The future is bright but is it mobile?

Brief History and introduction

There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16!

Current situation

Mobile phones are everywhere. We may think that without laptops or desktops, electronic communication is difficult or we cannot conduct electronic transactions etc. Yep, that is an entirely incorrect assumption as whatever we may do with laptops/desktops we can either already do with mobile phones or we can pass that problem to the myriad of firms who specialise in such solutions to make it happen. What is fuelling the adoption of this small device to do everything? Well, firstly as stated above it is the sheer fast coverage that has been enabled by the explosion in mobile devices. How it has spread so fast and in many cases bypassed the landline/analogue scenario, is quite amazing. Many countries used to have outdated systems and waiting queues for landlines that ran into years, in many cases. Enter the mobile phone. You want one and you want it now? Okay, we aim to please was the response by the mobile operators. Secondly, in the developed world, the cheap costs contributed further to ubiquitous adoption.

Now we live in almost two parallel worlds. One world is dominated by the developing countries that use the mobile phone for payment of goods, banking, medical alerts and general communication at rates that they can afford. The second world is the developed countries and the adoption of smartphones, even by the consumers. As these users are considerably affluent, they are looking for more ways of using these devices to do almost anything. Attend a meeting and they want to know about more people who they have something in common with, whether at that meeting they can locate their next marketing director or whether they want to do their weekly grocery shopping.

The Future

I predict that within the next five to ten years, laptops, desktops, land lines and client side installed applications will become obsolete.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the future – One world, One device!

Yes, it’s true. Why would we need any more than one device.

Here is the story of Paul in the not too distant future.

It was 8am in New York and Paul was ready to attend his first meeting for 9am. While shaving using his mobile (Yep, okay, maybe not), he was lost in thought and was wandering whether to have breakfast delivered to the room or to go downstairs. This thought was quickly interrupted by the phone that was still charging; he looked up at the head up display just above the sink in the mirror trying to recognise the number. He didn’t have to look too long as he could see the silhouette of the automatic doctor telling him quite loudly that he had to take his medication.

He was just about to phone for breakfast to be delivered to his room when the auto doctor reappeared. He knew he wouldn’t go away, so he opened the tablet bottle and took his tablets (RFID tag triggers that the bottle has opened & transmits signal via phone).

At approximately, 905 am, the phone rang for attending the meeting. The Head up display showed that six people were in attendance virtually around a table including him and the meeting started. During the meeting, another colleague had to be called but no one knew his mobile number. A quick look through the mobile device’s address book gave them the number of his landline. Luke, picked up his phone and told them that he was actually in Argentina (VOIP enabled extension on follow me). The meeting recommenced and concluded around approx 1030am.

Paul looked at his Calendar and noticed that he had a presentation and a whitepaper to write for a conference later in the week. He sat back in his chair and enabled the head up display. As all the company’s files were held in the Cloud, he called up the necessary applications via voice commands and finished his work by approx 2pm.  While looking at some stats, he was thinking to himself how far the banking world had come from the days of the 2009 bailout and reliance on in house systems.

As he was networking in the evening, he decided to look at the attendee list to identify and mark the people he wanted to meet in order of priority. He also set auto replies for these people and others who he could not meet.

As he was leaving the hotel room, he paid his bill.

The future is One world, One device!