Category: Mobile Work

How quick the week has passed again, quite unbelievable… This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, the best ressource of blog entries written by the mobile community, is now online at the blog of C. Enrique Ortiz. Great job, Enrique, thanks a lot!

If you have a blog entry of your own you would like to be included in the Carnival next week, send an eMail to mobilists at gmail.com no later then next Wednesday and have a look at Mobhappy, founder of the CoM. See you next week!

It has sort of become a tradition for me to bring back a book on wireless from the 3GSMWorldCongress. This year, I’ve picked a somewhat unusual book for me as it is not about a particular technology but about how technology can enable work to go mobile. The book is called “Work Goes Mobile” and the three authors discuss the ongoing process at Nokia to mobilize their workforce. This blog entry is not intended as a full book review but rather for me to write done some thoughts about topics in the book that were of particular interest to me. Having said that I can recommend the book very much and further information about it can be found here.

Topics and statements in the book I found useful and some comments from my side:

Mobility is more than a technology: Mobilizing a business means to embed mobility into the fabric of a business.

Mobilizing a business has three dimensions which need to be addressed: People, process and technology.

Zero latency: The aim of mobilizing a business is to come as close to a ‘zero latency’ process as possible. In other words, a process is optimized to contain as few disruptions as possible due to inefficient communication. E.g. writing down a failure report on a piece of paper that is manually put into a CRM system a couple of days later.

Good and bad sides of mobility: The book discusses pros and cons of mobility and addresses prejudices and perceptions of workers on introducing new processes generally and mobility specifically.

Freedom of choice: One statement I particularly liked: “Mobility is about freedom of choice – it’s not a forced directive to work 24/7 but an individual decision to work when and where it is most appropriate”. Sometimes this is easier said and done and involves a learning process for both the mobile worker and the management that needs to understand how to manage mobile workers. Both mobile work and managing mobile workers are fundamentally different from working on a desk and managing desk bound workers.

The book is technology neutral: Even though written by Nokia employees and copyrighted by Nokia the book does not try to push any kind of Nokia devices or services. I like this approach very much as I find books, brochures, or articles written companies which only aim at pushing their products rather tiring.

Mobility is not an end state but an evolving process.

Workload management: Mobility is not intended to increase workloads. It helps workers to be as efficient as possible in the time they dedicate to their work. In general this is true but requires a management that understands this one the one hand and a good amount of self control to balance private and work time.

Challenges to Mobility: There are plenty and I like the discussion of how to overcome/deal/change/improve reluctance to change, management competency to deal with a mobile workforce, mobile workplace challenges, operation support, self management, family, processes.

Benefits: Mobility brings quantitive and qualitative benefits and one should be aware of both. A quantitive benefit can be measured in monetary terms, e.g. reduced time to spend on paperwork increases the number of cases a mobile field worker can deal with a day. Qualitative benefits are things one can not measure in such a way. Examples are increased employee satisfaction because of increased flexibility, freedom, etc., or increased customer satisfaction due to faster response times and quicker problem solutions.

This book is quite an eye opener for me as I mainly deal with the technical domain on a day to day basis. The book shows, however, that this is just one of many dimensions that need to be addressed to mobilize businesses in particular and people general.

P.S.: Daniel, this book could potentially be very interesting for you, too!

I feel greatly honored to host this week’s edition of the Carnival of
the Mobilists, featuring the most interesting posts of mobilists submitted this
week. In the best tradition of a mobilist, I exchanged eMails with Russel
Buckley leading to this on my notebook and smartphone in various airports and
taxies while traveling to Portugal. As you can see in this week’s Carnival once again, there are great ideas out there on the future of the mobile Internet:

• Mobile Application Development: Kelly Goto
  has written an interesting post this week on mobile application
  development in which she goes into the details of why " […] How,
  when, why and most importantly – where interaction takes place […]"
  are major things to consider during the development process.

• MVNO Strategies: Two entries this week on MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators): Carlo Longino gives us his thoughts on the business case of content MVNOs in his post called "Selling Dollars for a Dime". In another post, C. Enrique Ortiz takes a look at strategies of different MVNOs and gives us his thoughts on adoption curves for new services and service uptake.

• The Phone is the Key: Jim Downing over at Smartmobs reports on a new system in Japan that lets people use their RFID enabled mobile phones as virtual house keys. RFID is a hotly discussed topic for a while now and this is one of the positive applications of the technology.

• New Lifeblog version: It’s CeBIT time and lot’s of companies show their new products. Nokia is no exception, launching their latest version of Lifeblog. Stuart Mudie has taken a look and gives us his thoughts.

• External Identities: Xen Dolev had an interesting discussion with a new friend at her university about what mobile gadgets tell you about a man and manhood in general. Take a look.

• Mobile Advertising: Scott Shaffer over at the Pondering primate has written an interesting post on how Google could combine mobile keywords and SMS into an advertising platform. I like the idea, no unsolicited knocking on the front door this way.

• Mobile Internet and Politics: Justin Oberman has sent me a link to his recent blog entry where he reports about what some people do not get about the political mobile buzz
  during the recent "Politics Online" conference. He was invited
  as a speaker to talk about the mobile Internet in politics.

• Mobile Gadgets on the Run: John Sun reviews the Garmin Forerunner 2005 runner’s watch and it’s cool functionality when combined with Google Maps. Still needs the PC to connect to the net but other products with that capability are not far away.

