Author Archives: Maureen

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the New Year!

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From all of us at Mobile Helix, may your days be merry and bright!

For this short week, here are three of my favorite reads. If you read one thing this week, read Paul Graham’s post.

How to be an Expert in a Changing World

america-astronaut-astronomy-2422 Earth

This post by Paul Graham resonates for me as it echoes my own view that embracing change and exercising creativity are keys to success.Two quotes, “…have an explicit belief in change,” and, “When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the startup incubator which broke the mold and has had success beyond the odds.

 

IDC Reveals Worldwide Mobile Enterprise Applications and Solutions Predictions for 2015

I find several of IDC’s findings to be optimistic with respect to enterprise mobile application development adoption, but I would be perfectly happy if they were proven out. For example:

  • 35% of large enterprises will leverage mobile application development platforms to develop and deploy mobile apps across their organizations in 2015.
  • The number of enterprise applications optimized for mobility will quadruple by 2016.

How Customer Success Meaningfully Reduces Cost of Customer Acquisition

Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint does the math. Customer success can have a significant impact on customer acquisition cost (CAC) for SaaS companies. The key is in customer referrals.

–Maureen

Legal IT Gems from the ILTA 2014 Technology Survey

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legal it

Credit Viktor Hanacek

If you love data and Legal IT, the new International Legal Technology Association 2014 Technology Survey will be right up your alley. At 301 pages it is chock-full of fascinating data.

Over 450 law firms and legal departments responded to nearly 200 questions. The firms range in size from under 50 attorneys to over 700 attorneys on staff. I encourage you to take a look at the report for yourself. Legal IT is not like IT in other sectors. Legal IT moves more slowly in some arenas and more quickly in other arenas. Some of the data will amaze you, especially if you are from the west coast of the United States where Cloud-hosted solutions have been more readily adopted.

Email

For example, attorneys, as they will tell you, “live in email.” What email platform do they live in?

MS Exchange 2010: 78%

MS Exchange 2007: 13%

MS Exchange 2013: 6%

Office 365: 1%

Gmail: less than 1%

By far the dominant email platform at law firms is Outlook, with 91% of those surveyed still using 2007 or 2010. Email hosted in the Cloud, much like file storage in the Cloud, is far from mainstream at law firms.

Document Management Systems

Law firms use an abundance of products to manage data, search data, and discover data. One widely used type of solution is known as document management. It provides strict version control and document check-in and check-out. Firms were asked which DMS they use. Shown here are the 2013 / 2014 responses. WorkSite (now from HP) has long been the market share leader, but NetDocuments is emerging as the growth leader.

Autonomy WorkSite:  47% / 49%

OpenText/Hummingbird: 19 / 20%

Worldox: 11 / 12%

NetDocuments: 6% / 8%

At Mobile Helix, we provide mobility solutions for law firms and were especially interested in the mobile data.

Tablet Usage

Adoption of tablets is strong in law firms. An average of 40% of legal IT teams report that their attorneys use tablets or iPads. 90% have iOS tablets in use, 44% have Android, and 42% have Microsoft Surface Pros in use. Notably, this 42% for Surface Pro is up from zero percent reported last year. Surprising? For insight, read Leo Sun in Why Microsoft’s Surface Pro Could Be One of the Most Important Devices of 2015.  He accurately makes the point that legacy enterprises are dependent on Microsoft Windows products. This won’t change in the next few years. For those entities, the Surface Pro 3 provides lightweight mobility as well as compatibility with existing software. Per IDC’s report in August, tablet demand is leveling off. While the volume of Surface Pros in use at legal teams may not be high today, Legal IT professionals in many firms are testing them or have pilots in place.

Mobile Device Management

Legal IT professionals were asked, which third-party systems are you using for MDM? The responses:

None: 54%

MobileIron: 12%

Good Technology: 8%

AirWatch: 8%

The data on Mobile Device Management show that there is no clear leader in MDM in the Legal sector.  Usage is fairly evenly distributed between the top three providers. As the data show, many law firms are in the process of defining their mobile strategy and solutions.

Financial Support of Smartphones

Of the firms responding, 82% provide some type of financial support for smartphones for partners. 47% provide partial support for the phone. With respect to the service plan, 55% pay for the entire data plan while 47% pay for a portion of the data plan.

Finally, a resounding bit of data. Do you force the use of a password to unlock the screen of mobile devices? Yes – 83%.

–Maureen

 

Mobile File Sharing – It’s About More Than the Cloud

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Credit: Viktor Hanacek

Credit: Viktor Hanacek

You’ve been in this situation. You prepare for a client meeting or for court. You’ve got digital copies of all of the documents that you will need. Until you don’t. While you are in transit you get a message which changes things. You will need a few more files, but you have no mobile file sharing from your smartphone or tablet.

