January NAMA Luncheon – The Future of Mobile Apps

I attended the January NAMA luncheon this past week and got the chance to hear Tim Moses, CEO of Sitemason, a web development and CMS-provider here in town, give a talk on the future of mobile app development.

He set up the talk by giving the status of the mobile app landscape: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android pretty much dominant the market while Blackberry users only check email. In other words, if you’re a marketer, you’re going to want to focus your efforts on those two markets.

But one of the most interesting things I think he did was to pull a quote from Matt Cutt’s blog, supposedly penned in 2008, but published January 3rd, 2011:

“More people will realize the inevitable truth that Bill Gates saw years ago and that Apple has chased since the introduction of the ROKR: of all the devices in your pocket, the only one you’re not willing to give up is your phone. Therefore, all personal gadgets will eventually be subsumed by your phone. Camera? Already part of your phone. Pen and notebook? Quite close. Video camera? Almost there, give it a couple more years. Car keys, wallet? It will come. In five years, your phone will have fingerprint authentication and be able to start your car or pay for groceries with contactless/RFID chips. It’s all coming. In 10 years you’ll use your phone to authenticate yourself at the doctor, authenticate prescriptions, and store your personal health history, not to mention all your desktop preferences, bookmarks, browser add-ons, and keys to which music you have permission to stream or download from the cloud.” I call this TRUE. Most people now agree that your phone is a personal computer in your pocket. Back in 2008, not everyone realized this.

I think that was (if true) a great prediction. Moses also followed that up with a stat that the most frequently used camera to upload photos to Flickr is the iPhone.

It’s amazing how we take all of this granted now. “People use an internet-enabled device that is with them at all times more often than their $1,000 (with lenses) Canon Rebel? Duh!”

Moses also shared a great anecdote of how his 7-year-old son asked to use his phone the other day because he lost something under the couch. It’s perhaps unsurprising that phones have become our cameras, our computers, our internet connections and, yes, our flashlights.

The two trends I keep hearing more and more about, as far as smart phones go, are the implications for e-commerce and augmented reality (AR). I hear less about accessing and managing personal medical records, but those implications are interesting as well.

Where do people find the time?

http://blip.tv/play/AbTSFAA

Growing up with the Internet (my parents got dial up when I was eight or nine years old), I always despised the television, but lacked the historical framework to explain why. Broadcast news and sitcoms were my usual targets, and I would contrast the passive isolation of watching television with the participatory, group nature of the Web.

Clay Shirky offers a persuasive framework for understanding how the Web is changing/has been changing/will continue to change society.

Enjoy.

Does Facebook’s ‘friend limit’ thwart the ability for mass organization?

A friend of mine sent me the following story of a Canadian union organizer banned from Facebook for making too many friends:

CUPE organizer/Labour Start correspondent Derek Blackadder’s foray into labor-related social networking was rudely interrupted by a warning from Facebook saying that he was making too many friends.

He then asked me, “Does this thwart the potential for organizing through Facebook?”

No, I said. And here’s why:

Obviously, if you want to get a message out to organize a protest, a prayer service or anything else , you’ll get that message out most QUICKLY by having a lot of friends, say, more than the 5,000 limit. Note I said most QUICKLY. (This is the equivalent of broadcasting a message through a traditional one-to-many medium).

But not necessarily most EFFECTIVELY, nor most SUCCESSFULLY, if the barometer for success is how many people take the desired action you’re hoping for.

Here’s the key

Successfully organizing on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean one person broadcasting a message to 5,000 people. If anything, that message is going to be watered down for broad appeal, less relevant to each specific person, and prompt the least (percentage wise) action.

The KEY is getting 50 people to each tell 50 people to teach tell 50 people, etc., etc., etc. (Or, really, 5 people to tell 5 people, etc., etc., etc.) Each message then becomes a relevant, targeted message, and a message that the recipient of which is most likely to pass on.

And that’s what gives social networking sites, such as Facebook, such a great potential for organization.

So you sort of have two issues: 1) crafting the right message and 2) getting that message to the right people.

Obviously what I’m describing here is simply viral marketing in theory (the practitioners of which will tell you in reality is anything but simple).