This blog post has two meanings, hence the title. First part is about my blog that has been dead for a while (over a year in fact) and I have been thinking about writing one last post saying good bye and thanks to all my past readers and asking them to continue following me in Twitter or Facebook since that is where I do socialize on the Web these days (as the joke in the title say, social networking killed the blogging star even though I was not that much of a star but the rest is totally true).

Then few days ago, I got an email from Rudy De Waele inviting me (thanks a lot Rudy for the opportunity) along with many others to take the chance that we are entering a new decade to send him my list of what are the 5 game changing trends for the mobile industry in the next decade. This is the second part of the title.

In his email, Rudy asked us to post in our blog the predictions so we could explain them there in more detail (the rules were to send him only one sentence per trend). Then I realized that I did had a blog that I started way back in 2005 (5 years in Internet time is a long time ago…) and that 2009, for the first time, was the first year that I had not updated my blog a single time (In fact, it has been already a year and a half). The main reason I stopped writing in my blog besides lack of time and the fact that, in spite of what most people think, I do have a personal live, has been the raise of social networking and sites like Facebook or Twitter where I became active since mid 2007. Those sites allow me to communicate with people much more frequently and in a much more dynamic way and specially since I got an iPhone and had both Facebook and Twitter access from it (with a great user experience by the way), then the urge to write a post about something to tell people has pretty much disappear. Now I can do it in real time, sharing quick thoughts, links, comment about what is happening at the moment if I am attending a conference or seeing a talk and get immediate feedback, something I will never achieve with a blog. I still like the more permanent nature of blog posts and, of course, the length, but I realized that I am not going to be updating my blog frequently enough anymore so it is time to officially close it. I have even now changed my twitter username from @unpocodetodo to @carlosdomingo to signal the divergence of my Twitter account from my blog.

And what could be the best way to close it than talking about what has become one of my passions for the last 3,5 years, the mobile industry and its (imminent now) convergence with the Internet industry? When I started my current job at Telefónica 3,5 years ago we had long discussions about whether mobile Internet was going to take off and when. On one side, there were the ones that claimed that this will take very long time to happen, that flat rates for mobile will never arrived because the economics did not add up, that user experience on phones was inferior than on desktop, that needs were different, etc. These are probably the same ones that never saw the raise of mobile phones when they started because mobile phones were bulky, expensive and quality of voice was bad compared to fix line phones. On the other hand, there were the more optimists and visionaries saying that this was going to be the biggest revolution since the Web. Obviously, I sided with the second group. I am optimistic by nature but I had also spend most of my time in Japan for the last 15 years before returning to Spain and I had seen there that mobile Internet was a reality since long ago. Even though people tend to discount what happens in Japan because of cultural differences, in this case there was no reason why mobile Internet was not going to take off in the West as well. Inevitably, someone was going to build a cool phone with a good user experience, a rich application and content ecosystem and network costs will come down so that flat rates on fast networks become a reality. Then Apple´s iPhone came along with the deals with the major operator in each country and all that became true.

Unfortunately, I cannot now look back and see what is happening in Japan since although some trends are still showing there before the rest of the world (think of mobile books, mobile social networks or mobile payments) now the field has leveled and we are all at a similar point in technology usage time. So what´s next? Here is my pick for the next decade:

• Ubiquity of cheap mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of connected devices (ala Kindle also, not just phones) and M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device). This is perhaps the most important game-changing trend as mobile broadband connectivity is the basis for the explosion in usage of any other type of services and devices. Throughout the next decade, we are going to see 3G+ penetration reaching 90% in Western Europe and North America and +50% in the rest of the world. Also, we are going to start seeing the first LTE deployments in the second half of the decade. As with any other technology, 3G+ technologies (3G, HSDPA, etc.) will become cheaper and cheaper, past networks cost will get amortized and inevitable this will lead to much cheaper mobile broadband (after all, we are in a deflationary industry). Ubiquity of mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of m-X services: mobile health, mobile commerce, mobile banking, mobile education, mobile gaming, mobile multimedia, etc…And particularly in developing economies, the mobile phone will become the personal computer. Moreover, ubiquity of cheap mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of Kindle-like devices that are preconnected to a mobile broadband connection. As has been also noted by the recent report on mobile Internet by Morgan Stanley, we will have 1 order of magnitude more devices connected to the Internet than ever and the majority of them will do through a mobile broadband connection. M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device) via mobile broadband will also explode due to the availability of this wealth of cheap mobile broadband and in 10 year, more machines will be connected to the mobile network than persons.

