Oracle Fusion Mobile Expenses

Within the Oracle Fusion Application stack we have an application called Oracle Fusion Expenses. Oracle Fusion Expenses, a component of Oracle Fusion Financials, is a robust travel and expense solution that automates the management of travel spend and establishes policy-driven controls for expense reimbursement. In general most of the expenses made by people are when they are on the go. When traveling, taking a coffee on an airport, taking a taxi while traveling to a meeting or booking a hotel room when somewhere at the go. The moments you do not have the time to open your laptop and start typing your expenses into an application. Meaning that a mobiel application is one of the ideal solutions to add to a expenses application.

Ultan O'Broin is running a nice article on Oracle.com on the user experience of such an application. In the below demo video you can see how such an mobile application can be used. We have already been discussing building mobile application with Oracle ADF before on this weblog in combination with SOA. A cool feature of this user experience design pattern is the use of voice. Specially for such a mobile application is speech often a great solution to enter data instead of typing all the data into your application. At a later stage you can check and consolidate your expenses and prepare them to be paid to you. 

Sonte window film

For some reason curtains are something that troubles a lot of people. It troubles some people because the have to pick them and some people it troubles because they have to make sure that hey are installed in front of the windows. Even though I am not a fan of curtains I can see the role they play in your house and that they provide some form of privacy and shielding the sun from time to time. However curtains are already taking a place in houses for hundreds of years and we have seen some "mild" improvements in them nothing to fancy has happend to them. That is at least in my opinion while a curtain specialist might differ from opinions with me.

However, now a startup company is providing a en way of thinking about curtains that is exciting me. A company called Sonte has produced a film which can be applied to your windows and can shield them and make them less transparant. The level of transparency can be adjusted to the situation and can even be controlled from a mobile device.



Sonte has started a kickstarter project to raise funding however for some, currently unknown, reason stopped the fundraising. Hopefully this is due to the fact they found one single company that is willing to invest into the Sonte window film.

What makes the idea from Sonte so exciting is that you will be able to controle your windows via a mobile app. This also should potentially give you the options to connect the Sonte window film to your home automation and add this to a more general way of controlling your house. Think about options where you can blind your house from remote, have it scheduled or make it reliant on the heat inside your house in combination with the location of the sun and the level of sunlight that is hitting your windows. We only have to hope that Sonte will include an API to its product that people will be able to build hooks into home automation solutions to control this from a more central console then only the Sonte applications.

WiFi doorlock

Not a new project or a new product for that matter. WiFi enabled doorlocks are already out there on the market for some time. However, Lockitron is having something cool and nice to it. Lockitron is growd funded project for the development of a wifi enabled lock, or more so, a wifi enabled part you can add to your already existing lock and helps you open and close it via your mobile phone or via a webportal. Next to this Lockitron is using bluetooth as a "near field communication" methode to open the door for you when you are close to the door.

Already other companies are producing WiFi enabled locks, take for example lockstate, the difference however with Lockitron is that lockstate is selling a full lock where Lockitron is providing a piece which you can add to your already existing lock.

Now the main question is if you want to put a WiFi enabled lock on your front door. There might be some security issues with that and I am not sure what insurance companies state about using such a lock. However, for a true tech lover I can imagine you want to play with such a solution and as it is not requiring you to change your lock it is a good way to start experimenting with such a locking device.



Fun thing is that when you start working with network enabled locks you can potentially add this to your full home automation solution. There are a lot of solutions in place to automate parts of your house, adding locks to this will in the future be something almost every house will have. This will also make that your phone becomes more and more important. We are already starting to pay with your phone, start the music in your house, controle you lighting and heating..... and within some time opening your doors with your phone will become very normal in my opinion.

keyless security,..... will Lockitron and the likes be the companies who are at the forefront of this new wave of connected things. I think doors will get a very well respected place in the internet of things. What I am missing at Lockitron, or I did not see it, is an API to add this to other services or get reports of your lock usage out of it. This would enable developers to create nice and cool new features for Lockitron where the current people of Lockitron might not even have thought about.

SoMoClo outlook for 2013

One of the futures of computing and the futures of cloud computing is the the hookup between mobile technology, social media and cloud computing. The three concepts are complementary to each other from a technology point of view and  combining social media concepts with a mobile (and location aware) platform and bring the storage and computing of data streams to the cloud to enable a always on computing backbone delivers a quite interesting new concept. A concept which enables companies to quickly tap into a B2C market segment and quickly and for low costs build pilot projects and tests to test the SoMoClo concepts.

