Mobility, Social Networking and Convergence: The Next Big Revolution

In an interview with TechnologyReview, Sandy Pentland, professor for media arts and sciences at MIT deliberated on the kind of revolutionary applications that could be ushered in with mobile computing, social networking and ubiquitous connectivity.

Professor Pentland goes on to deliberate on how electronic gadgets could make use of the immense information available via social networking sites to essentially bring the reality of virtual relations to the user’s immediate proximity.

Termed as ‘reality mining‘ , the field marries user information from several repositories online with the mobile gadgets such as mobile phones and portable music players that are part of everyday life.

What the Professor may have been hinting towards could be the next revolution that is bound to hit the technology world with mobile computing really poised to take-off. And no other firm is betting more on it than the Web giant Google. With its Android initiative, the firm is planning its next series of innovations resulting from the talent of developers up-taking the Android Mobile SDK.

This will also be one frontier where Google will be directly threatening Microsoft. Microsoft has been highly successful in the mobile industry with a mobile variant of its Windows OS. Google’s entry in the mobile space will be closely watched.

Gadgets getting smarter does seem like the next big step in technology innovation.

Arun + on January 21, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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3 comments on “Mobility, Social Networking and Convergence: The Next Big Revolution”

laima on January 22, 2008 at 6:47 am said:

the question is how far will the android be successful in uniting the players at one platform and will gain benefits for the users…
Daniel on January 22, 2008 at 9:59 am said:

laima, I think it will.

Symbyan has an a first mover advantage, but under the information age the power of connection and collaboration should erode that easily.
Arun on January 22, 2008 at 10:44 am said:

@ Iaima

Yes, a very relevant question is how much cohesion Android brings to a development platform that has seen several initiatives (such as J2ME and various Linux centered platforms). When Android was released there was certain uproar in the mobile development space since it would be causing more disruption.

But there are advantages to the platform such as the backing from very many big vendors in the mobile industry and perhaps a sort of conformity across devices, reducing the amount of rework done to port applications to various devices.

Couple that with technology that brings GPS type features to non-GPS devices and Android makes a very good proposition.

@ Daniel
Symbian was the first mover in this space indeed and with Nokia as client it has a lot of experience in the mobile arena. The much watched issue would be how Google goes about conforming to same standards across all mobile devices. From what a dev manager at Nokia has to say – maintaining compatibility among the API is not an easy task.