MOBILE TECHNOLOGY OF TRAVEL

 It’s not all luxury hotel breaks and glamorous destinations at Mr & Mrs Smith, sometimes we have to focus on the more serious business of, well, business. Last week I popped in on a presentation hosted by The Daily Telegraph and sponsored by T-Mobile. The speakers were, naturally, a rep from T-mobile (Ollie Chivers, head of business marketing), and Professor Jim Norton, head of e-business at the Institute of Directors). The topic was the rather prosaic-sounding: ‘Boosting profitability through mobile working’.

A lot of the discussion centred on how small companies can change the way their employees work by embracing mobile technology  – the mobilisation of everything; not just email but complete virtual offices, office-less sales forces, home-workers, employees operating on other continents from the main HQ, yadiyadiyada. Much of the morning’s talk involved issues such as working on the go and managing one’s work life balance, but the subject of the consumer quickly reared its head – predictably, given that this was the day that Google held its UK launch of the much-anticipated G1, its answer to Apple’s iPhone. Because the G1 is built around Google’s open-source Android operating system, software developers and sites like Mr & Mrs Smith  will have the opportunity to develop applications (as we did with BlackBerry) and be creative – something I think the closed-platform iPhone stifled a little. Our mobile tech-monkeys are already conducting their experiments, so watch this space.

A few pub-chat-worthy stats were thrown around during the session:

32 billion emails are sent on the move every day.

If Facebook were a country it would be the 11th largest country in the world (nudging Mexico out of the position, and coming in behind Japan).

A new blog is created every second.

So, are we all going to end up doing pretty much everything through our mobiles? Well with every Google innovation, with every platform created that uses open source – something anyone can develop against, we get a little bit closer.

I was also interested to learn about one such recently created Android application: Shopsavvy. This nifty little programme lets you scan the bar code on any product in a shop using your phone camera, then brings up a list of local stores that have the same product cheaper, as well as prices from online retailers.

This got me thinking – what other applications might we expect to see in future? I’d like to see the Japanese purchase model come our way, so I could buy anything through my mobile and be able to leave my credit cards at home, just scan and spend. I did a quick poll of Smith HQ to see what innovations our team would like to see on their phones. This was the result: