Future Files:The Rise of The Mobile Society
Posted On: 08 December 2006 By: Jay Oatway Filed Under: Culture Wars | Future-Stuff-That-Goes-Ping | No Strings | Power Struggle
A big W00t! out to my friends at Charged magazine. Their first issue is now out and it’s a beauty—mobile entertainment news from Asia. A great idea, with great advertising and, with our help, a rapidly growing readership—do not wait to check them out. Better yet, do yourself a favor: subscribe to their eDaily newsletter.
Nothing is going to shape tomorrow’s society more than the culture that is growing from mobile entertainment. And no place is going to be more mobile than Asia, according to a recent Juniper Research report.
That said, even as mobile music continues to grow on the strength of full track downloads, it will eventually be overtaken by mobile games and mobile TV in terms of revenues by 2011. Interestingly, even bets from mobile gambling will have exceeded the value of the mobile music industry by then, as it’s one of the few mobile entertainment sectors that will not see product price erosion, Juniper says.
Asia Pacific and Europe will dominate the market. Over the next five years, Asia Pacific will account for 37% of mobile entertainment revenues worldwide, while Europe will generate 35%.
Charged is right on the money. So this week I’m going to be blogging about topics inspired by the inaugural issue.
Straight out of the gate, Charged publisher Robert Ferguson puts his finger on the number one problem: batteries. Our more specifically, we need “power themselves” mobile devices that end our reliance upon ever having to plug-in for anything–not even electricity. No one has a working model of this quite yet, but here’s my portension of how it will likely go down based on the cool stuff recently released on the Net. Firstly, mobile devices won’t shed their batteries, but they will replace them with something that more effectively stores electrons like nanotube capacitor.
The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Similar to how a thick, fuzzy bath towel soaks up more water than a thin, flat bed sheet, the nanotube filaments increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today’s batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors.
“It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and … it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours,” he says.
This technology has broad practical possibilities, affecting any device that requires a battery. Schindall says, “Small devices such as hearing aids that could be more quickly recharged where the batteries wouldn’t wear out; up to larger devices such as automobiles where you could regeneratively re-use the energy of motion and therefore improve the energy efficiency and fuel economy.”
This is the sort of technology that powerful energy companies do all they can to suppress, so don’t expect production to begin on this one until we demand electric cars.
Secondly, put one of these cool belt drive generators inside. Give it a shake (or just put it in your pocket and walk around) and the generator stores power for when you need it.
Having an always on, “self-charging” media machine means a complete shift in how we evaluate the market. Consumer generated content makes up the bulk of the Long Tail. But in theory it will never have mass appeal, and therefore will never be able to make a profit. We all believe that those with big budgets can produce something that will enjoy their season of good fortune above the Long Tail curve, yet it is likely that those season will grow shorter and shorter, and big budgets will get broken into smaller and smaller chunks
However, “Power is Shifting,” as Stefan Rust points out in the print version of Charged, to the consumer. Everyone else in the mobile industry has one job—make the consumer the star of the show (Yahoo has just launched some new mobile social software to this end). The coming mobile revolution will tear down the mobile service provider hierarchy and replace it with a neutral territory of affordable wireless broadband. You’ll pay a flat monthly rate for all the bandwidth you can use. Amazing things will happen. Consumers will become the directors/stars of their own media — they will each have the potential to become the studio boss of their own personal media empire. They will make money off their own content, and they will be creating more while on the move. Just as long as the sun stays shining.
In the future, when you take a seat at your favorite outdoor cafe, simply (or as ostentatiously as you please) set you phone on the sun drenched table, and charge it up — that’s right solar powered phones are in the news [via TwoPandas].
Finally, if that doesn’t fry your brain, then we can charge your mobile device by sending power over the air. Yes, the technology has been around since Tesla’s days. The implications for this sort of power delivery truly spell mobile society, where we unplug from everything and throw away all our cords and our phones truly become “The Remote Control for Life“.
[via the Beeb] “There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years,” said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work.
“We started thinking, ‘it would be really convenient if you didn’t have to recharge these things’.
“And because we’re physicists we asked, ‘what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?’.”
To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of “non-radiative” objects with so-called “long-lived resonances”.
When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. “Tails” of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface.
“If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,” said Professor Soljacic.
The future is always charged.
![The Return of "Cold Fusion"](http://www.portension.com/assets/fusion.jpg "Click to enlarge: The Return of "Cold Fusion"")
December 10th, 2006 at 3:48 am
Mobile Content Expected to Gain Major Ground in Next Five Years, Juniper Says…
According to new research released this week by UK-based Juniper Research, a boom in mobile content is expected to take place over the next five years, with estimations that the global mobile entertainment market, currently valued at $17.3 billion, wil…