Well – after a long cold winter it’s finally here. OPENING DAY of Major League Baseball. It’s a time of renewal, of optimism, a time to look forward. We know that for the next 5+ months, baseball will be part of the daily ritual. I was at Shea Stadium with my buddy on Opening day in 1983 for Tom Seaver’s return to the Mets after having been traded on a dark day in 1977. He was the starting pitcher on opening day and he shut out the Phillies 2-0. I can’t recall any details of any of his other starts that season – but that’s the magic of opening day.

I know that I romanticize he days as a young boy when I would hide the old battery powered am radio under my pillow listening to Mets games long after I was to have lights out. At the time, my old am radio was my connection to the outside world. As an adult, I still love the game – but have much more appreciation that Major League Baseball and it’s associated teams are first and foremost – businesses.

Major League Baseball has understood that there are great opportunities to increase revenue and extend their brand through the use of mobile technologies. A quick review of MLB mobile provides a number of offerings – some free and some paid. MLB has done a good job of driving additional revenues through their mobile offerings.

A subscription model can enable a user to see games from all over the league at any time. In addition, there is added value in that there are informational pop ups and data presented throughout the broadcasts. Baseball is a very statistic oriented game for those who have a passion for the game which makes it well suited for the combined broadcast and interactive data push approach. MLB seems to have found an approach in which they can have their customers pay for something that they could receive for free. Games are still available for free on am radio and TV – but people are putting down hard earned dollars for the privilege to interact with the games on their mobile devices.

There’s value add there which commands a premium. This is a grand achievement; but remember to put this in context of the more crowded media and content environment in which we live today. As a kid, we didn’t have ESPN 24/7 or the Internet – if we missed the game it was likely we would have to hope for the box score in the next day’s newspaper.

Apply this level of thinking to your own business. What products and services that you offer can be enhanced via mobile technologies. How can you repackage, redeliver, bundle, enhance, expand your offerings?

This is the secret sauce that turns your mobility project from an expense line item to a revenue line item. There are great rewards for the companies that harness this power – and for the business executives who drive these new channels to their customers.

So find the ‘am radio’ customer – and determine how your business can turn them into an enterprise mobile consumer of your brand.

As for Tom Seaver, he retired many, many years ago. He runs GTS Vinyards in Napa Valley. (GTS is for George Thomas Seaver). Wonder what he’s doing to reach his mobile customers…Tom – give me a call!

∞

As I work with various customers, partners and fellow employees I am constantly reminded that language is often open to interpretation. We talk and think we are making sense but occasionally we aren’t being understood. As one old nun used to put it, ‘The problem isn’t in the speaking, it’s in the listening.’ As much as I hate to admit it, she was right. I was usually only half-listening and that combined with the attention span of a gnat usually got me into trouble. I can honestly say I see the same thing happening in many meetings I participate in and I’m not the only culprit (this time).

Simply by its own nature, mobility is complicated and has lots of complex detail. Many times we have to evolve the details of a project as we go. What we thought at the beginning may change due a number of influences. Assumptions are fine as long as they are challenged and validated. It helps to have a base understanding but you have to take the Ronald Reagan approach; trust but verify.

Recently I spent some time working with a group of folks that came from some very diverse areas of a business. They all had full time jobs and were loaned to a project to help get a kick start and flesh out the core requirements. This is a great start for any project. It helps to get a cross-functional team engaged and puts them in the position of change agents within the organization. Having people from different walks of the corporate life really helps create a groundswell of support and buzz for your mobility project. The challenge with a group like this is keeping them focused.

We had several discussions about the realm of the possible. We talked about various possible paths to take and the pros and cons of each path. The team looked at the various challenges and benefits of each suggestion and weighed each against the overall project scope and goals. This was a great example of the power of ‘team thinking.’ The team was looking at the detail while maintaining healthy skepticism and never lost sight of the overall goal. All seemed right with the world. Until everybody went back to their day jobs.

