A few days ago, I received an interesting invitation from mobile strategist and innovator Rudy De Waele:
It’s the end of the decade and for many of us it has been a very actively ‘mobile’ decade, a lot of the efforts and projects of our peers have become real and succesful during this decade.
As for the start of a new decade, I’ve had this idea of asking some of the people I met during the last decade to write down their five game-changing mobile trends for the next decade.
The format is to list your 5 trends for the next decade, in words, a sentence or a pagaraph, no links.
It was a great question – especially the requirement to stick to just five trends. Here’s the set which, after some thought, I emailed back to Rudy:
- Mobiles manifesting AI – fulfilling, at last, the vision of “personal digital assistants”.
- Powerful, easily wearable head-mounted accessories: audio, visual, and more.
- Mobiles as gateways into vivid virtual reality – present-day AR is just the beginning.
- Mobiles monitoring personal health – the second brains of our personal networks.
- Mobiles as universal remote controls for life – a conductor’s baton as much as a viewing portal.
No fewer than 37 different people from throughout the mobile and IT industries contributed answers. The entire set of answers is now available for viewing on Rudy’s m-trends.org blog and is also posted onto slideshare.net, from where you can download a PDF version.
Each of the 37 sets of answers has at least one item (usually more!) that’s a good conversation starter. The ongoing “#m2020” dialog that Rudy has started is likely to cast a long shadow.
Some of the predictions are very encouraging – like the set from Katrin Verclas covering mobiles in social development, transformation of politics (for example, in Africa), mobile payments, mobile healthcare, and mobile environmental monitoring. Other sets of predictions foresee difficulties and backlashes as well as progress. Some of the destruction foreseen could be counted as “creative destruction”, as in the prediction by Alan Moore:
The communications revolution accelerates, destroying businesses that refuse to think the unthinkable.
The predictions include many “first order effects” (technologies or products that people already foresee and desire, and which are already under development), but also several interesting comments on what Tom Hume calls “second order effects“. Tom comments:
No-one predicted the loosening of time and space that Mimi Ito has noted. Similarly, what happens to our social arrangements when every photo can be face-recognised, geolocated and individuals tracked? What happens to shops when every price can be compared? What happens to conversation when it’s all recorded, or any fact is a 5-second voice-search away from being checked?
The full effects of ever-wider usage of mobile technology are, indeed, hard to predict – especially when we bear in mind the following forecast from Carlos Domingo:
Ubiquity of mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of connected devices (à la Kindle, not just phones) and M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device). In 10 year, there will be more devices/machines connected to the mobile network than humans.
In similar vein, Nicolas Nova predicts:
Non-humans (objects, animals, places) will generate more data than humans.
Mobile handsets will very likely look quite different, at the end of the decade, than they do at the beginning. As Marek Pawlowski forecasts:
Keyboard dimensions and screen size cease to be the primary limiting factors in handset design as new input and display technologies free designers to radically change the form factor of personal communication devices.
I’ll end by sharing one of the predictions from Jonathan MacDonald, which seems to me particularly compelling:
Convergence of physical, augmented and virtual reality: augmented and virtual reality will become an increasingly standard method for search, discovery, gaming, eyesight, healthcare, retail, entertainment and most other experiences in life. Location and other contextual functions will grow so our 2D mobile experiences become 3D and ‘real’. To such an extent that the prefixes ‘augmented’ and ‘virtual’ will eventually become redundant.
The items I’ve picked out above are just scratching the surface. There’s much, much more to read and ponder in the entire slideshow – click over to Rudy’s blog to explore further!
dw2 
Great article David, although looking through the slide set a lot of what you and others describe I can see happening well before 2020. Ten years ago mobile usage was for a tiny minority, another ten years from now and the whole landscape of mobile technology could be very different.
For example, I could imagine the mobile phone of today becoming redundant. Why bother carrying one if an a smaller “thin” device could let you use any available connected hardware to as a conduit? Or there could be a completely different class of device that is in the mainstream that allows us to communicate more naturally, using many more of the non-verbal signals we give each other when we communicate today. Don’t go more artificial and VR, go more natural.
Paul
Comment by Paul Beardow — 6 January 2010 @ 9:43 pm