Mobile Enterprise— The next wave of mobile-first & augmented reality

Victoria K Peng
The Startup

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Mobile enterprise is a projected $100B market opportunity. Yet to-date, hyper-growth “mobile-first” enterprise companies have primarily been about screens with smartphones as another interface for users to engage with their work data as opposed to truly harnessing the functionalities of everything a smartphone has to offer.

The next wave of “mobile-first” is for applications and businesses to fully tap into the feature-set unique to smartphones — from the automatic logging of geo-location data to the smartphone camera that enables augmented reality to the smartphone acting as a sensor node in a broader network — dramatically expanding the opportunity for enterprise applications to take advantage of mobile.

Mobile-first Today

Today, “mobile-first” in enterprise is primarily characterized by two forms:

1 — “Companion-app” mobile-first: For most horizontal/productivity mobile applications focused on knowledge workers (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote, etc.), what’s coined as “mobile-first” is more often a “companion-app” to the core desktop/web experience. “Mobile” is a checkbox of another screen that the app has to be on (e.g. web, desktop, iOS/Android/Windows) in order to be successful and has limited independent value without other platforms.

2 — “On-the-go” mobile-first: “On-the-go” mobile-first targets the rapidly growing 1.3B (100M in the U.S.) desk-less workers. These mobile applications take the value that was previously centralized on the desktop/web app and transfers it to the smartphone interface as the primary screen. In addition to having the phone be the primary screen, applications such as Invoice2Go and PlanGrid also offer robust offline functionalities that enables end users to access files, run diagnostics, etc. when connectivity is uncertain in the field.

In this form, the desktop is the “companion app” as the centralized system-of-record for the invoices/blueprints while the primary value of the application is delivered on the smartphone screen instead of the other way around.

The Next Wave: “Deep” Mobile-first

The next wave of “mobile-first” in enterprise is for applications and businesses to go one level deeper and tap into all the functionalities of smartphones — “deep” mobile-first.

Deep mobile-first is already starting to emerge to harness the increasing penetration of smartphones in every worker’s pocket in vertical plays in massive industries that have previously been constrained to legacy desktop solutions or even pencil and paper.

For example, in the ~$8.5T construction industry, Rhumbix taps the real-time location data generated by smartphones to automatically collect geo-local data when workers are entering and leaving a worksite. This not only helps provide insights to the construction site manager to help optimize labor performance, but also enables individual workers to have an accurate record of their work hours in order to ensure they are paid properly (a system that is still mostly run on paper and pencil today).

Rhumbix leveraging the smartphones in every construction workers’ pocket to develop a heatmap of the project site

In agriculture (the world’s largest industry), Farmlogs leverages the smartphone’s geo-local capability and geofencing algorithms to automatically detect when certain work is taking place in the field and automatically logs the information as a farmer works throughout their thousands of acres and tracks the movements on a tractor basis.

Other massive industries that deep mobile-first has the potential to impact to expand the opportunity set of mobile enterprise include the $700B trucking/fleet management industry (something that KeepTruckin is tackling), the $4T oil and gas industry, the $18B manufacturing software industry, and more.

What’s next?

This is just the beginning of deep mobile-first in enterprise. Some deep mobile-first enterprise apps that leverage the diverse functionalities of smartphones I’m excited to see emerge:

1.Situational awareness/ active “geo-local data” paired with “historical data” — With smartphones in every worker’s pocket that are constantly building situational awareness with the geo-local data collection in the background, there’s a unique opportunity to match this “active” data with historical datasets from everything from satellite data to data collected from the increasing number of cheap sensors deployed everywhere (e.g. the oil + gas industry has ~423K devices w/ cellular or satellite connectivity globally) to enhance productivity.

Farmlogs Field Yield Maps that combines historical and live field data

One example workflow is matching real-time satellite images with historical imagery and geo-local data collected from daily workflows, an app can send a push notification to farmers when specific areas in the field are underperforming (something that Farmlogs is exploring) which saves countless hours to the end user. Previously, the workflow would be for the farmer to travel across their hundreds of acres to determine problem areas.

2. Augmented reality via the smartphone camera: Imagine an architect being able to pull their plans from PlanGrid and then using their smartphone camera to leverage augment reality to super-impose the plans against the construction site live or to view previous versions (not too dissimilar to the consumer app StarChart).

StarChart Android App that leverages the augmented reality and geo-local GPS data to enable users to point their smartphone camera anywhere in the sky to see constellations. Imagine doing the same for PlanGrid with construction plans.

By tapping into the smartphone camera, mobile applications like PlanGrid can now also assist in space planning and design visualization leading to more rapid iteration cycles as well as enabling builders to understand the environment conditions around them (e.g. past earthquake damage, etc.) as they build. RoomScan in the UK is already starting to explore this by tapping into the smartphone camera to automatically create dynamic floor plans.

3. Sensor network tooling — In order to successfully tap into all the functionalities of smartphones, we’ll need to create the tooling to streamline the ability for smartphones to act as an effective node in a broader network and for enterprise apps to be built on top without having to start from scratch every single time.

The possibilities for deep mobile-first in the enterprise space are endless. I’m excited to see how they will continue to evolve to not only further tap into the $100B mobile enterprise opportunity, but also help make workers smarter and more productive!

Building a deep mobile-first app or have thoughts on the next wave of mobile enterprise? Would love to hear about it @vickipeng.

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