Agriculture Answering the Call of Smartphones

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Updated August 11, 2011: The Apple iPhone, now in it's 4th year, has brought a dramatic shift in how we communicate with people and access information. Key is the integration of widely available software with an always on Internet connection. The iPhone has driven other companies to introduce their own mobile phone ecosystems, greatly increasing the choices for consumers.

While there are five major smartphone platforms, Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile 7, the iPhone continues to receive the majority of the consumer's attention. The market for smartphones has expanded with increased Android sales and the recent introduction of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7. And the coming year will see an increase in the number of options, features, and software for consumers to use.

More and more farmers, growers, and producers will pickup a smartphone as they trade in their old phones. How would a grower use a smartphone application, or 'app' as they are called? Immediate uses include general information tools, like weather, news, or finance. Many of the smartphones ship with these types of applications pre-installed. Other uses include specialized seed and soil calculators, ag news, and subscription ag management tools.

Here are a set of links to specific agriculture applications

• Agriculture Crowdsourcing: These sample apps use the smartphone and  crowdsourcing to bring data from the field into a lab database.
• Agriculture Management Information Apps: These types of applications are mostly mobile extensions of a farm or operation management system.
• Agriculture Calculator Apps: These are a sample of some of smartphone tools to help make in field calculations without having to head back to the home office.
• Agriculture Information Resource Apps: These types of apps are primarily used as a lookup tool, either to help identify species, review a piece of regulation, or get the specifics on an issue.
• Agriculture News Apps: These are a sample of agri-media focused news aggregators.
• Weather Apps: These are a sample of smartphone weather applications.