Copyright © 2012 The
Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
November 10, 2012
“Bring Your Own Car” Hits Mobile UC
By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC
Strategies Expert
It
is time to recognize the need for UC-enabled “dual persona” applications for
all types of mobile device interfaces, including built-in car
dashboards. Aside from personal and entertainment applications, business
applications fall into two basic categories, person-to-person communications
and automated, Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications, all of which can be or
will be “mobile apps” available through public and enterprise “app stores.”
All
types of organizations are being challenged by this shift to application
mobility for several reasons:
·
UC-enabled multi-modal
communications and CEBP are more complex than the siloed, premise-based
communications of the past.
·
BYOD, by both
employees, business partners, and consumers, is adding to the complexities of
different user interfaces, as well the loss of control over the end user mobile
devices.
·
“Bring Your Own Car”
(BYOC) for mobile apps to be used while driving, is becoming another contender
for mobile apps, where “hands/eyes-free” user interfaces have to be easily
accommodated automatically when needed.
·
Legacy online desktop
applications for workers must be converted to support wireless tablets,
smartphones, and car dashboards, while online customer/consumer self-service
applications must also do the same.
·
With application
mobility, there is also a need for UC-enablement, which means that both input
and output must be multi-media to support an end user’s current situation or
status.
·
Since all applications
are primarily software based, they will constantly be changing to dynamically
support a variety of end user needs.
·
The above considerations
are driving the shift of mobile applications to exploiting the wireless Web and
hosted/managed application services.
Car Manufacturers View UC-enabled Dashboards As Competitive Feature
A
recent announcement from the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) at
it’s second annual summit, reported that it’s new industry standard, MirrorLink, which will transfer a user’s current
mobile device user interface to a car’s dashboard entertainment control and
display screen, is now being offered to third-party application developers.
Although 80 percent of world automakers and 70 percent of global smartphone
manufacturers are members of the CCC, “adoption of the standard has been slow.”
The
CCC hopes to have mobile application developers certify their apps for “drive
mode functionality” as a key benefit to mobile users who will be using their
mobile apps while in their cars. This will be particularly important for all
forms of text messaging to exploit speech recognition and text-to-speech while
driving, as well as for voice interfacing with on-line applications.
The
CCC standard should simplify how voice-to-text and text-to-voice multi-media
interfaces will work for various driver applications. However, that doesn’t
necessarily mean that functional mobile applications provided by auto
manufacturers as options for different car models have to be identical. Just as
smartphones can exploit personalized, mobile applications, so too, that
personalization can be applied to car models.
Business Communications Means Both Work and Commerce
The convergence of all forms of “business”
communications, including both work and customer interactions with people and
business process applications, will require that mobile endpoint devices
support all of the above. The difference is “who” controls “what.” When it
comes to mobility, the car has become a new endpoint for the drivers, and will
probably become subject to enforcing driver safety rules, such as
“hands-free/eyes-free” contacts while driving. That’s what they did with
testing drivers who were inebriated.
UC has become important for both flexible
person-to-person contacts, as well as for application user interfaces. However,
both categories have to broken down further in terms of control and responsibilities
over contact accessibility and application access to a shared mobile device.
Making mobile devices both flexible and secure, means restricting the device to
being used just for access through “thin“ clients, not for storage of sensitive
information. This is often described as “dual
persona” controls over endpoint device usage; adding your car’s capability
to access a variety of personal and business mobile applications means that
your car must also be “dual persona!”
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