Mobile Strategy » General

I think I am back… I hope I am back!

Jose HC — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:10:14 +0000

For many and varied reasons I have been unable to write. Some of it was time, some of it was money and some it (if you can believe this) was strategic.

Over the last few months writing on this blog took second place to many other things. Yesterday something happened that I believe will give me both the reason and the impetus to begin writing again. After a few weeks of being very close to signing with a reputable research firm as their mobile financial analyst … the door finally closed. What had been a roller coaster ride of emotions (from ‘this is the best job in the world‘ to ‘there is something not right in my gut‘) came to an end in a surprising turn of events spurred by a misunderstanding. I see an Invisible Hand who graciously spared me from something and where a veil was removed and suddenly I could see what I could not see before. It is amazing how that works!

So today I find myself 100% free to write but not about everything that you’d expect me to write about. I am currently engaged with a US Bank in executing a portion of their mobile strategy and I will stay away from talking about certain things. It is not at the level that I am accustomed to but it has been great to see the other side of the fence as I find myself deeply entrenched in IT. The good news is that since I will not be joining the research firm and I will not be writing for clients with a twist – I can now concentrate on writing on things that are of interest to me and I believe will be of much interest to you. Topics related to the engagement of the mobile financial consumer and the entrenchment of brands with such consumers. All fun stuff.

The doors are also opening up on a potential mobile health assignment… which could also be great fun. As you know I have been involved with mobile healthcare, hospital operations and healthcare IT in a big way in the past so to see opportunities opening up for me in that area is greatly encouraging.

The other reason I have been slightly unavailable is because of MSA Management Consulting; a firm I am heavily involved in and which we are building and expanding with a very strong team. A firm focused on generating measurable returns on investment of your current assets.

Expect to see much more over the next few weeks and for this place to once again turn into the hub for mobile strategy discussions.

So there you are… consider yourself updated.

Is HP’s play for Palm about tablets?

Jose HC — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:33:33 +0000

In fact, HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) 1.2 billion play for Palm is shaping up to be more about tablets than smartphones. The smartphone business, which is quickly becoming super saturated with the likes notebook makers such as Dell, Lenovo and Acer, is one both HP and Palm are separately struggling in. But as Technology Business Research points out, the tablet computing space hasn’t been well defined by any single manufacturer or operating system. Could Palm’s WebOS combined with HP’s extensive PC manufacturing expertise give it the leading position?

The scuttlebutt this week has to do with whether HP will drop tablet plans to incorporate Windows 7 and go with the WebOS. IMS Research principal analyst Anna Hunt expects HP to employ WebOS in favor of Windows 7 OS, citing the high cost and potential strain on the processor.

Moreover, Palm’s webOS, despite gaining little traction in the smartphone market, is liked by developers as it offers many similarities to Linux. The platform just didn’t have the volume to woo developers en mass. “If HP can create a compelling tablet offering that people are willing to buy, the barriers to entry for developers might be fairly minimal,” wrote IMS Research analyst Chris Schreck. Moreover, HP has a commanding presence in the enterprise market, which should be attractive to developers.

Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst with J Gold Associates, points out that since tablets are mainly front ends to the Internet, there is a big play for HP to deploy many cloud-based services from which it can generate revenue. I can only imagine the cloud-based services HP can dream up for the enterprise

via fiercemobileit.com

Think enterprise people. This was first and foremost an enterprise move by HP. Consumers are fun and it’s fun to write about and think about pretty things for them… but the big money is in the enterprise. The value add is for the enterprise.

Posted via web from Mobile Strategy

Five Trends Influencing the CIO Smartphone Agenda

Jose HC — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:54:18 +0000

The good news is that companies are shifting their thinking. They’ve realized that what worked for laptops does not work for smartphones and that they need to develop very different management strategies. Here are the five trends CIOs across the country and across industries are considering as they develop an enterprise mobility plan.

1. The smartphone has become the platform-of-choice for the knowledge worker It’s no longer a question of whether laptops or smartphones are the platform of choice for employees. Technology has advanced hugely in the last 18 months and employees are embracing a pocket-sized device that delivers voice and wireless email with a PC-class browser. Smartphones are the device that an employee never leaves at home, the default ‘go-to’ device. This creates a swath of new, powerful end-points for which the CIO has to manage risk and leverage innovation.

2. The CIO is now a virtual wireless operator When a CIO has 50,000 employees using smartphones, whether they like it or not, they have become a mini service provider. This challenge is further complicated because smartphones are not uniform: there are multiple operating systems and multiple actual operators to be managed. To be effective, CIOs need the same types of tools and technology as a cellular operator. They want technology that lets them work at a network level not a device level and they want to get in front of potential problems by tracking usage and costs in real-time. Finally, like any service provider, they want to minimize helpdesk calls and proactively monitor quality.

