Versatile Amphibian

A few months ago I prepared an abstract for a paper on the effects of mobile technology on the economy. Since the requirement for the full paper has gone away, I thought I'd share as this summarises several previous posts I've done on the subject. Hope it's useful! Mobile is often referred to as revolutionary.  I agree, but not, perhaps for the reasons most regularly cited.  I’m not down on mobile technology. Smart devices have enabled greater scale and scope of communications between individuals, greater consumption of content, greater variety in that content. Five years ago, applications were the preserve of suits with laptops. Now they are a mega-industry in the making. A new media untarnished by the false dawn of the dotcom era. Androids are cool for the first time since Star Wars. Mobile has enabled all of this and still found time to revolutionise banking in Africa, catalyse the growth of the largest company in history and overthrow half a dozen regimes. Not b...

On the day that Nokia and MS announced their tie up, HP also released their latest set of Web OS devices. Yes, Web OS. The OS2 Warp of the 2010s. Even the intro video is frankly a bit embarassing - for starters, Todd Bradley appears to be the only person in the audience clapping when he arrives. Anyway, if you haven't got two hours to listen, here's some highlights: The aim Leverage the capabilities of HP to create a step change in mobile computing similar in scale to the introduction of the HP35 calculator (wasn't that the iPhone?) First OS designed from scratch to fully embrace the Internet (and the need for that is...) The market Most people have multiple devices and they consume a lot of web based content No one has developed a solution that works consistently across those devices (Android?) WebOS is a unique technology leveraged across a range of (HP) devices Technology The "Synergy" feature merges information from cloud and brings it onto devices in an inte...

I found this Intel press release on the use of smartphones for personal monitoring interesting as it tallies with some work we've been doing recently on application stores. The concept is that handsets can do far more than simply tell you where you are and what's around you, they can also take measurements from your body and determine your health, mood and general wellbeing. This is nothing new, of course. I understand that Apple has a number of patents that relate to extended sensing of device users. What the article misses (and perhaps Intel have too) is that handsets are already well capable of making these measurements today. A few weeks ago the istethoscope application was the top selling app on iTunes - demonstrating the growing understanding of how to exploit smartphones for health and wellbeing. Heartbeat monitoring is a basic diagnosis tool, but has many uses in personal monitoring - level of exertion being the most obvious example. Smartphones have taken off big tim...