Surging Mobility - Home Phone Lines Disappearing

In yet another example of how industries are going throug rapid change, it was recently reported that twenty-five percent of U.S. households rely exclusively on mobile devices for communication, having cut their traditional land lines. According to the latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of wireless-only households continues to increase. In the first half of 2009, around 22% of all households did not have a landline.  It is worth pointing out that 15% of households that have a landline say they now receive almost all of their calls on their mobile phone. Therefore it is likely that the percentage using mobile exclusively will continue to increase and probably at a more rapid pace.

Younger adults under 35 are most likely to have cut their landlines, but the number of wireless-only households increased among all age groups. Half of all adults aged 25 to 29 now live in households that are wireless-only, but around 5% of adults over 65 don't use landlines. The full report from the CDC is here (PDF).

What Does This Mean?

This is an interesting trend because most mobile application development has been focused on the traveler. This will start to shift as users of mobile devices will look for applications that are usable at home or in the office.  For example, the market for in-home apps that control appliances will likely surge in the coming years. It also means that telecommunication issues around wireless and Internet, particularly as it pertains to maintaining a free Internet, will garner more and more attention.

The Quantified Self - Technology Implications in Everyday Life

Gary Wolf, writes about science and social issues for Wired, where he is a contributing editor. Gary is also working on a project with Kevin Kelly and a book termed, "The Quantified Self". He recently wrote an interesting article for NYT Magazine, The Data Driven Life which reflects on the surge of new devices that track everything and demonstrates his keen interest in the quantified self concept. The advent of inexpensive technologies is creating new ways for people to think about how they live. As I have spoken about recently at the IHRSA show for the health and fitness industry this is a significant trend that is and will continue to have tremendous impact and implications. Here are some excerpts from Gary's recent article:

Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them. 

“The real expertise you need is signal processing and statistical analysis,” says James Park, the chief executive and co-founder of Fitbit, a company that makes a tracker released late last year. The Fitbit tracker is two inches long, half an inch wide and shaped like a thick paperclip. It tracks movement, and if you wear it in a little elastic wristband at night, it can also track your hours of sleep. (You are not completely still when sleeping. Your pattern of movement, however, can be correlated with sleeping and waking, just as the acceleration of a runner’s foot reveals speed.) Park and his partner, Eric Friedman, first showed their prototype at a San Francisco business conference in the summer of 2008. Five weeks later, Park and Friedman, who are both 33, had $2 million in venture capital, and they were flying back and forth to Singapore to arrange production. Last winter they shipped their first devices.

At nearly the same time, Philips, the consumer electronics company, began selling its own tiny accelerometer-based self-tracker, called DirectLife, which, like the Fitbit, is meant to be carried on the body at all times. Zeo, a company based in Newton, Mass., released a tracker contained in a small headband, which picks up electrical signals from the brain, and uses them to compile the kind of detailed record of light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep that, until now, was available only if you spent the night in a sleep-research clinic. Lately I’ve been running into people who say they wear it every night. And Nike recently announced that its Nike+ system, one of the first personal speedometers, has been used by more than 2.5 million runners since its release in 2006.

Read the article and follow Gary and Kevin. They have a lot to say and share about what is happening with technology and its impact on our everyday lives and culture.

How Can You Connect With Customers Using Mobile Apps ?

How can you connect with your customers using mobile applications ? A recent WSJ article, "Services Tailor Apps for Small Businesses" written by Riva Richmond shared some important information about using new affordable tools to generate mobile applications. Mobility is surging and customers are increasingly accustomed to having information important to them delivered via their mobile telephones. Mobile Apps can be an effective way to connect with those customers. Here's what the WSJ article had to say:

In general, businesses that rely on repeat customers, like restaurants and retailers, or have intense interaction clients for some period of time, like real-estate brokers and car dealers, are the most likely to benefit from an app, said Greg Sterling, a senior analyst at Opus Research Inc.

"For ongoing, regular contact with customers that are on the go, it makes sense as a promotional or loyalty tool," Mr. Sterling says, since apps enable businesses to send out coupons and event details, including by text message, and customers can easily place orders or contact you for information.

But businesses that are looking primarily to attract new customers, such as doctors, lawyers and contractors, may find an app is a bit of a waste.

So how can you create mobile applications ? Technology is driving the cost of creating and deploying mobile applications down. Services including MobileAppLoader, SwebApps, Mobile Roadie (as shown above) and Kanchoo have emerged to help any sized company create apps. With easy-to-use online templates, much like those used to make low-cost Web sites, a basic iPhone app can take as little as 15 or 20 minutes to make and cost as little as $15 a month in hosting charges.

Are Companies "Slowly" Adopting Cloud Computing ? NYT Says Yes

Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance recently wrote in the NYT that companies are "Slowly" Joining the Cloud. They're joining alright, but probably more quickly than people might realize. This is particularly true when one realizes how fast startups and smaller more agile firms are jumping onto the Cloud bandwagon because it just doesn't make any sense not to. Here is a direct quote from the article.

When given a clean slate, many new companies have chosen a full embrace of the cloud model, figuring the technology industry has matured to the point were these types of services make basic business sense. For example, Arista Networks, a five-year-old company that makes networking equipment, runs its sales software with a cloud software company called NetSuite, its corporate e-mail on Google Apps, and other Web infrastructure with Amazon.com.

“It’s so much easier,” said Andreas von Bechtolsheim, the co-founder Arista and Sun Microsystems and one of earliest investors in Google and VMware. “For a new company like us, you would just never build a traditional data center anymore.”

And this is where the real story lies. You see while larger organizations might be wary of the Cloud, each day they fail to shift their IT infrastructure to the Cloud is a day the competition is gaining a leg. Ironically, the ROI for larger corporations adopting the cloud is much higher than for smaller ones from a strictly cost benefit standpoint. From a strategic point of view the ROI is even higher.

Yes companies are adopting the Cloud and for the ones doing it slowly or not doing it at all, they best reconsider their long term viability.



Google Will Make Us Smarter - Not Stupid

A recent Pew Internet research project on the Future of the Internet included a survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders to reveal perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The report addresses thought on the following issues:

Will Google make us stupid?
Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.” Read more...

The survey results are based on a non-random online sample of 895 internet experts and other internet users, recruited via email invitation, Twitter or Facebook from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University.  Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population other than the experts in this sample.

Watch Vint Cerf of Google talk about the future of the Internet below.