Mobility New Opportunities & Changing Paradigm….

I have been working in the domain of Mobility, and have been closely associated with many customers on several Mobile Initiatives. During the same time period, I worked on taking a B2C eCommerce platform online starting from scratch. In both the scenarios it has been pervasive nature of mobility and computing that has created new opportunities and new business models.

Going back a 10 years, when the iPhone was just launched and other smart devices were more of bulky bricks, with flaps than anything close to smart, who could have imagined that we will be ordering butter through our mobiles, without speaking a single word. Who could have thought that we can avoid our official laptops at home, and can check all enterprise internet on our mobile. We were talking about PCs and laptops, and comparing them on their boot time, if it is 30 sec to or 40 sec.

Since then we have progressed at breakneck speed. Now tablets need not be shut down, and the time to wakeup devices from standby is couple of seconds. Now more than buying anything, we can sell anything online. Use cases of technology keep on evolving and so is the backend IT models.

But what next, is the value created by technology is ability to buy or sell anything online.

Well if that is true then most valuable tech companies would be the one letting us buy and sell things. The latest Forbes list, of most valuable Tech companies says something else.

Rank	Name
1	Apple
2	Microsoft
3	Google
4	IBM
5	Facebook
6	Amazon

A closer look at the top organizations reveals a generic observation that the top companies are the ones that have control over the eco-system primarily OS. But there is another factor that defines the top technology companies.  These companies invariably have a lot of information about their users, and that information goes till intimate level like what does the user buy, what does he watch,  where does he go etc. And it helps these companies in delivering customized experience to its users. But this doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities to new entrants to enter this market.

IoT and Telematics is opening a new segment of users, which are machines or devices that are connected. These devices will be consumer for those companies that provide communication platform for these devices, which is easier to configure and easier to manage. The strength of platform would lie in the fact that, any device should be able to talk using this platform. The learning curve should be minimal for these devices and the platform should be universal so that any device can use it.

Any organization coming up with such UIT (Unified Interconnected Things) Platform will be able to serve the market that is largely untouched and which is potentially 4 times the consumer market that is there. The buying behavior of these devices would be more reliable, as these devices would not suffer from mood swings. For Example, an inverter which is allowed to place an order for supplies like distilled water within certain budgetary range, can automatically triggers an order without any behavioral dysfunction that delays buy decision. 

Well we may be living in a world with small patches of things/people connected to each other, but the opportunities will continue to exist till we do not reach a state where all barriers to get and share information, from any person or object, are not broken. Once we reach that utopian state, I believe then we will find new mountains to climb, and new journey will begin.