Spiral Arm News

Mobile data capture boosts car sales.

Staff at Skoda's "ride and drive" events used mobile devices to capture customer information during test drives. Annette Spencer, Skoda's communications manager, said: "With data collection, it is all about speed and accuracy. We need to get data to our retailers as quickly as possible and relying on paper meant that in the past, it could take days or even weeks."

The results, as reported in Computing, was "an increase in sales by 18.5 per cent compared to last year, with a 31.7 per cent increase in sales of its Octavia model."

Postcode-based SMS weather warnings.

For a monthly subscription Netweather.tv will send SMS alerts of any rain due
in your selected postal code. The UK's met office radar stations supply
rain information to Netweather every 15 minutes. "It's not a long-range forecast or a complex one; it's reporting what's happening at the time, so accuracy is not an issue" says Netweather MD Paul Michaelwaite. The service is to launch "soon". (From The Observer)

Wal-Mart have signed up to receive critical weather events for their store managers.
Wal-Mart's director of emergency management "said that the 2005 hurricanes demonstrated to the company that letting its managers know as quickly as possible when bad weather threatened their stores or personnel was crucial.". The service only works with GPS enabled handsets in the US, but could also work with other location systems. (From eWeek.)

Street crime attacked with mobile phone.

Computing reports on how mobile data is playing a role in reporting incidents of graffiti, vandalism, fly tipping and other street crimes. Castle Morpeth Borough Council, in the North East of the UK, has issued 220 street wardens with mobile devices to record incidents which are then sent via GPS to a database. IT officer Peter Almond says the technology has "removed several days from the process".

2008: 80% of workers will use mobile devices.

"Research firm Gartner last year estimated that out of six billion corporate email accounts in use worldwide, less than one per cent were accessed from mobile platforms such as hand-held PCs or smartphones. Given the size of the market opportunity, Gartner now expects rapid expansion, predicting that 80 per cent of workers will use wireless email from some sort of mobile device by 2008." Story continues in Computing.

A related report suggests that Laptops lose out to PDAs. The white paper from Avanade predicts a drop in laptop use over the next four years: "Two-thirds of UK companies plan to increase their use of PDAs and BlackBerrys, while half intend to increase investment in 3G phones and tablets".

Smartphone shipments up 67.8%.

Data from IDC, reported in Computing, show that 2006Q1 smartphone shipments grew by 67.8%, to 18.9 million units.

• Nokia 43.2% (down from 48.4% last year)


• Panasonic 10%


• NEC 9.5%


• RIM 7.7% (highest growth rate at 85.7%)


• Sharp 5.7%


• Others 23.9%

The findings are summarized on the IDC website.

Meanwhile, "Symbian has dismissed fears that smartphones pose a security risk, claiming instead that they can be 'keystones of enterprise security'" (Computing).

Mobile Linux

Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo,
Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, and Samsung
are to form an "independent foundation" to provide
a standard for Linux running on mobile phones.
The group, which already has considerable experience
with mobile Linux, aims to not only develop an open
Linux implementation but also be a central point
for participation and create safeguards to reduce
fragmentation.

A working version is expected in 18 months. The current
market for Linux-based phones is small, and concentrated
in China.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson are invested in Symbian. PalmSource has it's own
Linux platform. Microsoft continue to lag, and have only introduced
a 3G Windows Mobile smartphone this month.

Sources:

• LinuxDevices.com


• eWeek


• Computing


• The Register