With the progress of technology and the availability of smart materials we can rest assured of a future, by the end of this decade I would say, where most surfaces will double up as screen and interaction points.

The sketchy representation of a future cell phone patented by Apple

I had the opportunity of discussing with a start up founder just few days ago. He is focussing on new ways to interact with information based on advanced capabilities offered by Surface 2 (MS) and others. Today these technologies are still quite expensive but the day when they will become commodities is on sight.

The interesting thing, I think, is that the interaction will no longer be a property of the device, rather it will be a property of the person interacting! That is to say that if I am interacting with the surface of a desk in a public space, like  a kiosk in a mall, that surface will first recognise who I am and then will react accordingly. This can be achieved in several ways, by an identification service in the “cloud” or by an interaction with an identity tag embedded in my body (just to name to extreme cases).

The availability of plastic screens, like AMOLED, or ones based on Graphene (NED can be considered a first step in this direction) will make it possible to “wrap” any surface with a screen and touch sensitivity. This, I guess, is the technological bases for a patent presented by Apple and described by ZDNet of a cell phone having a wrap around screen, as shown in the drawing above.

The curvature of the surface, according to interpretation by ZDNet, can be used to provide a sense of 3D. The wrap around can also be used to identify (my speculation) the user by “sensing” some characteristics of her hand.

Not sure if and when we are going to see an iPhone like that but for sure the new smart materials invented every day by researches are freeing designer imagination.

Apple has announced they will have a “best in class’ maps app coming with iOS6 and Google has just improved its own maps.

An eye catching map from Hover

But there are plenty of “mappers” out there and more will be coming as new and better devices will make maps an everyday backdrop in many of our interactions with computers and, more important, with the world. Indeed, I can easily imagine that we are going to use a map even to see the place where “we are”, because that map will provide plenty of information about the place “we are”.

And in a longer term I can imagine that we won’t even need a screen to display a map. It will be displayed directly on our eyes. and will overlap, in an augmented reality way, with what we see around us.

Maps are getting better, just look at the picture above. It is a map, even though it does not look like. It is produced by Hover, a company creating stunning 3D maps. And there are several others, like UpNext, producing 3D representations. Just read the article in Technology Review to get a feeling on what is going on.

However, an this is the reason for this post, as I was reading that article I thought that indeed the best mapping would come from photos, even better from real or quasi-real time photos. I am pretty sure that before the end of this decade we will see some companies that will create dynamic maps by integrating photos that will be taken by you and me and by millions of others around the clock.

Those maps will also contain quasi real time information, will result from mashing up a variety of information channels appropriately filtered to fit my needs at that particular time.  GPS and continuous picture taking are becoming more and more common. Already today, just bought an AW100, you take a picture with your camera and you see overlaid on the screen information about the place you focused on. The first time I saw it I was surprised; in a few days I got used to it. Now, after just one week, I am using my new camera not (only) to take pictures but to get information about what I am seeing through the lens. The bits and atoms are coming together in most unexpected ways…

New Players are changing the rules of the game

The closed club of Telecom Operators has been shaken by the entrance of several new players both at the infrastructure level and at the service level. At the infrastructure level the strong emergence of IP transport has changed many architectures and led to the need for new skills. More than that. It changed the meaning of Quality as it was, and to a large extent still is, understood by Telecom Operators. A quality that has to be perceived by the end customer in spite of the fact that the network can only deliver “best effort” and of the fact that no single subject can control a communication end to end. This is a hard conceptual change for Telecom Operators that have guarded, as holy priest, the sanctity of their infrastructures working for years to come to acceptable standards, to preserve interworking….All of this has to be seen in a different perspectives. As communications has become independent of geographical boundaries (information is accessed without knowing were it is) services are delivered across networks by enterprises and individuals that do not control any part of the network.

Regulation has fostered this transition in several countries by imposing the unbundling of the local loop, by allowing third parties to act as virtual Operators (MVNOs – Mobile Virtual Network Operator). Skype today is the largest telecommunications Operators for international calls, although it does not own a single copper pair. An it is not alone. Viber, to name another, has moved a step further by hijacking the phone number, so that whereas Skype requires a Skype identity to set up a call (or direct the call to a Telecom Operator if a number is dialed) Viber uses the client telephone number.

