Dear Mobile Manufacturers, Show Me a Truly Connected World – An Open Letter

[photo: movies.nytimes.com]

[tweetmeme]The following is a result of a dialog between Gabriel Biller and I, Kevin Wong, who are both researchers at Artefact. Mobile manufacturers have put into people’s hands a device that unlocks information and connects people with each other. There is one question though, and that is:

what about connecting our phones to everything else?

Our intention is to share our thoughts and understanding of the marketplace for the sake of advancing conversation towards a connected world for everyday people. It all started after an IM chat the other day…

Kevin: Hey, Gabe. You know what’s annoying?
Gabe: What is it this time?
Kevin: Last week, I was at my sister’s. And she was showing me photos of my niece’s recital from her PC upstairs, using Apple TV connected to her big plasma. And I was, like, oh my god, I need to show you some photos of Lauren from the last time I was here that I haven’t showed you yet. They’re on my iPhone.
Gabe: And?
Kevin: Well, let’s just say there was no obvious, quick, and easy way for me to do that. I couldn’t do it, and I’m usually pretty good with these things. You’d think an Apple TV and an iPhone would easily allow that kind of sharing.
Gabe: Hmmm… that is one rotten apple.
Kevin: Why do they even call it a phone anymore anyway?
Gabe: Good point. It’s basically barely even a phone anymore… at least, not primarily. It’s a mini computer, my Internet-enabled sidekick, my trusted friend… they should call it an “also-a-phone.”
Kevin: An AAP? Ha! An AAP loaded with apps.

So, what’s the problem?

Despite the digitization of many devices and appliances in our everyday lives, very few of these devices can communicate with each other. The Internet-enabled smartphone, with its array of communications antennae, is poised to enable us unprecedented ability to monitor, manage, and control devices and systems that are communications-enabled. But if you look around today, we just aren’t there yet.

1. First, I’m still not connected to everything I want to be connected to.
2. Secondly, the things a phone can do are primarily passive. I can get information, and yes I can send information and do creative things like take photos and videos, but I can’t always take action with it – at least, not on other things.

For instance, without the resources and brainpower of Bill Gates,

• Why can’t I check if my lights are off and my doors are locked when I go on vacation? And if they are on, shouldn’t I be able to switch them on/off from anywhere?
• Why can’t I start my morning from bed by getting the coffee maker going, turning on lights, warming up the car, etc.? I can check my emails, the weather and my schedule, but I can’t do anything else to make my morning more productive.
• Why can’t I carry my medical records with me and share them with my doctor? I can search symptoms, directions to the doctors office, but I can’t transfer my information from one doctor to the next.
• Why can’t I print something from my phone to a nearby printer? Or just show some photos or videos on my phone on any big TV or monitor I get close to (without it being a big hassle)? I can view photos on the tiny screen and even Word documents, but I can’t use the TV that’s just sitting there to show photos for everyone else to see.

The following is an overview of the current state of mobility where, in the end, we’ll highlight what we believe are the important things for mobile manufacturers to consider as they evolve their strategies for improved user experiences for their customers.

So why the phone?

The most portable, personal and cherished digital object in our lives is the phone. It is more powerful and more capable of completing tasks similar to what you would expect from a full sized computer only a couple years ago. People are relying on it more to find, capture, collect and share their personal and professional experiences. Palm released the Pre last summer in June, a sliding touch-enabled phone that contains a full QWERTY keyboard, the power to multitask with multiple applications at once, and even cuts cheese! Android and Apple are bringing tens of thousands of applications to people everyday letting them know that, “there’s an app for that.” The phone, as Alexander Graham Bell originally conceived it to be, was an “electrical speech machine” for people to communicate with other people from remote distances. It has now evolved into a computer, a platform, that allows people to communicate with other people and machines with their voices, text, video, photos, their personal data, tweets, and whatever else the imagination holds. More importantly, phones have empowered people with control over many things, literally at their fingertips.

We can’t simply think of the phone as a phone anymore. Instead, we must continue with imaging the phone as a portable entry point into our surrounding digital world.

How people are using phones now

Let’s take a second and look at what’s going on right now, and what we might see happening in the near future. Today, the average smartphone user is doing the following activities with his/her device:

• phone calls
• texting/SMS
• emailing
• web browsing
• game playing
• watching videos, even recording videos
• taking, sharing, and viewing photos
• social networking
• mobile banking
• buying music, videos, TV shows, books, etc.
• personal organization and management tasks (calendars, notes, etc.)
• making fart sounds

But, on the horizon are many other interactions that have either been demonstrated already or will soon become possible as well – possibly even mainstream:

• paying for parking spots
• scanning barcodes to get product information
• locking/unlocking and starting one’s car
• opening/closing one’s garage door
• turning on/controlling other devices (like TVs, stereo systems, appliances, etc.)
• controlling PowerPoint or Keynote presentations on a computer
• controlling home appliances and systems remotely (lights, heat, air, appliances, etc.)
• driving a car?! (http://www.appirion.com/en/)

While our phones continue to bridge our communication, information, and entertainment needs, we’re beginning to see some attention applied to interactions that allow people to have direct control over physical things around them. The exciting part is that as more of these things become digital, the more people can control them from a single point of access.

