When thinking about the new new thing, it’s quite easy to lose sight of opportunities in older technologies, such as Voice. Voice was obviously the first service to emerge in mobile telephony (that was the only thing you could do with the early phones, Best Beloved) and is still easily the highest revenue earner for operators around the world.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) pre-dates even the first mobile, being first deployed in the 1970s and really taking off in the 1980s. Uses ranged from annoying customers to screening calls in call centres (Press 1 to book a ticket etc), to voting, entertainment (and sex) and pre-recorded information, such as weather, horoscopes (and sex). To give you an idea of scale,Wikipedia claims that today “Currently, IVRs are serving more customers than all fast food and coffee chains combined”, although a citation or geographic area for the information is missing. But it’s big.
A parallel theme (bear with me a moment) is that in developing countries, the mobile is the de facto digital device for many people. In countries like India, Indonesia and China, many more people have leapfrogged the PC and do everything from make calls to surf the mobile web on their phones. AdMob has nearly 500 million page views a month in India, as an example, and it’s our second largest market. In China, 5 Billion mobile web pages are viewed every day.
Another theme we’ve been writing about is that companies like P+G are looking for their next Billion consumers in order to continue growing outside the saturated markets of the West - after all, it’s hard to get us to use more soap powder or toothpaste, but many of the developing markets represent virgin territory for these products. At the same time, traditional media has little reach and impact for many of these consumers - they don’t read the press, watch TV or have PCs. But they do have mobiles, making it potentially the only media option available.
So where am I going with this? One of the final megatrends in developing countries is illiteracy. India has 250 million people who can’t read or write. There’s at least another 100 million in China - and that’s the number they admit to. In reality, it’s probably far more. And in total an estimated 1.2 Billion people in the world are illiterate.
This raises all kinds of issues for us as a society as a whole. Illiteracy is strongly correlated to poverty. Illiterate people are usually poorly educated too, making them vulnerable to extremist ideologies and propaganda.
But while illiterate citizens might not be able to read or write, they can speak and understand speech, which means that mobile IVR is a perfect way to level the playing field for these people. They can compete and use telephone services on an equal basis to their literate compatriots, whether these might be mobile banking solutions to education programmes, or social media to job seeking.
There may also be a role for advertising to play in this programme, by doing what it always does - providing the funding model for free-to-consume media and services. Perhaps advertisers interested in reaching out to this market might be in a position to fund and produce the content. Could yesterday’s Soap Opera become today’s Soap School?
So if you’re reading this and looking for your next big idea, please have this one with my compliments. There’s an addressable market of 1 billion+ people out there, which by any definition is a big one.
I’ve been a long time fan of Clay Shirky. For instance, I loved his seminal “Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data” essay back in 2003 - still a must-read if you haven’t.
He’s always great value as a writer and as a speaker, so if you haven’t seen his TED talk on mobile, twitter and a few other areas, watch the video I’ve embedded below.
Clay picks up on a lot of the themes we’ve been writing about for a long time at MobHappy, including the idea that mobiles will be one of the first technologies where reverse global tech transfer takes place. In other words, how people use mobile in developing countries will influence how we use them in the developed world. The example he gives is vote monitoring in Nigeria was transferred to monitoring the US elections, but we’ll see many more in areas like mobile payments, social media, recruitment and indeed, politics.
Another case study he gives concerns how politics is using social media. In Obama’s case, to establish meaningful dialogue (ie two way) and in China how the ruling party is losing control of the political agenda. I think that eventually, we’ll see Direct Democracy arrive to replace representative democracy, but that’s another story.
I’ve written about microfinancing a few times in the past, most recently about Kiva, and now I’m pleased to see that microfinance has met mobile.
If microfinance is a new idea to you, it has really exploded in the last few years, ever since the Grameen Bank pioneered the concept in Bangladesh. Read more about Nobel Prize winner and founder of the industry Muhammad Yunus here, but the basic concept is lending tiny amounts of money to the poor in developing countries to enable them to start or expand businesses. It’s distinct from charity, as the entrepreneur is expected to repay the loan in due course.
