Reading the articles about Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook ‘Places,’ you might get the impression that location-aware apps are only for helping 20-something urbanites meet and mate. In fact, as analyst Seth Grimes pointed out in a recent Intelligent Enterprise article, location-based services may have more potential in the less glamorous area of hard-core enterprise technology.

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One recurring complaint from those watching Thursday morning’s SAP/Sybase media webcast with SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe and Sybase CEO John Chen was the lack of detail around product roadmaps and integrations. As one wag, CIO magazine columnist Thomas Wailgum, tweeted: “question: how many analysts/bloggers does it take to analyze an event with no new news?”

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I used to write about Microsoft, so I’m no stranger to large-scale media events filled with mobs of press and analysts. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that even an enterprise applications vendor, albeit the world’s largest one, has almost the same drawing power.
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I just watched the movie Inception, and like many of you, was blown away by it. The plot revolves around some thieves led by Leonardo DiCaprio who do “inceptions,” or implant ideas in someone’s mind during dreams.

There needs to be a term for when someone implants an idea in your mind at a cocktail lounge, because that’s what Mike Harrold did (“wine-ception?”). (more…)

Everything Everywhere Ltd. was created out of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile late last year. It boasts 30.2 million customers and 713 stores around the country.

Despite its size, it had a small problem.
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Every company that hawks its own platform technology must at some point wrestle whether to build its own applications or hardware on top of that platform, running the risk of competing with – and alienating – your customers. (more…)

Market researchers IDC Corp. just came out with their Worldwide Mobile Device Management Enterprise 2010–2014 Forecast and 2009 Vendor Shares report. For the 9th year in a row, Sybase came out on top, with a 19.7% share of the market.
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Sybase’s 40,000 customers don’t need to worry that the products they rely upon will suddenly disappear in the new SAP era, Sybase CEO John Chen said Monday.

“There are no roadmap changes at all,” Chen said at Sybase’s annual TechWave user conference in Washington D.C.
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What do the UK’s largest mobile operator, a huge Argentine healthcare group, a leading Ukraine bank, and a fast-growing mobile ISV have in common?
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