A Laptop That Fits on Your Hip

March 5, 2001

By Harry Goldstein

Marble and tile subcontractor Joe Miletto has been using AirHours for over a year.

Question: When is a cell phone more than a gadget that saves you the hassle of finding a pay phone?

Answer: When you can use it to enter timesheet information and tracking project costs on the fly.

That kind of functionality is what got Joe Miletto hooked on Airput Inc.'s AirHours, a service that lets users enter timesheet information on their cell phones and send it to an online database. "It saves me at least an hour a day not calling back to the office,"says Miletto, chief estimator for Lower States Tile and Marble, Philadelphia, a beta tester for, and now customer of, the AirHours service. "Usually the [assistant] at the office would call us [for the timesheet information] and often we'd be in a meeting. … This saves her time, because she can just look on the computer now to see where anyone is and she doesn't have to bug us."There's also the benefit of being able to access critical job cost information on the spot. "If we're halfway through the job, I can pull up the hours on my phone and I can see it right there when I’m in the field, if we're in trouble or if we're doing good,"he says. Miletto notes that his company got computers only two years ago, and yet has quickly adapted to employing, on a daily basis, cutting edge technology over a wireless network. "There was no learning curve at all," he adds.

Usability is a huge issue facing software vendors targeting the construction industry. In order to ensure mass adoption of new technology, companies such as Airput have concentrated on creating intuitive interfaces for devices people already know and love. "The majority of our customers don't browse the Internet," says Airput CEO Rick O'Brien. "As long as they consider this a tool on the phone, they are very comfortable with it and they will run with it in a hurry. The idea is to keep it simple and make it something that fits their needs. … That's why we focus on the phones—every one of our potential customers already has a phone on their hip."

Last month, Airput Inc., Norristown, Pa., and Nextel introduced AirHours, a solution that lets users enter timesheet information on to a Web-enabled Nextel plus phone, which passes it on to the Airput AirHours Web site. From there the information can be imported directly into spreadsheets and other software applications as well as relayed to payroll services or viewed in the form of customized weekly timesheet reports on the AirHours Web site. The information is stored in a secure database and is accessible 24/7 via a web-enabled cell phone or PC.

David Brodie, senior vice president of Wohlsen Construction Company, Lancaster, Pa., who also sits on Airput’s advisory board, believes that cell phone-based applications will be readily embraced by the construction industry. Ten years ago, Wohlsen, an ENR Top 400 firm servicing the mid-Atlantic region, was banking on each site superintendent having a laptop in his trailer for entering daily logs, filing reports and doing project costing. "That still hasn't happened," Brodie says. Today, most Wohlsen superintendents fill out paper timesheets and drive them to a central office where someone keys that information into the computer. While slow to use laptops, superintendents have quickly adopted mobile phones, "and at such a rate that they're asking us if we’re going to get the Web-enabled phones," says Brodie. He sees wireless phones as inexpensive substitutes for laptop computers, especially for the types of functions he thought Wohlsen superintendents would be doing by now via laptop.

This Nextel smart phone features a five line, 16 character display and connects to the Web in about three seconds.

It's the extension of backoffice functionality into the field that Airput sees as its greatest opportunity. "We have expertise in putting together intuitive front-end pieces that will work with the current workflow in the field," O'Brien explains. When the company was starting out in 1999, it considered becoming a wireless ASP (application service provider), but quickly recognized that there were several established players in the construction IT space. "We prefer much more to work with them than compete with them,"says O'’Brien of the Primaveras, Meridians and Timberlines of the world. He believes that AirHours appeals to the construction industry across the board, although smaller companies might find it easier to integrate into their current systems than larger companies, which will need special handling to ensure a smooth migration to the service.

AirHours is the first piece of a mobile, integrated project management suite called AirBuilder. The company, which has received funding from Ben Franklin Technology Fund, The Eastern Technology Fund and Pennsylvania Early Partners, will be adding more pieces over the course of the next several months, including a scheduling package. O'Brien notes that the company is betting heavily on the aecXML data standard currently in development, which he considers "the key to our whole future"because it will provide robust back end flexibility.

For now AirHours offers a generic, comma delimited data output that can be imported into Excel spreadsheets, QuickBooks reports, and most accounting packages. Airput plans to introduce full synchronization services in April supporting QuickBooks, Timberline Software Corp. and other leading accounting software vendors. Synchronization with these packages will require an ongoing service support contract with the software vendor and a maintenance service support agreement with Airput to handle all integration issues. Basic pricing for AirHours is $19.99 per month per phone and is billed through Nextel; Airput gets an undisclosed cut of that revenue.

"They have a perfect matchup to Nextel, which provides service to 50% of the construction industry," says Nicole M. Nicas, a senior research associate with Aberdeen Group Inc., Boston. "Airput has a good solution. It's easy to use, it's not overly complicated, it functions on the type of device that is most used by construction industry."While Airput has "a good foot in this business,"according to Nicas, they aren't alone. Or at least they won't be for very long. As a niche player, Airput will soon find itself competing with larger companies that provide a variety of vertical applications to several industries such as the Texas twosome of Handango Inc., Hurst, Texas and Wireless Verticals Inc., Austin, Texas. The companies have teamed up to provide Symbian-based smart phones from Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushita with Wireless Verticals' MobileTimeBilling Application. Currently MTB is aimed at the legal industry, but according to Lester Blanchard, director of technical services at Wireless Vertical, the company will target several new markets next year, including the construction industry. That's good news for construction field personnel, whose slow adoption of computer technology seems to have created an opportunity for software vendors that develop applications for the industry's favorite high tech tool.

Glossary

aecXML: Based on extensible markup language (XML) and intended specifically for the AEC industry, aecXML will be used to represent specific kinds of information related to resources including projects, documents, materials, and parts, as well as activities such as proposals, design, estimating, and scheduling. The purpose is to allow AEC data to be easily exchanged on the Internet. Visit www.aecxml.org for more information.

application service provider (ASP): a third party company or institution that distributes and manages software applications and services via wide area networks, including the Web.

comma delimited data output: a data format where each piece of data is literally separated by a comma, making it easy for different programs to swap information.

suite: a group of individual software applications, which taken together, comprise one large software product.

Symbian-based smart phones: Symbian Ltd., San Mateo, Cal. licenses a smart phone software platform to Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushita, which, along with Psion, own Symbian.

Photos courtesy of Airput Inc.