• Convergence of desktop and mobile web into one web, everything moving to the cloud and “the end” of native mobile applications and application stores. Today, a lot of people are still talking about the mobile Web or mobile applications and building specific mobile applications using specific mobile technologies. Two things will change. First, the majority of the applications what we will use will be the same, indistinctly of the platform. Even now that we are still at the infancy of usage of mobile Internet applications, this is already happening as the top applications that people use on mobile are the same ones that people use on the Web (think of Facebook). The second consequence is that people will build Web platforms on the cloud that will be access from browsers in different devices and the platform will adapt its features depending on the browser requests. This does not mean that the usage from a mobile phone has some different features (see my next two predictions for examples of that) but the application will be essentially the same one, going after the same server in the cloud and built in a convergent way that uses both web technologies for all accesses (whether is desktop, mobile or any other device) and that synchronizes the usages between desktop and mobile without distinguishing which was the platform that you use to access the application (think of how you access your email server from either your Outlook or iPhone and the status of the email changes indistinctively). So within the next decade, say goodbye to close application stores and the current fragmentation of specific mobile platform development. Over time, the web will win because it always does. Firefox, although still immature on mobile, is pointing towards this trend creating a browser that is cross-platform and synchronizes what you do on the desktop with what you do on the mobile version. Google will eventually also port Chrome to the Android platform and we will have another cross-platform browser. In spite of the explosion of mobile applications exemplified by the iPhone´s AppStore, I think that Web developers are only really starting to be interested in the mobile arena and when this true convergence between this will change the pace of innovation and the quality of execution of (mobile) applications. This will also mean that mobile advertising will grow much faster than expected and it will become the primary way of monetization for the Mobile Web as it is of the desktop web.

• Truly context aware mobile computing, where the context is far richer than just location and personalization and recommendations are ubiquitous. Location based services have been one of the promises of the mobile industry that has never taken off. However now location is becoming a commodity due to the explosion of smartphones (that throughout the next decade will become the majority of devices) that include a GPS and also the commoditization of other location information. If you look at the applications for the iPhone or Android phones, many of them already use location in a very obvious and simplistic way. For instance, when I post to Twitter from my phone it includes my location as part of the metadata from my tweet. What will be game-changing for the next decade is how access of applications from mobile phones becomes truly context aware beyond location. To give you an example of what I mean by this, suppose my Twitter application is context aware and when I am spending my new year break in the mountains and I tweet that I am going skiing, uses that information together with my location to determine which stations are near by and recommend me the best one to go based on the weather and quality of the snow, the least crowded route to get there and at what time to leave to avoid traffic jams and whether there is any of my friends actually skiing at the same stations. All these by just using two pieces of information (location and the fact that I post that I am going skiing) and then accessing and processing in a smart way the wealth of information that is already available on the web (information about the status of the ski resorts, traffic information, friends current location, etc.). For this to work we need that Web technologies like RSS that allow you to pull information in a structure way further evolve and that services that provide context information based on location appear on the Web for other applications to use in a simpler way. This example is not casual as I am doing all these during this Xmas break that I am skiing in the mountains but the difference is that I need to do all these manually and what I believe that will happen within the next ten years is that people will figure out a simple way to put all these together and make it available to applications so that they can use it in a smart way and I do not have to do all these manually.

• Augmented reality and mixed reality services/applications: pervasive services that seamlessly combine the physical and digital World. We have seen few startups and some of these services to start appearing on Iphone and Android platforms during 2009 mainly with two applications, local information (see the Yelp Monocle) or advertising although the idea and technology exists for a while. These are basically services where we combine physical things via a camera with digital information typically overlayed on top of it leveraging also improved object recognition technology (Google making inroads with Google Googles that is already on Android and I believe will come preinstalled very soon) and context information (see above prediction for info on this). Since all mobile phones have or will have cameras, Internet connection and large, pixel dense screens, I think that more and more we will see this type of functionality being added into mobile applications. Moreover, as augmented reality becomes more and more common and some of the necessary functionality to include it in services (Web based services, as discussed above) is included in browsers (which we will be seen happening within the next 3 years, today in fact the platforms for augmented reality are already refer to as augmented reality browsers) then we will see an explosion of usage of augmented reality in mobile applications also as a way to enhance the mobile experience of Web applications.