Along with these Operators new communications service providers have take a foothold  worldwide: like Apple with Facetime and iCloud or DropBox and iBox supporting file sharing.

This blog is about the future but once in a while I feel it makes sense to turn back at the past. I have been asked to do so for a celebration of the last decade at IEEE and I would like to share some of the thoughts with you.

Ten years in telecommunications used to be a very short window of observation. True, there have been many pivotal moments, like the invention of the vacuum tube in 1906 by Lee de Forest that made long distance communications possible or, just to take another example the 1947 invention of the transistor that led to the deployment of the PCM ten years later. But all of these “events” took a long time to be felt by the public.

If we want to characterize this last decade we need to appreciate that we had witness an unprecedented global change, fueled by technology, but led by the transformation in the market and in the Society.
We are too close to say what historians will consider the main achievements in this decade in our field looking back fifty years from now. What we can say is that some global phenomena made possible by the advances in telecommunications have swept the world.

The first of them is what I call:

1. The rise of visual communications

Human communications has been based on vision: a quick glance can tell us a lot. Telecommunications, however, has shifted our habits to “voice-only” for over a hundred years. It has become so part of our habits that the first possibilities to communicate using video images didn’t create a significant interest. Someone even considered the visual communications as an intrusion in his privacy.

Nevertheless, the advance of technology has made available three essential components at a very affordable price: the camera, the broadband connection and the display. This decade has seen an amazing growth in “asynchronous” visual communications. At the end of 2011 YouTube is receiving every second 10 new videos the equivalent of half an hour of new content. And each second millions of seconds of content are viewed just form YouTube, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. By the end of the decade we have also witnessed a shift from peer to peer (mostly content download, like music, video, books) to streaming. The strong growth of broadband connections, all over the world driven by ADSL, has ignited the fruition of video content. But the production of content in these ten years has progressively shifted from the Majors to the individuals and this has started to create demand for efficient uplink. Broadband provided by ADSL cannot meet the demand. This has accelerated the deployment of fiber, particularly in those countries like the US where Telecom Operators are feeling the heat form cable companies. In the other developed countries the high cost of copper substitution has pushed new technologies, like DSL Vectoring, able to provide a capacity in the order of 50/80Mbps downlink and over 20Mbps uplink. Developing countries usually lack a good fixed network (or its penetration is limited) and are turning to wireless infrastructure whose broadband is limited but in most cases sufficient.

The shift toward a visual communications is starting to affect human to human communications: video calls have become more and more common fueled by smart phones, tablets and always on connectivity

I’ll consider the others in the next posts.

There is so much wealth is apps stores (the Apple iTunes has just passed the 400,000 apps mark with over 10 billions downloaded) that thinking about their disappearance seems impossible. Like thinking that the mighty Roman Empire in the first century could ever disappear. It did. But it took 4 more centuries. We are not interested in what may happen in 2400 of course but the clock is ticking so much faster today than 400 years, 2000 years ago, may compare to less than 10 years today. And 2020 is within our range.

Angry birds as a web app

Take a look at the interesting ideas put forward by Brian Kennish.

Basically he is claiming that there are 2 billion web users vs 50 (I would say 100) million IOS users. The volume is clearly favoring web apps rather than apps stores. And this goes for any store, Androids, Windows, RIM. and of course Telecom Operators’ ones.

Then there is the biz model. Apps store are there to sell apps, and they charge 30% or so to distribute the app. Google, on the other hand, is mostly in the biz of ads and for distributing an app through the web takes something like 5%. Add to this that an app for the web can run on any device and you have a strong incentive for developers to do that.

The vision is compelling but I am not in synch. Personally, at least today, apps developed for a specific device are usually much better, in terms of user experience, than the ones developed for a browser. Add to this the fact that in this market the pricing is usually below the thresholds of perception (does it really bother you paying 1.99$?) and you see that there is a strong motivation to meet this market.

On the other hand, one has to acknowledge that web apps and apps are more and more stand alone, i.e. they can run when the device is not connected to the network. This applies to news as well. Your device can download the latest news once it has a connection handy and keep them in its storage for you to use at a later time. This, on our network, translate into bulk download and commoditized connectivity.

Personally, I see a future that, from a user point of view, will have information and apps (is there any difference, by the way?) local. The network disappears most of the time. If I do not have an information it i most likely that my device can find it on another devices in the vicinity and pick it up from that one. From time to time connection with data buoys (real or virtual) will update my device local storage and I will be in synch with the world.

