Going Mobile At DEMO 2007

Mobile phones can do anything today that your PC could do last week. It’s smooth sailing for Moore and his law, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to find anything resembling a “basic” phone for sale now – that is, the kind of basic that we grew to know and love back before the tech rocket crashed right when the market looked skyward to greet the new millennium.

So it comes as no surprise to find that these pocketable lifesavers are capable of giving and receiving more than voice packets and 150-word text messages. Ah, those were there days. Today we get cameras with our keypads; screens that showcase feature-length video; and connectivity options that make you feel as if you’ve never left your workplace. For many, their mobiles are their main workplaces. Like our desktop-based browsers and the dual-core supermachines beneath them, our handhelds are bringing us closer to the dreamscape scenario Web 2.0 visionaries… well, envisioned. For the deets on this new era, we’re going to consult the goings on at DEMO 2007, which brought folks from all over the world to Palm Desert, California to see what’s new, what’s happenin’, and what’s going to be happenin’.

The latest issue of BusinessWeek declares phones the lifeblood of the new Internet; a discovery they made at the DEMO conference. But it’s not really the thing you hold in your hand that’s changing the world. It’s the things, the powers held inside those 4-by-2 inches that are changing things around. It’s all about the apps.

One of the highlights of DEMO 2007 was Vringo, a service that lets you easily send and receive video clips to others, as long as both ends of the connection have got either a Symbian 60 or Windows Mobile device. (Gotta hate these exceptions.) You can think of Vringo’s technology as an easy way to send and receive video messages, but it’s really more of a multimedia-based Caller ID. Sure it’s kitsch - it’s hardly necessary - but do we always have to do practical things with our phones? As data speeds get faster and fees shrink, we’ll see plenty more where Vringo came from, and as silly as it may seem now, you probably will be using the service or something similar shortly. (Give us a year or two to test this prediction out, eh?)

Also, there’s something we’ve managed to pass over entirely in our quest for all data, all the time. We can send text messages to as many people just by checking off names in our phonebooks, but why can’t we do the same with voicemail? Well, actually I’ve spoken falsely right there, because it looks like Jyngle has already closed that gap. Sure, they’re going to have to seriously consider changing their name and market this to a greater audience than just 13-year-old girls with braces. It should’ve arrived sooner, too. But it’s a good idea nonetheless, and doesn’t require a much more advanced network. It just needs a lot of people on board to tip fate in their favor.

The highlight of the mobile mayhem at DEMO 2007, though, was Mobio. GetMobio, actually. It’s a platform on top of your mobile platform. What does this mean, exactly?

Well, according to GetMobio’s web copy, “Customers don’t need or want to take the ‘whole web’ with them while mobile. Instead, they want with them only those bits of the web that is relevant for them given their specific tastes, interests, geography, as well as the task they are trying to accomplish at a particular moment in time.” I can almost wholly agree with that judgment. People don’t want the complex powers of Firefox and Google and MS Office to wield on their tiny screens. That would make for incredibly cumbersome and ineffectual operation. Instead, you want to have what you’re interested in, need at any particular moment, and nothing more.

So rather than try to develop a single one-shot application, they’ve decided to deliver something that’s expandable, yet not at all overwhelming. As of this moment, GetMobio is comprised of lifestyle services (movie times, flight times, fine dining, etc.). These things are available elsewhere, and your carrier may provide software that takes care of these things, but they’re hardly as powerful. And GetMobio will expand. You can count on that.

This isn’t to say that carriers and the biggest mobile software developers aren’t working on these kinds of solutions. But these are items that are out there now or will soon be released. Eventually the Cingulars and the Verizons and the Vodafones will catch up and offer things of this caliber to everyone. And when they do, we’ll all be better connected, no doubt about that.

The presentations at DEMO 2007 are just a single step in that direction. The world’s biggest carriers have big shoes, but they tend to take baby steps with those clogs. We need people behind stuff like Mobio, Vringo, and Jyngle to make the big guys are moving with the times. Otherwise we all lose out. And we’re at the advent of the biggest Web 2.0 wave yet. We’d hate to see them slacking off now, right?