In our modern digital world, there is a set of tradeshow events that seem to perennially mark our calendars. The year starts with CES, where “everything” new (or not) regarding consumer electronics is on display. The next global event is Mobile World Congress. MWC, for anyone remotely connected to mobile is THE event, this year hosting 72,000 attendees from 200 countries.
Rambus came to MWC to introduce our Binary Pixel technology, with its breakthrough image sensor and processing architecture that provides single-shot, ultra-high dynamic range (HDR) and improved low-light sensitivity for professional-quality images and videos in tomorrow’s smartphones and consumer cameras. We also showcased Imerz™, the end-to-end multimedia platform that enables semantic, contextual, interactive TV, from any device.
Beyond the hundreds of product and technology announcements, MWC is mostly about the community, innovators, and shared visions of the dynamically changing mobile landscape. My friends at Fjord, worldwide experts in human-centered digital service design, shared their annual view of mobile trends for 2013. I’d like to share a few as I see them as relevant.
People are running everything
Social networking is about peer-to-peer. Once for connecting and fun, now peer-to-peer services are mainstream (AirBnB, Kickstarter…)
Dawn of the personal ecosystem
Connected objects providing “living services” become our personal ecosystem; the internet of things has us as the central object
KISS – Keep it simple stupid
Ever-increasing volumes of data mandate that devices and services are simple, effective, and elegant
Access is the new ownership
The proverbial library card becomes the digital key to things we use, replacing the need to own
Think like a start-up
Innovation can be blocked by organizational and bureaucratic structure. design-led thinking begins with end-users, use-cases, and value definition; This is relevant for the latest start-up based mobile services and chips or sensors alike
These ideas are both provocative and essentially obvious. Interestingly they start from the perspective of the end-user, which is typically the origin of great products and services. On a related topic, the folks at MLOVE, an international non-profit dedicated to everything mobile, released the book “Lifestyle of Mobility”. I was excited to be included in their list of the 100 mobile influencers with the following quote:
Yes, everything is becoming mobile and we are connected to the cloud. I already look forward to next year’s MWC and am certain that the winning technologies, products, and services will be those that keep the user in mind.