Nomads and wireless: how your day will change
The economist published, a few weeks ago, an interesting special on mobility. The report is called “Nomads”, published the 10th of April, and all the articles can be accessed directly from this link.
I advise you to read them all. They are very interesting, and cover many different aspects of mobility driven by the new wireless era.
Fairly interesting are the considerations about the “nomads oasis”, i.e. places where they can stop, recharge, get wifi connection and get stuff done in a pleasant environment. You could think to the Starbucks. These are called the “third spaces”, as in the place between your first place (home) and your second place (office). Once great places to socialize, they have recently become lonely places full of people busy with their crackberries or their laptops. Part of the revenues of these places come from wifi access, and it will be interesting to see what happens when wimax will be released, or wireless broadband becomes mainstream in any way, shape or form. I guess people sitting with a single espresso and surfing online for 2 or 3 hours won’t necessarily be welcome.
Another interesting point made by the article is that mobility is completely change traffic patterns, and the way people use the city. Architecture will have to re-think the way cities and building are built, and spaces are used. It appears that desks are going to be a thing of the past. Although I quite fancy having one, and I am not sure I would trade if for a daily search of a spare couch in a common space, for as confy as the couch can be.
Let’s go a bit further ahead. Just a few years.
Mobility is going to change the way we do many things, and I am particularly interested at how it will change the way we use the internet. And it will also reinforce the need of the “cloud”. The very simple fact that you cannot squeeze 1600×1200 pixels into a 3inches screen, and that, even if you manage to do that, you couldn’t probably make good use of it (unless you carry a microscope with you, at which point you are probably better off carrying your whole pc) will require ubiquitous access to your data, files and applications. So that you will have your 3 / 4 inches mobile for the “on the road” stuff like quickly skimming through a PowerPoint presentation, reading emails, making phone calls, reading news. And then you will use a laptop -if you carry one- or a desktop at a “third space”. Clearly, all your stuff will need to be remotely stored, to make sure you can easily access them from any device around the world. Your mobile device will also carry your music and videos, and they too will be remotely stored, or the more frequently used will be locally stored while the whole archive will be sitting in a server somewhere around the world. Clearly your mobile will be able to connect via bluetooth to your camera stereo, if the stereo is too old to access your cloud. No need to buy CDs. Your camera -if you are not happy with the 5MP in your mobile you’ll probably have a tiny 14MB handy- will take geo-referenced pictures that will be uploaded in your cloud and properly categorized and tagged by a product like flickr, for example. Of course, new pictures would update your social profile online. This is, in a nutshell, what the “cloud” means for a user, and it is being made possible by a few key things: the Internet (as an infrastructure and as a collection of services), ubiquitous wireless access (wifi, 3G, 4G, wimax when it will come) and devices. Interesting times.
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