Files. After mobile access to email, files are the medium which we most need on the fly. We swap them with colleagues. We prepare and send docs to clients, who send them back and ask for changes. We change them, save them, and send them back.

It’s a tremendous productivity boost to have mobile file sharing from our smartphones and tablets.

Here is the challenge for IT. Where are the files which employees need to share from their smartphones stored?

Wait, you say. Isn’t this simple? Aren’t files all moving to the Cloud?

No, not in all cases. And definitely not in the near-term. While file storage in the Cloud is growing, there are many sectors and companies which won’t migrate to the Cloud for many years, if ever. Gartner’s 2013 CIO Survey1 found that 28% of CIOs expect to source all critical applications and operations via the Cloud by 2016, and 55% expect to do so by 2020. On the other hand, this means that 45% of CIO’s do not expect to source via the Cloud by 2020. While a significant portion of companies can move to the Cloud, for others it’s a more complex matter.

By some estimates, 20-30% of all file storage may never migrate to the Cloud. The Everest Group, in their Cloud Adoption Survey 20132, found that 21% of surveyed enterprises have no plan to migrate collaboration and content management systems to the Cloud.

Law firms, financial institutions, and other regulated industries will, in many cases, not be able to meet security and confidentiality requirements with Cloud storage. Amongst other issues, the concern that governments may require Cloud storage services to release files to the government is a major deterrent to Cloud-based file sharing at firms with highly sensitive data.

The reality is that file storage is undergoing a major transition which will last for many years. Some legal and financial firms do store certain classes of files, for example, those used for training, in Cloud storage. In the ILTA/Inside Legal 2014 Technology Purchasing Survey3, 35% of participants reported that they had purchased Cloud storage (e.g., Dropbox, Box, ShareFile or OneDrive) in the last 12 months. However, only 17% plan to make Cloud storage purchases in the next 12 months. A wholesale conversion to Cloud storage is not in the works in the legal sector. At many firms, files will remain on-premises, behind the firm firewall, for years to come.

What this means is that mobile solutions must support sharing of files stored in a myriad of repositories, both on-premises and in the Cloud. Files may be stored in Windows shares, SharePoint, or WorkSite on-premises, or in NetDocuments, OneDrive, Box, or Dropbox in the Cloud. Files may be on-premises this quarter and be migrated to Box next quarter. To the mobile professional, where the files are stored must be transparent. All that matters to the user is that file sharing on a mobile device is fast and easy. Therefore, IT needs one mobility solution which lets mobile users share files no matter where they are stored.

–Maureen

  1. Gartner CIO Agenda Report 2013, p. 8; http://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/cio/pdf/cio_agenda_insights2013.pdf
  2. Everest Group Cloud Adoption Survey 2013, p. 9; http://www.everestgrp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/2013-Enterprise-Cloud-Adoption-Survey.pdf
  3. 2014 International Legal Technology Association/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey, p.6; http://insidelegal.typepad.com/files/2014/08/2014_ILTA_InsideLegal_Technology_Purchasing_Survey.pdf

 

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I share a few of the more interesting tech and business pieces which I have read. Uber and Barbie got a lot of ink last week. You probably read enough about Uber, but did you see the scorn of the book, Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer? If Barbie wants to become a real developer, she should review the list of highest paying programming languages.

I. These Are The Highest-Paying Programming Languages You Should Learn, Ranked By Salary

Interesting list. It tops out with Ruby-on-Rails at $109K/year. But becoming a Salesforce architect pays almost twice as much. By Lisa Eadicicco, @LisaEadicicco, in Business Insider.

Credit Jeff Sheldon

Credit Jeff Sheldon

II. 50% of CIOs Think Mobile App Development Takes Too Long

In this post, Eric Carlson, @ericjohncarlson, of Propelics refers to new data from a recent Kinvey survey entitled, The State of Enterprise Mobility. The survey data indicate that the average app takes 8 months to develop at a cost of $270K. Kinvey, Propelics, and Mobile Helix each provide ways to make the development of enterprise mobile apps easier and quicker.

III. Georgia Tech Student Rewrites Barbie Book

Did you read about this last week? A blog post about the 2010 book, Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, went viral. As one Amazon reviewer had written, “Barbie admits, ‘I’m only creating the design idea, I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game.’”  In response, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech wrote a “remix” of the book with Barbie a full-fledged developer. You can view, and even download, the remix here. From hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Adam Carlson, .

IV. 2015 Corporate Equality Index 

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 13th report on workplace LGBT equality across U.S. enterprises has been released. This year 386 businesses earned the top score of 100%. The Legal sector is the highest scoring sector. Law firms make up 89 of the top scoring entities.150 companies in the Fortune 500 achieved a 100% score.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

–Maureen, @MobileHelix

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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From my favorite recent reads, a 13-year old develops a Braille printer which Intel invests in, the legal destiny of APIs, what is COPE and signs that you have found your life’s work.

