The Mobile Revolution is Just Getting Started
The Mobile Revolution is Just Getting Started by Michael F. Finneran
A few days back my good friend Dave Michels posted a piece claiming the mobile revolution was over. Let’s start with the obvious – he’s dead wrong. The fact that some of the smartphone giants had an off quarter is hardly evidence that one of the greatest technology surges of the current century has suddenly petered out. I assume Dave wrote it primarily to get a rise out of me, and while I won’t go hashing through his arguments one by one, I will point out why I think that on the mobility front, “You ain’t seen nothing yet” (apologies to BTO).
The one point I will vehemently disagree with is that smartphone technology is “nearly ubiquitous.” According to comScore, for the three months ending April 2013, 58 percent of cellphones in the U.S. were smartphones. Of course that’s the U.S. market, and the U.S. is the third largest cellphone market in the world with 327.5 million devices. That’s a rather paltry number compared to China’s 1.15 billion and India’s 867.8 million. The vast majority of those devices are basic voice or feature phones, but it won’t stay that way for long. The biggest growth market for smartphones will be in those developing markets.
Further driving that prediction is the fact that the smartphone will likely be the primary Internet access device for users in those developing countries. While Internet penetration in developed countries is hovering around 80 percent to 90 percent of the population today, it’s 42.3 percent in China and 12.6 percent in India. By the way, the mobile phone penetration in those countries is 85.2 percent and 70.7 percent, respectively.
There has been talk of Apple coming out with a low cost iPhone for those developing markets, but with Apple’s cost structure I find it hard to believe they could succeed in a price war with the likes of Samsung, HTC, ZTE, and Huawei. While Apple’s offering might be “low cost” in U.S. terms, it would still be a premium product in those developing countries. As the smartphone markets in those developing countries begins to take shape, Android’s share of the smartphone market, which is already three times Apple’s worldwide share, will simply explode. As things stand I don’t see either Windows Phone or BlackBerry getting much of the action.
Switching back to the U.S. and other developed markets, it seems that half the new technology ideas have something to do with smartphones. The big growth areas I see will be things that will interact wirelessly with the smartphone. Those wireless connections may use Bluetooth, NFC (maybe), Wi-Fi, and developing technologies like Miracast and 802.11ad.
The first of the mobile products to hit the market will be smartphone peripherals like smart watches and wearable displays like Google Glass. There are naysayers on that front as well as I picked up on an article in Computerworld reporting on a telephone study by Opinion Research Corp and commissioned by IT staffing company Modis. The study found most people would not consider buying or wearing a consumer-grade smart watch or smart glasses. They did find greater interest among those who earned less than $35,000 a year versus those who earned over $100,000. My question was: Why would anyone do a study as meaningless as this in the first place?
Needless to say, the piece attracted a lot of comments, the more insightful of which followed the line of one “adamant,” who wrote,
“Would you ask someone how they like a certain food if they never tasted it? Would you ask if you should travel somewhere from someone who's never been? Would you ask a 30 year old what it's like to be 50?”
That is exactly the point: how can you ask someone for an opinion on something they have seen, never used, and have never thought about how it would fit into their lives? What if you asked someone if they’d be interested in a tablet computer two years before the iPad was introduced? In short, there’s little insight to be gained by doing an “opinion survey” of those with nothing more to offer than an “uninformed opinion.”
I’m not sure if I’ll ever see myself wearing Google Glass (I don’t think my wife would let me out of the house), but I’m pretty darn sure someone will – probably lots of “someone’s,” though not many in my generation. I am more intrigued by the idea of a smart watch as an adjunct display for my smartphone. I do have a really nice mechanical watch I’ve been wearing for 25-years so I will have to figure out where the smart watch “fits in.” Will I wear it on the same arm or my other arm? Maybe I hang it on my belt? Maybe they’ll have a version that clips onto the band of my nice watch. Wherever I put it, it’s got to be more convenient than yanking my cell phone out of my pocket every time I get a text or an email.
We are starting to see these types of smartphone peripherals show up, particularly in the way of activity monitors like Nike’s Fuelband or Jawbone’s UP. These gadgets are geared primarily for the health and fitness conscious and require the user to wear a bracelet that monitors the activity levels, calories burned/consumed, sleep patterns, and other data and then downloads them to your smartphone for tracking. One nice feature of the bracelet is that it’s water resistant so you don’t have to take your iPhone in the pool.
One wireless technology I see a real potential for is Miracast, an idea being pushed by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Miracast will allow information to be transmitted wirelessly from a smartphone or tablet to a Miracast compatible room-based appliance like a flat screen TV, stereo, or smartboard. People could share pictures or videos, play soundtracks from their smartphone anywhere they have access to a Miracast-compatible device. If we’re talking about UC, that would allow a user to bring a work project in progress into a conference room on their smartphone or tablet, display it on a smartboard, modify it during the meeting, and either distribute it to all participants or, more likely, upload the new version to a collaborative workspace so everyone involved could view it. The new 802.11ad standard is moving in the same direction so we’ll have to see how those two come together.
There are also companies that are looking at collecting information on smartphones that turn up in a particular area like a retail location. Euclid Analytics has a product that allows a retailer to count the number of people with smartphones passing by their stores versus the number who enter. The Wi-Fi interface in your smartphone regularly sends Wi-Fi “Probe” messages looking for an available access point and Euclid’s solution can tell if the smartphone is inside or outside the store by the relative difference in received signal strength.
The company claims the data is kept “anonymous.” Even though the system reads the smartphone’s unique Wi-Fi MAC address, the address is run through a one-way hash and the original discarded. So in essence Euclid’s system will know whether it has ever seen that smartphone before, but it will have no way to know who it belongs to and no way to communicate with it. However the merchant will be able to measure things like the change in the number of new or repeat customers in the store and how those numbers change in response to different promotions.
To be clear, not everyone is thrilled with merchants listening in on their smartphone’s Wi-Fi Probe messages. Sen. Al Franken [D-MINN], chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Privacy subpanel, has been looking into Euclid’s technology. However, with Americans’ lackadaisical attitude regarding personal privacy (even in the aftermath of the disclosures regarding the NSA and the U.S. Postal Service) I’m not sure anyone will pay much attention to the senator from Minnesota.
I for one am not too pleased with retailers tracking my presence (which might turn into my “absence” if they are required to post the fact that they are doing this type of monitoring), there are lots of other really cool things we could do by being able to recognize someone’s smartphone. That might include turning on a specific set of lights when they come into a room, turn on a particular radio station, reset the thermostat, or even set up a particular program when they step on the treadmill. I’ve suggested in the past that we could also use this to modify a user’s presence status, but I think people will be far more comfortable using these capabilities in their personal lives than in a work environment.
So no, I don’t think the mobile revolution is over – far from it. Smartphones are a First World appliance today, but lower costs will lead to phenomenal uptake in the developing world. I tie the start of the mobile computing revolution to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 – that was six years ago! Personal wireless technology is just getting started and it has opened the eyes of countless entrepreneurs who continue to dazzle us with new and exciting possibilities. While the action today is in “gadgets” like smart watches and Google Glass, they are just the tip of the ice berg. The real action starts when we expand the concept of machine-to-machine (M2M) systems beyond talking to trucks and vending machines and into people’s daily lives.
I can’t wait.