McGuire’s Law

Today I participated in the Links Executive Summit in Santa Barbara.  The overall theme of the conference was content, and participants ranged from old world telecom players (e.g. AT&T), to those that sell to telcos (e.g. Cisco, HP, IBM), to those in the media value chain (e.g. Nellymoser, Real), and all the way to the President of the Houston Texans and the Chief Content Officer of Netflix.

Those last two provided some interesting perspectives that help illustrate the opportunities and challenges in the mobility revolution. 

As I’ve discussed before, context is a key component to the Mobility Revolution and this became a key theme throughout the day.  Location is one of the first ways that context is being built into mobile applications (e.g. Sprint’s announcement today with Microsoft of location-based search).  Location is particularly relevant to Jamey Rootes, President of the Houston Texans.  In Houston, the Texans have a growing and loyal fan base.  Under the structure of the NFL’s national/local structure, there are ways in which the Texans can build upon that valued base with unique content within their immediate vicinity, but not beyond.  Therefore, Jamey is very interested in progress being made to make mobile content contextually relevant to the Texans fans in Houston.

Another theme that continually came up throughout the day was about the challenges of finding the right content within the constraints of mobile devices.  Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix provided a clear picture of the challenge.  Netflix offers nearly 70,000 titles.  Yesterday, 35,000 of those titles were ordered by customers, so there’s real activity across the entire portfolio.  How can Netflix customers wade through so many titles?  They find what they’ll enjoy, Ted claims, because of the Netflix personalization system based on the ratings that Netflix customers provide.  In effect, the titles that appeal to each customer rise to the top with amazing consistency.  For mobile content to overcome the navigation challenges, similar ways to intelligently simplify the process will need to emerge, undoubtedly helped along by the awareness of context.

Overall, some great discussions and congratulations to the Heavy Reading crowd for putting on a well-run event!

Moto still gets it!

Motorola continues to bet big on the Mobility Revolution, demonstrating that they believe that mobility is fundamentally transforming how business will be done.

Back in September, Motorola bought Symbol Technologies, giving the company a solid move into the space of automating traditionally paper-based processes with mobility. But the first place that most businesses are catching hold of mobility is in mobile e-mail, and this week Motorola announced the acquisition of Good Technology, a leading provider of e-mail mobility software.

Kids today. They don’t get out. They just sit in front of the TV or computer, playing games, surfing the web, and IMing their friends. What’s happened to the vibrant social life us non-natives to this digital world enjoyed when we were their age? I remember spending hours running around the neighborhood from backyard to basement to treehouse, often creating make believe worlds and practicing different forms of social interaction, many of which would never become part of our real world (thankfully), but developing adaptation to changing social settings that would serve us the rest of our lives. I also remember when my sisters became teenagers and, in a pre-call-waiting world, my dad decided to invest in a second phone line so his calls could get through as they too worked hard at developing those all important social skills.

Many claim that today’s kids, sitting emotionless behind a computer keyboard, are failing to develop the skills that will be critical to a vibrant, interactive, caring society of the future. Others claim that social development has just moved online, with online communities providing even greater flexibility in taking on alternate personalities and creating even more dynamic social situations. Of course, that invisible, unsupervised social world creates its own scary scenarios that should frighten every parent.

This past week, at the LBS World Forum, Jonathan Spinney of OpenWave asked if I thought mobility would finally reintroduce real, human-human, in the visible and physical world social interaction to digital natives.

It’s a great question. It’s a complex question with both positives and negatives.

On the positive side, remember that I believe context is what will ignite the mobility revolution beyond our current view of mobility as merely an extension of the current Internet and voice networks. In other words, mobility will enable new uses that are only possible because they operate and interact with the physical world. Where am I? What’s the temperature? Who am I with? How’s my blood sugar? What’s my heart rate? How loud is the environment? How good is my network connection? What’s on my schedule later today? What’s the score of the football game? Is my flight on time? How’s the traffic to the airport? Is Al also running late? Some of this information already exists in the network and for any given activity, they may or may not be part of my context. Others can only factor into how I interact with the world and with information if mobility really happens in a way that unleashes my personal context into the equation.

