Topic: Mobile and Wireless
From the first mobile phones in the 1970's to the "teleputers" we call smartphones today, we have continued to enhance our remote connections with each other and the world with these handheld devices. What will this trajectory look like by the year 2020? Futurist Szymon Slupik gives us a glimpse of what he thinks mobile phones will look like and offer us on their 50th birthday.
Hold on to your smartphones -- she's been criticized for talking too fast with too many ideas before and she intends to do it again now. Mary Meeker, formerly managing director at Morgan Stanley and now partner at famed Internet venture firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, reports on Internet trends. In this talk, recorded on 10/18/2011, Mary tries for twelve trends in twelve minutes. Things are looking up, with ever-faster adoption of devices, a new audio push, and e-commerce on the rise.
According to Michael Luna, better radio technology, such as 4G, is not enough to resolve the current and coming data crisis. The data tsunami challenge has been to keep user experience satisfying, while keeping app signaling and network activity clutter to a minimum. Although web-connected applications are still the bulk of the issue, the weight and complexity of streaming is becoming the next significant annoyance. This will lead to a twelve-fold increase in demand for networked services over the next five years.
"All you wanted to know about Opera browsers but you didn't even know you could ask," is presented by Karl Dubost, of Opera Software, as interviewed by Mac Slocum, of O'Reilly Media. Far from being in a "browser war," Karl says we are in a time of "browser love" among browser engineers. Karl also predicts that in 2014 mobile will be more important than the desktop. Karl further describes the differences between the current popular perception of browsers and mobile, and the actual situation, and shares his view of where the focus should be.
Spectrum, according to Michael Calabrese, is an infinitely renewable resource. However, exclusive use, auctions, and large corporations lead to a massively inefficient use of that spectrum for communication. In this talk, the Vice President and Director of the Wireless Future Program presents how spectrum has been divided, discusses contemporary difficulties, and suggests a few solutions that would lead to opportunistic and efficient usage of air space.
Do not let what you see in the front window at eBay distract you - it is the backroom of the shop that is really interesting. eBay announced X.Commerce, its shopping and payments platform services in late 2011. On top of its acquisition of PayPal, eBay is bulking up into an online payments powerhouse! John Donahoe, president and CEO if eBay, talks with John Battelle about retail and the trends for online purchasing and payment.
Apple and Google are both big enough to buy AT&T. So, would they want their own carrier? Jan Dawson of Ovum Telecoms makes a ten-year projection for the telecom industry. He predicts two trends. A shift in value from carrier to content. And the needs of telecom consumers driving the development of offers, which in turn will lead to the formation of two types of players -- the S.M.A.R.T. and the L.E.A.N.
What is the digital Swiss Army knife that you grab along with your keys and wallet when starting out for the day? That device is your smart phone, and Rich Nespola says the other two things are irrelevant. In this talk he describes how the global app "hockey stick effect" is creating seismic changes in innovation, and why collaboration among separate companies will be essential to survive in the emerging mobile communications ecosystem.
The third major semantic web revolution is node.js, following Java and Ruby. One programmer replaced 10,000 lines of production C code with 4,000 lines of node.js, and that's just the beginning. Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, Inc. describes a new class of applications that will further revolutionize the real time web, especially mobile.
In a country that lacks formal financial services but contains over half a billion cell phone users, two brothers saw a unique opportunity. In this audio interview, Sheela Sethuraman speaks with Abhishek Sinha, co-founder of Eko India Financial Services, about their efforts to lower the barriers for end-consumers in India. As The Tech Awards 2011 laureates of the Flextronics Economic Development Award, Sinha discusses Eko India's breakthrough developments in branchless banking.
