Perry

Hewitt

Tag: mobile

  • Is health care next for digital disruption?

    Health appsMuch has been written about the internet’s disruption of longstanding models for education. The success of Khan Academy in K-12, the launch of Coursera, edX and others in higher education, the publicity garnered by the Thiel fellowships, and the aggressive funding of edu start-ups everywhere (EdSurge provides solid coverage) all illustrate the opportunity to take a well-established system and do things differently. Digital channels enable a shift to explore new ways to learn that are not confined to one era of your life (undergraduate years) or location-based (on campus). The goals are clear: reduce cost, provide equal or better outcomes, and spread educational access to the world.

    Is health care next? Today, the founder of RunKeeper focused on mobile health with a terrifically titled GigaOm piece, Your phone will soon be your new doctor. The piece focuses on mobile and the myriad apps that have sprung up to connect mobile device users to their day-to-day health awareness and performance. But, beyond mobile, the larger point about digital disruption is there. Health care today is episodic — you go to the doctor once a year and/or when you’re ill, it’s location-based (in the doctor’s office, out of your element), and it’s heavily reliant on your memory as a diagnostic device. Mobile health can be just the opposite: always on, always with you, and reliant on hard data (number of steps taken, heart rate, meal consumption) in a way the traditional health care model cannot be. The future is here: welcome to your personal health KPIs.

    Venture capitalists and nonprofits alike are moving fast ahead into both education and health care, exploring ways digital channels can create new markets amidst disruption. New Pew research released about the news industry this week feels like a cautionary tale: it’s time to focus on new delivery models before the older ones are on life support. In education and in health care, the hunt for digitally-driven reimagination is on.

  • Quick takes: Apple vs. Samsung

    Round up of interesting opinions on last Friday’s decisive victory (see this comprehensive count-by-count summary in the Wall Street Journal) for Apple in the patent wars:

    Unsurprisingly, Apple’s Tim Cook circulated a memo proclaiming that “Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.” Samsung is working on appeals while messaging that this is a loss for the average consumer, and took a 6.9% beating in the market, the largest drop since October 2008.

    Graphic: Infomous-generated cloud of Apple Samsung topics in the news 08.26.2012

  • Down and out (of access) in Paris and London

    Was lucky enough to get a little time away this summer — never enough — and sneak off to  London and Paris. Managed to avoid the Jubilee and the Olympics for the former, and all the Parisians (and, regrettably, their best boulangeries) for the latter.

    It was eye-opening to me how much more digital and mobile London felt. Everything from finding location-aware Tube maps to evaluating museum passes to seeing what’s on around town at a glance on an iPad was easy and optimized for information on the go. Paris felt almost like the opposite — nothing seemed to render well for mobile and sites were organized more bureaucratically than with the user in mind.

    End result: easier to find and buy via mobile in London. Wired cities may begin to see investment in digital as more than streamlining infrastructure and engaging citizenry in governance, but as a key to unlocking tourism dollars via mobile commerce.

  • Find your mobile champion

    Google has released the Mobile Playbook, which as they point out renders beautifully on tablet devices (or on what the rest of the country calls “My iPad”).

    Not too much new news here, and unsurprising but important emphasis on the rise in mobile search (25% of all movie searches are on a mobile device, for example). Biggest need and shift identified is for appointing a mobile champion in the enterprise. We’re at the same race to the siloed bottom without an integrated strategy as we were when every product brand in the enterprise created a website back in 1995. But the stakes are higher — back in the day, the web was one among many strong brand touchpoints, where mobile in 2012 will be the leading touchpoint for many audiences.

  • The mobile future’s already here …

    Cross-posted on the MITX blog

    One of my favorite quotes is from the science fiction writer William Gibson. He once said, “The future’s already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”  I first grandly predicted the Year Of Mobile in 2000. Now, finally, there’s enough of it here that I can claim to be right.

    What’s happening in mobile right now is exactly what happened during the stampede to the desktop web in 1995. Organizations are trying to force-fit existing content and transactions to meet the needs of a new use case. Unfortunately, in most instances, it’s not working. There are so many mobile–appropriate and even mobile-magical opportunities left on the table.

    Social is the accelerant that’s igniting the mobile platform. It took AOL 9 years to get to one million users; it took Facebook 9 months, and it took Draw Something only 9 days. (Source) Mobile apps spread socially – brands need to figure out how their mobile experiences fit into that ecosystem, and how learned mobile behaviors, from gestural inference to game mechanics, provide opportunities to surf the social wave.

    But on the technical front, figuring out what to do with mobile isn’t always easy. Developing for mobile elicits church and state decision points, like native app vs. mobile web. Both play an important role in the mobile ecosystem. However, the advent of HTML 5 is helping to address this. Better HTML support in native apps allows for faster/cheaper native app creation for both smartphones and tablets. The “hybrid” approach of injecting HTML5 code into native allows developers to do both effectively. And of course browser-based apps can be made more compelling. Check out Facebook at http://m.facebook.com/ on iPhone/iPad’s Safari web browser and compare it to Facebook iPhone app and iPad app experiences, for example.

    Another emerging religious issue is responsive design vs. RESS (responsive endpoint with server-side adaptation). Responsive design addresses a fundamental challenge that everyone’s facing today: how to serve the growing variety of physical form factors of end-user devices. Responsive design assumes that all users on all devices want the same content, just formatted differently. That’s not always true; if you’re walking down the street looking at an iPhone for a few seconds, do you really want to see everything served up to a user sitting in front of a large-screen desktop? In contrast, RESS does more of the work server-side, and offers customized (and reduced) content for different form factors.

    What’s next for mobile?

    First, analyst firms report that in just a few years the number of mobile devices will dwarf the number of personal computers. We see it anecdotally with the devices students bring to university each fall, and we see it as mobile-first behaviors are reflected in our site analytics and app download numbers. This will be a wake-up call for organizations used to thinking of mobile as discrete apps or afterthoughts.

    Second, the steep innovation and adoption trajectories mean that generations just a few years apart are having very different experiences with mobile. We’ve all seen the video of the baby trying to make the print magazine behave like the iPad – and who knows what her little brother will expect? So the rapidly growing and rapidly changing experience of mobile will be yet another way consumer behaviors drive seismic shifts in the enterprise. In the mobile near-future, we may see a more seamless interaction with things and people around us, compared with the relatively clunky and interruptive way we “check in” today. Tablets are already changing how people – especially senior ones — access and share information in business meetings, too.

    So, “mobile first and mobile everywhere” is where we’re headed. It took me a decade, but just like that stopped watch, the prediction was finally right.

  • [Mobile] March Madness

    20% of browser-based (not an app) sports content viewed during the NCAA has been on a smartphone or tablet, according to Comscore.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the second-screen effect, and how watching a show on a large screen TV is now often accompanied by engaging via a hashtag on Twitter or a viewing a network’s additinal features. But there’s a lot of primary rich media experiences taking place on the phone and the tablet – tablet consumption has the bigger lift — up 94% from the average of the previous three analogous timeframes. Time-sensitive lends itself to mobile consumption and the new iPad is about as close as you can get to carrying your flatscreen around with you.

    Image: bumeistr1