Nick Jones

Today I’m working on some presentation material for our September portals and collaboration summit in London where I’ll be talking about the future of mobile working. One of the things I find disappointing about mobile collaboration and work is how primitive it still is, the killer mobile application is still the phone call. Most of the things we see today are just shrunken and feeble imitations of PC collaboration and social networking. E.g. messaging and email, UC, mobile Facebook, accessing the corporate portal from a mobile so you can struggle to read documents on a tiny screen and so on.

There’s a huge untapped opportunity here to move beyond inadequate imitations of the PC to genuinely new forms of collaboration that leverage the unique features of the mobile device such as its portability and ubiquity. As usual a lot of the innovations are from academics experimenting with both mobile-enabled traditional collaboration and new ways to use mobility. A few of the many things I’ve seen recently include:

Audio Wiki, to access your Wiki from a mobile handset using voice alone.

Photo conferencing, the University of Bath here in the UK did some interesting work on how two people can share and navigate images on separate mobile devices. They combined voice with remote control over scaling and pointing to create a photo conferencing tool.

Spill-over video, the idea here is that two or more devices can be combined to increase the viewing area. E.g. if I put my mobile next to yours the video spreads across both screens and we together we can see a bigger image than if we each looked at separate screens.

VuPoints, this is a very neat idea from Duke University in the USA. A server scans a set of adjacent handsets, for example in the same room at a party, to identify socially interesting events like people laughing. It then triggers several mobiles to start recording audio or video so there are multiple perspectives on the event. The server can then stitch these together to produce a video and audio summary of what happened.

Multiplayer mobile games,the games industry has driven innovation in PC collaboration, visualisation, interaction and communication; and it’s a fair bet that the same will happen in the mobile space. Contextual, location aware games using interfaces such as motion and gesture control and peer to peer communication with Bluetooth will likely spin out ideas for new forms of collaboration.

Context. By next year I expect to see some powerful tools to let mobile developers create real time experiences that leverage location, identity, presence and behaviour. Consumer app stores will be the distribution channel and as usual sex, fear and greed will drive the early applications. Imagine, for example, real time dating that puts you in touch with someone in the vicinity who’s looked at your Facebook in the last week and likes the same music that you do. Or maybe tells you which night club queue contains the sort of people you’d like to meet. However, once developers get the early trivia out of their systems I’m hoping that some serious collaboration tools will emerge.

I believe context will be the next mobile revolution; the shift from mobiles as isolated personal devices to mobiles as a passport to interactive communities. What sort of community applications would you like to see on your mobile?