Mobile first or death

Mobile first enterpreneurship

Roger Lee from battery ventures talks about going mobile first or dying. http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/12/software-entrepreneurs-must-go-mobile-first-or-die/.

So, he is absolutely right. I was talking to my Dad in India the other day. He expressed the absolute delight in using his Samsung smartphone for various tasks as opposed to his laptop. It got me thinking, how many things will get migrated from the laptop to the mobile device.

1. Social already on mobile
2. Search already dominating on mobile
3. Messaging, calling, recording all moving to mobile
4. Email and minor publishing moving to mobile
5. E-commerce moving to mobile
6. Healthcare moving to mobile
7. Banking, financing moving to mobile
8. Sharing (photos, posts, etc..) all moving to mobile

In fact, I can’t think of things beyond hardcore coding (say Xcode, Visual Studio), desktop publishing (Adobe, Microsoft), heavy Audio/Video mixing and Enterprise Software (the “traditional” kind — think SAP Financials or SCM). Can you think of a large category apart from these that will be done primarily on the desktop?

As the developer of a mobile consumer health care product, I’m acutely aware that minimizing the intention action time lag is important for uptake. You feel the need to interact with your data (input, get it out etc.). Doing it on a smartphone is so convinent that it is a no brainer. That is even before getting to the sensor abilities (GPS, Voice, Camera, Gestures…).

Prediction: By 2020 about 80% of all activity relating to information technology will be done on the smartphone.