Every company starting a SoMoClo concept will have to be aware that cloud computing is the basis of the SoMoClo concept. One of the main reasons is the flexibility of cloud computing. You can quickly ramp up and down computing resources and you have the advantages you can quickly adopt services from other cloud enabled companies who do provide API's to their functionality. Every company looking to start a SoMo(Clo) project without giving the CLOud part a good look will make a very big mistake and will most likely have (A) have a unsatisfactory RTO (B) a disappointing group of users and (C) a failed project.

The Aberdeen group has the following statement about this:
The rate of transformation in IT is the fastest it has ever been, and increasing almost daily. The rising number of cores on processors allows the compute capacity of servers to grow dramatically. With faster local and wide area networks, servers can be placed anywhere. The amount of data stored by organizations is doubling every 2 years. At the same time, new mobile computing devices are being deployed to end users, allowing them to work anyplace and anytime, with constant access to new forms of social media. These are exciting times, but where is this disruptive change taking us?Aberdeen’s Telecom and Unified Communications, Wireless and Mobility Communications, and IT Infrastructure research analysts have been watching these trends for several years and has observed a growing convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud computing. These three computing revolutions are creating a new computing paradigm. The future is a converged computing infrastructure, which Aberdeen has termed “SoMoClo” to underscore the integrated nature of this single overriding trend.

 

In a recent article by Scott Hebner at cloudtimes.org he got into how we can make SoMoClo ready for the enterprise. Scott is currently Vice President at IBM for Cloud & Business Infrastructure Management. Inteersting thing from this article is that it go's into a couple of things of making it ready for the enterprise world. On one side it go's into the how you, as an enterprise, should adopt SoMoClo technology to grow you business by using it externally and internally.

It also go's into the fact that your employees are already using it and you can most likely not stop the usage of it by your employees. Even though you might have policies around the use of public and cloud services it is very likely that if you have banned the usage of these services that your employees are using, for example, dropbox a lot. For this it would be good to not ban online and cloud service however to adopt them in such a way that you are able to channel them and make sure they are getting more compliant to internall rules and regulations.

If you ban your staff from using any online service it will most likely not work and your employees will use every service available online. However, if you create a policy that they can use this and this and this service however not THIS specific one due to some good reason you will notice that your employees will most likely accept this without any issue. It will bring issues with it however coping with those issues and problems will bring you more benefit in the end opposed to blocking the total use of it towards your workforce.

Interesting is that this is exactly the same discussion we have been having some time ago on BYOD (Bring your Own Device). In this it was Bruce Schneier, CTO of BT Managed Security Solutions who stated that he was seeing a big security risk in a BYOD policy however would never oppose to it as the benefits where so big to companies and users would do it anyway in they end that it would be better to channel it.

The same go's for the usage of Cloud, mobile cloud and social mobile cloud solutions. Your employees will be using it, are already using it. You can better channel it and make use of it internally an externally. The same go's for building your own SoMoClo, as you will see the adoption of SoMoClo applications is picking up with an every increasing pace your company can get a big benefit of a SoMoClo strategy if understood, adopted and executed in the correct way.

Use Oracle SOA for mobile

We have seen a trend where more and more people start using mobile applications, people start to use there phones and tablets more and more and not only for social things but for all kinds of actions. As the mobile trend is well on its way and is still picking up speed we now see that the same trend is on its way in the enterprise market. Mail on your phone is already common. Large numbers of employees do get their business mail on their phone and use it to interact while not in the office. The next step is that companies are making applications mobile so they are available to employees 24 hours a day 7 days a week on any device.

Issue is however that enterprise applications are commonly complex and often consist out of a multitude of applications and servers. Building a simple mobile application is not that easy and you have to pull information and interact with multiple applications when you are building a single application that can be used in a mobile way. Secondly, enterprise applications are commonly not equipped to be made mobile and are often "old".

Oracle is providing a couple of things that can make your life a lot easier as an architect and as a developer. If you are developing a platform and application that is intended to make enterprise applications (legacy applications) available on a mobile device you do want to look at the Oracle SOA suite and you do want to look at Oracle ADF.

