Introducing SmartApps

I just came home from Forum Nokia Tech Days in Budapest, June 7th – 8th 2007. HansaWorld was invited to speak about HansaWorld as a success story for Forum Nokia.

Three days filled with 30 minute sessions for 140 registered participants gave a brief but wide introduction to many topics all related to the growth in mobile content and mobile services.

More demanding customers
Uptil now, the early adopters have tried and used and paid for content and services. No matter the quality. When we now go into the majority of users, they are not willing to pay as much as innovators. They require better quality and is not very interested in the technology as such. It just needs to work.

Developers need to use design guidelines and quite a few suppliers out there are still using the “build first, test later and do not have any user needs” development method. We were urged to rather work with the policy of “fail fast, to succeed faster”.

Consumer vs. business applications
Most of the Tech Days was about games, content and services for the consumer market. Nokias new devices focus on making the features easier to use and the services easier to discover. Music, pictures, contacts, communication and location are the themes. And many of these themes go hand in hand with what businesses need as well. All devices will have free maps and navigation as addons to mention a few. HansaWorld and Oracle was showing Business Apps for mobile devices, and we both showed ie. Expences as one of many smart things you could do on your mobile phone.

Introducing SmartApps
I had pre installed SmartApps on my E90 on the way to Budapest. And I spent som time on the plane and in the streets actually using it: The Pictaphone for taking pictures of churches adding comments and voice the each record. I built myself a tourist info catalog on the fly. The same I could have done for shops, restaurants, boats, seminar participants, potential partners and more. I added my expenses, my daily allowances and created a shopping list as well. All to get to know SmartApps. It helped me realize the value for a mobile worker of the potential power of SmartApps. And if I could use it, so can others.

I spent 30 minutes talking about our company and about SmartApps. I think it went quite well, and after the presentation, several people came over to me to ask more about them. Nokia representatives, a potential polish partner and San Diego university, to be precise. The Oracle guy also came over to discuss how we could use their Oracle Lite as a tool to even further develop SmartApps…..

Discover and Access it
Forum Nokia decides what goes on the devices as preloaded software. As you know this might happen in the Middle East (MEA). The other version is to be on their Catalogs or what they might start calling is Downloads. There will be a large number of apps in that section and it makes a huge difference wether we are in the first, second or third layer of this. However, when discovered, we need to be good, because you do not get a second or third try by the customers, is what they say. Downloads is a live section for Nokia on content. With more than 200 million devices out there and a growing number, this off course can be interesting for us. By creating our own Market Place, direct from SmartApps, we can also reach more users for our development community.

Business Models
There are many models to choose from. Our “Pay as you go” or “Try and buy” seem be great choices, One time fee or subscriptions. Perhaps your content provider like Reuters can pay the apps provider and give the app away for free to browse their content. Advertising will also be one model, many will try out.

Get the right price
If we miss on this one, we will lose 95% of all potential income. The magic price is difficult, and it may change from market to market and from content or app to another. All markets are different, and there seem not to be one killer app or service equal in more markets. We use the “Whats in the customers pocket”. It seem to work, but the magic price as of today seem to be 7,5 eur.

Limit your App
Going from an “All in one” ERP suite down to SmartApps suites us great. The common recommendation seem to be limit your SmartApp or service to maximum 4 functions. That’s all the customer wants to pay for. As I see it, SmartApps is just like this. For any topic you choose one SmartApp. For another, you register another one.

Cash is King vs. Content is King
To sum up, our success is measured on turnover created by SmartApps. There is a great opportunity out there now, since we are early. This however will also take some time. Content is Kind, is relevant for us, both in generating business for our new partners, developers and content providers that need tools that their customers can us to access the content.

I am looking forward to downloading my first SmartApp from our pages and to follow our new development community create and publish their own SmartApps.

BusinessPhone, integrate your crm with skype or VOIP

Many companies are right now discussing the use of VOIP or IP telephony in their business.The classic switchboard is getting old, and is both difficult to handle and to intergrate with your CRM system.

