The Connected Future: Part III
This is the third article in our #ConnectedFuture series, which aims to provide an understanding of the key aspects that comprise the IoT and how it can be applied to your daily life and business needs. Be sure to follow along all month as we share our insights to the hyper-connected future.
Reaching 88MPH
In 2007, Apple changed everything with the release of the iPhone, the world’s first hyper-connected device. This advancement moved mobile technology from business-driven, commercial applications, to a new era of empowered personal computing. Few technologies — printing press, steam engines, electricity, etc. — have had the same impact on the world, at both the consumer and business level. As momentous as the debut of the iPhone was, it wasn’t our first introduction to mobile.
Mobile technologies, as we understand them today — in many forms — have been around since the early 1900s. Walkie-talkies and two-way radios were some of the first attempts to use mobile communication technologies to add new layers of connectivity. Until the mid-1900s, these technologies were our looking glass into the future of connectedness. That is until, in 1946, Bell Labs invented the first mobile phone service, establishing the first network for mobile communication. Since that time, we’ve seen the mobile phone evolve from brick phones to hybrid satellite/GSM phones, to Blackberries, and finally to the phones we know and love today.
In years past, new technologies often face a slow evolution, gradually working their way into our lives and becoming part of the world we know. It took the television nearly a quarter of a decade to reach a quarter of the American population, or what might be considered mass adoption. Mobile technologies shared no such fate, reaching similar levels of adoption in nearly half that time.
While there are many factors to acknowledge the meteoric rise, this is a staggering rate of adoption, and only seems to be accelerating.
For years, many have touted mobile’s evolution as one of the most impactful technologies in years. Predictions of scale, impact, and success started rolling in not long after its release.
“Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014”
was the headline summarizing the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. While there are many aspects of the mobile revolution, it’s become pretty clear that for any technology to succeed, it must adapt and evolve. Mobile is now in a constant state of evolution, adapting and evolving to the predatory nature of newer, faster-growing technologies.
The Next Wave of Mobile
All aspects of IoT — from Big Data, to Cloud, to security and analytics — are critical to its prosperity, but mobile plays an especially critical role. It is the brain that ultimately drives its successful commercialization. Before IoT reaches commercial success, we’ll experience another important point in the evolution of mobile: the final wave of mobile. The next, and likely final wave will guide a new interaction model, from which all new technologies will be a continuation of mobile. Those products — both mobile and other — that succeed will harness the ability to: anticipate, adapt, and act.
Anticipate
The hyper-connected world — including cars, homes, and wearables — is creating new user access points. These new points create opportunities for users and businesses to derive value from their devices in new and interesting ways. They also unearth some potential pain points stemming from our growing expectation of immediacy.
In today’s on-demand economy, we want our files to be immediately available via Dropbox, our images to share without lag time, our movies and TV shows to stream effortlessly, and our purchases to be swift and secure. Companies, like Postmates and Uber’s, success is driven by putting information at our fingertips and immediately delivering instant gratification. Mobile has unlocked the first wave of IoT potential but also continues to offer new design and technological challenges that must be addressed as we move into hyper-connectivity.
Going forward, users will demand that their needs be met not in real time, but before they even know they have them. Using data — either stored in the cloud or collected locally on your mobile device — users will expect the next wave of mobile to anticipate their every need.
Adapt
Our ability to adapt is what has kept humans — and businesses — at the top of the food chain. Over the years, as the internet found its way into our mobile devices, our ability to produce software (apps) that altered our usage and improved our experience grew alongside it. Apple and Google created a system where anyone can become part of the mobile revolution, at almost no cost. In time, our approach to software, and apps, has changed and adapted. Apps have transformed and reshaped entire industries, and done so in short order.
The evolution of software — along with the ever-present need to stay competitive — has companies moving away from large-scale applications and software tools to more nimble, useful apps. For business, the opportunities presented by intelligent software are exploding, and the risks of being caught on the wrong side of this transformation are dramatically increasing. Those who have correctly calibrated the impact of software are winning. Those who have miscalibrated are losing. Apps that will survive must find ways to be constantly present and consistently useful, lest they be forgotten or worse, deleted.
Act
The expectations that mobile has afforded us are just the beginning. With each new level of connectivity comes an accelerating need to provide seamless experiences between users and devices. As apps start to anticipate our needs and adapt to our feedback, the call to act will be imminent.
The pervasiveness of mobile technologies has changed the way we buy products, read news, connect with friends and family, and even regulate the temperature in our homes. Mobile devices have become a tool with which we can get complex things done, efficiently. In this new on-demand economy, we’ve learned to rely on technology to provide a service, app, or new experience for our every want and need. In the next wave of mobile, our devices will be expected to not only anticipate and adapt, but to intelligently act on our behalf.
What Comes Next?
As mobile continues to evolve, so will its place in the technology food chain. We’re likely to see mobile become a hub for additional devices within IoT, controlling, commanding, and defining interactions across a hyper-connected world. The next wave of mobile will be more intuitive than ever, opening up possibilities for more natural interactions with our digital and physical surroundings. Are you ready for the next wave of mobile?
Written by Kevin Kirkpatrick (Partner & Co-Founder) and Ryan Peterson (Partner & Co-Founder) at Uprise.
