By Cat Yong
These are the top mobile technologies that Gartner predicts will impact organisations well into 2013 and which organisations need to stay on the ball ON. Here they are in no particular order:
1. Platform-Independent Application Development (AD) Tools – in most regions between 3 to 5 smartphone platforms will have significant market share. Platform-independent AD tools can reduce cost of maintaining all the different platform versions of the same application.
Currently, a wide range of these tools are available. These tools are likely to extend support for other platforms like smart TVs. ‘Write once 80%, customise 20% per platform” is more achievable than maintaining separate program versions, and will be the new mantra for organisations creating employee- and customer-facing mobile apps on multiple platforms.
2. HTML5 – this is the next generation of HTML, and already garnering strong support from the likes of Google, RIM, Apple, Microsoft – all key mobile vendors.
What it does is substantially enhance mobile Web application features, causing a shift in architecture – from native applications to hybrid and Web approaches. It’s a strong alternative to proprietary tech like Silverlight and Flash and can already be found in many smartphone and tablet browsers. HTML5 addresses underlying platform features that aren’t available to Javascript.
Low-end and low-powered phones may not be able to run complex HTML5 and it will likely fragment as vendors add platform-specific extensions but if you are an organisation that develops mobile applications, you must not miss this.
3. NFC – Near field communications is technology for ranges less than 10cm. Some of us may know it as a payment technology, and indeed, that is just only one of its applications. It’s more appropriate as a ‘touch to act’ technology that enables more applications like discount tokens, authentication and check-in to location-based services ie. four square, and smart posters.
There are NFC-ready smartphones out there, though by 2015 these will increase to a more significant 30% of handsets shipped globally. Consumer applications will dominate, and industries with a lot of customer interactions like travel, retail, marketing and more, should explore NFC.
4. LTE – Long Term Evolution is the next-generation cellular wireless technology. Peak theoretical speeds are hundreds of Mbps and latency is touted to be reduced as well. It will be widely adopted – there is no waving off this wave.
Over 200 cellular operators have committee to deploying this technology over WiMAX. LTE data dongles and handsets are available since late 2011. LTE coverage may not be complete by 2013, but organisations will find applications that can benefit from LTE ie. data connectivity in urban areas.
5. Location and Context – Matching services to employees’/customers’ needs at a specific time and place is the most basic contextual information that location services can afford it right now. The long-term vision involves knowledge of more like individual needs, social networking sensor info and a whole bunch of other ‘clues’ that can suggest appropriate offers and services.
Location can already be determined by technologies like cellular networks, GPS, Bluetooth, indoor WiFi marketing and so on, but location-sensing tech and principles like context still have a very long way to go and there are privacy issues still left to deal with.
6. Machine to Machine (M2M) and Smart Products – M2M will be implemented using a wide range of protocols like cellular, WiFi, ZigBee and Dash7. It is expected to make up a major portion of that concept known as the Internet of Things (IoT) and already enables many smart networked products or non-phone wireless devices like Kindle and cars with built-in telemetry.
Even leading telcos have .formed M2M business units to accelerate adoption; some cellular networks have 10% of their subscribers from the M2M segment. One day, there could be more machines than human cellular subscribers, but M2M product development and deployment will be a long and arduous process.
Augmented Reality (AR) – This technology overlays information onto a real-time video of the world on smartphone or tablet displays. AR is expected to evolve over the next 5 years with vendors and tools like Aurasma, Layar, Wikitude, Qualcomm’s AR toolkit. There are many opportunities for consumer AR for in marketing and gaming, and non-handset applications like heads-up displays in cars have a lot of potential.
AR requires sensors and a lot of power processing. Because it is proprietary, we won’t be seeing it standardised and embedded in browsers for at least the next 5 years.
7. Multiplatform MDM – The average CIO expects to support more than 3 platforms by end this year. The complexities of managing multiple platforms in the workplace is further compounded by fact that knowledge workers usually carry at least 3 mobile devices, that are also not necessarily corporate-owned.
Mobile device management (MDM) tools are usually proprietary and seldom interoperate, and there are already over 60 MDM vendors. True multi-platform MDM tools would be rare, a sight for sore eyes and highly valuable.
