smartphones, cellphones

If it’s a Thursday, April 28, I must be -- Aging in America.  Where are the restrooms? With so much travel these days, it’s easy to get disoriented – have I seen this exhibit floor before and which one of my seven PowerPoint slide decks is labeled Thursday at 2:30 pm? From talking to attendees and later reading AARP and Linda Barrett’s comprehensive and updated Healthy @ Home 2.0 -- it looks like as we are becoming older, we are more tech-aware (and apparently saturated with PCs), but still not galvanized into caregiver tech adoption urgency. It also seems to me that industry professionals hear about technology products and see more potential for introduction to their parents than for their elderly constituents.  Oh, and by the way, they are waiting for integrators to bundle them into well-tested packages, short lists and solutions for family and professional caregivers.

When disruptive tech disrupts -- hindsight is 20-20.  Even famous executives like Michael Dell can be surprised by market change -- his comment about the rise of the tablet: "I didn't completely see that coming" made me wonder a bit about his marketing staff. But it was his remark about Android that made me pause: "if you look at 18 months ago, Android phones were like, "What is that?" And now there are more Android phones than iPhones." Consider this description from another WSJ article, which notes that "the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction." And Android phones support voice-activated search, e-mail response, and navigation. It would not be unreasonable to expect all smart phones to do all of these things, oh, maybe by next Thursday. And the following version may be quite usable. 

Good luck dudes -- boost savings through virtual reality. So it seems that as a society, we are not great savers. Some researchers seem to think if young people could only imagine what they would look like in the future, they might boost their savings efforts earlier. Scientists in a Stanford lab are experimenting with the 'Proteus effect', morphing a photo of a 22-year-old into an image of what she might look like at 68 -- showing it to her through a virtual reality headset as her image in a mirror. Hmmm, now gray-haired, face sagging -- it's enough to make a 22-year-old nervous for a few minutes, long enough to answer questions about her attitudes on money, demonstrating newfound awareness and a desire to save. Maybe just looking at her grandmother, volunteering in an assisted living facility or making the trek to The Villages would produce the same 'scientific' outcome, prompting a 22-year-old to save more for retirement. The reality (not virtual)? In another poll, 18-34 year olds are more determined than older age groups to save money. Maybe Stanford could save a few bucks and apply its research to something more near-term -- how to train bankers.

Watching people watch their phones.  Over the past several months my consciousness has been raised about the pace of tech change -- and how far behind most of us are from understanding the new phone, computer or software we confront -- by choice! -- at too frequent intervals. Cell phones are kept an average of 20 months at an average monthly bill of $78. And for that expense? Pew Research observes that 35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them. Why not? According to Pew interviews, users don't know how.  Some recent phone observations:

So ya gotta believe Eric Schmidt-- he says the Smartphone is the new PC.  Can you believe it? He must know. The chief Googler says that this device is the new PC, smartphones are outpacing the sale of PCs and yeah, we will get everything we need from this 2 x 4 inch shaky little box. He really said this -- pretty much unquestioned by press who were at the event, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  And your car will drive itself, you'll never be lonely -- and you'll be happier. I'm not making that up -- he said it. Maybe he really can predict the future -- when miniaturization rules the world and we have bifocals attached to our bifocals. Just don't drop your PC into the trash on his say-so just yet.  Let's see how effective business people can be with this cute little thing -- let them try to edit a 21-page word document like the one I just sent out with 9 different graphics and 21 end-note references. In fact, I am willing to bet that none of the folks I sent it to are reading it on their iPhone, Droid, or BlackBerry. And folks I know are not updating their multi-sheet Excel files where they track their business performance and they're putting down their phones to work on those large PPT sales decks that they can only see fractionally.