10 places to look for mobile’s next killer app
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.
