2012: Technologies create the Perfect Storm

The #1 buzz phrase that everyone has grown to hate (especially Ron Shevlin) is Big Data.  Sure, you may hate it, but it is still pretty
important, as I blogged a wee while ago.

A second area that has become so over debated that it is
dull is Mobile.

Add Cloud and Social to the mix and you have the
perfect storm of overheated technobabble.

It is not to say that these things are unimportant
however.  The very fact that we are
talking about mobile social in a cloud of big data (stop it Chris, I’m
feeling sick) is because this stuff is fundamentally transforming banking,
finance, government and the world.

I’ve spent a lot of this year debating these points, but here
are a few illustrations as to why they are such transformational technologies.

Mobile is
truly transformational as it has moved us from having to go somewhere to do
something – a physical place or a DESKtop
screen – to having connectivity in all of our pockets and purses.  This means the 24*7 availability of service is
now the optimal state rather than the dream.

It goes beyond that however, as mobile delivers two further
transformational moments. 

First, it gives everyone
on the planet the ability to communicate. 
In the farthest reaches of the world, people are communicating
wirelessly in a way they never could before.

And you may think that these remote corners of the world
just have simple dumb 2G phones, but you would be wrong.  The fact that most affluent consumers change
their mobiles every eighteen months
means that emerging markets are getting smartphones sooner than you think.  For example, here’s a guy in the village of
Kisama, Nagaland, India taking a photograph on his mobile. 

In other words, everyone is socialising via mobile.  Anyone, anywhere can now relate socially and communicate globally. 
Seven billion people globally are connecting one-to-one, person-to-person,
peer-to-peer. 

Second, mobile provides a transactional
infrastructure that was non-existent just a few years ago.  It is the reason why Africa has seen the most
rapid transformation through mobile,
with M-PESA n Kenya cited as the most revolutionary change.

Source: The Economist 

This means that communities that only had physical
connectivity now have digital connectivity.  Communities have exploded from local to global, and the wireless
transmittance of anything to anyone, anywhere is a reality.

Mobile is part of
the reason why Social is now a major
shift.

After all, communicating with friends and family is what
most people use a mobile telephone for,
and the ability to create and share photographs, updates, news, links and more
via mobile is the truly social hemisphere of tech change.

Add on to this that mobile
allows you to locate anyone, anywhere, anytime, provides a further dimension of
change, and brings in the importance of Big
Data and Cloud.

Geolocating targeted consumers with offers at their point of
consumption is a big piece of change. 
This is the dream of marketers, and is now a reality.  Forget mailing coupons in the post, you just say
at the point of retailing: “here’s the deal”.

But you cannot do that without having massive analytical
capability of data to dig out what is relevant to whom at what point of time.

Big Data, Cloud and Mobile brings all of this together and
delivers.

Obviously, Big Data
and Cloud also does a lot more than
this.  After all, Cloud provides the ability to analyse unlimited amounts of data for
any purpose. It is the antidote to Big
Data.  Big Data is all about drowning in exabytes of bytes, whilst Cloud provides the magic capability to
gain access to unlimited power and storage to analyse that data.

So these four technology shifts are centrifugal forces of
change in 2012, as they are massively complementary. 

Mobile allows
anyone to socialise with anyone on
the planet, whilst cloud allows
companies and government agencies to sift through the massive amounts of data that the mobile, social world is creating.

The perfect technology storm.