industry. And there were a lot of very vocal (if not always entirely rational) Apple supporters in Chicago.

Think carefully about your platform choices. There are too many mobile platforms, some of them are going to fall by the wayside. And as I said earlier, the definition of a “platform” is changing, the decisions of 2009 will likely be obsolete by 2011. We’ve got lots of predictions about future platform market shares and decision frameworks to help you make these choices. However, as a cynical and hard-hearted analyst I lean towards rational selection processes so don’t expect much sympathy if your heart is heading in illogical directions.

During some presentations we take the opportunity to do quick audience polls to ask how people feel about various technologies and services. One surprise came from a panel on ecosystems where the audience were more positive about Android than Apple, Nokia, Microsoft or RIM. Admittedly this was based on a show of hands from a self-selected audience. But it’s clear that Android has a lot of support; despite its immaturity and the lack of handsets we don’t seem to be going down the slope of the hype cycle towards disillusion yet.

As we’re in Chicago we also had great beer and pizza. Like mobility this too is a subject dear to my heart because I started my working life as a software developer, and as everyone knows software is basically a metabolic by-product of beer and pizza consumption.

I’m flying back to the UK tonight but when things calm down I’ll try to report on a few of the themes that we identified in Chicago.

There are two problems here. One is that interfaces need to be more contextual and socially aware, to better understand what sort of notification is appropriate. The second part is that we need new forms of subtle notification, to provide hints rather than shocks. So here are a couple of subtle interface technologies I’ve come across recently.

Deutsche Telekom labs in Berlin have programmed a mobile phone to vibrate with a “hearbeat” pattern so you know that your phone is alive. The heat rate jumps when you get a call, and fades away as the battery dies. I’m not sure if this would be reassuring or annoying, but it’s definitely ingenious.

An even weirder interface I came across recently used a Peltier device which is a semiconductor that can act as a heat pump either cooling or heating. The idea is you wear one of these as a patch next to your skin and it uses temperature to communicate. E.g. your girlfriend calls and its gets hot, or your mother in law calls and it goes cold. Apparently the developers tested this as a subtle way to allow a GPS to direct someone. Sounds a bit like hide and seek when I was a kid, “you’re getting warmer” but in a very literal sense.

Maybe neither of these are going to become mainstream, but they do illustrate that people are thinking about the role of mobile interfaces in new ways. If you want to learn more about some of the cool new mobile technologies come to our Spring conferences in Chicago and London where I’ll be talking about them. In a very subtle way, of course.