Mobilizing Life – What's in Store for the Future of Mobile?

Evaluating the current smart phone offering, there are millions and millions of applications that make the consumer life easier. Whether an application helps with directions or shows the nearest high end restaurant to your location, these offerings have been growing more and more for the consumer side of the market. Yesterday, Gartner released their April 2010 Mobile Metrics Report, with some serious growth figures coming from Android and iPhone. On the enterprise side, it seems that the growth has been truncated with instant email and messaging, calendaring and contact syncing and integration in your email platform.

However, as employees start taking more trips, companies becoming more global, employees have their desk in a plane, and social applications penetrate the corporate firewall, mobilizing the key functions they see at their desk will be invaluable and will bust open a completely brand new market. Looking into the good folks down the street, Research In Motion is developing their MVS 5.0. This will allow your BlackBerry to receive extension calls regardless of location with the incoming call. This will help reduce overall long distance charges and improve productivity by allowing employees to receive business calls on their devices.

Apple is thinking of similar innovations, but their major focus is going to be around video conferencing. Imagine being on a train, going home to pick up your kids, and you are communicating and seeing your fellow colleagues on a 4:30pm call. Given the versatility of the Apple platform, the video conferencing is suppose to be very intuitive and functional. The only major concern is the battery power, but that’s a different story.

Seeing these applications being built has brought about a lot of hype and excitement, but from mostly IT professionals and IT managers. Some employees are worried being “too connected to work” will cause them to be at the companies call 24/7. Where does the personal life come in. Are there controls that turns these functions off over the air at 5pm everyday? We know from research that your view might differ here depending on the year you were born. Gen Y consistently uses mobile technology for non-work tasks.

The major market here will be to package these with a social media interface that will allow users to control the functions, personalize the UI and help them make it as individual as possible.