The World is in our hands

We all remember in the late Eighties, when the first handphones were developed by Motorola, a huge phone with an antenna of more than 25 cm long ! It was long after the first fiction phone from a distant future in Star Trek where the famous sentence was pronounced by William Shatner (alias Captain Kirk) when he calls his operator back in the mothership the Enterprise: “Beep me up Scotty”. Fortunately mobiles have been developed into mini workspaces where people can not only contact each other but make video conferences and use internet to share, collaborate and work from distance.

All the players in the market agree that the future is in our hands, specifically at the top of our fingertips. Thanks to Third generation smart phones a person is able to work without being on his desk. You can share and transfer your files, using smart softwares such as Windows mobile, but you can also use google and its free documents and workspace application. Third generation phones, let us call them 3GM are not only more interactive to users but it can be personalized and updated with new and smart applications for all sorts of use.

Social networking can be used without any problem, you register and update your profile with your 3GM. You can access  Linkedin by just clicking the icon on your desktop. Change your profile or update your status, download your contacts to your phone, search for people you know on Facebook, upload or download pictures and videos on flikr and youtube.

Google for examples offers some breathtaking tools and features in order to render our lives more spicy. Thanks to Google maps you can pinpoint your location and use it as a GPS, than you can download a game based on your location, where you can compete with other players in your area, completing missions, like the first to be at a certain place near a monument or a famous statue. Iphone offers another application, whoswhere where you can see your friends that are  in the neighbourhood in order to ask them to join you to a party you have just been informed.  You can even play online games on your phone with others. The thing is that 3GM need to be connected to internet in order to be updated. Google has released recently their 3GM that will compete with its price and originality with Iphone and Blackberry, based on free software.

 

Your road trips will be more efficient thanks to Trapster, a Google application that enables you to know (with a vibration) where are located the “Speedometers” so you will have the time to slow down your velocity.

Mapsbuddy is another interesting application that works on Googlemaps, it shows you restaurants, clubs and bars in the neighbourhood (it knows exactly where you are), but the good thing about this application is that it shows you ratings by people who have already been  there.

It happened to everyone to stop in a country for lunch or diner without knowing the place and than begins the chase for a good restaurant. Do you see yourself in that situation? What happens next is the law of Murphy in action, the place is dirty, the prices are to high, the quality is low, the service is non existent ! but unfortunately there is no place left at walking distance, but perhaps thanks to Mapsbuddy you can be alert and stop a few kilometres further.

 

Sports tracker is another jewel application for Nokia smartphones, here you can train with you friends and gain miles running in the streets, already millions have downloaded the software.

 

In the future other smart application will emerge and the mobiles will be the next level of interactive network between people. In the future 3GM and 4GM will be used to do anything in our lives, from the virtual world to the real world; from buying clothes (your Sim card will be your ID card and Bank card at the same time), being a tools at school to your workspace. Therefore people will have more free time because it won’t be necessary to work in the office but from home or from some beach in the Caribbean.

 

Generation Gap in social networking

 The study of generation has stated that people of different generation react differently and have different patterns of behaviour towards internet and its use. O’reilly’s Web 2.0 philosophy and use of interactive online softwares that enables users to contribute, collaborate, comment, participate and even develop and create are typical GEN Y tools. The Baby boomers which are responsible for the world’s order and economy of today are simply watching their grand children (generation Y) creating and developing a new kind of economic environment, all that with a few clicks !

Generation X are those who are the inventors of the roadmaps of the internet, while Generation Y are the builders of cars inside these roads ! The next Generation, Gen M will look at generation Y and laugh at the use of a laptop in order to create an interactive website, GEN M is growing into a mobile world where you have fully virtual workspace at the palm of your hands ! They will build an economy that is 10 times faster than today ! where people will go virtually on holiday ! ok ok that’s too much science fiction !

In order to give you an overview of the personality of every generation specifically I have interviewed some psychologists mixed with a timetable of internet evolution and Voilà :

Generation Baby Boomers: Post war generation, grew with a strong believe in human freedom, freedom from a system, system of control and pressure. They are the contributors of peace rallies around the world. They are more conservative. They were born after the Second World War and influenced From 1960 till 1979. .

