According to a February 2011 InfoTrends survey, the biggest reasons why people didn’t print from their mobile devices were 1) lack of access to a printer (48%) and 2) lack of support from a mobile device (32%). No need to print was third, at just 29%.

There are a lot of products that can make mobile printing smooth and easy. But there’s a significant gulf between what’s more suited for a home or small business, and what works best in a big organization or enterprise.

Take Apple’s popular AirPrint feature. Built into iOS 4.2 and later, AirPrint enables an iPad or iPhone to print wirelessly to a nearby printer. That reportedly works with more than 200 printers.

AirPrint is a great solution at home or for smaller offices that are standardized on Apple, have recently purchased a wireless printer, and aren’t concerned about a lack of control over print quality.

But Holly Muscolino, an IDC analyst, says that AirPrint’s impact in the greater business world “has been minimal. Peer-to-peer local-type printing is not the same thing as enabling you to print from anywhere to anywhere. It’s limited.”

There are also third-party apps like the $20 PrintBureau and software like the donationware handyPrint (formerly AirPrintHacktivator) running on a Mac that is connected to a printer (any will do), to enable wireless printing via iPad or iPhone. You can also use the $20 FingerPrint, which runs on Mac and Windows PCs and which CNET loves.

There have also been clumsy attempts to directly integrate tablets with printers. Like this short-lived attempt by HP, the PhotoSmart eStation, which mated an Android tablet with an inkjet fax/printer/scanner:

Credit: Engadget

While some of these solutions can connect to a larger pool of printers or more types of mobile devices than AirPrint, they still suffer a major limitation – incompatibility with the sophisticated networks that are typical inside any medium-to-large-sized company.

Let’s take two common scenarios – an employee with a BYOD device, or a tablet-toting salesperson or field representative visiting another organization. Any network administrator worth his salt will confine those devices to the guest network for security reasons.

But guest networks rarely have their own printers. And devices logged into them are blocked from accessing anything on the corporate network. Like printers.

If mobile devices DO get onto the corporate network, they may find still find it difficult to print, due to:

- firewalls that protect printers from spammers and paper-spitting malware;

- confusing networks with multiple subnets that make it hard to find the printer you want;

- group policies that parcel out access only to select devices in order to track costs and cut down on waste.

One attempt to sidestep the network issue is via public cloud-based print services. They include Google’s free Cloud Print and Hewlett-Packard’s ePrint. ePrint lets users print by sending an e-mail with a document attached.

ePrint is free. But you need an HP-branded, Web-enabled printer to use ePrint. And apart from being able to lock printers to accept e-mails only from registered e-mail addresses, there is little control for IT managers. As a result, ePrint has gained only some enterprise acceptance.

The great strength of Google’s Cloud Print is its cross-platform ability. It can work with any brand of printer and any device type (provided they are running Google Docs or the Chrome Web browser).

On the other hand, Google Cloud Print gives users little control over how their print output looks. Only two choices are fully supported for all printers – single or double-sided print, and black and white or color pages. Printing booklets or using special paper sizes is not supported.

The bigger issue is that Cloud Print doesn’t allow IT administrators to set policies such as black-and-white only printing (to save on expensive color ink), usage quotas, or encrypted printing. Nor does it allow IT administrators to control what and how much guest or BYOD devices are allowed to print.

For large organizations that need such features, ease of use and manageability – and are willing to pay – there are several enterprise-class solutions. There’s the cloud-based Breezy. There’s also PrinterOn, which comes as a public cloud service or internal server software. And there is PrintMe Mobile from EFI, which come as software installable on Windows or Linux servers.

EFI says it is the only vendor that can 100% solve the vexing problem mentioned above: enabling mobile devices on the guest Wi-Fi network to securely print to printers inside the firewall located on the corporate network. That would help visiting dignitaries, salespeople, partners and customers.

“Our solution is as easy as hitting File and Print,” says Tom Offutt, director of business development for EFI.

IDC’s Muscolino warns that the market is still maturing, and that some solutions that promise to enable high-quality printing from any device to any printer may still fall short.

Nevertheless, she predicts that this mobile printing market will grow at a “hockey-stick-like” 71.2% Compound Annual Growth Rate to $1 billion in 2015.

