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18 March 2013

The future of the Mobile World Congress

Filed under: Accenture, Cambridge, Connectivity, innovation, Internet of Things, M2M, MWC — David Wood @ 3:37 am

How should the Mobile World Congress evolve? What does the future hold for this event?

MWC logoMWC (the Mobile World Congress) currently has good claims to be the world’s leading show for the mobile industry. From 25-28 February, 72 thousand attendees from over 200 countries made their way around eight huge halls where over 1,700 companies were showcasing their products or services. The Barcelona exhibition halls were heaving and jostling.

Tony Poulos, Market Strategist for TM Forum, caught much of the mood of the event in his review article, “Billions in big business as Barcelona beats blues”. Here’s an excerpt:

In one place for four days each year you can see, meet and hear almost every key player in the GSM mobile world. And there lies its secret. The glitz, the ritzy exhibits, the partially clad promo girls, the gimmicks, the giveaways are all inconsequential when you get down to the business of doing business. No longer do people turn up at events like MWC just to attend the conference sessions, walk the stands or attend the parties, they all come here to network in person and do business.

For suppliers, all their customers and prospects are in one place for one week. No need to send sales teams around the globe to meet with them, they come to you. And not just the managers and directors, there are more telco C-levels in Barcelona for MWC than are left behind in the office. For suppliers and operators alike, if you are not seen at MWC you are either out of business or out of a job.

Forget virtual social networking, this is good old-fashioned, physical networking at its best. Most meetings are arranged ahead of time and stands are changing slowly from gaudy temples pulling in passers-by to sophisticated business environments complete with comfortable meeting rooms, lounges, bars, espresso machines and delicacies including Swiss chocolates, Portuguese egg tarts, French pastries and wines from every corner of the globe…

But at least some of the 72,000 MWC attendees found the experience underwhelming. Kevin Coleman, CEO of Alliantus, offered a damning assessment at the end of the show:

I am wondering if I am the boy who shouts – “but the emperor is wearing no clothes” – or the masked magician about to reveal the secrets of the magic trick.

Here it is. “Most of you at Mobile World Congress have wasted your money.”

Yes, I have just returned from the MWC where I have seen this insanity with my own eyes…

That’s quite a discrepancy in opinion. Billions in business, or Insanity?

Or to rephrase the question in terms suggested by my Accenture colleague Rhian Pamphilon, Fiesta or Siesta?

To explore that question, Accenture sponsored a Cambridge Wireless event on Tuesday last week at the Møller Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge. The idea was to bring together a panel of mobile industry experts who would be prepared to share forthright but informed opinions on the highlights and lowlights of this year’s MWC.

Panellists

The event was entitled “Mobile World Congress: Fiesta or Siesta?!”. The panellists who kindly agreed to take part were:

  • Paul Ceely, Head of Network Strategy at EE
  • Raj Gawera, VP Marketing at Samsung Cambridge Mobile Solutions
  • Dr Tony Milbourn, VP Strategy at u-blox AG
  • Geoff Stead, Senior Director, Mobile Learning at Qualcomm
  • Professor William Webb, CTO at Neul
  • Dr. Richard Windsor, Founder of Radio Free Mobile.

The meeting was structured around three questions:

  1. The announcements at MWC that people judged to be the most significant – the news stories with the greatest implications
  2. The announcements at MWC that people judged to be the most underwhelming – the news stories with the least real content
  3. The announcements people might have expected at MWC but which failed to materialise – speaking volumes by their silence.

In short, what were the candidates for what we termed the Fiesta, the Siesta, and the Niesta of the event? Which trends should be picked out as the most exciting, the most snooze-worthy, and as sleeping giants liable to burst forth into new spurts of activity? And along the way, what future could we discern, not just for individual mobile trends, but for the MWC event itself?

I had the pleasure to chair the discussion. All panellists were speaking on their own behalf, rather than necessarily representing the corporate viewpoints of their companies. That helped to encourage a candid exchange of views. The meeting also found time to hear suggestions from the audience – which numbered around 100 members of the extended Cambridge Wireless community. Finally, there was a lively networking period, in which many of the audience good-humouredly button-holed me with additional views.

We were far from reaching any unanimous conclusion. Items that were picked as “Fiesta” by one panellist sometimes featured instead on the “Siesta” list of another. But I list below some key perceptions that commanded reasonable assent on the evening.

Machine to machine, connected devices, and wearable computers

MWC showed a lot of promise for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and for connected devices (devices that contain communications functionality but which are not phones). But more remains to be done, for this promise to reach its potential.

The GSMA Connected City gathered together a large number of individual demos, but the demos were mainly separated from each other, without there being a clear overall architecture incorporating them all.

Connected car was perhaps the field showing the greatest progress, but even there, practical questions remain – for example, should the car rely on its own connectivity, or instead rely on connectivity of smartphones brought into the car?

For MWC to retain its relevance, it needs to bring M2M and connected devices further to the forefront.

Quite likely, wearable computers will be showing greater prominence by this time next year – whether via head-mounted displays (such as Google Glass) or via the smart watches allegedly under development at several leading companies.

NFC – Near Field Communications

No one spoke up with any special excitement about NFC. Words used about it were “boring” and “complicated”.

Handset evolution

The trend towards larger screen sizes was evident. This seems to be driven by the industry as much as by users, since larger screens encourage greater amounts of data usage.

On the other hand, flexible screens, which have long been anticipated, and which might prompt significant innovation in device form factors, showed little presence at the show. This is an area to watch closely.

Perhaps the most innovative device on show was the dual display Yota Phone – with a standard LCD on one side, and an eInk display on the other. As can be seen in this video from Ben Wood of CCS Insight, the eInk display remains active even if the device is switched off or runs out of battery.

Two other devices received special mention:

  • The Nokia Lumia 520, because of its low pricepoint
  • The Lenovo K900, because of what it showed about the capability of Intel’s mobile architecture.

Mobile operating systems

Panellists had dim views on some of the Android devices they saw. Some of these devices showed very little differentiation from each other. Indeed, some “formerly innovative” handset manufacturers seem to have lost their direction altogether.

