GigaOM » iPhones

Box adds more enterprise perks to cloud storage

Barb Darrow — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:00:48 +0000

Cloud storage provider Box is adding more enterprise-class features to its storage service including a more advanced administrative console, enterprise-wide search, and the ability to support multiple email domains in a single account. The new features are available in beta form as of Thursday.

The Los Altos, Calif., company, which claims 11 million users, is pushing its cloud storage as an IT-friendly safe and secure way for business users to store documents, presentations, photos and share them as needed.

With the new enterprise search, administrators can scan, search and view files and folders across their organization to see how they are shared both inside and outside the company. Then they can grant or end access to content for any user.

Administrators can also now layer password locks and set permissions for smartphone users to control offline access to files. Those capabilities are available now for Android devices and are coming for iOS.

These are the sorts of features that should make cloud storage more palatable to IT staff worried about employees putting corporate documents into a less-secure cloud. As more companies promote bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs in which employees use their own smartphones and tablets for work, this notion of controllable yet easy-to-use cloud storage is big. IBM made news earlier this week when it was reported that for its own BYOD program, it is stripping out some device capabilities (including iPhone’s Siri) and blocking use of public file transfer programs.

The problem is that so many consumers have gotten used to easy file sync, transfer and storage services like Dropbox, that they use them at work. Box’s pitch is it combines the ease of use of Dropbox with its own secure cloud and IT-friendly controls.

Box also launched a new Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) which offers the type of multi-year pricing and volume discounts that corporate customers have come to expect from software vendors. IT also named Avaya, Lennar, MGM Resorts International, Netflix, Stanford University and Webcor Builders as new customers.

CIOs are getting more comfortable with cloud storage but others in IT are still loathe to move company data off site — they worry about security and outages beyond their control. Box had a minor slip early this week when some customers were unable to access their documents for a few hours. Glitches like this could impact cloud storage adoption although — as several GigaOM commenters pointed out — such glitches are not cloud-specific: they happen inside company data centers all the time.

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Myriad focuses on low-end phones, buys UK’s Synchronica

David Meyer — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:58:59 +0000

Not everyone wants or can afford a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need some of the key functions that comes with these app platforms — browsers, messaging and social tools, for example.

Monday saw some consolidation in the industry supplying these capabilities for low-end phones, with Swiss handset software company Myriad Group hoovering up Synchronica, the UK-based mobile messaging firm, for around £24m ($38m). The result, they say, is the world’s biggest mobile social messaging firm.

Both companies do a lot of business with carriers, supplying white label software that those operators can then preinstall on handsets and brand as they wish. Although it also helps carriers build Android apps, one of Myriad’s core services is in providing simple tools to let even cheap phones hook into social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Synchronica’s forte is in mobile messaging, again allowing non-data-enabled devices to work with push email and social networks.

This deal will create a powerhouse in the rapidly growing sector of mobile-social convergence,” Myriad CEO Simon Wilkinson said in a statement. “It will establish a global service organisation serving over 100 carriers and 25 [manufacturers] around the world. At a stroke, it increases the addressable base for our award-winning product portfolios to over 1.8 billion subscribers with pre-installation of our products in over 100 million new devices each year.”

Those are big figures, and if you look at the histories of the two companies that’s no surprise.

Myriad was formed in 2009 through the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs, a big name in the early days of mobile Linux development. Purple Labs had already absorbed the mobile team from French handset maker Sagem and bought in the handset client software division of Openwave (the one that’s suing Apple and RIM over patents). Crucially, the Openwave deal brought in the Openwave Browser (now called the Myriad Browser) which has been installed on 2.5 billion low-end devices.

Now add to that Synchronica’s widely-used push messaging, synchronization and backup software. Synchronica has made plenty of acquisitions of its own – most recently of Nokia’s messaging business and Neustar’s instant messaging portfolio – and the result is the kind of subscriber base Wilkinson’s talking about.

