I believe one of the most important developments is augmented reality. This allows you to view the world through the camera on your phone and have an 'overlay' of information on top of the live image. For example, you could walk through your city, raise your phone up and see text in front of buildings. This text could tell you the name of the restaurant you are looking at and then let you touch that text to bring up reviews or contact information about that restaurant. Imagine driving past a movie theater, raising your camera and seeing a listing of movies at the movie theater your camera is staring at. In this way, we are one step from the cyberspace reality in science fiction novels such as Neuromancer by William Gibson.
I think mobile web will have a major impact on the competition between brick and mortar stores and on-line stores. We already saw a bit of this during the 2009 Christmas season. There was a price war going on between Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Any time Amazon.com lowered a price on an item that Wal-Mart carried, Wal-Mart would lower its price to match Amazon. This is because many people go into brick-and-mortar stores, find items the are interested in and then compare prices to the on-line stores using their phones. People even use bar-code scanner applications to scan in the barcodes of items on the shelves of stores like Best Buy and then end up just purchasing them online. Wal-Mart took the first step to combat this and I believe that other retailers will have to do the same sort of thing in order to stay successful.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
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