Paying almost everything with your cell phone

It is now several years that Japanese can use (and do) their cell phones to pay at a cashier in a department store, buy a ticket for the public transport and get a coke from a vending machine. They have been using NFC, Near Field Communications, to let their cell phone exchange information with the cash register and vending machines.

In the other parts of the world this system has not been available. Telecom Operators have been shy (reluctant) in making their customers using their cell phone credit to buy other things but communications services fearing to lose revenues. The absence of a unique NFC standard didn’t help either. In some countries regulations restrict payment transaction management to bank and do not allow Telecom Operators to do that. Topping it all, cell phones manufacturers did not release any models with embedded NFC capabilities (this is the usual chicken and egg problem),

But now the situation seems about to change. The NFC Forum will be starting in a few days the certification process for NFC devices (the standard has been released later last year) and ATT, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to cooperate to launch a commerce network based on NFC.

Nokia has recently declared that most of the new phones they will put on the market in 2011 will have NFC embedded.

To complete the list, the rumor of Apple including NFC in its iPhone 5 is strong. And it is likely that the transaction will be managed through the iTunes Store. This is a first explanation on why Apple has been developing a huge data centre lately.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26796/page1/

I am pretty sure that in the next 3 years we are going to see an explosion of cell phone based wallet in Europe as well. That is likely to create a new ecosystem with plenty of apps able to record what we buy, ready to show us our spending habits and creating a data base of all of our shopping spree. That data base, in turns, will be a data mining field for yet other apps. I would be surprised if I will not be very surprised by the variety of apps that will become available and by the way my shopping habits will change.

How many Apps are out there? Difficult to say and their number grows any day more. If at the beginning of 2010 the Apple Apps store had some 120,000 apps and the Android market 20,000 in November the Apple store has exceeded 300,000 and the Android market 175,000. And, of course, they are not the only ones. Facebooks is credited with close to 500,000 apps and then you have the Nokia, Microsoft, RIM and many others.

Growth of apps and downloads from the Apple Apps store

Once you are confronted with all theses apps it gets difficult, no, impossible, to keep track of what is going on and be able to take advantage of what is becoming available.

We are going to need a search engine to get the apps but, and here it gets interesting, differently from information where syntax and semantics basically coincide with apps a semantic search is really what is required and what we are missing.

The article “Top trends of 2010: App Stores” published by ReadWriteWeb, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/app_stores_top_trends_of_2010.php makes for an interesting reading. It reports of a poll on App stores customers on their liking/disliking of App Stores in terms of usability. Take a look.

What is also interesting is that the difficulty in keeping abreast with new apps being released and finding the one that might serve your whim (or need) is generating a number of recommendation sites, like Appoke, AppStoreHQ, Appolicious, Chomp, AppsFire, AppBrain, Appboy, AppAware, SmoingApps, iApps.in, 16apps, Apptism, Freshapps, ScatterTree, Frenzapp, Sidebar, Chorus, Appsaurus…and may be it is better if I stop here. You can search for more using Google.

Most of this recommendation sites are leveraging n crowd sourcing to review (and discover) new apps and to provide the guidance that can be transformed in semantics.

I feel that we have just started. This is Web 2.0 come to life and we have to learn to use it. Many enterprises are now creating their own app as a way to access their products so we can expect a further increase in numbers and consequently a bigger problem in finding the right app. The solution to this problem is not easy and will bring us into the Web3.0 where semantics will dominate the landscape. But that won’t happen in the next 2 to 3 years. My bet is on the second part of this decade.

I just read an interesting blog on “How Apple could become the world’s biggest tech company”

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/30/how-apple-could-become-the-worlds-biggest-tech-company-reader-poll/

Take a look at it. There are several interesting issues being raised but the one I like to discuss here is what will the future in our hands be like at the end of this decade. Are we going to have smart phones or tablets by the end of this decade to dominate the landscape?

Clearly the form factor is important and it is difficult to imagine something that does not fit a pocket to be always with us (I use the pocket since the bag for the other half of the sky is much larger). Hence, my first pick would be a smartphone. I do not believe that within this decade we will have a screen woven in our shirt (at least not in any shirt…) so a specific device to interface with the network will still be required.