PCs just made it easier for us to print more, while document management systems gave us more to print. Electronic forms, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and digital signatures – all valiant efforts that, so far, have failed to make much of a dent.

(Check out my other piece, ‘The Good, Bad And Ugly of Different Mobile Printing Solutions’)

And while the Internet is rendering paper obsolete in some areas – newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, to name a few – it has replaced it by providing other printable content, ranging from e-mails to cute kitty pics.

Credit: Sheila Hollingworth. Check out her other cartoons.

In that context, can mobile wean us from paper where other technologies have failed? Some certainly think so. Government agencies and city councils have equipped managers and other heavy meeting-goers with tablets with the goal of cutting down on the number of printed memos and presentations. Meanwhile, schools and colleges have used money originally set aside for paper textbooks to buy tablets, e-books and apps.

According to Holly Muscolino, an analyst with IDC, there are two “schools of thought” on how mobile affects print. One is that easy-to-read tablets like the iPad, with its near Letter-size dimensions (8.5″ x 11″), will cause “print [volumes] to fall off a cliff.”

The other? That office paper usage will continue to be flat or slightly decline, with larger forces like the economy having more impact than mobile.

Muscolino leans towards the latter. “I don’t foresee a rapid decline,” she said.

Muscolino has hard data to back up that opinion. According to a December 2011 IDC survey she helped oversee, only 22% of organizations said that getting data and docs on their smartphone decreased the amount of pages they were printing. 43% said their print needs stayed the same, while 10% said they actually went up.

Ah yes, but nobody said that squint-inducing smartphones were paper substitutes. What about tablets? Even there, IDC found that most respondents’ (38%) print needs were unchanged, while 13% said their print needs increased. Only 22% said the amount of pages they printed dropped.

Large enterprises were especially likely to print more as a result of using smartphones (25%) and tablets (27%).

Moreover, more than half of mobile-carrying respondents said there many instances where “they needed to print, but couldn’t,” Muscolino said.

For example, an executive trying to read a large Excel file on his tablet may rue that he hadn’t printed out a copy in his hotel’s Business Center.

Or a salesman who wants to print out copies of his presentation while visiting a customer’s office may find his tablet prevented from connecting into the network printers.

In other words, mobile is similar to technologies before it like PCs and the Internet: it accelerates the flow of information and grants us more freedom. The former creates more information to print, while the latter creates more moments when we want to print.

Moreover, tablets, especially the wave of Windows 8-based devices coming out now, are evolving into ‘laptablets’ and ‘tabtops’. These tablets come with keyboards and larger screens, making them perfect for creating content, not just consuming it.

The coming release of Office 2013 for Windows 8 and other mobile OSes such as Android and iOS will also make it easier to create documents, PowerPoints and spreadsheets on your tablet. All of which you might want to print out.

No wonder that IDC forecasts that the global market for products that enable mobile printing will grow from $68.3 million in 2010 to $1 billion in 2015 – an amazing 71.2% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) that Muscolino calls “really hockey stick-like.”

Tomorrow, look for my blog where I describe the main options for enabling mobile printing at work.

I may not be able to make to the Venetian/Palazzo Congress Center, but I still plan to attend TechEd virtually, watching sessions and talks viaSAP’s broadcast platform.

Sessions begin at 8 AM in Las Vegas, or 7 AM Pacific Time. So if you’re in California or Washington, set your alarm clock. Or catch the replays, which should be up within a few hours.

Some of the talks and workshops in the Virtual Events Catalog have incorrect starting times or durations. Please double-check the main catalog to get the best, latest schedule.

There are many worthy technical sessions on SUP, Netweaver Portal, BusinessObjects Design Studio and Afaria, that I’d recommend for developer and IT types. They may also want to download the Developer Survival Guide for TechEd.

Here are the higher-level mobile sessions I plan to catch remotely:

Tuesday, Oct 16:

11 AM: Mobility Platform Road Map and Strategy. Get the latest overview of where the SAP Mobile Platform, including the Sybase Unwired Platform, Mobilizer and SAP Afaria, are headed. This features two ex-Sybase technical experts, CTO Jagdish Bansiya and product manager, Sami Lechner.