(more…)

So another CTIA…big crowds, lots of tablets. The lists and reviews of current new tablets on the block (especially those from Samsung) are easily found elsewhere. What I find most intriguing about the entire next tablet wave is that none of them has managed to get the ‘design’ right. Not a single company has managed to apply the same level (or even remotely close to it) of Apple UI and design capabilities to their new devices. On an individual by individual consumer basis Apple will dominate. Some financial analysts now even believe Apple can actually more than double revenue to $200B (see for example,  http://yhoo.it/fQIxxv).

There is a lot of noise made everywhere about the need to compete on price points to ‘beat’ Apple. However, Apple has by and large eliminated the price point discussion. Pricing will have nothing to do with the number of iPad 2s that will be sold in 2011 and beyond – or with the number of iPad 2s that aren’t sold in 2011. It is the entire collective user experience that will drive Apple’s consumer sales to Mt. Everest heights while the entire rest of the pack are still trying to climb the local hill.

If, as an enterprise, you buy into the argument that consumers bringing their own hardware into the workplace is today’s reality, you have to factor that into your longer term mobile planning. Line of business people and marketing and advertising teams will have no trouble with this – they will design many cool apps, then simply hand off the plans to enterprise IT to make it a reality.

If enterprise IT, in turn, has done its mobile homework and understands mobile realities (especially mobile security issues, back end connectivity, mobile-driven SaaS, and longer term mobile app development issues) it will drive the enterprise to build its ‘foundation’ mobility initiatives on a mobile application platform (such as Antenna’s Mobility Platform – AMP). In addition, enterprises can make use of technology such as Antenna’s Volt to also get around the limitations (among other things) of publishing their apps through an App store (today that means either Apple or Android). The tools exist today to make these things happen. Today there is no excuse for enterprise IT to not have the software side of mobile planning initiatives figured out.

Leverage Employee Hardware? Really?

Then there is the hardware side of the equation. Do enterprises really believe that the right path is to leverage their employees’ hardware? I’m very much not convinced that enterprise IT wouldn’t like to gain a little control back over this. In fact, a few IT folk I’ve spoken with over the last few months would absolutely prefer to regain control – especially control over tablets – which could conceivably become far more heavily used as enterprise tools than smartphones – far more data, more ‘enterprise’ critical mobile apps. Etc.

So then, if we cede Apple the consumer market – because as I say above, no one is winning the design wars against Apple (I should say design + Garageband + iMovie + …) – that still leaves the huge enterprise market – for which Apple has no real game plan – wide open. And in this space it isn’t the ‘alternative hardware vendors to Apple’ who hold the aces. It is enterprise IT itself that holds them and can use them to drive some powerful tablet deals for itself (and in the process drive smartphone deals as well).

I’ve focused a few posts over the last several months on the need for enterprises to negotiate/renegotiate wireless data contracts with the carriers. Here I’m strongly suggesting that now is also the perfect time to get into deep discussions with Dell, Samsung, RIM (which had been known to give hardware away back in the day it made money from its email services), HTC and especially HP (dare I add Nokia/Microsoft?) – every one of these vendors MUST focus on heavily seeding the enterprise market with their mobile devices (in particular their tablets) if they are to make any serious enterprise headway. Grab the bull by the horns and land yourself a great volume hardware deal today!

If you do you will be able to pass along significant savings to your workforce. Add in renegotiated wireless data plans (possibly if not likely in conjunction with your hardware deals) and your workforce will completely forget about bringing their own gadgets to the office. IT can indeed regain control of its enterprise hardware. In an earlier post I referenced an iPass study that suggests employees love the idea of enterprise-subsidized data plans. Add the hardware component to the mix and complete the virtuous circle for both your employees and your enterprise IT team. Negotiate and take control.

∞

There are millions of IT security people out there who have made a pretty good living keeping their stakeholders systems, networks and data secure. They have honed their skills in their current environments and depending on how much regulatory pressure they are subjected to, many have incredibly restrictive policies. These policies are designed to insure the greatest level of security and compliance and very often they don’t necessarily balance the burden placed on the ‘users’ with the security concerns of the organization.