Operator branded software the norm… for now

The nature and price of the Myriad-Synchronica deal (bear in mind that last year’s Nokia buy alone was worth $25 million) speaks volumes about the future of operator-branded handset software. It’ll stay the norm on very cheap devices for some time yet… but anyone jumping onto the smartphone bandwagon gets to choose their own apps — they don’t need preinstalled stuff. And smartphones are gradually taking over even that low end of the market.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that operators are giving up their fight to be the intermediaries of the mobile software world. Myriad and Synchronica’s customer base includes ATT Verizon, Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, T-Mobile (DT), América Móvil, NTT Docomo and many others, and it’ll be doing good business for a while yet.

I’ve asked for further details of how Synchronica’s product line will fit in with what Myriad already provides, but it’s certain that the combined operation will continue targeting emerging markets in places such as Africa and Asia.

(On a related note, Openwave seems to be getting out of the product game itself, selling off its remaining ‘mediation’ and messaging products to Marlin Equity Partners. The company said on Monday that it will embark on “a multi-pronged strategy to realize the value of our unique patent portfolio”, so it looks like RIM and Apple may soon be joined by other suit victims.)

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4 iPad apps to help wrangle data

Erica Ogg — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:17:20 +0000

In 2012, the next big thing will be what we do with the millions of iPhones and iPads that have infiltrated the office. When it comes to the iPad specifically, one of the most useful ways to incorporate the touchscreen device into your workflow is as a tool to visualize and manipulate data. That is why it is so exciting that there are a growing number of apps that give us new ways to gather, absorb and manipulate data necessary to get our jobs done. Here are a few of the more interesting ones out there that take advantage of Apple’s tablet.

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Clear(ly), it’s time to say bye-bye to buttons

Aynne Valencia and Alfred Lui, Fjord — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:00:38 +0000

With its new iOS app, Clear, Realmac Software has taken the “less is more” axiom to its ultimate conclusion. The Clear app puts a new spin on the common to-do list by enriching it with a playful perception of depth, dynamic transitions and crisp audio feedback, all wrapped under a minimalistic visual language and shallow navigation.

Is this “less is more” approach revolutionary? Nope. Evolutionary? Absolutely.

As designers, we admire Clear’s UI, and we think it ties into some trends we’re watching here at Fjord (a digital service design agency). We’re betting that we will see more of this stripped down approach in the near future thanks to three big industry trends:

1. A “mobile first” approach to features

The small-screen real estate of mobile devices has forced companies to scale down the bells and whistles and extraneous content afforded by the web, prioritizing features and services that make the most impact for the business and customer experience.

This also means that, in order to be successful, these types of applications are focused on a very narrow subset of features. In the case of Clear, not only did the company select the most rudimentary functions in a to-do list, it also followed through with a minimalistic form in the interface.

A simple interface requires paring down interactivity to its barest essence. It requires prioritizing features and focusing on the essentials needed for the desired outcome. The challenge is to know how much you need to create a viable and desirable product, how much can be stripped away, and how to prepare for scaling up the product and service. It will be interesting to see how these applications evolve and scale (or choose not to).

2. Thinking in 4-D and making the user a magician

User interface designers are beginning to realize there is no longer a need to hang on to representations of real life objects and drag them into the digital space. Digital is something else. It gives the user magical powers. It is no longer the user, a mouse and a complicated ballet of hand eye coordination. It is the user directly manipulating a screen or an object to access a magical, four-dimensional world (time, space, people, information) that exists invisibly almost anywhere the user goes. Clear’s focus on gestural UI bestows this sense of magic by escaping the traditional paradigm of check boxes and text inputs that normally exist with digital to-do lists.

3. Getting Agile with it

Both designers and mobile platforms are pushing toward cinematic user interface designs. While motion is nothing new in every day life, appropriately and meaningfully adopting it into consumer-facing applications poses a new set of challenges for designers who are more accustomed to formulating designs using static wireframes. A new prototyping and blended-discipline approach to software and product development such as the Agile method and the new Lean UX movement are making it easier and more acceptable than ever before to create and communicate dynamic, looks-like, feels-like prototypes. This has allowed for a cinematic approach to design that employs more dynamic movement. And much like a good movie, the most crucial bits are often found between those still frames.

