If you’re reading this blog post then chances are you’re a male between 20 and 40 and at some point during the past 12 months you’ve typed 192.168.0.1 into your address bar. That string of 8 digits is typically used to access a web based user interface for your wireless router. It would be considered silly if your router had a VGA output port and two USB ports, one for a mouse, the other for a keyboard. Likewise in the future it’s going to seem silly that you had to install software on your computer to access and modify the data on your mobile phone.
People working in a corporate environment are familiar with either Microsoft Exchange or BlackBerry Enterprise Server, both are solutions that let users keep their address book, calendar, and emails in sync. Consumers on the other hand have no easy or free solution to manipulate all of their personal data. The software that is out there typically involves using Google’s services and another intermediary application that handles the syncing process between Google’s servers and the mobile phone’s PIM (personal information management) suite. It’s a terrible kludge.
Computers that are on all the time, and have a permanent connection to the internet, are often called servers. Can’t the same be said of your mobile phone today? The perfect smartphone has a server built in and requires nothing more than a browser to interact with every aspect of the device. If you’re sitting at home in front of your computer and your friend asks you if you’re free to hang out later tonight, why should you have to switch to a device with a smaller screen and keypad just to send a response? If someone just sent you an email with their phone number, why should you have to open up Outlook, assuming you even have Outlook, enter in that person’s contact information, wait for it to sync with an Outlook server, and then wait for your phone to sync with that server? If you come home after an evening of partying with your friends and you want to see all the pictures you took, why not just type in a URL and start flipping through the images on your mobile phone?
All devices with a screen and an internet connection can now suddenly become an extension of your mobile phone. The television of the future, with WiFi and browser built in, can interact with your mobile phone. Your laptop. Your portable gaming system. Your tablet. Anything. The service, if you even want to call it that, is accessible to everyone. Business models can be built on top by companies offering to back up that precious data, or companies offering improved user experiences around the data on your mobile phone.
It’s one thing to have your device host a plain webpage that allows for simple interaction, similar to your wireless router today. It’s another to have all of the data on your mobile phone stored in such a way that 3rd party developers can create websites and services that can call that data and then present it to you in a new and interesting way. In the future there will be a decoupling of a consumers’ data and the services which they use. “Data Portability” is a joke since it implies that you can take your data out of one system and then shove it into another. What people should really be asking for is “data autonomy”, meaning that data is stored independent of any service and can then be plugged into one or many services with little to no effort. Data autonomy exists today, and has for quite a while, you’re just more familiar with it under the phrase “file type associations”. The day you install iTunes and any mp3 or pls/m3u file you double click on now opens with iTunes, instead of your previous music player, can upset you if that’s not the behavior you prefer. All you have to do to go back to the old way of accessing your music is to right click on that file and then change the default application associated said file type.
Data is valuable, always was and always will be, while the applications that interact with that data often come and go. In the future your smartphone will have a server built in and will host all of your of data. Applications ranging from an incoming call notifier on your television, to an SMS editor on your laptop, to a photo gallery application on a wireless picture frame in the living room, will access your content. This data will be decoupled from services and will reside on your mobile phone. Several of you probably pay $50 to $100 a year to a 3rd party to make sure all that data will be backed up, but most of you will be just fine taking a risk. You’ll connect to different devices, allowing them to interact with the data on your mobile phone, by simply tapping said hardware with your NFC enabled mobile phone. If you see a service on the internet you’re interested in trying out, you simply click “connect to mobile phone” and then you’ll receive a prompt to touch your mobile phone to the built in NFC reader in your laptop.
In the future there are not a handful of companies controlling the “cloud computing” space. There are hundreds of millions of clouds, one for everyone of us.
In the future there is a server in everyone’s pocket.
[Note: Nokia tried this concept a few years ago and the service was radically ahead of its time. There will also not be an episode of “Mission Impossible” next week since it’s going to be December 30th and I’ll be partying with my friends.]