Security policies that are onerous for users within a company’s facility can become impossible to implement for a mobile solution. These same policies may also be unnecessary or redundant for mobile applications built, deployed and managed using a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). These platforms have layers of security capabilities targeted specifically to address the mobile world. More importantly, some of these seemingly unnecessary internal policies may make the mobile application so unusable that there is very little point in deploying it.

Security too onerous?

How do you balance your IT security requirements with the ability to address your mobile application requirements? What are the reasons for specific policies and do they apply to the mobile application or user community? How will ‘standard’ security policies look, act and feel on a mobile device and when the user is operating off-line or disconnected from the network? I’m willing to bet that your security policies haven’t been designed with any of these considerations and that’s a bet I haven’t had to pay off on yet.

There has always been a balance between secure and usable. If most security people had their way user’s would need to give a DNA sample and submit a copy of their tax returns before logging into the company’s network or applications. On the other hand, most users would like IT to install the ‘clairvoyance module’ on the system so the computer, network or application already knows who they are and what they want to do before powering it up. Reality sits somewhere in between. The challenge is getting to tolerable solutions that, at a minimum, make neither group perturbed (and forget trying to make both groups happy).

One additional consideration in a mobile world is that your IT security folks have to deal with a syndrome I affectionately call the ‘wild, wild west.’ In the office they can always walk over and unplug your computer. If your worker is mobile, IT’s arms aren’t long enough to reach out and pull the plug on the mobile device and this scares many traditional IT security people. The business users who want a mobile solution on their handheld devices feel that IT security is overreacting. This is not IT’s fault. They have been given a nearly impossible task: keep our stuff secure at all costs. Much like most legal departments (who are tasked with: keep us from getting sued) they rapidly become the ‘business prevention department.’ What I’d suggest is have as many mobility conversations with your IT security team as early and as often as you can. Including them in your requirements gathering and design sessions will help them understand what you are trying to do and what the impact of any security decisions will be on end users.

But beware… You may get the IT executive responses that are sure application killers, ‘Frankly, I could care less if this inconveniences the users… I don’t care if nobody will use it, that’s the way it has to be… This I our policy, take it or leave it…’ There are lots more but you get the point. These responses are a typical sign that you have involved IT security too late in the process. They see you as ‘dumping this on them’ and when pushed they will retrench and fall back on tried and true policies.

Security is a Balancing Act

When I worked for the phone company I had a field staff. I wanted to provide them with laptops so they could log in from the field (remember, this was years ago). I submitted the request and got a violent reaction from a guy in IT security. The answer was no! Not being smart enough to let it alone I set up a meeting and asked John (the IT dude) to attend. I explained what we were trying to do. He listened and then said, politely, no. I asked why and the response I got was that it would be too easy for somebody to ‘monitor and intercept’ our transmissions and this introduced a security hole.

Nicely Balanced Securty

Since my team often tracked criminals, I explained, in gory detail, what it took to ‘find’ a specific mobile user, camp onto their call, extract the actual data from the call and use that data (complete with graphics, previous case examples, the cost of the equipment required and quotes from Federal, State and Local law enforcement agencies we worked with). He replied, ‘Why are we having this conversation… If our cellular network is that secure it is more secure than walking into one of our retail stores or offices. Go for it.’

John was doing his job. He was tasked with protecting our network and absent facts he had to fall back on the safest process. Once we gave him the data he could make an informed decision. Being a true IT security dude to the core, he audited our process once we were ready to get going and even spent some time in the field with us to make sure he fully understood how we would be using the system.  John was satisfied with the results. Bye the way, John has turned out to be a very close friend over the years after staring off a bit tense.

The point is that if John hadn’t been doing his job nobody would have reviewed what we were proposing. My mistake was assuming that John knew what I knew about what I was trying to do and the mobile world. That was a huge mistake on my part and caused delays to my project. My bad!

