On Mobile 2013 – an AlwaysOn Event
October 2013 – At the Fox Theater in Redwood City, the AlwaysOn team had their 2013 look at directions in mobile and also announced their new visibility on the web. The event used a new event format with the “powerplayer” members (top 1% movers and shakers in the industry) seated in tables at the front the event and the new attendees in the theater seating. This was a nice mix as the format had no formal “step up” stage and it lead to very interactive discussions between the presenters and the audience.
The theme was that the Silicon Valley core of the group was now integrated into a Global Silicon Valley group that exists in multiple forms and multiple focuses on technology distributed around the world. There is no longer the ideas of localized deployment and localized clients – the web is truly global and the launch of products in the cloud need to address this complete world wide audience.
The event featured a display and use demo of the new Zeeting public sharing system. It is targeted at incorporation real time feedback and stats from audience members or just meeting participants in a single room where you can avoid a central screen and all the information was available on a mobile device when it was presented. In the setup at the event, the system showed only 8-10sec latency on real time voting for a group of about 100 people and the live device transcoding for display reformatting and presentation (based on the 6 different devices at my table – 2 different android phones, an iPhone4, a Samsung tablet, a Nexus tablet and an iPad) was less than 15sec glass-to-glass based on the main project screen changing and the devices being updated. Only the DroidX phone was able to display the slides with the same color as the projector, the rest were all skewed differently based on the device. The videos when played through the system stayed in sync for voice and video and did not significantly increase the latency of the system.
The system is being targeted as a social replacement for the meeting room and the need for a central screen. The idea is that now all meetings can be done with this interactive mode, and there is no need to physical meet with others, and there will be higher participation through the anonymous voting. The interface seems nice, however there may be challenges on bandwidth restricted networks or with a large number of connected members from a latency / pace of presentation point of view.
The event also covered mobile awards – the winner was LYFT which is a system of locating and providing rides for people at varying rates of cost. This mobile system is an alternative to the licensed, regulated, inspected and taxed taxi system by providing peer-to-peer ridesharing in private vehicles that is located through a cloud based app that location matches rather than use a dispatcher. The innovation of the system was recognized for both the advanced algorithmic accomplishments for the dispatch mechanisms and the social integration aspects of the service.
Evernote was recognized by KMPG as the B2B company of the year for being on an $80M 2013 pace due to their monthly subscription model and the addition of nearly 8,000 new users this year. The mobile market place for B2B is the fastest growing sector in the international community.
The keys for new products was base on workplace tech – connected screens, unified communication, content sharing and automated identity management. The basis for these new developments is app creation without coding, without regard to copyright and assuming cloud based automated regionalization for language with auto translation. This allows the app to focus on the statefull knowledge of use without regard for location of use guidelines or policies on the devices – it will be managed by third party services in the cloud. This trend lets group create global targeted apps, into cultures and use methods they have no knowledge of, and assume that the penetration model and revenue collection model will be normalized and sanitized into a USD and “standardized user” count that can then be dollarized into the advertising market place.
The majority of new tools shown were in the “no code needed”, “it is an app not software” and “no knowledge to use” marketplace that were showing the promise of collecting the 1B+ people in India, 1B+ people in Africa and 1.5B+ people in China into the USD based ecommerce system, based on cloud services. They overall assumption of this mobile growth was that 90% of the world would have 4G access on smart phones (6B+ users) and 95% of the world has 20Mbps or better bi-directional broadband at a cost of less than 1% of per capita income by 2015. Figure 1 shows the KMPG / AlwaysOn top 100 for mobile winners.
On Mobile Top 100
