A recent new product announcement has convinced me we are entering the next stage in mobile services that goes beyond simple wireless voice (and even video) delivery that includes ubiquitous Internet Protocol (IP) delivery ushering in perhaps a whole new level of human to human experience enabled by improvements in the human to network interface.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

Looking to a time of ubiquitous WiMax, Korea-based Posdata has built a new mobile gaming platform that allows users to take network gaming on the road. That’s on-line games in a mobile environment, with continuous connectivity to multi-player action even in a crowded Seoul subway. Can Sony’s next gen PSP or other tier-one portable game device be far behind? When the multi-billion dollar game industry smells money, things begin to move fast.

Viewed alone, this announcement looks like just another iteration in the long line of mobile network development. Yet it strikes me that with WiMax, we have the potential to move from an era of static or fixed IP network delivery to Internet everywhere-and that really will change everything. How? By putting the power of the network literally at our fingertips, in our ear, and yes, even on tiny screens in our glasses, not at home or work mind you-but everywhere we use a cell phone today.

In the march of wireless evolution we are currently in a stage where wireless providers are sinking billions of dollars in a number of network upgrades to capture lucrative new services like mobile video and mobile IP packet delivery. Forget the fact that there is no single delivery standard, the options are convoluted and no one has quite figured out how to make money doing this yet.

In the midst of this infrastructure build-out, Apple enters like the first upright simian (if you will) offering its iPhone with the promise to "change everything" by linking in to its iTunes phenomenon and serving up the first mobile full web browser, albeit on a slower, EDGE wireless network. But it’s not the phone or MP3 service that will keep Apple’s promise.

Ask most iPhone users today and they’ll probably say that on the road, the web browser is used far less than the phone. In the office or home, you can use the much faster Wi-Fi connection which comes in quite handy-but not much different from being on-line using the desktop (in a static environment.) Because of the slower speeds of the wireless mobile network, it’s really too soon for Apple to deliver much beyond what they already have. But thanks mostly to the iPhone, the door to "Internet everywhere" is open, and people are beginning to get it.

But that’s just the beginning-let’s fast-forward fifteen years into this brave new world of ubiquity. As the network matures, look for new devices that leverage the processing power not of smaller, faster on-board chips, but rather high-level refinements in the network itself. Handheld devices may simply become smart displays or disappear all together, morphed into sensory interfaces that link the human senses to the network with most the heavy lifting off-loaded to the back-end.

Smart voice and image recognition systems could identify persons approaching or talking to us, to remind us of names, last meeting times or a host of other pre-set cues. Links to social networks could provide business and social intersect points, contacts, mutual friends with all the details continuously fed in bite sized visual or audio cues. Pattern recognition software could be used to pick up on conversation topics supplying us with relevant information and even suggest meeting times and locations based on published personal calendars. A permanent recording of the conversation with key phrases like agreed meeting times, locations, etc. would populate and update the personal schedule automatically.

Contrast this with the time of pay phones booths-you remember, those static, hard wired to the network, coin operated vending machines that served up, not a candy bar, but analog network access via human voice-it sounds so last century! (Oh yes, it was last century.)

Time was that no one made more money in coin currency than good old Ma Bell. For multiple generations, she raked in so many coins (mostly dimes) that it became part of our lexicon-ever heard the term "get off the dime?" Translation: hang up the phone.

While this may sound fantastic, even bordering on information overload, consider how archaic the era of the phone booth looks to us today, and how our wireless world of instant SMS messaging, multimedia (MMS) and instant touch of wireless phone technology, e-mail and rest might seem to someone in the phone booth era.

So we’ve move from "Get off the dime," to "Hang-up and drive." And, we’re still evolving, moving toward the ultimate network - ubiquitous and constantly serving up relevant data to make our lives a little more… productive, simple, well, you fill in the blank.

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