Apps that mean business

Mobile business applications are powerful enablers for workers and for business efficiency. Bill Bennett went app spotting.
Smartphones and tablets mean you no longer need to be chained to a desk to run a business. You can trade anywhere there’s mobile data coverage. These days that effectively means all of New Zealand except, perhaps, the distant ‘wop-wops’.

Smartphones come preloaded with basic apps – the precise mix depends on the phone’s maker, its operating system and, in some cases, the phone company supplying the phone. Expect to find email, calendars and address books. Most phones also have maps, calculators and tools to manipulate photographs. Some phone makers include social media apps like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as standard. They can be distractions, of course, but many businesses find them useful for communicating with customers.
If that’s not enough (it usually isn’t) every smartphone and tablet comes with links to an app store run by the company behind the phone’s operating system. App stores are packed with an overwhelming choice of software. Apple lists 800,000 iPhone and iPad apps in its iTunes store. Google’s Play store has roughly the same number. Even Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 app store (which some criticise for its relative lack of choice) and Blackberry World claim more than 100,000 programs.
Business apps are rarely expensive. You’ll be hard pressed to find many costing more than $25; most cost less. A complete suite of business apps should leave change from $100. That’s for the software; you may find yourself paying subscriptions and license fees for more advanced functionality, but the prices are still far less than traditional PC software costs and, in general, you only have to pay while those services deliver value.
Over half the apps offered in the Apple, Google and Microsoft stores are free. This isn’t always as good a deal as it looks. Some free apps are lures to paid versions; others are initially free but require subscriptions to paid services. Others are free because the companies making them want to snoop on your activities or your whereabouts – they use this information to fuel ‘big data’ projects for marketing and other purposes. Another type of free software delivers advertising.     

There are millions like you
You’ll certainly be in good company using mobile apps. More than a billion people worldwide use smartphones – for many in the third world it is their only regular experience of using computers. Research company Strategy Analytics says 200 million mobile workers will use mobile apps in 2013. Recently Apple announced that the 50 billionth app was downloaded from iTunes. Google numbers are similar.
While games and entertainment make up the bulk of app store software, millions of users do more than just play Angry Birds or solve Sudoku puzzles. And today’s mobile workers have moved beyond the simple communications apps like email and messaging that dominated the early days of smartphones.
Workers in larger companies use smartphones to access powerful company-wide ERP and CRM systems – that’s the software they use to control business processes and keep people informed about customers. If they want, smaller businesses can have access to exactly the same tools – software that a few years ago would have required huge investments in licence fees and the server hardware needed to run the applications.
That approach is no longer necessary because smartphone apps have changed the way we view and use computers. Business software was complex – the companies making desktop applications decided they could serve customers better building wide-ranging products packing in more and more features. This meant a single program could do lots of things, but learning to use it took time.
Mobile apps on the other hand are usually streamlined. They do one thing, but they do it well. And they tend to be simple to use. It’s all about doing more with less.

Like desktop, only smaller
If you need desktop PC-style applications on a smartphone or a tablet, you won’t be disappointed. A cut-down version of Microsoft Office is included with Windows Phone 8 devices. With it you can write and edit Word documents, tinker with Excel spreadsheets and make last minute changes to a PowerPoint presentation.
Microsoft Office isn’t yet available on Apple or Android. It may never be. An alternative – DataViz Documents to Go – fills the gap. The standard version costs $14 while $21 buys the Premium edition. It’s not pretty, nor cheap, but allows you to work with Office docs on Apple or Android. The $17 Polaris Office does much the same job with a little more style. Meanwhile there are dozens of apps for Android and Apple devices which allow you to open and even edit individual Office documents.
Apple sells its own Office-like apps under the iWork banner. The Pages app is for creating text documents, Numbers is a spreadsheet and KeyNote creates and edits presentations. All are in the iTunes store and they cost $14 each. Google doesn’t charge for Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. Both are bundled into Google Drive which comes as part of the stock software on Android devices and is a free download for Apple device. Google Drive isn’t available on Windows Phone 8.

Cloud storage
Google Drive is really a cloud application. You can’t really talk about mobile business apps without looking at cloud computing. The mobile versions of Microsoft Office are closely tied to the SkyDrive cloud service while Google Drive also saves documents in the cloud. Both allow you to share material with colleagues and to sync mobile information with a desktop computer – if you still need one.
Dropbox is a handy alternative. Although it isn’t officially tied to any application brands, it is used by great mobile apps like iA Writer – a minimal document editor for iPhones and iPads. Box, meanwhile, claims to be like Dropbox, only more secure.  

Remembering stuff
Geeks might describe Evernote, OneNote and Google Keep as free-form databases. You use them like a virtual document folder to store, synchronise and organise snippets of information for later use. They will handle text notes and photographs. Evernote and OneNote have built-in optical character recognition (OCR) – which can be useful when it comes to searching for information later. If you have a device with a stylus it may even be able to decipher your handwriting. All of these tools are available in multiple formats for PCs, tablets and smartphones – although at present there’s no version of Google Keep for Windows Phone.

