I came across a timely article from the consumer centric blog ReadWriteWeb. This blog post from RWW comes straight off the heels of our well attended Content Days in the Asia Pacific and Japan region in February, where we gave customers and partners a sneak peak at the upcoming launch of Open Text Everywhere. Open Text Everywhere aims to provide the empowerment, agility and control you’ve come to expect from an ECM vendor like Open Text, but right in your hand in a mobile device. At the end of my speech on the topic of mobility, we looked into the crystal ball and had a lively forum with the audience about how we as the Content Experts could envision the next generation of mobile applications for ECM. As I mentioned, RRW has made an interesting point in their article dubbed “FourSquare for the Enterprise: Give it 2 Years, Max.” FourSquare, a location based service or LBS, is known in the consumer world for allowing you to share your whereabouts and activities within a social network. It uses your current GPS location of your mobile phone to enrich your experience, allowing you to “check in” to restaurants and cafes as well as see exactly where you friends are at the moment. I happened to use FourSquare as an example of consumer technology that is headed our way within the enterprise during our Content Days in February. Truth be told, the Japanese have been playing the internet-enabled application game for years now, and the rest of the world is just catching up. One of the examples cited from the RWW article is that “A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms.” This is a reasonable assumption for ECM as well, as location is an integral part of your approach to collaborating with a person. Are you in the office? Are you working from home? Should we meet face to face, or over a unified messaging platform? Automation will be key, as no one wants to have to explicitly state they are on the go, but simply having a mobile device that can detect that you are out of your GPS defined “office” or “home” region should allow your followers to understand you’re on the move. However at the Content Days, we all agreed that there are some interesting applications for location, mobility and even augmented reality for the future of mobile ECM. For example, we envisioned healthcare applications that could allow a doctor to see patient records and casefiles immediately from their mobile when approaching a patient’s bedside. Retail applications that allow you to use the phone’s camera to identify products on store shelves and be presented personalised coupons, rich media and social reviews. Energy and Utility applications that would overlay pipes, cables and pathways in a similar fashion to allow engineers to see a heads-up display of important data. Technicians in the field could be presented with MSDS, PDS and repair manuals on the fly when simply approaching a piece of plant, property or equipment. Even a museum or gallery goer could benefit by snapping photos of a famous painting and then being returned reams of historical information, artist background, related works and video content of that artwork or architecture. As you can see, the future for mobile applications is quite bright and Open Text Everywhere is only the first step in allowing the massive amounts of content organisations have today to be exploited and leveraged by their employees and consumers, at the moment they need it most. Disclosure: Cuneyt Uysal is a Product Manager and corporate blogger for Open Text corporation. You can find this post at http://possibilities.opentext.com