Ted Talks - Mobile phone

http://www.ted.com/talks/jan_chipchase_on_our_mobile_phones.html








Jan Chipchase is a researcher at Nokia mobile phone. He takes a different via of technology in the future. At the start of the presentation he states that he does not know what the future of technology will look like. He does not even seem to care about how technology looks. What he is concerned is how people will behave in the future. This strikes me as an interesting way to look at the future. Can we be more accurate in understanding of technology by not extrapolating the current technology but instead by understanding the behaviors of people in the future? This ties to our textbook the The Fortune Sellers. Sherden (1998) states that a problem with predicting the future is that we base it upon our lenses of present. Can we be more successful in predicting behavior rather than objects (technology)? It is an interesting idea. An important point to note is that Nokia is loosing market share at a very rapid rate. They seem to be behind in the Smartphone race. Apple, Samsung, Motorola and other are gaining market share from Nokia. This is a good reference point, but this can turn fast. Motorola was on its death bed two years ago. Their hit phone the Razor was only news and nothing they had interested customers. People expected Motorola to disappear. Well they jumped on the Android bandwagon and built the Droid. Now Motorola is back in the game.

Jan starts with the question of what do people carry. Clearly we all own a lot of stuff. I still have stuff in a box from the last move I did ten years ago. So with all of this stuff what stuff is important. Well clearly what we carry must be important. It may be the most important. Jan’s research shows that people carry keys, money, and a mobile phone. Key provide them access and transportation. Money allows commercial interaction with other people. It gives them undefined resource. The mobile phone provides the individual with a recovery device. Jan used that term. I don’t know why. I have heard of people describing a mobile phone as a security blanket, or as a person’s lifeline. No matter what the term a mobile phone provides a person with access. That access might be to social network, people, services, or resources. In all cases Jan states that people carry devices that support needs on the bottom rungs of Maslow’s need hierarchy. At this point Jan’s logic makes a jump that I did not connect. There seemed to be a gap or a piece that he did not explain. His presentation jumped from behaviors to the impact mobile phones will have on the future of innovation. He then went to explain how the mobile phone will change the social way ideas and innovation move through society. The first idea is of no surprise. The speed of ideas will increase. This then moves into not only speed what is a big idea or a significant idea will increase. Your idea may be trumpeted or made obsolete before it even gets started because of somebody’s idea. A great example would be what if Facebook moved so fast into society that MySpace never really got started? Or maybe it did? Does this start to change the VHS verse Betamax dilemma? His second prediction is the immediacy of objects. All objects, things, and ideas become immediate. The gestation period for technology decreases. The third prediction is that innovation will occur at the street level and it will come from sources that we will not expect. In 1910 we could expect innovation to come from a limited number of people that were attached to a limited number of organizations. In 2020 the number of people and the location of innovation expands to “the street”. His last prediction is that there are a lot of people that are demanding to be part of this innovation conversation. This cannot be contained in within a countries boundary, an economic class, or an educational cast. People are demanding to have role. Innovation becomes global because of the mobile phone. 

Bringing this conversation back to our AL words. Clearly it is about how the mobile phone is going to bring a global innovation. It also shows the social impact of the mobile phone. There is a cost to carrying something, so those things that we do carry must have value. If universally money, keys, and mobile phone are the most important things to carry than that has meaning. 

Robert