3 PM: Business Benefits of Mobile. In a 20 minute interview, hear the thoughts of Bill Clark, one of Gartner’s former top mobile analysts, who has just joined as SAP’s global VP for mobile strategy.

8 PM: Demo Jam. The annual showcase of the best business demo applications created by SAP, and its customers and partners. Mobile entrantsinclude the intriguingly-named “Singularity” created by Accenture and Cooper Tire to enable instant collaboration across mobile devices, “Food Agent” by Roberto Clemente Middle School that is a mobile app that lets shoppers scan supermarket barcodes to check the origin of food items and possible contamination, and “Personas,” an SAP app to let users self-customize SAP application interfaces for better productivity on their PCs or tablets.

Wednesday, Oct 17:

12:15 PM: SAP User Interfaces – Strategy and Road Map. Improving the design and ease-of-use of applications, both its own and its partners, has never been more important for SAP. I’m eager to hear about the UI development toolkit for HTML5 from SAP.

Thursday, Oct 18:

11 AM: Avoiding Design Errors and Improving User Experience for Mobile Apps. The speaker promises to “share examples of real and already in the market applications” and how their UX/UI is or isn’t up to snuff.

2:45 PM: Developing Apps and Interfaces with Our Cloud Solutions with an On-Demand SDK. The world is moving to the cloud, and SAP is keeping apace. Werner Wolf, a solution manager at SAP, will demonstrate how to bring an iPad, Business Objects, and cloud data together.

You could blame this on the uncertain U.S. economy. But I put equal blame on the mainstreaming of e-commerce. Everyone I know who is my age or younger buys a ton online. There are sexy category specialists – Newegg, Gilt Groupe, GroupOn and Zappos – but Amazon.com gets the lion’s share of their dollars.

Fittingly, Amazon.com is the fastest riser on STORES’ list (42.5% year-on-year growth). Ranked 15th, Amazon.com already sells more than Safeway, Sears and Macy’s. It is the poster child of how to win in e-commerce: low prices, speedy shipping and personalized offers that leverage its rich data on customers. Add a fourth factor: the hot trend of consumers “showrooming” goods at a brick-and-mortar store while checking online prices via a smartphone, from whom they will presumably eventually buy.

How can retailers fight back? I don’t think it’s through expensive attempts to amp up the EQ (Entertainment Quotient) of their stores. It doesn’t fly with time-pressed moms, who control the majority of household budgets.

Nor is the solution to further streamline their supply chain in order to compete with Amazon.com and its ilk on price. Most of the retailers around today survived the initial dot-com onslaught by deploying ERP software and successfully adopting lean and Just-In-Time techniques to cut costs.

In other words, they’ve done a good job of playing defense. Now, it’s time to play a little offense – use technology to enhance customer service, boost sales and, rather than lamenting sales lost through “Showrooming,” take advantage of it.

Mobile Point of Service

On customer service, retailers are arming their floor salespeople with smartphones and tablets and apps that allow them to reprice items, check inventory for customers and speeding transactions by conducting them where-ever they are in the store.

Large retailers doing this include Lowe’s, which has given iPhones to all 42,000 employees, Sear’s, J.C. Penney, Costco, Sam’s Club, Nordstrom, Apple, Urban Outfitters and Sephora, the 1,300-store cosmetics chain.

Sephora is using the Mobile Point of Sale app for iOS developed by SAP and partner, Agilysys. Check it out at the SAP Retail Forum North America in Dallas this week.

Precision Retailing

Good customer service is not just providing information on demand and accelerating purchases. It’s also about anticipating consumer wants, and delivering them personalized discounts and offers not just in real-time, but at the right time.

If it sounds like I’m going to talk about marrying Big Data and mobile, you’re right. This is taking customer data from every channel, from Web to POS, and applying predictive analytics to it, so that you can augment the in-store shopping experience with mobile coupons and reminders that are relevant and not spammy.

“Instead of old-school loyalty programs with their points and reward schemes, you want to give consumers real, meaningful relevant information based on what they’re looking for,” said Colin Haig, the retail industry principal for SAP.

In other words, the exact opposite of that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is bombarded with ads as he runs through the shopping mall.

That puts the Precision in Precision Retailing.

