Nick Jones

App stores are a discovery machine. We throw millions of developers with hundreds of millions of ideas into a melting pot, filter their efforts through tens of millions of users and somewhere along the way we find out what humans actually want to do with smartphone applications. Its a form of crowdsourcing, an internet idea that has worked amazingly well in areas as diverse as t-shirt design, analysing politician’s expenses for fraud, organic chemistry, proofreading and even prospecting for gold.

Mobile software innovation is so far ahead of mobile hardware innovation it’s painful. We’re generating tens of thousands of new mobile applications a year and finding all sorts of cool things to do with smartphones. But hardware design is stuck in the stone age. When did you last see a genuinely innovative new form factor? Surely there must be something waiting to be discovered beyond those boring candy bars, tablets, PDAs, flips and sliders. Here in the UK it’s London fashion week and the newspapers are bombarding us with pictures of amazingly creative clothes design; I wish the handset industry would harness some of that creativity.

As an industry we waste massive amounts of time and money agonising over questions such as “what do people want from netbooks”? We build useless devices such as MIDs that no-one buys. Why? It’s because we don’t have a discovery machine for mobile hardware that operates as efficiently as the discovery machine we have for mobile applications. So the solution is simple, create one.

I’m not underestimating the challenges, it’s a lot harder to design a mobile phone than a t-shirt, But on the other hand crowdsourcing is being effectively used for amazingly complex tasks like finding organic synthesis paths (Innocentive) so why not mobile hardware design? Maybe not all the designs would be practical, I don’t for a moment believe the phone design I sketched out in a blog a few months back is totally feasible, but the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible because somewhere along the way some of them will be both feasible and amazing.

This would be a great opportunity for one of the struggling tier 2 handset manufacturers like Sony Ericsson. They’ve got nothing to lose, their attempts to use traditional tactics to compete against the giants like Nokia and Samsung haven’t worked. It’s time to try something really radical, and crowdsourcing might just be it.