Mobile Health Part II

This week, UK-based Applied Nanodetectors brought a prototype of their breath-analyzing technology to an industry event here in Japan. This type of innovation adds further support to the fact that these types of services will become increasingly important in both developed and developing economies around the world. Remote medicine may no longer need to be so remote... Here is the full story from the Small Times

4 Billion Mobile Subscribers

Whew! A little later than the expected Q4 2008 ITU expectations for this milestone, but today the GSMA announced that the world has truly surpassed the 4 billion mark. That's just shy of 59% of the world's 6.8 billion people. And factoring out those too young or too old to text and make phone calls, we are reaching an astounding level of connectivity.

For all those out there who are predicting that the mobile phone is ushering in a whole new way of business and living our lives, with a diffusion level of these proportions, it's getting nearly impossible to argue that these can and will ever stay the same.

And if we add in Marshall McLuhan's feelings that just the association with a new media (as opposed to active adoption and usage), leads to fundamental changes in our behaviors, the 1st degree non-subscribing connections of these 4 billion mobile phone users are also being influenced.

The takeaway? It's an exciting time to be studying and exploring the impact of mobile technologies and services on consumer behavior!

Mobile Health Applications for Developing Economies

Today, it was announced that Dimagi was focusing its efforts on providing health-related information services available to health workers in Tanzania.

The full report is on the Industry Standard site here .

While this is a fantastic next step, our friends over at Mobile Healthcare have already taken this idea one step farther and placing patient care in the hands of actual patients as well.

Putting these two ideas together could possible lead to unprecedented advances in health care solutions for both developed and developing economies. Providing health care workers with remote applications and tools, and patients with self-diagnostic capabilities could take the mobile platform to an entirely new level of usefulness.

I remember reading that a Japanese company had applied for patents related to patient self-diagnostic tools (for monitoring temperature, heartbeats, etc..). If anyone can find this company for me, it might help solidify this idea..

It's clear though that 2009 will be a very exciting year for mobile/wireless solutions!

The Future is Definitely Mobile

The Pew Internet "Future of the Internet" report was just released, and the results are clear - The future is MOBILE. This Report is a MUST read for anyone interested in the future trajectory of the Mobile platform, and it highlights a number of important facts. Probably one of the most important take-aways from this report is the fact that even the "experts" in this field are not certain the the evolution towards a more mobile future will better empower individual consumers.

Issues such as the further blending of personal vs. work time and physical vs. virtual reality are something that the Mobile Consumer Lab will continue to focus upon over the coming years.

Although this report is fairly long (100+ pages), it's completely free and well worth the time spent reading it.

The Future of Mobile Interfaces

I've been talking a great deal about the future of mobile and wireless devices these last few weeks in classes here at IUJ and at presentations in and around Tokyo. The heart of these discussions has been the concept of a Simple Front End merged with a Complex backend - or Simplexity, a term my friends Marco and Ludovico have also been endorsing. And in perfect alignment with these conversations, Priya Ganapati from Wired just blogged about this exact same concept today.

The idea of more elegant and user-friendly interfaces are vital to the future success and development of mobile content and services. And while these ideas may not ultimately work, the concept that is driving them, Simplexity, is sure to be a major force going forward.

IBM Concludes that the Future of the Internet is MOBILE

IBM has just released the results of its new study which explored the growing importance of the mobile phone as the "platform of choice" for accessing the Internet. They received responses from 600 respondents in the U.S., the U.K. and China and lead researcher Dr. Sungyoul Lee concluded that: "With 70 percent of consumers worldwide who believe that the mobile Internet has the potential to add significant to moderate value to their day-to-day lives, the time is now for companies to develop intuitive applications and services that allow people of all ages to effortlessly access and use the Internet while on the go -- anytime, and anywhere."

But company executives must not take this as an open mandate to simply port their existing Internet content to the mobile platform. That would be an enormous and costly mistake.

Instead, business leaders must look at the Mobile platform as an entirely new channel, with distinct differences from the fixed PC (or even portable, laptop PC with a wireless connection). Consumer behavior on the mobile platform mandates a different approach that leverages the power of the mobile platform.

For example, Amazon.co.jp here in Japan did not replicate it's PC site experience on the mobile platform, but instead significantly modified it to match with the mobile consumer experience. One of the most important innovations (one that I believe suggests a complete paradigm shift in marketing competition) is their development of Scan Search. Through the use of a simple bar-code reader, they have turned the mobile phone into a huge competitive advantage. With a consumer shopping in a competitors store, using Scan Search, that consumer can get an immediate price comparison, read peer reviews, and explore recommendations for similar books all at Amazon.

While such a model may not be possible to replicate in other sectors or industries, this is a clear lesson than the mobile phone and its enormous set of capabilities has the opportunity to truly re-shape how we develop and implement our "eMarketing" initiatives.

This IBM study offers a very important glimpse of what will come, and look forward to continuing our own studies in this area.

The meek shall inherit the Web

The Economist just recently published an article on the growing power of the mobile platform to bring the Internet to developing economies. While Nick Negroponte and his colleagues at OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) captured the world's attention with the concept of the $100 PC, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the PC is a far inferior platform to the mobile phone for bringing the Internet to the world's least developed nations. Instead of thinking about the $100 PC, let's start thinking about the $1 handset which is capable of accessing the Internet.

But the PC Internet is not built to be viewed via the mobile phone. And while mobile browser companies such as Access , Opera and others do amazing things in bridging the gap between these two platforms, the onus is clearly on site owners and content developers to re-think their approach to content and service delivery, creating sites specifically designed for the mobile phone and not the PC.

Such developments are already underway. And what is most exciting about all of this, is that the future of the mobile industry is clearly aligned with developing economies. And as we continue to study the impact of mobile services and solutions on consumer behavior here at the Mobile Consumer Lab, we are regularly applying these lessons to student business ideas in developing economies within this region and around the world.

If you'd like to get involved in our efforts this year, please feel free to let me know!