Coming Soon: Desktop In Your Pocket
Last year, I wrote an article about using your mobile device as a window into your desktop world. This year, we are several steps closer to that goal.
Ironically, it's desktop search companies that are leading the way even if they don't know it.
The Problem: Too Many Devices
The paradigm of yesterday is that you have multiple devices, and each one has its own set of information you work with. Your PDA holds your contacts and calendar, which occasionally syncs with Outlook where you also have your email. Your laptop contains your files and presentations that you work with, and your work server contains corporate files. Your home computer contains your digital photos and your private work.
What a mess. We keep things consistent through a complicated set of procedures we learn over time: sync your PDA daily, enter numbers into your phone, copy files from your work servers or home computer to take with you on your laptop, and hope that you don't accidentally forget or change the same file in both places.
The Solution: One Window To A Wireless World
When I wrote the article last year, the mobile devices (Treo in particular) were finally able to support the simple tasks you need while on the move: work with Microsoft Office documents, do email, etc. The latest Treo now has all of those features included in the purchase price, and applications like instant messaging are now robust enough to become useful mobile tools as well.
However, the problem of getting one window into all your information remains. That email with second cousin Selma's new address that you received 3 years ago is not something you want on your PDA. Companies like Good Technology are partially solving the problem by allowing you to share the same email, contact, and calendar view as Outlook on your desktop. However, current organizer information and email is only one facet of the problem.
Enter The Google
The latest fad in the consumer world is finally giving us a glimpse into the future. Google released the Google Desktop Search utility, which indexes your personal files and emails. It then allows you to search them using the familiar Google interface. It's cute, but the really powerful tool is called X1 (from the prolific folks at Idealab). It indexes all emails, even the old archived ones from three years ago, and has a variety of features that put Google to shame (of course, there's a lot to be said for free - X1 is $75).
This is finally a window into your desktop that could fit on a 2" by 2" screen. I wouldn't need to carry my desktop files around with me. I should be able to do a very simple text search on my Treo that will tell me precisely what file I'm looking for on my desktop. I could then download the file, work with it, and put it back. I could even find cousin Selma's email from three years ago.
The additional technology necessary to support this feature is trivial. All X1 or Google would need to do is open up a secure interface as a web server. Any device with a web browser - your laptop, your Treo, your cell phone - could log in and find the necessary file, email, or information.
Your entire virtual world could be available to you in seconds through device that fits in your pocket. Will the desktop search companies realize this potential?
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Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Coming Soon: Desktop In Your Pocket.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://ventureblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/217
There's quite a lot of blog chatter about desktop search at the moment and especially how it relates to mobile. VC and guru Kevin Laws has speculated that, while it's not the intention of these companies, accessing powerful desktop... Read More
VC Kevin Laws is speculating on the next step for desktop search in the threadlink above. His point is this: Wouldn't it be cool, not to mention logical if you were able to use your mobile device to search your home PC?
Imagine: You cou
Read MoreMobile just looks bigger and bigger all the time. For a start, Reuters offers some interesting stats in Mobile Phone Users Double Since 2000, that Nick Wilson at Threadwatch conveniently breaks down into core stats in Some Interesting Mobile Stats:... Read More
Your PDA has your contacts and some notes. Read More
Link: VentureBlog: Coming Soon: Desktop In Your Pocket. Last year, I wrote an article about using your mobile device as a window into your desktop world. This year, we are several steps closer to that goal. Ironically, it's desktop search Read More
Coming Soon: Desktop I... Read More
Coming Soon: Desktop I... Read More
Mobile Advertising Physical World Hyperlinks
Billboards, posters, newspaper, radio, TV, Internet…and soon the mobile phone. Think of the transformation advertising has had to endure.
Newspaper has print ads, radio has sound commercials, TV has commercials and Internet has seen the change from popups, banners to PPC search. But TV advertising (largest dollar) has 3 troubling issues, more channels, fewer viewers (broadband), and Tivo like devices.
Broadband has taken more eyeballs from the TV to the Internet. TV has now taken to placing products within the show to get eyeballs. Advertisers are trying to adapt to the change in TV...Advertisers have found a way to tap into each form until now, the cell phone.