Security is always going to be a balancing act but without including it in your requirements and design process it has the potential to derail your project entirely and at the most inopportune time. Start talking now and keep talking till you’re all on the same page and be ready to compromise because this is a two way street.

I’ve been reading through a number of my recent collection of blog posts (while also working on some updates to my Human Centered Mobility white paper), looking to come around to a central and common theme concerning today’s me/we-centric highly mobile marketplace, HCM and the overall large worlds of marketing, advertising and publishing. Here is a list of some of the particular blog posts I’m referring to:

• Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, SEO, Authority & the Mobile Brand
• Zite, Flipboard, The Daily & Today’s Mobile Publishing Industry
• Marketing, Advertising, Consumers & the NEW Mobility
• Me-centric in We-centric Mobile Social Retail Advertising Worlds
• Enterprise Mobile Apps – Focus First on Your Users
• The Antenna and HP Mobile Visions – Innovation at Work
• Steve Jobs Says Mobile Advertising is all IN the Apps – Is It?

Let me pull out here as well the following excerpt from my Innovation at Work post:

Sure, Apple and Android get all the media coverage, and combined the two have in place half a million mobile apps and…15 billion downloads (whatever the actual number is, it doesn’t matter, that it’s that order of magnitude is what counts). Yet, regardless of that immense number, the questions always come down to:

• How many of those apps are downloaded once and only used once or never used
• How many are immediately deleted
• Does the extremely low cost of most of them (if they aren’t altogether free) change the dynamics for downloading (of course it does – it makea such a huge number a lot more meaningless than it may otherwise appear to be)
• At what point does mobile app innovation at this macro level finally become almost impossible to achieve
• Can a market that becomes so large it begins to significantly stifle innovation possibly continue to foster differentiation

Are the next few years of mobility destined to be  measured by a race to the 1 millionth meaningless mobile app and the 30 billionth download of a meaningless mobile app? I sure hope not! Rather, the time is now upon us to begin thinking about the quality and larger scale meaningfulness of mobile apps that will function in the enterprise and personal cloud environments that Antenna’s and HP’s mobile visions encompass.

Innovation and differentiation are the keys here.

If you lack innovation and differentiation, I can point you to an entirely different solution for your business…

Although it falls under the general heading of ‘unintended consequences,’ failing to add real innovation that leads to differentiation WILL lead to unhappy mobile users.

So what then is the unified underlying theme? Very simple…

Engage Your Mobile Users Long Term

Before I go on, here are a couple of very interesting blog posts from others in the social blogosphere: 

• Engaging Customers on Facebook - A collection of how-to tips
• EdgeRank – What Does It Mean for Brands? - A good intro to Facebook’s new EdgeRank algorithm – where the emphasis is now placed on how well YOUR brand utilizes Facebook for customer ‘engagement’ (rather than customer acquisition)

These offer some good general social ‘engagement’ background.

For those of us living in and having to deal full time with today’s mobile world, how are we to insure that our mobile users are able to effectively live within their own personal mobile worlds? The blog posts I noted above all focus on arriving at a large scale definition of what exactly it means to ‘effectively live’ in our mobile worlds. To sum up everything in those posts, from my own perspective as, say, a brand (a company, a business, etc. etc. etc.) reaching out to my audience of consumers (we can add ‘workforce’ here as well), we come to the following:

You need to constantly and consistently engage with your users (and target users) in a manner that empowers them with highly valuable and context sensitive information they can use to both create immediate actionable events for themselves (me-centric). and feel highly comfortable with to disseminate to their personal social networks (we-centric). 

It is that simple. And extraordinarily hard to pull off!

What is necessary for a successful mobile-based social engagement strategy?

• Well-executed mobile app(s) – either native or hybrid – that offer innovation and differentiation from your competitors
• Easy and consistent access to the Web via any mobile device
• Fully-connected, large-scale (e.g. desktop-based) online experiences that seamlessly dovetail with your mobile app(s) and your mobile Web capabilities

It isn’t about mobile apps. It most certainly isn’t about getting to that 1 millionth mobile app download.

