Planet of the Apps (Part II)

The Application Tree

Although demographics and geography are of little help in defining application needs, users do adopt devices according to an "application hierarchy," says Tercek. Local language information and content come first, including news and traffic updates, and stock market data and weather reports. Then come games, music and finally, video. The hierarchy follows the evolution of desktop PC applications, from basics like word processing in the 1980s to multimedia entertainment a decade later, although the wireless evolution has been faster.

According to Tercek, each segment of a television news broadcast (stock reports, weather reports, sports updates) could potentially explode into its own wireless video application. A key difference, however, is that wireless users are less willing to search for information and prefer to receive personalized data in user-specific categories when it becomes available, Tercek says.

Bandwidth limits are likely to restrict the image quality of wireless video, but PacketVideo’s Tercek says that wireless users are more forgiving about video quality than PC users. Web video viewers tend to compare their experience to television, but for wireless users, "the mere fact of having the video is what’s important," says Tercek. "The wireless user is very elastic in terms of video production values."

Some very basic social realities could contribute to the adoption of mobile video applications, regardless of the quality. When Josh Tak worked at PacketVideo’s office in Seoul last year, during the commute he often saw bored Korean businessmen watching television on small screens attached to the dashboards of their barely moving vehicles. Although five million Korean homes have DSL connections on their desktop computers, Seoul is "the kind of urban environment where once you’re out of the house, you stay out, and you don’t go back until the evening," says Tak. Wireless entertainment may work better in crowded urban environments where users have commute time to fill.

The Seoul traffic example may not translate well to the highway systems of the United States, where already there is political pressure to limit even basic voice cell phone use while operating vehicles. And typically, public transport is considered the venue of choice for mobile video; on average, Americans spend more time in their cars, and less on public transportation, than people in Europe or Asia. Some commentators say this might restrict the growth of wireless entertainment in the United States.

Devices: Agents of Change

Wireless devices and services are proliferating, and as they do so, user expectations are changing. On one hand, the user demand for personalization is increasing; on the other, that demand itself is becoming more uniform globally. "The people change the devices, and then the devices change the people," says Christopher Eisbach, a former researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. "It’s an iterative process."

Wireless users — whether they’re in London or Helsinki — already share an important quality, something Washington Post foreign correspondent Thomas Friedman describes as "connectedness." Cell-phone users in Hong Kong are intertwined through constant SMS messaging, but also well connected to friends and family in GSM-compatible Europe. Wireless devices give users more connectivity — with each other and with wireless information or entertainment services. And then the devices create people who cannot live without this connectivity.

It’s the Internet, part two: Everything from information to goods and services is now distributed even more immediately — everywhere. "Wireless is about convenience," says Phil Gossett. "It’s about doing what you want, where you want."