technology trends – Page 8

November 6, 2010

Where are you, Dick Tracy? The future form of mobile gadgets

It’s no secret I’ve always wanted a watch phone. Not the least reason being, I’m constantly losing the “phone” (information aggregation device, or “IAD” as I like to call it, when in a particularly geeky mood. Not, of course, to confuse with Dulles airport’s code) that I do I have – attempts at making it easier to find with bright covers and rhinestones nonetheless.

It makes such sense, really, that this precious device which increasingly is our connection to the world, holds our personal data, pictures (memories), entertainment, emails, etc etc should somehow be attached. When this precious device is our payment medium as well (which is coming), it’s just common sense that we won’t want to misplace it, or have it easily stolen while it lies on the restaurant table.

Siemens always seems to be on the cutting edge of product design…I watched with fascination back in 2003 when they introduced the “Xelibri” line of mobile phones when I was living in London, which they launched through Selfridges (a fashion store, not a “phone” store – interesting and intentional category statement there). Personal communication jewelry, necklaces, mostly, from what I saw; not particularly attractive, and definitely too early for the technology to really support the concept; it flopped horribly, but they were on to something. Just, way too early.

So why haven’t these really taken off yet? Well – cost is one factor. Interface, another. Battery life – all these things. But with ear pieces, talking is solved; with increasing miniaturization, and private transactions going mobile, it’s inevitable.

Perhaps, in line with a phone not being a “phone” anymore but a new sort of device, we should come up with a new category of what this will be: not a watch, or a bracelet, or even a phone; I’ll try to come up with some brand spanking new term….in the interim, I’ll just keep thinking of it as a watch phone. And I want one.

October 24, 2010

Disintermediating the entertainment industry

I’ve been thinking a lot about “entertainment content”, people’s increasing demands for what they want / when they want it, and the proliferating host of gadgets that are on the market. I mean, we have a “phone”, a “tv”, and “ipad”, etc etc. There have been fits and starts towards true convergence for years now…I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the computer people being the convergence drivers (the Origami micro PC was an attempt a few years ago), or the phone people, or the television people – as it turns out, the “phones” are where convergence has come from.

….At any rate, and despite all the convergence gadgets, entertainment content is still being delivered in a really channeled manner. I pay for tv, for my Internet enabled phone (where I can stream tv shows), for Internet access and then Netflix for their streaming entertainment, and for the most part these four (TV, phone, Internet, Netflix) are four access point for the same content. This is obviously not efficient.

I’m waiting for the day when I pay for one access point – and I think it will be through the phone. As soon as what we now call a “phone” is able to act as the funnel point for my entertainment needs and then send the information to the output device which is set up to interact with that data, the need for all these others will vanish. So – I will choose what I want to watch (when I want to watch it), tell the phone to stream it and output to the large screen on my wall. Or I will tell it to connect to a keyboard, and an external screen then work on a Word document.

I understand that this all has challenges: besides the obvious current bandwidth issues of the “phone” device (which can be solved), there’s the challenges that the entertainment content people (20th Century Fox, etc) face in their current agreements with the existing/legacy distribution channels. The entire industry will be turned upside down, and every tier of the chain is madly scrambling to figure out how to manage what’s happening. But it will happen because the people who have the most to gain – the phone companies – will push for it and have the fledgling support of consumers who are flocking to smart phones to back up their push.

I’ll talk about how cloud storage is also going to enable these developments in another post….as well as how consumer demand for instant gratification is one of the biggest drivers behind all of this.

And also the ramification for brands and advertising. Which is huge.

Update 1/8/2011: At CES, Motorola unveiled the Atrix Superphone, which has docking capabilities that allow you to use it with a mouse and a keyboard as if it were a normal computer (with 4G capabilities and a dual-core Tegra 2 processor – yee haw!). Not only can they now run Word, Excel, etc AND communicate AND surf the internet AND stream entertainment etc etc – the only thing keeping this from happening was interface and processing power. With cloud storage local memory won’t be needed (you stream it from your virtual memory on demand). Watch out laptop manufacturers – this is going to make you as obsolete as you did the traditional computer towers.