What Gartner's top 10 mobile predictions mean for your organisation
Jinfo Blog

By Sarah Dillingham

Abstract

Gartner has released its top 10 mobile predictions. What do they mean for information staff within the enterprise and why should you care about near field communication?

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Mobile is a big deal right now. Whether its the high appetite of organisations to get their content onto mobile devices, the endless evolution of apps or the speed of change in the market, there’s a constant stream of news and speculation.

But how do you filter out the noise from the substance? One way is to listen to commentators with a bit of clout and Gartner certainly fits the bill.

Gartner’s top 10 mobile predictions were unveiled at the Gartner Mobile Strategy Seminar held in Johannesburg late last month.

But what do they mean for information professionals working within the enterprise? Here are the key predictions to consider:

HTML 5
Gartner predicts a steep rise in the number of apps delivered in HTML5. Over 50% of apps currently delivered as native apps will be HTML5 by 2015.

This means that anyone deciding to launch an app for their organisation would be wise to get their heads around the pros and cons of HTML5 and native apps quick smart.

Existing websites will need to be optimised for mobile, so expect plenty of conversations between marketing, digital and knowledge teams on this topic.

Near field communication (NFC) / Bluetooth 4
Near field communication allows Smartphones to come into radio contact when in close proximity. According to Gartner this will enable capabilities such as “payments, ticketing, vouchers and coupons, check-in services, access control and information sharing”.

Plenty of opportunities for the retail, events and aviation industries, and it will be interesting to see how they run with this technology.

The last item on the list – information sharing – impacts every organisation.

NFC can be used for sharing files including video and audio – how could that work for your business (collaboration) or against your business (data security)?

Bluetooth 4 offers another, more familiar, way to share data between devices, and Gartner predicts that it will become the standard way to communicate between mobile and periphery devices.  

Platform independent AD tools
The "AD" stands for application development. Gartner believes that there will not be a single dominant platform, nor will HTML5 work across all platforms.

The holy grail of developing one app that works across all platforms is a long way off, but platform independent AD tools will help to keep customisation minimal.

This means that organisations will need to continue to understand the devices used by clients and staff, and take these into account when developing apps.

802.11ac
802.11ac is a wifi standard that supports HD video apps.

There is a huge appetite to push video of talking head experts to clients, or new product demonstrations.

As 802.11a and similar standards become ubiquitous, it will be easy to stream high quality video straight to smartphones and tablets.

Augmented reality
Augmented reality means imposing information over a view of the world. Mobile phones do this by overlaying text on the camera viewfinder.

Augmented reality made the news with Google’s glasses and there are already several apps on the market.

It's certainly the predictions where one’s imagination can run riot.

It’s not immediately obvious where it would provide benefits in the corporate content, but I couldn’t resist including it here in the hope that more creative minds might be inspired.

Unfortunately the technology is still immature, but let’s hope that changes soon.

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