Views were mixed on the likely impact of Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Is the user experience going to be sufficiently compelling for phones based on this OS to gain significant market traction? It seems too early to tell.

Panellists were more open to the idea that the marketplace could tolerate a considerable number of different mobile operating systems. Gone are  the days when CEOs of network operators would call for the industry to agree on just three platforms. The vast numbers of smartphones expected over the next few years (with one billion likely to be sold in 2013) mean there is room for quite a few second-tier platforms behind the market leaders iOS and Android.

Semiconductor suppliers

If the mobile operating system has two strong leaders, the choice of leading semiconductor supplier is even more limited. One company stands far out from the crowd: Qualcomm. In neither case is the rest of the industry happy with the small number of leading choices available.

For this reason, the recently introduced Tegra 4i processor from Nvidia was seen as potentially highly significant. This incorporates an LTE modem.

Centre of gravity of innovation

In past years, Europe could hold its head high as being at the vanguard of mobile innovation. Recent years have seen more innovation from America, e.g. from Silicon Valley. MWC this year also saw a lot of innovation from the Far East – especially Korea and China. Some audience members suggested they would be more interested in attending an MWC located in the Far East than in Barcelona.

Could the decline in Europe’s position be linked to regulatory framework issues? It had been striking to listen to the pleas during keynotes from CEOs of European network operators, requesting more understanding from governments and regulators. Perhaps some consolidation needs to take place, to address the fragmentation among different network operators. This view was supported by the observation that a lot of the attempted differentiation between different operators – for example, in the vertical industry solutions they offer – fail to achieve any meaningful distinctions.

State of maturity of the industry

In one way, the lack of tremendous excitement at MWC this year indicates the status of the mobile industry as being relatively mature. This is in line with the observation that there were “a lot of suits” at the event. Arguably, the industry is ripe for another round of major disruption – similar to that triggered by Apple’s introduction of the iPhone.

Unsurprisingly, given the setting of the Fiesta or Siesta meeting, many in the audience hold the view that “the next big mobile innovation” could well involve companies with strong footholds in Cambridge.

Moller Centre

Footnote: Everything will be connected

Some of the same themes from the Fiesta or Siesta discussion will doubtless re-appear in “The 5th Future of Wireless International Conference” being run by Cambridge Wireless at the same venue, the Møller Centre, on 1st and 2nd of July this year. Registration is already open. To quote from the event website:

Everything Will Be Connected (Did you really say 50 billion devices?)

Staggeringly, just 30 years since the launch of digital cellular, over 6 billion people now have a mobile phone. Yet we may be on the threshold of a far bigger global shift in humanity’s use and application of wireless and communications. It’s now possible to connect large numbers of physical objects to the Internet and Cloud and give each of them an online digital representation. What really happens when every ‘thing’ is connected to the Cloud and by implication to everything else; when computers know where everything is and can enhance our perception and understanding of our surroundings? How will we interact with this augmented physical world in the future, and what impact will this have on services, infrastructure and devices? More profoundly, how might this change our society, business and personal lives?

In 2013, The Future of Wireless International Conference explores strategic questions about this “Internet of Things”. How transformational could it be and how do we distinguish reality from hyperbole? What about the societal, business and technical challenges involved in moving to a future world where everyday objects are connected and autonomous? What are the benefits and pitfalls – will this be utopia or dystopia? What is the likely impact on your business and what new opportunities will this create? Is your business strategy correct, are you too early, or do you risk being too late? Will this change your business, your life? – almost certainly. Come to hear informed analysis, gain insight, and establish new business connections at this un-missable event.

The agenda for this conference is already well-developed – with a large number of highlights all the way through. I’ll restrict myself to mentioning just two of them. The opening session is described as an executive briefing “What is the Internet Of Things and Why Should I Care?”, and features a keynote “A Vision of the Connected World” by Prof Christopher M. Bishop, FREng, FRSE, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research. The closing session is a debate on the motion “This house believes that mobile network operators will not be winners in the Internet of Things”, between

23 February 2013

Health improvements via mobile phones: achieving scale

Filed under: Accenture, Barcelona, Cambridge, healthcare, mHealth, MWC, partners — David Wood @ 10:27 pm

How can mobile reach its potential to improve both the outcomes and the economics of global health?

MWC13_logoThat’s the headline question for the panel I’m chairing on Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona.

MWC is an annual conference that celebrates progress with mobile technology. Last year, there were over 67,000 attendees, including:

  • More than 12,000 mobile app developers
  • 3,300+ press members representing 1,500 media outlets from 92 countries
  • CEOs from more than 3,500 companies.

This year, a larger venue is being used, and the attendee numbers are expected to be even larger. Keynote speakers include the CEOs or Presidents from Vodafone, Telefonica, China Mobile, AT&T, Telecom Italia, NTT DoCoMo, Korea Telecom, Deutsch Telekom, Qualcomm, Nokia, General Motors, CNN Digital, American Heart Foundation, Bharti Enterprises, Qtel, Ericsson, Viber Media, Juniper Networks, Dropbox, Foursquare, Deezer, Mozilla, Ubuntu, Tizen, Jolla, and countless more.

And in the midst of all that, there’s a panel entitled Health: Achieving Scale through Partnerships – which, in my role as Technology Planning Lead for Accenture Mobility, I’ve been asked to chair.

MWC as a whole generates a lot of excitement about mobile technology – and about relative shifts in the competitive positions of key companies in the industry. However, it strikes me that the subject under discussion in my panel is more profound. Simply put, what we’re discussing is a matter of life and death.

Done well, mobile technology has the potential to enable the delivery of timely healthcare to people who would otherwise be at risk of death. Prompt diagnosis and prompt treatment can spell the difference between a bitterly unpleasant experience and something that is much more manageable.

But more than that: mobile technology has the potential to address very significant financial problems in the delivery of healthcare. Runaway medical bills impact individuals around the planet. According to a 2010 report by the World Health Organisation (PDF):

When people use healthcare services, they often incur high, sometimes catastrophic costs in paying for their care.

In some countries, up to 11% of the population suffers this type of  severe financial hardship each year, and up to 5% is forced into poverty. Globally, about 150  million people suffer financial catastrophe annually while 100 million are pushed below the poverty line.