It’s exciting to see Clear’s bold interface and the new capabilities it presents. But the Clear app is just a hint of the exponentially more thrilling interfaces we are likely to see in a coming wave of more complex products and services that will go far beyond the to-do list.

Alfred Lui and Aynne Valencia are service design leads at Fjord, a digital service design consultancy. Fjord has provided strategic direction and design for such brands as Nokia, Citibank, Foursquare and Yahoo. You can follow them on Twitter at @fjord.

Image courtesy of Realmac Software.

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Other European Apple resellers watching French lawsuit closely

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:50:50 +0000

Apple is facing a lawsuit in France over its retail practices, which reseller partner eBizcuss is claiming are unfair, and that case will be monitored closely by other resellers on the continent, a new report says. Still, others say this is just business as usual for Apple and that the French case won’t change that.

Channelweb reports that the case has piqued the interest of Apple Premium Resellers in the UK who have run into similar situations to the one described by eBizcuss, according to Robert Peckham, an Apple consultant and the founder of the Mac Technology association, an industry group for UK Apple dealers and resellers. The French reseller is claiming that Apple unfairly favors its own retail channels with new stock and that it undercuts the prices third-party providers are able to offer small business customers.

Because eBizcuss is the largest Apple reseller in France, Peckham says that the action will be “difficult to ignore” for Apple and that it could prompt others to join forces and attempt “a pan-European class action,” according to what he has been hearing from other Apple partners. Peckham believes that “partners have entered into an agreement to sell Apple’s products, and if Apple is operating restrictive practices that prevent them from doing that, they could have a case,” he told Channelweb.

The problems that eBizcuss is claiming are not news to the industry. Another reseller, who remained anonymous when speaking with CRN, said that the efforts are largely futile. “I can understand why they’re doing it, but can’t imagine any other way that Apple would continue to do business with them,” they said. Another source who also wanted to protect their identity said to CRN that Apple’s unfair practices are no secret, however, and that the inequality extends to service prices, where Apple will often undercut outside authorized providers by as much as $200.

Despite awareness of these issues, however, other resellers are fairly sure this legal action won’t really change anything. It has been tried before, as we have noted, by resellers in the U.S. Dave Stevinson, who works with Apple reseller VIP computers in the UK, told Channelweb that Apple’s partners “are aware of the rules of engagement with Apple and know exactly how to make money from selling Apple kit.” Apple may employ practices that not every reseller is thrilled about, in other words, but there is nothing hidden or surprising about those ways of doing business.

It sounds like the case is bringing some buried frustrations to the surface for Apple reseller partners, but it also seems like those same parties are mindful of protecting their relationship with Cupertino. No doubt the eBizcuss case’s success or failure will affect how willing or unwilling others are to pursue similar courses of action.

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Finance, healthcare jobs most likely to allow personal iPhones, iPads

Erica Ogg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:00:22 +0000

It’s not news that more and more businesses are allowing workers to bring their smartphones and sometimes tablets of choice to the office. But would you have guessed that two of the most highly regulated industries (finance and healthcare) would be the ones leading the charge for this BYOD (bring your own device) trend? That’s what a study undertaken by Good Technology, makers of enterprise mobile security software, found. Good’s data also shows that size of the company is not an impediment to making BYOD work, and that even when workers are paid a small stipend toward a device they bring, businesses save money overall by having more productive workers.

Good’s survey includes responses from 400 of Good’s largest customers, with 2,000 employees or more, in October. And according to the results BYOD is being very clearly embraced: 70 percent of respondents said they currently let employees bring their own smartphone (or tablet) to work, 19 percent are considering allowing it, and just 9 percent said they had no plans for BYOD programs.

Being a large company isn’t a deterrent: among those polled, 80 percent that allow BYOD have 2,000 employees or more, 60 percent have 5,000 or more and 35 percent have 10,000 or more. And of those companies, half allow employees to bring their own smartphone or tablet to work as long as they pay for all the costs, while 45 percent offer some kind of stipend for employees to use toward buying a device or a way to expense monthly costs.

