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School Plays Hooky With Smartphones. Is Your Industry Next?

Oracle

If you think finding a place to sit at Starbucks is challenging today, get ready for an even bigger invasion of the tweener boppers.

A private middle school in Houston, Texas, is abolishing classroom learning altogether, in favor of smartphones that allow students to get real-world experience, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. The kids will “have class in places such as coffee shops, tapping into free wireless networks to collaboratively edit texts, or visit city parks to photograph wildflowers before researching them online. They will spend roughly half their time out and about, and the rest at a rented space in the heart of Houston's Museum District,” the Journal says.

Indeed, one industry after another is getting transformed as new uses for mobile technology go from the drawing board to the Big Board – and no one is being spared, no matter how large or well-heeled.

For example, long-established financial services firms are sweating under pressure from startups with no legacy baggage to tie them down and a proliferation of wireless applications they can offer customers to connect with. Now comes news that Apple is likely to add security features to its next generation smartphone to make mobile transactions more secure – and to help persuade consumers to at least try new services from non-traditional banking firms.

To be sure, the incumbents still have many advantages in all these areas, not least of which are deep pockets to fight legal battles and an established network of allies in the judicial and political world.

Airbnb, which allows people to rent their apartments to one another – revolutionizing the hotel and tourism industry – is facing an investigation from New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as it disrupts the hospitality industry (and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it provides). Transportation startup Uber is under legal siege in a number of European cities, Bloomberg reported last week. But as Uber reportedly said, “you can’t put the brakes on progress.”

The one-two punch of cloud computing and the incredible computing power contained in today’s mobile devices is even leading to speculation about an “uber for the electricity grid,” something that would have been unthinkable even two years ago.

The ramifications of this mobile onslaught are clearly wide-ranging, and companies that wish to survive had better get on board – and soon. As Suhas Uliyar, VP Mobile Strategy, Product Management at Oracle, wrote recently for Computerworld UK, “Mobile-centric strategies are the future of the enterprise; capable of transformations we are only just becoming aware of.”

Wisely, Uliyar urges his readers to “join the revolution.” In the long term, there probably isn’t any choice.