Mobile Movement takes the concept to the mobile - actually a more relevant channel than the PC in many ways, certainly as far as the borrower is concerned. In developing markets, people are far more likely to have access to a mobile than a PC, as any MobHappy reader knows.
However, not only is mobile used to facilitate the loan and subsequent processing, it’s then employed to provide ongoing mentoring and support to the entrepreneurs via sms and email, as well as allowing the entrepreneurs to feedback progress, including via MMS photos. The MMS idea sounds fabulous, although not sure how practical inter-continental interoperability is in real life.
I think that this is the year when creativity comes to Location and some very interesting things happen as a result - albeit in a small way. We’ll start to move away from find-my-nearest and simple buddy trackers and start to see innovation.
So, I was interested to see Skyhook’s Ted Morgan’s presentation, which came out of the big Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona last week. I’d love to have been there, but had a clash. Hopefully next year!
Since January 2009, you can see that innovation has indeed exploded by doubling the number of location services in the market - largely led by iPhone, of course. Creativity has also come to call, with a whole bunch of services from tracking your location history when you’re out drinking, seeing claimed UFO sightings in your area and a kids’ car game based on spotting state licence plates (the furthest away states are worth more points).
Of course, one of the visions behind these types of services is hyperlocal advertising, which will provide an important part of the commercial engine, much as AdMob does today for many Apps, especially in Apple’s Apps Store. However, this has many logistical and supply issues to overcome , where technology can only help in a limited way.
Anyone interested in Location Based Advertising would be advised to read my free White Paper (email me for a copy), as everyone else in this game seems to have a copy. I’ve sent out more than 5,000 in the last 8 years!
Raimo van der Klein, who among other things is a founder of the excellent MoMoNe (Mobile Monday Nederlands) has just launched Layar, the world’s first mobile augmented reality browser.
If your response is WFT? - maybe you shouldn’t be here? As chance would have it, I was writing about the very same idea this morning in my vision for mobiles in 10 year’s time, when I wrote that the display for mobiles would be via:
a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.
Layar enables V1.0 of that idea for Android phones. You start the app, which automatically opens the camera. You point the camera at the scene around you and the phone works out where you are (via GPS) and the direction you’re pointing in (via the compass) and thus, what you’re looking at. Then the digital world is overlayed onto the real world with anonated information on topics like bars and restaurant info, jobs, houses for sale and ATMs.
You can even go totally digital, as I suggested, if you want to look at say, a map view or drill down for more information.
Watch the video and let your inner geek marvel.
It starts in Amsterdam this month and tomorrow, the world. I think this idea has the potential to go all the way and coming to an iPhone near you, will have the scale to drive adoption.
I’ve been writing over at Opinions in Mobile for a while now. The idea is that they send out a question very week to a panel of industry thought leaders (and me) and everyone responds with a short and pithy post. There really are some heavyweight thinks from around the world involved - I won’t give you examples, as then I’d have to list the lot - so it’s worth checking out.
This week, we were asked the question “How do you think mobile phones will look like in 10 years?”.
This is something that I ponder quite a lot in the back of my brain and I thought I’d share my response here.
In 10 years, we’ll be well into the post PC era and laptops will seem as quaint and nostalgic as the ginormous brick phones of the 80s. We may even have blown ourselves up, been decimated by a new virus (manmade or otherwise) or even be in a post-Singularity world, in which case, all bets are off.
But assuming that the world progresses without a major Black Swan event (big assumption!), mobiles as visible, handheld devices will have disappeared. They’ll be replaced by a tiny ear piece, an equally tiny hand controller (let’s visualize that as a ring, for the sake of illustration) and a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.
Controlling these virtual mobiles will be by a mix of gestures and haptics, with a voice option for those of you reading this who never got the hang of fluent gesturespeak. A common sight will be middle aged people wondering around twitching, waving their arms around and bumping into things as they try to make a phone call. The froody 20 year olds will be in total command without apparently moving a muscle.