So what does any of that have to do with kids and social skills? I really believe that new uses will be developed that leverage this context. This week I learned about undersound, an example of a new use for mobility that creates connection between people based on the physical world and enabled by the combined computer, Internet, and mobility revolutions. If you follow the above link, you’ll probably find, as I did, that it sounds a bit cumbersome and I rather doubt that it will work out quite as well as its inventors imagine, but it’s a great first step. Others are also working on ways to use location to get people out and interacting with each other (e.g. mologogo, SLAM, Loopt, and PhoneTag come to mind).

Of course, as you’ll often hear me say, success in the mobility revolution does not just require capturing the power of mobility, but also managing the danger. Bringing the realities of online social interaction into the physical world brings dangers with it. I want to believe that mobility itself will provide us with many solutions to managing the danger, but most of all, let us move forward with our eyes open to what the future will bring.

So what do you think?  Will mobility jumpstart social skills?  Will it bring more blessing or curse?

Yesterday I participated in the LBS World Forum in Los Angeles. Some interesting topics came up that I’m sure to address here in the coming days/weeks. A quick shout-out to Jonathan and Roland for giving me some new Power of Mobility thoughts to chew on.

But I also wanted to repeat to this broader audience the statement that started my talk yesterday. I was excited to be with the LBS community yesterday because I believe they are foundational to the launching of the Mobility Revolution. If you go back to the two previous technology revolutions - the PC revolution was sparked by the killer app (VisiCalc) that made real and tangible the power of the PC over previous ways of doing business - the Internet revolution was sparked by the 3Cs (dynamic content, commerce, and community) that made real and tangible the power of the Internet to those who began to adopt it.

With mobility, I believe that context will make real and tangible the unique power of mobility. Where am I? Who am I with? What am I doing? How’s my schedule for the rest of the day? Who am I meeting with later today? Where am I going next? What’s the weather here? What’s the weather there? All of these factors already impact how we connect with information and connect with people. However, today the burden of making these connections falls to the individual user and the ease of adjusting how I connect varies dramatically across applications. Some of us are blessed with great assistants (thanks Deanna) who can take on some of this work, but more often than not we simply don’t have time to deal with it and end up either missing critical connections or becoming inefficient by defaulting to a “standard mode” that doesn’t well suit our current situation.

The power of mobility will become apparent, and will radically redefine how we live, work, and play, as our converged devices work cross-application to factor context into everything we do. Location Based Services (the LBS in “LBS World Forum”) are the first working examples of what this means.

As a quick example, consider the #TAXI service from CellWand, a Toronto-based company. #TAXI does something very common and very simple. By entering the short code, you call a taxi. However, the service is powerful because it takes into account the current context. It uses your location information (with your permission) to identify the taxi companies that are best able to serve you where you are and it uses telephone network context to quickly find a cab company that is ready to take your call (avoiding frustrating busy signals).

So hopefully you can start to see why I was excited to be with the LBS World Forum group yesterday. The experts gathered in that room are the very ones who are transforming mobility from convenience to the kind of power that can spark a revolution!

Power Up!

Since most of you read The Law of Mobility during the week, it seems counter-productive to do most of the posting over the weekend. This weekend I’ll post a couple of end-of-month items, but starting Monday, the information you’re used to seeing over the weekend will be spread across the work week.

Have a great weekend!

Earlier this week, Motorola announced the acquisition of Symbol Technologies for $3.9B.

The move signals that Motorola understands the distinction I made yesterday. Everyone’s using a phone, or smart devices like Moto’s Q, but the real Mobility Revolution is just beginning. And the huge opportunity for companies like Motorola will be in fully integrating mobility into how companies do business. Once a company transforms a manual process that forces employees to return to a fixed location and turns it into an automated process that goes with the need, the benefits in employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and increased information velocity and accuracy can’t be lost by returning to pre-mobile ways.

