TRADETECH WEST: ‘Mobile is Everything’
September 11, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO – There are “only” 1.1 billion users of mobile devices worldwide.
But services targeting smartphones and tablets are going to be ‘everything’ in tech, in the immediate future, said Kara Swisher, editor of All Things Digital for the Wall Street Journal.
On the eve of the launch of the latest Apple iPhone at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts here, Swisher told technologists and institutional traders gathered at the Westin St. Francis Hotel for TradeTech West that five fundamental technical trends are ensuring that “mobile is everything” in driving change in computing and communications.
Kara Swisher, with cell phone.
[Dave Sifry, via Wikimedia Commons]
These are:
SOCIAL MOBILE LOCATION, aka SoMoLo. This is a combination of tracking and reaction techniques that means the phone, tablet or computer a person is carrying around will respond to you, the space you’re in and is aware of the people, places and things around you.
At some point, this will allow you to walk by a Starbucks or other store and get a fresh offer that is immediately redeemable, for instance.
The device becomes self-aware and starts to guide you.
"This is the Star Trek communicator,'' she said. "A lot of the concepts in Star Trek are coming into force.''
UBIQUITY. This is now an expectation, Swisher said. A growing number of airplance passengers now not only expect to use Wifi connections to connect to the Internet all flight long – but expect that the connection will be as fast as on the ground.
This despite the fact that signals go into heavens and back to a “tube of death” moving at hundreds of miles an hour.
Also coming are Internet connected glasses from Google. And, Swisher said, eventually technology that will enable individuals to connect to the Net and see the results will be embedded in eyeballs.
GEOLOCATION. This is part of the SoMoLo trend, too. But the precision of locating where you are will increase and the detail of what you can do with that precision also will increase.
A prime example: The arrival of self-driving cars, she said, as now being tested by Google. This requires awareness not just of where you and your vehicle are, but every vehicle around you.
DATA FLOOD. The big data phenomenon. So much data is being generated by Interent services, geolocation services, and new forms of rich media, such as streaming video, that the struggle now is to tame it.
Advertisers, for instance, have so much data now that it’s “very hard to analyze,’’ she said. And the flood keeps coming.