It’s not just individuals who are facing ruinous costs from healthcare. A 2011 study by the World Economic Forum and Harvard University anticipates that productivity losses and medical treatment for diabetes, heart disease and other non-contagious chronic diseases will cost economies $47 trillion by 2030. In the UK, the growing cost of treating diabetes alone is said to be likely to “bankrupt the NHS in 20 years”. In countries around the world, surging costs of healthcare treatment are exceeding the growth rates of the national economies.

In principle, mobile technology has the potential to reduce these trends in a number of ways:

  • By enabling more cost-effective treatments, that are less time-consuming and less personally intrusive
  • By enabling earlier detection of medical issues: prevention can be much cheaper than cure!
  • By monitoring compliance with treatment regimes
  • By improving real-time communications within busy, geographically separated teams of clinicians
  • By reducing barriers for people to access information relevant to their health and well-being.

The Creative Destruction of MedicineHere, the key phrase is “in principle”. The potential of mobile technology to beneficially transform healthcare has long been recognised. Success stories can indeed be found. This recent NBC news video featuring physician Eric Topol contains some excellent examples of the use of smartphones in medical practice; for my review of Dr Topol’s award-winning book “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” see my previous blogpost Smartphone technology, super-convergence, and the great inflection of medicine. Nevertheless, the mobile industry is full of people who remain unsure about how quickly this potential can turn into a reality.

Indeed, I regularly encounter people in the mobile industry who have been assigned responsibility in their companies for aspects of “mHealth programmes”, or similar. The recurring refrain that I hear is as follows:

  • The technology seems to work
  • Small-scale pilot trials demonstrate encouraging results
  • But it’s hard to see how these trials can be scaled up into self-sustaining activities – activities which no longer rely on any strategic subsidies
  • Specifically, people wonder how their programmes will ever deliver meaningful commercial revenues to their companies – since, after all, these companies are driven by commercial imperatives.

In this sense, the question of scaling up mobile health programmes is a matter of commercial life-or-death for many managers within the mobile industry. Without credible plans for commercially significant revenues, these programmes may be cut back, and managers risk losing their jobs.

For all these reasons, I see the panel on Wednesday as being highly relevant. Here’s how the MWC organisers describe the panel on the event website:

There are hundreds of live and pilot mHealth deployments currently underway across many and diverse territories, but many of these projects, both commercial and pilot, will remain short term or small scale and will fold once initial funding is exhausted.

To reach scale, mHealth systems must in many cases be designed to integrate with existing health systems. This is not something the mobile industry can achieve alone, despite operators’ expertise and experience in delivering end-to-end services to their customers, and will require strong working partnerships between mobile network operators, health applications and health IT providers.

Speakers in this session will draw upon their own experience to showcase examples of mHealth projects that have gone beyond the small scale and pilot stages.

They will seek to identify best practice in making mHealth sustainable, and will discuss the progress and challenges in partnering for mHealth.

The panellists bring a wealth of different experience to these questions:

Faces

  • Pamela Goldberg is CEO of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), an economic development engine charged with charged with catalyzing technology innovation throughout the Massachusetts Commonwealth. She has an extensive background in entrepreneurship, innovation and finance, and is the first woman to lead the agency in its nearly 30 year history. MassTech is currently advancing technology‐based solutions that improve the health care system, expand high‐speed Internet access, and strengthen the growth and development of the state’s technology sector.
  • Kirsten Gagnaire is the Global Partnership Director for the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), where she manages a cross-sector partnership between USAID, Johnson & Johnson, the UN Foundation, the mHealth Alliance and BabyCenter. MAMA is focused on engaging an innovative global community to deliver vital health information to new and expectant mothers through mobile phones. She recently co-lead the Ashoka Global Accelerator, focused on getting mid-stage social entrepreneurs in developing countries the support & resources they need to scale their work across multiple countries and continents. These organizations are focused on using innovation and technology to address global health issues. She recently spent a year living in Ghana, where she was the Country Director for the Grameen Foundation and managed a large-scale mobile health project focused on maternal and child health across Ghana.
  • Chris Mulley is a Principal Business Consultant within the Operator Solutions department of ZTE Corporation. He is responsible for the analysis of market and business drivers that feed into the development of cost-effective end-to-end solutions, targeted at major global telecom operators, based on ZTE’s portfolio of fixed-line and wireless infrastructure equipment and ICT platforms. A key part of this role involves informing ZTE Corporation’s strategic approach to the provision of solutions that meet the objectives of the European Commission Digital Agenda for Europe policy initiative for the wide scale adoption of ICT in the provision of e-Health, e-Transport and e-Government across Europe. Chris was instrumental in the establishment of an e-Health collaboration between ZTE Corporation, the Centro Internazionale Radio Medico and Beijing People’s Hospital.
  • Tong En is Deputy General Manager of the Data Service department and Director of the R&D center at China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), JiangSu Company. He has long been engaged in the research of mobile communication and IoT related technologies, and has chaired or participated more than 10 CMCC research projects. He is a multiple winner of CMCC innovation awards, and has published nearly 20 academic papers.
  • Oscar Gómez is Director of eHealth Product Marketing in Telefónica Digital, where he leads the creation and implementation of a Connected Healthcare proposition to help transform Health and Social Care systems in the light of the challenges they are facing. Oscar has global responsibility over Telefonica’s portfolio of products and solutions in the eHealth and mHealth space. Oscar holds an Executive MBA from Instituto de Empresa, a M.Sc. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and a Diploma in Economics from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He graduated in Healthcare Management from IESE in 2012.

In case you’re interested in the topic but you’re not able to attend the event in person, you can follow the live tweet stream for this panel, by tracking the hashtag #mwc13hlt1.

