McGuire’s Law

Mobility is a wonderful thing. As mobility gets built into all products and services, businesses need to learn how to both capture the power of mobility and manage the dangers introduced through mobility. Here are some examples of how the power of mobility is being applied to create competitive advantage:

• Tennant mobilizes so technicians can focus on repairs, not paperwork
• Kelleher puts inventory data in the hands of the sales team
• Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s mobility solution enables high-value, patient-centered care
• Finland provides government workers with secure mobile access
• Duke University Medical Center delivers up-to-date patient information
• Energen uses mobility to improve employee quality of life
• Sprint Nextel saving $100M by enabling “work anywhere” workforce
• Asian insurers adopt mobility to gain competitive edge

Complete list here

In order to be winners in the new mobile era, businesses will not only need to capture the power of mobility, but also manage the danger. Highlighted below are recent examples of the danger of mobility and how some firms are beginning to manage it:

• Virus protection
• Cisco and iPass release clients for secure mobile access

The complete list is here.

Yesterday I participated in the LBS World Forum in Los Angeles. Some interesting topics came up that I’m sure to address here in the coming days/weeks. A quick shout-out to Jonathan and Roland for giving me some new Power of Mobility thoughts to chew on.

But I also wanted to repeat to this broader audience the statement that started my talk yesterday. I was excited to be with the LBS community yesterday because I believe they are foundational to the launching of the Mobility Revolution. If you go back to the two previous technology revolutions - the PC revolution was sparked by the killer app (VisiCalc) that made real and tangible the power of the PC over previous ways of doing business - the Internet revolution was sparked by the 3Cs (dynamic content, commerce, and community) that made real and tangible the power of the Internet to those who began to adopt it.

With mobility, I believe that context will make real and tangible the unique power of mobility. Where am I? Who am I with? What am I doing? How’s my schedule for the rest of the day? Who am I meeting with later today? Where am I going next? What’s the weather here? What’s the weather there? All of these factors already impact how we connect with information and connect with people. However, today the burden of making these connections falls to the individual user and the ease of adjusting how I connect varies dramatically across applications. Some of us are blessed with great assistants (thanks Deanna) who can take on some of this work, but more often than not we simply don’t have time to deal with it and end up either missing critical connections or becoming inefficient by defaulting to a “standard mode” that doesn’t well suit our current situation.

The power of mobility will become apparent, and will radically redefine how we live, work, and play, as our converged devices work cross-application to factor context into everything we do. Location Based Services (the LBS in “LBS World Forum”) are the first working examples of what this means.

As a quick example, consider the #TAXI service from CellWand, a Toronto-based company. #TAXI does something very common and very simple. By entering the short code, you call a taxi. However, the service is powerful because it takes into account the current context. It uses your location information (with your permission) to identify the taxi companies that are best able to serve you where you are and it uses telephone network context to quickly find a cab company that is ready to take your call (avoiding frustrating busy signals).

So hopefully you can start to see why I was excited to be with the LBS World Forum group yesterday. The experts gathered in that room are the very ones who are transforming mobility from convenience to the kind of power that can spark a revolution!

Power Up!

The most convenient way that mobility is getting built into products is through the convergence into the cellphone of capabilities that previously existed as standalone products. That way, those products are now with you and available for your use whenever you need them wherever you go.

• Cellphone as “key under the doormat”
• Cellphone as scratch pad
• Cellphone as 10Mp cameraphone
• Cellphone as Bond prop
• Cellphone as NPR
• Cellphone as concierge
• Cellphone as dancing egg?
• Cellphone as social location annotation
• Cellphone as “the perfect gadget”

Complete list here.

The Law of Mobility talks about value increasing with mobility. The impact of this law is being felt because the barriers to building mobility in are being obliterated week after week. Here are examples of technology advances enabling this to happen:

• Slim LCD
• In-vehicle LCD
• Portable 3D
• Widgets
• Mobile Cell chip (no, not that kind of cell)
• Crossbow
• Virtual GPS
• Chip for earphone microphone
• SWAN
• Synchronization
• Bluetooth TransSend
• Dual-model WiMax chip
• UMA
• MegaSIM

Full list here.

More and more, the world around us reflects the growing assumption of the law of mobility. Each week we will track indicators of Mobility’s growing importance in our businesses, our lives, and our society:

• Cellphone as Monopoly token
• Consumers see increasing value in wireless
• Ringtone concerto
• Block letters replacing cursive

Full list here.

Mobility is a wonderful thing. As mobility gets built into all products and services, businesses need to learn how to both capture the power of mobility and manage the dangers introduced through mobility. Here are some examples of how the power of mobility is being applied to create competitive advantage:

• SMS helps boy escape captor
• University dining halls distributing menus via bluetooth
• Motorola selling phones to fight AIDS
• UpSNAP brings the value of toll free into the mobile age
• Baseball adopts mobile tickets
• Sprite adopts ShotCodes
• Waymarkr captures your life
• IBM uses cellphones to alert deaf to public announcements

Complete list here

In order to be winners in the new mobile era, businesses will not only need to capture the power of mobility, but also manage the danger. Highlighted below are recent examples of the danger of mobility and how some firms are beginning to manage it:

• Wireless is harder than it looks
• Crackberry lawsuits
• Unauthorized data access
• Device theft
• Hands free crashes
• Solio
• Proximity based security

The complete list is here.

The most convenient way that mobility is getting built into products is through the convergence into the cellphone of capabilities that previously existed as standalone products. That way, those products are now with you and available for your use whenever you need them wherever you go.

• Cellphone as wallet
• Cellphone as personal trainer
• Cellphone as free e-mailbox
• Cellphone as voice messenger
• Cellphone as ATM (and here)

Complete list here.

I received an e-mail this week from Microsoft with the subject “Your new Smart Watch is on us.”

Microsoft and its manufacturing partners have recently introduced the second generation of SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) products. Being the gadget freak I am, I bought a first generation SPOT watch. This makes me an obvious candidate for the 2nd generation products.

It’s a really cool concept - bandwidth built into a watch so that where ever you go, you can receive headlines, sports scores, weather reports, etc. In other words, Microsoft’s concept is perfectly aligned with the Law of Mobility - this should be a high value product because mobility is built in - more valuable than a watch because of the connectivity, more valuable than a newspaper subscription because its with you all the time.

However, when my one year subscription to the Microsoft Direct service ran out, I didn’t renew it, cutting off the flow of information to my bulky, geeky watch. Why would I give up on such a mobility-validating product?

And why am I going to pass on Microsoft’s offer to send me an expensive watch?

Bottom line, I don’t need it. Since I have my cellphone with me all the time, and since I can easily access headlines, sports scores, weather updates, traffic updates, and virtually everything else offered by the SPOT watch, why would I pay yet another service fee to Microsoft to access that information?

In fact, Microsoft may have really missed it by betting on the watch as the SPOT delivery vehicle. In addition to all the SPOT information, the cellphone is even making the wrist watch obsolete.

Microsoft has now moved beyond the wrist watch. I’m excited about Microsoft blazing the trail in building mobility into everyday items, but I doubt that the FM, one-way, limited capacity SPOT model will win out in the face of the coming 4G model, but time will tell!