Rather than describe how this would play out real life, I’ll let this video do it so much better. Click on the image below or this link. Added bonus: there’s a rom-com storyline cuter than a Katherine Heigl movie and a box full of kittens:

SAP is showing off a Precision Retailing solution, which combines a mobile app with cloud-based analytics courtesy of SAP HANA on the back end. Retailers from L’Oreal, European grocer Groupe Casino and the Montreal Transit Agency are already using SAP Precision Retailing, said Haig.

Haig says that Precision Retailing’s ability to help shoppers build lists of recurring items (think kids’ clothes, batteries or toothpaste) and offer them discounts means that the solution today makes it perfect for grocery stores and other general stores (think Wal-Mart or Target).

But Precision Retailing can also help speciality stores, the kind that offer high-ticket items or are beset by showrooming customers. Here’s how. First, we must note that only 25% of shoppers who check competitor prices in a store actually end up buying the item online.

That means 75% of shoppers or more are potential net new customers for the store. And the amount of sales lost to showrooming can be reduced – through precision.

Imagine a consumer visiting a retailer’s Web site to check if a large-screen TV is in stock. That raises a red flag to a retailer that the consumer may be coming to a store soon to inspect that particular item. When he or she enters the store, the store’s app on the customer’s smartphone can immediately open and buzz, alerting him or her to a coupon that for that item or category of items that would match or beat competitors’ online prices.

Such tactics can win back the shoppers who came into a store fully intending to showroom, says Roland Gonzalez, senior directory for mobile industry marketing at SAP.

“Retailers have always been customer-centric. But now they are trying to be customer-intimate,” Gonzalez said.

The futurism business is so competitive these days that technologies get declared dying at the very moment they are actually peaking. In monarchy terms, that’s like preparing to crown the boy prince when the reigning king is a hale and hearty 40-something.

So it goes with text messaging, aka SMS. Nobody disputes that SMS  is the king of mobile communications today. 7.8 trillion SMS messages were sent last year, according to Portio Research. Another firm, Informa, counted 5.9 trillion text messages worldwide last year, comprising 64% of mobile messaging traffic. You also have research showing that in developed countries, texting has just become more popular than voice calling.

Not only is SMS on top, but it’s still growing substantially. Portio predicted earlier this year that it will increase 23% this year to 9.6 trillion SMS messages.

According to Portio: “SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come.”

Yet, many experts have already declared the death of SMS. Consumers don’t care – they’re too busy texting. And some companies are reaping the marketing benefits (see Mobile Marketer for more North American case studies and Sybase 365 for the rest of the world).

But too many companies are being persuaded not to invest in SMS or its picture/video-enabled sibling, MMS, in favor of building native apps, or waiting to see what the mobile IM services or Twitter or even fast-rising ‘free’ Over-The-Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp.

I understand that there is a consumer desire for a cheaper alternative to SMS. But I think that companies waiting for the death of SMS will wait for a lot longer than they expect. In the meantime, there will be huge costs, in the form of blown opportunities to exploit the right-time, contextual marketing capabilities of mobile today.

As much as I’m a champion of apps, they remain largely a first-world phenomenon. Globally, smartphones that can run apps were outsold by featurephones by 2:1 last year.

The research firm mobiThinking estimated earlier this year that based on the 6 billion mobile subscriptions and the roughly 1 billion smartphones sold in the last 3 years, at most only 16% of mobile phones in use worldwide today are app-enabled. AT MOST.

“The media tends to overegg the importance of smartphones and Apple in particular,” wrote MobiThinking. But “businesses that ignore featurephone customers do so at their peril.”

Put another way: “If you’re a major global brand and all you use are apps for marketing, you’ll miss out on 70-80% of your customers,” Howard Stevens, a senior vice-president at SAP division, Sybase 365, told me in a recent interview.

Stevens, of course, has a horse in this race. Sybase 365 is the largest independent carrier of mobile messaging, processing more than 2 billion messages, mostly SMS, per day. It also provides back-end services for enterprise marketing and communications, such as real-time alerts, interactive polls, banking and coupons – all via SMS. But I think his advice is solid:

- “Even those [consumers] who have smartphones, there’s no guarantee they have or will download your app.”

- “I don’t believe it’s apps versus SMS. You need to have all channels covered. You can’t do it all with in-app notifications. The only truly ubiquitous form of communication is voice or messaging, and SMS is the most prevalent.”