Postscript

Although I passionately believe in the significance of this particular topic, I realise there will be many other announcements, debates, and analyses of deep interest happening at MWC. I’ll be keeping my own notes on what I see as the greatest “hits” and “misses” of the show. These notes will guide me as I chair a “Fiesta or Siesta” debrief session in Cambridge in several weeks time. Jointly hosted by Cambridge Wireless and Accenture, on the 12th of March, this event will take place in the Møller Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. As the event website explains,

Whether you attended Mobile World Congress (MWC), or you didn’t, you will have formed an opinion (or read someone else’s) on the key announcements and themes of this year’s show. “MWC – Fiesta or Siesta?!” will re-create the emotion of Barcelona as we discuss the hits and misses of the 2013 Mobile World Congress, Cambridge Wireless style…

Registration for this “Fiesta or Siesta” event is now open. Knowing many of the panellists personally, I am confident in predicting that sparks will fly in this discussion, and we’ll end up collectively wiser.

24 August 2012

Duplication stuplication

Filed under: Accenture, Android, brain simulation, Connectivity, cryonics, death, futurist, Symbian — David Wood @ 12:04 am

I had a mixture of feelings when I looked at the display of the Agenda application on my Samsung Note smartphone:

On the face of things, I was going to be very busy at 09:00 that morning – I had five simultaneous meetings to attend!

But they were all the same meeting. And in fact I had already cancelled that meeting. Or, at least, I had tried to cancel that meeting. I had tried to cancel it several times.

The meeting in question – “TPR” – the Technology Planning Review that I chair from time to time inside Accenture Mobility – is a meeting I had organised, on a regularly repeating basis. This particular entry was set to repeat every four weeks. Some time earlier, I had decided that this meeting no longer needed to happen. From my Outlook Calendar on my laptop, I had pressed the button that, ordinarily, would have sent cancellation messages to all attendees. At first, things seemed to go well – the meeting disappeared from sight in my Outlook calendar.

However, a couple of hours later, I noticed it was still there, or had re-appeared. Without giving the matter much thought, I imagined I must have experienced some finger problem, and I repeated the cancellation process.

Some time later, I glanced at my engagements for that day on my smartphone – and my heart sank. The entry was shown no less than nine times, stacked on top of each other. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Woops.

(The screenshot above only shows the entry appearing five times. That’s because I deleted four of the occurrences before I had the presence of mind to record the image for posterity.)

To tell the truth, I also had a wry, knowing smile. It was a kind of “aha, this confirms that synchronising agendas can be hard” smile. “Thank goodness there are duplicate entry bugs on Android phones too!”

That uncharitable thought had its roots in many moments of personal embarrassment over the years, whenever I saw examples of duplicated entries on phones running Symbian OS. The software that synchronised agenda information across more than one device – for example, between a PC and a connected Symbian smartphone – got into a confused state on too many occasions. Symbian software had many strengths, but laser accuracy of agenda entry synchronisation was not one of them.

But in this case, there was no Symbian software involved. The bug – whatever it was – could not be blamed on any software (such as Symbian OS) for which I personally had any responsibility.

Nevertheless, I still felt bad. The meeting entry that I had created, and had broadcast to a wide number of my Accenture Mobility colleagues, was evidently misbehaving on their calendars. I had to answer several emails and instant messaging queries: Is this meeting happening or not?

Worse, the same problem applied to every one of the repeating entries in the series. Entries show up in the calendars of lots of my Accenture colleagues, once every four weeks, encouraging them to show up for a meeting that is no longer taking place.

Whether I tried to cancel all the entries in the series, or just an individual entry, the result was the same. Whether I cancelled them from my smartphone calendar or from Outlook on my laptop, the result was the same. Namely, the entry disappeared for a while, but re-appeared a few hours later.

Today I tried again. Looking ahead to the meeting slot planned for 30th August, I thought I would be smart, and deleted the entry, both from my smartphone calendar, and from Outlook on my laptop, within a few seconds of each other, just in case a defective synchronisation between the two devices was to blame. You guessed it: the result was the same. (Though this time it was about three hours before the entry re-appeared, and I was starting to think I had cracked it after all.

So what’s going on? I found a clue in an unexpected place – the email folder of Deleted Items in Microsoft Outlook. This showed an email that was unread, but which had somehow moved directly into the Deleted Items folder, without me seeing it.

The entry read as follows:

Microsoft Outlook on behalf of <one of the meeting participants>

One or more problems with this meeting were detected by Exchange 2010.

This meeting is missing from your calendar. You’re the meeting organizer and some attendees still have the meeting on their calendar.

And just as Outlook had silently moved this email into the Deleted Items folder, without drawing my attention to it, Outlook had also silently reinstated the meeting, in my calendar and (it seems) in everyone else’s calendar, without asking me whether or not that was a good idea. Too darned clever.

I still don’t know how to fix this problem. I half-suspect there’s been some kind of database corruption problem – perhaps caused by Microsoft Exchange being caught out by:

  • Very heavy usage from large numbers of employees (100s of 1000s) within one company
  • Changes in policy for how online meetings are defined and operated, in between when the meeting was first created, and when it was due to take place
  • The weird weather we’ve experienced in London this summer
  • Some other who-knows-what strange environmental race conditions.

However, I hear of tales of other colleagues experiencing similar issues with repeating entries they’ve created, which provides more evidence of a concrete software defect, rather than a random act of the universe.

Other synchronisation problems

As I said, when I reflected on what was happening, I had a wry smile. Synchronisation of complex data between different replications is hard, when the data could be altered in more than one place at the same time.

Indeed, it’s sometimes a really hard problem for software to know when to merge apparent duplicates together, and when to leave them separated. I’m reminded of that fact whenever I do a search in the Contacts application on my Android phone. It often lists multiple entries corresponding to a single person. Some of these entries show pictures, but others don’t. At first, I wasn’t sure why there were multiple entries. But closer inspection showed that some details came from my Google mail archives, some from my collection of LinkedIn connections, some from my set of Facebook Friends, and so on. Should the smartphone simply automatically merge all these instances together? Not necessarily. It’s sometimes not clear whether the entries refer to the same person, or to two people with similar names.

If that’s a comparatively simple example, let me finish with an example that takes things further afield. It’s not about the duplication and potential re-integration of agenda entries. Nor is it about the duplication and potential re-integration of pieces of contacts info. It’s about the duplication and potential re-integration of human minds.

Yes: the duplication and potential re-integration of human minds.

