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After reading Seth Godin’s ‘What Matters Now‘, A group of leaders and marketers on Seth’s private network triiibes thought about bringing up a few pointers on What is the need of the hour. What can each one of us do - to bring that missing Magic in our lives.

The book “What you can do now? - Here’s how“ is about Action. It’s your manual for action in 2010. Choose your pick of the 30 odd entries and try to implement a thing today. You can take one each day. I bet you’d find yourself in a 5x better position after a Month.

Do feel free to download the eBook, share with your friends and leave your comments here.

Here’s to your Change and Success!!!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25344954/Do-Now-Here-s-How

PS: Entry #17 is from ‘yours truly’ Enjoy!!! Share!!! Comment!!!

Chick here to download!

Here are the five questions you should answer before you start taking your business to mobile.

1. Why do you want to bring your enterprise software to mobile?

Is your concept based on Mobile or are you bringing an existing business to mobile. If it is an existing business you should analyze how going mobile can help you.

2. Will it significantly affect the Product/ Productivity/ Profit/ Popularity?

Mobile development should significantly affect you or your users in one of the mentioned ways. It might make your product user friendly, make the users more efficient. Or It may increase your popularity and profits. Though investment is not big, taking account of the ROI is a good idea.

3. What smartphone devices will your users have?

Mostly all Smart phones provide similar features. Some basic pointers are if you want to access high-end professionals, business people, Doctors, CEOs, Vice-Prez they are mostly (RIM) BlackBerry and Windows Mobile users. While if you are looking at young populace iPhone and Android are gaining popularity. If you are planning to provide devices and software to your own employees or associates, you will need to consider other criterion based on your exact need and budget.

4. Will your application be Native or Web-based?

Native applications are applications that are downloaded on the device and are accessible by clicking the applications icon on the device.

Web application on the other hand are simply the Websites optimized for use on mobile.

You need to carefully understand the differences in the two types and decide on one or both. Typically if you would just want to extend your website to mobile you can get it optimized as a web app. If, in the other case, you are convinced that having a Native app will affect your Productivity/Profit/Popularity.

5. Which smart phone feature(s) can you leverage?

Smart phones have features like Camera, GPS, Touch Screen, WiFi, eMail, USB and VGA Connector, accelerometer. You should acquaint yourself with these and try to find out how you can leverage some or all of these features to your benefit. For example GPS can provide you with your location and speed with which you are traveling. Accelerometer can jazz up your application by utilizing quick movements of user. Touch screen can be used to implement various gestures and make your application pleasantly interactive for the user.

Wow! After a huge gap of being able to add something for the ideakosh, I decided I would resume my tech and Biz blogging with a series of posts on Mobile development and particularly iPhone development. Enterprise software are now going mobile and everyone wants to do their work on-the-go. I don’t know what they will do sitting in office then. Jokes apart, it is a huge facility to be able to gather information in real time and particularly in most usable formats. A user using Google Maps on iPhone to take driving directions to reach the most happening place in his neighborhood is unaware of the hundreds of satellites running around over his head, and the thousand-splendid-not-sun engineers that created the hardware and softwares for iPhone. But he is still empowered to use that intuitive interface to check availability and buy tickets for that event on the go. If he is not sure about conveyance, he might as well search for nearest mass transit stations, or even car pooler’s pick-up point. Then on his way back he may upload the pictures and videos he took during the event and share them with his online community- or the world. Behind that empowered user, are the empowered developers like me who are now able to create that state of the art applications. What you can think, you can create. Almost. So as every software development requires, mobile applications also require an organized development process.

Should I go mobile or should I not?

Mobile development is not a cheap exercise. If not planned properly it can be a really costly affair. A typical iPhone application using server components for data storage and processing can cost you around USD 20000. Though it can be as low as 2000 USDs and as high as 100000 USDs or more depending on your need and budget. Before you can think about bringing your enterprise software to mobile, you should be asking yourself a few very important questions about the business need, added value and ROI. If you are convinced to go mobile you should analyze your clientele to decide what mobile devices and technologies serve your interests most effectively. Then you can decide if the mobile application needs to be web based or native. And so on and so forth until you get into the intricacies of application. Because of limited processing and storage ability of Mobile devices, Mobile application generally requires a server side component to be prepared so that the data storage and processing can be done on huge and fast servers. This is an added but compulsory cost and is often ignored while planning for mobile applications.

To conclude the introduction, I would like to aver that taking your enterprise software to mobile can work wonders if planned effectively, making informed decisions at every step. You can leave your concerns and queries as comments, I’d get to them within a day.