Thanks to a Tweet from my Alma Mater pointing to this blog post, I’ve learned about an initiative to use smartphones as a transformative tool for small businesses in so-called emerging markets. The article provides some background into the growth of mobile applications for shopping and e-commerce; primarily through the use of text messaging protocols. However, the post’s authors – the co-founders of Frogtek – are more interested in the proliferation of smartphones as platforms for business management applications.

Frogtek is called a “foor-profit social venture that began as an idea in the classroom at Columbia Business School.” It will begin formal operations in the country of Colombia, where it is working with a prominent NGO to get smartphones into the hands of a group of 50 “micro-retailers.” The core application is designed for the merchant, not the upscale wireless subscriber. It is a tool that supports bookkeeping, inventory management at the point-of-sale. The value is accounting and inventory management tool that allows a shopkeeper to use a smartphone as a point-of-sale device. The camera even doubles as a bar code reader.

A scaled-down, mobile version of small business software is ingenious. It highlights the continued category creep of smart, mobile devices. By design, the application will enable the phone to generate and upload basic reports on sales, inventory and profitability to Frogtek servers for secure storage and analysis. It’s a gateway app that paves the way for mobile banking and delivery of other small business services. Frogtek suggests “business insurance”, but one has to think that promotional messages, couponing and search cannot be far behind.

Categories: Articles

Tags: smartphones, mobile commerce