That’s a topic that came up in a presentation in the World Future 2012 conference I attended in Toronto at the end of July.

The talk was given by John M. Smart, founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. The conference brochure described the talk as follows:

Chemical Brain Preservation: How to Live “Forever”

About 57 million unique and precious human beings die every year, or 155,000 people every day. The memories and identities in their brains are permanently lost at present, but may not be in the near future.

Chemical brain preservation is a technique that many scientists believe may inexpensively preserve our memories and identity when we die, eventually for less than $10,000 per person in the developed world, and less than $3,000 per person in the developing world. Preserved brains can be stored at room temperature in cemeteries, in contract storage, or even in private homes. Our organization, the Brain Preservation Foundation (brainpreservation.org), is offering a $100,000 prize to the first scientific team to demonstrate that the entire synaptic connectivity of mammalian brains, where neuroscientists believe our memories and identities reside, can be perfectly preserved using these low-cost chemical techniques.

There is growing evidence that chemically preserved brains can be “read” in the future, like a computer hard drive, so that memories, and even the complete identities of the preserved individuals can be restored, using low-cost automated techniques. Amazingly, given the accelerating rate of technological advance, a person whose brain is preserved in 2020 might “return” to the world, most likely in a computer form, as early as 2060, while their loved ones and some of their friends are still alive…

Note: this idea is different from cryonics. Cryonics also involves attempted brain preservation, at an ultra-low temperature, but with a view to re-animating the brain some time in the future, once medical science has advanced enough to repair whatever damage brought the person to the point of death. (Anyone serious about finding out more about cryonics might be interested in attending the forthcoming Alcor-40 conference, in October; this conference marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the most famous cryonics organisation.)

In contrast, the Brain Preservation Foundation talks about reading the contents of a brain (in the future), and copying that information into a computer, where the person can be re-started. The process of reading the info from the brain is very likely to destroy the brain itself.

There are several very large questions here:

  • Could the data of a brain be read with sufficient level of detail, and recreated in another substrate?
  • Once recreated, could that copy of the brain be coaxed into consciousness?
  • Even if that brain would appear to remember all my experiences, and assert that it is me, would it be any less of a preservation of me than in the case of cryonics itself (assuming that cryonics re-animation could work)?
  • Given a choice between the two means of potential resurrection, which should people choose?

The first two of these questions are scientific, whereas the latter two appear to veer into metaphysics. But for what it’s worth, I would choose the cryonics option.

My concern about the whole program of “brain copying” is triggered when I wonder:

  • What happens if multiple copies of a mind are created? After all, once one copy exists in software, it’s probably just as easy to create many copies.
  • If these copies all get re-animated, are they all the same person?
  • Imagine how one of these copies would feel if told “We’re going to switch you off now, since you are only a redundant back-up; don’t worry, the other copies will be you too”

During the discussion in the meeting in Toronto, John Smart talked about the option to re-integrate different copies of a single mind, resulting in a whole that is somehow better than each individual copy. It sounds an attractive idea in principle. But when I consider the practical difficulties in re-integrating duplicated agenda entries, a wry, uneasy smile comes to my lips. Re-integrating complex minds will be a zillion times more complicated. That project could be the most interesting software development project ever.

9 April 2012

Six weeks without Symbian

Filed under: Accenture, Android, Apple, applications, Psion, Samsung, smartphones, Symbian, UIQ — David Wood @ 10:58 am

It’s only six weeks, but in some ways, it feels like six months. That’s how much time has passed since I’ve used a Symbian phone.

These six weeks separate me from nearly thirteen years of reliance on a long series of different Symbian phones. It was mid-1999 when prototype Ericsson R380 smartphones became stable enough for me to start using as my regular mobile phone. Since then, I’ve been carrying Symbian-powered smartphones with me at all times. That’s thirteen years of close interaction with various Symbian-powered devices from Nokia, Ericsson (subsequently Sony Ericsson), and Samsung – interspersed with shorter periods of using Symbian-powered devices from Panasonic, Siemens, Fujitsu, Sendo, Motorola, and LG.

On occasion over these years, I experimented with devices running other operating systems, but my current Symbian device was never far away, and remained my primary personal communication device. These non-Symbian devices always left me feeling underwhelmed – too much functionality was missing, or was served up in what seemed sub-optimal ways, compared to what I had learned to expect.

But ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, held 27th Feb to 1st Mar, I found three reasons to gain a greater degree of first-hand experience with Android:

  1. I would be meeting representatives of various companies who were conducting significant development projects using Android, and I wished to speak from “practical knowledge” rather than simply from “book knowledge”
  2. Some of my colleagues from Accenture had developed apps for Android devices, that I wanted to be able to demonstrate with confidence, based on my own recurring experience of these apps
  3. One particular Android device – the Samsung Galaxy Note – seemed to me to have the potential to define a disruptive new category of mobile usage, midway between normal smartphones and tablets, with its radically large (5.3″) screen, contained in a device still light enough and small enough to be easily portable in my shirt-top pocket.

I was initially wary about text entry on the Galaxy Note. My previous encounters with Android devices had always left me frustrated when trying to enter data, without the benefits of a QWERTY keyboard (as on my long-favourite Nokia E6 range of devices), or fluid hand-writing recognition (as on the Sony Ericsson P800/P900/P910).

But in the course of a single day, three separate people independently recommended me to look at the SwiftKey text entry add-on for Android. SwiftKey takes advantage of both context and personal history to predict what the user is likely to be typing into a given window on the device. See this BBC News interview and video for a good flavour of what SwiftKey provides. I installed it and have been using it non-stop ever since.

With each passing day, I continue to enjoy using the Galaxy Note, and to benefit from the wide ecosystem of companies who create applications for Android.

Here’s some of what I really like about the device:

  • The huge screen adds to the pleasure of browsing maps (including “street view”), web pages, and other graphic, video, or textual content
  • Time and again, there are Android apps available that tailor the mobile user experience more closely than web-browsing alone can achieve – see some examples on the adjacent screenshot
  • These apps are easy to find, easy to install, and (in general) easy to use
  • Integration with Google services (Mail, Maps, etc) is impressive
  • I’ve grown to appreciate the notification system, the ubiquitous “back” button, and the easy configurability of the device.

