Virtua Team Talk

As someone who works in the mobile phone industry I’m always amused by some of the stories I hear about how these wonders of modern technology are being used – or misused! Take the News this week for example. There was a feature about an aquarium in the Ukraine where a visitor accidentally dropped her phone while trying to photograph a crocodile.

Apparently visitor Rimma Golovko had stretched out her arm over the enclosure whilst trying to take a photograph of a large crocodile called Gena opening his mouth, but the phone slipped from her hand. Obviously Gena thought the falling mobile phone was a tasty titbit because quick as a flash (if you pardon the pun) he’d swallowed it.

According to the news report the aquarium staff did not believe Mrs Golovko’s complaint that her phone had been eaten – until it began ringing! Since the incident the fourteen year old crocodile has been refusing food and has become listless which has been causing concern for the aquarium. “He moves very little and swims much less than he used to” a staff member told the Associated Press news agency. Oleksandr Shushlenko, the aquarium’s chief vet, said that if Gena continues to refuse food he will be given an X-ray next week and could face surgery. Experts have tried to tempt Gena with live quail injected with a laxative, but he still would not eat. An operation would be a last resort though as the procedure would be difficult and operating on crocodiles is neither common practice or easy.

As for Mrs Golovko she is very upset about losing her new mobile. “It could have been a very dramatic shot” she said “But things didn’t work out as planned and now my lovely new phone is in the belly of a crocodile.” Mrs Golovko then added that she really does want her SIM card back as it contains other photographs and important contacts.

In my view I think it’s never a good idea to reach you arm out over the edge of an enclosure full of crocodiles – and certainly not if you are clutching a prized new mobile phone. The hapless visitor probably only wanted to take a quick photo but it now looks like Gena is the one with a real bellyache.

I wonder what Mrs Golovko told her friends when they tried to call her and got no answer. “Sorry I didn’t get your call. My mobile has been eaten by a crocodile.” Yeah, right.

I guess some people will now feel sorry for Mrs Golovko and no doubt others will feel sorry for the crocodile. Whatever the outcome of this rather strange state of affairs one thing is certain. The one thing they both have in common is that they were both obviously looking for the perfect snap!

Working in the mobile phone industry, and being the father of a teenager, there is one thing I have noticed in particular about the younger generation and the way they use mobile phones.

It’s not about their ability to text at high speed, leading to the newly classified medical problem known as “texter’s thumb”, or about the way they seem to take photographs of everything and quickly upload it to Facebook. No, it’s more about the way that mobile phones has led them to communicate more –despite some peoples belief that texting stifles verbal communication.

Turn up unexpectedly at any typical teenage party and, apart from being a rather unwelcome intruder from the older generation, you will quickly notice that everyone seems to be simultaneously texting and talking. They are busily texting not only absent friends to tell them about the party, but also friends who are actually present at the same party and some who are even in the same room – all whilst holding an indepth conversation on the latest gossip!

I see my teenage daughters texting each other and want to join in. I like texting and there are some things that are better and easier said in a text or an email than a phone conversation.   It’s asynchronous for a start and easier to understand than a voicemail. It’s also a good way of having a short snappy exchange – which somehow never seems to happen on a phone conversation.   It also adds a level of privacy – my daughter can talk to her friends while travelling with me in the car without me hearing the content, which is great for both of us!

I love this new approach to communication and I certainly do not think it stifles conversation other than amongst people for whom conversation is difficult anyway.   When my daughter gets together with the friends that she’s sent 200 texts to during the week, they are never short of conversation. My teenagers can talk and talk and talk as well as text and text and text. The I struggle with is their ability to communicate in all these ways at the same time – it is no wonder they find it hard to believe we find it strange when it is a part of their nature.

On the 13th April Microsoft unveiled its new “Kin” mobile phone in a bid to lure the Twitter and Facebook community. With hardware built by Sharp, the Kin comes in two models: the basic “Kin one” and a more powerful model called “Kin two”. Initially the devices will be sold exclusively in the U.S. by Verizon, starting from May. In Europe, Vodafone will be the exclusive provider with the first phones becoming available in October 2010. Speaking at a San Francisco launch event last Monday, Microsoft’s Robbie Bach described the devices as “smartphones designed for social-networking and video-obsessed users”

Even though I work in the Telecoms industry the pace of change still manages to astound me. It seems that even with the phenomenal success of the iPhone and the Blackberry and the ever increasing range of add-ons now available from Apple’s App store, mobile phone innovation is still breaking now boundaries.

Social networking is currently a hot business topic with a lot of the top sites now moving firmly out of the realms of teenage bedrooms into the boardroom. Already companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever have announced that they are cutting their traditional massive marketing budgets for Radio, TV and billboards to focus instead on marketing via social media. Little wonder then that the mobile phone industry has jumped on the bandwagon and added social networking facilities to its already impressive list of phone apps.

If you are a great fan of Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter etc. then the appeal of having instant access to these sites via your mobile is completely understandable. Also, for those working in the Telecoms industry it means there are a lot of opportunities to get closely involved in the emerging technology.

But is all this innovation always a good thing? I think it depends on your viewpoint. On the positive side it is bringing people together as part of a thriving on-line community and open communication is always to be encouraged. On the downside, however, are the news stories we hear of susceptible young people being lured or influenced by the inappropriate behaviours of other social networkers.

Social media, therefore, can undoubtedly provide a powerful set of tools that can be used as part of an organisation’s sales and marketing strategy as well as an excellent medium of communication if used responsibly. And maybe that’s the key point. New social media apps on Kin phones might seem like a brilliant idea in principle but users need to take full responsibility for what it is that is actually being communicated.

“This new generation of phones have so much power in them, so many activities, so much information that it is the defining new category for our industry” Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive.

In some ways the mobile phone industry is going through one of those technology shifts like the one that happened in the 90’s. Nokia was the first to realise that kids thought mobile phones were as much a fashion accessory as a communications device.  That paradigm shift is happening again now as “smart phones” start to become more and more useful.

This time, though, the shift is affecting more than just the mobile phone industry. Smart phones and tablets are going to affect the computer business as well.

It’s two years since the iPhone was launched and it’s certainly changed the way in which people use hand held devices. As I talked about last week, it’s even changed the way quizzes are conducted at the local pub.

Some say that the success of the iPhone is down to the huge range of interesting applications that are available for it. It’s claimed that whatever you want to do there is an app for it. In some ways they’ve copied the very successful model Microsoft used against Apple in the early PC market place. Bill Gates always said that he considered the contribution of Windows as an application development environment to be much more important that its role as a user interface or an operating system. In other words, get great apps developed for your platform and you will win. It worked then and it seems to be working now.  The success of Apple’s ‘app store’ is testament to that. The store – which now boasts 65,000 apps and over two billion downloads, is now making serious money, but more strategically it’s making it harder and harder for rivals to compete.

So is the iPhone the end of the story? I don’t know. I think that the ‘form’ factor of devices will continue to change. I’ve long thought that in the fullness of time we will still all have two devices. We’ll have something “consciously portable”, which will probably resemble an A4 piece of paper. Why? Well, the paper business has had plenty of time to evolve to a size that humans feel comfortable to write on and carry. People don’t carry A3 notebooks, and only reporters’ carry A5 size ones. Your other device will be “unconsciously portable”. You won’t know you’re carrying it – and something about the size of a credit card seems about right.

I might be wrong about this ‘form’ factor thing, or even about the role applications play but I’m interested in this topic because it supports the view, which does matter, that the days of desk bound computers and phones are over.