Symbol has been a leader in making this happen in the real world, as I was reminded again yesterday as I signed for a package on a Symbol device.

Here’s how Motorola described Symbol: “Symbol is a leader in designing, developing, manufacturing and servicing products and systems used in end-to-end enterprise mobility solutions featuring rugged mobile computing, advanced data capture, radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless infrastructure and mobility management. The company’s products and services help customers increase workforce productivity, improve customer service and enhance operational efficiencies by delivering information in real-time, as people, information and assets are on-the-move.”

Acknowledging Symbol’s success to date, Motorola’s investment power and brand-recognition in the c-suite will undoubtedly accelerate the adoption of mobility for an increasing range of critical business processes.

Power up!

This week I participated in the CIO Bootcamp at Interop.

Before getting up to speak, I couldn’t help but notice that nearly everyone in the room had a mobile device of some kind and were using it during breaks (actual or imagined) to check their e-mail. Some would say that the Mobility Revolution is at hand. We all know that mobility is a requirement for our lives and our jobs and if you don’t have a mobile phone and mobile e-mail, then obviously you are behind the times.

So, here’s my analogy…

Think back to 1994. This was before the Netscape IPO. It was before AT&T had introduced flat-rate dialup Internet. It was before Windows 95 bundled an IP stack and Internet Explorer into the operating system. In 1994, it was unusual to have an e-mail address on your business card. If you did, you clearly were an early adopter of the Internet.

Now, fast forward to December 1995. All the things I mentioned above had now happened. By December 1995, everyone knew they had to be on the Internet. If you DIDN’T have your e-mail address on your card you were clearly a technology laggard.

But… Had the Internet Revolution really happened?

From a consumer perspective, realize that Yahoo was only incorporated in April 1995. Amazon didn’t even come into existence until July 1995. eBay launched Labor Day weekend in 1995. The Google guys didn’t develop BackRub until 1996. So, we were all still just beginning to get a glimpse of how the Internet would change our lives.

On the business side, things lagged significantly. As one indication, IBM didn’t launch their eBusiness campaign until 1997. Over the years, this campaign did a good job of introducing, in a credible way, how businesses could leverage the Internet and IP-based technologies to revolutionize how they operate their companies and how they compete in the marketplace.

To provide perspective, I started my talk this week by asking what would happen if the IT executives in the room took out all the PCs in their business. Could they figure out a way to still operate the business? Probably not. There’s no way to go back to a pre-PC world. What would happen if they took all the IP networks and the Internet out of their business. Could they come up with a fall-back plan to keep the company going? I seriously doubt it. The Internet Revolution has happened and has radically changed everything about how we do business.

What about mobile devices. If they all went away, most companies in most of their operations could figure out how to get by. Sure, we’d be miserable, but we’d survive. It’s December 1995 transformed into the mobile world.  We know mobility is important, but it isn’t yet fully integrated into how we do business.
But it will be.

Power up!

I’ve written a simple program to extract from my weekly listing posts all of the individual entries and compile them into a complete list for each category. So, for example, you can now get to one list of all 288 converged products that have been listed since the Law of Mobility blog was first launched.

The lists are accessible from the right hand navigation bar under “Complete Lists”, or here they are for easy reference:

• Converged Products
• Indicators
• Capturing the Power
• Managing the Danger
• Enabling Technology
• Mobility Research
• Mobile Music

The BBC has a great article about the 25 year anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC.

Here are some quotes from the article that are relevant to our discussion on the Mobility Age:

“The machine … altered the way business was done forever and sparked a revolution in home computing.”

“Moving this revolution forward are the one billion PCs that are now in use around the world. In many ways, the PC has become in the developed world, an essential tool in our everyday lives.”

“Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, told the firm’s shareholders last month the PC era was coming to an end. ‘We’re now in a new era, an era in which the internet is at the centre of so much that we do now with our PCs,’ he told them.”

“With all this small mobile technology and the growth of wireless internet, will people on the move bother owning a PC at all?”