BYOD is not as popular among retailers and government agencies, according the the study. But the reason that it’s finding so much success at highly regulated industries, like healthcare and finance — which have very high bars for security and compliance — is the existence of software available that allays those concerns. (Like Good’s, hence their survey.) New mobile software can be installed on personal iPhones or Android phones that “create strong separation between business data and what’s happening on the personal side of the device,” John Herrema, SVP of Corporate Strategy at Good, said in an interview. That separation helps hospitals, banks and other meet compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI data security and more.

“Once you solve that problem, we’re not surprised that [these industries] are the broad adopters,” he added. “They’re very much information-driven, knowledge-driven, real-time, access-to-data-driven,” which having your favorite mobile device in your pocket can help with.

As far as what kinds of devices these workers are bringing in when given the choice, it’s not a huge shock: “Overall, our customers are absolutely activating iOS and Android to the exclusion of everything else we support,” said Herrema. “Historically, we’ve supported Windows Mobile, Symbian, some are even on old Treo devices. Bu these days it’s all about iOS and Android all night.”

The exact breakdown among smartphones brought to work (among Good’s customers) is: 60 percent are iPhones, and 40 percent Android. In tablets, it’s not that close: 95 percent of tablets brought to work are iPads, just 5 percent are Android-powered.

For those companies or IT managers hesitant about the practice, consider this: BYOD can help you save money. It’s fairly obvious that by having employees buy their own smartphone instead of issuing them a BlackBerry you’re going to see savings in your IT budget. But even those companies giving a stipend are seeing the financial benefit.

While Good found that most companies offer a stipend of $61 or more per month for mobile devices, some are varying stipend level by role of the employee. By doing that, the organization can assign how much productivity benefit they think a person with their own mobile device brings — for instance, is it worth more to have a sales director with a mobile device or a general office worker? “So they put a dollar value on that role, which puts them in complete control of the ROI calculus,” said Herrema.

Companies can save money by not buying smartphones anymore, but they get more out of each employee in terms of productivity when they have a device they can use and that they want to use.

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Apple now accepts Chinese yuan for App Store purchases

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:56:11 +0000

Apple wants to make it easier for customers in its fastest-growing market to get their hands on software, which is why it started accepting Chinese yuan for App Store downloads (via the Wall Street Journal) on Friday. The change is designed to curtail piracy and grow Apple’s software ecosystem in its most promising growth market.

Before, Chinese shoppers had to hold a dual-currency credit card in order to make App Store purchases, which caused a lot of people to just jailbreak and install pirated software from outside sources or use false identities and fake gift cards to buy apps. Now over 20 Chinese banks have entered into an arrangement with Apple that will allow their customers to make payments in yuan to buy apps on the iPhone, iPad and Mac App Stores.

The switch to yuan should add “millions” of app sales for Apple, BDA China’s Duncan Clark told the WSJ, as some users who once pirated software opt to go legit for the sake of ease and convenience. The change should be good not only for Apple but also for iOS developers, as it positions the App Store as better able to compete with local application marketplaces like Mobile Market and WoStore, which already offered payment options that Chinese customers prefer, like mobile carrier billing.

A study this week found that Chinese localization is a key factor in determining whether apps will succeed in that market, with apps like Halfbrick’s special Fruit Ninja for China and versions of EA games with Chinese instructions doing better than their less-specialized Western import counterparts. Now that Apple has made buying easier, making games more relatable to Chinese shoppers will be the next step for devs hoping to succeed in Apple’s second-most-important market.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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How far can consumerization go for enterprise apps?

Derrick Harris — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:08:52 +0000

During VMworld this week, talk of consumerization — or the rise of consumer applications and devices in corporate settings — was everywhere, stemming from VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s and CTO Steve Herrod’s mobile- and application-centric keynotes. Included in Herrod’s presentation was talk of a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used.

