The Death of Place?

MOBILOCRACY: Spreading the Wealth of Mobile Connectivity

Evan Kaplan, President and CEO, iPass, predicts we're about to see a"destruction of place."

Subtitled THE INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF THE MOBILE WORKFORCE, Kaplan's presentation at GigaOm's Net:Work 2010, maps out a world where mobility or mobile work is the rule, rather than the exception that it was just a decade ago.

"Today's average mobile employee is 46 years old and lives outside of Silicon Valley," said Kaplan, whose research is based on the Mobile Workforce Report, a quarterly survey of about 2,000 of the 2.5 million iPass users.  "Main Streeters are catching up with the technological elite, many have multiple devices, and their embrace of smartphones and tablets are creating the largest workplace disruption since the PC."

Trends from the iPass Mobile Workforce Report include:

1. Security and cost / productivity imbalance
2. Hyper-connected workers are becoming a norm: only 6% of workers totally disconnect on vacation
3. Post PC - the device stack that lets me work across multiple devices [simultaneously]
4. Multi-generational and global dissemination of the mobile workforce continues.
5. Multiple devices: 50% have three devices

"A highly mobile lifestyle come certain habits," says Kaplan, "which is both highly beneficial and also potentially risky to the enterprise."

"For instance, devices are cheap, but the networks are expensive," said Kaplan. "Just look at the recent LTE high-speed mobile data announcement by Verizon, where a 5GB subscription at $50 per month, can be drained in less than two hours of video viewing."

According to Kaplan, whose company works with mobile enterprise customers, enterprises need to strike the fine balance between data security protection and mobile employee productivity.

"The dirty secret is that the most of these mobile devices are more secure than the PCs or laptops we provision," said Kaplan.

Finally, Kaplan discussed what he calls the Mobility Bill of Rights:

I have the right to stay connected, to access the best networks and services, choose what device I want to use," said Kaplan, "and I want to personalize it (make it my own)."

"I want to be free of security threats and not be deprived of IT support," he continued. "I am one person, so I want one account for all my devices, not one per device."

Through it all, Kaplan talks about the "death of location" as a norm, but says that location is even more important than it was before.

"We see the cropping up of co-working, including the local CitizenSpace [here in San Francisco]," said Kaplan. "We see Starbucks and other coffee shops positioning themselves as 'third space' locations, since the need to meet with a group—and even to be around others while you work on your own thing—is still a key factor."