FaceBook, which is often touted as one of the OTT players that will kill SMS, evidently agrees with Stevens. Last week, it added the ability to send and receive text messages from its FaceBook Messenger app for iPhone and Android.

What Does The Future Hold?

Admittedly, there are a ton of OTT players that are vying to beat SMS, including: traditional instant messaging services like Yahoo Messenger or AOL, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), VoIP services like Skype, Apple’s iMessage, FaceBook, Twitter and, most formidably today, WhatsApp.

The free WhatsApp, unlike BBM and iMessage, is not restricted to particular brands of devices. And its fast rise – it carries 10 billion+ messages a day, up from 1 billion 10 months ago - means it is nearly half the popularity of SMS today.

There are several things, though, that should make you wonder how sustainable this growth is. For one, these services are all fragmented. I don’t see that changing anytime soon – can you imagine iMessage and Microsoft’s Skype suddenly interconnecting?

Also, OTT services generally rely on users having a smartphone with a pricey mobile data plan. For many consumers (though not readers of this blog), that all-you-can-text package may seem like a better option. And smartphones remain outnumbered by featurephones 5:1 worldwide.

Also, the use of mainstream IP networks by OTT players can leave them more vulnerable to outages and delayed messages than SMS.

Finally, while these services are free, some – namely Twitter and WhatsApp – will need to figure out a way to make money. Starting to charge consumers could cause a sudden halt or reversal in their popularity.

Even if SMS is no longer dominant half a decade from now, it will still probably the largest player. Informa, for instance, thinks SMS traffic will grow 60% between 2011-2016, and hold 42% of the market.

Bottom line: Companies thinking about their marketing and communications strategies should consider SMS an important part of the mix for many years to come.

Even the latter wouldn’t be surprising. According to Net Applications, Windows 7 only overtook Windows XP in popularity last month. That’s more than three years after its release.

This sort of lag would never happen in mobile. In the post-PC era, companies are upgrading to new devices and operating system versions within months or weeks.

Take my employer, SAP. On its first day of availability last Friday, SAP’s Global IT team already had 20 iPhone 5s in possession that it was putting through their paces.

“I already have one in hand, and I have to say, it’s very nicely done, pretty cool to look at,” said SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann in an interview that day.

If everything goes as expected, Bussmann hopes to make the iPhone 5 available to employees within 2 weeks, or by early October.

How about iOS 6? That new version should be available to SAP workers even sooner, with targeted availability this Tuesday September 25, or just one week after its official release.

How is SAP able to test and certify iOS 6 so fast? “We were part of the iOS 6 beta program, so we did a lot in advance, knowing that expectations from workers would be pretty high and there would be a lot of pressure on our engineering team,” Bussmann said. “Hype on the consumer side always translates into demand on the corporate side.”

SAP may be faster than other companies, but it’s not alone in its plans to embrace iPhone 5 and iOS 6. It’s confirmation that the two new Apple releases deliver features that CIOS care about: LTE, better camera and microphone and improved MDM features (such as the Authorized Mode and Guided Access features that preload apps and restrict users to use only them (like a point-of-sale app for a retail kiosk, or a classroom app for students).

SAP, by the way, now manages 18,000 iPads, 18,000 BlackBerries, 13,000 iPhones and 2,000 Samsung devices, according to Bussmann. Its total of BYOD devices is up to 4,000 – more than double over the summer, which Bussmann attributed to the addition of devices owned by the now-integrated Sybase employees.

What about other devices?

As much as SAP employees love their iOS devices, they also love Android. So SAP is expanding its support. At the end of August, Samsung Android devices were cleared to become available to employees, both as corporate-owned devices, as well as BYOD.

To enable Android BYOD, SAP is testing an Android MDM app called Divide By Enterproid. The software creates a virtual sandbox for all corporate data and e-mail within the employee’s personal device. Bussmann says the software is both technically promising and surprisingly inexpensive.

As for Windows 8, SAP has been testing convertible laptop/tablets from Fujitsu and Samsung for the past month, said Bussmann. The devices hold a lot of promise for workers to replace their existing tablets and laptops with a single piece of hardware, he said.