On the other hand, I’m still finding lots of niggles, in comparison with devices I’ve used previously:

  • It’s hard to be sure, but it seems likely to me that I get a working network connection on the device less often than on previous (e.g. Nokia) devices. This means for example that, when people try to ring me, it goes through to my voice mail more often than before, even though my phone appears (to my eyes) to be working. I’m finding that I reboot this device more often than previous devices, to re-establish a working network connection
  • I frequently press the “back” button by accident, losing my current context, for example when turning the phone from portrait to landscape; in those moments, I often silently bemoan the lack of a “forward” button
  • The device is not quite capable of one-handed use – that’s probably an inevitable consequence of having such a large screen
  • Although integration with Google services is excellent, integration with Outlook leaves more to be desired – particularly interaction with email notifications of calendar invites. For example, I haven’t found a way of accepting a “this meeting has been cancelled” notification (in a way that removes the entry from my calendar), nor of sending a short note explaining my reason for declining a given meeting invite, along with the decline notification, etc
  • I haven’t gone a single day without needing to recharge the device part-way through. This no doubt reflects my heavy use of the device. It may also reflect my continuing use of the standard Android web browser, whereas on Symbian devices I always quickly switched to using the Opera browser, with its much reduced data transfer protocols (and swifter screen refreshes)
  • Downloaded apps don’t always work as expected – perhaps reflecting the diversity of Android devices, something that developers often remark about, as a cause of extra difficulty in their work.

Perhaps what’s most interesting to me is that I keep on enjoying using the device despite all these niggles. I reason to myself that no device is perfect, and that several of the issues I’ve experienced are problems of success rather than problems of failure. And I continue to take pleasure out of interacting with the device.

This form factor will surely become more and more significant. Up till now, Android has made little market headway with larger tablets, as reported recently by PC World:

Corporations planning tablet purchases next quarter overwhelmingly voted for Apple’s iPad, a research firm said Tuesday [13th March]

Of the 1,000 business IT buyers surveyed last month by ChangeWave Research who said they would purchase tablets for their firms in the coming quarter, 84% named the iPad as an intended selection.

That number was more than ten times the nearest competitor and was a record for Apple.

However, Samsung’s success with the “phablet” form factor (5 million units sold in less than two months) has the potential to redraw the market landscape again. Just as the iPad has impacted people’s use of laptops (something I see every day in my own household), the Galaxy Note and other phablets have the potential to impact people’s use of iPads – and perhaps lots more besides.

Footnote 1: The Galaxy Note is designed for use by an “S Pen Stylus”, as well as by finger. I’ve still to explore the benefits of this Stylus.

Footnote 2: Although I no longer carry a Symbian smartphone with me, I’m still utterly reliant on my Psion Series 5mx PDA, which runs the EPOC Release 5 precursor to Symbian OS. I use it all the time as my primary Agenda, To-do list, and repository of numerous personal word documents and spreadsheets. It also wakens me up every morning.

Footnote 3: If I put on some rosy-eyed glasses, I can see the Samsung Galaxy Note as the fulfilment of the design vision behind the original “UIQ” device family reference design (DFRD) from the early days at Symbian. UIQ was initially targeted (1997-1999, when it was still called “Quartz”) at devices having broadly the same size as today’s Galaxy Note. The idea received lots of ridicule – “who’s going to buy a device as big as that?” – so UIQ morphed into “slim UIQ” that instead targeted devices like the Sony Ericsson P800 mentioned above. Like many a great design vision, UIQ can perhaps be described as “years ahead of its time”.

9 October 2010

On smartphones, superphones, and subphones

Filed under: Accenture, embedded software, Internet of Things, M2M, smartphones, subphones, superphones, vision — David Wood @ 9:24 am

What comes next after smartphones?

There’s big league money in smartphones.  In 2009, around 173 million smartphones were sold worldwide.  IDC predicts this figure will jump to nearly 270 million in 2010.  According to Informa, that represents about 27% of the total mobile phone unit sales in 2010.  But as Informa also point out, it represents around 55% of total market value (because of their high average selling price), and a whopping 64% of the mobile phone market’s profits.

As well as big money from sales of smartphones themselves, there’s big money in sales of applications for smartphones.  A recent report from Research2Guidance evaluates the global smartphone application market as being worth $2.2 (£1.4) billion during the first half of 2010, already surpassing the total value of $1.7 (£1.1) billion for all 12 months of 2009.

  • What’s next? If there’s so much money in the rapidly evolving smartphone market, where will the underlying wave of associated technological and commercial innovation strike next?  Answer that question correctly, and you might have a chance to benefit big time.

Three answers deserve attention.

1. More smartphones

The first answer is that the smartphone market is poised to become larger and larger.  The current spurt of growth is going to continue.  More and more people are going to be using smartphones, and more and more people will be downloading and using more and more applications.  This growth will be driven by:

  • Decreasing costs of smartphone devices
  • Improved network connectivity
  • An ever-wider range of different applications, tailored to individual needs of individual mobile consumers
  • Improved quality of applications, networks, and devices – driven by fierce competition
  • Burgeoning word-of-mouth recommendations, as people tell each other about compelling mobile services that they come across.

Perhaps one day soon, more than 50% of all mobile phones will be built using smartphone technology.

2. Superphones

The second answer is that smartphones are going to become smarter and more capable.  The improvements will be so striking that the phrase “smartphone” won’t do them justice.  Google used a new term, “superphone”, when it introduced the Nexus One device:

Nexus One is an exemplar of what’s possible on mobile devices through Android — when cool apps meet a fast, bright and connected computer that fits in your pocket. The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call “superphones”. It’s the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store.

Blogger Stasys Bielinis of UnwiredView takes up the analysis in his recent thought-provoking article, “Nokia’s doing OK in smartphones. It’s superphones where Apple and Google Android are winning”:

Smartphones and superphones share some common characteristics – always on connectivity, ability to make phone calls and send SMS/MMS, access the internet and install third party software apps.  But the ways these devices are used are very different – as different as iPads/tablets are different from laptops/netbooks.