I. This 13-Year-Old Is So Impressive, Intel Is Investing Hundreds Of Thousands In His Startup

LEGO® lovers alert: Inspiring story of Shubham Banerjee, 13-year CEO of the Braille printer-maker Braigo Labs. Take a look at the terrific photos of the prototype which he made with the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. By Eugene Kim, @eugenekim222, in Business Insider. 

II. COPE Offers IT and Workers an Alternative to BYOD

This is an informative piece which irons out the difference between COPE (Company Owned, Personally Enabled) and COBO (Corporate Only, Business Only) and BYOD programs. From what I see in the industry, I have a hard time envisioning most companies footing the bill for smartphones and service packages for all of their information workers. In the BlackBerry era, phones were mainly issued to executives and customer-facing employees. Today, most employees in information-related jobs want and need mobile access. Will an insurance company provide smartphones and service packages for 20,000 employees? Tom Kaneshige, @Kaneshige, provides a clear contrast of these approaches, in CIO.com.

III. 8 Signs You Have Found Your Life’s Work

Does your life’s work feel like “work?”. Is committing to you life’s work an honor? Ask yourself these 8 questions from Amber Rae, @heyamberrae, in FastCompany.

IV. Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court to Rule APIs Can’t Be Copyrighted

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, @EFF, has filed a brief with the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing on behalf of 77 computer scientists that the justices should review a finding that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable. This case began several years ago when Oracle sued Google over its use of Java APIs in the Android OS and has broad ramifications in software and hardware development.

–Maureen, @MobileHelix

 

"Design Tools" Miguel Angel Avila

“Design Tools” Miguel Angel Avila

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I post a few of my fave reads related to tech and business. This week: addictive apps, being a minority in tech, what you owe your employer, and why some workers don’t love BYOD.

VW bus

Why Your Workers Hate BYOD

Hoping to get away without sharing your location with your law firm IT department? Using a health-related app on your personal smartphone? Device management by employers is getting some backlash. Tom Kaneshige, @kaneshige, writing in CIO.com, explores these concerns with BYOD. Disclosure: our Mobile Helix Link mobile app does not track employee movements or capture information regarding personal apps.

Five Things You Owe Your Employer – And Five You Don’t

Liz Ryan, @humanworkplace, CEO and founder of Human Workplace, with some solid pointers. For example, you do owe your integrity; you don’t owe your soul.

The Other Side of Diversity

A sobering narrative of Erica Joy’s career moving from “a young black lady to a black woman in the predominantly white male tech industry.” From Alaska to the San Francisco Bay area and points in-between.

Why Messaging Apps are So Addictive

Who doesn’t want to build a habit forming app? Nir Eyal, @nireyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, outlines how hooks work in apps. This is good stuff.

–Maureen, @mobilehelix

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Slack’s $120M raise was big news this week. Learn why selective wipe on mobile devices is not enough on its own. Of course, Tim Cook, CEO of arguably the most admired company in the world, delivered a significant message.

I. Tim Cook Speaks Up

In an essay in Business Week Apple CEO, Tim Cook, @tim_cook, wrote, “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” Cook decided that the potential good of his message on human rights and equality out-weighed his own valued privacy. Beautifully written.

II. Selective wipe: The secret to getting users to report lost mobile devices

Employees are often reticent to report a lost or stolen mobile devices to employers for fear of losing personal data if the device is wiped. It is important that IT use a mobility solution which allows selective wipe of data. Selective wipe means, for instance, that only business content on a smartphone or tablet may be wiped, not personal content. The next challenge is that employees need to be informed as to what the company procedure will be when a device is reported lost. In this piece in InfoWorld, Ryan Fass, @ryanfaas, makes the case that transparency and communication when a device is lost need to be part of the company’s mobility policy.

III. Stewart Butterfield explains why Slack is now worth more than $1 billion

What is Slack? One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. The Slack platform was released to the public in February 2014. It is used by 30,000 teams to send over 200 million monthly messages. Slack raised $43M in April and just raised an additional $120M at a $1.12 billion post-money valuation. Writing in Fortune, Dan Primack, @danprimack, interviews founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, about Slack, the competition (HipChat and Yammer), and selling his first company, Flickr, to Yahoo.

IV. Following iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Launches, App Marketing Costs Hit an All-Time High

The launches of the new iPhone 6 phones sent an influx of new users to the App Store for mobile apps. Sarah Perez, @sarahintampa, explains in TechCrunch that advertising costs to win them over are up. In addition, the upgrade to iOS 8 caused users to have a free up a lot of storage space on their devices, which lead to users deleting many apps.