Oracle SOA Suite;
The Oracle SOA suite can help you to design and build a way to interact with a multitude of backoffice systems and tie this into a single point of interaction for your mobile application platform. For example, if you need information from two different systems pulled into your mobile application, do an interaction on this data and ship it to a number of other systems it is not making sense to build all those interactions and connections into your mobile application. It would make more sense to create a communication and interaction model in your mobile application server and use the Oracle SOA suite to take care of all the interactions for you.

This will help you simplify the interaction between your mobile application and the server used to connect your mobile application to and all the possible backoffice systems you need to interact with.

Oracle ADF;
Oracle ADF (Oracle Application Development Framework) is a framework developed by Oracle to develop Java applications. If you are about to develop mobile applications and the needed background services in combination with SOA this is one of the things you do want to look into. Oracle is providing a lot of functions out of the box to interact with the Oracle SOA components as well as building mobile applications for multiple devices.

The below video is showing a quick guide into developing mobile applications with the help of Oracle ADF.

Make SharePoint mobile

A lot of companies do use Microsoft SharePoint in one or another form and they use if to for all the good reasons. Even though I am in favour of opensource products it has to be stated that Microsoft has done a great job by developing their SharePoint solution and it ties nicely in with the MS operating systems and the domain security parts. One thing however is to be stated about SharePoint, it is not that mobile and quite often requires you to boot your laptop and make a connection via VPN to your corporate network to make full use of it.

As a mobile worker I am not always in a location, or do have the time, to boot my laptop and start and VPN connection to quickly check a document. What would be ideal is a dropbox like function that shows me files on all my devices including my mobile phone and tablet.

Now Good is providing a good way to share files and interact in a safe manner with your SharePoint installation from you mobile devices. Using the Good solution (and possible other solutions from other vendors) will help you to make your workforce even more mobile. I do think we will see more and more multi-platform solutions and tools coming to the market in the upcoming time if you keep the adoption growth of mobile devices and the new way of working in the back of your mind.

You can check out a video from the Good Share application below;

Mobile systems in Africa

When we talk about mobile systems we automatically think about smartphones who do connect via the internet to services to bring services to the customer. We do see an explosion of apps and more and more companies are starting mobile channels for sales and services. Specially in Europe and the US we see the trend picking up and now Asia (Japan was already heavy involved in mobile). However what we sometimes forget is that Africa is a large and upcoming market.

For example, Africa is the number one continent for mobile banking where a mobile banking revolution is taking place.

Millions of Africans are using mobile phones to pay bills, move cash and buy basic everyday items. So why has a form of banking that has proved a dead duck in the West been such a hit across the continent? It has been estimated that there are a billion people around the world who lack a bank account but own a mobile. Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market in the world and most of the operators are local firms.

One of the things however is to consider is that in Africa only arround 1% of the mobile phones is a smartphone. Due to this the app revolution is not picking up (yet). However, Africans are also very eager to work in a mobile way. Francis Pisani is explaing some of the mobile innovations currently happening in this Capgemini video.

Missing the mobile hype

Mobile usage is skyrocketing and especially the use of apps on smartphones is already in overdrive for quite some time. That would suggest that companies are investing heavily into the smartphone and apps. One would think that mobile apps are the talk of the town at many corporate marketing departments and due to this a hot topic at many CIO meetings. You could expect that mobile is on the combined strategic roadmap of both IT and marketing.

A recent study done by Forrester shows that only 40% of the companies actually do have a mobile roadmap.

“Successful mobile road maps require investment in supporting activities. Making specific investments in mobile education and skills development, maintaining organizational flexibility to increase speed to market, and adapting to local markets are key to the success of a mobile road map.”

source: Service2Media

Indeed this is true however having a good mobile strategy can put your company on top of the food chain which is a comfortable place to be in the current economical period. When in a economical downturn market you want to make your brand (B2B and B2C) as visible as possible and you would like to offer your customers as much easy service as possible against a price as low as possible.

For example, you run a reservation line for restaurants. A common practice of people is to decide where to eat when they are with friends and such events are not planned well in advance. Due to the nature of the decision cycle a phonecall is commonly the quickest way to find out if there are still tables available. Every phonecall to a service agent costs you 50 cents. Calculating your ROI is quickly done and you also provide a second service to your customers who now can quickly browse available restaurants in the area from their smart phone.

The examples are numerous and the options are endless. Missing the boat on mobile can put your company at the bottom of the food chain. There are quite some good companies around that can help you plan your mobile strategy and do the full execution of this plan. Some good examples are Capgemini and Service2Media.

