Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.

It is not broken, it is a feature...

If you are in the tech industry, you have probably heard this one, usually said as a joke.

If I have to explain any further, this refers to when the developer or Marketing finds an unexpected bug or defect and -BAM- (please draw starburst around it...) turns it into a new feature.

What is interesting is that the opposite is also true. New features that are misinterpreted can often be taken as a defect. I am an example of this with my newly-found learning curve on touchscreen phones, while I am still trying to make use of that muscle memory, now with almost no other tactile feedback besides haptics.

This also happens at any level of human life. One example is the controversial ADHD. Most people that I have known with this syndrome tend to be extremely creative and intelligent. So maybe it IS a feature!

I am trying to convince my wife on some of my "features"....

The "unconvergence" age

Everything is cyclic. In business and technology we see it all the time. We push, push, push and there is a point where the market stops us as saying "that's just way too much".

The convergent device has been great. Being able to integrate phone with PDA and then being able to GPS locate and email almost everything on the device is just fantastic.

However, I find myself more and more in a situation where I would rather prefer a second device, an example is when I am driving following a map and suddenly somebody calls.

The question here is how do we approach this? I can think of three basic solutions:

1.- Better and smarter peripherals. If the audio interface and a second display on goggles could be an option, maybe -and just maybe- we won't need a second device.

2.- The dedicated device collection. We tried this, and while we somewhat like it, it is not the Holy Grail. Carrying a collection of dedicated devices is not a good answer.

3.- The second, multipurpose, connected device. One is not enough? Try two! Not a brilliant idea but if we can limit the number of devices that we carry to two, and both can do everything we can dream of, we also get redundancy. To some extent this is happening with the arrival of the iPad. In fact many appleheads just think in "number of Apples I own". Good for Jobs, that is Steve Jobs.

4.- The interactive environment. Let's expand on concept 1. Turn your car into a peripheral. When you sit in your car, your device works like a security token and information is shared. Suddenly you have access to the map on your personal device and display it on the dashboard, or your phone can use the car stereo, and the car marks your calendar for the oil change. To some extent we are there. Now expand that thought to Home and the big screen TV, or the office's keyboard, mouse and monitor and desk phone.

Whichever way we go, the key here is to establish the real, secure Personal Area Network. Is Bluetooth ready for this?

The mobility I want

High Speed Connectivity....Got it
Mobile Data Availability....Got it
Network Security and Privacy....Got it
Data-Voice convergence....Got it
Fixed Mobile Convergence....Got it

So what's next on the list?

It is now common to see business people poking compulsively on their Blackberries or any other mobile device while they wait for a flight or to be called for a meeting. Some seem to try to accelerate time or seem to be hoping that looking at their Blackberries will solve the immediate issue they are facing at a moment. Kids are connected now also, their version comes in a different, hipper device, the SideKick. SideKick's big screen and friendly application software promises a better experience when surfing the web and connecting to an IM service. The übercool have their own device to resort to, long awaited, rumoured and recently released iPhone.

All these devices provide ubiquitous, pervasive connectivity and they are constantly menacing people's "real" lives, transporting them to some other place through the ether. I can foresee individuals suffering from anxiety and being disconnected from reality, all with the help of these devices.

A solution for eliminating or mitigating this should be next in our list.

Have you ever had a personal assistant? or a "Secretary", as they used to be called some time ago?

That is exactly what I would like to have in my mobile device (or hosted somewhere and have it associated to it). A "truly personal" Gatekeeper, a Majordomo that would be capable of separating our personal and business lives and that will enable us,broadband addicts, to devote our undivided attention to whatever requires it at the moment. A piece of software capable of learning from instructions issued over time and to derive a set of rules to be used generally.

It would go something like this:

• I am in a meeting and my associate calls me. My device knows that I am in a meeting, so his call goes directly to my voicemail, and I don't receive a notification until I leave the meeting, which allows me to stay concentrated on the meeting.
• My wife calls minutes later, she has an emergency, has lost one of her credit cards and requires a PIN from me. When she calls, because her number has been highlighted, she gets a message that I am in a meeting, without the need of me picking up the call and she is given the option to "barr in" if it is an emergency. My device starts to ring with a disctinctive tone, I excuse myself, pickup the call and give her the PIN. Back in the meeting.
• The device also alerts me later that my anyversary is coming up in a week. But I did not put in this alarm specifically. The device noticed that next week is going to be an extremely busy week and is "concerned" that I will not be able to get her a gift. It is alerting me both that the anyversary is coming up and that I better get a gift now as I will not be able next week.
• A salesperson calls. The number is not registered in my contacts so the call is diverted to my assistant. She screens the call and figures out what is it about, confers with me, and it happens to be a salesperson of a shop I called to get that gift!, I tell her to transfer the call and she does redirect the call back again to my device.
• Later in the day I am at the gym. My boss calls me. He wants something to be done tomorrow, it is not extremely urgent, but he wants to make sure that he does not forget. So he is given the option to leave a voice mail, he is also given the option of having the voice maildelivered to my email, where I will check it the following day.
• The device starts alerting me now, 5 hours before my flight back home. The device is aware of a traffic congestion that has been reported on the way to the airport and is taking measures to make sure that I get to the Airport in time. It also gives me the option of calling the airline to change my reservation, but is already connected via XML to their system and shows me my options. I decide to take the same flight, si the device reconfirms my seat.
• I return home, we are at a dinner. My email system shuts down and stops notifying about new incoming mail, it also places a message on my IM, saying "In a dinner! - Chat with you later!".
• We go for a vacation on a long weekend. The autoresponder is configured automatically. I am back to work on Wednesday. On my way to work, my device gives me a summary of what happened during the days I was out.

The interesting part would be to build all these rules from our behaviour and how we handle each situation in real-time.

Mobility Nirvana, connected when I can, and focused when I need to. No need for programming, simplicity of use.

iPhone came - Some friends are coming along

So far Apple has experienced a spectacular product success with its iPod line of music players. Apple's statistics indicate that 100 million iPods have been sold. This 29th of June, Apple is releasing its latest creation, the iPhone converged device, the media is all hyped-up about the features, the functionality and the prohjected sales of 10 million of these devices.

The iPhone is a data-centric device, and as such it is being offered with a diversity of Mobile Internet plans, including an All-you-can-eat option.

This is what is really thrilling and disruptive of the iPhone. The instantaneous creation of 10 million mobile Internet users with ubiquitous Internet and with an almost as good experience as on a desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

10 million new users, accessing broadband content on the Internet, whenever, wherever they want. The first impact on this of course is the traffic, a maximum of almost 4000 additional Gigabytes on the network. This might not sound as much considering the enourmous capacities built into todays networks.

The real impact is of business and social nature. The introduction of the telephone, the Internet and -most lately- a high grade of adoption of broadband access have reshaped the business world and the lives of people here in the US and around the world. Business models unthinkable of before, become possible by the adoption of these technologies. Online document delivery, application hosting, such as Google Documents and Spreadsheets, photo printing through the web, Vonage, Skype, and software and video downloads as well as the 99c/song model would not be possible without broadband.

In the same way, the availability (and the assumption of a demographic with the availability) will eventually lead to new business models to be discovered. The exact successful ones are difficult to predict as they require that fortunate factor of being accepted by the public. Mobility is being replaced by pervasiveness.