Again, a lot of it comes down to WHAT COMMUNICATES WITH THE SOFTWARE I ALREADY HAVE.

The software on my phone is nothing special other than for some reason, a lot of companies won't make android interfaces or if they do, they are second rate web encapsulations of what I'd have to buy ANOTHER component for my servers to use.

Most of my work is in stats -- machine intelligence and all that trying to figure out why something is working or not working based on data available. And people come to me and ask "why don't you just use Excel?"...mostly because if I'm a consultant and can get a project done in a few hours -- and charge the client several thousand dollars -- because the specialized tools are able to figure everything out pretty quickly -- or I can spend a week and do it in a $300 application...I'm going to look at the investment in the much more expensive stuff as it often pays for itself in a single use. A lot of life sciencey sort of data really requires something that can go in and try to find patterns automatically -- and these days a lot of this is getting to be turn key...I'm going to looking into a few other predictive analytics tools whose prices have actually come down quite a bit (IBM's Watson now has a simple to use interface that I was looking at the Watson Analytics portion).

Why is a lot of this useful for mobile? If you are sitting with a client and they ask for something and you can pull it up off the server with a few clicks and show a correlation in real time...even if it isn't really that useful from a data perspective, it may be the key to getting your next gig.

The hope is in a few years everything I use is cross platform...right now it isn't. Nerdy shit that most of the time I don't even scratch the surface of using...but makes my job easier.