It is about creating that one holistic mobile strategy that drives a deep engagement experience and long term relationship with your user.

I recently started thinking a lot about wireless bandwidth when both AT&T and Verizon began to compete head on through the scope of their various wireless data plans in my post New AT&T/Verizon Data Plans: It’s Time to Renegotiate Enterprise Wireless Data Costs. The bottom line is that wireless data consumption is growing at an enormous – I might even say at an insane – rate, and it is a real question whether AT&T or Verizon is up to the real challenges of meeting this growth. Now AT&T has presented us with an interesting scenario.

Should the AT&T deal to acquire T-Mobile USA fail – and the only reason it would is if the Justice Department (and FCC and FTC) kills it on antitrust issues – AT&T would need to pony up not only $3B to T-Mobile USA parent Duetsche Telecom AG, but some spectrum rights as well in that case. That is one hefty break-up fee…but it suggests a high degree of confidence on AT&T’s part that the deal will eventually take place. Following what will likely be a lot of noise from Sprint, and the usual sabre-rattling by Justice, complete with bold statements of having secured high profile concessions from AT&T to insure both consumer and competitive protection, the deal will take place. And the number 2 and number 4 wireless telcos in the USA will become number 1.

Instead of the big 4 providing approximately 90% of all wireless service, we’ll have the big 2 and little 3. It doesn’t really change the competitive landscape. Since Verizon and Sprint both use the same network technologies (arguably, Sprint has the most state of the art wireless capabilities along with WiMAX) will it be long before we only have the big two left? And is there really any difference between having these 4 competitors today or the inevitable 2 in this case? I truly don’t see it myself.

I’ve been a Cingular/AT&T wireless customer since early 1993. That’s 18 years, and in truth I’ve never had a lot to complain about. There is always negative noise about AT&T customer service but even there I’ve never had a complaint. That said, what I do complain about is that AT&T’s network is a serious laggard, especially relative to other countries. Period. When is 3G not 3G? When it’s AT&T. When is 4G not 4G? Most emphatically when it’s AT&T. That’s not to say that T-Mobile doesn’t suffer from its own GSM-based issues. In truth the two networks are mostly in lockstep with each other from a technology perspective. True 4G simply will not happen until both companies move into full scale LTE – that is the bottom line on 4G here.

A great many ‘consumers’ have already voiced their opinions on the deal – many, if not most, collectively run along the lines of…’Hey, I was just about to drop AT&T and go over to T-Mobile…now I’ll just end up with the same bad customer service, the same higher costs and the same less overall services I’ve always hadt with AT&T…or maybe I’ll go to Verizon.’

It misses the real point though. Spotty 3G service and what I personally believe is overblown rhetoric on AT&T’s customer service is totally yesterday’s news.

The real question that need’s to be answered is whether or not the combined AT&T and T-Mobile can deliver – on a very timely basis – the true next generation wireless network. Will the merger lead to a true 4G (LTE) wireless environment with rock solid coverage across most of the civilized wireless USA world? AT&T needs to give Verizon real technology competition. That is the competitive layer that truly matters – and it is the only competitive layer that will lead to real and substantive gains in net wireless bandwidth and quality of coverage.

Sharp Focus on LTE and 4G

To my mind pure next generation wireless technology is the ONLY issue worth debating. AT&T will make the necessary Justice Department ‘regulatory’ concessions – there is absolutely no doubt about that. The company has already arrived at this state of affairs - AT&T already knows what will be asked and it already knows what it will give up. The rest will all simply be the usual posturing.

For enterprises already living in a mobile world  - and for consumers from the perspective of these consumers as enterprise customers – business success hinges on the availability of true 4G bandwidth over the rest of the decade. Verizon has a real technology lead on speeds and feeds and general coverage scope (there’s a map for that). But it also has  its own technology issues. AT&T and T-Mobile have had to ‘paper over’ through marketing gimmicks what their networks are really capable of in order to at least give the illusion of maintaining parity with Verizon. Verizon has been and remains a small step ahead on bandwidth – an edge that continually threatens AT&T’s business.