HighLight help finding people in a party

Ever walked into a party or business drink where you did not know anyone and would love to meet some interesting people you have a common ground with. Highlight helps you finding people you have common ground with. It shows all the connected people who have a connection with you based upon common friends and or interest and shows them on your application.

Do you know the feeling you know someones face and cannot remember what this person his or her name is and you cannot place this person. You are sure you know this person and you are crunching your memories on it however cannot recall it. By making use of HighLight you can check who this person is.



Paul Davision is the showing how it is working and is talking about his application in this interview with Robert Scoble. The app is just released and is still very experimental however already working and helping you locate people with the same interest or connections based upon your geographical location.

Fun thing about this app and the company is that they recognize they started something and not sure where the application and the usability will go to and they are asking the early adopter community to help think and shape this application. If implemented correctly you could make this the next generation foursquare and if connected to other services like for example groupon\ you could share information about great deals in the surrounding or in combination with foodspotting it could tell you which places with a common interest are visited for meal. Also think about all the other things a person is showing online and you can check that before you walk up to this person, what books someone is reading, what movies someone likes, friends, relations. It might sound scary and it might sound freaky however most people already do share this information. HighLight just gives you the option to have this information consolidated into one app and show it moments before you meet each other.

HighLight, a company and application I will follow with very much interest in the upcoming time.

The next level of board control

Chaotic Moon already has a reputation for building great and cool things for mobile platforms and they do have some impressive names in their portfolio like NVIDIA, Discovery Channel, Sony Music, FlightAware and CBS sports. They describe themselves as:

As the world’s most proven mobile application studio, we provide everything from initial brainstorming and strategy, to custom development and publishing, to managing your entire mobile presence in any application marketplace. We stand on our history of long-term success by embracing an intense desire to reach further, faster and longer than ever before. Whether you’re a Fortune 100 company or a one-man start-up, we’ll help take your app from a concept to reality. Let us establish, design, and manage your mobile strategy. We will provide custom development on any platform to deliver you a new application or resurrect your struggling media.

Being a key innovative player in the mobile application market they now also have turned their creative heads towards something else. Boards..... The tried to sell it to the public as a "technology teaser" however we all know it serves to very important goals: (A) start a viral (B)even more important have a load of fun building it.

Chaotic Moon Labs' "Board of Awesomeness" is intended as a technology teaser to show how perceptive computing can turn around the way we look at user experiences. The project utilizes a Microsoft Kinect device, Samsung Windows 8 tablet, a motorized longboard, and some standard and custom hardware to create a longboard that watches the user to determine what to do rather than have the operator use a wired or wireless controller. The project uses video recognition, speech recognition, localization data, accelerometer data, and other factors to determine what the user wants to do and allows the board to follow the operators commands without additional aid. Video produced by Michael Gonzales at EqualSons.com

FlipBoard on the iPhone

The moment I almost made my decision it is time for a new phone Mike McCue comes out with a new version of FlipBoard. For all of you who have not been working with FlipBoard already, Flipboard is a new and very quick way to read information like it was in a newspaper. For none iPad users the issue was that it was only available on the iPad. Now Mike McCue, CEO at FlipBoard announced the iPhone version.

This is making my decision to move from iPhone to Android a little harder. My phone is currently not able to keep up with the processing demand of the apps that are released and due to this I am in "need" of a faster phone. Looking at Android it made a good impression and convinced me that I would switch from iPhone to Android. The release of FlipBoard makes this however again something to consider.

wikipedia:

Flipboard is a social magazine application and company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll, based out of Palo Alto, California in the United States for Apple's iPad tablet computer. The application is designed to collect the content of social networks and other websites and present them in magazine format on the iPad. The application is designed specifically for the iPad's touch screen and allows users to "flip" through their social networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with Flipboard.

99 cent fraud prevention

In an attempt to stop identity fraud AT&T no longer gives you the new iPhone for free when you purchase a 2 year contract with them. According to a AT&T employee this is to prevent criminals who use stolen identities to purchase phones for free. His Story was published on macrumors.

The 99 cent needs to be charged against your credit card which is an extra hurdle for criminals to take before they can use a stolen identity to purchase the phone.

Identity theft is not only used in the illegal purchasing of phones, it is seen as one of the fastest growing forms of criminality. The Wikipedia description of identity fraud is the following:

Identity theft is a form of stealing another person's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name. The victim of identity theft (here meaning the person whose identity has been assumed by the identity thief) can suffer adverse consequences if he or she is held accountable for the perpetrator's actions. Organizations and individuals who are duped or defrauded by the identity thief can also suffer adverse consequences and losses, and to that extent are also victims.

