It should not go unnoticed that mobile telcos already have a directory of always on identities, which they are able to observe the behaviour of (they’re your ISP when you’re not on WiFi). They have not however managed to leverage this great asset from the world of voice and SMS into the internet value chain. There have been passed attempts, most notably Phorm, which failed to respect consumers and the existing internet ecosystem players. More recent forays in the space seem to lack ambition, whilst the OTT players are gaining in speed and scope (see X.Commerce (https://www.x.com/) from eBay and Facebook Credits rolling out across 3rd party sites).

If Telcos do not act, by necessity over the top players will be forced to re-create or work-around their assets - at the requests of both merchants and consumers. Complicating things further for Telcos, device association to network connectivity (for data) is now as low as 20-30%, forcing telcos to innovate their own Over-The-Top solution to let them span these ‘off-net’ experiences. All this can be done, the question is to they have the ambition to do it? Signs are we may see a resurgence of ‘operator portals’ (dressed up as App Stores or Deal Sites) but little engagement with the wider world. This would be a tragedy for the industry, as we all watch more and more of the ecosystem drift State-side.

I want a series of folders, each shareable with a difference group of people. The folders should be accessible via my naive drag-and-drop GUI in Windows and OS-X. They should also be accessible via my mobile and tablet. The folders should be automatically sync’ed over the internet (being hosted either locally or in the cloud).

The service would be a bit like drop-box, except it would allow multiple different ‘drop boxes’ per machine (with different sharing profiles). It also would have full integration with the host OS (for drag and drop in standard GUI). The fact that it could leverage local storage instead of cloud resources would help to keep the service costs (and therefore fees) nice and low.

I’d use the service to share photos with relatives (the kind who don’t use Facebook etc…) and documents amongst co-workers and across machines. It’s not much of an ask, but nothing seems to offer this setup in an easy to use way straight out of the (drop) box.

As a general theme, new mobile technologies and service that reduce the need to input, or simplify the input process, have got to be a good bet.

It is somewhat ironic that the new voice services require (I believe) more meaty processing power on the device. Given the devices are/were built in the first place to communicate voice back to a giant cloud/exchange, it is strange that voice recognition is not a prime candidate for centralised processing power (please correct me if Siri is using this approach).

[Update] I believe Siri has to have an internet connection to work - not sure how it shares the load between local and cloud however

If voice related number portability was an issue, you could easily imagine a situation where an ‘overlay’ network would be used to disconnect the user’s perceived phone number from that of the operator ‘owned’ number(s).

Following on from the above, if you’re ok with the incumbent telco (like BT) and cable company TV services in the above example, do you want these to be the only people able to offer such services, or should 3rd parties be allowed access to the same differentiated delivery infrastructure? Pushing still further, if 3rd parties are to be allowed access, should you have to pay an explicit fee for the network service they use, or would you be happy for them to pay this fee (either out of your TV subscription or via ad funding)?

I’m naturally (as I guess are most) in favour of net neutrality, but I’m also disappointed to see internet pipes flooded by TV content crowding out other services. The recent non-decision by the EU regarding net neutrality seems more reasonable the more you push the argument towards what innovations should and shouldn’t be allowed. IMHO, what matters is clear service descriptions and the maintenance of competition. I look forward to seeing what happens.

* this is in fact more or less happening now, with the BBC iPlayer available via the set-top-box, offering the same internet experience but via a QoS enabled line outside my internet download allowance.

The key benefit of XBMC is the ability to unify my local content and online services into a single seamless UI. Hulu / iPlayer don’t know about by locally stored DVDs, nor do they pay any attention to my photo library (local or cloud based). As such they need to be ‘demoted’ to an App within a broader TV experience. But … what if iPlayer / Hulu were more like iGoogle or the BBC homepage and allowed me to plugin other Apps into their unifying UI. What if my local content could be web server enabled and appear just like every other cloud/web service (but perhaps only behind by firewall/router).

XBMC could move to web enabling my local content and match this to a browser based UI. Any TV with a remote capable of interacting with a browser would be compatible with the system, and system configuration could be controlled remotely. Now you could argue that all my content should be in the cloud, and that any system focused on merging local and web will soon be irrelevant- perhaps so (never say never) but it will be some time before performance and or price enable me to have an effective solution for the tens of Gigs of local data.

I’m aware that DLNA and other technologies can enable steaming from local storage to TVs. However there seems to be very low awareness of this, and the user experience seems to be hard to configure and underpowered at the presentation layer.

With feed aggregators moving on from Newsgroup style minimal lists to flashy magazine style UIs (see flipboard.com) you can see how a compelling offline browsing experience could be constructed from existing APIs/RSS feeds (even in this world of ever more dynamic websites). With networks unlikely to expand bandwidth at a pace capable of stemming the rise of such services (indeed they should encourage them) the future’s bright for the time being for those able to jump on the wave.

Maybe I am wrong, but the appeal of having a storage unit that I can plug my camera and video camera into without the need to go near a PC seems huge. I want a NAS that simply sucks files from my devices. I can then later edit/alter/view them on a PC if I wish, but I want files taken from my devices with the same ease I put electricity into them. However, the industry doesn’t seem to agree with me, as I cannot find any mainstream prodoucts making use of USB On The Go. Why is this? Is it a conspiracy by PC manufacturers, or are the storage product people just very conservative. Whatever the answer, please consider me officially in the queue for a storage appliance that ‘pulls’ data from my digital devices.

Perhaps the most worrying development in the barage of new asynchronous communications technologies (by asynchronous I mean communication mechanisms with no limit to how much information can be pumped at you) is Google Wave. It explicity unifies email, IM and ‘track changes’ style functionality for document management. A simple highlighted bold line in your ‘inbox’ could represent a simple ‘hi ya’, or a very serious change to a legal document. With no clear way to differentiate one from another, the risk of missing and important ‘message’ in the midst of pleasantries, typos corrections, and general work banter is a very real prospect.

I’d like to see Google’s engineers turn their attention to tools that help manage a recipients precious bandwidth to read information. This would require an effective way to prioritise ‘messages’, or restrict the receipt of messages based on the available bandwidth. I haven’t a solution to this, but it would probably involve some sort of contention mechanism, where people would vie for attention, competing for a limited amount of mental real estate. As important as the technical solution, whatever it may be, will be the social norms/expectations that evolve around it.