If employees already use Dropbox, she asked, why would they want to use a different service to do essentially the same thing while at work? The truth is that I don’t know. I can see why employers would want them to use a separate service, but will employees stand for it?

I tend to agree with my colleague Stacey Higginbotham, who noted while reporting on VMware’s mobile play, “While enterprises will love the ability to control who can access their data, employees may not want to give up the ability to use their own tools and choose who they share their files with.” Of course, it’s not so much a question about Dropbox or Project Octopus as much as it is about the role of consumer applications in corporate settings in general.

There’s no denying that consumerization is real. Employees really are demanding the ability to use their personal devices rather than company-issued BlackBerrys and laptops. By and large, employers seem content to let them do so because it takes productivity to a whole new level. That’s one of the megatrends driving VMware’s new focus on mobility and applications: If personal devices can’t be locked down from a security standpoint, it wants to make sure enterprise applications and data can be.

Consumerization even has made its way into traditional enterprise applications, thanks to the advent of Software-as-a-Service offerings. Business users accustomed to clean, simple web-based consumer applications in their personal lives expect the same thing from web-based business applications. As Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker asked in a post last year, “Why buy and manage complex infrastructure or applications when a simpler approach will get results faster and cheaper?”

But there’s a difference between applications that either emerge from business settings or that are only relevant to businesses, and consumer-focused applications that prove themselves useful in business settings. Beyond social tools such as Socialcast and Chatter (no one could legitimately suggest Facebook, for example, as the interoffice communication channel), I’m not so certain it will be easy to get employees to give up the consumer applications they’ve already begun using for business needs.

Dropbox is just one example. Look at Amazon Web Services, which grew popular among enterprise developers despite not having been sanctioned by IT departments. Despite an endless supply of vendors selling private cloud software and alternative hosting providers’ pushing “enterprise cloud computing,” AWS still dominates cloud computing. Maybe that’s because anyone within the organization who has used AWS really likes it and won’t settle for less. Or look to Google Apps, which has wormed its way into many companies by this point.

Application providers aren’t stupid, either. When AWS and Google recognized the money to be made by selling to businesses, they got started with all sorts of security and identity management improvements. They both even undertook the effort to achieve certification for the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) to be able to win lucrative federal-government deals. It seems only logical that other new consumer-based services will follow the money, too.

Given that iPads, iPhones, Android, AWS, Gmail and so many other tools have made the transition from the consumer world to the business world, it just seems a bit off base to suggest that enterprise applications mimicking useful consumer applications will suddenly catch on. Sure, companies might buy them and mandate their use, but that doesn’t mean employees still won’t use their preferred services, or that they’ll be happy about the change.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Pete Prodoehl

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The Trouble With iPhones

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:32:00 +0000

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant.

Laptops are still consuming most of the data on carrier networks that don’t have iPhones on them, but once folks get a touch-based smartphone such as the iPhone (and right now it’s the most popular touch-based smartphone out there), the volume of data used by those devices far exceeds that of laptop usage. In other words, when it comes to the network and data consumption, the device does matter. The report also offers some self-serving data about video consumption on mobile devices that may help carriers save on bandwidth consumption. (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average video online is about 5 minutes in length, about half of the people only watch 60 seconds of a video, which means that sending the entire file to a user would be a waste of bytes and bandwidth. Only 31 percent of people watched all of a video, and 30 percent watched less than 10 percent. The rest of the viewers stopped watching somewhere in the middle. In addition to bandwidth consumption, such findings also could help determine where best to place ads. Although I for one hate getting pre-roll ads on my phone because that data consumed counts against my mobile bandwidth cap. But maybe I’m just super cheap.

Regardless, the problem with the iPhone is that it’s both a gateway drug for consumers, who’ve now tasted the mobile web and want more of it, as well as a canary in the coal mine, as it shows carriers what’s likely to happen as other touch-based smartphones become more popular on their own networks. Curtailing video, as suggested by the report, will solve some issues, but once you give folks a taste of broadband, they’re going to want more.

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