Bob Borchers, who I met back in March of this year (known to most as Mind Mannered iPhone Guy) speaks to Colin Gibbs of GigaOM about Mobile.
Bob is now a partner at Opus Capital, an early-stage technology venture firm. Bob will also be speaking at Mobilize.
But the place I’m particularly interested in is the white spaces — those places between (technologies and industries). That’s where mobile has the potential to take its transformative abilities and implement some changes in long-existing industries or markets. Take health care, for example — in my view, and I think a number of other people’s views, mobile has an interesting role to play in that. Everybody agrees that they want health care delivered more affordably, but at the same or higher quality, and I think mobile has an opportunity to help drive some of those changes.
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Also, I think infrastructure is interesting: What are the things the network operators can do to extend coverage, to make backhaul faster, to enable location awareness on networks?
It’s the vertical markets that make Mobile interesting. It’s seeing the ‘humble’ mobile phone being co-opted into new roles. First as a camera, then an email device, then an internet browser, now a games machine and in the future – access to healthcare, public services, education, democracy.
The limited size of these devices means moving as much ‘brains’ as we can into the ‘cloud’. The network operators are able to monitor where you are (using cell towers) so there’s really no need to have an app and GPS burning battery power constantly. With Push messaging and context on your phone there’s reduced need for multitasking as long as the server side is somewhat intelligent.
Tomorrow night we’re putting some of this into practise with a project I dreamed up last year: Code4Pizza.
Code4Pizza is really about directed work. The concept being that you take some developers, you give them a few unsolveable problems and you feed them. By the end of a single evening you should have part of a plan of where to go.
The first unsolveable problem is improving the way we receive information about public transport. In theory, public transport is a more sustainable way to travel. The problem is always going to be communication. There are lots of bits and pieces here but having lists of bus stops, by their longitude and latitude, would seem to be most useful. We have a lot of this data already and we’ve started recruiting people to fill in the blanks. Moving it into the mobile arena where it can be viewed on iPhone, Android, Symbian and indeed any platform with a decent web browser is the main goal. Come along and join us.
(The second unsolveable problem will be in developing a sustainable funding-management application for some local charities. We’re going to be working with the Camphill Community, NICVA and the Open Source Solutions Centre for this. Work to begin soon.)
The long term plan is to have somewhere for the Code4Pizza workers to work. The only requirement is to have something to work on and allow that work to be reviewed by chosen peers and mentors. And in return you’ll get a desk, you’ll get Internet access, you’ll get business mentoring training and you’ll get pizza.