Over the last couple of weeks, my wife has been shopping for home and auto insurance. She used a temporary email address as she was concerned about subsequently receiving spam or unwanted email from insurance sales agents after she reached a decision. However, she had to provide a phone number to discuss and clarify quotes and so she provided her mobile phone number. She received numerous calls late in the evenings and she lamented at the lack of a second number availability on her existing mobile that would allow her to share this second number with the insurance sales agents.

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Pew Internet & American Life Project reported on Internet status update trending (see results here). They have shown a significant increase in Internet users updating status on some social networking site. In April of this year it was at 11%. Five months later results showed 19% of Inernet users updating status on a social networking site. That’s nearly 1/5 of the Internet population updating their status somewhere.

“Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users”

In this study, 54% of Internet users have some type of wireless access to the Internet (via cell phone, wifi, etc.). Of those, 25% use Twitter or some other service up from 14% in December of 2008.

“Owning and using a wireless Internet device make an Internet user significantly more likely to tweet.”

When asking wireless Internet users why they value their mobile connections, 50% say to stay in touch with other people. (I read this as status updates.) 

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In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Congress directed the FCC to come up with a plan and metrics for measuring this plan to get broadband accessible to all Americans. As a result, the FCC has published a request for comments here.

Excerpt: Driven by technology and market forces, this evolution of communications services to broadband creates many opportunities for our country, but it also has a significant impact on the circuit switched Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a system that has provided, and continues to provide essential services to the country.

What does this mean for the end user? Hopefully this will open the doors to a whole slew of new application opportunities for developers. Take Google for example; the chromium OS that they are touting is 100% a browser. There is nothing else to it from an end user perspective. Why? I think the idea is to increase mobility and give you access to your data no matter where you are. All you need is connectivity. I read an paper a long time ago entitled "Rise of the Stupid Network" written by David Isenberg. It described a dumb pipe. Google is trying to reverse this by making dumb computers with a smart network. What better way to make use of blanket broadband for the population than to make the services live in the cloud?

One project that jumps to mind is Bespin found on mozilla labs. Its a great project that puts a developement environment in the cloud and lets multiple developers collaborate on code, no matter where they are. Its all about mobility. I love having access to my email from anywhere, any device. Using apps like Bespin let me and my colleagues have access to my coding environment from anywhere. Its no longer tied to my laptop. I see a bright future ahead for all end user as these technologies slowly roll out to the world.

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Back to the future…

I started in the computer industry in the late ‘70’s. I didn’t work on mainframes, the norm in that era. I spent most of my waking hours on these new things called microcomputers. If you wrote software for a microcomputer, you were in absolute control. It was an era when could do anything you wanted or, more to the point, were capable of designing. True to the Wild West attitude of the time, before I graduated high school I owned a company which wrote, among other things, personal accounting software for Radio Shack’s TRS-80s. You had to pick your bets and choose which machine you wanted your software to run on. When machines such as IBM’s PC came along, we had to decide whether the device would take off and, if so, whether it would appeal to the demographics we were going after. In short, we spent our time porting our software so it would run on whatever was selling to our target market at any given time. In all cases you had to craft your application to get the most out of the device you were running on.

So why am I babbling about the past?

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I was on a Wedbush Morgan roundtable panel recently where we discussed mobile applications.  

It reminded me again that diversity of background and experience is absolutely critical when you are trying to figure out where a given market or technology is going. Wedbush do a great job with their panels to make sure that the discussion can be open and that everybody from the chip manufacturers through the apps guys in a given space are represented. I am always awed by the caliber of the folks attending and the mutual respect people approach the discussion with.  

As a result of Wedbush’s approach, you get a coalescing of opinions from the app guys (like Movius) that things are going a certain way then out of the blue the CEO of a company who optimizes backhaul from the base station says “well, here is the problem if that happens”…and the discussion launches down the path of what impediments are which make that path impractical for another decade.  

It reminds me of GPRS. I spent a great deal of time, in what seems like a previous life, launching GPRS as quickly as possible. Five years later, I finally found an application, email of the RIM, which used the technology to add value to my life.   

So, in homage to the Wedbush, I would like to do a bit of a survey to see if we can start an educational debate. Let’s start a discussion. What do you think the next hot discontinuity will be in the mobile space? Please give a quick summary of your background and then make your prediction, elaborating on why you expect it to be so. I am really interested in what you have to say. 

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I attended a conference in Denver this week where the discussions, sessions, and underlying themes comprised converged services, mantras such as "any content, any where, any device, any time," IPv to IPv6 migration, IP-based networks, delivering rich media-rich interactive applications, leveraging SOA architectures, using Flash technologies for delivering applications, and using common standards to enable advertising. Some of you might be surprised to hear that this was not a
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There are a ton of different cell phones out there. The problem that you run in to as a developer is deciding on which phone to develop an application for. Depending on your choice you end up deciding what language the application is written in, and in many cases what your limitations are going to be as a result of this decision. Java: When writing apps for phones in java you gain portability. The problem here is that you can also gain a myriad of issues with particular phones, and partic... [More]