You may wonder about this question – and, more significantly, the answer! The fact is that, unless you understand that change is occurring, you and your business are missing one of the most fundamental shifts occurring in the global market at this time – one that will radically reshape your industry’s business models.
We exist in an unprecedented emergent age of advancing and converging technologies. The Internet appears set to subsume consumer electronics, broadcast, wireline and wireless communications, enabling seamless “anytime anywhere” experiences.
The spread of advanced cellular technologies has enabled consumers to adopt these converged technologies at an ever increasing pace, and, in some countries, people’s first experience of the Internet has only been from a mobile device. We see convergence (and the changes in human behaviour that accompany it) as an accelerating trend. Consumers, customers and businesses alike are embracing this change; they are interacting and sharing knowledge and experiences with one another in new ways – and in near real-time.
One such trend is the rapid global growth of collective knowledge (commonly available information and shared experiences) which motivates united actions that are facilitated by mobile, Cloud and social networking technologies. The most recent dramatic evidence of this has been the Egyptian, Tunisian and Libyan uprisings. Previously, we have also seen how the power of these technologies contributed to motivating the youth vote in the election of President Obama in the US, as well as igniting the protests in China and Iran. It is becoming clear that images uploaded to the web not only add to the sum of human knowledge but can also change the course of history. The ability of converged technologies to awaken a global social consciousness and encourage humanitarian concern for disasters occurring in other parts of the world is evident from the scale of online donations received for victims of the recent Japanese earthquake disaster.
As this convergence grows, a new capability is beginning to emerge as the Internet-based cloud services collide with the 24/7, “always on”, high speed, advanced 3G and 4G wireless networks. This phenomenon is the mobile cloud and it is set to be to the Internet what cellular was to telephony; it will liberate consumers and enhance their everyday lives in ways that most of us could not have imagined a few years ago.
At the heart of the mobile cloud is the concept of online services (information and social networking updates for example) going mobile and offering “anywhere-anyhow-anytime” accessibility and availability. Increasingly, as satellite navigation data and social networking are merging, these services will be personalised by location. As a result, consumers continue to rapidly absorb these services into their lives and adjust their behaviours accordingly. In the future, all lifestyle services will be available via the mobile cloud, addressing the mobile needs of businesses and consumers.
Markets, customers and employees of all companies are being shaped by these changes; the issue is that only a few companies recognise and are doing something about the pace and extent of them. Businesses need to understand that it is now going to be imperative for them to incorporate a holistic, integrated and interconnected view of digital life into all of their future enterprise strategies. If they fail to recognise that “mobility” is rapidly becoming an adopted way of life, rather than just a product or a feature, they will struggle to win against competitors who already understand the impact that digital life is having on their businesses.
Tags: technology social