Expanding Your Universe

Computerworld - A new era of mobile wireless devices may finally give us the Dick Tracy style - and benefits - we've been craving. Many businesspeople routinely connect to their offices and other mobile colleagues via handheld voice and data devices. But high costs and limited functionality have impeded their universal use.

The subtle solution lies in building business-specific applications with off-the-shelf tools and then running them over existing wireless networks.

Take gasoline distributors, for example. They're using a combination of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and two-way mobile wireless communications running over an existing wireless network to automate fuel sales and deliveries. Using GPS-enabled mobile data devices, the companies can schedule and monitor deliveries with preset pricing variances - recognizing a customer who's a tax-exempt farmer, for example, or a gas station that pays a different price.

"The nature of fuel deliveries is mundane and cumbersome," explains Shane Dyer, president of Bend, Ore.-based consulting firm Dyer Group. "At the end of the day, you used to have a stack of invoices on which you'd have to run a reconciliation, balancing the trucks' inventory. Now that's all synced with the mobile device and software at a central location." The technology to do this isn't necessarily new, but now lower prices for the software and wireless network connections have put it in reach of small and midsize businesses, Dyer says.

Simon Buckingham, an analyst at Mobile Lifestreams, a wireless consulting firm in London, says that before sorting through the services offered by wireless carriers, business managers should determine whether some type of mobile wireless application that runs on an existing wireless network can improve their businesses. To do so, they should ask the following questions: