AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday said that the next wave of growth in the wireless industry will be led by a combination of mobile broadband and cloud computing. Stephenson says customers should be able to buy an application once, and have it work across many different devices – using cloud-based web apps.
Stephenson pointed to texting, which was originally a walled garden whereby users could only text people on the same network. Once interoperability was introduced, however, “demand just skyrocketed and created a business model for companies like Twitter.”
The average customer is OS, device, and network agnostic, he said. They want something seamless and that’s “a perfect example of how this cloud computing and mobile Internet are going to provide a very powerful force” for growth.
“There’s a tidal wave coming … that’s being carried by these 4G networks and cloud computing environments,” Stephenson said. “We as an industry can try to control this tide … but customers are going to do what they want. Our objective is to create a seamless and open environment.”
“Smartphones surpassed PC sales last week”, said Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress today. “By the way, PCs are not catching up. Smartphones are the future of games, productivity, apps, everything we think about,” he said.
“You’ll never forget anything,” he said, because computers will remember it for you. You’ll never be lost because of mapping technology, he said. “Even better, you’re never lonely.”
WAC faces an uphill struggle, says C/Net. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are very popular, both with programmers and with customers. Even Microsoft, trailing both those rivals, has 8,000 apps.
The WAC initiative has 68 members now. Handset supporters include Huawei, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and ZTE. Carriers that support the Wholesale Applications Community include; China Mobile, MTS, Orange, Smart, Telefonica, Telenor, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Vodafone. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson touted WAC in a speech today.
Startups could benefit from cloud-based apps that run of a variety of devices. Mobisante wants to change the way ultrasound is delivered, reports TechFlash. Mobisante uses cell phones and existing wireless networks to transmit ultrasound images from patients in remote areas to hospitals. Here’s Chutani explaining how the technology works on a recent CNN news segment.
Cloud-based processing can now provide supercomputer power to mobile devices.
Elemental’s Cloud processing uses Amazon Web services for GPU processing in the cloud.
There are now over 10,000 medical apps in the App Store; a big jump from the 1,544 apps last year. Houston Neal narrowed it down to a list of the 70 best apps on his “Best Medical iPhone Apps for Doctors and Med Students” website.
Microwave chips aren’t just for communications anymore. They enable new sensor applications.
Imagine an Intel i7 handheld with Nvidia GPUs in a couple years. Like Wordlens for doctors. Nanoscience and metamaterials are opening new worlds.
Amazon’s new cloud application, Elastic Beanstalk, manages cloud applications automatically. Developers simply upload their application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing and auto-scaling.
Perhaps the time has come for open source cloud competition that provides services similar to Amazon’s Cloud Service, but with hooks and interfaces for a variety of mobile phone apps.
Open source resource mapping projects like Oregon Explorer (www.oregonexplorer.info) and Willamette Basin Explorer (willametteexplorer.info) can make databases, created by government silos, available to everyone using the expertise of Oregon State’s Open Source Lab. OpenOceanMap (ohloh.net) is an ambitious project to break the ties of traditional geo-spatial data collection and develop a truly cross platform, Open Source, and transportable decision support tool. Their Gulf Project demo shows the utility of combining open source data bases.
Amazon’s Cloud is being used for Ocean Observatories. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of world-class hosting services for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, Drupal, and more than 50 other leading open source software projects
Portland’s Max Ogden is a CivicApps contest winner and Code for America Fellow. He built PDX API, which enables access to geographic and real time data from Portland, Oregon, for things like bus and train arrival times. Web apps, hosted on a server, might run on virtually any device, including smartphones, tablets & kiosks.
