Disruptive Mobility Roundup: Mobile Banking Arrives, Plus Facebook’s Mobile Future
March 2nd, 2009 • mobile
Originally published in Digital Design Blog. Mobile banking is beginning to break in the US, if Bank of America’s recently published stats are any indication. According to Netbanker, 40% of Bank of America’s 2 million mobile bankers use iPhone or iPod Touch. Also 8 to 10% of mobile bankers signed up for the mobile service within 90 days of opening a BofA account. In a related article the Wall Street Journal reports on how improved technology is helping banks to attract customers despite the economic downturn…
Crunch Gear reports on details of a recent patent granted to Apple which describes a video conferencing application for the iPhone. According to the patent “an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display.” It’s worth noting that last year hackers Glen and Ken Aspeslagh actually beat Apple to the punch by creating their own videoconference application of their own using the iPhone’s speakerphone call and a mirror…
Six trends are conspiring to drive electronic books into the mainstream according to Mike Elgan at Computerworld. The article points out that despite the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs claims that “people don’t read any more”, the iPhone may yet prove to be a Kindle killer. Elgan also predicts that Apple will release a tablet, ideal for reading e-books. The Economist is on top of this trend with its article on the popularity of electronic books and what this could mean for newspapers, also Jeff Bezo’s Worst Nightmare…
Speculation in GigaOm that Facebook’s Future is Mobile. Om Malik writes “As we transition to an increasingly mobile world, the location beacon takes the role of the TCP, and most mobile services (and applications) find their context from this location beacon”. Malik prefers the iPhone version of Facebook to the web version, citing that the combination of the social graph and the phone’s address book make the mobile version more “socially relevant”.
4 Responses (Add Your Comment)
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Good point. The content that you will build your blogs with now can bring you a lot of revenue when the economy bounces back.
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Interaction Designer (IxD) and Mobile UX Specialist with expertise in rich internet applications for the world wide web and the emerging mobile internet.
If you do the math, the device is expensive, books are slightly discounted, newspapers a bit more so, but in the end, with a cold, rational look, you can’t really justify the expense. That’s what I figured and decided in a moment of “irrational exuberance” to buy one nonetheless. I’ve had it for only 2 days but I can say that, from a reading standpoint, it’s a transformative experience. The device and the store are designed well-enough that they are likely to make you read more because it’s so easy to sample no matter where you are.
I grew up a strong reader and have regarded to this day books as objects that border on the sacred, holding knowledge, opening the gates of imagination. In a way, the kindle is the rise of the profane. The “object” book loses its status, disappears to let the contents appear. While the screen could be bigger and the refresh rate faster, it’s already feels like a taste of what reading will be about in 10 years.
Back to more earthly matters, things I don’t like about the kindle are the fact that you essentially lease books, and that, 3 years from now, the device will be utterly obsolete. Still a trend is started and it’s an exciting one.