3. Data is more important than the device When it comes to phones a device can be replaced but the data is priceless. As a result CIOs are recognizing a need to shift their thinking from device management to data management. Think of it as the “MP3 school” of smartphone management. Employees use their phones like an MP3 player; they use them to access data that is stored somewhere independent of the device. Smartphones have become a broad-ranging gateway for data access, which underscores the need to secure them.

4. IT has been blind-sided by the App Store phenomenon The iTunes App Store topped three billion downloads in January and that’s just for one mobile platform. CIOs know that this explosion of consumer apps has hit or will soon hit their enterprise phones. That has scary implications for security and support. At the same time, they see a silver lining. The app explosion can work in their favor if they can figure out how to leverage it to improve employee productivity. They want to be able to develop their own enterprise App Store with vetted and recommended apps whose delivery and usage can be tracked and managed.

5. Native e-mail has won Whether it’s BES for BlackBerry or ActiveSync for other smartphones, the email battle is over. In the past, IT wrestled with standalone e-mail clients that were device specific, drained battery, and lagged new phone releases by six months because of certification cycles. Just last week, the mobility head of a F200 company told me they were getting out of the business of supporting third party e-mail clients because the native clients had equivalent functionality and far lower support costs. Interestingly, while the rest of enterprise mobility is becoming more and more complicated, the mobile email landscape has simplified dramatically.

via sfgate.com

Just for reading.

Posted via web from Mobile Strategy

Almost Back…

Jose HC — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:39:30 +0000

My apologies to everyone who still visits this site. It has been over a month since any relevant content has been posted here. This message is to let you know that you should not worry, life and posting should be back to some normality next week. I have been pursuing contracts and writing proposals to clients – this has kept me relatively busy and distracted from the Mobile Strategy Blog.

But return we will…

Thank you for your patience!

Holiday Hiatus

Jose HC — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:07:43 +0000

Greetings everyone! You will not see much content here between now and 2010… in fact it will be completely empty. I am currently writing from another city in Ontario where we will be spending the rest of the holidays. My family and I do celebrate Christmas and we enjoy time with loved ones as we celebrate the birth of Jesus and remember what He has done for us! He is not in a manger but in our hearts!

I actually count this humble blog among my many blessings… It is an honour to know that about 400 hundred of you come to the Mobile Strategy Blog on a weekly basis. Perhaps not that many to others, but to me it is quite a crowd! Writing on this blog started as a hobby and continues to be a hobby for me… so any reader outside of family or clients is quite amusing to me.

Thank you for dropping by and I hope to see you back next year!

Mobile Strategy Site Visitors and Mobile Themes

Jose HC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:11:23 +0000

In an effort to understand why some of you visit the Mobile Strategy Blog I have done a quick analysis of the search engine referrals. Of course this is a circuitous analysis because your searches bring you here due to the content and keywords on this site which are indexed by the search engines (mostly Google). This analysis merely helps me to focus further on the main topics or themes that are already bringing you here. The most important outcome of this analysis will hopefully be that it forces me to drop some of the filler that I write when I am either too busy or lazy to give you some good stuff.

The dates of the downloaded stats do not coincide with each other 100%… but they provide sufficient information for our purposes.

The Searches

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

Traffic to the Mobile Strategy Blog comes from three main sources:

Direct Traffic 30.3%
Referring Sites 39.1%
Search Engines 29.8%
Other 0.8%

Direct traffic is just that… those of you who either have this site bookmarked or know the URL by memory.

Referring sites are mostly LinkedIn, Twitter, link backs, blogs I have left comments at or those blogs that have this site in their blogroll (like Enterprise Mobility Matters and Mobile Manifesto).

You know what search engines are. The interesting point here is that 92% of the searches during this time period came from Google, 6% from Bing and 1% from Yahoo.

The Keywords

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

We could slice these in different ways and there are too many (including onesies) that do not add that much value to your searches but that in the right combination still brought some of you here. The top 5 keywords used during searches on this site for this period were the following:

mobile 22%
strategy 9%
banking 5%
application 4%
canada 3%

The top 5 or all of the individual keywords that brought readers over here during this period do not really tell the story so let’s get to the exciting stuff below.

