Working From The Basement

Great article Michael. I’m willing to bet most taking this survey would have the same answer.

The amount of work you can get done away from your desk today is immeasurable but perhaps more important than that, your customers feel more connected.

By simply carrying a smartphone, you can connect via text meassage, IM, email, phone, socially on twitter, facebook or linked-in, reply to a comment on your blog and all of these are instantaneous so both you and your customers feel that instant gratification. There’s a comforting feeling knowing that someone you do business with is not only savvy enough to keep all those channels going but to know they can get an answer from you relatively quick and that you aren’t MIA for days at a time. (Anyone know who I am referring to? CC!)

I hate to keep sounding like the old salt around here, but as a small business owner, I have been using a Smartphone of one kind or another since 2003, (Samsung i500) with varying degrees of satisfaction.

The experience with the IPhone has been the best by far. If you are a single person enterprise, it is a great all on one solution; they have enterprise apps that allow you to process credit card payments, rent cars without using a kiosk (zipcar), and features like built in GPS are a godsend for the average road warrior like myself.

The downside of the experience has been the software and hardware issues. In the world before the Palm Pre, The Treo was often a nightmare when asked to do modest multitasking, but because there was such a huge user community form the Palm platform, there were tons of developing apps and hacks that often worked far better than anything offered packaged with the Palm OS. Speaking of Netbooks, anyone remember the Palm Foleo disaster? They nearly brought that turkey to market! Can you imagine that device trying to compete with a $300 netbook?

The most recent interesting wrinkle is the ongoing users vs. Network squabble with ATT: iPhones are now no longer being sold to people with NYC zipcodes online. Retail stores only.

I have been availing myself of various technologies to allow for personal office mobility of one sort or another for years, experimenting and come to a couple of conclusions:

1. There are some things that really do have to be done from the office. The trick is knowing what they are and then prioritizing your time there.

2. The now ubiquitous “Cloud” Computing: syncing email, contacts and events through exchange type services and using remote data hosting really have opened things up. It’s not so much a matter of working from the basement, but working from the client’s office, a hotel room, a conference, a job site, or your own home office.

For me the iphone was a game changer that ultimately led to a surprise. Finally I had something that synced with Outlook and allowed me to have access to everything no matter where I happened to be. Ironically, syncing with Outlook is no longer important as I’ve switched to a Macbook Pro and couldn’t be happier. It was partly the iphone’s ease of use (and also the disaster called Vista) that got me to switch.

Apple’s .me account is essentially a trojan horse to synced/hosted data file along with Exchange style services that do in fact work, and albeit not as instantly as they would with regular BB or other hosted exchanges. Still, its working well and overcoming the “home machine to sync to issue” previously faced by those of us who want to sync data across several deavices. I am not just talking iTunes libraries wit ya Ja Rule and Steely Dan on there, ok.

Mac had some trouble in in the initial rollout, but it seems to be working where it counts.

What bears watching, I think, is how the new tablet will parlay into the workspace, if at all, How ATT is going to either screw the goose that laid the golden egg (by not building out their network, pronto), or not, or will ATT make serious moves to open up to other carriers.

There are a lot of chess prices on the table here, and Jobs and CO. have been here before in one form or another. They have a blazing hit product, they’ll make it work but but to get there it it is going to piss some people off,including Google, HTC and Droid. These guys are all talking big game but really kits still just catch-up.

Just my 2 cents.

Happy New Year, Mike!

I’ve been a “road warrior”/mobile-office user to varying degrees for just about as long as there have been laptops and cell phones. IM, text messaging and Twitter all expanded my reach, but they all felt like incremental extensions of my toolkit. Calendar and file sync were a major enhancements, but they too was basically a better way of doing stuff I’d always done.

After so many years of helpful but evolutionary advances, I experienced a technology in 2009 that really felt revolutionary: Location services. I know it’s existed in various forms for a while, but its implementation in iPhone OS 3 felt like a sea change. Sure, Apple’s Maps app can give directions starting “here,” no matter where “here” is, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Apps from the JiWire hotspot locator to the Foursquare social utility (we need it in Hartford!) to the Planets night-sky map all use location awareness to serve up information in truly compelling ways — and the capability is only in its infancy. I’m really excited to see how Apple and future app developers further integrate location services into their tools.

Cheers,

Jim

D’oh — “was” should be “were” in the last sentence of the first paragraph in my previous post.