At HansaWorld we have introduced the BusinessPhone direct from the contact card. Lots of time is wasted in various attempts to contact customers, suppliers and others. Most people have more than one phone, etc. With HansaWorld BusinessPhone all contacts are stored centrally and shared. In this video, you can view the first online presentation. This video is also posted on YouTube, althoug in a strange quality.

Facebooked

Creating networks. It seem to be the hype these days. There are many ways, presented for us today. Facebook and LinkedIn are my new arenas. It is all about visualising your virtual network. Norway is by far the largest community of Facebookers (1. Norge – 172158 brukere2. Tyskland – 252663. Frankrike – 236034. Sverige – 225695. Italia – 10710). It all started at Harward Business School as an effort to join students in a social and academic network. Today you can search for school-buddies and long lost friends all over the world.

At HansaWorld, we work constantly on improving our relations with our existing customers (read network). Realising that a happy customer is more valuable than any new customer, is important in the way we conduct our day to day business.

Improving efficiency for HansaWorld users is our focus number one. When we manage, we will see that the virtual network this creates, also will attract new business, that fits with our solutions and way of doing business. Let´s see where this brings us in creating a HansaWorld community.

I also read a nice article about this by David Terrar.

Carpe Diem

I just realised, I have resigned. I have enjoyed beeing a country manager of HansaWorld Norway for more or less 15 years. A great journey of challenges, successes and lessons to be learnt. Both for good and bad.

First I told my wife and kids, then my boss and then my collegues who work for me. A frightening thought for all. But I need a change. There are and have always been great opportunities working for HansaWorld, the cutting edge of "state of the art" ERP and CRM solutions. But for me now, I need to be able to look back and say, I did more.

My boss, gave me a new task as well, on my way out. At HansaWorld, we have more than 68.000 installations in 84 countries. Now we want all our customers, to get easy access to our products, modules, functions and to the new internet services. We would like to present our hidden secrets in the software. I guess thats why I also started blogging.....

For now, thanks to all collegues at HansaWorld. Most are still in the company and many are spread arround the world in other exiting companies. Think about the good times, and lets all work for making HansaWorld rule the ERP & CRM world of business.

While I think about what to do with my life, I will keep you posted on this blog and others.

Yes, we have a mobile client for erp and crm

Hi. This is my first posting to my first blog. About time you might think. I agree.

I just come back from a business trip to Seattle, WA. I represented my company HansaWorld, on a special event hosted by Symbian for Cingular descision makers. They were looking for new apps for mobile phones, and our HansaWorld ERP and CRM solution runs online on Smartphones with Microsoft Mobile 5 and Nokia Smartphones on the S60 and S80 platforms.

After showing our solution live to one of their high ranked execs, he flat out told us: "thats the best mobile solution I have ever seen. Just what companies need and want."

We (my collegue Ludvig, a systems architect in HansaWorld, and my motivator to start blogging), thought this would be an easy match. We are looking for some strong parters in the US. Until his next frase was this: "We have worked with both S.., O.... and M........ (famous ERP vendors) the last year to try to get their solutions on mobile devices, but they have nothing." (he actually used another word for this, but I don´t think I will put that in my first posting).

Of course they have a name and loads of customers, is what he meant. And we have THE solution, but not a brand name in the US so far. "Come back to us when you have this, and we might be intetrested", he stated. Don´t misunerstand me: I was happy with his true and sincere black and white opinions.

After the event, Ludvig and I was thrilled of the opportunity, and even more happy about our one-of-a-kind-solution. As we speak we are getting more users among our 68.000 sites worldwide using our online mobile client for multiuser calendar, mail, collaborative mail, shared contacts, in addition to the whole solution making it possible to view customer history on the fly, create quotations and sales orders in front of the customer, and even report on stock levels, employee profitability or just a plain and simple Profit & loss report when you need it.

I just had to call Robert Scoble. Beeing in Seattle and all, but when he answered the phone thursday evening, he told me he had moved and was in Salt Lake for the moment. So if you read this, Robert you know who I am.