On the other hand tablets will be probably replacing PCs and Laptops in most homes and will be equipped with wireless connectivity (LTE and local area wireless) and therefore they will likely be used for communication within the home (and the office, our and our client’s office).

The Smartphone “form factor” convenience is also its limit and I bet we will be using it along with tablets. More and more we will see tablets integrated in objects (I am sure that by the end of this decade many homes will have the small table in front of the couch embedding a tablet, a big one…) and biometrics will ensure that we are able to transform any interface into our interface.

Technologically speaking, the diversity that has set smart phones apart from computers is likely to fade away and this will bring companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP on the same turf of Nokia, Motorola, Sagem… Samsung and Apple, of course, are already there and this may be a strong competitive advantage.

As Telecom Operators I am convinced that there is no chance for us in the device domain but we may have a chance, and a big one, in the virtualization of the device.

This is quite a peculiar question! Of course the future will bring even more programming, and programs, than what we have today. At the same time some people are starting to wonder what is the implication of the explosion of Apps. Particularly so, after the announcement made by Apply that a new Apps Store will be available in the next few months to create a market place for Mac application. Additionally, the 2011 evolution of Snow Leopard, Lion, is promised to be able to run all present iPhone and iPad Apps.

Where is the Apps Store steering the Program Ecosystems?

Indeed, this may be seen as a turning point in programming. We will no longer buy/download a program but an App delivering a service. The advantage of course is to get rid of viruses and malware problem, the drawback is to hand over our freedom to choose from an infinite variety and be limited to what the Apple of the situation will consider as appropriate.

In a way this is the real arrival point of the Web 2.0, changing the rules of the game in terms of perception and biz framework. Will people be willing to give out the flexibility in exchange of increased security and simpler interactions?

We’ll see. In my opinion I believe this will be a natural evolution. Ecosystems are based on some de facto domination, resources rule. The ambient is closed in the sense that whoever wants to play the game there has to conform to the unwritten rules of that ambient. If your ecosystem is the ocean you better swim.

Take a look at this blog for further thoughts on the subject (the picture in this post is taken from that blog), a nice piece written by Matt Buchanan:

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/10/big-brother-apple-and-the-death-of-the-program/

Last week an article on Le Figaro

http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2010/09/15/04015-20100915ARTFIG00612-social-le-patron-de-france-telecom-s-explique.php

anticipated  a joint initiative by Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom to be announced on October 8th. There is not enough information to really get a grasp on what they are after but based on the speculations put forward by the journalist, an alliance to create a new “systeme d’exploitation” I started to think and want to share now with you some of these thoughts, ready to change my mind as more information will become available.

These companies have a market size of about a billion customers and according to their statement this is a gigantic market place giving them the strength to be leader and shape the innovation. Difficult not to agree to that. Or is it not?

How could it be that such strength has not already resulted in the evolution of the mobile marketplace being led by the Operators? Remember that there are (since many years) several association bodies that could have dictated how the evolution should be like.

The fact is that the time where single centralised “muscle” can shape the evolution is gone. Now it is a time where innovation is pervasive in its creation and in its effect. Those succeeding are not necessarily the one making the “spot” innovation, rather those that can leverage on some asset to steer others’ innovation.

Apple and Google are case in point. Besides, their success can be measured in terms of number of apps downloaded or people “googling” by the money stick to measure success in gauged in number of physical pieces sold (iPods and the like for Apple) and number of ads clicked (Google).

Now, let’s assume that the new association manages to get a market share with its “systeme d’exploitation” (is it an operating system like Androids or Symbian, a platform to release apps like iTunes….?). It is not going to be easy to get a significant (and worth) market share but let’s assume it will succeed and get a 10/15% of the market. Where will new revenues come from?
Remember that revenues to Apple and Google, the evils they are fighting, are not from the download of apps. Hence we can easily forecast that also the successful “systeme d’exploitation” will not derive any significant money from that. What is the asset of the Association? Connectivity of course, but they are already selling as much connectivity as the marketplace is willing to pay and it is very unlikely that the offer of apps or whatever will increase the willingness to pay for connectivity per se.

Yes, if I am given more appealing service I would like to use them and hence will require more connectivity but the market pressure will end up in providing me that extra connectivity at a lower price than today!

Let’s wait for October 8th to understand a bit more what their strategy is…