Generation Jones: was the generation of actual children in the 1960s, which came of age in the middle to late 1970s and early 1980s. Their approach with new technology is for the most strictly for work purpose or for example for a specific use such as messaging a family member or using a search engine.

Generation X: is the generation born between approximately 1965 to 1980, are the first to use computing and the internet. They are the programmers and love technology, but are still argues the value of sharing knowledge with the crowd, they generally are connected only to their dear friends on Facebook. A few of them use social networks only for specific purposes, money, business or work.

Generation Y: is a very large generation born between 1981 and 1995. they are often called the Millenials, this generation are the promoters of a new interactive web of sharing and collaboration. They understand the use of a fully interactive internet but not so much its backbone, they develop, mashup, use API to their website and share on a peer to peer level, they are mostly anti-global but work with the world online. They walk around with their laptop at school as if it was a walkman back in the Eighties.

Generation M, or mobile generation are born from 1996 to present, they will work in a more interactive world. They are not seeking money, but notoriety, based on project concept and not on a contract. They like to travel the world, learn languages they interracial and seek an approach with different cultures on every level of communication. They don’t like the idea of being bond to a place or culture or company. They will probably assist to a new frontier human perception of itself.

Enter the Super Network

Facebook on Second life link your real friends and your virtual friends

Even the best Science fiction novels could not predict the future of humanity, interconnected as they are today.

The future of Social networking provides us plenty of surprises; what about talking to your friends online, while you are viewing your banking movements ! Imagine your are calling someone on Netlog via Skype and chatting with someone on Linkedin and Facebook simultaneously while you are working on Twitter and Xing or on Viadeo sharing files on Huddle or Weplus ! All that on the same network, a super network using 3D graphics such as second life, pc or mobile with portals through different networks interconnected for one purpose; to  serve you !

This is not far from the truth, nowadays the online gaming industry has provided some interconnection between games, in order to switch between games bringing over your friends.  Social networks are now entering into a mature faze, where they are monetizing their applications.

Only the biggest players will emerge from the crowd. This means that over hundreds of social networks, only a few will remain online to provide the user of all its necessity. Already today you can see some kind of a collaboration between social networks that allow users to add API’s from any network. In the future all networks are going to be merged into one network with all kinds of applications, from your office working station to a playground. The user will connect to the network and do everything it does both in the real life as virtual.

Second life is doing some steps towards collaboration with social networking sites such as Twitter, where you can connect in order to keep in touch with your projects. More and more applications will be added into the virtual world of second life.  You will be on second life to visit shops online, buy clothes on virtual ebay, playing games, network with your friends online , through a portal that gets you to Facebook 3D on your mobile, seek business opportunities through Linkedin 3D or find a job on Secondlife  Careerbuilders Portal. Another next level of web 3.0 application will be that people will share documents on 3D level through online platforms, working on their virtual office.

The world is changing tremendously, the economy is transforming towards a global networking collaboration, modifying to a complete new angle of the old hierarchical model of the Twentieth Century !

The changing in the economy is radical, more and more open source software’s are gaining notoriety. The way we think about an economic model of profits based on demand is changing drastically.

In order to understand the economic changes we must overview what was the economic model till now:

You invent a product, you sell the product with a profit margin in order to compensate the costs of production, use some marketing and sales and sell the product. Build a company with a capital that is based on bank loans, stock shares and sales revenues.

A simple product has a value on the market.  The problem is that millions of people entered the global market with little purchase power.  Now Both companies and consumers want to pay a low price to acquire a product ! In order to do that, you need to lower the costs of production. Previously companies closed their plants in their developed countries to move and rebuild them in the developing countries, but this was just postponing the problem. After the internet bubble in 2001  services and software’s were suddenly available for low prices or even for free on the market due to open source development.  Companies such as Microsoft suffered from this change.  It became known as the Web 2.0 economy “share, develop, collaborate, free”.

Companies need to accept the fact that they can lower the price of products such as low cost flights.

On the other hand consumers want to have quality from their products, the only way you can do that is to monetize the new web 2.0 economy.

The next step will be the collaboration between all networks, providing both quality of products and services for a low price.

Now after that the next step will be something similar to the matrix simulated world where people plug themselves into it, working and living into a virtual real world where it will be difficult to tell the difference between the real and the simulation ! I hope this time we will be conscious of the fact that it is still a virtual world !

Snapshot from facebook link on secondlife