(i)Phone as human to digital interface.
An important element of being able to create and deliver useful services is the real-world to digital interface. The thing that captures all the data generated by real-world interactions and translates it into a form that can be read, manipulated and transmitted over a network.
I think I may be slow in picking this up, but it has just dawned on me that the mobile phone is and will be the human to digital interface. With existing and upcoming technology, it captures many of the things our human senses do – digitally.
For example, according to Gartner, almost 50% of mobile phones had cameras in 2006 and that is predicted to rise to over 80% in 2010. Essentially these are visual to digital interfaces.
Images only have limited usefulness because they’re static and they don’t have the benefit of the context or intelligence that you or I would associate with an image. However, new technologies like Photosynth (if you haven’t seen it check out this mind-blowing demo), are able to add intelligence on the back (server) end. Other technology like the kind Siemens is employing in their Pocket Trainer game actually embed intelligence on the front (phone) end by giving you meta information about the things you see in you phone viewfinder.
Of course, every phone has a built in analog to digital sound encoder. It would be easy to enable the microphone to store audio as a file instead of simply transmitting it. As with the digital images, intelligence can be added to these data through a host of new services. Several years ago Philips invented song identification through your mobile which has now gone on to spawn a host of new companies. Identification of songs is just the start. Speech to text transcription is becoming increasingly accurate – there are numerous new audio services that can make what your phone mic hears intelligent.
Next, phones like the iPhone, have built in accelerometers. These are cheap devices – like the ones found in your Wii controllers – that can track physical movements in the real world and transfer them to the digital one. Of course games like Wii Sports have shown how powerful this kind of interface can be but this is also essentially the same technology that’s behind Nike+.
Finally, many phones today EXCEPT THE iPHONE (GO FIGURE), have built-in GPS locators. Of course we’ve already seen how powerful these things can be.
When you put all these things together, the phone can translate what your eyes see, what your ears hear, what your body does and where your body goes into a digital form. And of course, it can send that wirelessly to a server on the Internet.
For all intents and purposes this makes your mobile phone your digital surrogate – an avatar that sees, hears, does and goes everywhere you go, but which is connected to the broader intelligence and utility of the web.
I think I understand why I hate the idea of mobile advertising so much now.