There is this massive, bloodless revolution going on. A substantial part of humanity is migrating, not so much to virtual realities as Professor Edward Castronova would say, but to an augmented reality. Executive Vice President en General Manager of the Markets unit of Nokia Anssi Vanjoki:
People will reside in the web and live in the media. They will be exchanging pictures, video clips, music, messages. Their souls and identities will be in it.
It was a rather poetic and one of the more radical visions at the FT Business of Mobile Conference in Brussels. Mind you: Vanjoki did make it clear that he meant augmented reality, not virtual reality.
This augmented reality will be enabled by the small computers we all carry around in our pockets, called cell phones or smart phones. Even when the telecom operators are still searching for business models, it seems pretty obvious that those small but powerful computers will allow us to access the internet using better and better interfaces and to link multimedia with communication. Voice will be reduced to being a feature of an application.
Mobile internet will not be that different from the internet as we know it. People will look for news, generate content, and use it – very important – for social networking. It seems obvious that cell phones are used for communication – but increasingly so for using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed (and who knows, Second Life in 3-D?). One industry insider told me:
We will be supported in a way by ICT-departments trying to close down access to social networks on the company computers. People will just use their personal devices – smart phones – to have access anyway.
You get the picture? Companies trying to close down access to social networks? It will be increasingly unthinkable to be blocked from getting access to the Twitters of this world for hours and hours. Of course people will go mobile, also because there is the strong feeling that a cell phone is a very personal device where no company boss should intrude. CEO Lex Fenwick of Bloomberg LP:
Everyone has a mobile number. It rarely ever changes. It becomes an identifier.
Fenwick was very outspoken in his vision. The speed of the connections will go up and the cost will go down, becoming almost irrelevant for many, many people. The cell phone is a pc:
There is little or no difference. The only issue is size, all the other constraints will go away in the next two years.
The size issue means that probably the cell phone as we know it will never become a device for watching long movies, long television shows, elaborate holiday planning, elaborate financial analysis needing lots of fields, buying of clothes. What will work however: financial quotes, payments, stories about specific things, leading market stories, stock trading, short videos, customer support with people IM’ing back and forth resolving issues, social networking, gaming (including tests and exam-training).
The search for business models can not be too difficult for the network providers. Cell phones will have GPS systems allowing to exactly locate the owner. As Vanjoki said, this means the mobile devices will situate people exactly in time, place and in social relationships, “all mashed up in one context relevant experience.”
Anto Ohrling , co-founder of Blyk, had some very interesting stories to tell about the social network applications of mobile networks. Blyk offers 16-24 olds in the UK free mobile communication, financed by targeted advertizing. And he really does mean “targeted”, because the members provide very detailed profiles. This information is used by brands which are interesting for this age group, using interactive campaigns. Ohrling:
This ia about relevance and engagement, not frequency.
I must say this comment about relevance and engagement made me think back at the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference in New York City, where exactly the same comments were being made about brands and virtual worlds. Blyk gives insights on their site about the way they develop their business.
What about privacy issues in this augmented reality world? Fenwick was characteristically blunt:
We all get over it. In London every single street is on camera. You will be able to switch the GPS on and off, but there is value to being told where the nearest coffee house is or cinema. People want this immediacy and this value.
Of course, sometimes one wants privacy. But probably more often you want the Twitter- of Facebook-friends to know you are at a conference or on holiday in Madrid or Rome, maybe one of them will locate you and have a coffee with you.
Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and co-founder of Opera, said that “personal aspects will become even more personal using cell phones.” He admitted that operators don’t like to talk much about it, but one and very clear indication is that there is a fair amount of porn and dating going on. Once again, mobile and the “classical” internet are not that different at all.
This made me think back once again at the Virtual Worlds Conference in New York: the most likely outcome of all this seems to be that the differences between Mobile, the Web, and Virtual Worlds will disappear and that it all will be just “the Web”. Only, the dramatic distinctions we make between “reality”, “virtuality”, “internet” and so on, will no longer be that relevant for the youngest generations, just as the older generations don’t make a fuss about making that classical voice phone call either. As Michel Dupont, senior vice-president of MTV Belgium said:
Kids and youth want to consume anywhere anytime. They just don’t reason in terms of technological solutions.
Roland Legrand