HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE MOBILE

We in the southern part of the UK have started to see our Indian summer start to slowly fade as we get into this first week of October.    It has been a wonderful but disorientating week with temperatures in the high 20’s (80’s F) – and clear blue skies - I could have sworn this was Jo’burg in Summer.   All that was missing was the swimming pools !


Well I know that parts of the mid-West have also had some great weather.  Indeed in the good ol’  US of A October has become known as  National Cyber Security Awareness month.    Who would have thought ten years ago that a whole month would be ‘honoured’ with such a strange moniker.    


Well I guess 10 years ago no one would have predicted that we would have become so utterly dependent on the Web – our every waking and in some instances sleeping moments have some Web connection.    E-mail, social-media,  telephony,  shopping, business, entertainment, gaming  – just about anything you can think of - we can now do on the ‘Net.    


And it is has all now migrated to the mobile.  


We don’t move without our smart-phones attached to us like newly evolved limbs –extensions of our arms and hands like permanent deformations.   Each mutation reflecting our individual taste –our particular phase of evolution.    


Some of us are Apple boys – coveting the very latest offerings from the Cupertino emporium with breathless anticipation ( like tomorrow Tues 4th – iPhone5 day ) - while those Droids amongst us turn their noses up at such blatant snobbery.   


They, the heroes of the ‘’working man’ of open source - embrace the democratic  power that Android brings to the masses.   (Compatibility, hardware issues and viruses aside)     Then there are the die-hards – the traditionalists - those who haven’t evolved as much.   They still ‘carry’ themselves like our predecessors of the last decade with ‘ancient’ devices made by Nokia, RIM and Microsoft.    Some of them pride themselves on using their phones only for calls and text messages.     There are those who swear by their Blackberry buttons desperate to hang on to this dying function which is destined to wither away like a non-functioning limb.   ( I predict that two case studies in business schools in 2012/3 will be the demise of RIM and Groupon and how these success stories faltered and failed)  


What this mobile revolution is doing is making the Internet more accessible as WIFI/WiMax and LTE become more ubiquitous and as we embrace these devices to do that most important of human activities – payments.   I predict that some aspirants will fall by the wayside but that a few smart technologies will come to define this next evolutionary period.   Those who can make payments simple and secure and usable will go a long way to solving the biggest challenge of the 'new mobile era'.  


Perhaps these newly evolved limbs will be defined not only by their form factor and the services we consume but also how we pay for them.