More things the phone should be able to talk to

How many appliances do you have currently in your home? How many electronics do you have in your home? Done counting? Gabe has 16 total and I have 14, respectively (of course, we are technophilic Seattleites). Technology is all around us, and it will continue to become more pervasive as time goes on. According to some futurists, using Moore’s Law and observed changes in purchasing power and technology spending, the number of “impact of computing” devices (loosely defined as those pieces of hardware where much more powerful/capacious versions will be available for the same price within 2 years) in an average household has been growing exponentially.

The average household in the current decade (the 2000s) will have had anywhere between 6-12 different digital, electronic devices. In the 1990s, that average was only 3-4 devices. Remember your first cell phone? In the 1980s, the average was 1-2 devices. Remember your first PC? In addition, consumers are buying more and more of these devices as their lifestyles have become increasingly digital. Have you ever seen the “what’s in your bag?” group on Flickr? And that’s just bags, not entire homes. Here’s mine. It’s predicted that in the next decade, the average home will have 15-30 impact of computing devices; in the 2020s, the average home will have as many as 40-80! Our world is becoming more digital by the moment and soon enough, these devices will all have computer chips and access to wireless networks just like our computers today.

More phones available to talk to these things

More people are going to have this control. You probably already know the numbers, but for everyone else, let’s break it down:

In the past 3 years, the smartphone category has shown a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3%.

Smartphones as a percentage of all mobile phone shipments was previously 7.6% in Q4 2006 but jumped to 10.1% in Q1 2007. The size climbed steadily to 15.1% in Q1 2009 with only a slight drop in Q2 2009 to 14.9%.
(sources: Canalys and Strategy Analytics)

While analysts have a range of predictions on how big it will be in the next couple of years, one thing is similar: they predict there are going to be at least 300 million units out the door by 2013. As it stands, there are currently 131-192 millions shipments worldwide (sources: Gartner and iSuppli). Gartner is most optimistic in that they believe 525 million units in will be shipped by 2012; Parks Associates says over 300 million in 2013 and iSuppli says 400-450 million by 2013.

Basically put, the smartphone market is growing and there are going to be more people using them.

Current attempts to ‘Connect the World’

The pieces seem like they are there. Powerful computers in our pockets, increasing number of devices that can talk to each other, and an expanding network of untethered connectivity. Yet, still, much to our dismay and frustration, very few of these devices and appliances communicate well with each other outside of our home theaters. To date, we’ve primarily been cobbling together a hodgepodge of point solutions to little problems and marveling that it actually works. This approach won’t work in the long run. The initial excitement of what can be done will soon fade away, and people will realize that how it is accomplished is awkward, convoluted, poorly designed, and incomplete. Fragmented solutions and poor user experience leaving us still wanting.

Unsurprisingly, Apple has been the most successful with their approach to offering a seamless digital lifestyle that is simultaneously desirable to consumers, technologically elegant and sound, and that has translated into financial success through new business models. A handful of scenarios that is possible from their approach might sound something like this:

• Running a business presentation in Keynote on a MacBook via the Keynote Presenter application on your iPhone
• Watching TV, listening to music, or watching local or streaming video content from your couch using Apple TV and the Remote application on your iPhone
• Driving a car using the iDrive application available in the Application Store
• Fighting global warming by warning you when you’ve reached your monthly electricity budget via Tendril’s application and allowing you to throttle your usage
• Connecting to medical accessories through a standardized framework that senses, captures and controls health information

Everyone has their reasons for wanting these applications and frameworks at their fingertips. Apple has demonstrated a vision that could bring us closer to a tangible, connected world.

As for the rest of the mobile handset manufacturers?

Research in Motion (RIM)
Not made by RIM, but Unify4Life is an application that you can install on your BlackBerry giving you the ability to flip channels on your TV, change the volume of your stereo, and even open your garage door. It’s been well-received so far, but the experience isn’t completely seamless. In order to control your entertainment system, Unify4Life requires proprietary add-on device that sends an infra-red signal to your DVD player or TV. The same goes for your garage door opener. Your BlackBerry isn’t completely free to control your world just yet, but someone is starting it. RIM?

