I attended a Disruptathon last night (May 26) at the British Embassy. Put together by Pete Ericson, and hosted in part by Cynergy, it was a great gathering of individuals that were looking at what they were innovating now, and where innovation could go in the future.
The topic was government 2.0 and mobile innovation. Lots of great ideas on how the governnment could use mobile to be more productive internally, and also use mobile applications and their existing data streams to leverage outside mobile application developers.
Interoperability was a key - and the fact that smartphones were still oriented toward a leading edge segment of the population. Many of the organizations working today are using least common denominator standards like SMS to insure that they can get the message across.
This is an area of explosive growth, and there are many different features like geolocation that are under utilized today in the mobile phone arena. As more applications become more capable of utilizing these inherent features, and as more of the advanced phones move toward some kind of unified development environment, the state of the art will advance more rapidly.
Kudos to the organizers of this event.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Data the key to mobile apps
There are 4 major players in the "smart and getting smarter" mobile space; Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft - you can argue about the order, but in my mind they are the only meaningful players for the next 5 years.
I'm partial to the momentum and openness of the Android OS, but everyone will decide which phone they want a different way. Key will be the availability of killer apps on multiple platforms.
The key to emerging killer apps working across phones will be the inherent data that is associated with the application, and how interoperable it can be between phones. This is pretty easily done if you are sending Twitter messages, but can get pretty complicated when you are assuming things like geospatial awareness or other complex functions that might be implemented differently on different phones.
Standards will become important, and those standards will also help drive other apps into being - kiosks will be dropping in price, the IPAD and non-Apple competitors to the IPAD will be ramping up sales dramatically, and the number of applications using standardized data will increase dramatically.
Standardizing the data will also help reduce the number of redundant applications - RSS eliminated a host of proprietary ways of transmitting simple information between websites.
You will see some very intelligent applications that get smarter based on all the information flowing through their databases and being improved by both analytics, data points from people, and data points from sensors - the cost of which is dropping rapidly.
I'm partial to the momentum and openness of the Android OS, but everyone will decide which phone they want a different way. Key will be the availability of killer apps on multiple platforms.
The key to emerging killer apps working across phones will be the inherent data that is associated with the application, and how interoperable it can be between phones. This is pretty easily done if you are sending Twitter messages, but can get pretty complicated when you are assuming things like geospatial awareness or other complex functions that might be implemented differently on different phones.
Standards will become important, and those standards will also help drive other apps into being - kiosks will be dropping in price, the IPAD and non-Apple competitors to the IPAD will be ramping up sales dramatically, and the number of applications using standardized data will increase dramatically.
Standardizing the data will also help reduce the number of redundant applications - RSS eliminated a host of proprietary ways of transmitting simple information between websites.
You will see some very intelligent applications that get smarter based on all the information flowing through their databases and being improved by both analytics, data points from people, and data points from sensors - the cost of which is dropping rapidly.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The data sharing imperative - an irresistable force
If you deal with data in any way (and you do), get ready for the world to start sharing data at a faster rate, in much more detail, and organized where many more people can use it for a much wider set of purposes. You can help it happen, watch it happen, or later wonder "what happened?"
Standardized data vocabularies will make this all possible. I examine this topic in detail in my book "Silver Bullets - how interoperable data will revolutionize information sharing and transparency". The "plumbing" is all coming into focus, with a wide array of data formats having been developed over that last several years, and many more in the works.
Why is this an imperative? Data collection is too expensive a task for everyone to take on, and the decreasing cost of publishing and consuming data is less than doing without. Let's take a traffic example - if a manufacturer has 2 plants on each side of Chicago, and needs to route critical parts shipments back and forth - there are a variety of things that can impact the flow of materials and production.
a: actual location - easy to pinpoint and map today
b. Traffic: Many cities are starting to make traffic cameras available, and mapping packages like Microsoft Bing have a real time capability to show major thoroughfare bottlenecks.
c. Weather: NOAA and other weather providers are identifying severe weather ahead of time, and making those alerts easily consumable.
d. Events: Where did that neighborhood parade come from?
These are just some of the simple sharing items that can occur - when you combine business partner interactions, government to private sector notifications, movement of data between government layers (federal, state, local), and all the other types of shareable data, there is much to choose from.
Standardized collection of all these data types and the distribution to a wide array of mobile devices will change the fabric of our lives in 20 years. Data will be available where needed (increasingly from automated sensors in a structured form) to make better decisions. It will impact us in every aspect of our lives - especially as video becomes smarter and provides data as well as images.
Will there be negative backlash - of course? Will there be breakdowns and shortfalls? Undoubtedly. Privacy violations? Many. Will the inexorable push forward continue? Absolutely - just like the glaciers in the Ice Age.
Standardized data vocabularies will make this all possible. I examine this topic in detail in my book "Silver Bullets - how interoperable data will revolutionize information sharing and transparency". The "plumbing" is all coming into focus, with a wide array of data formats having been developed over that last several years, and many more in the works.
Why is this an imperative? Data collection is too expensive a task for everyone to take on, and the decreasing cost of publishing and consuming data is less than doing without. Let's take a traffic example - if a manufacturer has 2 plants on each side of Chicago, and needs to route critical parts shipments back and forth - there are a variety of things that can impact the flow of materials and production.
a: actual location - easy to pinpoint and map today
b. Traffic: Many cities are starting to make traffic cameras available, and mapping packages like Microsoft Bing have a real time capability to show major thoroughfare bottlenecks.
c. Weather: NOAA and other weather providers are identifying severe weather ahead of time, and making those alerts easily consumable.
d. Events: Where did that neighborhood parade come from?
These are just some of the simple sharing items that can occur - when you combine business partner interactions, government to private sector notifications, movement of data between government layers (federal, state, local), and all the other types of shareable data, there is much to choose from.
Standardized collection of all these data types and the distribution to a wide array of mobile devices will change the fabric of our lives in 20 years. Data will be available where needed (increasingly from automated sensors in a structured form) to make better decisions. It will impact us in every aspect of our lives - especially as video becomes smarter and provides data as well as images.
Will there be negative backlash - of course? Will there be breakdowns and shortfalls? Undoubtedly. Privacy violations? Many. Will the inexorable push forward continue? Absolutely - just like the glaciers in the Ice Age.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
$3 Microscope plugs into Cell Phone!
Check this MIT Technology Review story out.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25286/?nlid=2973&a=f
The implications for standardized, interoperable plug-ins to cell phones and other portable devices are amazing - as long as the data moving from one device to the other is interoperable, you can assemble some amazing capture and use scenarios.....
This is in a similar vein to the glasses that can be adjusted by the user in the field rather than being done by perscription - you use a pump to change the pressure of some internal fluid which changes the shape of the lens to fit the user's eyesight.
Go interoperability.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25286/?nlid=2973&a=f
The implications for standardized, interoperable plug-ins to cell phones and other portable devices are amazing - as long as the data moving from one device to the other is interoperable, you can assemble some amazing capture and use scenarios.....
This is in a similar vein to the glasses that can be adjusted by the user in the field rather than being done by perscription - you use a pump to change the pressure of some internal fluid which changes the shape of the lens to fit the user's eyesight.
Go interoperability.
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