Oracle mobile project management

"iPhone App, Enhancements Available in Oracle's Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management", this presentation is shared by Oracle online and free for you to watch. From a personal experience and from a personal point of view I think that Oracle is making a great move at this point to intergrate project management and portfolio applications with mobile applications. This is not all the presentation is touching however for me it is a important part. 

Why is the mobile option such a big deal? When you are working on a project, or in my case on multiple projects the same time you most likley will be running from place to place and you are always in need of the latest information. This is why I love e-mail on my mobile, you can send and read your mail always on the go and now you also have the option to look into the details of a project and add information to the project. This is especially handy when you are commuting daily by train and have some time on your hands while waiting for the train to come or when you are on the train. Making things more mobile and available always, everywhere and on all devices is in my personal opinion the way to go forward. 

We will see this trend picking up in the upcoming years and I expect that we will see more and more applications in the business area adding a mobile part to it. For some companies this will not be a very big plus however for most companies this is a very big thing and it will help you as a employee to work always and everywhere you want. The new applications from Oracle do have a native app for the iPhone and the iPad and do have options to connect to other mobile devices, for example Android, by making use of a mail interface. If you would like to view the presentation please refer to the Oracle site at this location.

The transcript of the presentation reads:

The latest release of Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management offers many significant enhancements, including a new iPhone app and a streamlined architecture that enables companies to more effectively plan and operate business processes.

The new release’s integration with e-mail and smart phones improves communication among project managers, schedulers, and field personnel to ensure that projects stay on track and delays are minimized. Teams can comment on tasks via e-mail, view project to-do lists, and distribute photos via their mobile devices.

Other key benefits allow organizations to

    * Unite project teams and stakeholders with a host of collaboration and feedback capabilities

    * Reduce the risks of cost and schedule overruns

    * Better optimize resources for maximum ROI

    * Clearly monitor and visualize project performance versus plans to help workgroups achieve project commitments

The new release is designed for easy scalability—to aid a single person overseeing a small project, or tens of thousands of users engaged in millions of complex activities across hundreds of projects. And the application’s role-based capabilities address each team member’s needs and responsibilities. For example, senior managers can view real-time performance summaries for the organization while interactive dashboards, Web applications, and simple forms help workers across all levels easily communicate status updates and issue scope changes.

Interactive activity Gantt charts allow planners, schedulers, and project managers to communicate a more accurate and complete graphical representation of a project’s schedule. Top-down or bottom-up resource requests and staffing processes help groups match the right people with projects. And finally, calendar and activity network views provide team members with a clear view of ongoing assignments. 

I you like to see the presentation slides without the audio and just want to have a quick look please check the document below;

iPhone App Oracle's Primavera P6

Posted via Johan Louwers his Posterous page to his blogger page.

Upcoming market for indoor navigation

Nokia research labs recently launched a promotion video for a indoor navigation system. To be honest, even do the spread of blogposts and news items, this is not new. indoor navigation systems have been around for some time in both good and bad implementations. Some do work some do unfortunately work not so good. So what the big fuzz should be about is not the fact that Nokia is working on it, which is obviously and would be a suppress if they where not, the fuzz should be about that it is Nokia who is working on it and hopefully will make it to a product.

Reason that it is important that a company like Nokia is working on it is that it will be integrated in the new mobile products and that it most likely will trigger the competitors to also speedup the research on indoor navigation.



The next big thing could be indoor navigation. We have seen a giant step forward in outdoor navigation the past couple of years meanly due to the work done by TomTom, Garmin and Google. Google specially for creating Google maps and the integration into mobile phones and services. Applications, devices and all other kind of stuff is now location aware. Pictures taken with a mobile phone or a camera are now location aware and when you need to find your way around a city you can always rely on the navigation systems you carry in your pocket or which are integrated in your car.

Still a open field for improvement is when you are getting into a building a out of the reach of the GPS satellites. When you walk in an airport and need to find the way to, your gate, the toilet, a coffee corner, a shop, you have to turn to the old fashion of reading signs. When you are in a office you do normally not visit you have to find your way to the restaurant, the printer, the coffee corner, the desk of someone, a specific meeting room. When in a conference center you are always struggling to find your location.

