Everyware: The Mobility of The Earth by Faris Yakob
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I recently gave a talk at an IAB Conference on Mobile Marketing. You can flick through the deck above.
The talk begins by pointing out that Everyware is stolen from the book of that name by Adam Greenfield about the internet of things and the future of ubiquitous computing.
As Adam himself recently pointed out, he wrote it in 2006, before the iPhone changed the mobile landscape, and so it doesn’t take into account how much the ubiquitous computing future would be a function of mobile phone technology.
The second bit is from Copernicus.
He was a smart dude and renaissance type polymath, who dabbled in astronomy mostly as a hobby.
He began to suspect that, contrary to what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD believed, and what our senses tell us, that the sun didn’t go around the Earth.
So he went back to older sources before Ptolemy to find anyone else who had suspected this, and he found some, which helped him light the way to a cogent heliocentric model of the solar system.
So my points were: sometimes we can use the past as a lens to help us look into the future, when we do look forwards we are often heavily biased by the concerns of the present, and that sometimes the thing we are focusing on gets in the way, and maybe it’s the other stuff that’s moving.
Then you get to watch some awesome AT&T ads from 1993 that predict the future with the voice of Tom Selleck, directed by David Finch.
In the bit below, I talk about some use cases for mobile.
I am often fighting back, as I have before right here, about the way new technology platforms as subsumed into our worldview as ‘channels’. New things don’t fit into the old boxes – new digital platform aren’t like previous media – receptacles for certain shapes and sizes of content.
They are functions as well as containers – digital things can take any form, and digital platforms are convergent – things that receive can broadcast, things that consume can produce.
Hence the endlessly heralded year of the mobile will never come – by the time that it does ‘mobile’ will be the ‘web’. Increasingly the idea that channels are discrete I find unhelpful.
This is why I think it’s useful to think about mobile not as a channel but as a tool – something someone is using, not just viewing.
[Although with the iPhone, the highest definition screen anyone owns will be their phone – it is significantly higher resolution than full HD TVs. This means that, should you want to create transmedia content, you would need to record for the iPhone and degrade the footage down to HD for broadcast.]
Your mobile exists in a constant state of NOW – which is what leads to the Google Use cases I highlight in the video.
But Google’s bias is that of a company built around information retrieval. My contribution to their use cases was the addition of TIME SHIFTED NOW – when you use your phone to make sure you do what you intended.
I suspect there is a role for lots of brands here, in helping people act the way they think they will tomorrow, NOW.
[There’s a journalist's write up of the talk here],
Posted: September 13th, 2010 | Author: elen.lewis | Filed under: Digital, Faris Yakob | Tags: Digital, Faris Yakob, Mobile | Leave a Comment »
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