What’s next for Smartphones?

What is the next for Smartphone, which has become the hottest-selling consumer device around the world in just over a decade? Even as Top makers like Apple and Samsung unveil new handsets with new features and improved performance, smartphone sales have flattened with most major markets largely saturated.

Next Catalyst – The next catalyst for Smartphones could be the possibilities offered by the forthcoming 5G or fifth generation wireless networks, new form factors or advances in virtual and augmented reality. But some analyst contend that something entirely different may supplant the smartphone.

Transition – 2018 marks the beginning of the end of traditional smartphones and sees a transition to a new era of computing and connected devices based on voice, gesture and touch. The transition from smartphones to smart wearable’s and invisible interfaces – earbuds that have biometric sensors and speakers, rings and bracelets that sense motion, smart glasses that record and display information – will forever change how we experience the physical world. The Smartphone market is not going away, but it might change its shape and form factor. The smartphone market still has legs for many years to come.

Evolving – The mobile industry is evolving to devices with more immersive touch-less experience fueled by artificial intelligence, mixed reality and gesture control. New devices may also see improved biometrics such as face recognition, and changes such as foldable screens. Google and Amazon will lead and drive innovation around smartphones and related ecosystems over the next five to six years because of their strength in these emerging technologies.

Mobile Subscription – In the US, 91% of adults under 50 use a smartphone and 95% teens have access to one. Europe had some 465 Million subscriptions at the end of 2017, representing 85% of the population with more than two-thirds of the devices smartphones. The market may get a boost in 2019 from 5G and a likely appearance of the first devices with foldable or bendable displays.

Next Innovations – Smartphones are still preferred by consumers despite the arrival of new devices like smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The next innovations are likely to be devices that are ever “smarter” than the current generation of handsets, with artificial intelligence that is built in. The completion among tech firms is now centering around the smart digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and others.

What is Beacon Technology?

Beacons have been generating buzz since 2013, when Apple first introduced iBeacon Technology. And while it may have appeared for a time that this new way of connecting with customers might be slow to catch on, today it’s catching fire. According to a report, Beacons would be driving $44 Billion in retail sales by 2016. While there’s been a lot of hype around Beacons, they haven’t necessarily been very well understood.

Retail is probably the most often cited example of an industry employing Beacons, with heavy hitters like Lord and Taylor deploying them in their stores. Starwood Hotels is running a pilot program to replace hotel room keys with Beacons. Major league Baseball is using them to reach out to fans in stadiums to offer them seat upgrades. American Airlines is one of a growing number of airlines leveraging Beacon technology to improve connections with customers in airports.

Apple explains iBeacon Technology to consumers as the enabling technology for Apple devices to alert apps or websites when someone approaches or leaves a location. In other words, retail or other venues that have Beacons in place can detect where a customer is at any given moment. This is the key part as the retailer or other business can push timely messages to that customer promoting products or providing other useful information.

Say someone is walking past a retail store, if they’ve downloaded the retailer’s mobile app, the company can use Beacon messages to capture their attention as they go by, enticing them to enter. Once inside, Beacons can be used to make personalized offers, speed checkout processes and pretty much anything else the retailer can dream up.

Apple doesn’t actually make Beacons, it has developed iBeacon standard around which Beacons can be built. Google has its own Beacon standard, Eddystone. There are a number of players in the Beacon manufacturing space – not only Kontakt, but also BlueSense, Gelo, Estimote and others.

Beacons employs Bluetooth low energy (BLE) wireless technology to pinpoint the location of customers in stores and other places and to deliver messages to their mobile devices. Specifically, a Beacon emits a BLE signal that a retailer’s or other company’s app on a smartphone coming within range of that signal can pick up on. A big differentiator between Beacons and RFID is that Beacons are far more private because it gives users control of the apps that leverage the Beacon. Beacons are authenticated and with user permission, which can ultimately lead to tremendous experience as a result.

Beacon will overcome the major hurdle for companies that want to engage with customers in a more personalized way.

Know about Chatbots

Messaging platforms are coming of age, and chatbots are all the rage now, they are touted as the next app like wave in communication industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are advancing by the day, there is a layer of it being added to everything we know, smart cars, smart homes, smart shoes and of course messengers have become platforms on which commerce and brand communications are being built now.

There are three key drivers shaping the market for chatbots. Firstly, large communication technology companies from the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are making it conducive for building chat based products, they have opened up their respective messaging platforms for developers to build and innovate on top of it. Even Apple has announced APIs for Siri, a move to allow developers into what has been a walled garden so far. So to say, chatbots are no longer standalone products but part of an ecosystem just like how apps are built and distributed on app stores.