*****

Last week, SAP launched a Mobility Design Center in its Palo Alto office. This group is focused on quickly customizing business apps for enterprises, especially creating highly-usable, consumer-grade interfaces that will satisfy workers and end users. Learn more here.

That’s right – this family-owned Indianapolis, Indiana firm has succeeded against mighty Apple with its $375 tablet where Google, Samsung and Amazon have so far failed.

It’s particularly impressive because among educators, Apple has the same cachet that IBM once owned in the enterprise. If no corporate CIO used to get fired for buying Big Blue, then few school principals or district CIOs get overly grilled for choosing iPads over other tablets.

1,000 Wawasee High School students in Indiana are using the Kuno.

Credit: CurriculumLoft

Yet, here you have San Felipe Del Rio District in Texas deploying 1,600 Kuno tablets instead of iPads, Wise County Public Schools (Virginia) rolling out 600 Kunos, and William M. Bass Elementary (Virginia) and Morton District (Illinois) both using about 100 Kunos in their classes.

The Kuno’s biggest fans are in the Midwest, with Martin Elementary School in suburban Chicago rolling out 1,200 Kunos, Cardinal High School in Iowa (530 Kunos),  and, of course, Indiana, where Wawasee High School and Beech Grove City Schools have each rolled out more than 1,000 Kunos, and Crothersville HS has deployed 600.

“This month alone, we’re implementing 12,000 Kunos,” said JR Gayman, CEO of CurriculumLoft.

Gayman declined to say how many Kunos total are in use today. Asked if it was in the six figures: “I think the number would surprise people,” he said.

That the Kuno – the name combines K (for K-12) and the Spanish number for one, ‘Uno’, to signify one-to-one student:tablet deployments – is around today is a result of luck and entrepreneurial spirit.

CurriculumLoft is a spinoff of CIM Technology Solutions, which was founded in 1983 by JR’s parents as an installer of slide projecters and other 80s-era audio-visual equipment to schools. Even today, the Web site www.CIMtechsolutions.com automatically redirects to CIMav.com.

About 3 years ago, Indiana became one of the first states to allow schools to take taxpayer money earmarked for textbooks and use it on digital technology.

Gayman, who had worked as a developer in the Bay Area during the tail end of the dot-com era before rejoining the family firm, spotted an opportunity.

“We could see that the funding that was going toward smartboards and projectors would start moving to tablets and e-books,” Gayman said.

The latest 10″ Kuno 3 tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The company dipped its toe by first building a cloud platform for teachers to store and share their e-books and  teaching materials. Think of it as DropBox but geared for K-12 teachers. That software morphed into a matching set of applications – the CurriculumLoft Cloud digital repository and the CurriculumLoft Explore 1:1, which manages the synchronization of content onto students’ devices, whether it be Kuno, iPad or PC.

Indeed, many schools are using the CurriculumLoft software without the Kuno, said Gayman, citing one school district an hour north of Indianapolis that is deploying it onto 1,800 student laptops today.

Building a Better Android

By late 2010, CurriculumLoft also decided to jump into building its own tablet, spurred on by the iPad’s success and the then-high price of Android entrants.

For about a year, Gayman and CurriculumLoft vice-president Josh Whitis went to China to find and then oversee the manufacture of the Kuno. Released in the fall of 2011, the Kuno was similar physically to other Android tablets.

What distinguished it was the software. Not just the CurriculumLoft apps, but also the content filtering built at the Android kernel level that enables schools to comply with governmental rules around childrens’ exposure to the Internet.

“Other solutions, especially for consumers, tend to be at the Web browser level. We can filter content at the app level, not just the browser,” Whitis said.

The Kuno also includes a number of Mobile Device Management (MDM) features, albeit tailored by CurriculumLoft for the school environment. So students aren’t able to easily install or delete apps. Kunos and their content can be logged and tracked by teachers or tech administrators using Active Directory/LDAP. They can also be remotely wiped if the tablets are lost or stolen.

(Speaking of MDM, SAP Afaria now supports the latest iOS 6 features.)

The total solution, including Kuno tablet, rugged aluminum keyboard, and CurriculumLoft Cloud and Explore 1:1, brings the total cost into the $500s. That’s more than an entry-level iPad, but it’s also a turnkey solution that many schools have found attractive.

