Content for the Mobile Enterprise

The aggregate trends for mobilization of rich media continue to show strong growth, despite a lingering global recession. The drivers on the surface are obvious; the number of mobile devices continues to expand both in terms of smart phones and in terms of cloud-enabled feature phones, Apple has gotten hundreds of millions of people all wound up on the sexier aspects of mobility (primarily through a much friendlier user interface), an entire generation (actually multiple generations) have moved their lives on-line and are now moving to a complete mobile paradigm, and the underlying framework for this is a rich media experience as a core driver. Pushing pretty pictures around with your finger is a lot more interesting than typing in arcane instructions at a command line processor, and the fact that Apple has gone from zero to 10% market share in a very short interval attests to the fact that consumers prefer their information in pretty, mobile, bite-sized chunks.

There are a number of trends that will be affected by this continued shift; social networks (including business social networks) are and will continue to have a huge effect on how content is packaged and delivered, consumers who are now used to a very user friendly mobile experience will expect the same type of easy interface while access mobile applications in a corporate setting (since presumably most of them have jobs), which has a completely different dynamic from pure-play consumer interactions. Security is a huge issue (as is privacy on the consumer side), virtualization and synchronization are a baseline requirement for mobile content, and require precise collaboration between mobile content enablers and mobile infrastructure enablers, most of whom are dealing with their own particular, separate ecosystems. Continued focus on content standards such as DITA need to expand to encompass the entire range of media types (video, graphics, speech, text, etc.) while also expanding to include the inherent security concerns associated with a mobile framework.