Mobile Strategy Themes

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

This is what I did:

Took the entire list of searches
Filtered out nonsense and mistakes
Classified the remaining ones into main themes

And these are the mobility themes that brought searchers to this blog with their corresponding weights:

Mobile Strategy 33%
Mobile Banking 20%
Mobile Application Development 18%
Mobile Analytics 7%
Enterprise Mobility 6%
Mobile Ecosystem 5%
Mobile Venture Capital 4%
Other 6%

From this I can only assume that visitors to this blog that do not come through searches are also drawn here by the same content and themes. As much as possible we will try and focus on the first three themes (mobile strategy, mobile banking or financial services and mobile application development). However we will also give it our best shot to provide you relevant links and interesting stories on the next four topics which are still very interesting to us (mobile analytics, enterprise mobility, mobile ecosystem and mobile venture capital).

Hope this helps you as much as it did me.
If you want to see something specific here please drop a comment below.

Get Clicky
Of the four different analytics programs (non-mobile) that I use here my favourite is Clicky Web Analytics. If you are interested in checking it out you can use my little code – here Get Clicky.

Finish Strong Or Stay Home (Some Thoughts On Strategy Implementation)

Jose HC — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:12:51 +0000

A good sound strategy is more than a beautifully produced plan with eloquently worded thoughts on the future. It is also more than carefully laid out words on glossy paper. It is also definitely much more than a collection of great ideas. A strategy needs to be executable.

If you don’t have a way of executing your strategy then you might as well not even have one. You should probably just stay home!

Many have failed along the road to achieving their dreams for one obvious and painful reason – their inability to finish strong. Starting strong will give you an advantage. Perhaps you will even be a few paces ahead of your competition at the beginning; but if you can’t finish you might as well not waste your time. Again … stay home!

A strategy needs to be ‘implementable.’ In other words, it needs to be doable. You should be able to do it! Or else it is not worth the effort put into it and it is a waste of resources.

Many are tasked with the preparation of strategies, plans, roadmaps (call it whatever you want) but the lack of realism in these documents make them nothing more than a pipe dream. An exercise to extend someone’s employment or to get a firm (consulting or analyst) more work. They become nice-to-haves; instead of a reality.

This is not a rant, it is only what I have seen both in enterprise, government and even in non-profits. We spend more time planning and dreaming instead of doing, executing and implementing.

A strategy needs to be realistic. And so does a mobile strategy.
A mobile strategy needs to be implementable and executable.

Now you know what you need to do … either execute or stay home!Similar Posts:

Mobile Application Development – Continuing the Conversation

Jose HC — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:30:28 +0000

We have written a few posts about this already which I am sure will show up below in the ‘related posts’ bit. I wanted to let you know of an article over at IT Business Edge entitled – The Growing Sophistication of Smartphone App Development. You can get to it here.

We will resume to our more frequent writing over the next few days as I return to a more normal schedule.Similar Posts:

Monday Morning Mobile Catchup – October 19/09

Jose HC — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:07:10 +0000

Although a bit late I can still call it Monday Morning since those on the West Coast could still be reading this in the morning. Not many links today since I have been busy with family and other things thus reducing my reading significantly.

Read or ignore the list below of links I found interesting from last week. As always no comments or opinion given on these (although there are some others I do want to comment and opine on later this week).

Why RIM will not suffer the same fate as Canadian giant Nortel

For the Mobile Web, Social Networking is Top Dog

CTIA Panel: Meet the Wireless Health Leaders

Unifying Application Management With Device Management

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch

What can we expect next in mobile?

Building a business in mobile

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Jose HC — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:13:14 +0000

It is a long weekend up here in Canada and we are celebrating our Thanksgiving!

We will be back tomorrow with some fresh content for all of you. Personally I am very thankful for all the blessings in my life and today is definitely a good day to pause and consider from whom all these blessing come from!

Special thanks to the readers of this blog – now trending to almost 1500 visitors for October! Not that many in comparison to other places but to me it is a big deal. Hopefully as we provide more and better content we hope to continue increasing that number month to month. For now, as my son would say, it is a baby blog! It has been fun over the last few months to write and think about all things mobile… thank you.

On this Thanksgiving Monday I want to leave two things with you… one indirectly related to mobile and the other one related to Canada.

The first one is a single solitary thought that you will never hear on this blog on a regular day… What is it? My belief that RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsille should have been allowed to purchase the Phoenix Coyotes and moved them to Hamilton, Ontario. Gary Bettman’s attitude and whoever else is behind him seems to be based on their own criteria and not what is best for the game of hockey and the fans. Okay so maybe not that related to mobility…

The second thing is a set of pictures from a beautiful slide deck I found on Slideshare for you to enjoy and relax… and if you are Canadian then you can digest some of that turkey while you look at pictures. If I get a chance I will also post some personal thoughts on my personal (and neglected) blog.

Beautiful Canada.

View more presentations from Roelof van den Berg.