Going mobile at SLA2010
Jinfo Blog

10th June 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Next week is the SLA Annual Conference, this year held in New Orleans. The FreePint team will be on hand to meet customers and vendors and find out what's on the minds of information professionals and the vendors who serve them. As I peruse the list of exhibitors, I'm struck by how many of them have introduced mobile applications over the past year - the Financial Times, EBSCO, Swets among them. Every statistic I've seen, including a June 2010 study by research firm iSuppli (http://digbig.com/5bbshc), shows stratospheric growth in smartphone usage over the next few years - the iSuppli study predicts that the global smart phone business will more than double from 2010 to 2014, with shipments rising to 506 million units in 2014. Smartphones and tablet computers are here to stay, so I'll be stopping into booths to find out whether and how mobile computing fits into vendor product strategy, and what customer response has been so far. But I'd also like to put a question back to LiveWire readers based on anecdotal observations made here at FreePint - are you actually using mobile devices to access traditional information products? Or is this a case of the tail wagging the dog? We all know that consumer embrace of technology has become a major driver in how business to business applications evolve. Social networks were, after all, aimed at college kids when they first popped onto the scene. A few years on and we've just published a comparative review of three services aimed at business users in VIP Magazine #78 (http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1651). So it would stand to reason that the so-called 'side pocket' devices like personal iPhones and iPads, which ride along with officially issued corporate laptops and Blackberries, will influence how information consumers want to received their work-related information. But is it really happening yet? I'd welcome your thoughts - either here in the LiveWire comments or privately via email to nancy.daviskho@freepint.com - about how mobile computing is really working for your organisation for the consumption of business information. Is it critical? A nice-to-have? Or still far off in the future in terms of practical business use? And what specific mobile content apps are you interested in? Your comments will influence the priorities with which we cover mobile products in the pages of VIP. And I can pick them up on my iPhone while I'm on the road next week.

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