• LBS Overview: Denis of Wap Review has written a great article on the how location based services work and how the U.S.’s E911 requirements have helped to bring the infrastructure in place not only for emergency services but also for great public LBS services. He does not stop there though and goes on to describe LBS in other parts of the world as well.

• Women in Mobile: My favourite post of the week: Rudy De Waele continues his great series on interviewing women in mobile with an interview of Keren Flavell. His post contains interesting thoughts from ‘down-under’ in Australia! I very much liked the interview and Keren’s mobile technology podcasts on her website.

• Karaoke on Mobiles: Looks like Karaoke has gone mobile in Finland and is a big success. Tomi Ahonen over at the "Communities Dominate Brands" reports.

• Service Discovery: Troy Norcross says that operators are not doing a good job in promoting their services because they only push their platform and not individual services.  In his recent post he shares some interesting thoughts on this topic .

And finally, my own post for this week is part two in my mini-series on different mobile VoIP systems, their applications, and their pros and cons. This week’s blog entry is on SIP and its use in the wireless word.

Next week, the Carnival
will be hosted by C. Enrique Ortiz. Make sure you’ve submitted your entry to “mobilists
(at) googlemail.com” by next Wednesday.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s selection and I wish you a happy weekend,

Martin

Steve Litchfield  at allaboutsymbian.com and Anina at anina.typepad.com report of a new Google beta service: "Goggle News On Your Mobile". As I often read news on my mobile while traveling I had to take a look immediately and was very pleasantly surprised how they downscale and reorganize their normal news pages for mobile phones.

If you don’t have a mobile to check it out you can also get an idea of what they are doing by using this link from a PC browser.

I just wished they would be a little bit bolder and offer their mobile news beta not only on google.com but also on google.co.uk, google.de, etc. The news at google.com are just a little bit too U.S. centric for people not living in the U.S. So, Google, do something about this!

Josep M. Ganyet has put some interesting thoughts on his blog on the business cards of people  he met (including me) at the recent 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Josep says: "more often than not, you would be given a corporate business card and
instead of reading it carefully, you would flip it to see what was
scribbled on the other side, which usually was the URL of the card’s
owner personal weblog. The B-side".

His observation is right on the point. I put the address of my blog on the B-side of my business card for Josep and I have received many business cards that also contain the blog address of the owner on the back. While some people in the comment section of the blog entry have speculated if they should move their blog address from the front to the back of their business card, I just had the opposite thought. Companies are great because of the people that work for them. So if somebody wants to show some more of himself, why not put it on the front of the business card? Does some knowledge about whom you are dealing with hurt? Depends on the blog I guess… I for my part like to know a little bit more about the people I am doing business with and have no problem sharing my passions on mobile technology with them. More often than not, it enriches and tightens relations with customers.

The Carnival of the Mobilists of the week is out again, this week hosted by Kelly Goto at gotomobile.com. It is the source with links to blogs written by mobile enthusiasts in the blog space in the previous week.

I thought that the list of blog entries would be short this week after everybody was in Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress last week and probably needed some rest. But I guess most people must have been like me: Two days of rest, then back to the computer to start writing down all those ideas and thoughts 3GSM has inspired. The result is awesome, there are more entries then ever and I am looking forward to reading many of those that I haven’t seen over the last week already.

Great job Kelly, thanks a lot!

Xen Dolev is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. If you are interested in the mobile Internet, it is the
ressource to find out what people are thinking and in which direction
the technology is moving. Have fun!

Once upon a day, GSM authentication and encryption was quite easy. A key, a random number, a little algorithm and off you go. Seems that was too easy for some people so they came up with a new authentication and encryption system called Milenage. Very hard to find  information about this written for the ‘non cryptanalyst’. Fortunately, I’ve finally found an exception. Take a look here. Enjoy!

Every day, mobile phones and the Internet come closer together. Recently, Nokia R&D have announced that they’ve ported Apache and Python to the S60 OS. They envisage to use the mobile web server to create new services for people on the net depending on the location of the owner. Indeed, interesting thoughts. I say let’s turn the stick around for a moment and think about what a web server embedded in a mobile phone can do for the owner.

A web server in a mobile phone combined with Wifi can also be a powerful personal platform, i.e. serving mainly the owner of the device. We are not far away, Nokia has already announced Wifi support in the Nokia N80 which should be on the market very soon. Here are some applications for a combination of Apache, Python and Wifi in a mobile phone:

• While you are at home, the mobile phone is part of your network via Wifi. Instead of using the small phone keyboard for many things like writing text messages or to change settings, you can use a web browser which communicates with the personal web server on the mobile phone.
• Today I use Yahoo! Go for synchronizing my calendar and address book with the web. This way, I can edit my contacts and my calendar via a web browser while at home or at work and synchronize back and forth between the desktop and the mobile phone. With a personal web server in the phone, no synchronization is necessary anymore. Everything is always in the phone. Of course there should be a function in the phone that automatically sends a backup of all data to a server while I am at home.
• If you are away from home and in the office, you can still use the web browser instead of the mobile phone as the web server can also be accessed via the cellular network.

These are just a few example of what the combination of web server, programming language and Wifi will enable people to do with a mobile phone in the future. Not to speak of all the other things Wifi on it’s own will bring like Voice over IP in the Wifi network at home and in the office, storage of all your music and videos on the phone and distribution to devices like the TV and stereo set at home, personal file server.

Almost everything is in place, now a couple of people just have to take the next step.