• Explosion of mobile video applications including mobile video communications. Within the next decade, video will be in mobile, as it is already on the desktop Web, the main source of traffic with forecasts predicting that it will be anywhere between 60% to 80% of the traffic (of course, this is a bit misleading as video takes up a huge amount of bandwidth compared with any other content type but you get the point). During this decade that we are leaving, two things have fundamentally changed on the web, the social networks/UGC phenomenon and the explosion of video usage. I believe that the same will happen in mobile and concerning the second one, video, I think that two things will happen. First, as people move to smartphones with flat rates and network bandwidth improves, people will access more and more videos from their devices. The second is that people will start using video from mobile phones as a way of communicating. This has a two fold meaning, the first thing that we will see is that as we have video cameras on mobile phones, people will start posting videos about their activities into the Web from their mobile phones the same way that we have seen happening with pictures. The second is that since the existing standard for videocalling from mobile phones has a really bad user experience (quality is really bad), other communication platforms (most likely Skype or Facebook although there might be other contenders) will, within the next few years, start offering better video calling functionality and people will eventually start using video communications on their mobile phones as it is starting to happen on the desktop with free Web conferencing tools like Skype.

Picking up the above five themes has been a challenge as I had some other important topics that might predominate within the next decade (social network access from mobile phones, mobile phones as payment systems, mobile phone usage for ehealth etc.) and some more disruptive ones (thanks Pablo) like mobile persuasive computing, mobile computing and smart cities, short range mobile applications or direct phone2phone communications using local PANs.

Here you have what has been compiled from Rudy based on the input of a ton of important people from the mobile industry (I am really proud to be in that list considering that compared to many of them I am a total newcomer). Many people have predicted similar things as I have done although not every list is the same, I think that is the beauty of the exercise that Rudy has done. That presentation has a wealth of information that I am planning on using for my own planning work at Telefónica. Very, very cool job, congratulations Rudy!!!

Thanks also to Oscar Divorra, Nuria Oliver, Oriol Lloret, Pablo Rodriguez, Jose Luis Landabaso, David Lopez Muñoz and Jaime Gonzalez because they have helped shape my initial list with their feedback.

And to all of you, thanks for reading me so far and see you in Facebook or Twitter

Perhaps 10 years from now I will update this blog again to see what has happened with my predictions….

Carlos Domingo

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• Older people are digital aliens, complete foreigners to technology,
• Baby boomers are digital immigrants, foreign to the technology world but adapting to it as they enter adulthood with certain difficulties
• Digital adaptives, born in the 70’s, entered the technology world at an early stage (Gerri recalled that PacMan was born in 1972). For the record, I was born in 1971 and I was recently referred to as old by my girlfriend because my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81
• Digital natives, from the 80’s, they have lived with technology all their lives, they live in hybrid worlds partly online party offline,
• Digital avatars, born in the 21st century, they live mostly in the online world and have lots of virtual relationships and communications

I do feel more like a digital native than adaptive even though by age group I belong to the former. I loved that slide and refer to it during my talk later. At lunch, I asked Gerri about it and she mentioned that the term digital immigrant and digital was coined by Marc Prenski in the context of education and that she had come up with the other ones. Here you have what I think is the original article from 2001 were Marc introduced the terms, I had a lot of fun reading it as I am surrounded by digital immigrants (many of my peers and people senior than me) that are fairly technology savvy but fit very well with the digital immigrant patterns described in the article: printing emails, bringing paper rather than a notebook to meetings, calling you after sending you an email, etc. After reading this I am more convinced than I was before that one of the reasons some companies have a hard time innovating on the Internet is because a lot of the people taking decisions about products and services are digital immigrants (or worst, digital aliens) and therefore they do not get some of the things that digital adaptives or digital natives like. This terminology is really cool as it helps not only to understand educational issues but also to explain differences in behavior when using digital services. The scary part is the new addition that Gerri has come up with, Digital Avatars, people that mainly have virtual relationships and communications. It makes me think that someone 20 years from now is going to be blogging (in which ever form they do it in the future) and saying something similar about digital natives..

