Topic: Personal Technology
With several mobile device platforms in wide use, the designer's job is more complex than ever. Suzanne Ginsburg sorts it all out, proposing several approaches and giving examples and tradeoffs of each. Should you design a native app only for the iPhone? A web app that works on Android and Windows phones, too? Or should your design fall somewhere between, targeting only a few platforms? Or take a hybrid approach? Suzanne gives guidelines to help you decide and describes tools that can ease the designer's task.
"Incumbents, Attackers, and Disruptors" are accelerating mobile Internet development. The ability to gain market share through innovation and motivating shoppers will sort winners from losers in the smartphone market, according to Mary Meeker. Currently, mobile Internet adoption is accelerating because of the demands of modern life, while angles such as flash sales and virtual goods are opportunities still not fully exploited.
The future is not just in social media's connection to people but in "discovery:" the virtual exploration of physical spaces. This is what Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, believes is the future of location applications. The check-in provides more than just the ability to see "who" is around but to see "what" is around. Dennis believes the combination of rewards, badges, tips and discovery are what make Foursquare successful.
Nick Pudar has an audacious vision of a convergent future where automotive components are able to upload metadata to the cloud to enable software to extrapolate information about a user's intent, and intervene on their behalf. His company OnStar is clearly pushing the envelope in the space of automotive connectivity beyond infotainment and into the areas of destination and intent management.
Commerce enters a new phase which brings back "local and personal", Google's Osama Bedier explains. But the innovation won't come without its challenges. These trends require payments to become completely digital, inventories to move to the cloud and platforms that determine user identity to become interoperable. After hurdling these barriers, technology can bring commerce back to the intimacy of 50 years ago. Sellers hope to see the return of traditional consumer loyalty as well.
Deborah Estrin talks about GIS tracing of individual activity, it's fascinating usefulness, and potential privacy drawbacks. She assesses how combining tools such as location trace and environmental data with a wellness focus can inform public policy and personal decision making. According to Estrin experience sampling can yield data points which help patients to adjust and cope with medications. On the other hand, these living records can be intimate traces almost impossible to erase.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with the Director of Personalized Medicine for Life Technologies, Linh Hoang, about personalized medicine, and what that means for a breast cancer study with just 14 select women.
Consumer mapping on the web and traditional back-office geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming less distinct. Both are more accessible, standards-based, and flexible. Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, speaks about the creation of a publicly accessible GIS mapping system, ArcGIS.com, a web platform that works with maps from various authoritative sources and provides the public with useful tools to add and use their own crowdsourced, volunteered geographic information (VGI).
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and Managing Director for Alchemy Growth Partners, Mehrdad Baghai, about his new book, As One: Individual Action, Collective Power. Published in Feburary 2011, this book is already being heralded as the key to unleashing lost productivity, hidden potential in people, and the inspiring power of purpose.
The market is beginning to fight being "hijaaked" by proprietary SDKs to develop mobile content and experiences. Blackberry maker, Jim Balsillie, shares his predictions for the rapidly-changing mobile market. Balsillie thinks the days of proprietary SDKs are as doomed as proprietary DRMs for music. He calls on the audience to reject the "appification" of the web, saying, "you shouldn't need a YouTube App to go to YouTube on a mobile device." Balsillie also answers questions about Blackberry security and credentialing for point-of-sale.