The Law of Mobility is all about the observation that we are entering a new era.  As Ray Ozzie notes, we are already in the Internet Era.  The PC Era enabled the Internet Era to happen, and both the PC Era (enabling very inexpensive computing power to be built into mobile devices) and the Internet Era (enabling connectivity to everyone and every piece of information in the world) are enabling the Mobility Era to happen.

As the article notes, the PC radically changed how we live our lives and how we operate our businesses.  The Internet has similarly radically changed how we live and do business.  And now, Mobility is beginning to have the same impact on all of us.

The PC era was defined by Moore’s Law.  Moore’s Law is all about processing power and specifically price/performance.  Because computing power became incredibly inexpensive, it could be built into everything.

The Internet era was defined by Metcalfe’s Law.  Metcalfe’s Law is all about networks and specifically the value of networks relative to their connectivity.  Because the Internet is connected to everything and everyone, it has become incredibly valuable and integral to everything we do.

The Mobility era is defined by the Law of Mobility.  The Law of Mobility is all about being able to do things anytime and anywhere and specifically how that creates value.  Because Mobility enables products and services to be with you and usable all the time, whereever you go, our patterns of how we live and operate will radically change to follow.

Thanks BBC for giving us an opportunity to look back and reflect, and to look forward and imagine!

Yesterday, Sprint formally announced the long anticipated plans for a Fourth Generation (4G) broadband wireless network using the company’s 2.5GHz licensed spectrum.  Sprint had already committed to launching advanced services using the spectrum as part of gaining approval of the merger of Sprint and Nextel a year ago.  So the real news yesterday was the choice of WiMax (802.16) as the technology to be used for the network, key partnerships with Intel, Motorola, and Samsung, and that trials would launch by the end of 2007.

In the announcement, Sprint CEO Gary Forsee acknowledges the impact of mobility on our lives and our businesses: “None of us today can envision our lives without wireless connectivity or the Internet.”

KiTae Lee, president of Samsung’s Telecommunications Network Business explained how Sprint’s technology choice will help further extend the impact of mobility on the world: “I believe Sprint Nextel’s decision to deploy Mobile WiMAX as the 4G network technology will set a milestone in the U.S. telecommunication industry’s history and contribute to further advancements in wireless technology. Mobile WiMAX has the fastest data transfer rate among the existing wireless technologies and is based on all-IP technology. Mobile WiMAX-based services will create a new paradigm shift in wireless services and improve consumer lifestyles. I believe that Sprint Nextel will successfully provide this mobile WiMAX technology based service and begin a new revolution in mobile broadband services nationwide.”

But, what does that revolution look like?

In short, it is mobility being built into every product, every service, and every process, thereby creating tremendous value for the consumers of those products and services, and for the businesses that provide them.

In the simplest example, yesterday’s announcement pointed to building WiMax bandwidth into consumer electronics products. As RCR Wireless News reported in their coverage of the event: “One key element of the strategy is to have the chipsets embedded in a variety of consumer electronics devices. During a conference call with analysts, Sprint Nextel Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee described chipsets potentially being embedded in portable game stations, video cameras, MP3 players and vehicle navigation systems to provide wireless connectivity for those items—and potential new revenue streams for Sprint Nextel.”

BusinessWeek apparently recently interviewed Atish Gude, Sprint’s chief strategy officer, who also provided key insights into the impact of this announcement on building mobility into products and into our lives: “It will be a life-changing event for the customer to have control and connectivity…. [the] ability to enable the iPod to connect anywhere, anytime is a very powerful concept… We’re not creating new trends but we’re enabling them in a different way.”

The Motley Fool gets it (although perhaps going a bit overboard…): “I’ve come to believe that as computer chips move beyond cell phones and laptops to become embedded throughout our environment — even in our bodies — WiMAX’s type of ubiquitous communication will come to be viewed as an essential element for navigating, prospering in, and surviving in tomorrow’s brave new world.”

Welcome to this brave new world. 

Stay tuned here at law-of-mobility.com to watch it unfold before your eyes and to stay on the cutting edge of capturing the power and managing the danger of mobility.