“You can’t get that with an iPad”

“We’ve literally had some school districts deploy over 3,000 devices without adding a single IT person,” Gayman added. “It’s why we’re getting the buy-in that we have, as we simplify the IT support and address the needs of every stakeholder.”

CurriculumLoft CEO JR Gayman (left) and vice-president Josh Whitis traveled to China for a year while designing the first Kuno.

Credit: CurriculumLoft

“We have a complete mobile learning solution for education. You can’t get that with an iPad,” added Whitis. The iPad “is a great product, but it can be hard to manage. We’ve had several schools that were in the adoption process for iPad, that changed direction because of us.”

According to Gayman, the iPad isn’t even the Kuno’s biggest competitor. “Lenovo is who we see the most,” he said.

“The use of the Kuno was not a hard transition for the students to make at all,” wrote Drew Markel, assistant principal for Crothersville Community Schools in Crothersville, Indiana, which deployed 550 Kunos, last year. “We want our students marketable in today’s workplace.”

Here are some anonymous student comments from a Kuno pilot in Georgia. Check out CurriculumLoft’s YouTube channel to see other educator testimonials.

The biggest problem with the Kuno in its first year appears to have been the high breakage rate, which Gayman blamed on an inadequately-ruggedized case. To fix that, the latest version of the Kuno comes standard with an aluminum back, thick interior padding, and a plastic molded case that includes a cover to protect against pencils and other sharp objects.

With the re-engineered Kuno, the breakage rate so far is under 1%, Gayman said.

Gayman also touts the Kuno’s battery that can be recharged 1,000 times, giving it a lifespan of 3-4 years – a key point for cash-strapped schools.

But is that lifecycle realistic considering the Kuno’s single-core ARM chip? Especially when there are quad-core, Tegra 3-based kids’ tablets like the Nabi, or dual-core Android education tablets like the Kineo that also boast curriculum and management software?

Gayman says that no schools have complained. “Our goal is to maintain a cheap price point with a single-core model that is durable and sustainable,” he said.

And, he says, the Kuno is doing so well that CurriculumLoft is planning to release a version tailored for healthcare and corporate verticals. Ironically, CurriculumLoft is not planning to create a Kuno tailored for universities. “We’ve found that it is a very different market,” Gayman said.

CurriculumLoft’s expansion could be jumping the gun. Some educational tech experts think that growth in the K-12 market will come, as in the enterprise, from BYOD, rather than school-funded deployments. That will put the Kuno at a disadvantage vs. $199 consumer tablets like the Google Nexus and the Amazon Kindle Fire, said Corey Thompson, CEO of Naiku, Inc., an educational software firm.

“I think the challenge for these specialized tablets will be to find the schools that are willing to pay a premium in order to have some additional support in addition to already paying for the devices themselves,” he said.

Do you think the future for Android tablets in education will be solutions like the Kuno or consumer-y tablets like the Nexus?

Flight attendants will be able to record customer meal and beverage preferences, access customer info and better identify high-value customers or those needing special assistance. The 5.3-inch Notes were chosen after months of testing and attendant feedback.

The 17,000 Notes are in addition to the 6,000 Samsung Galaxy Tabs that the airline said in June 2011 that it would roll out as weight-saving in-flight entertainment devices.

According to a Samsung spokeswoman, the Tabs are already available to business-class travelers on its long-haul flights.

These 23,000 Samsung tablets would make American Airlines the biggest enterprise user of Android devices publicly known to date (see my list).

Don’t forget: this is all in addition to the iPads that AA says will be used by pilots in cockpits to replace heavy paper charts and manuals. American Airlines has 10,000 pilots.

With up to 10,000 iPads, along with 23,000 Samsung Galaxy devices, American will have 33,000 modern tablets in use by the 75,000+ employees that the airline expects to have after its latest round of layoffs. That’s up to 44% of its workers!

That made me wonder: what are the reasons why enterprises stumble or fail at their mobile rollouts?

Coincidentally, several days later, I happened to be a guest on the business technology radio show, In the Cloud with Gamechangers, hosted by Bonnie D. Graham (and, full disclosure, sponsored by SAP).

