- Jose Larr
Mobile is Everything: A part greater than a whole?
Back in 92-93, I was a foreign exchange student in San Diego (California) at Rancho Bernardo High School (a life changing experience for many reasons), when I first had a tête-a-tête with Prodigy (some kind of computer connected network). Back then, it was the early days of PCs and Macs, and for me it was still the days of evolving from BASIC to PASCAL programming (this is the part of the article when I corroborate that my brain BIOS dates back to a few decades).
In these 25 years, a few things have changed obviously, and many paradigms have also evolved with time. Many of them have had a strong impact caused mainly by technology. Back then PCs and Macs were just the new nerdy thing, and soon enough they became a tool, which internet propelled, and then many of the things we had in real life adopted e’s as a way to be represented in the internet like commerce would be e-commerce and business as e-business to mention the obvious. In later years these e’s were progressively dropped the reality of those concepts moved from a nerdy niche to main stream.
Fast forward a few more years to 2006, I had joined an Italian company Dada.net (later acquired by a Japanese Telecom group), when it was the boom of mobile, that year and the few that proceeded were the so-called MOBILE YEARS, each and every single one of those years, the mobile channel was going to be the next revolution and it would leave behind the web as we knew it (just bare in mind that WAP was the pattern, RIM (BlackBerry) was the hot shot, and there was an extremely limited portfolio of mobile products besides the ones produced by some mobile software developers), but still the years of MOBILE were there…. However it just didn’t materialize in a way that the market expected.
Then all of sudden the mobile revolution took place, it pretty much took everyone by storm, and app stores, app developers grew like mushrooms and the whole world understood that the new standard had set a race to conquer those little and invigorated screens.
Those small screens, that we see and carry with us and that we check more than 100 times per day, are our “life remote controls” for many reasons; they certainly help us navigate the day. The technology advances that they bring within them allow for many functions that were unthinkable years ago, and through their lenses a whole new reality can be depicted; bringing new experiences, new meta-information pieces are revealed, and as such many business opportunities can be created for connecting brands to consumers.
The Mobile channel, like the Internet with its “e” for electronic, had an “M” attached to is for example as M-commerce, for any transaction done via mobile devices.
Now, and feeling the 2017 just out of the oven and having seen a 2016 full of tech ground breaking initiatives from Droves, self driven cars, chat bots, PokemonGos, artificial intelligence, AmazonGo’s and a long list of novelties where the mobile was not A channel but THE channel, can we conclude that the M will be removed or diluted into the whole and that this part has become bigger than the whole, or better, THE WHOLE?