Indoor navigation can make that a lot more easy. Imagine visiting the office of a customer for a project. In the beginning every consultant is struggling to find all kind of information to get started. Where do I find the printer room, where is this person located (and who is it), where can I find that conference room and where to grab a cup of coffee and a snack. This could all be resolved with indoor navigation. However this is also putting some stress on people maintaining the building. They will have to provide this information and specially in environments where people do not own their own desk it can be hard to keep track of who is sitting where.

For all those problems a solution can (and will) be provided in time and I strongly feel that indoor navigation will be the next big thing coming to the market. First as standalone apps created for airports and conference centers at a later stage for office buildings and shopping malls. At some point it will connect with social media networks to be able to share great indoor locations in somewhat the same way as you now see for outdoor locations with services like foursquare and similar services.

One big issue is that for indoor navigation you currently need a infrastructure to be able to do locate your position. You will need points in the building broadcasting a anchor point where for GPS you can make use of the satellites around the planet. This will slowdown the growth however it might be integrated with wifi spots. It would not come as a suppress to me if indoor navigation base stations will be in the future also broadcasting free (or commercial) WiFi.

Starbucks Iphone

Starbucks is launching a new app for the iPhone. It will be launched on the US version of AppStore first. As we all know strabucks is already a very internet friendly company and me included a lot of people have spend some time with a laptop in a Starbucks to get some work done.

Now Starbucks has launched which can help you enjoy it even more. It can help you locate a starbucks close to you so you will never spend to much time looking for a place to get coffee. You can also give credit points to coffee and in this was indicate what your favorite is. This will help starbucks to do some marketing I guess…..

A second part of the application can be used only in a couple of test starbucks in the US. You can place a amount on your iPhone app and use it to pay for your coffee. It works in the same way as yur starbucks card would do. Only difference is that it is now on your iPhone.

I am really wondering how this will fly. If this is a success and I guess it will be we will see a lot of those applications coming in the upcoming time for other companies. Gas stations for example can come to mind. So you phone will become more and more your wallet. Eventually someone will start to build a new app which is capable of holding all the custom apps. Years ago people where already talking about pay with your phone. Well I guess this is one of the best steps towards that goal. Some pilots and options with SMS pay are already tried and on the run at the moment however I feel personally that this is he first attempt in a way that it can be accepted by the public.

However, security comes to mind. I would love to dive into this to find out what the security is on this thing.

Oracle on your iPhone

When you have worked with Oracle OBIEE you will have noticed that it is quiet web2.0 cool looking and nice to work with. To make this even more attractive now you can run it on a Apple iPhone. Oracle releases a press release named “Oracle Announces Oracle® Business Applications for iPhone Available on Apple App Store”.

You can now download for free from the apple appstore the needed tools to access Oracle applications from your iPhone.

So the question was, is the iPhone a business phone or not? Wel the answer is yes, you can now access your Business Intelligence Oracle applications from your iPhone, 2 very good things in your hand. All the knowledge of your business and a fun tool like a iPhone.

Mobile internet trends

Forrester research has released a research paper on mobile internet use in Europe named “Mobile Internet Users Lead In Advanced Mobile Services' Adoption In Europe”.

The executive summary states:

A decade after accessing the Internet via a mobile phone became a reality, adoption is finally set to cross over into the mainstream. Regular mobile Internet users today are still more tech-savvy than the average consumer. They show greater interest in advanced mobile services in general — for instance, a fourth of them already use mobile email and a fifth are interested in using their mobile phone to tap into social networking sites. Operators shouldn't bank on locking users into their own mobile portals: As the frequency of mobile Internet use picks up, people are more likely to use Google than their operator's start site.

This paper reminded me about a post I wrote on the way America is searching mobile which you can read on my weblog and is named “How America searches: Mobile. This post and the links in it can be of interest if you are reading the Forrester paper which is written by Pete Nuthall.

How America searches: Mobile

More and more people are using mobile devices to access the internet. Getting directions, checking your e-mail, reading files and websites…. As of March 2007 the number of wireless subscribers has climbed to nearly 234 million, reaching more than 72 precent of the total population, according to industry tallies by CTIA The Wireless Association. With mobile devices on hand throughout the day and the number of mobile internet users topping 20 million, wireless is beginning to deliver on its long-held promise of becoming the “third screen”.

The digital marketing agency icrossing has delivered a comprehensive report on the figures of mobile internet use and they way of searching on the American region.