Other guests included Sheryl Kingstone, director of mobile and CRM research for analyst firm, the Yankee Group, Blake McLaughlin, an associate consulting partner at IBM and the lead for its SAP mobile practice, and Matthew H. Schwartz, IBM’s North American head of innovation around SAP software, including mobile.

The topic, “Mobile Moments: Opportunity or Catastrophe?” was a juicy one, and it ended up taking a turn around the biggest risks that enterprises going mobile face today. They included:

1) Brochureware. This was a dot-com term to describe Web sites so hastily and superficially built that they were no more interactive than the printed pamplets they were supposed to replace. Often, they were literally just scans of paper-based marketing materials.

Brochureware for a fake paper company. How fitting.

Credit: NBC’s TV show, The Office

History is repeating itself with mobile. “People are just taking their Web sites and mobilizing it and saying  ’Good enough,’” Kingstone said.

Just as bad dot-com era sites failed to take advantage of the Web’s interactivity, bad mobile sites and apps fail to take advantage of the real-time geolocation features of mobile devices. Or they try to jam too much information into a device’s small screen. Or they forget about the advantages and limitations of a touchscreen.

Bad mobile sites and apps disappoint your workers, customers and managers. And they’ll leave you far behind the curve of your competitors. Fortunately, they are easily corrected. 

2) Letting IT control mobile’s fate. Not so easily corrected is the bad attitude of who should be mobile’s biggest advocates.

Sure, in some organizations, the CIO is the force for pushing mobile forward. Take SAP’s Oliver Bussmann, for example.

But in organizations with a traditional, command-and-control style, CIOs and IT managers can be mobile’s biggest enemies (no surprise if you’ve seen my book, The Mobility Manifesto).

“The best ideas come from outside (IT). I see IT as almost an inhibitor,” Schwartz said. Many CIOs “have a lot of concerns around security, and how to sustain and maintain the infrastructure around mobile. Unless the line-of-business steps up to declare that they will pay for this, IT won’t go forward.”

My personal take: half or more of organizations out there are in this situation today. Fortunately, that’s changing. CIOs recognize that their role is changing, from the Department That Says No to a Partner and Enabler of the Business Side. 

3) “Paralysis by analysis.” Sometimes the caution towards mobile is spread more widely than in IT. Mobile’s very new-ness creates “many challenges” for organizations, McLaughlin said, due to the “moving parts” that touch many departments besides IT: legal, sales, operations, business processes, upper management, etc.

It’s enough to create “a lot of guesswork and paralysis by analysis,” McLaughlin said.

For Schwartz, inertia is more often the result of lack of a single champion for mobile within a company. “If I go to a company, and ask who’s in charge of mobile, either no one raises their hand or 5-6 people raises their hand,” he said.

While informal champions – think of the sales VP who evangelizes the success of the mobile CRM app for his charges – are good, companies typically need more, argues Schwartz. Companies should consider appointing Chief Mobile Officers and creating a Mobile Center of Excellence to help push mobile projects along, unify disparate deployments within various departments and offer guidance on the best way to deploy devices and apps.

4) Expecting R (Returns) without the I (investments). There are many organizations making huge investments in tablets and smartphones. Yahoo, for instance, is rolling out iPhone 5s to all 12,000 employees. 

Problem is, some organizations think it starts and ends with the devices, and, maybe, e-mail. If that’s your mindset, then you might as well have stuck with BlackBerries, then.

“Organizations are failing to put a stake in the ground and make the tough choices to move forward and build apps as quickly as they can,” McLaughlin said.

(Speaking of rapid app development, McLaughlin will present on this topic at the Enterprise Mobility 2012 conference in Las Vegas on October 30. Check him out as well as the all of the other SAP mobile experts speaking there.)

Other organizations hear the word app and are fooled into thinking that mobilizing business processes should be as quick and easy as buying something from Apple’s App Store. That’s Schwartz’s beef. Companies “think it will be fast and cheap. And mobility isn’t necessarily like that.”

For example, if you run a manufacturing plant and want to ensure uptime and save millions of dollars, a single “out of box app may not fit your needs,” he said. You will need to plan for multiple apps, and then customize then to wring out the full value.

What are the biggest reasons you’ve seen why enterprise mobile rollouts can stumble or fail?