I am a strong advocate of smartphones as I firmly believe this makes employees more productive. In my own organization I have been predicting at least two-thirds of the staff will have some sort of smartphone to their disposal in the next two years. Turns out I am backed by the numbers.

According to Forrester’s 2009 Smartphones and Telecommuting: Workforce Technology Adoption 2009 report many of them will are willing to pay the bill or at least part of it to gain access to corporate email and documents.

Another encouraging finding is that teleworkers, on average, work two hours more per week than office workers. Access to real applications from anywhere means more work in more places.

I am convinced we’ll see organizations developing an increasing number of native applications for smartphones to provide this access. While the web is moving towards a standards based approach that works in all browsers, smartphone applications will move the opposite direction. Why? To leverage the platform’s strengths, and because web applications don’t work on smartphones, however good their browsers are.

Read more on FierceMobileIT and Computerworld.

Nomadio used the new “Virtual WiFi” feature in Windows 7 to create a free application called Connectify that enabled other devices to share the connection without special software. Nomadio has released a beta of the application that can be downloaded from the company’s website. For more details read Windows 7 app turns laptop into Wi-Fi access point

Although Mac’s have something similar called ‘Internet sharing’, they do not allow you to share a wifi connection through wifi. You can however share an ethernet connection over wifi, ethernet or firewire, or a wifi connection over ethernet or firewire.