I, for one, appreciate your thought leadership and vocal support for each of these three emerging learning technologies. Given we’re actively involved in two of them (mlearning and social – and focused on continuing efforts to find way of seamlessly combining the two together!), your shared insights into the coming future help complete the cycle of moving past the chasm crossing with those first visionary customers and moving up the model to support the early adopters and mainstream users. And while I agree with your statement that there are many “reasonable and cheap (read: free)ways to develop mobile apps”, our experience points to the fact that enterprise accounts may exhibit early interest in these basic tools as they begin to dabble with what mlearning is all about, but once they get serious and need to deploy a solid solution for learning reinforcement, just-in-time access, performance support, sales enablement, whatever, their need to make their mobile learning efforts more scalable, secure, flexible, integration-ready and “enterprise-grade” often dictates the use/adoption of better tools and platforms which likely come at a price.

In our experience, mobile learning and social-enabled platforms from companies like our own (as well as Intuition, Outstart/Hot Lava Software, RIM/Chalk, Giunti Labs and a few others) are probably not the “first mobile tools a company tries” but we’re often the second or third one they end up coming with once they realize they need a vendor to stand behind what they are using, to teach them what works and what doesn’t, and ensure their efforts meet their requirements in whatever format, on whatever device, in whatever method they desire — all while being tracked and secure and easily supported.

Agreed, the timing for mobile, social and virtual are all nigh, and the growing adoption trends will carry things forward for everyone’s mutual benefit. And just like many (most?) Global 5000 enterprise organizations don’t rely on open source LMS/LCMS platforms to manage their entire L/D responsibilities, enterprise-grade mobile learning solutions and platforms are a sound business decision for those companies who are serious about mobile learning content creation, development, deployment and tracking. And these platforms are generally not cheap or free but certainly can prove their ROI and value in both the short and long term too.

Keep up the great efforts and looking forward to following your progress on your upcoming book as well!