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Our Cell Phones Are Us

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase explains why the cell phone has become a mirror image of our own selves. From TED 2007.

Mobile Social Momentum Update

 
Here is a further update of my previous post on mobile phone based social interactivity gaining momentum in the future. This latest article from New York Times covering the privacy implications of Google's acquisition of Jaiku has some great points about the potential of mobile as the centre point of a person's life (for further deep delving into this specific point Jan Chipchase is the man).

With regards to the privacy issue, being a Jaiku user myself, it is as idiot-proof as you can get - that is when you sign up there is a simple option to make your jaikus public or keep it private.

Here are some key snippets from the article:

"To begin with, the reasoning goes, Jaiku is not really about microblogging — those minimessages submitted by text or e-mail that made Twitter famous. Jaiku is “a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications,” and therefore “a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet,” Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter credited with the phrase Web 2.0, wrote in his blog.

Petteri Koponen, one of the two founders of Jaiku, described the service as a “holistic view of a person’s life,” rather than just short posts. “We extract a lot of information automatically, especially from mobile phones,” Mr. Koponen said from Mountain View, Calif., where the company is being integrated into Google. “This kind of information paints a picture of what a person is thinking or doing.”

In practical terms, Jaiku’s mobile application allows users to broadcast not only their whereabouts, but how the phone is being used, even what kind of music it is playing.

The information opens up a world of new mobile services for regular users, beyond the world of early adapters familiar with Jaiku.

Mr. O’Reilly’s example is the Web 2.0 address book, where the old address book is made into a live diary, constantly updated so that we can see, on our cellphones, where our contacts are and what they are doing.

Chris Messina, an open-source entrepreneur and founder of the consulting firm Citizen Agency, takes it a step further. In a blog post after the Jaiku deal was announced, he said that he envisioned a world where all information had migrated online, where the address book “lives in Googleland,” indicating presence in a way similar to the buddy lists on instant messaging programs, “and the data never grows old and never goes stale.”

“Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book,” he wrote, “you see all manner of social and presence data.”

One might, he suggested, “even get a picture of their current location."

"A holistic view of a person's life through all manner of social and presence data." - Can it possibly get any better for advertisers and their agencies to better understand their customers.

Mobile Social Momentum

I have always wondered why application and web 2.0 development on the mobile was not happening as quickly as that on the net. Given the fact that there are about 2.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide (a 150% increase between 2001 and 2006) compared to  only about 747 million people online (grew about 10% from 2006 to 2007) it makes sense that more innovative killer social applications should be deployed on the mobile than the internet. [Source for above figures is Euromonitor] But this did not happen as the phones were not capable of it.

But that has been slowly changing and it seems like things are gaining momentum. The focus is shifting back to the mobile phone. Geo-tagged location-based social apps like Plazes, Jaiku, Twitter, Dopplr etc got people with mobile phones involved with the net in a useful, delightful, meaningful way. Suddenly as things progressed on the developer end(as it usually does in Silicon Valley and of late Helsinki, Finland) the phone address book seems to be the  epicenter of gravity for all things socially networked. As is confirmed by the words of the father of Web 2.0 Tim O'Reilly himself:

"I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven "social networking application" represents my real social network."

There is a spate of big action happening among the big players. You can read about Nokia and Google's latest acquisitions  here, here and here on Renny Gleeson's blog which is a fantastic place to follow the latest and greatest on all things interactive, digital and engaging. Then there is the latest acquisition of Jaiku by Google. iPhone is also in the action. All sorts of possibilities seem to be emerging for anybody with a good third generation handset. Rudy de Waele and Raimo Van der Klein has this fantastic slide which captures where things are headed:

The great part of the slide is it is done in the spirit of crowd sourced enhancement - you can go in and add input or changes to the slide and mail back to them.

