What are you doing with that old telephone?
If you are Baby Boomer or older you probably have a land line at home, a land line at work, and a mobile phone you carry with you. Maybe you use Skype with a headset when sitting at your computer. And maybe one of your landlines is a VoIP phone. Each of these phones has its own voice mail. If you interact with the younger set, you may do some text messaging on your mobile phone. Since this was eased in upon us, we have sort of adapted to it but think about how complex this is and how many different places you have to go just to communicate.
You of the younger generation, the Millennials, already accept that you only need one phone and it’s mobile. In your dorms, in your apartments and even at your job, the mobile is your only phone. You probably text as much as you email and more than you voice call. And you are open to new things and will experiment with technology to find a better way to do things. Communication is as important as ever to your generation.
The phone is over 130 years old and certainly things have changed a lot in that time. But the pace of change has really heated up and in the very near future this picture is going to be very different.
Unless you have an iPhone you don’t do much computing on your phone. Yet. But the iPhone has really broken new ground not just because it’s cool and hip but because of the openness of its platform and its application store resulting in over 80,000 applications so far. Even before external applications were being written, Apple showed us that browsing, email, maps, and more work great on a small powerful device in our pocket. From now on, the mobile phone is not a phone but is a communications and computing device that is connected to the network all the time. Another thing the iPhone shows is how a networked device can fluidly move from one communications network to another with ease without interrupting what you are doing. You can be browsing the internet or receiving email on the device over the cell network and move into your home where it will jump seamlessly onto your WiFi network and dramatically increase its speed of communication and you won’t even notice what the device just did. The same thing will soon happen with your voice calls. When you move into your home, or anywhere that has a WiFi or WiMax network, the device will jump onto the faster network and continue communications. In your home, this will also enable switching to mobile handsets throughout your home to continue your calls.
In our 10-digit phone numbers we still call those first three digits an area code but they no longer have anything to do with areas. That relic is also all but gone and with number portability, you will from now on think of your phone number as a number for life instead of something you change when you move. Since we still might want to take calls on other devices than just our mobile (like our computer, TV, or home handsets), we will have the ability to control where that number rings through. Callee control is coming. Today, the Caller still has control over where and how you receive their communication. If they text you, you get that text on your mobile phone. If they call your mobile number you either answer or their call goes through to your mobile voice mail. Callee control means that, based on who is calling and rules you set for how calls from them are to be handled, that call might be re-routed to your computer, to your voicemail, or never to be answered at all. Furthermore, humans can process written text faster than we can speak or listen so a service that routes a call to a transcription system that then sends you the text as an email or a text message is much less intrusive then a voice call you must take right now.
Increasingly, our ’conversations‘ with people stretch across multiple modalities of communication. We might start a discussion via email. At some point, the information exchange has to be real time so we open up a chat dialog with the other person. Later they call and leave a voicemail with more critical information building on all the previous dialogs. And you light up when they text you with the short message, ‘Deal is closed!’ But later, what if you need to see the entire conversation you had with that person? Maybe there is a legal challenge. Or maybe you just need one tiny detail they said to you in one of those many modalities, which with today’s technology are spread across many different clients, devices, and repositories. Voice is a start, but ultimately we want to integrate all our communications in one place.