By that time, it’ll be impossible to live any kind of mainstream life without a mobile. Banking, payments, shopping, access to your house and car – all will be via your virtual mobile. All interfacing with Government bill be done via mobile too, including daily mandatory voting on key issues of the day as representative democracy is replaced by Direct Democracy – a result of the repeated parliamentary scandals of the Blair and succeeding Governments.
Over 50’s mainly opt to live in sheltered accommodation, which offer largely tech free environments, where they can be seen hunched over old-style netbooks playing Solitaire and wondering why the kids of today never reply to their emails.
Here’s the final piece based on Omar’s experiences on successfully building a business worth hundreds of millions dollars in just a few years. Today we cover Communication and a final piece of advice that he says is the most important of all.
Communication
Don’t hide anything
It’s not worth the trouble and it will come to light eventually.
Re-ask the question if necessary (get a real answer and don’t just go through the motions)
Some people have conversations as if the only thing needed is for both people to move their mouths and make noise. If you are in a conversation make sure you are both really saying something. Feel free to challenge people on fluff until something of substance is uttered.
Russell adds: Omar walks the walk on this one, for sure. I’ve frequently heard him ask the same question numerous times until all is clear.
Be right (unless you have a right to be wrong)
It’s ok to say you don’t know, but it’s not really ok to be dead wrong about things you SHOULD know. Choose your words carefully; people build their opinions about each other through lots of small interactions.
Say no or say when
If someone asks you for something provide them with a clear “No” or a delivery date. Constantly providing open ended “I’ll look into it” answers generally builds frustration after a time.
Russell adds: Take note Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, BD, Finance (is there anyone I’ve left out?) everywhere.
Most important
Don’t be afraid
Don’t be afraid to fail, don’t be afraid to get fired.
Don’t be afraid to make a mistake or change your mind.
If you find that you are doing or not doing something simply due to a fear of what might happen, chances are you need to rethink the problem.
Fear is an awful guide and people tend to be awful judges of the true “downside”. One of the most amusing things in the world is watching MBA students at the best business schools in the world fret over their career opportunities as if they will be living out of a cardboard box if they don’t get the right internship.
The best advice I have is that whatever you do, it should be done as if you are reaching for a new opportunity, rather than shrinking from a phantom anxiety.
Last night, I gave a speech at the American German Business Club about technology and The Singularity, which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The audience was very mixed, ranging in technology sophistication hugely, so I pitched it at a fairly tech-lite level, which seemed to work OK. Overall, the talk was very well received, with lots of questions, which is always a good sign.
There isn’t much point in sharing the slides, as they were largely image based, but I thought it would be interesting to write things up, as I think I do raise some important and fairly fundamental questions about the whole of humankind - dramatic though this sounds.
I started off by demonstrating that technological “advances” are frequently not remotely democratic - they’re decided by a small cadre of relevant business people or scientists. Wider audiences aren’t consulted, including our elected representatives or we, the people, the ordinary citizens, whose lives are affected by such innovation.
I cited quite a few examples such as the prevalence of CCTV in urban areas in the UK, where there is now 1 camera deployed for every 14 people and where 25% of the world’s CCTV are focused. The UK is being studied as a potential role model by other countries, despite CCTV being known to be inefficient as either a deterrent (see Banksy’s famous graffito) or as an efficient means to apprehend culprits. Police are generally very reluctant to use CCTV evidence in court and those cases which make it that far are thrown out 75% of the time.
The point about this isn’t whether CCTV monitoring our every action is a good thing or not. But the fact that we haven’t been consulted on any level about this. And as I’ve said before, this may sound like great technology to the law abiding citizen, but if we ever did have a regime change (and there were plenty in the last 100 years), it would give the new Government complete and utter control over us all. And that’s not even considering the potential of CCTV evidence wrongly convicting the innocent from time to time.
However, it’s not just about CCTV. Other examples are Google’s Streetview, location tracking technology and the huge centralised Government databases that we’re starting to see emerge - which have a horrible habit of being installed on laptops that Civil Servants seem to be incapable of taking with them when they get off trains.
