Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: With the mobile decade upon us, here are 10 categories where mobile’s next killer app may come from. Perhaps one could keep RIM relevant?. E-mail. Tweet.

With many proclaiming the mobile year or decade upon us, largely due to contributing factors like falling costs, better handsets, pervasive connectivity, and emerging standardization it seems we’re upon a new era of mobile development. After receiving some heat, from my Canadian counterparts, for recently berating RIM. I thought I’d be more positive, and present some ideas on where innovation may come from in the mobile application space, this year.

I’m reminded of Jeff Bezos’ quote from 1999:

“I liken it to the Cambrian era 550 million years ago, which saw the development of multicelled life. While nature tried every kind of experiment possible, the creation of new species was offset by the extinction of others.”

Searching for the next killer app
So, as Bezos implies, the explosion in the hundreds of thousands of ‘smartphone’ applications, may imply we’re just at the beginning of finding a killer app. Originally, it was voice, then text messaging, then e-mail; but what’s the next major application that will really spur the next phase of adoption and determine winners and losers?

So, I offer a classification taxonomy of how to think about various application forms, which may help determine where to look and think about what’s next. Rather than take a ‘genre-based’ approach like every other app catalog, or a technology-based organization, I’ve tried to build a framework based on customer needs, or as Clay Christensen would put it, the ‘jobs they do’, for people.

Here are 10 categories of where the next killer app may come from.

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I wrote an essay back in 2006, after reading John Battelle’s book, The Search, and thought I’d  revist it and take a look at how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go. All that said, I’m still an idiot for not buying GOOG back in the day…

The unrelenting rise of search (and with it, Google’s share price) as chronicled in John Battelle’s excellent book, The Search, is the topic of much discussion. That said, Search still has a long way to go, and there is plenty of room for improvement, and I think there are real opportunities to unseat Google’s top spot by providing strong offerings in the 3 C’s outlined below.

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Came across this TechCrunch post yesterday entitled: “Firefox 3.5 not playing nicely with Twitter”. This seems pretty innocuous at first — “ok, so what if app X doesn’t work in some new browser”; however, looking a bit deeper the choice of words here is actually pretty interesting. This post implies that it’s Firefox’s “fault” for not “playing nicely” with  Twitter – not the other way around.

It wasn’t too long ago that I remember our teams wildly running around to enable our application to support “browser x” (do you know major companies still use IE6?). The browser was always the top dog, and you (the app developer) had to support it.

When did the rules change? When did the browser become the tail, and the applications become the top dog?

More generally: how or when does a power shift occur from the platform itself, to the ecosystem around it? I believe it inevitably happens in “open” ecosystems (i.e. platforms are open) such as browsers. Exactly how, is a function of two conditions:

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