MoMo #8: How will mobile influence our lives?
by dirk
How about Bruce Sterling as a preacher?
Another great MoMo Amsterdam event yesterday afternoon! The quality of the speakers was high and they gave us quite some food for thought. The role of mobile in society was at the center of the discussions.
A remarkable afternoon ended with a remarkable Bruce Sterling climbing up the pulpit of the Rode Hoed and preaching us about the development of mobile technology: “As developers of mobile applications, you are living on a volcano and guess where the ashes will fall when it explodes?”
Connecting it all together
The mobile phone knows everything about each of us. Nowadays it knows our location (GPS), who we’re talking to, what our movements are (accelerometer), what objects are around us (NFC), who are our contacts and friends, etc… Think what you could obtain if you link this information together with the content you create (photo’s, video’s, messages, twits, blogs) and with other people doing the same:
- Waiting for the next tram at the tram stop could be very different if your mobile phone could alert you that the person sitting next to you shares the same hobby with you or that you have a friend in common.
- Visiting a city for the first time would be an entire different experience if your mobile phone could tell you where your friends and relatives stayed, what they enjoyed and which places they recommend.
It’s already all possible, but do we want to give so much information away and how do we control it? Great presentation by Johan Koolwaaij about iyouit from Telematica Institute.
Mobile revolution
The mobile revolution hasn’t yet started: The mobile phone still looks very much like 15 years ago and is mostly used for phoning, texting and passing regular internet content to its user. So much more can be done! To use Bruce Sterling’s words, we need to move on from developing the swamps (which the Dutch turned into a clean, organized and predictable but boring world) to developing the volcanos (which are chaotic, erratic and make casualties when they explode). Stop thinking about the plastic, which is what will be left of a mobile phone in 10 years, start thinking about the services! MoMo shouldn’t be the place where Vincent Evers preaches the fantastic new keyboard of the new Blackberry, yet another piece of plastic.
The “Internet of Things” will be made possible by the mobile (call it just ‘mobile’, not ‘handset’ or ‘phone’): Every object will have its place in the connected world and we will move as avatars around theses objects. It’s not about a virtual world or ‘augmented reality’ but about the real world, the reality. Mobile will change the way we interact with the real things and it’s just beginning now.
For more information and recordings of the event, go to the MoMo Amsterdam site.
Tags: behavior, bruce sterling, internet of things, mobile, momo