Watches are getting smarter. The i'mWatch and the LiveView keep you connected at the wrist.

For a long time, I’ve been thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to use my watch as a smart device for e-mail or SMS notifications that come on my mobile? If the notification seems interesting, I could dig my mobile out of my pocket and read it. Or I could also use this tiny, but handy, display panel to see who is calling me. Even better -  what if I could answer the call from my watch?  And then, hang up and play my music through that same watch?

It’s here. An Italian company, Blue Sky Srl , has created this smartwatch and they call it i’mWatch. A brilliant idea. However, Blue Sky Srl is not the first company to build it. Sony Ericsson had already created a similar watch called LiveView.

There is a significant difference between them. LiveView has an interactive display panel that can talk to your Android Smartphone through Bluetooth technology. But i’mWatch is a true, smart device because it runs on Android OS. You can run you own Android application on it, and it can also talk to your iPhone and Blackberry devices as well.

Because these watches talk to your mobile through Bluetooth, they can also talk to your Bluetooth headset. With touch screens, the combination of a smartphone, a smartwatch and a Bluetooth headset – life is easier.

I’m looking forward to the future of the smartwatch. As it becomes more powerful and more intelligent, doors will open for more opportunities. We can already bump smartphones to exchange contact information. Wouldn’t it be great to bump without holding your smartphone? You just need to wear a smartwatch, which will detect the bump pattern and pass it over to your smartphone. Forget bumping – just shake your hands together!

Lately, I have spent the majority of my time with enterprise teams that are looking at mobile more holistically. While this is a welcome change, as I have been harping on the need for a focused mobile strategy  for some time, the turn is incremental. Now there is a feeling that a mobile strategy needs to be developed, but the change has become – build the strategy around a vendor. This is not strategy. If you survey your organization, look at the competitive landscape. Then derive a set of features and capabilities that your organization would like to take advantage of. Then, you’ve got it half right.

The mobile sphere embodies more than just some smartphones, and when looked at from the perspective of what your company wants to provide to the market and to internal employees, the right set of requirements for technology selection begin to form. But this is not enough. You need expert advice from battle-hardened technologists who have put out applications successfully. That guidance will keep your app from falling into the “so what” category to a greater extent, than if you make a go of it on your own.

There is also a great need for creativity. Not just some goofy gimmick, but real, valuable, interesting capability, that brings through what the app is supposed to achieve. In my next installment, I’ll hit on some of the methods to get at these areas that can help you start further down the road than your competition.

Though not portable, non-mobile devices, like IPTVs, are on solid ground in the app revolution.

Have you noticed that the world of mobile development continues to enlarge? Technologies are expanding to include an ever-increasing set of inherently non-mobile devices that can be addressed by smart mobile solutions. The iPad has become the new form for kiosk and portable display. It is a great use of a device that provides for a rich, touch-driven experience. The iPad is clearly a mobile device that, in this example, is used as a stationary fixture. Gaming consoles now support WebKit. This allows for apps to be downloaded and installed by consoles like the Playstation. Why is this powerful? Take the example of developing a consumer app for mobile. I can now address a base that not only includes smartphones and game consoles, but Internet Protocol Televisions (IPTVs) as well. With a single application, I can address a broad swath of consumers via channels that follow them everywhere. Some may not welcome this next level of the technology invasion, but it is exciting in its own way. Why not have your personalized content follow you through different mediums? Whether you like or not, you will see it on a TV near you soon!

Mona Lisa in Low Resolution

I have the opportunity to interact with lots of customers who are in various stages of their mobility effort. Some have years of experience and are on their second or third iteration of mobility and others are just starting out on the mobile journey. Regardless of which one you may be, you need to manage the risks associated with the art-driven user interface.

For some customers the entire process may start with engaging an art house to create a user experience that is compelling and can easily pass the logo-police standards. This is usually the easy part. Creating a static set of images that can show what your application might look like in a perfect world is as simple as mocking up some screens in the graphics program of your choice. Now what? Everybody is excited and buys into the vision. But what happens next?