Banking and finance
All major New Zealand banks have smartphone apps. At the time of writing ASB has the broadest range, covering just about every mobile device on the market. While not every bank supports every smartphone operating system, they also offer websites optimised for small screens. In each case you’ll be able to check balances, move money between accounts and pay people.
Online accounting firm Xero has apps for Apple and Android, other phones can use the mobile site. One advantage of the full app is that you can take photos of invoices or other items and link the information directly to the record in the database. There are also mobile apps for Quickbooks and MYOB.
The New Zealand government’s Mobile Business Toolbox is also worth a look with templates and videos designed to help improve the way you run your business – although this is only available for iPhones and iPads.

Mail and instant messaging
Every smartphone comes with a stock email app, but your first choice may not be the standard option. You can download Gmail for Apple devices and there are versions of Skype – which allows you to make low-cost Voice-over-IP calls bypassing toll call rates.
Skype also handles video calling – although video calls can chew through data allowances. Apple devices come with Facetime, which does the same thing but, in our experience, tends to work more smoothly.
There are dozens of instant messaging apps including ones from the phone makers. In business it pays to have all your staff standardised on a single system. One popular choice is Microsoft’s Yammer – it’s a little like Facebook but restricted to people working in a single company. Versions are available for almost everything. Salesforce offers a similar app known as Chatter.

Other cool tools
With Camcard you take photos of business cards, the software then scans the information and sends it to your device’s address book app. That way there’s no more sitting at home typing in cards after a business function. LinkedIn’s alternative is called CardMunch. Instead of using optical character recognition, the service sends the card photo to a real human who then interprets the information and sends it back a few minutes later.
One day you may be glad you installed Logmein Ignition on your mobile device. There are free versions and paid versions that do more. The basic app lets you access your desktop computer and either download or work on remote files – handy when you’re away from the office and suddenly need to check something.  

Bill Bennett is an Auckland-based business IT writer.
Email [email protected]

Local Heroes
New Zealand has a healthy industry developing mobile device apps for local and export markets. Many of them specialise in small business tools. Take Christchurch-based IT Link for example, the company sells a mobile sales automation app called SalesLink Cube.
Managing director Oliver Huggins says the app replaces all the paper that sales reps would normally carry around while on the road. “They used to carry a case full of brochures, pictures and sales forms.” He says the business started by offering smartphone versions, but now his customers have found the software works better on an iPad.
Huggins says reps can use the app to get information before visiting a client, then to make call notes while there. It can take orders, create invoices or deal with credit notes and quotes. This information is synchronised with the company’s central database where it can link to accounting software and other systems.
One feature that has become popular with SalesLink Cube is the ability to attach photos to call notes – mobile devices all have built-in cameras. He says a sales rep might set up a display of sausages in a supermarket, then share pictures with colleagues so they can do the same. Or it might be used to capture what a rival’s current in-store marketing looks like. Photos are also helpful for dealing with credit requests due to faulty packaging or other problems with stock.
GeoOP combines a mobile app with cloud services to help businesses manage mobile workforces. A typical customer might be a trades operation with vans and staff visiting customer premises. There are interesting parallels with SalesLink. Like SalesLink, GeoOP started life as an iPhone app, but is now on iPads and Android devices. And like SalesLink, GeoOP aims to get rid of paper.
GeoOP founder Nick Bartlett says small businesses with field teams tend to have the technology in place, but not the processes and systems to take advantage of the tools – that’s where GeoOP fits in. He says few other developers target low-end companies with a handful of employees and that’s a strength. He says those small companies could do away with a desktop and manage everything from iPads – once you get past half a dozen people, you need an admin person and that means adding a PC to the mix.
GeoOP makes a point of integrating with other products. So there are links to Xero for accounts and Navman to pull in GPS information from vehicles. Bartlett says by next year there should be as many as 30 to 40 products that integrate with his software.
An example of a GeoOP customer might be a pool cleaning business. Bartlett says the software will organise and schedule the job for the cleaner. When the work is done, there’s a simple on-the-spot job report to complete. He says there’s really not much to write – mainly it means picking items from lists. If the customer isn’t on the premises, the cleaner can take photos of the pool to show its pristine state – this helps with customer relations if they return later to a swimming pool full of leaves.
Navman can be used to complement GeoOP or in its own right. North Shore-based vice-president and director Ian Daniel says his company fleet-tracking apps – which work on Apple and Android devices – combine turn-by-turn navigation with information needed to make businesses more efficient. When someone uses a vehicle with the GPS system, information about their whereabouts and the time until they reach their destination is sent back to base and can be used to help customer service. Typically it is used to tell a customer “they’ll be with you in 15 minutes”.
The level of data collected is an aid to accurate billing – the system knows how long a vehicle was parked at a client’s premises. It can be used to manage driver behaviour, reporting if they drive too fast or use too much fuel. And there’s an important health and safety aspect – if a vehicle is too long at a stop it could be because a driver has had an accident, so it’ll send an alert.