Would the ability to check your business health on a mobile device make a difference to you? I know it certainly does in my business. I use my Treo Smartphone quite regularly to check in with our CRM and Emails all the time.
But what has frustrated me is the inability of some of our (Australian) financial institutions to offer a mobile interface to their services. I would dearly like to check my bank balance and perhaps even pay a few urgent suppliers while on the road on conference or holiday. Whilst I always carry a laptop and wireless 3G card, it is inconvenient to have to fire it up and login etc. just to make a quick payment or funds transfer.
I noticed this week that ANZ, the bank we use, has finally released a mobile interface, specifically geared towards the Apple iPhone. This was of particular interest to me because on our holidays a couple of weeks back, I actually bought my wife an iPhone 3G to replace her dead Nokia N80. (Note: Thank you to NextByte in Adelaide city who relented and sold me an iPhone outright without a crappy limiting carrier plan!).
Now, for those of you who dont know my wife, she is extremely technophobic. For instance: I knew my wife for 13 years before she sent me an actual email – so you know what we are working with here!
However, as soon as I gave her the iPhone, she was off and away with scarcely a backward look. Before I knew it, she was sending emails and SMS’s all over the place, forwarding email work requests to other team members and generally running our business – all whilst we were driving between country towns in remote South Australia. The interesting thing was that she kept learning new things on the phone by herself, and for once, she was not afraid to push the envelope and experiment.
This got me thinking about the whole iPhone mania that is currently on the airwaves. I believe that Apple have a game changer here with this phone as it has an interface that truly removes the ‘fear factor’ from new users.
This really puts the phone into the hands of (and I say it with all due respect), the ‘everyday’ people out there, rather than us techno geeks who like to play on the bleeding edge.
As more and more people adopt mobile devices and start to push the capabilities, I would like to see more and more business, financial institutions etc. come on board with mobile interfaces to their service. Next step would be for accounting software vendors to bring out mobile interfaces to their software, so that we can check journals, do bank reconciliations and chase tardy debtors from across the globe. My dream would be to run my entire business from a hand held device within the next year or so.
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