I realize the smartphone thing is more Julia Vogel's patch but having recently switched to iPhone from
the abysmal Nokia N96 I've concluded that iPhone will crush all the competition - at least in the short term. Here's why:
The Apple AppStore holds more than 100,000 applications. A good number have genuine business value. A good example is TripItPro. TripIt is a way of aggregating all your travel plans in one place, connecting with others that might be staying in the same area or attending the same events and publishing that information so others can see what you're doing,what your plans are and connect with you.
This week I will be in San Francisco attending Dreamforce. That means traveling to London, doing a stopover, picking up a flight from Heathrow, returning via Philadelphia and landing in Manchester for the next event, SAP UK & Ireland User Group meeting next week. It's a complex journey involving 5 flights, two hotels, 7 train rides and a string of meetings. Ideally I'd like to have all these details in one place. TripIt allows me to do that for $69 per annum. That's less than 80p per week.
It works by allowing me to email confirmation notices I receive from various travel and booking sites that are automatically added to my itinerary. No rekeying required. It also allows me to add notes about the journey so I can create agenda items. It can optionally send me either SMS or email alerts when there are flight delays/cancellations, gate changes, arrival and connection summaries plus check in reminders. It also adds in useful extras like route maps to hotel locations. Finally, I can create a trip feed that is added to my calendars which I can then synchronize between the desktop machine and my iPhone. It's an incredibly powerful tool at a ridiculously low price but one that can help millions of travelers.
The only time it gets slightly confused is when I booked a set of train journeys across event boundary dates without merging the events. It took the first date and applied that to all the journeys. That was easy to resolve by simply deleting the details from one date and re-sending the email. It then attached the correct details to the correct event.
That's just ONE application. Now imagine if that was tied to an expenses application? Oh - wait a minute. Expense Bay has an application that works on the iPhone and, if you're prepared to pay $100 a year, it connects to Salesforce.com, Intacct and NetSuite! Think about all the integrations you'd need to do if TripIt and its partners were purely deskside applications? It would be a spaghetti soup nightmare. (note: ExpenseBay is US centric but it managed to find my UK bank without difficulty.)
The side story to this is that services of this kind extend the iPhone's value way beyond being a cute phone with a great interface. Sure, the services are paid for but think of it this way: you have teams of sales people (as example.) How good are they at recording what they do? A combination of say Salesforce.com, TripIt and ExpenseBay will likely come in at around $90-100 per month. That's around £65 per head. If you have say 10 sales people then that's a cost of £650 per month. How much does it cost to check, vouch and record expenses, either for direct expensing or recharging back to customers? What about rekeying errors? What about the added benefit of being able to allow your people to book their own 'stuff' within corporate policies rather than paying the travel agent tax? And that's before you start negotiating with the providers for lower fees for higher numbers of user.
That's just ONE thing to consider. Plus of course, your people will love you for providing such a cool device plus easy to use tools. What CFO/FD/Expenses Manager or professional partner is going to pass this up? In the meantime, what does Blackberry or Nokia offer? Plenty, but they simply don't have the reach, popularity or 3rd party developers out there willing to provide these types of service.
Finally: Goodman Jones just came off Blackberry in favour of iPhone. Why? Their IT department did a cost comparison and found that iPhone works out better value.