Howard Rheingold On Our Mobile World 49
Roland Piquepaille writes "Howard Rheingold is the well-known author of "Smart Mobs" and many other books describing the evolution of our societies. His last book predicted the transformation of our society into a mobile one. Four years later, his forecast is more than confirmed. As one of the futurologists who can detect the emerging technology trends behind our daily lives, I wanted to know what Howard was thinking in 2006. He was kind enough to agree for an interview which was conducted by e-mail in mid-June. We discuss the importance of mobile technology, blogs, the changing climate, and the future of surveillance" From the article: "The power of the technologies packed into mobile devices continues to multiply, the diffusion of devices to all parts of the world and socioeconomic strata broadens, the spread of knowledge about how to use technologies to organize political, economic, social, cultural collective action quickens. It is in the convergence of the technical, cognitive, and social forces generates that the real power of smart mobs -- for both constructive and destructive."
Re:The other end of the stick (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's one counter argument: the Blackberry. It's basically a smartphone. The missing piece was not networks, price, features, etc. It was focus. The Blackberry demonstrates how to make a successful smartphone: you package useful technology in a usable and simple form. It does not have to be cheap.
I'm also using a Nokia E70, my third 'seagull' Nokia. And to my own surprise, I'm surfing the net with it. I bought it because I like writing notes on the fly. But it has built-in wifi, so gets connected whenever I can find a hotspot. And I've gotten it working with Orange UK's 1UKP/day unlimited GPRS internet. It's slow but acceptable. Gmail provides a really efficient mobile mail interface and a mobile map application that works well enough to let me find my way around big cities like London.
What's happening is that the "smartphone" market, pushed by telcos and self-styled gurus like Rheingold, is in fact coming to life, because after the hype and the WAP and the other technology-driven failures, we are entering the period of demand-driven innovation. I can see the smartphone market fragmenting into several clear niches, which is a sign that it's maturing:
- portable text/email (Blackberry)
- mobile Microsoft (that's a niche all in itself)
- general-purpose mobile computers (wifi, voip, Symbian)
- dumb media phones (camera, MP3)
Telco's are particularly bad for trying to push technology-driven products that they believe will make them money but which no-one wants because they're too complex. It takes other manufacturers to build products on top of those technologies, and since only a minority of products ever make it to market, this is why we have such a gap between new communications technologies being announced, and people actually using them.
In simple terms: I don't want GPRS, I want mobile gmail and google maps.