A guest post by researcher Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden
The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap. We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already.
At the Mobile Life research centre in Kista, Sweden, partners from academia and industry are working together to imagine this future of abundant mobile services. Fortunately, we are not working in the dark – we can build on a foundation of several decades of research. Some 20 years ago, Mark Weiser, a research scientist at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, had a vision of the future: he called it ubiquitous computing. He imagined that dozens, even hundred of small computers would be available everywhere, and seamlessly support us in our everyday tasks. Unlike the personal computers at the time, these devices would be un-tethered, user-friendly, aware of their surroundings, and conducive to communication and collaboration in the real world rather than through a screen. To explore this vision, he and his team built a number of computing devices in different sizes – they called them Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Each was connected to a wireless network and aware of its location and other factors in the environment, the so-called context.