Carlos

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The idea of recording the video came up after Nestor Domenech from the Digital Barcelona Film Festival DIBA contacted me to think about collaborating for festival and Pedro Alonso from my team had the suggestion that it will be cool to do a 3D video clip for the festival since we had been working on 3D video technology for over two years and production technology started to be affordable. Nestor and the DIBA team quickly bought the idea and found all the necessary partners in record time (the email from them with the list of possible collaborations including the 3D video is from 18th of February so just over three months from idea to reality!!).

The partners for the video Sony BMG and the band Pastora (a great choice since they have a very sophisticated image and use very polished audiovisuals that fits well with being the first ones doing a 3D video clip), Apunto Lapospo a very innovative audiovisual postproduction company from Barcelona that took care of the shooting, editing and postproduction (actually, they even developed some new technology for this shooting to be able to synchronize the two cameras used and see the content in 3D as they are shooting using stereoscopic goggles), Ovide that puts the cameras, lenses, steadycams, etc. for the shooting, NEC that will use their 3D projectors and stereoscopic goggles and us, Telefonica R&D will be working on creating the stereoscopic version that can be reproduced on our prototype of 3D Imagenio (Telefónica’s commercial IPTV system) that can be displayed on 3D without goggles using Philiips 3D TV Wowx.

The video is going to be shown for the first time at the closing party of DIBA at Telefonica’s Espacio Movistar in Barcelona on June 15th. You will be able to see both versions there, the one with stereoscopic goggles on a large screen and the one without goggles that we will create on Wowx TVs.

We have also been collaborating with DIBA creating a Kyte site (many thanks to Sergio and Juan for their work!!) that hosts their short film challenge of creating a short film in just 10 days for the festival, check it out here This has been a great success with their Kyte channel getting embedded in more than 2,000 web sites and receiving so far close to 300,000 views.

Carlos

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Everything related to the judging process is available with Google apps and services, a Google site dedicated to it, Google docs and the list with the scores comes in Google Spreadsheets. Even though I am not a big fun of Google apps (see a previous post here) doing this I realize how far has Google come in terms of providing a complete suite of Web apps for pretty much everything an office worker needs. Usability and funcionality is still not there but since Google since to be crusing along and not being impacted by the poor state of the world economy, I guess that they will continue investing on it and eventually catching up. No wonder Ballmer was saying this past week in Madrid that Google is one of their three main competitors (along side with Apple and Open Source).

The challenge is being judged using an application designed for it that comes preloaded in a IBM Thinkpad (and old one as it is not branded Lenovo) with Ubuntu as the OS. The app is simple but well designed and it links with the Google Spreadsheet that contains the list of apps assigned to every judge. Once you have login into the app, you are taken to an Android phone emulator that looks a bit like and HTC phone, large, high res screen that contains a carrousel in the bottom of it to access the main apps (one of them being the applications folder where everything else gets installed) and just five buttons (call, hang, home, back and menu) with a volume controller on the side. The look and feel is similar to some of the prototypes that I saw in the Mobile World Congress back in February. You then go app by app, showing its documentation, installing it in the phone and score it according to the following criteria:

1. Originality of Concept: Does the application introduce a great new idea; for example, a new angle on social applications?
2. Effective Use of the Android Platform: Does the application take advantage of Android’s unique and compelling features, such as built-in location-based services, accelerometer, and always-on networking?
3. Polish and Appeal: Is the application easy to use and aesthetically appealing?
4. Indispensability: Is the application compelling and essential, such as a game the user just can’t put down or a utility she can’t live without?

Since point number 2 is effective use of the Android platform and Android comes with Google Maps integration among others, many applications are actually using Google maps and location based services as well as Wen integration via the always-on-networking which makes me think that if Android phones are successful, they will finally make location based services and usage of contextual information for mobile phones a reality and a big differentiator from PC based Web apps.

The main challenge to evaluate the apps is that for many applications is hard to see its real usage without actually having a phone and use it in your day to day basis so you end up evaluating it based on the documentation and how you think it will work in a real live situation.

I think that this is as far as I can disclose without breaking the NDA so just add that while some apps are the obvious ones that you can think of it for a phone, there are some surprises (and also some very silly ones). In general, the level of the apps is very mixed, I am judging the first round so my apps have been selected from a total of 1,700+ initially submitted (see details about the submissions here). I understand that Google has not done any prior filtering to keep things fair but some applications really do not do anything useful and are very poor while others are very polished with a lot of functionality and good documentation. I was initially not planning on getting into round two but I am thinking about emailing Google to see whether I can also do so since I might get to see a better set of apps. Given the level of submissions, the challenged has been a success and it will go a long way to start popularizing Android with developers (the $10MM in prices certainly helped).

