ME exec editor Tim Green on 'active skin', Zumbas and orgasms over IP...
It's not often you go to a mobile conference and hear all about 'orgasms over IP'.But that was the surprise in store for attendees of Gfk's Future of the Mobile World event yesterday. The speaker was 'futurologist' Ian Pearson, who opined in highly entertaining fashion about the changes being wrought by technology.
One of his big ideas is 'active skin' - passing tiny currents inside the body to produce displays on the flesh - another was fingertip sensitivity as an alternative user interface (if you've seen Minority Report, you'll get the idea).
Marry these two and you can conceive all manner of helpful applications. But in reality, we're talking porn and self-abuse. Credit to Pearson for addressing wanking before any juvenile member of the audience did. In other words, me.
But Pearson did eventually move from onanism to mobile. And his big pitch here is that mobile devices are set to disappear altogether. He contends that advances in processing will shrink everything you need in a mobile device, except the display and input, to the size of a pin head.
So if we can project a screen onto a pair of glasses, and use our fingertips for input, why not just have the SIM in a piece of jewellery that's connected via Bluetooth? Boldly, Pearson said that within 10 to 20 years owning a physical mobile device will be laughably 'retro', much like using one-piece stereo midi system to play CDs is today.
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It's a fascinating idea. If he's right (and Pearson admits he's wrong '15 per cent of the time'), where does it leave Nokia with its one million sales a day, or Apple with its delicious user interface? Do they diversify into displays? Or push on with their services strategies?
I don't know. It's hard to buy into Pearson's thinking. It's just so radical. My instinct tells me people simply like possessing a beautiful, smart bit of physical kit. But maybe I'm making that classic mistake of thinking in the present. Remember, people didn't believe the telephone would take off because there would always be servants to pass on messages.
But how perfect that, in the week of Pearson's comments, news has arrived of a 'device' called the Zumba. It consists of a SIM, which connects wirelessly to an earpiece for calls. There's no keyboard; everything's managed through voice recognition. Yes, it's bonkers.
