The dumbest true statement

One night in December of 2019, I was up until 3 a.m. watching TikToks in bed, and woke up with a sore shoulder from holding the phone up at a weird angle. Since “I pulled my shoulder watching TikToks in bed” is the dumbest true statement I've had to make in quite some time, I have since been good about not bringing the iPhone 6S Plus to bed. I leave it on my desk and read instead. I can't overstate what a positive effect this has had on my life.
Emanuel Maiberg, After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus: A fine and durable phone for a hard and horrible world, Motherboard, 13 February 2020

It does not spark joy

The smartphone is a window into the world. The bigger the window, the more of the world you see, and the world is often bad. This is the screen that quivers and glows in the middle of the night with ominous texts. It's the screen I leaned up on my nightstand and watched as I fell asleep to a live video of Trump's 2016 election victory speech. It's the phone that rings when my parents need to tell me that someone has cancer or has died. For some reason I only have bad memories of the phone, though I know that it has delivered good news as well. It does not spark joy.
After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus: A fine and durable phone for a hard and horrible world by Emanuel Maiberg, Motherboard, 13 February 2020

Everything else is optional

“…All PCs are niche devices: for most people, particularly outside the U.S., a smartphone is all they need or care to buy. The world today is the exact opposite of the world a mere decade ago, where we bought dedicated devices to plug into our digital hub PCs; the smartphone (and cloud) is the hub, and everything else is optional.”
— Ben Thompson, Surface Studio, Nintendo Switch, and Niche Strategies. 
October 27, 2016. https://stratechery.com/2016/surface-studio-nintendo-switch-and-the-potential-of-niche/ 
“But I speak to many people whose organisations have not even considered what digital transformation looks like. Not considered a world where customers will always have better technology and communication abilities than they do.”
— Paul Taylor, from The Battle Against Digital Disruption

Paul Taylor describes the disconnect between the abilities of a tenant with a new smartphone and the capabilities of the property managers.

Welcome to a new breed of resident. Residents who live digital lifestyles that are completely out of sync with the operating system of the landlord.

Paul is the 'innovation coach' at The Bromford Group, which supports innovation for a British housing association. @PaulBromford

The 21st century data challenge

“This is the 21st century data challenge:
Not transactions.
Not data warehouses and business intelligence.
Not database backed web sites
Not even MySQL backed web services…
[The challenge is] real time cloud-based intelligence delivered to mobile applications with algorithmic intelligence”
— Tim O'Reilly, Keynote from 2010 MySQL conference, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqLB99dA48k

A few thoughts about mobile

I was just asked a question about how we should be thinking about “mobile”. The question came with some assertions that made me think the person was thinking about mobile mostly as a content consumption device. This was my very very very quick answer.

[I’ll need to flesh these out later to get the quotes right.]

  • Most of the world will experience the Internet through a mobile device (via H. Rheingold, Smart Mobs, in 2002!!!)
  • Moore’s law and its cousins are pushing these devices towards INSANE amounts of speed/power/low cost. (Even if you think Moore’s law is plateauing)
  • “real time cloud-based intelligence delivered to mobile applications with algorithmic intelligence” is the 21st century data challenge, Tim O'Reilly, from keynote at 2010 MySQL conference
  • Think about the mobile device not as a content consumption device but as a sensor rich platform that knows where it is, temperature, altitude, tilt/rotate/yaw, high rez picture/video. See Cory Doctrow “would you rather be the barcode or the scanner” essay from Make magazine and elsewhere
  • “The odds that an event of historical [or scientific] significance will be witnessed by an individual with a high-rez camera on internet connected mobile device have gone from zero to almost certainty…” paraphrase Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (I think)
  • Brand (or Institution)-to-consumer interactions matter less than consumer-to-consumer interactions, and these kinds of interactions are becoming ubiquitously mobile.