A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, talks about the future of the Web.

Some clear trends:

• Increasing amount of networked applications on mobile devices
• Increasing network speeds
• More and more Internet-enabled devices (e. g. smart home automation)
• Increasing amount of sensor type systems (e. g. sensing your surroundings from temperature to humidity)

Why do I blog this?
Three minutes I cannot agree more, the future of the Web is predictable from a broad perspective, now it’s time to think about new use cases and services where the real innovation happens.

Nathan said some truly remarkable things about mobile phone adoption in Africa:

• Majority of mobile phone subscribers today, live in the developing world
• The developing world is where we are seeing a lot of the innovation
• Africa, is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world
• Kenya has some mobile phone services that are many years beyond what we have right now
• Day labor in many parts of Nairobi is organized via sms
• Now 30% of Rwandan’s buy their electricity using their mobile phone

[via Dale Zak: Mobile Phones, Crowdsourcing & Africa]

Why do I blog this?

Where does the innovation in the mobile market comes from? The talk gives many insights about the differences in African markets. His examples from states like Kenya or Rwanda show that new kinds of applications are required for a mobile usage behavior that’s very different from the industrialized world.

Interesting talk, session-based SMS have been completely new for me.

IBM’s Next Five in Five, mentions the innovation trends for the next 5 years:

1. Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
2. You will have a crystal ball for your health
3. You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
4. You will have your own digital shopping assistants
5. Forgetting will become a distant memory

These trends are based on IBM’s research and the impact on society.

I am sceptical that speech interfaces will become really dominant. Mobile search via speech input is already deployed by Google but as mobile phone keyboards and touch interfaces are getting better speech is just a good alternative.

The digital shopping assistant scenario is already an attractive business opportunity for new startups like Barcoo, that facilitate barcode scanning to retrieve product information and price comparison data.

The distant memory is a scary scenario in which all your activity in social networks, on the web plus the sensor data of your mobile phone (GPS) is collected. Your whole life is one data stream including all your interactions and if everything from every point in time can be accessed this would dramatically change the way we behave and live. Problematical ethical questions would arise but you don’t have to take the perspective of all of your personal data must be collected, instead consider use cases where it makes sense to collect very specific data in health scenarios (diseases) or business scenarios (workshop protocols). In more closed scenarious you have better control on privacy issues and the big brother is not watching your whole life.

We will see what happens… locative media is becoming much more influential and important, especially with the rise of ubiquitous location-based user generated content and sensor networks data.