June 09, 2007

Mobilizing the Human Network: Part 1

Last week I finally go it. Mobility in the Web 2.0 world is about seamless integrating the experience between the physical world and the digital world when you are moving. Today, we have an increasing part of our economy dependent on information gathering, shopping, and now, creating community on the Internet. Leading merchants and commerce communities like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and CNET are blending product information, shopping and user reviews/comments to re-personalize the information and advice loop for a range of products.

Recently when deciding on a pair of replacement tires for a car, I used the message boards on http://TireRack.com to get the experience of several dozen prior owners. More significantly, I brought the information to my car dealer to show a fault pattern in my current set of tires. He questioned me on the results, so I pulled out my Nokia e61i and showed him the comments on TireRack.com (my dealer has a customer Wi-Fi network) The result: he replaced them, with the newer model for free.

What I increasingly see is a blending together of the digital world and the physical world for business, starting with a range of consumer commerce situations. The in-store shopping experience we delivered recently with Mediacart (http://www.mediacart.com) blended the information content and targeted marketing of an entire supermarket and its brands to an individual consumer, based on their location in the store. In this latter case, the WLAN enabled tablet on the front of the supermarket cart was the delivery vehicle.

What is interesting, what really is striking here, is that the drive to dual-mode smart phones and other devices, with larger and larger screens and simplified navigation schemes, is making every individual a potential commerce/community target in the Human Network. And the entrance of a larger and larger number of physical objects connected to networks through passive and active RFID as well as a range of emerging sensor technologies is putting things into play from a community sense.

If Descartes lived today and wrote about Mobility and the Human network, he might say: “I am there, connected, even when I move, therefore I am.”

My predicted evolution for this movement is something like this (I will be refining this over the next few weeks):

Consumer Commerce Applications (books, music, clothes)

Service/Consumption Industries (food, restaurants)

Tourism (travel spots)

Real-Estate

Business Applications (D&B to SAP)

Generationally, I think we are currently seeing a movement where folks under 25 are particularly adept in bringing their digital experience into full-body contact with their day-to-day personal lives, wherever and whenever we go. The growing access to pervasive high-speed wireless networks simply becomes a steroid in this emerging interaction.

If this idea makes you uncomfortable, remember the words of the great Beat writer Jack Kerouac on changes in society: “All of life is a foreign country.”

Posted by Alan Cohen at 08:57 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)