Brian Pleet is the classic business professional.  He runs a small Canadian sales consultancy business called the Strategico Marketing Group.  Brian’s lifeblood is being able to accurately bill his clients for his time and costs and to manage the time he spends on each project.  Brian is well organized; his emails and documents are all nicely filed by category, his favourite online content is bookmarked, and his contact database can be sorted by type of contact, location, etc.  It could be argued that he is a real-life proponent of semantics.  However Brian spends a lot of his time on the road, and this is where his system lets him down.  Unlike his desktop world, his mobile world is represented by a wireless phone bill that is page after page of numbers, and an inability to categorize the time that he is spending on his clients while he is out and about or working on his mobile phone.

Brian finds that his cellphone bill is one of his biggest expenses, and yet the bill doesn’t really make sense and isn’t in a format that he can invoice back to his clients.  Yes, the telephone numbers are usually listed but numbers don’t match up to client names and there’s no record of what the call was about.  When the bill arrives at the end of the month, marrying telephone numbers to clients and projects requires Brian to have a yellow highlighter pen, hours of patience and a good memory.  Also those hours spent reading and sending emails from his BlackBerry and browsing add up to a lot of billable time that can’t easily be captured.

Brian therefore identified the need for some kind of mobile semantic tagging solution where his calls, emails, and other mobile activities, could be seamlessly tagged to the things that matter to him; client, project, billable, etc.  He came across momentem from Redwood Technologies, a Canadian developer of mobile solutions.

momentem is a combination of downloadable software for smartphones such as BlackBerrys and a managed service provided by Redwood. It empowers people to categorize their wireless activities by “tagging” them directly from the handset. Let’s face it, the only real way to tag an activity is a few seconds after it has ended, while it is still fresh in the mind.  It is impossible to remember what a call was about hours later, let alone at the end of the month.  For example, at the end of a call, momentem pops up and Brian can tag that call to the client he has been talking to and flag the cost of the call, or his time, as being billable back to the client.  He can also use momentem’s powerful reports to analyze all of the time being spent on each client and project, which is far more than the phone bill could ever do.  Brian commented: “instead of the well-intentioned but irritating ‘what was that expensive call all about’, we are able to simply look it up and associate it with the client and reason for the call.”

momentem also allowed Brian to input expense items, face-to-face meetings, and even time spent at his desk on his PC doing emails and reports.  All of these non phone activities were tagged using the same client and project names and appeared in the same momentem report, nicely labelled and sorted.  Brian found momentem to be very different from other similar tools that he had looked at, such as Stumble Upon, Digg and del.icio.us, because it was designed for the mobile user and for business purposes.  Brian stated: “momentem is far easier to use than any other tracking system and it’s all done from my always-on mobile device, not my office.  Having everything categorized in a uniform manner is vital.” momentem quickly became Brian’s main repository for all activities.

Brian recalls the real value of momentem: “I needed to look up a number that I had called a few months prior, and of course there was no way I would ever find it among my reams of phone bills. However I remembered that I would have tagged the call as “legal” so I simply searched momentem for that keyword and found it within seconds.  I was able to see everything about that event and call the person back.”

Brian continued: “Once I started using it, I realized the other spin-off benefits such as being able to show the taxman that I was predominantly using my phone for business, and being able to show my clients which projects I was spending my time on.  Having all of my activities nicely tagged made me look like I had my stuff together, which impressed my clients.  My philosophy is ‘tag correctly once, use that tag many times for many reasons’ in the course of my business.”

“In the future I will use my mobile just as I use my PC today, for so many different applications, and I will expect momentem to keep tabs on them all for me.  Mobile banking springs to mind as an area where momentem could be valuable, to categorize my mobile payments in the same way as my calls.”

Terry Hughes, President of Redwood Technologies, the developer of momentem, explained their philosophy.  “We realized that the mobile environment was the last bastion of non-accountability, and yet was the way people were spending more and more of their time, so we decided to fix that.  We had to build handset software because none existed, in other words our mobile tagging solution is proprietary.  From the outset we designed momentem to be incredibly easy to use, such that tagging could take place within a few seconds.  We knew that people would only use it if there was a clear ROI so we focused initially on the business market where people account for their time and recover their costs.  However, having built a scalable platform and a service where we manage people’s tags, we are working on what’s next for mobile semantic tagging.”

Terry has some clear views on where semantics and mobile will meet.  “Nobody is blaming the wireless carriers for the way they present their bills today.  Let’s face it, they don’t have any information other than the date, time, number dialled, duration, cost and location.  What our technology does is empower the user to tag that call with information that is meaningful to them, in other words they can overlay semantic context on top of the basic information, which effectively enables them to make their own bill based on the things that they care about!”

Terry went on to say: “Information is power and yet nobody really knows what the billions of mobile calls made each day are about.  What are people spending their mobile time on?  How much of what they do is billed to others?  There is real value in these semantic tags for other people in the value chain, far beyond Brian Pleet billing his clients. Redwood’s mission is to ensure that the phrase “playing telephone tag” takes on a whole new meaning in the new wireless world.”