We are excited about our update to the Open Device Framework. There are over 600 3G and 4G wireless cards. iPass has integrated 200 plus. Our framework helps IT administrators integrate the cards that they want for their solution easily and security. You can use the cards that you want and lower your risk in technology choices. Kevin Murray, our VP of Product Marketing explains more. And we provided a cool 15 minute tutorial that walks you through the process.
Here’s a tutorial by Kimi Ushida, Sr. Systems Engineer, that explains how to integrate your cards in six steps.
Stephen Pritchard, producer for the FT Connected Business podcasts on FT.com, just published “How can enterprises manage the costs of mobile working?” We have included the portion of that podcast which features an interview with Evan Kaplan, CEO of iPass. You can also find the link to the podcast in it’s entirety.
In the week that Apple is set to launch its next iPad, we hear how businesses are replacing both laptops and smartphones with tablets, and how enterprises can manage the costs of mobile working.
It [a tablet] is a much better reader than my smartphone and I don’t have to open my laptop. But I move pretty seamlessly between all three devices. Increasingly, for the enterprise, you are looking to provision applications that work seamlessly across all three platforms.
For the entire podcast, including internet access for people in developing countries and information security, please go to the FT Podcasts.
See how easy it is to use iPass to connect to Wi-Fi, avoiding bandwidth download limits, offloading your roaming charges and giving you faster bandwidth.
With iPassConnect on the iPhone 4, you do have to go to the Settings first to turn on Wi-Fi because iPhone does not allow apps to interact with the Wi-Fi radio. But once that’s done, the iPhone does the work.
See a faster and simpler connection experience with Open Mobile on an Android platform. Start the iPass app, and you can start Wi-Fi within the app and then immediately see all networks available. If there is a network that you’ve previously linked to, you will be auto-connected.
This comes after months of articles about bill overruns. In talking to our own IT Director, I learned that managing roaming charges are one of her top concerns.
Back when AT&T announced tiered pricing, I asked my colleagues and followers out on Twitter about peoples’ average consumption. I found that:
No one checks (or cares to check)
No one knows how to check
Having checked, most had the counter going since they got the phone, rather than checking/restarting the counter each month.
From the article: “Most people still don’t know what a megabyte is,” Mr. Genachowski said. “So it’s hard to expect them to know when they have reached their limits.”
Our IT Director commented that seeing the MB number doesn’t do it either. A phone user needs to see the dollar amount, making the impact more tangible. It’s easier to decide whether to download or make the call, when faced with an overrun of costs.
A consumer will pay more attention when they themselves are paying the bill (look at these articles on “surprised” customers!). Enterprises, accordingly, have a dilemma, being further removed from the device. As we found in our Mobile Workforce Report, 76% of mobile employees surveyed said that they have their smartphone bill fully or partially paid by their company. They are probably paying less attention, if any, to those overruns and charges. And may never know what they are costing the company.
When you look at the pace of growth in the smartphone market, since the launch of the catalytic iPhone, it’s incredible to see what has happened. The iPhone Android and Blackberry smartphones have now made their way to the consumer level comfortably. While smartphones enable us to stay connected and respond more efficiently, they have also become a crutch, which many of us rely upon to surf the web, find a restaurant, send emails, watch videos, get to our destination, instant message and of course make telephone calls.
However, for enterprises, mobile service costs have increased dramatically in recent years. The rise of the smartphone has brought a rise in data usage. Last week, John Stankey, President and CEO of AT&T stated that its mobile data usage has risen 5,000 percent over the last three years. With many companies relying on an ever-growing mobile workforce, business needs to be able to control mobile data costs that have been typically beyond their control.
With Android getting more ready for business and projected to become the number 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System this year, according to Gartner – enterprises will be looking for approaches to secure ways to manage the costs of mobility services by offloading data usage to Wi-Fi networks.
Here are some of the strong reasons for offloading to Wi-Fi:
Smartphone users typically prefer Wi-Fi because of the speed at which they can interact and respond. In our recent Mobile Workforce Report, iPass found that nearly half of workers use Wi-Fi on their smartphones, 31.8 percent because it is faster than 3G, yet only 15.6 percent because it is cheaper.
The quality and bandwidth provided by Wi-Fi is often better than a mobile network given there are smaller amounts of users (anyone who works in the financial district of San Francisco knows the pain of mobile networks.)
Enterprise smartphone users generally don’t have to view their phone bills and therefore have little knowledge about the usage and costs associated with their phone (see first bullet point).
From an IT administration and accounting nightmare, it’s also nice to be able to secure the devices and control costs by limiting data roaming and 3G, and prioritizing connection to lower-cost Wi-Fi networks when available.
Listen to the podcast: 
Yesterday, this article ran in the New York Times: 
When you look at the pace of growth in the smartphone market, since the launch of the catalytic iPhone, it’s incredible to see what has happened. The iPhone Android and Blackberry smartphones have now made their way to the consumer level comfortably. While smartphones enable us to stay connected and respond more efficiently, they have also become a crutch, which many of us rely upon to surf the web, find a restaurant, send emails, watch videos, get to our destination, instant message and of course make telephone calls.
