Think Big

Today, we are inundated on a daily basis with information and news about Smartphones and Tablets, the Mobile Internet, and 4G Wireless. In particular, the terms wireless and mobile seem to be used interchangeably without much thought. So are we in the mobile wave or the wireless wave and what’s the difference?

Early wireless solutions provided a means for making calls or sending bits between two stationary users through the air instead of over wires. At the time came cellular or mobile networks, with a new set of user devices, that allowed people to communicate from nearly anywhere on the move. Today, those same mobile networks are allowing us to do everything from accessing the internet and watching a movie, to navigating our way to a store and checking the status of our pets. And just to make somewhat confusing, many of the things we will connect to via these networks are not mobile, like our refrigerators, electric meters, or TV sets.

The mobile device

While the mobile device and smartphone revolution has been remarkable by empowering users with broadband and computing anywhere they go, the more transformative revolution is just emerging, the "Internet of Things". There will be near 10 billion things connected by the end of 2012 and only about half of them will be people. By some estimates, this could grow into the trillions by 2020. But up until the present, the hundreds of millions of connected objects just as truck fleets, environmental sensors, and smart meters were considered part of the closed "Machine-to-Machine" or M2M world, virtually inaccessible from standard consumer devices. This is changing. Fueled by the integration of technologies just as WiFi, Bluetooth, QR Codes, NFC, and Zigbee into mobile devices, we are lowering the barrier for people to interact with objects and open up a new category of innovations we call P2M or "People to Machines".

With a few touches on your smartphone or tablet, you can check for an open parking spot from a meter, text your oven to preheat earlier you get home, turn the air conditioner on or off, get a tweet from your pet’s collar when they eat, or view the ingredients of a product when you scan it. Wireless is the pervasive cloud that ties all of these things at the same time to enable new forms of interaction. The figure below illustrates how mobile is just a subset of the broader ecosystem that wireless ties at the same time.

It is important to note that Mobile users have some very in a class by itself needs and expectations that differentiate them from fixed wireless users. During Mobility REQUIRES wireless as the medium, Mobility implies immediacy, or communications and applications within "arms reach". It as well increases the value of location, context, and proximity as critical to understanding the users needs, much more so than with fixed wireless users or things. To illustrate, serving a mobile coupon up to a customer 1 hour afterwards he has left the store probably has a lot less value than serving it up such as the customer walks out the door to shop. It would as well be nice to know that a Mother is shopping with her daughter and son versus alone to decide what type of offer to send her. Lastly, mobile is implicitly social as you tend to want to share or get feedback at the instant you are experiencing something. To tell the truth social media is now the most used application on mobile devices, moreover than web browsing.