Work, play, learn: smart phones and the EMBA candidate

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Whether it’s for work or play, smart phone apps have transformed the world of mobile devices. Which ones are best suited for the EMBA candidate? Ann Graham takes a look.

Manage that risk

The last situation you want to find yourself – and your business – in is one that you could have avoided. But as an executive taking business risks, there’s always the element of the unknown... until now. Citicus MoCA is a risk-management application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, which allows you to identify the potential impact a particular scenario could have on your business. What could be the risk to your business of a failed supplier relationship? What are the long-term effects of your organization’s assets and processes being disrupted? Ask Citicus MoCA. As soon as the app completes its assessment of your particular risk, graphical results will be presented on your screen, highlighting the asset’s calculated criticality rating, maximum credible loss, and required protection.

What’s more, Citicus MoCA is free to download, minimising risk from the outset.
www.citicus.com

Deal breaker

You’ll have learnt such strategies in the business school classroom, but for quick reference when the end of that deal is drawing near, turn to the "Close My Deal" iPhone app. Designed for all levels of business, you’ll be able to further negotiate your way to success with features such as:

• ‘How to win’ – a step-by-step guide to successful negotiation, including advice on attitude, behaviour and the negotiating process

• ‘Who Holds the Aces’ – a breakdown of the nine different sources of bargaining power and a guide to who has what in a given situation; and

• ‘Tough Guys’ – how to handle bad behaviour and difficult situations. Designed by negotiator Clive Rich, "Close My Deal" will have you managing multiple deals and perfecting your personal negotiating style. Combined with your Executive MBA, there’ll be no stopping you in the business world.
www.cliverich.com

Search your desktop

How often have you filed something in a safe place, never to be able to find it again when you need it? Well, putting your finger on that report and accessing that old email you saved for a rainy day, just got easier. Simplexo SearchYourDesktop allows you to remotely search for desktop files, as well as information in web-based services and email accounts, all from a mobile device. Find files, documents and other content, and summon it to your phone (or tablet). The app searches through your desktop content, social networking sites, media library and online, and presents you with the search results in a single unified search interface. Then you can pull it to your mobile device and start using it. If that isn’t going to make life simple, we don’t know what is!
www.simplexo.com

SugarSync

Share files while you’re on-the-go. Don’t be caught in an airport or taxi without the ability to send that important file to your boss. With SugarSync, you have remote access to multiple computers and can instantly access and share all of your computer files. Send any file, no matter how large, right from your iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile device in a matter of seconds — no scrambling for a Wi-Fi hotspot. And no worries about size limitations since — any files you have backed up with SugarSync, big or small, are instantly available for you to share.
www.sugarsync.com

Disappearing expenses

It’s now possible to get your expenses taken care of for the price of a cup of coffee. With the ExpenseMagic app, you’ll no longer have to worry about accumulating piles of receipts; simply take a picture of the receipt or invoice on your iPhone, process it through ExpenseMagic, and trained specialists will store the data for you on secure servers. Before you know it, you can generate an expense report, detailing all the digitised receipts and send it through to your accounts department for payment. Ranked in the top 25 finance apps on iTunes, ExpenseMagic is fully UK tax-compliant, free to download from the iPhone App Store and comes complete with three tokens, allowing you to process three expenses. You can then purchase bundles of 20 tokens for just £2.99.
www.expensemagic.com

Note it online

If you want to capture the essential of any webpage, Memonic is the app for you. An online note-taking tool, Memonic allows you to clip whatever you want from a website, video, photo or selected text, and save it to your personal online notebook. It then allows you to organize your items and find your newly captured content, anytime, anywhere! Sitting in the boardroom? Simply research a topic and save the websites to a specific folder, allowing easy-to-view access. Available for the iPhone and any Smartphone, the standard Memonic account is free to download. The Premium Memonic account costs £18.
www.memonic.com

News sources

As an EMBA candidate, it’s important to keep up to date with global business news, and thanks to the host of news sources you can access via an app, you can. Leading publications, including Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, BBC World News, Financial Times, and the Economist are all available via apps. There’s also the option of listening to the news via radio apps, such as NPR News and Stitcher, which allows you to subscribe to a range of news-based podcasts. But perhaps the most valuable of apps for busy EMBA candidates are those that allow you to browse news feeds in a number of different ways. Fluent News Reader is a free app from iTunes that acts as a simple news aggregator bringing you a steady stream of current events, breaking news and international headlines, while iPad app My Times is a simple, yet effective, Google Reader RSS app for just $1.99.
www.itunes.apple.com