Secondly, there's a rising usage of Messengers over traditional SMSes; recently, Zuckerberg announced that 60 billion messages are sent over Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp every day, together they are thrice bigger than the 20 billion SMS sent. WeChat in China has set an impeccable precedence to show the world how a thriving metamarket can be built within a chat app. WeChat is more like a virtual hypermarket on top of which others businesses have built stores through chat apps.  

Third macro factor driving the rise of chatbots is the Gen next's growing preference to chat based interfaces. Messaging has surpassed social media to become the preferred method of communication for millennial. Mary Meeker's research shows that 69 percent of millennial prefer web/internet chat, social media, and messaging to other channels such as talking on phone or IVRS. In past decade we saw brands enabling customers to do everything online, from ordering pizzas with emojis to banking with hash tags, we have seen it all. Chatbots is the emerging new world order.

All of this gives genuine reasons for marketers to consider investing their time and efforts to build chatbots and make it an effective means to allure new wave of customers their way. Chat apps/ bots is not a magic wand one can wave to make a product or service awesome. In foreseeable future, chatbots are only likely to be another customer touch point or an interface to existing business, it can perhaps slowly replace the load on IVRS and Email based customer support.

Chatbots are slowly evolving into an enabler, a digital concierge. But that evolution comes with a subset of challenges, one of them is the multi-agent problem. Consider this, Google's upcoming messenger Allo allows user to add @Google in a group chat and invoke it for getting answers or to get things done. Besides the multi-agent problem, there's another task for marketers to grapple with, to ensure a seamless experience for people using chatbots and smart assistants. 

Communication is a tough business:the way a message is written is not how people preceive it. Just like humans have selective distortion problems, bots have context and natural language processing (NLP) problems. For now, the only jobs chatbots can take away are that of a few helpless souls working at call centres with pseudo American names and a fake accent.

Past and Future of Internet

In December 2015, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Apple to open a ‘backdoor’ to break into a phone recovered during the San Bernardino massacre. Apple refused, and is now fighting a battle to overturn a court order that went in favor of the FBI. In January 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India banned the use of differential pricing by telecom companies, effectively putting an end to Facebook plan to roll out Free Basics, a scheme under which subscribers of a partner telecom companies would have free access to a subset of websites.

Both incidents appear to pitch the state versus a technology company. However, a brief history of the Internet will show, the implications to be drawn for the future of Internet governance are different in each case. In the 1990s, as the Internet grew in scope, the US government contracted the Domain Name System (DNS) registry, the task of ensuring unique identifiers for the different servers connected by the Internet, to Network Solutions Inc., creating a private monopoly of $1 Billion.

However, in 1992, the Internet society (ISOC) created a memorandum of understanding to assign governance functions, with representatives from businesses, intergovernmental organizations and ISOC itself. In 1988, the US department of commerce rejected the MoU process and recommended the DNS system be managed by a non-profit company, leading to the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The past 15 years have seen a remarkable growth of the Internet, with the number of websites increasing from 12 Million at the turn of the Millennium to over 1 Billion today.

However, traffic is heavily concentrated in websites belonging to a few corporations. The global slowdown and the decline of the BRICS have resulted in the coining of a new acronym of power – FANG, referring to Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Many Internet Companies are based in the US and place their servers there, thus giving the US government access to data from foreign countries while reducing the control of local governments over their information, and their ability to prosecute the managements of these companies.

So far, users have been willing to give away large amounts of information for the benefit of free services. However, the possibility that the government can gain access to their information may exercise a chilling effect on their usage and create an insurmountable obstacle for the future of the Internet Business Model. For the first time, as the Apple Episode shows, the US has specific interests which may be best served by allowing other states the freedom to pursue their own goals with respect to the Internet, thereby giving US itself similar powers, despite its diminished share of the Internet market. 

Biggest Tech Brands in the World

Technology Brands are all the rage right now so it’s no surprise that Apple and Google have occupied the top two positions in Interbrand list of most valuable global brands for three straight years. Branding consultancy recently released list of top 20 brands names in the world of Technology. This article includes their Global Rank in 2014 & 2015 and also their Brand Value in 2014 & 2015.

Foremost is the Apple. Their Global Rank in 2014 & 2015 is one. Brand Value of Apple was $118.863 Billion and in 2015 it is $170.276 Billion. Second spot is hold by Google. Their Global Rank in 2014 & 2015 is two. Brand value of Google was $107.439 Billion and in 2015 it is $120.314 Billion. Microsoft Global Rank in 2014 was five whereas in 2015 it is four. Brand Value of Microsoft was $61.154 Billion and in 2015 it is $67.67 Billion.