–Maureen – I tweet at @mobilehelix

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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So many articles, so little time. Each week I post a small number of pieces which stood out to me and which were well-worth the time to read. Which of your recent reads do you recommend? Let me know at @mobilehelix on Twitter.

I. Why Public WiFi is a Public Health Hazard

We all know that public WiFi is not secure. Maurits Martijin, @mauritsmartijin, writing in de Correspondent, spends the day visiting cafes in Amsterdam with a hacker who makes child’s play of capturing passwords and spying on personal information. Chilling.

II. In Conversation: Marc Andreessen

The Netscape creator turned Silicon Valley sage on why optimism is always the safest bet.

I don’t know how Marc Andreessen @pmarca, does it. I have a hard time keeping up with simply reading everything that he writes and all of the interviews that he gives. Andreessen sees more new technology than almost anyone else alive. He is very generous with his insights, and yes, optimistic, opinions. Terrific interview by Kevin Roose, @kevinroose, in New York magazine.

III. Silent Benefits of PR

Twice an entrepreneur, Mark Suster, @msuster, is now a General Partner at Upfront Ventures in Los Angeles. He fittingly calls his blog, BothSides of the Table. His perspective is so clearly that of someone who has been there and who has figured out what works when it comes to building a company. Mark’s writing reflects a lot of wisdom and compassion. I always learn something from Mark. Here he points to reasons to do PR beyond customer acquisition, such as fund raising and business development.

IV. Yahoo, Marissa Mayer and the Leadership Question

Yahoo’s stock was up after last week’s earnings call which revealed results which were better than expected and increased revenue at Tumblr. Katie Benner, @ktbenner, in Bloomberg View, writes about Yahoo and Mayer’s leadership, strategy and team building. I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which is terrific.

Contrast Mayer to Steve Jobs. He got away with being a tyrant because of his sheer genius in product intuition and creativity. Jobs was bursting with vision and was a stickler about building teams of A players.

–Maureen

Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I post a few of my favorite pieces in technology and entrepreneurship. This week’s range from income inequality to the internet of things.

I. Why Inequality Matters

From Bill Gates, @BillGates, thoughts about wealth and income inequity after he read, and spoke with, Piketty.

II. What we’ve learned listening to 6,000+ people complaining about email

What people say is broken about email, from Alice Default, @alice_default, content marketing wiz at email inbox company, Front.

III. Here’s What Hackers Do With Your Data

“…cyber criminals make around 10 times more money hacking someone’s medical information than from stealing their credit card details.”
From Natasha Bertrand, @NatashaBertrand, in Business Insider.

IV. The Key Financing Attributes Of Startups In The Billion Dollar Club

How did Uber, SpaceX and Square get there? Recent WSJ data shows that there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations. There are 49 startups with one billion dollars valuations. Ten years ago they would have gone public.

Tomasz Tunguz, @ttunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint slices the data by sectors (Consumer, Enterprise, etc.) showing how much was raised, valuation and valuation efficiency. Another terrific analysis by Tunguz.

V. How the Internet of things could transform the enterprise

How the IoT has the potential to benefit our lives.

By Sanjay Poonen, @spoonen, the executive vice president and general manager for end-user computing at VMware.

My Favorite Reads of the Week

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Each week I spotlight a handful of my favorite articles and posts in technology and entrepreneurship.

I. Zingers in Peter Thiel’s conversation at Venture Alpha.

If you are not reading Thiel’s Zero to One you are missing a provocative series of lectures.

Steve Jurvetson, @dfjsteve, captured some of the gems from Thiel’s talk. Example: “VCs overvalue things that they use. Uber is overrated because VCs like to drive around in town cars.”

However, there is no substitute for reading the book.

II. Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Ranked by Pay.

It’s not hard to guess that Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is ranked number one. Would you have imagined that her total compensation is nearly twice that of the next highest exec?

Charted in Fortune Magazine by Scott DeCarlo.

III. Malcolm Gladwell Says Steve Jobs Became Steve Jobs Because Of This Personality Trait.

I won’t spill the beans, but I strongly believe in the value of this trait.

Business Insider’s Drake Baer, @drake_baer.

IV. U.S. Broadband Speed Ranking: We’re (Down to) No. 14!

You knew that we were not competitive worldwide. Akamai survey shows that the U.S. continues to drop in ranking.

In ReadWrite by Adriana Lee, @adra_la, with graphics.

V. Mobile Web App Checklist.

More than a checklist, this informative post offers terrific tips on UX, UI, performance, homescreen, and offline.

By Zack Smith, @coderzach, and Eugene Butler, @ebutleriv, on the Luster blog.

–Maureen, I tweet at @MobileHelix