Beyond voice: cell phones evolve into business productivity tools.

• Author: Burrus, Dan

In the early days of cell phones they were used simply for talking. Today cell phones have myriad applications. For many people their cell phone has become their daily organizer, music player, camera, GPS system, and news and weather device. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In the very near future cell phones will also be people's banks, credit cards, keys, remote controls, and video conferencing platforms, just to name a few applications. Clearly today's cell phones are much more than telephones. Tomorrow's cell phone applications will revolutionize the business world.

Anticipating the future

To stay competitive and ahead of the curve, businesses need to look beyond what the cell phone is today and anticipate what it will be tomorrow. The business owner needs to ask, "How is the cell phone changing my customers?" "What new service could I deliver on a mobile platform?" or "How are these beyond-voice capabilities changing my customers' customers?"

The fact is that if a business doesn't change with its customers, it won't have these customers much longer. Most businesses' customers are changing rapidly. However, are they learning and changing as fast as their customers?

Because today's technology is rapidly evolving, a business has to go beyond keeping up. Merely keeping up will cause a business to always be behind. Instead, a business needs to jump ahead based on what it knows will happen.

What do we know will happen? We know that three driving forces are creating exponential technological change approximately every 18 months:

1. Processing power doubles as it drops in price.

2. Storage capacity doubles.

3. Speeds are faster, and bandwidth is higher.

Because a cell phone's processing power is faster, it can perform online searches faster. Phone companies continually upgrade their networks, so the 3G (3rd generation) network becomes the 4G (4th generation) network. In less than a year, processing power, storage capability, and speed have all doubled, and next year they will double again, making the cell phone as powerful as your current desktop computer.

Additionally, businesses need to look at what other countries are doing. We Americans tend to think we're first with technology applications. However, that isn't always the case--and definitely not the case with cell phones. We have multiple standards for cell phone technology, whereas many other countries have one national standard so that everyone's phone works the same way. As a...