Today I will give a presentation on the future of mobile at “De Haagse School“.
I will present for a group of Human Technology students.

I tried to look beyond the obvious role of context. I ended up in a world where media and life are delivering ONE integrated experience.

As you see chapter 3 is still not finished.. Atleast that is how it feels for me.. What should be added?

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This is a hour long video where Marc Andreessen gives his take on everything concerning IT, Mobile, cloud computing, social networks and more. He has a great view of what makes the valley and other industries tick and who is doing well and why. He doesn’t seems to up to speed on mobile yet but that will come.

Marc wrote the original code for Mosaic which ended up in Internet Explorer and also started Netscape which now turned into Firefox. He can take credit for both.. In 1999 he started Loudcloud (rebranded into Opsware) which was one of the first cloud computing enterprises. He is also founder of Ning and is on the board of Facebook and ebay among others. And he is an early investor in Twitter and Qik (hmmm maybe he does get Mobile just didnt say in the interview?). He now also started his own VC fund.

Here is the transcript.

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Mr. Enver Tanriverdi from the Dutch town of Nieuwegein has fully automated his house. Although I have seen many of these examples in lab-situations, I never saw this implemented to such a level in a normal home. Where an entire family lives!

The cool thing is that this guy has installed and programmed it all himself, and is controlling his curtains, lights, heating, webcams (in children’s rooms) through his mobile.

Watch the video and full article here (in Dutch, source AD):

http://www.ad.nl/multi-media/3005552/Hele_huis_in_mobieltje.html

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While the mobile industry is rapidly growing, most mobiles and services still seem to appeal to, and are targeted, at men. For the market to fully mature - it is about time to reach the ‘other 50%’: female users.

And even though there are many attempts in reaching this target group, most women feel not being taken seriously when mobiles are being marketed with their 58 tech features, but also not with ‘pink phones with fake diamonds‘, let alone ‘ovulation calculators‘.

This might not be surprising if you consider that most mobile conferences and developer teams are focusing on men - and women are almost invisible in this area.

Now is the time to change this and help the market mature. SPRXmobile’s Claire Boonstra has, together with Helen Keegan (technokitten, Beepmarketing) and Maarten den Braber taken the initiatieve to to create a facilitating platform where consumer research and ‘female insights’ can be shared, and where women can explain how they would like to see and experience their mobiles and services.

The platform is created - and input delivered - by women, but is targeted at the entire mobile industry: men and women, manufacturers and service developers, bloggers and journalists, telecom operators, retailers and researchers, marketers and advertisers. And anyone else who feels attracted to this subject.

A kickoff meeting is planned February 5th in Amsterdam, more events in London to be announced soon - working towards an International Conference in Amsterdam on August 17th, 2009.

You can follow and contribute to this initiative on twitter, by subscribing to the meetup - and on the website (to be launched soon).

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Robert Scoble did an Interview with Sumit Agarwal, product manager for mobile at Google. It provides a good overview of the mobile search services Google provides in the US via Voice or SMS. The simplicity of the services is cool. As well as the integration with the more complicated services.

Hmmmm, maybe SPRXmobile should build a voice interface in a new version of the omroep application so you can find and listen to your shows hands free… You know, for when you are driving… Or am I the only one that listens to video’s on the road?

Seriously, voice interfacing is not being used enough yet and is important on mobile just as mobile games which you can play with just your thumb.

The video is best in the first 15 minutes.

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Just tried out a new service called 12 seconds. It let’s you make mini clips of 12 seconds(duh..) and post it to twitter. Also they have an iPhone app. I love that they limited the videos to 12 seconds. Just a new handy tool to distribute micro video content.

I believe this service to have a bright future!

Check out the test clip:

Testing 12 seconds.. I love it!!!! on 12seconds.tv

Here is the iPhone demo:

iphone app for 12seconds.tv from Sol Lipman on Vimeo.

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Last week, while enjoying a fanastic holiday in Sicily (Italy), I found out that there was just one item I couldn’t have missed: my GPS-enabled N82 mobile phone - working seamlessly together with Google Maps.

Even though we had enough maps and card-reading skills on board (I simply love maps and both my boyfriend and I are good at navigating), we have been thanking Saints Nokia and Google a few times for having helped us out.

Being used to Dutch traffic and roadsigns (all extremely well organized), Sicilian traffic and wayfinding takes some getting used to.

Apart from really needing all your sensors to stay concentrated on traffic alone ['Keeping your lane" doesn't really exist, there were easily 5 rows of traffic on a 2-lane + safety lane motorway], road exit signs are simply very hard to find. And usually placed after an exit, amongst all kinds of other highly distracting signs.

We therefor used Google Maps, together with regular maps and route descriptions from our picturesque yet sometimes quite remotely located Agriturismos and hotels.

It works so easily. Just press “0″ and the GPS tells you immediately where you are. Zooming in and out, scrolling - it is all so incredibly intuitive. The fact that you can choose any level of (non)-detail via Google Maps makes it very easy to get an overview of the entire journey and of the details.

Satellite mode

We also used the ‘Satellite’ mode (= Google Earth) multiple times, for example to find ourselves a nice beach on our way to the next destination or  to locate the ‘teatro Romano’ (lower right on the picture) from our location near the ‘teatro Greco’ (upper left) in Sicacusa.

Again, the roadsigns at that point didn’t help us out, Google Earth did.

We didn’t even use the ’search’ option for finding restaurants this time - this time we simply chose to follow our real life eyes, ears and nose to find lovely places to eat and drink…

So, where will this lead to?

Currently, there were no usable other mobile location services available for Sicily yet, apart from some very simple (but not so interesting) Lonely Planet content. But how would we have loved to get more information about the wonderful monuments ready at hand. However, this is just a matter of time- I’m sure that by next summer many of these services will be available. In the iPhone app store, you can already try out Wikime (link to article in Dutch).

My dream would be to point the camera of my phone at all of the archeological sites which make Sicily (and many other tourist destinations on this planet) so special - and see in the screen of my camera:

• how this site looked like in the old days
• how the people looked like, and what they were doing at that moment

This type of ‘Augmented Reality’ via your regular mobile phone is also only a few years away.

It could radically change the way we live our holidays… If we want to, of course. Luckily there’s always the possibility to switch off your mobile, simply get lost somewhere in the middle of nowhere and phantasize about how life and the historic sites could have looked like a long, long time ago.

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