Growth In Smartphone Sales Driving Mobile Device Tracking Market
- Mobile Workforce Management through Mobile Device Tracking
Managers using the latest generation of GPS enabled smartphone or PDA devices as consumers are driving new opportunities for the technology’s application in the business environment.
Earlier in the year, Symbian, the consortium of companies developing the operating system forecast 12-15% growth in the sale of smartphones, whilst Cambridge-based chip-manufacturer ARM forecast a more conservative 10% in the sale of GPS enabled mobile devices. Gartner Research have stated at this month’s CommunicAsia 2009, one of the world’s largest mobile communication fairs, that they expect the global smartphone market to grow by 27% in 2009.
Jason Laight, Sales Director at Romex says that this trend in consumer smartphone sales will contribute to the growth in the commercial mobile device tracking market. “We always believed that device tracking for mobile employee management was the natural evolution in the vehicle tracking market, but more recently we have noticed a growing trend where business leaders that have used consumer applications are thinking about the commercial application of mobile device tracking and the commercial benefit to their organisations”.
“What can start of as consumer driven location-based information services on a mobile device is developing into real business opportunities for our company” continued Laight.
“If a manager is able to find his closest ATM or Fuel Station via a PDA’s location based service- then why not allocate the closest employee to the sight of a breakdown or delivery using the same technology? - This thought process is opening up the introduction of location-based services inside the business”.
In addition to web-based mobile employee tracking based services, Romex has recently launched an application named MobiFix is essentially a supplement to core application for the Team Manager running his fleet of vehicles or mobile employees by allowing access to all tracking data from a Internet enabled phone.
Key data from TeamFix and the MyFix website are now fed through to a internet enabled phone giving details such as current status whether driving, at a customer site or at home and information on each users last journey. This service enables a team to be entirely mobile and frees up a manager to work on move as well.