The search engine/ppc model is been the advertisement of choice for the Internet. But it’s primitive and passive. It is the equivalent of paying for a 30 second prime time TV ad, but not knowing when it will air, or on what channel and the cable company keeps changing the listing lineup.
When mobile traffic exceeds PC traffic, how as an advertiser, do you reach those eyeballs on the 2”x2” screen?
What happens when the shift goes even broader and goes mobile? Right now there is no outlet for advertisers on the cell phone. It wont be a search engine. People wont be using their cell phone to type in words to search, let alone have the SE “sponsored links” on their cell phone screen.
After a couple years, advertisers/cos are realizing the pay-per-click model is right now the golden goose for Internet advertising. It took a specific tool/app/portal (search), for brands to have a direct outlet for advertising.
What is the tool/platform/portal for the mobile that gets advertisers to spend their dollars?
There is a portal/platform that “turns on” those physical world hyperlinks.
What happens when advertisers have to find another tool/platform for the mobile Internet?
Advertising will be different when the medium is mobile, it has to take into account the environment the user is in and what information he has access to.
TV is stationary; the Internet is slowly becoming mobile. Cell phones are mobile, so the environment and the database are constantly changing.
Seth Godin, Internet marketer extraordinaire, in his Free Prize Inside!, talks about companies having to find the “soft innovations that turn a product or service into something truly remarkable. A soft innovation is a clever, insightful, small idea that makes a product worth talking about. A soft innovation that succeeds is a Free Prize, because the revenue it brings in is far greater than the cost of implementing it.
Great thought goes into the packaging of a product, but one thing is put on every package that brands have never been able to use before, until now. The barcode. Its universal, can be scanned/typed, doesn’t take up any more room on the product to market, and can now provide a direct connection w/ the Internet…a Physical World Hyperlink.
Brands have the opportunity to create their own “soft innovation” by turning on their barcodes. By turning on the barcode, you have created a physical world hyperlink. A hyperlink offers a direct connection to the wherever the brand owner wants you to go. Leverage the existing product package and turn it into a portable website.
Brand manager creates the ad that makes a consumer click/type a barcode (already existing) and creates an innovative marketing tool.
What brands or brand manager will be the first to start marketing this tool? Do brands even know they have this tool?
The killer app for Mobile Advertising will be a portal/platform that “turns on” those physical world hyperlinks.
Search engines will lose initially when this transformation takes place. But eventually they will realize that brands will be directing traffic through this portal and will want a piece of this.
Hey Google and Microsoft are you paying attention?
Brands and advertisers can have their own pay per click. Physical world hyperlinks will be the ppc model for the mobile advertising space. The owners won’t have to pay a SE for traffic and their own marketing will generate the “click”.
Nokia’s CEO Jorma Ollila states his goal is “to put the internet into every pocket”. Think bigger, how about making every physical object Internet accessible. Give every physical object in the world a physical world hyperlink.
So who will offer this app/platform that advertisers choose to use for the mobile phone?
Scott Shaffer
While I haven't spent any time with X1, I will say that Google Desktop has revolutionized my document searches. I believe that there is a strong market for both large enterprise and SMB for “search and sync” products. By simply matching the index files of individual computers over the net, the “My Documents” folder and the “Outlook.pst” file will always stay in sync on your office, home, laptop and mobile computers without having to send and store the actual documents on a separate server. The index file should be small enough so that sending it via a cellular connection won’t take longer than a few seconds, which would enable fast searches on your mobile phone or wireless PDA. Once this is done seamlessly, you would almost create a “virtual RAID” in that all of your hard drives could mirror each other incrementally and automatically so that one computer crashing wouldn’t bring all of your data down with it.
You can extend Googld Desktop Search with DNKA - remote desktop search tool. Lets you set up your desktop as a server and browse your Google inex from anywhere.
My blog entry here: http://users.tns.net/~skingery/weblog/2004/11/add-on-for-google-desktop-dnka-remote.html
You know, I've been using my Treo now for about a month, and I don't want a window onto my desktop. I don't want a desktop at all anymore. I want everything on the web, google email, files, contacts, everything. That way it doesn't matter what device is in front of me, my data is accessible.
Down with the desktop. Its a piece of junk anyways.