Mobile applications are the way forward

Microsoft and Nokia are teaming up to create an application called Microsoft Office Mobile on Nokia handsets it was announced last month. The deal will give Microsoft leverage against Google and others that are attacking its Office business with free or low-priced, Web-based productivity applications.

The companies are going to design, develop and market productivity applications for mobile professionals. They are going to work on an application called Microsoft Office Mobile and install it on Nokia’s Symbian devices. They will also do the same for other Microsoft communications, collaboration and device-management software. Even though Microsoft already had its own Windows Mobile platform they have realised that they have never really established itself in the mobile market while Nokia’s Symbian handsets is market share leader for midrange handsets.

With the launch of google docs, this venture is sure to create a cause for concern in the google offices. Google claims 1.75 million businesses use Google Apps, which is a small number compared with the amount of businesses and customers at hom using Office. According to Forrester who undertook a survey of 152 IT decision-makers, nearly 92% per cent support Office, while only a little more than 3% use Google Apps. This year, Office is forecast to generate about $20bn (£12.2bn) in revenue.

The new Microsoft app will first be available on Nokia’s Eseries phones, which are optimised for the business market and then will be extended to other Nokia handsets marketed jointly by both companies.

This alliance shows that sometimes competitors have to work together to beat the bigger rivals. By installing the Office applications on Nokia handsets, Microsoft and Nokia will be competing against Apple and Research in Motion (RIM). The iPhone as we already know has radically changed the smartphone market and the RIM Blackberry OS is very popular for business users. However, both companies will still be competitors in the mobile market. Microsoft already offers Office Mobile on Windows Mobile handsets and plans to put a new version of the application on mobile phones next year.

The first application to appear on Nokia phones will be Microsoft Office Communicator which will appear in 2010. The Communicator is the company’s instant messaging and Web presence client for business users.

Microsoft has also been working on its own apps what it calls “Office Web Apps” which includes Web-based version of Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote and will be availble on PCs when they release the next version of Office 2010. The apps will work on Safari and Firefox browsers on the Mac.

If you would like to find out more please visit the source of this post.

Mobile Cloud Computing

I know this site is also about SEO and optimising traffic to your own website, but we cannot ignore the growing mobile market and this new area called “the mobile cloud”.

According to a study conducted by ABI research, nearly all mobile money service providers will be impacted by mobile cloud computing. Cloud computing is defined as the evolution of computing processing in which processing and data storage move away from desktop and latops. In simple terms it means data storage and processing occurs outside the mobile device. Some you many have already seen is the mobile Gmail and Google Maps. Mobile cloud computing will continue to grow, ABI think it will expand rapidly over next five years, growing to 998.1 million subscribers by 2014.

Why are they so confident that this will happen? Well two reasons really:
1. There will be a rise in Platform as a Service players in the market. Otherwise known as PaaS these are are development platforms for which the development tool is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. This means there is no need to install tools on developers computers to build Web applications. It can all be done on the PaaS platorm, making it cheaper and easier to develop these applications.
2. There are several standards intitiatives within the mobile industry such as the BONDI intiative and the GSM Associations’s OneAPI initiative that will help the growth of mobile cloud services. The GSM Association’s OneAPI sets the standards for network APIs which means developers can access parts of the network providers’ capabilities such as location services.

So who uses this PaaS?
A lot of companies, one of the first ones is Salesforce. They have their Force.com platform which allows business applications to be built and run in the cloud. Others are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google’s App Engine. I know you may be surprised by AWS, but this is what happens in the market place today, a company that starts by selling books over the internet, can expand into a greater and more diversified business and now AWS is used by over 500,000 developers.

Ok, when will this take effect?
It all depends on the market. Those markets that use internet more will lead the way such as Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia.

The next step is for these companies to offer the service to not just the smartphones – Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone but to the other Symbian and J2ME phones on the market. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are major players in this market.

So you may even find by end of this year, early next there will be a growth in these mobile cloud appplications and those who haven’t yet started using apps will start using them like there is no tomorrow. Who would have thought people would be using mobile phones for more than just calling?