IBM Global Rank in 2014 was four and in 2015 is five. IBM Brand Value in 2014 was $72.244 Billion and in 2015 it is $65.095 Billion. Next is Samsung with Global Rank seven in 2014 & 2015. Their Brand value in 2014 was $45.462 Billion and in 2015 it is $45.297 Billion. Amazon Global Rank in 2014 was fifteen and in 2015 it is ten. Brand value of Amazon was $29.478 Billion in 2014 and in 2015 it is $37.948 Billion. Intel Global Rank in 2014 was twelve and in 2015 it is fourteen. Their Brand value was $13.153 Billion in 2014 and $35.415 Billion in 2015.

Cisco Global Rank in 2014 was fourteen and in 2015 it is fifteen. Brand Value of Cisco was $30.936 Billion in 2014 and in 2015 it is $29.854 Billion. Oracle is sixteen in Global Rank in 2014 and 2015. Brand value of Oracle was $25.980 Billion in 2014 and in 2015 it is $27.283 Billion. HP Global Rank in 2014 was sixteen and in 2015 it is eighteen. Their Brand value in 2014 was $23.758 Billion and in 2015 it is $23.056 Billion. Facebook Global Rank in 2014 was 29 and in 2015 it is 23. Their Brand value was $14.349 Billion in 2014 and $22.029 Billion in 2015.

SAP Global rank in 2014 and 2015 is twenty five and twenty six. Their Brand value was $17.340 in 2014 and $18.768 in 2015. EBay Global Rank in 2014 was twenty eight and in 2015 it is thirty two. Their brand value in 2014 was $14.358 Billion and in 2015 it is $13.940 Billion. Canon Global Rank in 2014 was thirty seven and in 2015 it is forty. Their Brand value in 2014 was $11.702 Billion and in 2015 it is $11.278 Billion. Accenture global rank in 2014 was 44 & in 2015 it is 42. Their Brand value in 2014 was $9.882 Billion & in 2015 it is $10.8 Billion.

Sony global rank was 52 in 2014 and in 2015 it is 58. Their Brand value was $8.133 Billion in 2014 and in 2015 it was $7.702 Billion. Panasonic global rank was 64 in 2014 and in 2015 it is 65. Their brand value in 2014 was $6.303 Billion and in 2015 it was $6.436 Billion. Adobe global rank in 2014 was 77 and in 2015 it is 68. Their brand value in 2014 was $5.33 Billion and in 2015 it is $6.257 Billion. Xerox global rank in 2014 was 62 and in 2015 it is 71. Their brand value in 2014 was $6.641 Billion and in 2015 it is $6.033 Billion. Huawei global rank in 2014 was 94 and in 2015 it is 88. Their Brand value in 2014 was $4.313 Billion and in 2015 it is $4.952 Billion.

Planet of the Apps

India has the third largest mobile user’s country in the world. With data showing Indian users, spend an average 198 minutes each day on their smartphones. It is believed that mobile phones are the future of an economy. Soon laptops may become obsolete and everything in the world will be operated through smartphones and tablets. Many companies are trying to make this happen.

Smartphones are used on a large scale because of 1.3 Million Android apps and 1.2 Million Apple app available to use. With introduction of mobile apps, most businesses in the world are turning their focuses towards mobile apps. Especially in the Internet based business. For E-commerce, business mobile app is the future. Mobile apps began appearing in 2008 and are operated by Operating system of a mobile. Mobile app is a short version of a website and a handy layout to operate.

Every social networking, news, business, entertainment, and sports have their apps. This not only will increase the usability and business for app developers, but will also increase the use of smartphones. In India, number of toiletries is less than the number of smartphones people have. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are the most dominating companies in mobile apps. I remember the first app I used was the Shazam in my Nokia Symbian phone six years back.

After that Whatsapp, the most used chat app in the world. As the time passes by, now I use plenty of apps in my Android Smartphone. It has become easy for me to collect any information in an instant of time from mobile apps. There is no doubt that mobile app developers and companies will grow more. However, there will be time when everything will be available on the app. Most e-commerce business they use mobile apps because 70% of orders are placed from mobile apps.

The benefit of companies from mobile apps is that they collect user information and can sell that information to other companies in millions. Now talking about, E-tail companies give more discounts on ordering from mobile apps. In India, E-tail companies offer vouchers for other businesses too. Amazon was the first company in India to launch app sale, although Flipkart did planning first. However, there is an increase in growth of mobile apps and a majority of this growth is coming from outside of metro cities.

If internet reach is more in rural India then increase in number of users for mobile apps will also increase. However, new government “Digital India” initiative can make this possible. This will not only add value to reach people but will also contribute to Indian Economy. More companies will emerge out and people from Rural India can bring their businesses online.