Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the superb European Ruby Conference in Barcelona.   It was fascinating seeing the enthusiasm of the audience for Ruby and the technologies presented.  I also got to talk to several attendees about their own Ruby efforts.   The most interesting chats that I had were reminders of how device capabilities on mobile are constantly expanding.  This will be a constant thread and area of continued development and innovation for Rhomobile.

For example, I talked to Bart ten Brinke and other developers from Nedap Healthcare about their mobile home healthcare monitoring and timekeeping software.  It runs via the builtin RFID on the nurse’s mobile. They swipe the patients card over the phone to check in and check out during their visit.   Right now it’s only J2ME based for Nokia’s Series 40 RFID-embedded featurephones.  But the forthcoming RFID support in various smartphones, including several accessories for the iPhone, plus support for RFID in Rhodes, would enable a much more powerful (far beyond just timekeeping with patients) suite of similar apps for the iPhone.

I also talked with Jason Goecke of  AdHearsion after he did a superb talk on voice-enabling apps. I really like following great speakers as they get the audience woken up and ready to process even more information (this phenomenon contributed to our mutual five star ratings).   Like Rhodes, AdHearSion is a Ruby-based framework that makes it easy to buid server apps that do voice and IVR processing for apps such as phone-based customer support systems.

The possibilities of doing interesting applications with data on the smartphone but allowing the user to voice drive a backend app via a smartphone are pretty extensive.  Imagine the customer/user interface for a CRM or issue tracking system and then invoking “reach out via voice” totally within context that you’ve selected via your smartphone. With the IVR systems I’ve used I think you’d save at least “voice menu options”, which I would imagine would make customer satisfaction skyrocket in such systems.

I’m sure there are developers using Rhodes and AdHearSion today without our knowledge given our common customer base of early adopter Ruby developers.  But regardless, I’m excited about about demonstrating the potential of data-oriented smartphone apps (aka Rhodes apps) to accelerate and alleviate interaction with backend IVR systems (such as those built with AdHearSion) in at least one of our sample apps.