Mobile, Social, Local and confluence

Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |

Not like Mobile’s wave has just recently hit us. I have had a cell phone since early 1990’s , I believe 1993 to be exact, It was a monster by today’s standard with it’s own case and not a case that would fit in one’s pocket. I forget if it was Verizon Wireless or it’s predecessor that powered the network. The pricing plan was such that you would treat each minute or part thereof as precious.

If I look at the last 17 years of cell phone usage at least in my household, talking on the phone is still one of the main activities but with kids now on my plan, I would say that text messaging has definitely risen to the top as the predominant use. In fact, I had to get the unlimited text/sms plan as not even 1,500 monthly messages was enough to satisfy my oldest child. Though I am tolerant, Mom is not when during dinner night outs he is consistently looking down on his lap where he keeps the phone reviewing and responding to an endless stream of sms messages. AS for me coming from a generation with a different set of social norms I am even more discrete and generally only take the phone out while waiting on a line usually at a Starbucks line or some other pause/waiting moment including yes long Redlights.

Where is this all going and why is 2010 now the year of mobile at least if you read and listen to the intelligentsia from the likes of Techcrunch? Perhaps most notably it’s because according to certain reports the engagement of the web via mobile has or is soon poised to surpass the conventional desktop/laptop engagement via a laptop. The referenced TechCrunch post though positive from mobile’s increase in engagement doesn’t indicate anything like half of engagement coming from mobile but I also believe engagement defined as strictly the consumption of standard browser based web pages is leaving out plenty of the modes of engagement that are optimized for mobile such as email, photo taking and uploading, managing one’s assortment of different calendars, short busts of status information such as twitter, Location services of all sorts from the useful like driving directions to the trite like checking into a business establishment via FourSquare and perhaps becoming a mayor of some random Dunkin Donuts.

As major publishers adapt their websites to provide an experience conducive to viewing and consuming on the small real estate of the typical smartphone screen real estate , more and more of my web consumption will move to the phone. Though I still usually park myself on the desktop to read the nytimes.com site every morning, their iphone application is engineered to making the consumption of news via my phone easy on the eyes and overall quite pleasing.

I believe there is still a lot outside of the normal and some would say trite uses of the Mobile device that needs investigation and development. It is something we all carry with us all the time and for those like me that use it as an alarm clock as well, it is on my person or nearby 24 hours a day. It should or at least for some can become the remote of choice for all things that can be monitored or managed via software signals including the home of the future where all gadgets and appliances will be smart at least if smart means a computer chip and set of hardware and software interfaces used for communication and management.
In fact, here is a link to Silicon Alley Insider Post that was published as I was writing that speaks about the evolving trend of the iPhone to become that centralized remote control.

Any smartphone can eventually serve the same purpose I suppose and even less then smartphones. Back in the day it was common to setup AOL Instant Messenger BOTS that could take commands streamed as IMs and respond in kind whether for Movie listings, or anything for that matter. May seem like a low technology angle but you can envision BOTs waiting at our disposal for all sorts of activities. The imagination is the limit.