The future looks more complex and disruptive than ever and more exciting (and uncertain) for us advertising folks. Or as Faris says 'The Future is Open'. It's really which way YOU interpret it. And Chris Messina interprets it thus here:    

"If you think far enough into the future, and realize that the iPhone is essentially the Sputnik of next generation of computing and telephony, you’ll realize how important the development of presence technology will be in light of the 2.0 Address Book. Sure, the VoIP folks have known about this stuff forever, and CISCO even has a few decent products built on it, but I’m not talking about IP-routed phone calls. I’m talking about IP-routed people. Believe it or not, this is where things have to go in order for Google and Apple to continue their relentless drive towards ease-of-use and clarity of design.

In the future, you will buy a cellphone-like device. It will have a connection to the internet, no matter what. And it’ll probably be powered over the air. The device will be tradeable with your friends and will retain no solid-state memory. You literally could pick up a device on a park bench, login with your OpenID (IP-routed people, right?) from any number of service providers (though the best ones will be provided by the credit card companies). Your user data will live in the cloud and be delivered in bursts via myriad APIs strung together and then authorized with OAuth to accomplish specific tasks as they manifest. If you want to make a phone call, you call up the function on the touch screen and it’s all web-based, and looks and behaves natively. Your address book lives in Google-land on some server, and not in the phone. You start typing someone’s name and not only does it pull the latest photos of the first five to ten people it matches, but it does so in a distributed fashion, plucking the data from hcards across the web, grabbing both the most up-to-date contact information, the person’s hcalendar availability and their presence. It’s basically an IM-style buddy list for presence, and the data never grows old and never goes stale. Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book, you see all manner of social and presence data. Hell, you might even get a picture of their current location. This is the lowercase semantic web in action where the people who still hold on to figments of their privacy will become increasingly marginalized through obfuscation and increasingly invisible to the network. I don’t have an answer for this or a moral judgement on it; it’s going to happen one way or another."

Meanwhile Steve Ballmer is spreading his dictum for the future for the big blue monster.

There is also a new whiff of irrational exuberance in the air. It's sure gonna be some exciting times ahead.

Story #5: Edison the Hustler

"One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame, and Stanley’s wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory in West Orange, N.J. Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, “Mr. Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?”

“Napoleon’s,” replied Edison without hesitation.

“No, no,” Stanley said piously, “I should like to hear the voice of our Savior.”

“Well,” explained Edison, “You know, I like a hustler.”

[Photograph and story from this New York Times article]

the art of leaning back

"On the Web today, you have to know what you're looking for, lean forward and click. But we wanted people to be able to just lean back and watch."

These are the words of Fredrik de Wahl, who is the ceo of the eagerly awaited Joost. And teaching you the art of leaning back and enjoying your free time is what Joost is promising.

[From this Time article]

Robotic Obsession

[Source: Monocle magazine, Issue 1, Feb 2007]

Mobile Payments

"Worldwide payments using mobile phones will climb from just $3.2 billion in 2003 to more than $37 billion by 2008."

- Reckons Arthur D. Little, a firm of management consultants in 'The Economist' article 'A Cash Call', Feb 15th, 2007

inspiration!

"LEONARDO DA VINCI’S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings."

[New York Times technology section, Feb 8, 2007]

"I Roll"

77 million paintings

Brian Eno has yet again done what he does best. That is being an alchemist who analyzes and understands the fluid underpinnings of technology and art. He has delighted us with his wonderful alchemy of audio ambience. This time around, he has created the subliminally trippy collection of constantly evolving paintings, created with light. And it's not just one painting, it's 77 million paintings slowly blending into each other on one canvass - your computer screen.

Eno's idea stems from his belief that television is basically just light beamed to us from a screen.  The stuff we watch on TV are actually an interplay of lights that are color processed and coordinated through the picture tube. His light paintings are about manipulating those light bulbs to beam beautiful moving images fused with a background music. Watch it to believe it.

Moreover from a great branding perspective, it is with the help of the Apple tools that he was able to pull this off. As mentioned in the crossover promotional piece on the Apple site. The Apple site also showcases some other collaborations (worth checking out) it has done with some of the most cutting edge agencies of our time. Like the creative blitzkrieg of W+K Tokyo Lab or the superlatively insane but brilliant work of CP+B to drive the point about the maneuverability of the latest VW Rabbit. The success of Apple is I guess in how it knows it's core audience and how it associates with them and helps them to showcase their work.