Just finished reading an article looking at mobile technology from a biz point of view. It is short and to the point, take a look at it:

http://beta.technologyreview.com/spotlight/mobile/index.aspx

In a nutshell, it points out that although several barriers to exploit mobility in marketing terms still exist, a number of companies are working on circumventing them to enable a new way of reaching people.

Localization is a technological reality but then you are confronted with a variety of terminals each one unique in terms of how it manage and disclose localization coordinates; screens are getting better and more apt at displaying ads but again every cell phone has its own display with specific characteristics that may turn a nice ads into an ugly one.

Don’t worry: the time of hoping for standardization of features through manufacturers agreement is still far away but now rather than looking for standardization new companies are overcoming the problem through virtualization. Third parties will be able to create their services and look and feel on a virtual cell phone and the software provided by these companies will customise the output to the specific cell phone.

This will make possible economies of scale and the market of one. Those same companies are working to mask identity and personal information (such as localization) to third partiesm thus preserving privacy.

Operators can lean back and let other companies take care of managing the virtual cell phone, and by doing that they will make a further step in the direction of becoming transparent pipes providers, or may decide to lean forward and become Virtual Operators providing access to Virtual Cell Phones and Virtual Customers enabling the future biz ecosystem.
Personally, I have no doubts on the strategy an Operator has to pursue….

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Time has come for the smart phones to go virtual. A new service called CloneCloud has been developed by the Intel Research Lab-Berkley, to move the smart phones to the cloud computing environment.

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CREDIT: Intel Research Berkley

CloneCloud uses a smart phone’s high-speed network connection to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The clone on the Cloud is much more powerful than the actual smart phone and when the user executes a particular task, it is done either on the phone or on the cloud depending on the resources needed for the task. In the later case the results are reintegrated back on the smart phone.

This concept is very powerful as it can offer the following advantages:

• <!–[if !supportLists]–>A significant decrease in the processing time
• <!–[if !supportLists]–>No limit to the processing power of the smart phone
• <!–[if !supportLists]–>Enhanced battery performance

On the other hand, operation of a smart phone in such an environment needs to address issues such as:

• <!–[if !supportLists]–>Security of data stored on the remote servers
• <!–[if !supportLists]–>Network bandwidth limitations

Well, the technology has been developed, but the question that remains unanswered is: How effectively can we implement it?

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/bgchun/clonecloud-hotos09.pdf

How fast can your cell phone process information and run applications? Well, it is a computer but it has been specialised to support communications (signal coding, transmission…) and to use as little energy as possible. This is why running other kind of applications may seem slow and consume so much energy that your battery dries out in less than an hour.

Increasing the processing power would require increasing the battery capacity (bulkier and heavier) but that is not going to be practical because the more it consumes, the more it has to dissipate: hence you end up with a red hot brick in your hand.

Intel Research Berkeley has come up with an interesting solution (or proposal for a solution): create a clone of your cell phone and let it live in the cloud.
As you interact with the cell phone in your hand, its clone gets updated via the network and when it detects some processing that can be best performed in the cloud it takes over sending the results to the one in your hand.

They gave as example the processing required to recognize a face ina picture taken by the cell phone: using Android it took 100 seconds of processing time on the cell phone but only 1 second to the clone in the cloud and adding to this the one second required to transmit the photo to the clone and send back the result still makes the cell phone in the cloud to lead 2 to 100 in time and of course creating a consumption in the phone that is a trickle of what would have been required to process the face.

The concept of placing a clone in the cloud may apply to other devices as well and it is an extremely interesting idea for a Telecom Operator, particularly if it can be used to provide much better service to its clients (with a high potential of “lock in”) and to open up the cell phone to third parties that can provide service to the one in the cloud and hence, immediately and transparently, to the one in the hand of the client.

Here we have a perfect example of transforming atoms into bits as well as the power of an ecosystem to generate biz opportunities.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22571/?nlid=1994