We simply have not been consulted.
Now, if you don’t know about The Singularity, I should preface this next part by saying that I am not a conspiracy theorist, nor barking mad in the sense that I believe the world is ruled by a race of lizards. There are many serious and academic writings on The Singularity and it is not a figment of my imagination. Serious scientists with serious qualifications are tackling this issue.
The (non-technical) explanation of The Singularity is that we’re getting better at creating Artificial Intelligence all the time - huge advances are being made. Sooner or later, we’ll break through and create the first generation of a computer that can design the next generation of computer. Once that happens, subsequent generations will be developed increasingly quickly - not one per decade, but perhaps one a month, a week, a day - who knows? As each generation is significantly better, you can see that we have a machine at some point that is infinitely powerful in comparison to what we have today and far superior to our own monkey evolved brains.
The theory is that this God-like creature will take over from us and that’s The Singularity. I use God-like intentionally, as one Christian definition is that s/he would be omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnipresent (always present everywhere). You couldn’t describe this creation better.
From there, you have 4 possible scenarios that I can think of.
Scenario 1 is favoured by the scientists who are leading us in this direction, without consulting their fellow citizens (see a theme here?). They believe that this creation would essentially be benign and anyway, would have controls built in to its programming, such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which essentially state that a robot or computer can’t harm mankind.
Just assuming for a moment that such a machine decides to honour these Laws, it would thus create a kind of heavenly world, where wars, famine and terrorism were abolished. Work would be much altered, if it existed at all. And death would be terminated too - yes, that means that if you hang on until this happens, you would be immortal. The timeframe most frequently cited for this is 30 years maximum, so it’s a real prospect for most of us.
Immortality might be rather better than it sounds though. No matter how many great experiences you pack in, “life” might become pointless and boring after what, 500 years, 1,000, 1,000,000? Lots of writers have played with this idea ranging from Swift to Julian Barnes to The Singularity classic The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where the indestructible and immortal inhabitants of that post-singularity world are driven to more and more extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex as they struggle to find fresh and interesting things to do.
Scenario 2 is the Terminator plot. Machines somehow overcome their reliance on Asimov’s laws and set out to kill all of mankind. Despite the heroic efforts of John Connor and crew, waging war in this context is a little like playing chess against the afore-mentioned God. We wouldn’t stand a chance.
Personally, I think if it gets this far, this might be a pretty likely outcome - or at least as likely as any other. Humanity would be the only possible obstacle to the future of the machine and if we could be eliminated quickly and easily, why not? It would be like us deciding to eliminate mosquitoes, which we would if it could be done quickly and easily.
Scenario 3 would see some kind of merging of man and machine to create a kind of hyper intelligent and super strong race of beings, with a human soul - whatever that might be. With our new powers, both intellectual and physical, it might be possible to realise intergalactic travel and, if I’m not mixing my sci-fi franchises too much, boldly go where no man has gone before, while simultaneously saying “I’ll be back”.
Finally, Scenario 4 says, OK, so the machines bear us no ill will and can’t harm us. But there’s nothing in the Three Laws that say they need to treat us well or as special citizens in any way. Maybe they’ll look at precedents from the human era and see how we treated inferior species - like animals under the factory farming system and conclude that ethical treatment is to squash us all into cages where movement is practically impossible?
The point is, we don’t know what the outcome of all this might be and neither do the scientists bringing about this brave new world, or Humanity 2.0, as I called it, somewhat unoriginally - I mean it was that or Machine-gate, right? And if you factor in a dash of chaos theory, no one knows what will happen.
Now, we might think that these risks are all perfectly acceptable as we stumble towards our destiny of self-created heaven or hell. But surely, we should be talking about this more? Surely citizens should have a say in the future of mankind? Surely this is a debate that politicians (bless ‘em) should be having too?
So my simple message is; tell your friends and start spreading the word. With all due respect to the brilliant scientists taking us towards this post-Singularity world, please don’t presume that we have agreed to this. Please take the time to educate us and debate it.
Consult with your fellow Citizens about the future of humankind.
