The VisionMobile blog recently brought together 5 mobile industry bloggers to talk about their visions of the mobile experience in a multi-platform world. As consumers are forced to use multiple devices daily to communicate, learn and be entertained, new problems and opportunities are created around how these devices could work together.
Marek Pawlowski, Editorial Director of PMN, describes the how people view their mobile devices as indispensable, taking them everywhere and never shutting them off. Because mobile phones are such a constant part of our lives, they need to act as complements to our other devices. Seamless convergence would enable each device to act as an extension of the whole, rather than adding a new set of constraints.
Thibaut Rouffineau of the Wireless Industry Partnership follows with how the mobile industry can provide better convergence via unifying services such as identity management and data synchronization. These services require a standard platform that runs across the majority of devices. The industry could create one themselves via a standards body or via market share; however, it has often been an industry outsider that has provided the needed disruption to create a common platform for these services to run on. Apple has recently done this with the iPhone as has Google with its web based applications.
Lisa Whelan, founder of SocializeMobilize.com, discusses how consumers like the thought of having options, but too many of them can be overwhelming. Users buy phones to reduce complication, not increase it. She believes that the simplicity of the Blackberry versus the extensibility of the Palm Treo led the Blackberry to become a market leader. There are so many available iPhone applications, yet only a few are popular after their initial launch or a used for the long term.
Matt Lewis, Managing Director at ARCChart, explains how “the cloud” is a combination of external storage with multi-device access. Photos, contacts, or email all can be hosted on a server, with users consuming the content formatted for each device. The problem arises as each set of data is kept in independent, forcing users to separately maintain contact data on Facebook, Twitter, email and other services. Users need a way to have these data sets combined intelligently, along with smart services that can enable them to be contacted appropriately based on the devices they are current using.
Andreas Constantinou, Research Director and founder of VisionMobile, finishes by saying that the increasing information across these platforms will require intelligent filters and recommendation engines that incorporate usage patterns and topics of interest to bring the most relevant items to our attention and to help deal with the the many choices available.
We are beginning to see companies take on these problems, offering versions of their application for each device and using existing standards, such as SMS, as the basis for their new products. Which companies do you feel are best succeeding? What areas are being ignored?
