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When was the last time you dropped your phone in a puddle, and lost every contact you’ve ever made? With the advent of the cloud, “I lost my phone, what’s your number?” Facebook pages are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Cloud-based offerings like Google Sync (available on a number of platforms, not just Google’s own Android OS) can automatically backup and sync contact information over any number of devices using data stored in the cloud. Ever lost your place in a book? Thanks to the cloud, Amazon’s Kindle app will remember where you left off, whether you were last reading on a Kindle, a smartphone, or a traditional computer.
HTML5
A driving force behind mobile cloud
applications is the implementation of a
new and improved web programming
language standard, HTML5, which
enables offline data caching. As a
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75% of the mobile cloud market is enterprise-driven. |
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cloud applications present considerable
savings to the business customer and
form the foundation for the distributed
“anywhere workforce” of the future.
Mobile devices can be used for just
about anything: video conferencing,
credit card processing, bar code
authentication, fleet tracking, remote
scanning and printing and office suite
collaboration.
“The proliferation of new devices, coupled with the vast expansion of mobile applications used by consumers has paved the road for mobility solutions to enter the enterprise at the worker, workgroup, and workflow levels. Given all this, we expect 2011 to be the year of the transformation of the enterprise,” said Dan Ortega, senior director product marketing, Sybase.
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result, devices won’t be dependent on
a perfectly reliable internet connection—
the applications will still function, even
if the data connection goes down.
Developers also like mobile cloud apps
because they are comparatively easier
to create and they offer a larger profit
potential.
Business in the Clouds
Juniper Research reports that 75% of the mobile cloud market is enterprise-driven, and a recent Sybase Survey indicated “A majority (82 percent) of IT managers share the belief that it would be beneficial – not detrimental – to host more of their mobile applications in the cloud.”
Both in terms of cost (development and
implementation), and time, mobile
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Energy Efficiency
One beneficial component of mobile cloud computing—especially once you get into cloud-based operating systems—is energy efficiency. Mobile devices, especially powerful ones, are notorious battery hogs. Many use processors that run at over a gigahertz to chew through the many complex applications that run native on the device. What if, instead, the high-horsepower data crunching was done from a land-based server, and the resultant output was fed through the mobile portal? Voila, handheld devices could be optimized as portals rather than handheld supercomputers, and battery life could be dramatically improved. It’s akin to the wired network/terminal topology of the past.
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