Understanding the future of mobile devices

Notes on Understanding the future of mobile devices, AIGA and the Design Council London, 6 Aug

[our editorial comments in square brackets]

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Format:
Nico MacDonald chaired, and these were the speakers, with Orange slated to speak about the business dimension, a Symbianer about the tech dimension, an anthropologist about the sociological dimension.

[Setting:
blisteringly hot, the setting sun scything through the windows and burning directly into our retinas. (The aircon was boosted, which later on sadly led to the death by antarctic exposure of some of the smaller members of the audience). The audience was 90%+ male, and I'd guess 80%+ designers. If they were handsets they'd have been a mixture of shabby old Nokias (like us) and a good proportion of shiny new P800s. The 10% female cohort were generally high-end.]

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Orange: Timothy Ryan, Head of Brand Direction
Karl Humphreys, Head of Prophecy [nice title]
[clever guys, informative]

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Tim Ryan on the business view of mobile world, how it's changing:

History of SPV sounded good: first define user/network needs (O) and look at tech needs (MS), next design device, then hand to HTC to manuf. O apologised for the OS in the SPV. Noted that it is a break with the tradition of simply taking the handset that a manuf offers.

Had a diagram that broke their world into eight areas:

                         Then           Now 


MobileServices*          O              O + others
DeviceApps		 handset mf     handset mf + others
DeviceOS		 handset mf     handset mf + others
DeviceHardware		 handset mf     handset mf + others
IndirectSaleschannel	 others         others
DirectSaleschannel       O              O
ServiceProvision         O**            O [+ others?]
NetworkProvision         O              O

and The Future?: will be even more fragmented [though of course still quite Orangey], particularly in MobileServices and DeviceApps as 3rd-parties enter mkt

Notes on the Future:

takeup of "services" [ie: non-voice call services] is niche, but starting to grow, particularly where driven by TV, eg: O2 and BB

3G: infra costs are 2x the license costs

Ecology of players gets more complex in mob services and device apps areas: Orange is opening their APIs to enable third parties to get in there

Device hardware: Europe is the incumbent, but Asia super-eager to do deals

Indirect and Direct channel: consolidation is happening (viz V buying their resellers), but new question is 'how do you sell this complex services stuff?' - room for sellers who are experts? Sim-free sales. Service-free sales: fashion sales (Xelibri at Selfridges). O's Direct [their own shops] is now primarily about educating about services etc, rather than shifting units

Service and network providers: more MVNOs (VM successful, Tesco - who claim to be interested in connecting everything together over making money on calls). Maybe some operators will drop back and become pure infra-providers.

[Quote of night] Always-on with IP, if all 13.X m subscribers were active, would kill O network instantly and it would never recover. A challenge for future!

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Karl Humphreys: questions for designing a mobile service:

- how will service be used?
- how will service be billed?
- get to the handset?
- how many OSs do we support?
- does it access stuff on the hset?
- will it work on a legacy hset?
- how do i access it?
- need special training to sell it?
- can it be OTA upgraded?
- how do we support it?
- what's the impact on network?
- does it work across all the networks?

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In the discussion: mention of SPV's backup-to-network feature. [Begs question: Why don't they have a dumb client model with the smart stuff on the network? 1: do consumers trust them enough?, 2: the network would fall over, 3: hset manufs don't like it]

Tim: in future would like to see O become invisible [he means so important to and ubiquitous/pervasive in your life that you don't think about it unless it's not there. Like water and sunlight.]

All location APIs are now open [technically, though not sure if they are in the business sense]

Personal Area Networks (IXI) mentioned (switch a friend's handset to be yours temporarily)

Other companies mentioned:
Zingo: taxi location
Savage: Java OS
Fasttalk: IM
IXI: PANs

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Joe Odukoya, Symbian [informative, but some clearly knew this stuff already]

traced a tech hype curve from a broadly Western European perspective (an example of the curve)

And then placed techs along it. VOIP just beginning to climb the curve, SMS already out the other side and mainstreamed. In the middle:

voip
Push To Talk
Wireless IM*
A/V streaming [this was the peak of the hype curve]
3G
wireless email MMS*
Location [the nadir of the trough of disillusionment]
802.11
open OSes [now beginning to climb again]
Java*
Wap
bluetooth
gprs*
sms [the plateau of mass mkt acceptance and brilliance]

[we would have probably placed 802.11 at the top of the hype curve, and 3G in the trough, but this is his talk]

Different cultures (Japan/FarEast, US) do things differently and run at difft speeds. Eg: Japan sees no need to bluetooth because they like cables.

In the questions afterwards: the curve implies that
(a) every tech has to go through this curve (Joe: good point. imode didn't); and
(b) every tech will eventually succeed (Joe: true, some fail).

(No-one present could explain the value of PTT)

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Dr Simon Roberts, Ideas Bazaar [off-the-cuff, mostly funny talk]

Wants a "society pull" view of mobile rather than "tech push"

often we pay lip service to real people

too much attention paid to early adopters, the gadget guys because:
1. a recommendation from a GG doesn't impress real people as much as one from another real person
2. they don't talk to other people as much as real people do [?!!]

[Yes they're niche, kind of, but it's a curious notion that gadget guys are marginal and isolated. And it gets successfully rebutted from the floor by a designer from Ideo who suggest that early adopters aren't necessarily = gadget guys, in fact gadget guys are the early adopters often because they're prepared to pay a lot for edgy tech. If we gave new tech to children we'd see a different early adopter profile, and different uses of the tech. Roberts has to modify/re-explain his position slightly because it was merely intended to illustrate his next point rather than being directly about these kinds of people...]

... need to design and market for the massive swarm of real people, mums, etc. Not for niches.

play as a [indirect] driver for good things in companies

'Design dissolved in behaviour' - Fukusawa, Ideo

'no group of engineers in a board room can ever anticipate what normal people wioll do with their inventions' - Doctorow [or as Gibson would put it, the street finds unexpected uses for things]

human daily behaviour a good place to look at to see future of "design disappearing" and ethnography, anthropology good tools.

A route into the everyday: Kinship. Relatedness. [Of course. But isn't everyone going for this already?: Nokia: 'Connecting People']

'We use people to find content. We use content to find people' - Fabio Sergio, Connectedland

[role of trust in kinship: people highly connected and related within companies, but often critical trust connections are missing or have been broken]

Other stuff

book mentioned: Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone: life worlds (real, individual) vs mediated, systems (mobile networks etc) [haven't read it, but we fear it exhibits a nostalgia for a time when things were real and pure etc]

Gladwell: connectors, mavens, salesmen

In passing [by Tim Ryan]: the history of SMS's birth is that Ericsson engineers working on the voice network wanted a way to comm on the network but one that didn't use the voice channel [ie becasue they were fixing it]

Japan: playful culture

Europe driven by consumers rather than suppliers (poss because companies are so cynical about the future?)