The main function of a smartphone – is a mobile phone.  You use it primarily to do voice calls and send/receive short text messages via SMS/MMS.  Yes, your smartphone can do a lot more things – take pictures, browse the Web, play music, stream audio/video from the net, make use of various third-party apps.  But you use those additional functions only when you really need it, or there’s no better option than a device in your pocket, or when there’s some particularly interesting mobile service/app that requires your attention – e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, or other status updaters.   But they are secondary functions for your smartphone. And, due to the design limitations – small displays, crammed keypads/keyboards, button navigation, etc – using those additional “smart” capabilities is a chore…

Superphones, on the other hand, are not phones anymore. They are truly small mobile computers in your pocket, with phone/texting as just another app among many. The user experience – big displays, (multi) touch, high quality browsers, etc – is optimized to transfer big screen PC interaction models to the limitations of mobile device that can fit in your pocket. While the overall experience doing various things on your superphone is a bit worse than doing those same things on your laptop, it’s not much worse, and is actually good enough for the extensive use on the go…

There’s scope to quibble with the details of this distinction.  But there’s merit in the claim that the newer smartphones – whatever we call them – typically manifest a lot more of the capabilities of the computing technology that’s embedded into them.  The result is:

  • More powerful applications
  • Delivering more useful functionality.

3. Subphones

The first answer, above, is that smartphones are going to become significantly more numerous.  The second answer is that smartphones are going to become significantly more powerful.  I believe both these answers.  These answers are both easy to understand.  But there’s a third answer, which is just as true  as the first two – and perhaps even more significant.

Smartphone technology is going to become more and more widely used inside numerous types of devices that don’t look like smartphones.

These devices aren’t just larger than smartphones (like superphones).  They are different from smartphones, in all kinds of way.

If the motto “smartphones for all” drove a great deal of the development of the mobile industry during the decade 2000-2010, a new motto will become increasingly important in the coming decade: “Smartphone technology everywhere”.  This describes a new wave of embedded software:

  • Traditional embedded software is when computing technology is used inside devices that do not look like computers;
  • The new wave of embedded software is when smartphone technology is used inside devices that do not look like smartphones.

For want of a better term, we can call these devices “subphones”: the underlying phone functionality is submerged (or embedded).

Smartphone technology everywhere

The phrase “smartphone technology” is shorthand for technology (both hardware and software) whose improvement was driven by the booming commercial opportunities of smartphones.  Market pressures led to decreased prices, improved quality, and new functionality.  Here are some examples:

  • Wireless communications chips – and the associated software
  • Software that can roam transparently over different kinds of wireless network
  • Large-scale data storage and information management – both on a device, and on the cloud
  • Appealing UIs on small, attractive, hi-res graphics displays
  • Streaming mobile multimedia
  • Device personalisation and customisation
  • Downloadable and installable applications, that add real value to the base device
  • Access to the Internet while mobile, in ways that make sense on small devices
  • High performance on comparatively low-powered hardware with long battery life
  • Numerous sensors, including location, direction, motion, and vision.

The resulting improvements allow these individual components to be re-purposed for different “subphone” devices, such as:

  • Tablets and slates
  • Connected consumer electronics (such as cameras and personal navigation devices)
  • Smart clothing – sometimes called “wearable computers” – or a “personal area network”
  • Smart cars – including advanced in-vehicle infotainment
  • Smart robots – with benefits in both industrial automation and for toys
  • Smart meters and smart homes
  • Smart digital signs, that alter their display depending on who is looking at them
  • Mobile medical equipment – including ever smaller, ever smarter “micro-bots”.

By some estimates, the number of such subphones will reach into the hundreds of billions (and even beyond) within just a few short years.  As IBM have forecast,

Soon there will be 1 trillion connected devices in the world. A smarter planet will require a smarter communications infrastructure. When things communicate, systems connect. And when systems connect, the world gets smarter.

This will be an era where M2M (machine to machine) wireless communications far exceed communications directly involving humans.  We’ll be living, not just in a sea of smart devices, but inside an “Internet of Things”.

Barriers to benefits

Smartphone technologies bring many opportunities – but these opportunities are, themselves, embedded in a network of risks and issues.  Many great mobile phone companies failed to survive the transition to smartphones.  In turn, some great smartphone companies are struggling to survive the transition to superphones.  It’s the same with subphones – they’re harder than they look.  They’re going to need new mindsets to fully capitalise on them.

To make successful products via disruptive new combinations of technology typically requires more than raw technological expertise.  A broad range of other expertise is needed too:

  • Business model innovation – to attract new companies to play new roles (often as “complementors”) in a novel setup
  • Ecosystem management – to motivate disparate developers to work together constructively
  • System integration and optimisation – so that the component technologies join together into a stable, robust, useable whole
  • User experience design – to attract and retain users to new usage patterns
  • Product differentiation – to devise and deploy product variants into nearby niches
  • Agility – to respond rapidly to user feedback and marketplace learnings.

The advance of software renders some problems simpler than before.  Next generation tools automate a great deal of what was previously complex and daunting.  However, as software is joined together in novel ways with technologies from different fields, unexpected new problems spring up, often at new boundaries.  For example, the different kinds of subphones are likely to have unexpected interactions with each other, resulting in rough edges with social and business aspects as much as technological ones.

So whilst there are many fascinating opportunities in the world beyond smartphones, these opportunities deserve to be approached with care.  Choose your partners and supporters wisely, as you contemplate these opportunities!

Footnote 1: For some vivid graphics illustrating the point that companies who excel in one era of mobile technology (eg traditional mobile phones) sometimes fail to retain their profit leadership position in a subsequent era (eg superphones), see this analysis by Asymco.

Footnote 2: On the “superphone” terminology:

It wasn’t Google that invented the term “superphone”.  Nokia’s N95 was the first phone to be widely called a superphone – from around 2006.  See eg here and here.

In my own past life, I toyed from time to time with the phrase “super smart phone” – eg in my keynote address to the 2008 Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco.