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When I hear “last call,” I typically rush to the bar and place a few drink orders before the bartender shuts down the flow of alcohol to its belligerent patrons. But in the case of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announcing last call on HTML5 – what does it mean? We’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid spiked with HTML5 for quite some time, and are drunk with hallucinations that it will solve all of the world’s problems. So if we’re already intoxicated, what’s the point of last call?

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and all of its flavors, is a victim of its own success. It made a relatively easy process out of creating and sharing information across the Internet. Millions of people now use it to develop Web sites. With that many developers, everyone wants to have a say in its future direction. The W3C is not only the governing body, but its director, Tim Berners-Lee, is the author of the first version of HTML. The 61 members of the W3C team have the arduous responsibility of making decisions that impact not only millions of developers that utilize the language, but also billions of users that see the results produced by HTML.

HTML 4.0 went to recommendation status on December 18, 1997. That was nearly a year before Google was formed in September 1998. The Web was a very different place at that time, and the mobile Web wasn’t even a consideration when HTML 4.0 went to recommendation. What took so long to get to HTML5? Part of the reason is that the W3C was taking a different path in the last decade – something the mobile Web got trapped in with variations of the language such as XHTML. But the sheer size of the affected parties and the revenue impacts that it has on the companies that support the Web created a political environment that makes it challenging to certify a standard the way that it was in the beginning.

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Mobile vision includes deciding - mobile app, or mobile Web?

If you’ve been a frequent reader of Mobile Masters, you’ve probably noticed that many of us spend a good deal of our ink communicating things like vision and planning. It’s not just that we all have the same one-track mind – this stuff is important. For many customers who know they have mobility needs, the task of moving forward can seem quite daunting. It helps if you create your mobility vision first.

The mobility world is complicated. You have users that are out of sight and often nearly impossible to control. You have a broad spectrum of mobile devices to contend with, and you have an ever increasing number of business challenges that could probably use a well-crafted mobile solution to help address them. No matter how you slice it, things are complicated and they’re not getting any easier any time soon. So what do you do to prevent yourself from imploding under all the pressure? Create your mobile vision as a first step.

In past blog posts I have harped on planning and doing a bit of analysis to help focus on the most important things first. That puts you on the right path for the projects you are aware of, but what about the unanticipated stuff that could be lurking down the road?  What would happen if you had a tremendously successful new product launch? What would the impact on the organization be? How could mobility help? What if the opposite occurred and you had a product recall? Could the same mobile vision help address these challenges too? Maybe.

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Is the cool, bump capability a practical worker app?

If you’re a home owner, I’m sure you have heard that a nice kitchen can add a lot of value to your house. There’s certainly no shortage of bells and whistles that you can build into your kitchen. You may have visited showrooms, or even your friends’ kitchens, and came away with a wish list of renovations as long as your arm. Some things like granite counter tops, fancy hood ventilation, and double drawer dish washers are pricey, but often worth the investment. But other things like a built-in cabinet vacuum, appliance garage, or even an over-the-stove pot filler often times may not be worth the investment–as cool as they may sound.

Let’s take the pot filler. It sounds practical and is a cool gadget to show off in your kitchen, but unless you have a large Italian family, you probably aren’t using it everyday to boil pasta. After accounting for the plumbing costs to install it, you’re better off just lugging the pots back and forth between sink and stove top. I have a great aunt whose daughter insisted that she install a pot filler in her kitchen because of all the soups that she makes. It seemed like a great idea, but in the end, she’s happy filling her pots from the sink and carrying them two feet over to the stove.

The parallel with mobility is in app design. There are so many cool looking apps with slick user interfaces and controls. You can bump, shake, flip, and much more when interacting with apps. Many companies see these cool features in consumer apps and instinctively ask, “What can I do for my business apps?” This is kitchen envy – thinking about how cool those bells and whistles could be in the app be without thinking through the usability consequences.

Sure a bump capability may be a cool and quick way to exchange data between two devices, but is it really practical for a worker app? Instead of implementing a fancy carousel control, maybe a simpler pick list would be quicker and more intuitive for many work processes. I’m not saying let’s go back to basics for your UI, but think about form as well as function. After all, decisions made due to kitchen envy often lead to kitchen remorse.