Convergence for the common man

I was at the Great Indian Developer Summit as a key note speaker. I talked about how Mobile Java (J2ME) could accelerate convergence and how it has been keeping pace with the growth of converged devices. My talk was primarily focused on convergence happening at the high end like that of smart phones.

D Shiv Kumar, Managing Director of Nokia India also addressed a jam packed audience at his key note session. He mentioned on how mobiles had cannibalized torch, calculator, watch, alarm clock, mini paper phone book and so on for the masses. He talked about how convergence at the lower end gives more value to the masses. Very true, simple ideas like torch in a mobile phone makes a common man in an Indian village more happy than a city dweller who gets NFC on his mobile.

Internet tablets – anything but convergence?

I have been trying to find the target segment of internet tablets and their positioning as such but in vain.  It appears that the tablets only supplement the laptops in terms of being a bit more handy (but laptops are getting handier by the day). Are tablets the re-incarnation of PDAs, whose market was cannibalized by smart phones? Who would want to carry a third device apart from cell phone and laptop? Will all those who do not mind carrying the tablets be able to afford them? All said and done, tablets do not seem to contribute much to convergence product wise or technology wise. What do you think?

Camera phone vis-a-vis DSC in India- an exploratory study

Does the advent of 5 plus Mega Pixel camera-phones spell the end of Digital Still Camera (DSC) which just took off in the late nineties? Or does DSC take a different shape altogether targeting a totally different segment of the market – much lesser but yet niche?

 

An exploratory research was conducted to gain a primary insight into the current usages of camera phones in India and interpretation of the survey results to analyze how the DSC will have to position itself in order to remain relevant. The respondents were people residing in the metros of India and who owned a camera phone.

 

The first result was a bit surprising as more than 50% of the respondents said that camera phone was also their primary camera. However on probing further it was found that most of the people in such category did not own a DSC and a very few were those who had camera phones with high resolution (5 MP and above). This gives credence to the fact that camera phones could well be the first camera owned by many people.

A vast majority of the respondents seem to own camera phones of a moderate resolution like 1-3 MP. What was quite interesting is the fact that a few elderly users did not know the resolution of the camera that they had.

A majority of the respondents seem to use the photos taken for sharing. This is an important part of social networking. DSCs cannot enhance the way people share the photos but that’s not the case with camera phones, as they are the strong player for social networking where sharing personal photos is an important activity. With data charges heading southwards and data speed bandwidth northwards, camera phones would make sharing all the more easy. Suppose you run a mobile webserver on your mobile and the images that you capture can be seen by your network as you take it, some of them can be tagged for your printer to pick and print them by the time you get home, you can create a picture diary at real time and there is no end to our imagination on what we can do with a camera phone.

This is an interesting result in the survey. Respondents are not bothered about insufficient memory at all, with most of them responding that it is an enhancable feature in a phone these days and need not be provided by manufacturer as a factory default. There were very few people who could not switch over to a phone as a primary camera only because they are used to a camera only device. It is only that features of camera in phones do not come even close to that of a DSC and that’s what prevents them from elevating their camera phone as their primary camera.

 

What can be concluded from this simple survey are the following:

· Camera phones if not today but before “tomorrow” will fast cannibalize the DSC market the way it is now in India. The DSC market segment would change to the current segment for DSC-SLR with only the professional photographers and photography enthusiasts being a part of the segment. There is no insight into the DSC manufacturers plan to get competitive by reducing the price of DSCs to an ultra low level.

· DSCs are carried to pre-designated events but camera phones will be ubiquitous. Also, phones without camera will be extinct in a few years. This means a manifold increase in the number of photos clicked away. This can essentially fuel a number internet businesses dedicated to post-usage of images like social networking, photo sharing, photo blogging, collaborative photo journalism, photo printing and so on.

All digital channels converging at mobile?

Vint Cerf   said that “that mobile devices and not PCs would fuel the future growth of the web”. For some statistics on why he could be right take a look at the presentation from Glass

World of convergence

At present, daily when I leave home for work my mom runs through her checklist to ask if I am carrying my wallet, watch, mobile phone, day planner, keys, identity card, letters to post, news paper, PDA, wireless network card, a post-it card with some stuff to bring home while I come back from work.

In all its likelyhood in a very few years my mom would only remind me to take my mobile phone. The mobile phone – for the phone it is, for the watch it has, for the organizer it contains, for the remote keys it has, for the digital card it has for proving my identity, for the post-it it has, for the GPS to show me the routes that are not congested at that time, for connecting on to the internet -  is a device much more than just a phone. My mom’s questions to me converge into just one. Technology, with its speed of convergence has helped my mom to ask just one question to me daily. Convergence also meant that my activities which had definite boundaries  have converged; I can afford to watch the latest news on CNBC  as I travel to work and get into my company network after dinner.

Why is everything in hand-held segment converging onto a mobile phone? Why did it not converge on something else say a watch? Probably it did just that but we chose to call such gadgets mobile phone just because of its conspicuous feature to be mobile and make phone calls from virtually anywhere.

Nils Stieglitz said that substitution and complementation  is the key to convergence for both technology as well as products.

Convergence has always happened before and will continue to happen today and tomorrow. Convergence is an exciting aspect to follow at any point of time in this world. Let me take a look at convergence as it happens in this world and mumble about my views here.

Wish me happy blogging!