This challenge has also allowed me to play around with the Android phone emulator. It is painfully slow. The browser is not very good, has similar issues as the one in the N95 when visiting regular web sites, it does not resize pages to fit the screen and it is very slow, I guess that because of the emulator so I wouldn’t draw any conclusions on speed yet. Mobile sites like m.twitter.com or m.facebook.com look good but lack the graphical sophistication and interactivity of iPhone mobile sites. Perhaps this will get fixed when actual Android phones come to market and people customize their mobile sites for them. Google maps is pretty cool and for the basic phone apps (call, SMS, agenda, etc.) are hard to actually see the real level of usability since you are doing it from the computer with the mouse but they are very simple, they are way behind in terms of usability from an iPhone although I am assuming that this is not intended to be a demo of the phone itself but just for testing the apps. Interestingly, how the phone apps are displayed on the emulator is different from how it is shown on the documentation provided, apparently there are two versions of the emulator around.

CD

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Btw, this post is done from my new MacBook Air, my return to MacOS X after two years with Windows is about to happen, now I just need my corporate tools to work with a Mac.

CD

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Go Kyte!!!

CD

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“$120 / 3 computers = $40 per computer. Assuming you upgrade every 3 years, that’s about $1.12 per PC per month for the MS Office suite. Why would I spend THAT kind of crazy money for software I use day-in, day-out when I can bang my head “for free” against the lame “experimental” features of Google Docs?”

Companies focused on efficiency and cost reduction tend to make the basic mistake of not looking at the total cost of ownership of things and only look at the direct cost of something. I am all for using free or open source software but only if its better than existing alternatives not just because is free. In the case of using Google Apps (or the situation we had in the company till recently), I am sure that the loss of productivity is much higher than the actual cost of the software by far. I have wasted a lot of company money (meaning my work time lost because of issues with the email and calendar software we were using) that is far more expensive that the few dollars per day that will cost us from now on moving to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

And Bernard argument about collaboration is wrong, Microsoft has a great collaboration tool, Share Point and any serious analysis of MS Office versus Google Apps should have included it.

CD

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CD

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And what about those Android prototypes? Well, unimpressive is the word. The hardware is not there and the user interface in the ones that I see is like a poor version of a Yahoo Go! or a iPhone so still way to go. They are not particularly slow as I read somewhere (my N95 feels slower in changing menus or starting the camera) but the user interface is also not particularly impressive. There are early prototypes so we will have to wait and see. I think that the most relevant around Android was the comment from Rich Miner about getting the price point of Android based terminals down to $100 in the next few years, that will really change the industry landscape. Another interesting comment I heard was from Arun Sharin, Vodafone CEO that in his keynote mentioned that one of the key issues to solve in the next few years is the fragmentation of mobile OS since that is stopping innovation. I could not agree more but the iPhone and Android for the time being are only adding fragmentation even though it could change in the future if we are left with four major mobile Internet enabled OS, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Consolidation on mobile browsers could also help solve the issue and here WebKit is getting more and more traction as the leading browser. I also saw a demo of Ovi but I was not very impressed, just putting together some of their existing sites and recent acquisitions. The OVI multimedia share site was still pointing at Twango in their demos and some other sites did not have an OVI look and feel yet but the old one). The "new" upload client was just the old Nokia Web Upload with a Ovi link. I guess is also too early to see where they are heading. 

And what about the parties? I did not attend many as some of my colleagues did since I was very tired from the weekend and the long days, I might be getting old (one of them, I will not mention his name to avoid public embarrassment, was twittering from two different parties on Wednesday night, then went sightseeing early Thursday morning in Barcelona and at 10am was looking very fresh in a meeting we had at the Telefonica stand). I attended the Open Handset Alliance party that  Google did at the MACBA, pretty cool set up and location but close to non OHA members till 10:30pm and in spite of promises from Google that the party was going to get wild after 10:30pm when they open to all public, it did not at all and overall was very lame, just good to have a drink with some of Madrid colleagues, Kyte video below.

CD

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CD

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