Mobiu launched by The Key Revolution is the next big thing to come out which will enable accelerate the growth of the effective remote and mobile worker.
Placing your IT in the cloud is becoming a not just a viable but a preferred option for big and small companies. Ad-hoc online collaboration internally within organisations and more interestingly across company boundaries is a growing sector. Out of Cambridge, Huddle is a leading UK firm which enables online collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles.
The Key Revolution with their Mobiu product provide a secure, out of the box online network together with a set of office applications. Delivered as a USB key, it contains the applications and the means of providing a highly secure connection to your online workspaces. Want to collaborate with other parties in a highly secure way? It's simple, they get a copy of Mobiu and you send them a secure invitation.
Today, people see themselves first as the manager of their own lives, and then secondly as company man. Mobiu enables this shift to the person over the work by putting people firmly in control of their data and enabling them to work and connect anywhere.
We shouldn't be surprised that it was a corporate refugee turned entrepreneur, Adrian Burholt, who founded The Key Revolution. Adrian, a keen magician and a member of the Magic Circle in Bath, successfully launched the award-winning Vodafone Simply consumer proposition across nine countries simultaneously.
Remote working enables many social changes, however. If your team is not in the office, you start to ask what "employment" is all about. Maybe it's a leftover from a Marxist dogma, and we should all manage ourselves, contracting out to various companies at different times during our careers.
One very successful (four time) entrepreneur in London has no one on salary in her current firm. She engages contactors to both avoid PAYE and National Insurance, and also employment disputes which may end up in an employment tribunal. Is she flaunting the rules? Probably today, but in three years' time what she is doing will seem absolutely good business practice.
I predict that IR 35 will have to change by 2010. IR 35 is a regulation which governs contractors to companies and stipulates that if you have only one client as a contract for a given period of time, you are essentially employed by them.
Mobiu is another chip at the wall, and freedom and empowerment of individuals are on the other side.
In the short term however, we won't see any government agency lose precious data by leaving a disk on a train. Mobiu has a "remote kill" facility if it is lost or used inappropriately.
