What People do Mobile Devices
The email marketing crowd are great for doing and finding research. It is no wonder that they are fully onboard the mobile computing bandwagon. Email, after all, is still one of the leading activities done on mobile devices. But the chart to the right is interesting for a number of reasons (source). More folks perform search on mobile device than check email.
As an organization that is focused on providing and managing content for mobile and internet enabled devices, I have to ask: What are they searching for?
The answer is, of course, content. While the search providers see the graph and quiver with excitement at the portent of a rocketing market, those of us a bit more stable understand that search is simply a means to an end. Content is that end. It is the content that is valuable. Less so, the path to get there.
If content is managed, tagged, categorized and delivered to mobile devices then people spend less time in the Means and more time with the Ends. That is the appropriate and most valuable “place” where their time can be spent. While the other bars on the chart are variations on the category “news” (weather news, sports news, entertainment news) the assumption is that people are going to web properties dedicated to that news subcategory and then browsing the information they desire. These are categories that have successfully led people, efficiently, into their content gardens and set them free.
We can, after all, assume that people are spending less time searching for “Sports News” than they are for other things simply because “Sports News” is a substantial category of content that is a primary destination for users. Rather than searching for “sports news” people are going to “sports news” and consuming and enjoying content. They do this to a variety of apps, browser bookmarks and socialized links.
Fishbowl Solutions has a range of mobile content solutions from apps, to mobile browser ready web sites to easy ways to socialize links on mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, Android Phones and mobile web browsers. I’m even speaking about it at this year’s Oracle Open World (Session S319079 – Information Mobility with Oracle ECM – Tuesday Sept 21 at 11am-12pm, Mariott Marquis Salon 7)
Bridge Ratings Research http://www.bridgeratings.com/press.02.22.10.MobilePhoneUsage.htm
So think about this. You are on the road or on a client visit and need access to information back at the office. Rather than slogging through some crazy VPN-as-Remote-Desktop thick client, you can get your videos, presentations, documents and images on your mobile device. You can even fill out forms, perform workflow tasks and do contribution. Rather than lamely searching through repositories you hope your IT admin made public or put into a DMZ, you can self-service without any disruption in capability or service. Rather than calling a co worker who is back at the office or your spouse who is back at your home office and asking them to email that thing you forgot, you can do it all right from the computer in your pocket.
That is real enterprise 2.0. See you at OpenWorld
