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The Codie Awards

Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 15:00

Mark Needham tests out some nominated mobile technology and services

The Codie Awards are one of the US's major computing industry prizes, and for the last two years I've been one of the judges in the Mobile Computing category. It's a useful event for me, as it provides an insight into new trends in the US market. One of the trends it confirmed for me this year was that extensions of customer relationship management (CRM) software, which allow salespeople in the field to record sales information on a handheld computer, are at last making progress into mainstream America. As one analyst said to me last year, it makes perfect sense for your salesperson to enter the details of a sale onto a BlackBerry while going down in the lift rather than on a laptop in a hotel room at 3am after a night at the bar celebrating...

Two of the products I looked at this year, Sendia and Vettro, work as handheld entry points to Salesforce.com. Whether this is because Salesforce.com has a larger market share than other CRM packages, or whether this is because it's easier to write applications that link into Salesforce.com's web-based databases than into packages that use a server back at the office, I'm not sure, but both were accomplished applications.

The ethos of Salesforce.com is that, as a web application, it enables business managers to do almost all the setup and customisation for their own sales forces without much input from the IT department being required. The Sendia product can run on a Palm Treo or BlackBerry only, while the Vettro product runs on three platforms: BlackBerry, Treo and Windows Mobile. Interestingly enough, Vettro claimed that almost 95 per cent of its implementations went out on the BlackBerry, describing a typical US roll-out as being BlackBerrys for the sales force and one or two managers with Treos. In the UK, however, their biggest account win has been with British Gas on an entirely Windows Mobile roll-out.

MobileLime

If, like me, you lingered longer in bed during those dark days between Christmas and New Year, you may have heard that episode of the Today programme in which Sir John Bond, who is stepping down as chairman of HSBC later this year, was guest editor. He was asked why he'd agreed to become chairman of Vodafone from next July, and I hoped for a moment that he was going to reply that it was because he was being paid loads and loads of cash, but instead he gave some anodyne reply about the similarity of the challenges in these two vast international organisations. Then, at the end, he added that he was sure that in some way the paths of mobile telephony and banking were going to come together over the next few years.

Russell Buckley, a blogger who specialises in mobile technology at www.mobhappy.com, has called the mobile payments sector 'the next billion-dollar market', so when Vayusa Inc, the company behind MobileLime (www.mobilelime.com) appeared as another Codie Award entrant I was predisposed to be interested in it. In a nutshell, MobileLime allows US users to transfer funds from their credit card to their mobile phone, which in theory enables them to use the funds on that phone to buy things in shops that have joined up to the scheme using just their mobile. Having the costs billed, in the end, to your credit card feels to me somehow more responsible than adding the costs of Crazy Frog ringtones onto your phone bill. And MobileLime's CEO, Bob Westley, a veteran of American Express and Visa, made a good case that his system allows shops (which ultimately pay the costs when you and I use credit cards) to make special offers to their best customers.