Today we take mobile apps for granted. They are integral to every aspect of our lives. And yet most of us can at least vaguely remember that this wasn’t always the case. In the article linked below I trace the beginning of the mobile app revolution to the early 2000s when a bunch of scrappy startups came together to help businesses start leveraging the power of mobility to improve how their teams worked.
Workers who were constantly moving around but needing to stay connected as a team came to love Nextel’s solution. With a push of a button, they could open a channel to one person or an entire team. The company quickly became the market leader within industries and departments that relied on mobile workers, whether they be blue collar laborers or white collar sales and service reps. Customers’ value of the Nextel service translated into them paying, on average, $69 per month, compared to the industry average of $51. Although it had become a big company, Nextel maintained its scrappy startup culture, constantly challenging the status quo.
Traditional software companies were also working to serve the kinds of mobile workgroups that were buying Nextel push-to-talk phones. What companies wanted, and workers would accept, was a software-based solution that actually ran on the phone they carried with them. But that would require the wireless carriers to make some major investments. Between 1999 and 2002 Nextel and Motorola worked together on four capabilities critical to the establishment of the Mobile Business App category. Those were a true packet data network, a software platform, GPS capabilities, and a business support platform.
I like to describe the value that carriers like Nextel brought to pre-iPhone software developers as being in three buckets: bits, bills, and bags. First, Nextel provided the core data capabilities (bits) including the packet data network, the development platform, and the GPS data. Second, the company provided the business infrastructure (bills) including the “bill on behalf of” capability and frontline customer support. Third, Nextel served as a sales channel for the software companies (bags), both through the download site as well as through the growing Nextel salesforce, many of whom were focused on the specific industry verticals being targeted by the mobile business application developers.
Through the business solutions team, Nextel pulled together a loose coalition of developers to firmly establish the Mobile Business App category. In addition to OpenWave and TeleNav, the team also helped startups focused specifically on business applications including GearWorks, Xora, Digital Cyclone, Trimble, and many more. Nextel became the title sponsor for NASCAR races and would invite car-loving customers to pre-race events where they would hear from a variety of the company’s software partners about how these new applications could dramatically improve the performance of their business.