Mobile Predictions

A recent article in Forbes, written by Maribel Lopez, included several predictions on mobility in the business world. Some of them have already been written about in many of our previous blogs.

Here is a short list of Lopez’s mobile predictions for the coming year:

1. Enterprise Mobile Apps & Micro Apps

We are all so used to downloading consumer mobile apps on our smartphones. However, this year, all the rage will be in developing and implementing enterprise mobile apps (our team at Namtek Consulting Services have been predicting this for a couple of years now as well). These apps will perform a specific business task to help employees on the road or that work out of the office. However, something new is ‘micro apps’; micro business apps will allow you to combine many of them to create one complete workflow. This eliminates all separate apps on your dashboard that do not interrelate.

2. Mobile Customer Care

This year it will be all about delivering “right-time experience with mobile”. Many companies will begin to use mobility to deliver greater customer engagement and support. The Starwood Hotel, as an example, already provides an option to its customers to text message for guest service requests at their hotels. Mobile Customer Care will allow customers to use their mobile device to place orders, requests, or even contact customer service without having to place any phone calls or to send emails.

3. Contextual Services

Contextual services will be provided by combining mobile, sensor data and analytics. These services are about getting the “right information on the right device at the right moment”. It’s about linking various information sources together in real time to get information that will be most useful at that specific time.

4. Indoor Location Services

We can already track our outdoor location however now many are looking into indoor location technologies. These technologies will provide the locations of people indoors! These applications will be especially useful for those working in warehousing or in the healthcare industry. Already on the market that many companies use are conference room location tools.

5. Native Mobile Apps

By now I’m sure many of you know that there are Native apps, Web apps and Hybrid apps. If not, here’s a very short and simple explanation of the differences between all three:

• Native apps: live on a device and are bought or downloaded from an App Store. Once downloaded, they are accessed through an icon on your phone’s screen and can work offline and use your phone’s camera, etc.
• Web apps: technically speaking these are not real applications. They are websites that look and feel like a native app. Internet is needed to use this app.
• Hybrid apps: part native, part web; this app lives in an app store however it relies on HTML to be rendered in a browser. It has certain aspects of both web and native apps.

According to predictions for 2015, native apps will remain quite popular. Many businesses seem to have greater experiences with native apps and will continue to develop them for their employees.

To view the full list of Lopez’s predictions, click here.