Belated notes from Les Blogs – The Future

I was going through some notes and found some stuff I had written at Les Blogs.

On the morning of the last day, Loïc asked me to join the last panel to discuss the future. I decided it was best to prepare, so I wrote down a few things. For the most part, I didn’t use any of it, since I was brought into a discussion on mobile phones and privacy, and gave a little rant about flat-world – spiky-world issues (very close to the heart, for me).

I intended to focus on my mobile perspective, since I was the only hard-core mobilist on the panel. Looking back at my notes, they are for the most part fears and not hopes. Here they are:

1) A hope: There will be more integration between mobile and Web (the fusion I always talk about). As part of this, voice and SMS still have more to go and contribute here.

2) Note: The next 1 billion phone subscribers will be in emerging markets. Most of these folks will not have a PC. The mobile will be their window, their experience with the Net, with blogs, with the Web. That’s when I realized that wireless broadband for these folks will actually be wireless ‘strawband’ (as in ‘through a…’).

3) A fear (and this fed into my rant, responding to a question from the audience): Silicon Valley will dominate. We are missing a significant European contribution (let alone cross-over innovations from Asia, Africa, or Latin America). And, partly because of this, we will remain mostly PC and broadband based.

4) A fear (thought from David Weinberger): Will we move to the light – increasing public domain content and consumer choice; or will we go to the dark – where carriers control everything and choice goes down (Ben Hammersley brought this up in his Les Blogs talk)?

5) A fear (tip of the hat to David Weinberger, again): As mobile and voice get integrated into the Web, how will that change the tone and texture of on-line conversations. Currently, the bulk of conversations on the Web are asynchronous and disjointed. With something like a Skype presence indicator providing a real-time connection, what will the ensuing conversation be like?

6) Trends in the back of my mind when I look at the future of mobile and the Web: urbanization, affluence, flat and spiky world views.