Chapter 6. Mobile Business

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."

Arthur C. Clarke

In this chapter, we will look at some of the emerging applications in the field of mobile business beyond the wireless enablement of enterprise packaged applications such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain management. We'll look at categories including wireless infrastructure management, mobile commerce, location-based services, telematics, and electronic tagging. Before launching into these emerging categories it is worth looking briefly at the history of mobile computing in order to see how it began and how it has paved the way for today's solutions.

In the first generation of mobile computing over the last decade or so, devices, networks, and applications were highly proprietary and consisted of mostly closed systems that performed targeted functions for mobile workers such as bar-code scanning and data entry. During this period, the industry also experienced several misfires in terms of pen-based computing and other technologies such as handwriting recognition which did not take off as expected among consumers. The Apple Newton OS-based products such as the MessagePad were introduced in 1993 and helped to create the personal digital assistant market. They were later discontinued in 1998 in order for Apple to focus resources on the Macintosh operating system. Despite this change in direction, these products helped to promote affordable mobile computing in the industry and were simply ahead of their time. Features included handwriting recognition and communications capabilities such as fax and email support even with the first MessagePad, the OMP, which was launched in 1993 at MacWorld, Boston. Overall, these early products helped pave the way for future PDAs such as the Palm Pilot and Windows CE devices to follow in the years ahead. These newer devices benefited from the increases in processing power over time due to Moore's Law, which helped manufacturers implement desirable features for consumers at an ever more affordable price.

The second generation of mobile computing really started in the late 1990s during the height of the dot-com era and the e-business era. From an enterprise perspective, this marked the start of a focus on extending enterprise applications so that mobile workers had access from the field and on providing mobile access to email and personal information management functionality. Also apparent during that timeframe was the move toward more open standards for wireless data such as the wireless application protocol and other Internet-based protocols.

Today, we are entering the third generation of mobile computing, which contains the market sectors mentioned earlier: wireless infrastructure management, mobile commerce, location-based services, telematics, and electronic tagging. This list of market sectors is by no means exhaustive and simply represents a sampling of some of the more interesting directions that mobile computing is taking as it evolves. These directions promise to more fully exploit the true benefits of mobility across both humans and machines by making mobile computing ubiquitous and embedded into our everyday activities and operations.

In order to exploit these new benefits of mobility in this third generation of mobile computing, one of the first items that is required, after the basics such as increased wireless bandwidth and geographic coverage, is a solid foundation for wireless infrastructure management. This can enable the enterprise or carriers to better manage the proliferation of devices, applications, and users from a security, management, and monitoring perspective.

The next sector, mobile commerce, provides the opportunity for ubiquitous electronic commerce transactions unconfined by physical location or access device. Location-based services can provide the location overlay and thus the added intelligence to information and transactions. This is especially important within the enterprise supply chain, or within consumer applications, helping to locate and track people and assets. Telematics can provide information, communications, and entertainment to automobiles. From a consumer standpoint, telematics stands to make the automobile the second most important convergence platform for digital services after the home.

Wearable devices help to adapt computer systems around the way that we work rather than requiring us to adapt ourselves and our movements around machines. They help to eliminate the additional process steps which take us away from the point of business activity in order to perform data entry or lookup tasks. Wearable devices can also help to create an augmented reality where digital information is superimposed upon the view of our physical surroundings. In this way, it enhances the physical reality rather than trying to replace it with complete virtual reality. The applications for augmented reality are numerous, and academic institutions such as the Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab are creating exciting experimental systems. Applications for augmented reality can include military operations, field service and repair, medicine, and consumer-oriented applications that provide additional information about a user's surroundings.

Embedded computing enables machine-to-machine interaction from an industrial automation perspective and has great significance for consumer and industrial products and for remote management of a wide variety of devices and equipment. Electronic tagging via techniques such as RFID enables objects to gain intelligence, or to at least identify themselves via a unique identification number, and provide information back to the network regarding their key attributes.

Within several of these emerging areas, we'll discuss the technology and how it can be applied in business scenarios that are just starting to appear and be adopted for new forms of value creation. Some of these solutions have been in place for several years but have been subject to expensive, proprietary technologies or business barriers that have hindered widespread adoption. Today, many of these barriers are coming down. For example, RFID chips are becoming smaller and cheaper and the industry is starting to standardize with initiatives such as the Auto-ID Center, an industry-funded research program at M.I.T. The Auto-ID Center has a goal "to change the way we exchange information and products by merging bits (computers) and atoms (everyday life) in a way that dramatically enhances daily life in the all inclusive global arena of supply and demand the supply chain."

The emergence of more open standards and the reduction in costs for many of these technologies have served to create the market and initial trigger for both consumer and enterprise adoption. Along with Web services, the mobile business technologies discussed here are key disruptive technologies that should be on the radar of most enterprises. They can be applied across industry in a variety of scenarios for revenue generation, performance improvement, and cost reduction.