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Early adopters of mobile technology are finding that mobile applications in the workplace can make a substantial difference when communicating between co-workers and clients.
When CoStar Group debuted its CoStarGo mobile app — which uses GPS to pull pertinent real estate information for area buildings — to real estate experts in North Jersey in August, brokers said it would change the way they do business.
"It's a total game changer," said Jeremy Neuer, senior vice president of brokerage services for CB Richard Ellis, in New Jersey, at the app's unveiling. "The iPad app allows us to serve our client better by being able to do what we do in the boardroom out in the field."
Real estate is not the only industry benefiting from the instant information access offered by mobile apps. Medical, education, human resource and security companies are using applications to simplify work flow and make enterprise data available at any time.
"Mobility is such a hot topic today — we're getting hit in all directions and we're getting a lot of requests," said Mike DePasquale, CEO of BioKey International Inc., in Wall. "What's most important is mobility is touching literally everybody's life today, at the enterprise level in business and at the consumer level."
DePasquale said his firm, which develops fingerprint scanning security applications and hardware for Apple Inc.'s iPhones and iPads, is fielding more requests for ways to secure mobile access.
"The volume and opportunity and potential is significantly larger, because there are more and more enterprise workers out there accessing information via their tablets or smartphones," DePasquale said. "Our business has grown, year over year, about 40 percent, and a significant portion of that is in mobility."
A large part of BioKey's client group is in health care, where doctors are trading in laptop and desktop computers for tablets.
"We're seeing a very strong movement by physicians and clinicians to be untethered," DePasquale said. "They see patients in offices, in clinics, in hospitals — they want to be able to access that information, and it's not just the demographics … it's images, it's X-rays, it's CAT scans, it's MRIs — it's all sorts of authoritative and reference information."
Another way the health care industry is adopting mobile technology is through electronic recordkeeping and online prescription writing.
"What we really do is provide software solutions and practice management solutions that are used by our providers to run their day-to-day office activities," said Stephen Snyder, chief operating officer of MTBC, based in the Somerset neighborhood of Franklin. "And we also provide a service on the back end … which involves submitting claims to insurance companies and providing feedback to the practice through that software platform."
"One of the things that's very important to us is responding not only to our clients' needs, but activity in the industry and trends that we see coming down the pipe," said Muhammad Chebli, MTBC's vice president of information technology. "It only makes sense that this could be a tool that providers can use that is less obtrusive when they are in the exam room with the patient, and also provide access to the information when they are away from a standard computer."
Chebli said the company launched a mobile version of its website that coincided with the traditional online launch, but that's no longer enough for its clients.
"Doctors today have to squeeze more into their work day than they've had to in the past," Chebli said. "So giving them access to these types of tools and applications makes them better able to respond to their patient needs, and better able to deliver the quality of care I believe they all are looking to deliver."
Chebli said the prescription-writing app has been popular with clients, and roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of prescriptions sent daily by clients come from a mobile device.
"Whether a doctor is going to prescribe from our website, or our clinical software, or from their mobile device, from the very beginning we had the concept that data presented on any one of these devices should be identical," Chebli said.
Developing a concept that meets clients' enterprise needs is difficult, but bringing to life an application that also is consumer friendly and can be used as a marketing tool requires additional creativity.
All Things Media, based in Ramsey, has produced apps for Mercedes-Benz and Pearson Education.
"The app is a sales tool, but it's also customer-facing, because it's available in the (online) Apple store," said Amy Ludlow, director of client services for All Things Media, about the 13 different Mercedes-Benz apps they have developed. "We try to use the functionality of the iPad to maximize the experience fort he consumer or for the end user."
Like All Things Media, which has grown from two people 10 years ago to more than 30 today, counting freelancers and temps, iSpeech president and CEO Heath Ahrens has seen his development company grow from his basement to a multimillion-dollar player in app creation.
"Our main technologies are text-to-speech and speech recognition. We focus on getting those technologies into mobile applications," Ahrens said. "We've launched some of our own apps and license our technology for developers to use in mobile apps of their own."
Ahrens said he got the idea for his company while commuting to Rutgers University, a "waste of time" in which he could not read his course materials and had no way to listen to them. While developing the technology to improve text-to-speech tools, Ahrens said, texting while driving became a phenomenon.
In September of 2009, Ahrens launched the DriveSafe.ly app, which reads text messages out loud. The app had 50,000 downloads the first day it was featured by Blackberry. Today, he said, more than 12 million people use DriveSafe.ly.
"From a business standpoint, we said we'll give away this free application, show off our technology," Ahrens said. "We can't pay for millions of dollars of marketing for everyone to find out who we are, but what we can do is make a free mobile app and absorb the cost of it, and that will be our marketing."
By charging mobile users for a premium version of the app, and developers for customized versions of the technology, Ahrens turned iSpeech into a profitable company in a short period of time. Now, "I hardly get to sit back and smell the roses," he said.
E-mail to: mcaliendo@njbiz.com
On Twitter: @MCaliendo33
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