Wearables At Work: 7 Productivity Apps
Wearables are great, but what good would Google Glass or the Galaxy Gear be without useful apps? Here's a sampling of the latest business apps for wearables.
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Today's focus on wearable devices and their companion apps usually skates over the consumer (Apple Watch notwithstanding) and zeros in on the enterprise. After all, smartwatches and "smartglasses" offer specific solutions to the specific tasks of mobile workers such as field technicians, doctors, retail salespeople, and construction workers.
According to research firms, wearables in the workplace are clearly time savers, but the effect is broader than that, as they will create serious productivity and profit gains over the next few years.
Gartner forecasts that the use of Google Glass and other smartglasses will help add more than $1 billion per year to company profits by 2017. Forrester recently surveyed 2,000 technology decision makers about the importance of having a wearables strategy in place over the next 12 months, and more than half of respondents reported that wearables were a priority, with 32% saying they're a "critical" or "high" priority.
Yet the technological and human behavior shifts brought on by wearables in the workplace come with hard truths for CIOs about bandwidth needs, battery life, security and privacy concerns, and integration with enterprise systems. IT leaders must weigh these challenges against how well wearables streamline the employee and customer experience.
This past summer, Salesforce.com opened up roads for app developers when it rolled out Salesforce Wear, an app development platform containing reference apps, demos, open-source code, and other documentation that can be used to develop apps for 11 wearable device types, including Google Glass, the Pebble smartwatch, and the Myo motion-detecting armband from Thalmic Labs, and connect the apps to the company's Salesforce1 mobile app platform. Wearables, business apps, and Internet of Things technologies were all big trends at the company's Dreamforce 2014 show last week in San Francisco.
Salesforce has been understandably bullish on wearable apps for business (it has serious skin in the game), but there's enough activity from ISVs and individual developers and support from the research community to justify preparing for wearables in your workplace now.
Here's a sample of standout wearable apps for retail, manufacturing, the service industry, and the general knowledge worker. This is sure to be just the first wave of many wearable business apps to come.
Death to the punch card! The ShiftExpert app works on wearable devices to let employees clock in and out of shifts and add that data to time sheets. Employees can quickly view their shifts, request to trade a shift, see trade requests from co-workers, manage vacations, and view overtime from a smartwatch. Managers can schedule shift trades, approve vacation and sick time, and track time sheets from the app. Used mainly in shift-based work environments such as warehouses and grocery stores, ShiftExpert can work on any mobile device. But the version developed using the Salesforce Wear platform maximizes the use of smartwatches, including the Galaxy Gear and Moto360.
Already popular as a smartphone app for note-taking, voice memos, to-do lists, and webpage archiving, Evernote has been customized for smartwatches and smartglasses, including Google Glass. You won't be taking extensive notes on, say, your Galaxy Gear smartwatch, but Evernote lets you quickly view notes and checklists on the watch. The app also lets you record audio and take photos using the Gear's camera, which are automatically uploaded as new notes. For Google Glass, Evernote takes advantage of Glass's voice feature for taking notes, and once the app is authorized on Glass, Evernote is added as a sharing option for images and videos.
For salespeople who want a quick and consistent view of how sales are trending, there's Intelligent Forecasting. The free data analytics app from Alpine Metrics gives salespeople fast access to sales forecasts on their wearable devices and the ability to compare them to past performance. They can view changes to the forecast over the past day, week, month, or quarter, and identify the top or bottom team members, or customers who had the most impact. Managers can then contact those who need assistance or congratulate top performers via the app. Intelligent Forecasting is available on Android, Android Wear, and iOS devices.
The Proximity Insight app connects with in-store iBeacons to make the brick-and-mortar retail experience more efficient and personal. Ideally, Proximity Insight works in conjunction with the store's website and mobile app like this: A shopper receives a mobile notification via the store app based on items she's viewed; the shopper later enters the store, and a salesperson is alerted to her presence via iBeacons on his smartwatch or smartglasses and can access CRM data via the Proximity Insight app that she has shared, including name and purchasing history. From there, the salesperson can assist the shopper. Proximity Insights is the first iBeacon app on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Through a mix of the Skylight Platform, Salesforce Wear, and smartglasses makers, the APX Labs app enables workers such as telecom service technicians or utility workers to view augmented reality overlay information, such as directions or instructions on how to fix equipment in real time, and quickly log a case in the Salesforce Service Cloud database via smartglasses. Augmented reality overlays are the key Skylight feature, but the software also makes multimedia calls between users, and allows messages and alerts and location tracking of objects and people. Here's more on how Skylight works.
The SpeechTrans translation and dictation app is a useful tool for the international traveler. Tap a recording button and speak in one language, and SpeechTrans translates what you say into any language you choose. SpeechTrans has recently been configured to work on wearable devices running Android and Android Wear. It runs natively on the Epson Moverio BT-200 smartglasses, and it works on Google Glass via the HP My Room web conferencing app. SpeechTrans also has its own Bluetooth wristband that tethers to your Android or iOS device. In addition to speech translation and dictation, SpeechTrans includes document translation, a currency converter, and long-distance calls with translation.
Brivo Labs wants to make ID access cards obsolete with its identity access management application, NthID. Paired with Brivo's Randivoo visitor management app, NthID integrates with the Bionym Nymi identity authentication wristband to give employees and visitors secure and easy access to office buildings, eliminating the need for ID cards or key fobs. The Nymi uses a person's cardiac rhythm to verify identity, which is about as unique as it gets. Here's a video demo of how all the technologies work together.
Brivo Labs wants to make ID access cards obsolete with its identity access management application, NthID. Paired with Brivo's Randivoo visitor management app, NthID integrates with the Bionym Nymi identity authentication wristband to give employees and visitors secure and easy access to office buildings, eliminating the need for ID cards or key fobs. The Nymi uses a person's cardiac rhythm to verify identity, which is about as unique as it gets. Here's a video demo of how all the technologies work together.
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