market driver

 Adam Sandler’s movie “Click” creates a public daydream about our emerging desire for an intimate relationship with the world through our mobile devices.  That thing in your hand is no longer an inanimate object - it is a dynamic extension of your self.

MobileMuse.ca in the process of defining a joint program of mobile media consumption research with Nokia and one of the more interesting experimental design factors is the ‘burning in’ period during which subjects need to build an effective and affective relationship with a new device.  There’s no point to user behaviour research while the subject and the device are strangers.  A relationship can’t be built overnight and in most cases it will go well beyond casual dimensions of friendship.  Marketers know that people begin to project their relationship with their device, along with their hopes and dreams for what it will achieve for them socially in the world, with the very first advertisements they see.  It’s similar to the way we begin to project our social selves through prospective mates from the first time we see them.

I’ve been percolating a specific post about imposed morality in the digital age for a long while now.  My ideas are still weak, but some banter following Mark Pesce’s Vidfest presentation has provoked me to serve them before their time.

Mark was promoting the concept of the mobile phone being the ultimate undiscovered social networking device.  As consumers we’re being encouraged to think of the mobile phone as a communications device or a camera or a game platform, but what we really want according to Mark, and are continuously hacking towards, is a social networking agent.  Mobile phones are increasingly sophisticated portable multimedia computers wandering around with us doing nothing 99% of the time.  What would happen if they applied a few of many spare cycles to quietly recording everything we do, everywhere we go, everyone we meet, and to continuously applying this information to mapping our social networking universe in constructive ways?  The raw thought has some tasty potentials that I’m sure I’ll overcook sometime soon, but not now.

Will there be profits in mobile media?  Everyone is betting yes, but winners are extremely scarce so far.  Television, games, gambling, sports, news, etc, they’ll all investing.  Just this weekend there’s another New York Times Magazine article on TV networks hungry for the right formula. It’s the new alchemy – how to spin all these base media into mobile gold.  

I founded and continue to lead the MobileMuse.ca Network so it might be worthwhile to know a little about my mobile motivations, and about what inspires the Network's mission for mobile media innovation at the frontiers of culture.

At different times I've been a cancer researcher, astronomer, observatory director, science museum director, and dot.com CEO.  Beyond Muse, I currently champion a set of very exciting applied R&D projects in learning technologies at the University of British Columbia while leading a couple of start-up companies and contributing to a few public and private boards.  The only subjects I'm close to being an expert on are prehistoric stone circles (the Stonehenges of the world) and Native American cosmological creation myths. My most intimate connection with mobile technologies is that I commute by bicycle everywhere, all year.