Footnote 3: I look forward to discussing some of these topics (and much more besides) with industry colleagues, both old and new, at a couple of forthcoming conferences which I’ll be attending:

  • SEE10 – the Symbian Expo and Exchange – in Amsterdam, Nov 9-10
  • MeeGo Conference – in Dublin, Nov 13-15.

In each case, I’ll be part of the Accenture Embedded Software Services presence.

27 August 2010

Reconsidering recruitment

Filed under: Accenture, Psion, recruitment, Symbian — David Wood @ 5:12 am

The team at ITjoblog (‘the blog for IT professionals’) recently asked me to write a guest column for them.  It has just appeared: “Reconsidering recruitment“.

With a few slight edits, here’s what I had to say…

Earlier in my career, I was involved in lots of recruitment.  The software team inside Psion followed a steep headcount trajectory through the process of transforming into Symbian, and continued to grow sharply in subsequent years as many new technology areas were added to the scope of Symbian OS.  As one of the senior software managers in the company throughout this period, I found myself time and again in interviewing and recruitment situations.  I was happy to give significant amounts of my time to these tasks, since I knew what a big impact good (or bad) recruitment can make to organisational dynamics.

In recent weeks, I’ve once again found myself in a situation where considerable headcount growth is expected.  I’m working on a project at Accenture, assisting their Embedded Mobility Services group.  Mobile is increasingly a hot topic, and there’s strong demand for people providing expert consuItancy in a variety of mobile development project settings. This experience has led me to review my beliefs about the best way to carry out recruitment in such situations.  Permit me to think aloud…

To start with, I remain a huge fan of graduate recruitment programs.  The best graduates bring fire in their bellies: a “we can transform the world” attitude that doesn’t know what’s meant to be impossible – and often carries it out!  Of course, graduates typically take some time before they can be deployed in the frontline of commercial software development.  But if you plan ahead, and have effective “bootcamp” courses, you’ll have new life in your teams soon enough.  There will be up-and-coming stars ready to step into the shoes left by any unexpected staff departures or transfers.  If you can hire a group of graduates at the same time, so much the better.  They can club together and help each other, sharing and magnifying what they each individually learn from their assigned managers and mentors.  That’s the beauty of the network effect.

That’s just one examples of the importance of networks in hiring.  I place a big value on having prior knowledge of someone who is joining your team.  Rather than having to trust your judgement during a brief interviewing process, and whatever you can distill from references, you can rely on actual experience of what someone is like to work with.  This effect becomes more powerful when several of your current workforce can attest to the qualities of a would-be recruit, based on all having worked together at a previous company in the past.  I saw Symbian benefit from this effect via networks of former Nortel employees who all knew each other and who could vouch for each others’ capabilities during the recruitment process.  Symbian also had internal networks of former high-calibre people from SCO, and from Ericsson, among other companies.  The benefit here isn’t just that you know that someone is a great professional.  It’s that you already know what their particular special strengths are.  (“I recommend that you give this task to Mike.  At our last company, he did a fantastic job of a similar task.”)

Next, I recommend hiring for flexibility, rather than simply trying to fit a current task description.  I like to see evidence of people coping with ambiguity, and delivering good results in more than one kind of setting.  That’s because projects almost always change; likewise for organisational structures.  So while interviewing, I’m not trying to assess if the person I’m interviewing is the world expert in, say, C++ templates.  Instead, I’m looking for evidence that they could turn their hand to mastering whole new skill areas – including areas that we haven’t yet realised will be important to future projects.

Similarly, rather than just looking for rational intelligence skills, I want to see evidence that someone can fit well into teams.  “Soft skills”, such as inter-personal communication and grounded optimism, aren’t just an optional extra, even for roles with intense analytic content.  The best learning and the best performance comes from … networks (to use that word again) – but you can’t build high-functioning networks if your employees lack soft skills.

Finally, high-performing teams that address challenging problems benefit from internal variation.  So don’t just look for near-clones of people who already work for you.  When scanning CVs, keep an eye open for markers of uniqueness and individuality.  At interview, these markers provide good topics to explore – where you can find out something of the underlying character of the candidate.

Inevitably, you’ll sometimes make mistakes with recruitment, despite taking lots of care in the process.  To my mind, that’s OK.  In fact, it’s better to take a few risks, since you can find some excellent new employees in the process.  But you need to have in place a probation period, during which you pay close attention to how your hires are working out.  If a risky candidate turns out disappointing, even after some coaching and support, then you should act fast – for the sake of everyone concerned.

In summary, I see recruitment and induction as a task that deserves high focus from some of the most skilled and perceptive members of your existing workforce.  Skimp on these tasks and your organisation will suffer – sooner or later.  Invest well in these tasks, and you should see the calibre of your workforce steadily grow.

For further discussion, let me admit that rules tend to have limits and exceptions.  You might find it useful to identify limits and counter-examples to the rules of thumb I’ve outlined above!

30 May 2010

I’m joining Accenture Embedded Mobility Services

Filed under: Accenture — David Wood @ 10:42 pm

I’m very happy to report that, from 1st June, I’ll be joining Accenture Embedded Mobility Services (AEMS).

I don’t intend to say much about my work for Accenture in this blog.  However, I’ll make a brief exception on this occasion.

Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to look at what Accenture is doing in the Embedded and Mobility space.  I’ve been greatly impressed by what I’ve seen of the vision, the accomplishment, and the potential.  I’m looking forward to helping to shape the future evolution of this unit.  As smart connected devices become ever more pervasive, with numerous uses across all sorts of different sectors of life, the need for rich expertise is going to grow and grow – to improve the chances of success for projects that create, utilise, and enhance these devices.  This is an expertise that AEMS already possesses in large measure.

I’m particularly looking forward to renewing working relations with many former colleagues from Symbian Ltd and even Psion PLC days – colleagues who formed part of the Symbian Technical Consulting / Professional Services group which was acquired by Accenture from Nokia last year, constituting the nucleus of AEMS.  These are people I hold in high regard – people with deep skills and integrity.  I’m also looking forward to getting to know lots of new colleagues.

I’ll be based in London but expect I’ll often be travelling.  I’m going to be busy on Accenture projects, but I plan to retain an involvement in some external projects too – projects such as the book I’m writing and various speaking engagements.

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