Does the equation make sense? Yes, it does.

So, aside from the immediate headline grabbing antitrust story, what I hope will be explored in depth instead is whether or not AT&T and T-mobile can QUICKLY deliver on the true 4G technology and expand their coverage to truly compete with Verizon. Both the mobile enterpise and consumers will win if they are able to do so.

Is true 4G really that important? Yes, it is. Just take a look at the wireless traffic numbers I noted in a recent blog post, Wireless Data Traffic Growth in the Years 2010 – 2015. Wireless data growth will be insane – it is on an enormous uphill trajectory, and the key wireless carriers MUST be able to handle it all. Wireless expense management (WEM) is clearly going to be a critical component of your mobility planning.

Will costs rise? Very likely consumers will see costs increase somewhat, at least initially. Later on, however, as AT&T and Verizon end up going head to head with true 4G service, the speeds and feeds issue falls out of the equation and the two will need to compete directly on price and value-added services. And they will.

Enterprises, meanwhile, as I’ve already noted, need to plan out a long term strategy relative to negotiating their wireless data costs. As the entire world rapidly goes mobile wireless data costs become the real elephant in the room – being caught unprepared is not going to win you any friends.

Now is the time to start both the planning and the negotiating.

∞

Let’s assume that you are one of those enlightened enterprise mobile people that are now on board with an HTML5-based Web strategy. There are many good reasons to be on board with HTML5 when it comes to mobile-driven app deployment, and you are ready to begin putting it to work for your company and its workforce.

There is, however, one serious problem with HTML5 – it creates potential security holes, as well as data and device management headaches. The most simple to grasp are those that involve corporate data residing on a user device, and access to the applications themselves (in terms of provisioning, commissioning and decomissioning).

It is simple enough to point a mobile browser to a Web URL and put the power of HTML5 to use. Through HTML5 you get data persistence on the user device, meaning that a user can continue to work with an app and associated data if offline or disconnected. Using data this way is trickier than it sounds however. A lot of effort would be required in maintaining back end integrity – when the user reconnects is the data still valid? Has anything changed that the user may not be aware of? What if the user loses the device? Can anyone simply reconnect and gain access? There are countless permutations of these basic common issues, including bad mobile app design.

Little Ticking (Tick Tick tick) Time Bombs

These are common issues – they don’t make headlines, they no longer offer encomiums to the latest and greatest devices (by which I mean the security and management issues are created and easily trumped because the devices are so cool that IT has to bend its usually strict rules to allow users to have them)…they simply exist as real - albeit small – problems that could never the less easily become ticking time bombs.

Kill IT Mobile Stress!

I’m generally enthusiastic about Antenna’s new Volt app platform – there is a lot that it actually does, especially in terms of building hybrid apps that blend HTML5 capabilities with actual device capabilities (such as accessing a device GPS – HTML5 does none of this), and taking the app store out of the app distribution equation. Real time mobile app transactional analytics is also very cool.

But in truth, the coolest thing about Volt is that is restores IT sanity and eliminates IT stress when it comes to totally securing the data and managing the HTML5 Web apps that are now inherently mobile and most typically used in mobile scenarios. The hardware itself is never really the issue – it’s the software and the data that are the real potential culprits.

If the seemingly small device management and mobile data security problems that now amount to little more than a hill of beans for enthusiastic enterprise users of cool new devices are in fact little ticking time bombs with potentially large ramifications, then Volt has a significant new role to play – it becomes possble to completely eliminate these potential mobile enterprise time bombs. Underneath what we might call the glittering stuff (shiny cool devices, accelerometers, etc. etc. etc.) are the not so glamorous mundane day to day issues that cause IT major stress.

What’s one little ticking time bomb? Oh, not much – but it may put things in better perspective to review a post I wrote a while ago when one of those little time bombs exploded at Citibank. Don’t let this happen to you – you will only have yourself – not your demanding users – to blame.

∞