Mobile technology – taking entrepreneurship a step ahead!

Remember the time when mobile phones were just to make calls and send SMSes? The mobile phone revolution has changed the way we live and work. It has altered the way service providers deal with us or we deal with bosses and our customers. It has only been a few years since this change has happened. But it will grow as consumers are spending more and more time connected to their mobile devices.

The advancement in mobile technology has changed the way business is conducted. Here are some ways it has impacted our work lives:

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The ability to work remotely

You can abandon going to the office while reaching out to your customers from any location. A sales person can give product presentations to a client while being in a completely different place or place orders and close deals with electronic signatures without having to venture out of the comforts of his home. This decreases the time between an order being placed and the payment being done.

Employees can now have the luxury of working from home. In fact, many employees consider it as a perk they have a right to, forcing employers to provide flexible working conditions. You can communicate with your office or be present in the meetings using many of the telecommunication or video conferencing mobile applications available on the Internet.

The advent of mobile e-commerce

There was a time when we used to deal in paper invoices while making payments for products or services delivered at our homes. With the advent of mobile e-commerce tools such as banking and credit-card transaction apps, a financial transaction can be completed anywhere. Such paperless transactions reduce carbon footprints, too.

Going mobile makes you work fast

The latest trends could often take a lot of time to become available. This means that the time taken to react on poor performance could take time resulting in poorer outputs. Mobile helps you react quickly since there is immediate availability of data through the latest mobile apps. This results in better decision making and optimal performance.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) security

Employees these days are encouraged to use their personal devices for work which benefits the employers, too. This means that the company doesn’t have to invest in hardware upgrades which affect the bottom line badly. The employees need to adopt good security practices so that no company data is compromised. Businesses increasingly use remote wiping of data, encryption software on personal devices and should have a written policy in place when one is accessing work data using personal devices.

Constant communication

The advent of mobile phones has blurred the difference between work and personal life. These days, it is not uncommon to see employees being made to work during their vacations, too. Using mobile devices for office work means the employers will expect the employees to be reachable at all times. This could alternatively mean that an employee will be allowed to work flexibly while on duty. But the chances of this cutting into family time are high.

Mobile VOIP

Mobile-phone usage translates to a lot of money wasted. The call rates and data limits are usually exceeded, resulting in exorbitant charges. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls are, however, becoming popular. This has put a cap on the amount of money spent, thanks to WiFi calling which results in saving precious mobile phone plans.

Cloud computing

The ability to store and access information without having to invest in hard disks or bulky servers is what makes Cloud a very attractive option. Apart from the features that Cloud offers, it is a viable option since going on the Cloud is usually easy on the pocket when compared to investing in servers.

Suite of mobile applications

The suite of mobile apps that are available in the market today is enough to do daily business. The trend towards using mobile for everything will eventually open the possibility of all business owners buying software to run their operations using mobile applications.

Here are some other ways the mobile technology has transferred businesses:

These are some of the ways in which mobile technology has transformed our work lives. How have you been affected by it? What has changed in the past five years? Let us know in the comments.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)