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IBM’s mobility play: MobileFirst

Airplane mode on iPhone

One of the big talking points at this year’s IBM Pulse was IBM’s recent unveiling of its new platform for mobile, MobileFirst. My colleague James covers the announcement in details on his RedMonk blog, but I thought I’d talk a bit about the GreenMonk perspective, as we haven’t covered mobile here very much to-date, and it is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Mobile is now huge. I know this is self-evident, but it is totally game-changing. Now everyone is instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, as IBM themselves might say.

What does this have to do with sustainability? Well, we here at GreenMonk take a broad view of Sustainability and as we noted in our write-up of the Pulse conference, IBM’s Smarter initiatives all play to a sustainable agenda. Sustainability is all about doing things more efficiently. Mobile definitely enables that.

You only have to think of the application IBM rolled out last year to help staff and students crowdsource cleaning up of the Los Angeles Unified School’s District. And, it is also making a big splash in the Enterprise space, as witnessed by SAP’s Operational Risk Management mobile app; the ESB and IBM mobile app to help finding and scheduling charging of electric vehicles in Ireland and many similar initiatives.

And there’s also social – I wrote a blog post last November about the intersection of big data, social and sustainability. What does this have to do with mobile? Well, in each of the examples outlined in the blog post, a significant amount of the data would have been entered via mobile. People as sensors. The internet of everything.

There are lots of other examples in healthcare, smarter cities (the Boston mobile app I mentioned in this post), education, etc.

The one place IBM may be missing a trick in mobile? Mobile endpoint energy management. IBM have an endpoint management app for mobile, but it’s focus is more on security than energy management, but, as we’ve noted here previously, battery life is a significant pain point for mobile users. A user whose device is out of battery, is a frustrated, disconnected, unproductive worker.

An Endpoint Management solution which manages mobile battery life (by having low power modes, or by automatically shutting down all but the frontmost app, or similar, for example) would be a definite win for any enterprise.

Full disclosure – IBM paid travel and accommodation for me to attend Pulse.

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April 27th GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show

I embedded today’s show live on GreenMonk.net on a new page on the site. Moving people to this page will allow me to change the back-end without inconveniencing people, however, it doesn’t appear to be possible for people to login to the chat on this page with their Ustream accounts so instead viewers were labelled “ustreamer-64326” and similar. Those who went to the show’s original Ustream page had no such issues. Need to see if i can fix that!

Had a rich link laden show today!

Here is the chat-stream from the show:
16:31 TomRaftery: Ok, can everyone see & hear me ok?
16:32 TomRaftery: Hello?
16:32 ustreamer-9456: Hello !
16:32 ustreamer-9456: I see you
16:32 TomRaftery: Anyone seeing or hearing me?
16:33 ustreamer-9456: see and hear this is Tish I see 6 others online/
16:33 ustreamer-2665: i got both. yes goiod
16:33 ustreamer-2665: yes
16:34 ustreamer-9456: How do we get a log in with our names?
16:35 TomRaftery: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/greenmonk-energy-and-sustainability-show
16:36 TomRaftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/24/andes-tribe-threat-bolivia-climate-change
16:37 TomRaftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/21/climate-change-natural-disasters
16:38 ustreamer-9456: just loged in to Ustream to get my name I hope
16:38 Suki_Fuller: Howdy all – on a conf call but no way gonna miss the show
16:39 TolkienLibrary: Hi there all greenmonktv followers!
16:39 TomRaftery: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090417084128.htm
16:41 TomRaftery: http://www.politics.co.uk/news/energy/another-step-towards-kingsnorth-$1290184.htm
16:43 TomRaftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/21/renewable-energy-savings
16:44 TomRaftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/21/south-korea-enviroment-carbon-emissions
16:45 ustreamer-7847: Primefuson here, finally. Best to all.
16:46 TomRaftery: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKPEK33615120090420
16:46 TomRaftery: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/04/global_competition.html
16:49 TomRaftery: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8012852.stm
16:50 yellowpark: wow, ustream’s new design chages really suck
16:50 TomRaftery: http://www.physorg.com/news159466841.html
16:51 TomRaftery: http://environment.uk.msn.com/news/headlines/article.aspx?cp-documentid=16254091
16:52 TomRaftery: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103110000&ft=3&f=searchTerm=recession
16:53 ustreamer-2582: Hi Tom, Diarmuid from Cork here. What do you think of the ESB announcment about smart grids . http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0416/breaking41.htm
16:53 TomRaftery: http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/20/arizona-surges-ahead-with-new-1b-solar-plant/
16:55 ustreamer-2582: cheers
16:55 TomRaftery: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=3
16:56 TomRaftery: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10225464-54.html?tag=mncol;title
16:59 TomRaftery: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html
17:00 TomRaftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/26/seafood-overfishing
17:03 TomRaftery: http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2009/100-ways-to-make-your-library-a-little-greener/
17:03 TolkienLibrary: thnxs G Bush… glad I can say this one time in my life
17:03 TomRaftery: http://www.withouthotair.com/
17:06 yellowpark: yes, all the shows were recorded
17:06 yellowpark: cheers tom
17:06 yellowpark: one sec
17:06 Suki_Fuller: I was looking for a sponsor to fly me home to attend!
17:06 yellowpark: just grabbing them
17:07 TomRaftery: homecamp.pbwiki.com/
17:07 yellowpark: won’t let me post it
17:10 yellowpark: icanhaz.com/homecamp
17:10 yellowpark: i cheated
17:10 ustreamer-5464: How much Have I missed
17:10 yellowpark: so you can link to the homecamp videos here icanhaz.com/homecamp
17:10 ustreamer-5464: Oops I’ll watch the recorded vs
17:11 TishShute: thanks Tom great show!
17:11 TolkienLibrary: thanks Tom… very interesting once again… nice way to close my working day!
17:11 Suki_Fuller: As always I learned bunches even though I couldn’t participate with interaction today. Awesome Tom!
17:11 TomRaftery: Thanks everyone for your time, attention & interest
17:11 yellowpark: bye
17:12 joegarde: cheers tom got here late too