Motorola
Motorola is in disaster-recovery mode following 2+ years of poor performance. Once the #2 handset maker in the world (22.4% global market share in Q4 2006, plummeting to just 5.8% share in Q2 2009), they’ve re-strategized and re-focused (less is more, bet on Android) in the hopes of regaining some past glory. The new Cliq smartphone is their first Android handset, with many more likely to follow. But, what if anything, are they thinking about doing beyond catching up? They have broadband cable modems and digital cable boxes in millions of households too, but have they done anything to make their handsets talk to those devices? Yes and no. They recently announced a new Android based set top box in Japan that connects your media in home from your phone. It also plays the role of your typical media center such as playing DVDs and potentially allowing you to surf the web. Other than that, there are no signs of bridging other devices in the home in any other way, even under their own brand.

Sony
The recently released Sony Aino is offered as a companion phone to the Playstation 3, incorporating the PSP’s Remote Play capability allowing controls to the menu system on the device. In addition, attaching a Sony PlayTV to your Playstation 3 turns it into a DVR which can be controlled by the same Remote Play application. But, you can’t mow down soldiers in Call of Duty with your phone just yet (not that you’d want to).

Nokia
They hold the largest share in both the feature phone and smartphone categories, not to mention they are projected to have the largest share of mobile OS’s worldwide (Symbian). While they continue to exploit the bottom of the pyramid, capturing global market share (from 30.7% in Q3 2004 to 40.5% in Q2 2009) and global brand recognition, they have shown some signs of weakness in the smartphone category. Their early advantage and dominance has fallen slightly in the past 2 years from 50.8% share in Q2 2007 to around 45% in Q2 2009, as RIM and Apple have emerged as the strongest followers. Nokia has its Ovi Store (ho hum), and they just released a netbook, but how else can you integrate a Nokia phone into your life?

A new future

There are still a lot of questions out there: What business models should companies adopt? And the best suite of technology solutions necessary to do it?

But there are things that we believe in:

• We believe open standards, an open developer platforms and more research should be done to continually understand how our digital lives are interwoven with a growing set of digital devices and appliances.
• We also believe there are a lot of smart people already thinking about these problems and have some ideas. But the fact remains the same, we aren’t there yet.

There are also things that we know:

• The market has had over 24% year-over-year growth in smartphone adoption since mid-2006, with forecasts expected to continue at 20%+ annual growth for the next few years
• Over 50% of the world has a mobile phone (4.1 billion+ total subscriptions)
• 36% of people worldwide say they “can’t live without their phones”
• Appliance manufacturer Whirlpool will manufacture over 1 million “smart” dryers by 2011 (25% of their total dryer production). GE is also doing lots of work on making our appliances smarter, and $3.9 billion in stimulus grants from the Department of Energy is helping
• People are highly mobile, and the things they interact with are in separate locations, or in the cloud. The phones that are with them all the time are the most convenient and readily available access points to their digital lives
• A pair of pants typically has only 4 pockets. There is only so much technology you can fit in those jeans. Not to mention the current trend of skinny jeans

So let’s imagine…

Let’s imagine this new ‘also-a-phone’ as a remote control. Having a “remote control for life” can do so much more for you as an individual and for your family. We’re talking about smarter, more responsible living. Mobile manufacturers should advocate and enable people to do more than just “connect.” Use connectivity to help people do something good!

For example: today, understanding our energy and environmental “footprint” and the impact of changing our behaviors is still a difficult and complex undertaking. We don’t have the tools or infrastructure for understanding how our energy usage is divided among all the things in our homes and world that require energy; all we have is a monthly bill with a total number.

In the future, as more and more of the energy-consuming devices we use in our lives become capable of communicating with one another and the infrastructure (the “smart grid”) for understanding energy supply, cost, and usage is rolled out and matured, we should be able to use our smartphones as the central device for monitoring, understanding, and acting upon this aspect of responsible living.

No other device or tool has the ubiquity and power to transform billions of individual, small actions into world-changing, collective actions by regular people to inform, modify, and correct our behaviors related to energy consumption.

And that’s just one example.

In the future, mobile phone manufacturers should design the handsets, software, and services to work cooperatively with the other devices and appliances in our lives so that the “phone” can evolve into more than just the information-communication-productivity-and-entertainment device it is now. The phone of the future can also become the “remote control” for responsible living.

Oh yeah, and maybe in the future, I can show those photos to my sister and my parents on the big screen, instead of on my phone.

Keep the conversation going

If you like the idea of your phone giving you access to control the things around you, we’d love to hear about it! Use the hashtag #remoteArtefact on Twitter and share your ideas, stories or thoughts. Tell us your ideas, stories of when your phone could have saved the day or other considerations we haven’t touched on yet. We’ll keep exploring the possibilities on our end here. Thanks!