Seybold's Take: More smart applications please!

In 1999, Barney Dewey, one of my business partners, wrote about the need for smart applications that would be more intelligent, more automatic, and easier to use than relying on a browser to find what we need. Since then, we have seen a few such applications come to market; applications that are a front-end for automatic retrieval of information from a corporate site or the web. With the constraints wireless network operators are facing today, we need to revisit the concept of smart apps and perhaps make them a priority.

The most basic form of smart apps today is actually applets that sit on your screen and when invoked, take you to a specific website and perhaps a specific page within the website. Amazon's Kindle application for the iPad is a perfect example of this, as is WorldMate Live, which takes smart applications to an even higher level. Not only does WorldMate Live take you to its website, it takes you to your own trips. The site constantly updates your flights and other information and you can also access weather, hotel bookings, travel arrangements, currency converters, and more, all from within this one application.

We are seeing many applications that are making use of applets or are smart enough to track information, but what Barney wrote about all those years ago was a series of back-end services for an application that manage everything in the master app. The example we still use is Microsoft Outlook. In Barney's article, he of course asked for the ability to enter an appointment into Outlook and have it synchronized to the wireless device, but he wanted a lot more than that. If the appointment was at an offsite location, the entry of the appointment would trigger other aspects of the program. A "must leave by" time would be inserted in the calendar and the route chosen and traffic on that route would be monitored. If there was a traffic accident or some other delay, the application might reroute you and would change the ‘must leave by' time to reflect these changes.

Or when you enter a flight from LA to Dallas, for example, the program would not only go get the flight details, it would also check the weather in Dallas. The app would constantly monitor the flight, the gate, and perhaps even your upgrade request and keep you informed of any changes. WorldMate Live does this to some extent since you can email your flight information to the site and it will fill in your calendar and watch the flights, but I would like to see it made simpler.

For example, sometime during the trip, the application would also see that you are renting a car from Hertz and traveling to a specific hotel so it would provide turn-by-turn directions with a single click on the calendar. It might also be smart enough to know that you have no plans for that evening and, based on your profile, might suggest a few activities close to your hotel. In the morning, your first appointment would be ready to view, the driving directions would be in the calendar, and a simple click on the appointment might take you to your corporate database file on the customer, look up recent news about the company, and perhaps its most recent stock price. If you were a Salesforce.com user, it would take you to the customer information you have stored there.

All of this and more is possible today. We have developers who know how to write smart applications. Many of the best of these take cooperation between two or more software companies to incorporate the best of several different applications, but this is certainly possible and the results would render our wireless devices easier to use with a single point of contact on the device for everything we do each day. In 2003, one large chip vendor developed such an application and as a demo, tied it into its corporate travel policy database and added the ability to email an admin and let the people being visited know about flight delays or any other changes to the itinerary. Today, this code is probably sitting on a hard disk in the Portland area going to waste because the company did not see how it had anything to do with its chip business.

In this case, smart is not simply a word, it is a change in the way we view applications for wireless networks and devices. Smart user interfaces, smart communications across the network, smart in the use of location-based technology, and smart because the application knows where it needs to go to find the information you want. Developers who start writing more smart programs will find they make more money--now that is SMART!

Andrew M. Seybold is an authority on technology and trends shaping the world of wireless mobility. A respected analyst, consultant, commentator, author and active participant in industry trade organizations, his views have influenced strategies and shaped initiatives for telecom, mobile computing and wireless industry leaders worldwide.