Innovator Spotlight: More mobile devices than people

Jorge Gomez

Jorge Gomez serves as VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Andago, where he analyzes business opportunities and develops new market initiatives, increasing Andago’s Health and Wellness ecosystem of partner companies. Jorge combines his Computer Science engineering vision with an Executive International MBA background, along with a thriving passion for state-of-the-art technologies and World cultures.

Common trends

The beginning of the year is always full of events, trade shows and product launches. When it comes to the IT world, some of the biggest events happen in just a calendar month. Most of the shows nowadays have a common trend: the proliferation of mobile applications (apps).

Far from being considered mere communication devices, cell phones and tablets nowadays serve as cameras, newspapers, gaming devices, books, health monitors, social connectors, payment transfer devices, tour guides or GPS systems, just to name just a few of the most popular uses. Mobile technologies are embedded in our homes, cars, appliances, schools, job places, governments, entertainment sports and utilities. And they are here to stay.

More mobile devices than humans

The mobile revolution is transformational and is shaping our present and driving our future into an interconnected, always-on network that brings us together, changes the perception we have about distances and relationships, and evolves our capability to turn data into information, information into knowledge and ultimately knowledge into collective wisdom. Mobility is rapidly changing, enhancing and expanding our horizons.

After the Consumer Electronic Show that I talked about in my last post, this week it’s the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference (HIMSS),a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting a better understanding of health care information and management systems, and next week Barcelona will host the Mobile World Congress (MWC), presenting the state-of-the-art in mobile communications while showing where the current trends are heading.

Even considering it’s been happening for several years in a row, one of the trends worth mentioning is the huge penetration of mobile devices. According to a Cisco paper released last week, mobile devices will outnumber humans during 2012. This paper predicts that there will be 10 billion mobile connected devices around the world within four years, and shows that tablets are having the fastest adoption rate of any consumer electronics device in history.

Behavior changes and security concerns

As more people use these devices, they turn to apps they can use in their daily lives, from recipes adapted to their tastes and budgets (and sharing them to their network) to driving their vehicle within a social context to having health service providers step up and prove that their mobile services work, especially considering the technology induced behavior changes that apps facilitate as they easily blend and integrate with our daily activities.

I was shocked last week to see how the social driving application Wazegot a full article en El Pais, one of the main newspapers in Spain. Waze is a cross between Google Maps and Twitter, where a social network of drivers inform others of the road conditions, traffic, accidents, police, etc in real-time. One of the potential dangers I foresee – and even if they provide an option to disable it while driving – is people paying more attention to their screens and missing the surrounding traffic.

In this regard, I would expect design and usability concerns to be a top trend in 2012, as are security concerns, both for the data being transmitted (for instance, applications sending personal health records information) or security in the way apps are used.

What do you think? Share your thoughts and predictions.